For European countries, Odessa is a young city. Once Catherine the Great realized that the port off the coast of Black Sea is necessary for the communication with the Europe, she gave her stamp of approval to found Odessa in 1794. The new Black Seaport Odessa quickly became a major success. Its first governors Josef de Ribas, Frenchmen Duc de Richelieu (1803-1814), and Alexandre Andrault de Langeron (1815-1822) are considered the founding fathers of Odessa.

They designed the city and organized its infrastructure. A Free Port regime was declared in Odessa in 1819 – 1859. It attracted investment capital and made the city of Odessa a vital trade link between East and West. Russia, which didn’t have trade fleet in the Black Sea at that period of time, got an opportunity to develop external trade connections through its new port Odessa.

In the period from 1795 to 1814 the population of Odessa has increased 15 times and reached almost 20 thousand people. By its 100th anniversary, Odessa was the fourth largest city of Imperial Russia, after Moscow, St.-Petersburg and Warsaw. In 1991, after the collapse of Communism, the city became part of newly independent Ukraine. Being the part of Imperial Russia for so long, the vast majority of population in Odessa speaks Russian and strongly identifies with Russia to this day.

Odessa’s history has left the city with some splendid architecture from the 18th and 19th centuries. Having been heavily influenced by French and Italian cultures, Odessa’s historical architecture has European elegance garnished with Russian cathedrals. Some buildings are built in a mixture of different styles, including Art Nouveau, Renaissance and Classicist.

Most of the city is located quite high above the Black Sea, which can be reached by descending long streets and staircases such as the famous Potemkin Stairs, formal entrance into Odessa from the direction of seaport. The Ladder was constructed in 1837-1841 by personal order of Odessa’s governor at that time general Vorontsov as a gift to the city and his wife.

Probably the most famous and ornate architectural feature of the city is its Opera and Ballet Theater. Constructed by the plan of two Viennese architects Felner and Gelmer in 1887, the Theater was a replacement of the first Opera House (1810-1873), which was completely destroyed in a fire. The architects were selected from 43 entrants in a competition by city authorities. The new Opera Theater was constructed in 3 years and incorporated all that architectural art has to offer from the Baroque, Italian Renaissance, Classical, and Rococo periods. Columns, arches, galleries, arcades, cupids, and sculptures of figures from Greek and Roman mythology – you can find it all there. The interior of the building is decorated in Louis XVI style, sparkly and rich, and luxurious, creating a wonderful light effect. The Theater’s unique acoustics allows to deliver even a whisper from the stage to any part of the hall.

Recent news is filled with Google scandal. Since 2006, the world’s largest search engine has systematically collected private data while accumulating its Street View photo archive. The data collection took place in the United States and Europe where Street View was been catalogued. Such data collection is a violation of privacy law, so questions were raised by the European regulators. The company was asked to allow examination of one of the hard drives to see how much data was collected on individuals.

Google said it did collect certain kinds of data like publicly broadcasted SSID and MAC addresses using Street View cars. That information identifies Wi-Fi networks and helps to improve Google mapping products, which enables people to find locations or get directions.

Review of the Street View software has revealed that, according to Google, because of a programming error in 2006, the company had been also mistakenly collecting and storing snippets of payload data (information sent over the networks) while the Google camera cars were passing by non-password protected Wi-Fi networks.

Google announced they “never used that data in any Google products”. Also, they said, they were collecting the data without knowing it, which is hard to believe since the company employs some of the best engineers. I think they knew they were collecting it they just didn’t think it will backfire. Assuming, they have more than enough “space” to store miscellaneous data, it would make sense for them to keep it in the event that they might find a use for it someday. I am not really concern about all of this, because, if somebody computer knowledgeable has a goal to gather your private information, nothing will stop them, but people need to be aware that if their network is non-protected their private information can be collected by anybody who is passing by. So the Google scandal might demonstrate, to those who didn’t know, how vulnerable their information really is. In this sense, Google did them a favor. Now the company started destroying the unnecessary information they have collected.  In the future the problem can be solved by delegating an independent auditor to police what kind of information is collected. In the meanwhile, people will at least put passwords on their networks.

I miss walking its old streets, feeling the salted smell in the air, watching the waves break just before they touch the sand. I miss its museums and theatres, its cozy squares, its beaches.

Odessa (or Odesa in Ukrainian) referred to as the “Pearl of the Black Sea” is the 3rd largest city in Ukraine, the largest city along the Black Sea, and the most important city of Ukraine for trade. It is the home to over a million people, Odessites who are convinced that they are their own separate nationality – mixture of different cultures, traditions, languages and humor. The city of Odessa is a home to an extremely diverse population of Russians, Jews, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Armenians, Albanians, Italians, Germans, and Frenchmen. “Odessa Mama”, – that’s how lovingly Odessites call their city, welcomes and unites different nationalities. Even in 1823 the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote: “Odessa is a city where the air is filled with all Europe”.

Probably due to their willingness to tolerate and accept people of many different cultures, Odessites are well known for their ironic humor. They say humor crystallizes like salt from the seawater in Odessa. The city is considered to be the Humor capital in the former Soviet Union countries including Ukraine and since 1972 Odessa has been hosting the annual festival of Humor. Nowhere else in the world will you find such “seriously” celebrated April Fool’s Day like in Odessa. It is called Day of Laughter here. Every year the city mayor traditionally declares April 1 a day off to enable all city residents and city visitors to enjoy the festivities to the fullest.

We met Max and her brother, Molly when they were both young squirrels. We gave them names before we knew their sex just by watching their personalities. Molly was gentle and Maxie was more aggressive, especially with my husband. Molly came up to my husband and sniffed his big toe as he was walking in his thongs in the front yard.  It took a while but soon both squirrels trusted us and began to come nearer and nearer as we fed them peanuts. Both squirrels were soon eating out of our hands.

When they got older and it became obvious that Max was a girl and Molly was a boy, but it was too late to do anything about it – the names have stuck.

Molly was chased by other squirrels a lot and often came injured then, one day, didn’t come at all.  Max has also had her war wounds.  The worst was a bite or scrape that tore off most of her cheek on the left side.  We worried for many weeks because she kept scratching it and opening up the wound.  It finally healed but, soon after, she showed up with another one on her neck.

Over the past two years, Max has had two sets of babies. It was obvious when she started nursing the first time, but we didn’t see her babies until they were several months old—and she never brought them with her when she came to eat.

Max is nursing new babies now.  She still meets us in the yard or down where the bus picks up the boys for school in the morning.  But, mostly, she comes to the boy’s bedroom window and sits on a branch outside until we see her.  Then we open the window and she jumps onto the sill.  Often, she will sit and eat quietly only feet from the boys while they play their video games on the Wii.

The Western Grey Squirrel lives an average of five to seven years.  Their main predators are hawks and cats.  We have a large hawk that comes around every month or so and has done flybys with a couple of the squirrels who live on our property.  He has killed several quail and doves over the years.  When you feed wild animals and birds, you also attract their predators.

We hope Max lives out a full life.  She is our very special, intimate friend.

Last week I went into Hollywood Video to rent a newly released movie and was told they are no longer carrying new movies.  They are going out of business.  This took me by surprise and made me sad.  I always felt that video rentals were one of the safe places for employees in this recession.  After all, since people can’t afford to go to the theater, a rental is an inexpensive option.

Unemployment in Oregon is still above the national average at 10.5%. In Bend metropolitan area, according to Bureau of Labor Statistic, the unemployment rate is 15.8%.

Here are few reasons why I think unemployment in Central Oregon is so high:

• Lack of industries. Because Bend is such a good recreational area and we are trying to preserve ecosystem here, industries that pollute the ear or use up the resources are not encouraged in this area.
• We are a tourist destination place. Tourism is always affected first in recessions, since it rely on the disposable income, which is limited at downturn times.
• A lot of small and big businesses that rely on transitory market as part of their revenue due to gas prices going up lost a big portion of their income and as the result had to downsize
• Labor force that was attracted to this area while the housing market was expanding (builders, contractors, etc.) is now out of jobs.
• Senior citizens that moved in to the area to retire found themselves having to work, since their retirement funds shrank due fallen stock market.

All of these factors contributed to high and sudden unemployment.

The majority of the people in the United States will tell you that we are a completely capitalistic society. But are we really? The difference between Capitalism and Socialism is that  the first  one is driven by the free market and the second one relies mostly on government controlling the economy and most social services. So, lets look closely at our country. The fact is, U.S. government is a huge business owner and currently is the largest employer in the country. It controls the military, law enforcement, postal service, public works and all public administration at the city, state and federal level. The fact is that we have some important social programs, like Social security, Medicare, and Welfare in place, which cannot be classified as capitalistic. The fact is that U.S. federal government intervenes and regulates private enterprise in numerous ways, like recent bailouts of the banks, wall street, auto industry or farm subsidizing, or monetary and fiscal policies, taxation and other government programs, designed to stabilize the erratic and often disastrous consequence of the capitalistic drive and also to prevent monopolies, achieve social goals, and maintain steady pace of economy. So, while it is true that United States allows its citizens the freedoms of trade, private ownership and choice of occupation and lifestyle, there is always the inevitable form of control. Since the government plays such an important role in our society together with privately owned businesses, our economic system is closer than we think to a Socialistic economy. Is our economy Capitalistic or are we really a mixed economy?

AmigaOS 4.1 (2008)

AmigaOS 1.3 (1988)

One of the assignments for this week was to find information about two operating systems other than Windows, Mac, Linux, UNIX and FreeBSD. So here is one for you:

AmigaOS, of the Amiga personal computer,  was developed first by Commodore international, and initially introduced in 1985.Early versions (1.0-3.9) run on the Motorola 68k series of 16-bit and 32-bit microprocessors, while the newer Amiga OS 4 runs only on Power PC microprocessors. On top of a preemptive multitasking kernel called Exec, it includes an abstraction of the Amiga’s unique hardware, a disk operating system called AmigaDOS, a windowing system API called Intuition and a GUI called Workbench. A command line interface called AmigaShell is also available and integrated into the system. The GUI and the CLI complete each other and share the same privileges. AmigaOS can be divided into two parts: the Kickstart (ROM) and Workbench disks. Kickstart is the bootstrap ROM. The function of Kickstart is comparable to the BIOS. Workbench is the native graphical desktop environment running  on top of AmigaOS.  The Workbench environment does not have to be loaded for software to run. A unique feature of AmigaOS is multiple screens. Each screen can have a different resolution and color depth.. In AmigaOS 1.x, the AmigaDOS portion was based on TRIPOS, which is written in BCPL..From AmigaOS 2.x onwards, AmigaDOS was rewritten in C and Assembler, retaining full 1.x BCPL program compatibility In AmigaOS 4.0, the DOS abandoned the BCPL legacy completely, and starting from AmigaOS 4.1, it has been rewritten with full 64bit support. The Amiga was born at a time when there was almost no concept of 3D graphics libraries to enhance desktop GUIs and computer rendering capabilities but, thanks to its graphic capabilities, the Amiga was one of the first widespread 3D development platforms. VideoScape 3D was one of the earliest 3D rendering & animation systems, as well as TrueSpace 3D.Then Amiga lead the 3D software market for years with software like Imagine and NewTek’s Lightwave (used to render television shows like Babylon 5).All modern Amiga systems have made large use of cross-platform SDL(simple DirectMedia Layer) engine for games and other multimedia programs. Following modern trends in evolution of graphical interfaces AmigaOS 4.1 uses Cairo 2D vector based interface integrated with 3D hardware accelerated Porter-Duff image composition engine.

John C. Dvorak stated in 1996:

The AmigaOS “remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT. The biggest difference is that the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 250 K of address space. Even today, the OS is only about 1MB in size. And to this day, there is very little a memory-hogging CD-ROM-loading OS can do the Amiga can’t. Tight code — there’s nothing like it”.

Another operating system that I am going to mention is a branch of the FreeBSD 4.8 release, called DragonFly BSD. What I found interesting is that it is kind of Amiga related. It has been created by a former FreeBSD developer and Amiga programmer Matt Dillon. DragonFly BSD aims to make the FreeBSD kernel more like AmigaOS architecturally.

DragonFlyBSD 2.6 (April 6,2010)

DragonFly BSD is a free Unix-like operating system. Like most modern kernels, DragonFly is ahybrid, containing features of both monolithic and microkernels, such as the message passing capability of microkernels enabling larger portions of the OS to benefit from protected memory as well as retaining the speed of monolithic kernels for certain critical tasks. In DragonFly, threads are locked to CPUs by design, and each processor has its own LWKT (Light Weight Kernel Threads) scheduler. Device drivers are being kept mostly in sync with FreeBSD 5.x .The developers of DragonFly BSD are replacing “K&R” style C code with more modern, ANSI equivalents. DragonFly’s version of the GNU Compiler Collection has an enhancement called the “Stack-Smashing Protector“. Being a derivative of FreeBSD, DragonFly has inherited an easy-to-use integrated build system that can rebuild the entire base system from source with only a few commandsLike the other BSD kernels (and those of most modern operating systems), DragonFly employs a built-in kernel debugger to help the developers find kernel bugs. The operating system is distributed as a Live CD that boots into a complete DragonFly system. It includes the base system and a complete set of manual pages, and may include source code and useful packages in future versions. Amiga-style ‘resident’ application support was added which takes a snapshot of a large, dynamically linked program’s virtual memory space after loading, allowing future instances of the program to start much more quickly than it otherwise would have. This replaces the prelinking capability that was being worked on earlier in the project’s history, as the resident support is much more efficient. Large programs like those found in KDE with many shared libraries will benefit the most from this support. Currently, DragonFly runs on x86 (Intel and AMD) based computers, both single processor and SMP models.

Version 1.0 of DragonFly BSD was released July 12, 2004. Since then there were ten more releases with the last being Version 2.6 (April 6, 2010)

He  always was a fan of Unix and other esoteric operating systems. Before co-founding the FreeBSD project, he Created the Ardent Window Manager software and other open-source tools and libraries. He started the FreeBSD project in 1993 with Nate Williams and Rodney W.Grimes. In July 2001 Hubbard joined Apple Computer  in the role of manager of the BSD technology group. Since 2005, he has been “Director of UNIX Technology” at Apple. In October 2007, Hubbard was promoted to “Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies” at Apple.

FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system. It is  characterized as “the unknown giant among free operating systems”,- reliable and robust.It is not a clone of UNIX, but works like UNIX, with UNIX-compliant internals and system APIs. FreeBSD is a complete operating system. The kernel,device drivers and all of the userland utilities, such as the shell, are held in the same source coderevision tracking tree, whereas with Linux distributions, the kernel, userland utilities and applications are developed separately, then packaged together in various ways by others.

Mac OS X is based upon the Mach kernel. Certain parts from FreeBSD’s and NetBSD’s implementation of Unix were incorporated in Nextstep, the core of Mac OS X.

Here is what David  Chisnall  on www.informit.com has to say in his article about Mac OS and FreeBSD connection: “Lots of parts of OS X come from FreeBSD, from the top half of the kernel up into the userland. The lower parts come from Mach and a lot, such as the virtual memory subsystem and scheduler, have been heavily reworked in recent versions.

It’s almost as much of a mistake to say that OS X is not FreeBSD as it is to say that it is FreeBSD. From the perspective of a userspace programmer, it is very difficult to tell the two apart. Aside from the presence of Mach ports on Darwin, the two are remarkably similar. The Mach layer at the bottom of the kernel is visible in userspace, but not directly used by most developers outside Apple. Indeed, their documentation recommends against relying on its presence, so it may vanish altogether in a future version. The best way to think of OS X is as a close relative of FreeBSD. It shares a lot of code and is very similar to develop for”.

FreeBSD Logo

The GUI was first developed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Larry Tesler, Dan Ingalls, and other researchers who worked there on the Alto project. It used windows, icons and menus to support commands like opening files, deleting files, moving files.

Engineers from Apple visited Xerox PARC and where given demonstrations of the Alto and its

graphical user interface. Later they incorporated much of what they saw into the design of the Lisa and Macintosh.

Microsoft’s partnership with Apple allowed them access to the Mac OS. Microsoft knew that they too had to develop a GUI to compete. So in 1985 Microsoft released Windows 1.0 the first Microsoft’s Operating system based on graphical operating environment. It was the first ever commercially available GUI Operating system. Windows 1.0 was followed by Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0 and in March 1992 by Windows 3.1. The Windows 3,1 was not Microsoft’s first graphical operating system, but it was the first successful and extremely popular version of Windows and a strong competitor to Apple’s GUI.

Illustration1.                                                                       Illustration2.

Windows1.0                                                                        Windows3.1

Assessment In this mode you cannot get help or hints. CertBlaster uses this mode to assess your knowledge of the material and will determine where you need to focus.

Certification – This mode simulates an actual exam environment. At the end of the exam you will see your score.

Study – In this mode you can change the timer and the number of questions asked. Hints and Answers with explanations for each question are available to you in this mode

Flash – In this mode by clicking the spacebar you can see the correct answer to the question.

CompTIA A+ Essentials (220-601) isn’t the only exam you can practice for with CertBlaster. It can help you with a lot of other exams, including:

Enterprise Technician (220-602)

Remote Support Technician (220-603)

Network+

Server+

It also has Microsoft Certifications learning programs, like Microsoft Office 2007, including MS Word (70-601)and MS Excel (70-602) which I need for my CIS 131 class.