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For those who like Lems work, let me suggest also two less-known but very good and very similar in their writings sci-fi novelists. Arkadi & Boris Strugatski. .I think that their novel "Definitely Maybe" are in many ways similar to the "Memoirs Found..." novel. The same questioning about the validity of the known social systems, the same claustrophobic feeling plus an excellent plot, to good to be described in a few worlds.

-- Where is the start button in this Linux thingy? --

When they do crack the files, they'll just find his grocery lists.

I am really glad to see the unlikely break of microsoft-flaming and transmeta-worshipping programming schedule on slashdot - especially since it has to do with good books from Eastern-bloc countries. I wil second all recommendations already given for the Strugatsky brothers. Hwever, when I think of Russian sci-fi, the first name that actually comes to mind is Polish.

Stanilsaw Lem, a Polish author who is immensely popular in Russia and many European countries (but, alas, poorly known in the states) is, in my opinion, the most incredible sci-fi author I've ever had the privielege of reading. His books are above and beyond what is commonly referred to as "science fiction" by the people I meet. Lem's prevailing notion is that a laser gun on a spaceship does not make a rehashed soap opera plot into something that may be classified into the science fiction genre.

Lem's books go a full range from hillarious to serious to outright bizarre. His "Memoirs found in a bathtub" was Terry Gilliam's inspiration while the latter was shooting Brazil. Lem's "Solaris" has been made into an amazing movie by Russia's cinematography great Andrei Tarkovsky - and more likely than not, it is available in your local blockbuster or library. I can go on and on, but I figured that if you (the reader) have made it this far down this post, I might as well provide the links and let you figure out if that sounds like something you'd like to read for yourself. So,

Planet Solaris - The Official Lem site

A brief biography and overview of books

If you can read Russian, this contains the translations of the bulk of his work into Russian.

A really good fan site, with overviews of all major works

A short passage from The Cyberiad - one of Lem's most famous collections of short stories

List of Stanislaw Lem's books, sorted by average customer review rating, at amazon

Take care!

PsychoOne

Frans G. Bengtsson's book, The Long Ships : A Saga of the Viking Age, is a great piece of historical fiction from about the same part of Scandinavia as Beowulf. It's probably available at Borders or Amazon and almost certainly in any medium or large public library. The original title is Röde Orm. It and his other writings are considered execellent works of literature. ) by Frans G. Bengtsson is a great piece of historical fiction from about the same part of Scandinavia as Beowulf. It's probably available at Borders or Amazon and almost certainly in any medium or large public library. The original title is Röde Orm and it and his other writings are considered execellent works of literature as well.

Frans G. Bengtsson's book, The Long Ships : A Saga of the Viking Age, is a great piece of historical fiction from about the same part of Scandinavia as Beowulf. It's probably available at Borders or Amazon and almost certainly in any medium or large public library. The original title is Röde Orm. It and his other writings are considered execellent works of literature. ) by Frans G. Bengtsson is a great piece of historical fiction from about the same part of Scandinavia as Beowulf. It's probably available at Borders or Amazon and almost certainly in any medium or large public library. The original title is Röde Orm and it and his other writings are considered execellent works of literature as well.

Tolkien's original inspiration to create Quenya, the High-elven language, came from his encounter with Finnish. How similar, then, are these two languages? http://www.sci.fi/~alboin/finn_que.htm

There are more fonts here, here, and here
There is also a Windows utility to aid in writing in Elvish: Tengwar Scribe.

1. Joseph Campbell was very impressed with the mythic base for the Star Wars story. Campbell was honored that his books helped inspire Lucas' story. The story entertains more than just the generation that grew up with A New Hope.

Do they ban only Nazi related items, or anything with a swastika on it? As you may know, the swastika was an ancient symbol with positive connotations before the 3rd reich.

Yeah, for example, before the wars the swastika was the symbol of Finnish Air Force. I found it strange that some American online flight sim maker (can't remember which) wanted to use the FAF's modern symbol (just circles) on historical planes...

Apply it to ISO filesystem you are creating, so when CD get's damaged, read everything you get to file, and use this to get original ISO-image.

Only problem is, error correction is for bit changes, and normally, when you have broken CD, you can't read part of it at all. So you have to insert missing bits to ISO-image (plain 0) to correct place before using error correction. Don't ask me how, dd conv=noerr will give you all data it can get, no idea where's something missing.

One solution might be writing some structured data, where you can find block numbers from data. CD doesn't have to have ISO filesystem, or filesystem at all. Just create own dataformat, and write it to CD. And tell us when you have solution available!

Check this sample for example pronunciation.

It's not free software, but BestCrypt (here) works really well for me on both Linux and Windows. I use it to encrypt removable media and can mount them under both OSes. It's basically free for non-commercial use.

I used to use TCFS but their efforts seemed to lag behind after the Linux 2.2.x kernels came out and I subsequently dropped off their mailing list.

There is supposedly a set of Linux patches that are available for embedding crypto of some sort into the Linux kernel. These were prevented from being placed into the Linux source tree due to U.S. export restrictions. Now that those restrictions have been effectively lifted I haven't heard too much about it. I think it's high time crypto became part of the kernel.

http://www.jetico.sci.fi/

Or better yet, sci.fi

Scramdisk (my personal favorite)

BestCrypt

PGP Disk

E4M

And to ease day-to-day operation: SecureTray (Windows tray utility to manage encrypted partitions).

engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

I remember reading about work being done to get Altivec support into gcc. Here is one link discussing it, but I don't know how athoritative this source is. I would love to get some more informed comments regarding the state of gcc wrt Altivec.

I don't know if he made it to any of the other sites, but when Stephenson did a signing last month in Minneapolis (the one at Barnes & Noble, not the one at Uncle Hugo's), Bruch Schneier was there as well. He didn't end up getting to do much during the presentation (he said he was mainly there to answer any highly technical questions), but I got to chat with him a bit afterwards and he was pretty cool. He was signing his appendix to Cryptonomicon if people wanted; he also indulged my nerdy request to sign my notebook, as there was much more important stuff in there (namely the blowfish algorithm in BestCrypt, the finest completely transparent, container-based encryption (for Windoze, sorry) I've been able to find.) I was wondering if Schneier made it to any of the other signings or if those of us in the Twin Cities were just lucky since this was his home turf.

Well, the initiative is about BeOS, but the system is meant for Linux and BeOS. ... which btw is a great combo.