Ural schoolboy, Denis Popov, created an alternative to Windows OS. Now schools of Nizhny Tagil are willing to install it on their computers. Expert and user community scarified a 16-year-old boy’s work.

Denis Popov created Bolgenos OS (“Bolgen” – a fire ball, “os” – operational system, informs LifeNews) during his extra-curricular information science lessons. The system is made on Ubuntu Linux, takes only 1.7 GB of space after installation, has got a nice interface, easy to use, meant for simple office applications, includes Free Pascal Compiler for academic competitions on programming. Denis also claims, that OS speeds up the Internet browsing.

Popov was criticized on forums where he shared his thoughts about Bolgenos. Even experienced users didn’t understand the reason of the rush about this invention.

Nevertheless, next year Windows license will expire in all schools of Nizhny Tagil. And local Office of Education is planning to save money by installing the Bolgenos on schools’ computers. Moreover, they won’t have to pay anyone for it.

Update June 10, 2010 at 15.10: “Telekon” company, that one of the first showed the report about the young inventor from Nizhny Tagil, made a disclaimer. OS Bolgenos was Popov’s science term work at school, and no one was going to install it on school computers. Particularly, the problem is he used some well-known open source code for his programm, so he had no copyrights for it.

Russian Ministry of Telecom & Mass Communications announced a tender, to study the potential of "cyrillic e-mail" in .RF domain. 10 million rubles ($300.000) will be given from the federal budget for the project. Contractor will be defined in July, and will have 110 days to carry out the project, reports Marker.ru.

The research of possibilities to provide mail for the Russian Federation citizens and State government bodies in .RF domain is one of the conditions. With the help of e-mail in .RF domain, it is planned to improve relations between State government bodies and citizens, access to State service online.

Domain names are planned to be translated into Cyrilic within the period of 2-3 years, login translation into Roman will take 5 years. At the same time, the problem of "@" symbol, which is used for e-mail, stays open.

To switch layout from Russian into English just for one symbol is obviously inconvenient, Webplanet.ru mentioned that problem back in November 2009.

At this point, two case scenarios are possible: either the @ symbol will be replaced with the other symbol, or there will be reached an agreement with keyboard manufacturers to make a special key for @ symbol, that will function the same way in any layout (National Domain Coordination Center is currently negotiating on this issue).