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http://hbar.phys.msu.ru/gorm/a... They could have used small round stones on hard surfaces, like shown on the page.

From the Dilbert: http://theory.sinp.msu.ru/~shamardin/dilbert.png

I tend to stick with ELinks, since it has tabbed browsing support. Links Hacked was pretty good back when it was maintained.

http://elbitz.net/home.php is good, but they only open up registering every now and then (I remember I waited like 2 months to get my user). In general, though I just use the same popular torrent sites for everything else I get for books, too and I've gotten 6.28GB that way. Also, appear to have just found a .pdf with a huge list of ebook sites (and one for how to swear in all languages!). Haven't tried any of them, but go for it:
O'Reilly online http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ | http://sysadmin.oreilly.com/ Computer books and manuals http://www.hoganbooks.com/freebook/webbooks.html | http://www.informit.com/itlibrary/ | http://www.fore.com/support/manuals/home/home.htm | http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/webbuy/freebooks.html The Network Book http://www.cs.columbia.edu/netbook/ Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc links http://www.extrema.net/books/links.shtml Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc fiction http://194.58.154.90:4431/enscifi/ Pimpas online books (Indonesia) http://202.159.16.55/~pimpa2000 | http://202.159.15.46/~om-pimpa/buku Security, privacy and cryptography http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/crypto-security.html | http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/ My own misc online reading material http://www.eastcoastfx.com/docs/admin-guides/ | http://www.eastcoastfx.com/~jorn/reading/ Computer books http://solaris.inorg.chem.msu.ru/cs-books/ | http://sweetrude.net/~cab/books/ | http://alaska.mine.nu/books/ | http://poprocks.dyn.ns.ca/dave/books/ | http://58-160.skarland.uaf.edu/books/ | http://202.186.247.194/~ebook/ | http://hooligans.org/reference/ Linux documentation http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html FreeBSD documentation http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/ Sun documentation http://osiris.imw.tu-clausthal.de:8888/ | http://uran.vvsu.ru:8888/ SGI documentation http://newton.unicc.chalmers.se/ebt-bin/nph-dweb/dynaweb;td=2 | http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/init.cgi IBM Online Redbooks http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/ Digital Unix documentation http://www.unix.digital.com/faqs/publications/base_doc/DOCUMENTATION/V40D_HTML/V40D_HTML/LIBRARY.HTM Filesystem Hierarchy Standard http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-toc.html | http://www.linuxbase.com/ UNIX stuff http://ww

VLC (VideoLAN Client) media player was good up to the 0.8.6 releases and after that it took a bit of a tumble in design and lost popularity because of its tendency to crash or freeze at any minor error or corruption in the media files.

Media Player Classic Homecinema stepped in and took the reigns after that. This player includes internal decoder filters for MPEG-2 (DVD), MPEG-4 (XviD, DivX), H.264 (Blu-ray), and VC1 (Blu-ray) along with audio decoders for AC3 (Dolby Digital), DTS (Digital Theater Systems), AAC (Advanced Audio Codec), etc. It also includes native support for MKV (Matroska) and AVI (Audio Video Interleave) file formats.

The most important feature of MPC-HC is the hardware accelerated DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) decoder filters for the H.264 and VC1 Blu-ray codecs allowing this player to leverage ATI, nVidia, and Intel graphics cards to handle the work load with complex 720p and 1080p movies. The difference in CPU usage goes from 70-100% on software decoding with dropped frames to 5% on DXVA decoding and no dropped frames, of course this is relative to the CPU being used.

DXVAChecker is the best tool to use to determine if your video card and latest drivers support hardware acceleration. It will list the list of video streams that are accelerated such as MPEG2, WMV9, VC1, H264 along with DXVA1 (XP DX9) or 2 (Vista DX10) for the version along with the resolution such as 720x480, 1280x720, 1920x1080 that is supported.

FFDshow Tryouts is another codecs to look into is that is based on libavcodec and ffmpeg-mt (multi-threaded) and handles pretty much all audio and video codecs in software using CPU decoding and includes a lot of filters for audio 2.0->5.1 up-mixing, real-time AC3 encoding for surround sound, noise filtering, and video filters for noise, sharpening, and subtitle support.

CoreAVC Pro codec is the most efficient software and hardware nVidia CUDA accelerated H.264 (Blu-ray) decoding. In hardware CUDA mode it users ~15% CPU to perform decoding and in software mode it users 50-70%, relative to the CPU being used of course. This codec a bit more efficient than FFDshow in software but a lot better in CUDA mode, nVidia video card required.

Haali Media Splitter is the preferred splitter for MKV (Matroska), MP4, and AVI files. This is the recommended splitter for these file formats over the internal splitters that usually come with the players.

MPlayer Media Player is also a complete alternative that now has hardware acceleration support for nVidia video cards with the latest SVN releases.

P.S. For those interested, here is the transcript of our email conversation.

Just last night I once again visited the Top 100 Sci-Fi List of Books and checked their list for any new books that moved up and their Major Series list to decided on what I will be reading next on my month long visit in Europe. After that I hit Google to look for eBook torrents for the books and series that I am interested in and I came across this Top 100 Sci-Fi Books Torrent with most of the books from the list and many of them as complete series.

The books are in Microsoft Reader's LIT format so if you have a compatible PDA device that you use for reading then you're set or you can always convert them out to HTML with Covert Lit utility (GNU licensed and open source to boot) that runs on a number of OS's and takes care of the work. Also I would recommend the Haali Reader for Pocket PC platform if you want a good full featured reader that can read text files directly inside .zip files without uncompressing and it saves your place in many books even on phone resets in case you have a PDA type phone that you can read on like I do.

I am exactly in the same boat as you, I also read the Hyperion Cantos but I couldn't get through the first book the first three times I tried to read, because the story lines were so diluted and all-over-the-place, that if it wasn't for the single story about the village of people and the Crucifix of Resurrection I would have dropped this book like a stone and missed out on the rest of the great series. That first books almost soured me to the Top 100 Sci-Fi List because it was one of the books there that was highly recommended, and there should be a warning placed on it.

Also, I personally prefer to read books as eBooks but I also like to own the best ones as mass print paperbacks so I usually buy them en mass as complete series from Barnes & Nobel since they seem to be a less sleazy company than Amazon. Also, just as a reminder don't bother with the Amazon Kindle eBook reader since you can't put your books on it without uploading them to Amazon and anything you buy to put on the reader is only licensed to you and you do not own the books you buy.

Writing up a reply to this question makes me look at all the books on my shelf with fond memories of the adventures that I read about. If you haven't already read these then check out the Dune series for deep sci-fi, and the Dune prequel books by Herbert's son if you like lighter fiction in the same universe, Ender's Game series, Vorkosigan Saga for action packed episodic sci-fi, and the other series mentioned in the links above.

Enjoy your reading.

Also for Windows, more up-to-date DS filters that include Vorbis support along with other formats are available --

"ffdshow tryouts" project: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=173941. (Don't fear the name and beta status, this is the de facto official release of ffdshow.)

Haali Media Splitter: http://haali.cs.msu.ru/mkv/

Luxi Mono? (also available at your local XFree86 mirror :)

I have been reading e-books for several years now,
on windows CE and windows mobile PDAs.

They are in an XML format described here:

http://www.fictionbook.org/index.php/Eng:XML_Schem a_Fictionbook_2.1/
with this
http://haali.cs.msu.ru/pocketpc/
software.

I have a small library of about 2-3000 books on two flashcards.
I am very happy about it.

Haali Reader, a PocketPC app for reading books (highly recommended!) allows you to annotate your documents.
Haali Reader

... but of course the best use of Greasemonkey is "defacement" of some your not-so-favorite sites. When having to work full time with something like .NET makes you really angry, it pleases to see something like this just to imagine what you would want to do with their site ;-)

OS/2 had a package called EMX. EMX was to OS/2 what Cygwin is to Windows. With it, people would compile UNIX apps for OS/2, and they would just require a single DLL, not the entire craziness that Cygwin-compiled apps can be.

This compatibility was so good that all of X Windows could be compiled for OS/2, leading to XFree86OS/2 (some name, eh?). Windows now has the same thing with Cygwin/X, but OS/2 had it back in 1996...

It was really very nice to be able to run the real UNIX versions of things like Bind, Sendmail, IRCd, Apache and other such UNIX daemons. Of course, you could do the same with Linux, but like I said, this was back in the mid-90's. If you think Linux driver support can be bad today, try back then! At least OS/2 had *some* hardware drivers! :)

Even today, a ton of OS/2 software is ported to OS/2 using EMX, at least in the beginning: Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Thunderbird, and other such Linux Open Source projects.

The idea of building a UNIX (or Linux) subsystem for Windows is an *old* one. As TFA mentions, Posix "compatibility" was built into Windows NT from day one. The fact that it's still a steaming pile of cow dung shows how much of a desire there is for it. The Windows people couldn't care less, and the UNIX people would rather swallow swords than use the NT kernel, especially with FreeBSD and Linux out there... Is this doable? Absolutely. Is it worthwhile? People's words to the contrary, there hasn't been a huge groundswell of support...

elinks is possibly better

• Tabbed browsing - you may use tabs either in graphical or even in text mode.
• Lua scripting - ported from Links-Lua, not from current ELinks code, but the differences are not so sensitive, I hope.
• HTTP Auth - stable, ported from Elinks
• HTTP Proxy Auth - ported from Elinks, need to be checked.
• Blocking of selected images - my own code ;-). You may block images containing given substring (of course, it is better to use regexps, but this way is more portable). Just press '-' to edit the list of blocked patterns.
• Cookies saving - ported from ELinks, now our HTTP-header date parsing is correct, I hope.
• New options system - inspired by ELinks one, but much more uglier currently ;-)) Only a few options are implemented through it. Press 'Ctrl+o' to call options manager.
• Possibility to open new windows instead of new links instances in graphics mode - new socket is created with name 'glinks' in links dir, instead of 'links' for text instances, so they can work independently. After that command 'links -g' works like 'mozilla -remote', simply opening new instances from currently running one. But it has some limitations - these new windows will open on the same display as original one...
• Url copying - some code from Ludvik Tezar' patch, but the backend is organized more cleanly - there are two additional fields in struct graphics_driver - put_to_clipboard and get_from_clipboard. Only X11 backend is functional now, as I don't use others ;-)
• Full-text selection - Now we have nearly complete full-text selection - you may select any part of rendered text (except form controls) and copy it to clipboard. Clipboard charset is configurable through new options system (Ctrl+'o').
• Simple printing - It is VERY simple - we make PDF file (throung pdflib) with text only (just a rectangles instead of images), and with PDF internal fonts only (don't even try to print non-latin-1 texts!!!) - but we have more-or-less correct layout and page breakings. Press 'P', and it will ask you for filename to print to.
• Forward history - really, single history list, you can move backward and forward through it
• Extended and configurable 'toolbar' - there are currently Back, History, Forward, Reload, Bookmarks, Home and Stop buttons. 'Configurability' means that you can change each button look (they use pixmaps from special internal system-medium-serif-vari font you can find in graphics/font dir) and even turn it on or off.
• Configurable 'mini-status' - some useful info in lower right corner of your window to show how many connections now in 'running' or 'connecting' state are, and also SSL, Content-Encoding and Images flags.
• Some small but useful improvements - support for "small" and "big" tags, keybinding ("i") to turn on/off images, possibility to show HTTP header ("|", as in Elinks), support for compressed content (Content-Encoding and gzipped local files), configurable support for Accept-Charset and Accept-Language.
• Modularized font subsystem - currently builtin fonts and Unicode TrueType (through freetype backend) may be used. Font manager is available (Ctrl+'i') for adding/deleting external (only freetype yet) fonts. External fonts have the same way into the code - so they are antialiased as good as builtin ;-)
• Dialogs shadows and borders - Just shadows ;-))

What about Visual Basic for MS-DOS. Does anyone still have a copy?

It's easy to find - just google for vbdos.zip [Direct Link]. In fact, you can find most older software this way - ie, Borland Pascal 7 (bp7.zip | Direct), Turbo C++ 3 (tc3.zip | Direct), QuickBASIC 7/PDS (qb7.zip | Direct), Turbo Prolog (tprolog.zip | Direct , etc.

Try poking around in the directories containing the files listed above (eg, http://thegeekery.org/downloads/ci/ - they tend to have cool stuff.

ps. - I had a book on VB for DOS - the book was terrible, but so was VBDOS, so I guess they went well together.

1. Moscow State University has a Specialist degree: "Most of the University faculties teach domestic students according to the Specialist programme (5 years) and grant Specialist Diploma." (from their website).

2. Well roundedness built into a rigid class structure? Unlikely. The idea of pick and choose courses in the arts and humanities (which often are discrete units with no "dependency tree") is to study outside the field of one's specialization according to one's own interests. Without some broadening of the mind a university education is no different than a trade school. The idea of selecting a couple classes from a limited number of in-field courses is to allow students some degree of specialization--these classes are usually taken in the last year of study. Does that mean that the American undergraduate education is the best way to go? No, but one must wonder at the large number of foreign students we have.

3. I'm not talking about some essay, I'm talking about papers as in those that get printed in academic journals like Biochemistry or Science or Cell. You take one of those papers and add a bit that you cut for page limits or some additional figures and a broader intro, and you've got a (more stringent) American M.S. thesis, which is roughly the equivalent to a Candidate thesis. You take 2-3 first author papers plus supporting author stuff and the hodgepodge everybody generates that never quite gets in print and you have a Ph.D. thesis, the rough equivalent of a Russian Doctorate.

Look, I know what I'm talking about. I've already got my M.S. and am pursuing a Ph.D. so I've got a pretty good look at how the American system works. I've worked in labs that have had Russian grad students and post-docs; some of my current lab's collaborators are Russian expatriates while some others are currently still in Russian universities, so I'd say I've got a pretty good handle on what the Russians are capable of and what they had to do for their degrees. You on the other hand have betrayed complete ignorance of the American postgraduate education system, best exemplified by your equating of an Amercian Ph.D. with a Russian highschooler or "incomplete highest." You said you spent time in Russia so I imagine you have a Russian 5-year diploma or something like it and I would take your word for how Russian undergraduate education works. However from your comments on academic publications it's clear that you have no experience with them. Since academic publication is such a major part of the work of a postgraduate student, I find it doubtful that you have any experience with postgraduate education, Russian or otherwise. I don't know where you've gotten your warped view on postgraduate education and I frankly don't care. Unless you're able to make some point to support your view this discussion is over as far as I am concerned.

Does everything I need at 1/9th the size of Mozilla.

Frames, graphics, SSL, JS, cookies, cut and past, and HTTP Auth at only 2mb.
http://xray.sai.msu.ru/~karpov/links-hacked/

Fermi's paradox doesn't do it for me, although it is a neat way of looking at the problem.

It's too neat, and that's my problem with it. There are just so many other variables. Like stick no FTL in there. Or no "cryo-sleep". Or not even any way of reliably going, say, past 0.3 C for any kind of duration. And let's face it, interstellar empires of the kind that Fermi was suprised weren't knocking on doors, need one or more of those things to exist. At least "life as we know it" "knocking on doors" type galactic empires. As far as "life not as we know it" goes, I'm not even sure we could detect them if they were living on the Moon. Their goals, communication methods, etc. would surely be truly alien.

I'm not convinced. Maybe everyone goes "Dyson". Or to achieve true technological mastery you must achieve a kind of "spiritual" way of working in large groups that knocks you out of the "galactic resource race", (another prerequisite for Fermi) think of your own reasons, we sure haven't figured any of even the stuff I've listed out yet. Not that these are even close to my favourite explanations. but they serve, I think.

There are other famous "equations" Sagan's or Baugher's, which tends to show nothing more, I guess, than that Clarke's famous axiom, which he attributes wisely to "Anonymous" is usually pretty spot on.

Incidentally, here's the actual paper, the one referred to from the guy's own web site (minimal), published in Phys. Lett. A... Gravitational Field of Circulating Light Beams.

Beware; it's a little drier than the Boston Globe would like to make it...

I say the actual paper; in fact, this particular paper naturally doesn't make any suggestions of the "Hey, look, this research gives me a way to go back in time and save my father from the evils of cigarettes" type - if it did, it would never have made it into any serious journals. Mallett mentions two papers on his site, one on Bose-Einstein condensation and dark matter, one on this...

He has done other work - this , for example, not to mention work on Hawking radiation and probably a bunch of other stuff. His newest one is apparently "Gravitational Perturbations of a Radiating Spacetime", which looks relevant, not to mention full of terrifying maths. "The principal aim of our study is to understand how gravitational waves are scattered by a background radiating spacetime".

Please see my other post here. As I point out, I believe this whole article is logically inconsistent. IF it is truly the case that you branch into a parallel universe, then we will never observe a neutron. And as you point out, the machine reduces to a disintegration chamber. Then there's no reason to expect we'd ever observe 2 neutrons at all. This is why I have LOTS of trouble taking this guy too seriously. But then again, see his paper on the topic and judge for yourself, or wait for him to finish building his prototype.

This is a bit more concrete than the BS in this Boston.com article. There is also a more reasonable New Scientist article, at least it isn't riddled with the same awful logical fallacies as this Boston.com piece is, and Mallett doesn't come off as quite as much of an arrogant idiot, and the author doesn't come off sounding so worshipfully stupid. I found a copy of this here.

Deep in engineering, down where mortals seldom go,
A manager and customer go looking for a show,
They pass amused among us, and they sign in on the log;
They've come to see our pony and they've come to see our dog.

Not on record anywhere as far as I know.