I am surprised nobody has mentioned the circumstances ounder which this book has been written. At the time, the Soviet Union was still intact and very much influential in Poland. A huge body of Lem's work is thinly veiled satire critisizing totalitarian givernments in general and USSR in particular (USA also got a fair beating at his hands). When you compare Lem to Orwell, keep in mind that Lem was writing in the face of potential immediate persecution. He walked a fine line, balancing satire, obscuring his ideas from censors but not general public and using his popularity with readers as a deterrent to his arrest. That takes guts.
MFIAB is fabulous, and so is everything else Lem has written. Pick it up, you won't regret it.
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,
Re:Why can't anyone see the implications of this?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
Oh, and the Dutch bikers are sane? I visited Netherlands last summer, and both bikers and drivers there make their NYC counterparts look tame. I will never forget this 20-omething dude pedaling calmly across a busy street (forcing cars to hit breaks), hoilding a joint in one hand and a cell phone in the other. He was just carrying on a conversation like it was an absolutely ordinary thing for him - and I am sure it was!
Re:The surgon general...
on
ACM vs. RIAA
·
· Score: 1
Well, to be more exact, the president can veto anything he bloody wants, but the USSC can't overturn legislation on a whim - they have responcibility to only do so if it is in contradiction with higher law (i.e. constitution).
Please feel free to modify and send as you see fit.
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 13:18:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: (Removed)
To: jcristof@adobe.com, dstyerwa@adobe.com, lvacante@adobe.com,
ablatchf@adobe.com, skrueger@adobe.com, gbabbit@adobe.com, wsaso@adobe.com,
jwarnock@adobe.com, cgeschke@adobe.com, bchizen@adobe.com,
snarayen@adobe.com, mdemo@adobe.com, cpouliot@adobe.com,
jstephens@adobe.com, mdyrdahl@adobe.com
To whom it may concern,
I (and doubtlessly many others) am writing to express my disappointment
with the recent actions of Adobe Corporation, specifically those having to
do with FBI's arrest of Russian citizen Dmitry Sklyarov. Dmitry presented
an academic paper at computer security professionals' conference (DEFCON),
and was subsequently detained for reported violation of Digital Millenium
Copyright Act. The subject of his paper was inferior security in Adobe
Reader application.
I've used Adobe products for a long time, in my career as web designer,
freelance consultant and programmer. I alone am responcible for over
$100,000 in sales of Adobe products, having recommended the purchases to
several educational and business organizations, and subsequently
supervising deployment of said applications. You might say I was a loyal
customer. Not only do I like your products, I also like your company. I've
spent many a summer night watching outdoor movies at Adobe's parking lot
theatre in Fremont (Seattle). I've corresponded with several engineers and
support personell within your organization, and I always found my
experiences agreeable. It'd be a shame for me to abandon the use and
recommendation of your products. However, if Adobe's actions continue in
the pattern demosntrated over the last few days, my principles will leave
me no choice, but to take my business elsewhere.
Please, understand two important things. First of all, as an experienced
software engineer, I can tell you that the copyright protection mechanisms
employed by the Reader application are *inferior*. Not only are they
horribly "broken", the entire approach the Reader team took is just plain
bad, and cannot be fixed. I can tell you, that based on what I've read in
Mr. Sklyarov's paper, if my goal were to reverse-engineer Reader's
security measures, I could have done it in a matter of days. By
suppressing Mr. Sklyarov's voice you are doing a disservice to yourself,
your customers and your shareholders. Copyright protection is important,
and you want to employ the best tools in your products! Your Reader team
made several exceedingly bad decisions, but it is a matter that should be
fixed internally, not by killing the messenger!
Secondly, Mr. Sklyarov was arrested under the provsion of DCMA (Digital
Copyright Millenium Act). I can express my opinions on DMCA at great
lengths, but I feel that my opinions are not of real value to your legal
counsel. However, I can tell you with utmost certainty, that an immense
number of computer users worldwide feel that DMCA is bad law. Many
organisations (such as Free Software Foundation and American Civil Liberty
Union) have expressed willingness to sponsor lawyer fees to have the law
overturned on the grounds of unconstitutionality. It may seem like a good
thing for Adobe now, but by using this law to persecute Mr. Sklyarov, you
are alienating millions of users! Please don't make this mistake.
Allow me to demonstrate an example of discussion surrounding this case:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01%2F07%2F17 %2 F130226&cid=&pid=0
&startat=&threshold=1&mode=nested&commentsort=3& op =Change
(join the two lines of text above together). This is an example of
alienation that is happening right now in a community that is highly
My father has done extensive business with Russian Far East (a small siberian town called Tynda) until he passed away. Himself being from Russia, he knew how to work the ropes. He didn't even try to send anything via a carrier, government or otherwise. What he would do is go to an airport here in Seattle, which has direct flights to Khabarovks, and ask one of the passengers to take the package along. What he shipped was mostly small plastic equipment, so people could easily see they were not trafficking drugs or weapons. Russians are generally very sympathetic with causes like that, and my dad would arrange for a person in Khabarovsk to come and pick the package up straight from their hands. He'd offer $50 or so for the trouble, sometimes people would take it, other times they'd shrug it off and do it for free. He must have used this method a couple dozen times, and he never came home with a package refused. Of course you can't ship anything large that way - and so he became an expert with dealing with Russian customs for sending anything large. Basically, they are not all theives, as some people in earlier posts seemed to state. They are normal, tired, underpaid people who try to do their job the best they can with very little cooperation from higher branches in government (which is another story altogether). Basically, a few hundred-dollar bills slipped in the right hand seem to do wonders to make sure that everything is handled properly - nothing illegal being shipped mind that. Anyway, if you have Russian friends in Seattle, or another city that has a direct flight to Khabarovsk, you might work out a deal and have your friend pick up the package straight from their hands.
I've seen these articles pop up time after time, on/., time, forbes magazine, you name it. And I think a fundamental point is missed by the authors, as well as in discussions following such publications (like the one happening right now). These people may be "techies" - but it doesn't take all that much to be one.
So, Mr. so-and-so makes $40K a year doing something vaguely described as "computer networking". Yes, in this hot technological climate people are willing to pay top $$$ for work which amounts to crimping cables, crawling through the ceiling tiles and setting up network workstations. This is not nuclear science here. You don't go to college to learn "white-orange, orange, white-green, blue...." order of colors in a CAT5 cable. If you don't want to invest the time to figure it out by yourself, with books and web (as most of us did), you can take a 4 week course that will teach you anything you need to know to be a $40K CAT5 crimping engineer and cable plugging monkey (no offense implied, this is how these people are referred to in my workplace, and hey, that's all they do:)).
What's wrong with making money this way you might ask? Nothing! But people who pass up an opportunity to receive a round-up education to get a hot IT/MISA/Junior sysadmin job in Silicon valley (gee, maybe even with stock options!) should stop and consider what the demand will be like for their job in five years. Right now, despite the slowdown in tech stocks, the growth rate is explosive and top dollar is paid for anyone who can get the job done at least well enough to last till next round of fund raising. Once the dust settles down, the HR people will need to decide who stays and who goes... and a college degree (with implied skills in communication, problem solving and ability to learn new things) will suddenly mean a good deal.
I anticipate that some people will dislike what I've said. Don't get me wrong, there are some highly talented people who might even be better off without college. But for every 10 cable crimper and windows networking "engineers" there may be only one person who will actually learn the things that they missed out in a college education on their own.
I have very mixed feelings about Matrox hardware. My NT box still runs a 4 MB mystique and the card is wonderful, I constantly use it at 12801024x85 Hz with no problems and decent 2D speed. The drivers are rock-solid, and I was able to use the same card in Linux perfectly.
But
I recently put together a Windows2000 box and got a Matrox Dual head G400 for it. The Matrox video web site advertized the card being Windows 2000 compliant. Matrox had beta drivers available. Guess what? They did not work! I tried 3 revisions, and the result was always the same: boot up, 2 seconds activity, hard lockup. You can't do that! You can't sell a card and say it has support for an OS, and then release drivers so bad they amount to no support at all!
I never did get the card to work, I gave up on dual monitors and got a TNT2 Ultra instead. Mind you, my machine has not has a single crash since (once I got rid of the aureal2 sound card which was hardware incompatible with my Abit motherboard due to PCI timing issues - another big rant there). The crashes were not Windows 2000 fault as many people here would tend to assume, it was Matrox's fault pure and simple. I'll never buy another Matrox again. Nvidia is my current graphics chip supplier of choice.
Ugh, long rant. Sorry, you just have no idea how much mental pain and anguish that stupid Matrox card cost me:) P.S. the machine specs are Athlon500/Abit KA7-100/TNT2 Ultra 32 MB/128 ram
Alex
Re:Am I alone? (spoilers)
on
Ender's Shadow
·
· Score: 1
I think you are touching onto something that plagues most of Western science fiction - that it sucks. I happen to believe that there is more to science fiction as a genre then setting it a few centuries ahead in time and giving the characters blasters/phasers. Science Fiction is there to inspire plots and thoughts that were NOT explored in traditional literature. Ender's Game is 85% an average adventure book, 10% pure drivel about superintelligent children that are just like adults only smarter, stronger and more vicious. The remaining 5%,IMHO,is very good stuff - the chapters in which Ender doesn't appear altogether. I thought that his' siblings characters and actions were the best parts of the book. Yes, they are still the same supersmart kids designed to make us (readers) feel humiliated at our own inability to fool and manipulate millions of intelligent people, but, at least, they don't try and solve all their problems with violence and intimidation (at least Valentine doesn't)
My biggest problem with OSC is that his writing is not science fiction in its pure sense. For me, to compare OSC with, say, Stanislaw Lem, is like comparing Robert Jordan with Tolkien (note: I am not looking to start a flame war on that). Tolkien was the visionary in the field, one who turned his extensive knowledge of Nordic mythology into a masterpiece of fantasy that created and consequently headed the field for many years since. Jordan, a professional writer, on the other hand, used the genre of fantasy to set his story which is much closer to his own Conan the Barbarian then Tolkien's LOTR. There is nothing wrong with that, I've gone through 7 books of Jordan's Wheel of Time and am awaiting for the 8th to come out in paperback. However I don't belive that Jordan's genre is quite the same as Tolkien's, and I equally don't think that OSC's writing belongs in the same classification as Stanislaw Lem's, Isaak Asimov's or Philip K. Dick's. He is much closer to a group of writers like Robert Heinlein (actually, I would classify one of his books as pure science fiction work worthy of highest honors - Starship Troopers), Larry Niven, Ande Norton et al.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish a robot would get elected president. That way, when he comes to town, we can all take a shot at it and not feel too bad about ourselves.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned the circumstances ounder which this book has been written. At the time, the Soviet Union was still intact and very much influential in Poland. A huge body of Lem's work is thinly veiled satire critisizing totalitarian givernments in general and USSR in particular (USA also got a fair beating at his hands). When you compare Lem to Orwell, keep in mind that Lem was writing in the face of potential immediate persecution. He walked a fine line, balancing satire, obscuring his ideas from censors but not general public and using his popularity with readers as a deterrent to his arrest. That takes guts.
MFIAB is fabulous, and so is everything else Lem has written. Pick it up, you won't regret it.
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
Oh, and the Dutch bikers are sane? I visited Netherlands last summer, and both bikers and drivers there make their NYC counterparts look tame. I will never forget this 20-omething dude pedaling calmly across a busy street (forcing cars to hit breaks), hoilding a joint in one hand and a cell phone in the other. He was just carrying on a conversation like it was an absolutely ordinary thing for him - and I am sure it was!
Well, to be more exact, the president can veto anything he bloody wants, but the USSC can't overturn legislation on a whim - they have responcibility to only do so if it is in contradiction with higher law (i.e. constitution).
Please feel free to modify and send as you see fit.
7 %2 F130226&cid=&pid=0
& op =Change
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 13:18:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: (Removed)
To: jcristof@adobe.com, dstyerwa@adobe.com, lvacante@adobe.com,
ablatchf@adobe.com, skrueger@adobe.com, gbabbit@adobe.com, wsaso@adobe.com,
jwarnock@adobe.com, cgeschke@adobe.com, bchizen@adobe.com,
snarayen@adobe.com, mdemo@adobe.com, cpouliot@adobe.com,
jstephens@adobe.com, mdyrdahl@adobe.com
To whom it may concern,
I (and doubtlessly many others) am writing to express my disappointment
with the recent actions of Adobe Corporation, specifically those having to
do with FBI's arrest of Russian citizen Dmitry Sklyarov. Dmitry presented
an academic paper at computer security professionals' conference (DEFCON),
and was subsequently detained for reported violation of Digital Millenium
Copyright Act. The subject of his paper was inferior security in Adobe
Reader application.
I've used Adobe products for a long time, in my career as web designer,
freelance consultant and programmer. I alone am responcible for over
$100,000 in sales of Adobe products, having recommended the purchases to
several educational and business organizations, and subsequently
supervising deployment of said applications. You might say I was a loyal
customer. Not only do I like your products, I also like your company. I've
spent many a summer night watching outdoor movies at Adobe's parking lot
theatre in Fremont (Seattle). I've corresponded with several engineers and
support personell within your organization, and I always found my
experiences agreeable. It'd be a shame for me to abandon the use and
recommendation of your products. However, if Adobe's actions continue in
the pattern demosntrated over the last few days, my principles will leave
me no choice, but to take my business elsewhere.
Please, understand two important things. First of all, as an experienced
software engineer, I can tell you that the copyright protection mechanisms
employed by the Reader application are *inferior*. Not only are they
horribly "broken", the entire approach the Reader team took is just plain
bad, and cannot be fixed. I can tell you, that based on what I've read in
Mr. Sklyarov's paper, if my goal were to reverse-engineer Reader's
security measures, I could have done it in a matter of days. By
suppressing Mr. Sklyarov's voice you are doing a disservice to yourself,
your customers and your shareholders. Copyright protection is important,
and you want to employ the best tools in your products! Your Reader team
made several exceedingly bad decisions, but it is a matter that should be
fixed internally, not by killing the messenger!
Secondly, Mr. Sklyarov was arrested under the provsion of DCMA (Digital
Copyright Millenium Act). I can express my opinions on DMCA at great
lengths, but I feel that my opinions are not of real value to your legal
counsel. However, I can tell you with utmost certainty, that an immense
number of computer users worldwide feel that DMCA is bad law. Many
organisations (such as Free Software Foundation and American Civil Liberty
Union) have expressed willingness to sponsor lawyer fees to have the law
overturned on the grounds of unconstitutionality. It may seem like a good
thing for Adobe now, but by using this law to persecute Mr. Sklyarov, you
are alienating millions of users! Please don't make this mistake.
Allow me to demonstrate an example of discussion surrounding this case:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01%2F07%2F1
&startat=&threshold=1&mode=nested&commentsort=3
(join the two lines of text above together). This is an example of
alienation that is happening right now in a community that is highly
My father has done extensive business with Russian Far East (a small siberian town called Tynda) until he passed away. Himself being from Russia, he knew how to work the ropes. He didn't even try to send anything via a carrier, government or otherwise. What he would do is go to an airport here in Seattle, which has direct flights to Khabarovks, and ask one of the passengers to take the package along. What he shipped was mostly small plastic equipment, so people could easily see they were not trafficking drugs or weapons. Russians are generally very sympathetic with causes like that, and my dad would arrange for a person in Khabarovsk to come and pick the package up straight from their hands. He'd offer $50 or so for the trouble, sometimes people would take it, other times they'd shrug it off and do it for free. He must have used this method a couple dozen times, and he never came home with a package refused. Of course you can't ship anything large that way - and so he became an expert with dealing with Russian customs for sending anything large. Basically, they are not all theives, as some people in earlier posts seemed to state. They are normal, tired, underpaid people who try to do their job the best they can with very little cooperation from higher branches in government (which is another story altogether). Basically, a few hundred-dollar bills slipped in the right hand seem to do wonders to make sure that everything is handled properly - nothing illegal being shipped mind that. Anyway, if you have Russian friends in Seattle, or another city that has a direct flight to Khabarovsk, you might work out a deal and have your friend pick up the package straight from their hands.
Hope this helps,
Alex
I've seen these articles pop up time after time, on /., time, forbes magazine, you name it. And I think a fundamental point is missed by the authors, as well as in discussions following such publications (like the one happening right now). These people may be "techies" - but it doesn't take all that much to be one.
So, Mr. so-and-so makes $40K a year doing something vaguely described as "computer networking". Yes, in this hot technological climate people are willing to pay top $$$ for work which amounts to crimping cables, crawling through the ceiling tiles and setting up network workstations. This is not nuclear science here. You don't go to college to learn "white-orange, orange, white-green, blue...." order of colors in a CAT5 cable. If you don't want to invest the time to figure it out by yourself, with books and web (as most of us did), you can take a 4 week course that will teach you anything you need to know to be a $40K CAT5 crimping engineer and cable plugging monkey (no offense implied, this is how these people are referred to in my workplace, and hey, that's all they do :)).
What's wrong with making money this way you might ask? Nothing! But people who pass up an opportunity to receive a round-up education to get a hot IT/MISA/Junior sysadmin job in Silicon valley (gee, maybe even with stock options!) should stop and consider what the demand will be like for their job in five years. Right now, despite the slowdown in tech stocks, the growth rate is explosive and top dollar is paid for anyone who can get the job done at least well enough to last till next round of fund raising. Once the dust settles down, the HR people will need to decide who stays and who goes... and a college degree (with implied skills in communication, problem solving and ability to learn new things) will suddenly mean a good deal.
I anticipate that some people will dislike what I've said. Don't get me wrong, there are some highly talented people who might even be better off without college. But for every 10 cable crimper and windows networking "engineers" there may be only one person who will actually learn the things that they missed out in a college education on their own.
Flame away...
Alex
I have very mixed feelings about Matrox hardware. My NT box still runs a 4 MB mystique and the card is wonderful, I constantly use it at 12801024x85 Hz with no problems and decent 2D speed. The drivers are rock-solid, and I was able to use the same card in Linux perfectly.
But
I recently put together a Windows2000 box and got a Matrox Dual head G400 for it. The Matrox video web site advertized the card being Windows 2000 compliant. Matrox had beta drivers available. Guess what? They did not work! I tried 3 revisions, and the result was always the same: boot up, 2 seconds activity, hard lockup. You can't do that! You can't sell a card and say it has support for an OS, and then release drivers so bad they amount to no support at all!
I never did get the card to work, I gave up on dual monitors and got a TNT2 Ultra instead. Mind you, my machine has not has a single crash since (once I got rid of the aureal2 sound card which was hardware incompatible with my Abit motherboard due to PCI timing issues - another big rant there). The crashes were not Windows 2000 fault as many people here would tend to assume, it was Matrox's fault pure and simple. I'll never buy another Matrox again. Nvidia is my current graphics chip supplier of choice.
Ugh, long rant. Sorry, you just have no idea how much mental pain and anguish that stupid Matrox card cost me :) P.S. the machine specs are Athlon500/Abit KA7-100/TNT2 Ultra 32 MB/128 ram
Alex
I think you are touching onto something that plagues most of Western science fiction - that it sucks. I happen to believe that there is more to science fiction as a genre then setting it a few centuries ahead in time and giving the characters blasters/phasers. Science Fiction is there to inspire plots and thoughts that were NOT explored in traditional literature. Ender's Game is 85% an average adventure book, 10% pure drivel about superintelligent children that are just like adults only smarter, stronger and more vicious. The remaining 5%,IMHO ,is very good stuff - the chapters in which Ender doesn't appear altogether. I thought that his' siblings characters and actions were the best parts of the book. Yes, they are still the same supersmart kids designed to make us (readers) feel humiliated at our own inability to fool and manipulate millions of intelligent people, but, at least, they don't try and solve all their problems with violence and intimidation (at least Valentine doesn't)
My biggest problem with OSC is that his writing is not science fiction in its pure sense. For me, to compare OSC with, say, Stanislaw Lem, is like comparing Robert Jordan with Tolkien (note: I am not looking to start a flame war on that). Tolkien was the visionary in the field, one who turned his extensive knowledge of Nordic mythology into a masterpiece of fantasy that created and consequently headed the field for many years since. Jordan, a professional writer, on the other hand, used the genre of fantasy to set his story which is much closer to his own Conan the Barbarian then Tolkien's LOTR. There is nothing wrong with that, I've gone through 7 books of Jordan's Wheel of Time and am awaiting for the 8th to come out in paperback. However I don't belive that Jordan's genre is quite the same as Tolkien's, and I equally don't think that OSC's writing belongs in the same classification as Stanislaw Lem's, Isaak Asimov's or Philip K. Dick's. He is much closer to a group of writers like Robert Heinlein (actually, I would classify one of his books as pure science fiction work worthy of highest honors - Starship Troopers), Larry Niven, Ande Norton et al.