Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

Selected Russian Software
 Developers Resources

As far as I can recall conditions of writing software in Russia, Ukraine and the whole xUSSR region always were bad. Exceptionally bad under communists. Poverty, very bad hardware, stupid and arrogant managers (such IS managers can probably be found only in the largest US corporations :-), again horrible poverty, bad telecommunication infrastructure or very bad telecommunication infrastructure or no telecommunication infrastructure at all ;-(. See also Tribute to Dmitry Gurtyak.

But something, probably it's a cultural thing (BTW intelligentsia is a Russian word) this area of the planet nevertheless provides a lot of gifted programmers :-).  In 90th due to economic turmoil the brain-drain  from this region was substantial. But nevertheless there are still a lot of  talented programmers (as well as talented mathematicians) in this region. And what is really amazing, despite huge economical problems and poverty Russian/Ukrainian mathematical and programming education is still on a decent level.  But that 's becoming more and more difficult as no due attention is paid to the secondary social functions of science. Scientists are needed not only to do research but also to teach -- in particular, to maintain the system of higher education -- and to preserve an intellectual atmosphere in society at large...

By Russian developers I will mean programmers that can speak Russian language -- it's a cultural, not ethnic definition (there is a special gender of computer humor that I can call "Russians are coming" see, for example, this story). Recently USA and other developed countries (Israel, Australia, Canada, Germany, UK, to name a few) were the major beneficiaries of the brain-drain from the xUSSR region (Israel alone benefited on the scale 6 billions a year -- as Israeli officials admit themselves, USA probably benefited at least twice as much). BBS quoted a Russian trade union official who said that "more than half a million scientists and computer programmers have left the country since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991"  Anyway a lot of first-class programmers left xUSSR region for economic and political reasons and settled in other countries. One can be surprised by how much code in mainstream software products were written by programmers of Russian descent. Let's do not assume that the brain drain was a totally negative phenomenon. due to suppression of business is Soviet times, science was a magnet for intelligent people. Some redistribution of society's intellectual resources away from science and technology is therefore a necessary part of the post-Soviet transition.

Below is a very small personal selection of products by Russian programmers that can a little bit widen horizons of the people who can attribute to Russian programmers Tetris and STL library only.  It's very eclectic, based on my personal preferences and in no way complete. I collected this just from purely educational standpoint -- in no way I claim any regional or cultural superiority of Russian speaking programmers (preferences and programming style can be a little bit different -- see for example The Orthodox File Manager(OFM) Paradigm; also some languages were much more used in xUSSR region than elsewhere -- for example PL/1 dominated on mainframes and managed almost completely eliminate Cobol; Pascal, especially, Turbo Pascal and Delphi also seems to be used more widely than in the USA).

Generally I just want to pay a small tribute to people who in immensely difficult conditions managed to became first class programmers and despite all odds finish products that other can benefit from. Many nice programs were written for Microsoft platform (see for example Far and Rar). First of all Microsoft software is very popular in this region. Contrary to primitive understanding of this complex issue, software piracy is actually a positive marketing tool. People will make an illegal copy of a friend's favorite program and often (especially if the program is used for business purposes) like it enough to eventually buy it for the price three-five times exceeding the price of the same program in the USA (Just look on the Web how much Microsoft charges for the for the localized version of the Office). Or maybe the person doesn't buy it, because its too expensive, but they will never buy a competitor's product either. This is largely how Microsoft Office became the standard in former USSR countries. Before Star Office it just did not have any really dangerous competitors.

The selection below contains both open source and shareware products. Most of shareware products described below are not crippled. The "share" in shareware should imply a sense of altruism that is much lacking in the products that provide only subset of features to unregistered users. I consider such software  a demoware,  not shareware.

Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov

P.S. To save bandwidth for people (as opposite to robots) the page was split in several sections: Old News   and  Selected Russian software.  See links in the header of the page for details.

Old News ;-)

[Dec 13, 2008] Anna Matveeva The western media must not spoil the vital relationship between Russia and the west Comment is free guardian.co.uk

A Russophobia virus has infected the air. What is it? It is when an English literature teacher in a good school, explaining how to answer an exam question on comedy, tells your daughter: "Don't worry, simply write – I am Russian, I do not have a sense of humour." Or the ease with which jokes like "You are Russian, you must know all about corruption," are made. A BBC documentary presenter asks his Russian interpreter in the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad: "Do you feel Russian or European?" What does he expect the woman to say?

When a fashionable detective writer wants to write a thriller with a foreign twist, guess who will be the nemesis? An al-Qaida plot in Hackney runs the risk of being politically incorrect. But Russian dissidents and oligarchs chased by Scottish police fit the bill perfectly. The British media, mindful of inter-race relations, seeks to avoid hurting the feelings of Muslims, but the idea that Russians can feel hurt does not occur to them. For Russians in the west, if one is not an oligarch, pop star or secret assassin, and does not think that "Putin's regime" is second-worst to that of Ivan the Terrible, treading these waters is problematic.

This is not to say that Russians in Britain are discriminated against in the workplace, or that my neighbours suspect me of dumping polonium when I throw rubbish away. Rather, it is possible to say things without thinking of what it might be like on the receiving end. Stereotypes promoted by the media are now entrenched: Russian companies are corrupt and are puppets of the state, minorities are not allowed to speak their languages and males are chauvinist machos. The economy survives on pumping gas, while the leadership dreams of conquering half of the world. News from Russia is bad news. It is hard to blame journalists for reporting what is newsworthy: saying that Russians go to supermarkets and buy the same food as their western counterparts is boring, while writing that Moscow hosts the first ever all-male strip joint is "sexy".

The Russia-Georgia debacle brought these attitudes to the fore. The reaction of the media and the politicians was overwhelmingly anti-Russian, because their gut feeling told them who was in the wrong. More objective reports appeared much later. Why was the conflict in South Ossetia so important? Because Russia was a party to it. Readers were led to believe that minuscule South Ossetia is a proto-state like Kosovo, while no parallels were drawn with Nato action in ex-Yugoslavia in support of Albanians.

The question is: can Russia do anything good? In Russophobes' eyes, it should (1) surrender and apologise, (2) give western companies control over natural reserves because Russians mismanage them anyhow, (3) limit their ambitions to culture and (4) award Boris Berezovsky a medal for democracy-promotion.

What feeds Russophobia? Moscow's own actions are only part of the story. In the last few years several constituencies came together to create a new momentum. The cold warriors found a mission again. The existence of a familiar enemy who plays by the rules is more comfortable than the "enemy amongst us" who may work in a corner chip shop. Western liberals who passionately believed in Russia's democratic transformation to their own recipe became disillusioned, turning the energy of embittered idealism into exposing the evils of "Putin's KGB regime". They were joined by immigrants who made their way in the new country by "unveiling the truth" about Russia.

What are the effects of Russophobia? Economically, as BP and Shell found out, it is harder to do business. Politically, it is impossible to conduct a frank dialogue on issues of common concern, as trust has gone out of the relationship. In the security field, it has resulted in militarisation on both sides, undermining the achievements of disarmament. Finally, polarising language flourishes. Unlike in the 1990s, the Russian elite reads English-language media, getting from it the idea that "the west is against us".

Why should we care? Attitudes matter as Russia is at a crossroads. It can go either towards increased modernisation or militarisation. It can build pragmatic, but solid relations with the west, or it can indulge in spoiling the international game and setting up anti-western alliances. It is the responsibility of the western intelligentsia to see that stereotypes create enemies and not to miss their chance to prevent a new division of Europe.

Anna Matveeva is a visiting fellow with the Crisis States Research Centre at the London School of Economics.

[Mar 18, 2008] Sir Arthur C. Clarke passed away today. He was 90 years old and his writings inspired millions of Russians.
 

[Mar 11, 2008] Let the Russians sort out Russia By Rodric Braithwaite

FT.com

Now that we have endured all the speculation about how Dmitry Medvedev, the new Russian president, will turn out (we will know soon enough, won’t we?), we should look more closely at a much contested question: are the Russians even capable of democracy?

Many people – both here and there – argue that the Russians have no democratic tradition, that they prefer the iron hand of the autocrat, that the place is too big, too heterogeneous and too disorderly to be ruled any other way. Vladimir Putin is more subtle: he believes that the Russians are not yet ready for democracy, that they need to be brought to it by a managed process, lest everything collapse in chaos. He reminds one of the British, who argued that Indian independence must be postponed until the natives were capable of governing themselves.

Given the chance, the Russians – like the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Pakistanis and others – turn out in large numbers to express their views through the ballot box. That is not enough, of course, to establish a working democracy in any country. But the result may well be a genuine expression of the popular view. Most ordinary Russians, thoroughly inoculated against the western model by the chaos, humiliation, poverty and corruption of the Yeltsin years and angered by endless hectoring and ill-conceived advice from the west, are willing to pay a price in democracy for the stability and growing prosperity that have accompanied the Putin years. So in the recent parliamentary and presidential elections they twice voted heavily for a continuation of the “Putin system”. In the circumstances, that was a rational choice.

The Russian government manipulated the electoral process – out­rageously – to get the right result: a curious sign of Putin’s weakness, not his strength, since no one doubted that most people would vote the way the government wanted, for their own good reasons. Nevertheless both elections had a certain legitimacy despite the obvious flaws. The voters were offered a choice on March 2 and many of them took it. One in five voted for Gennady Zyuganov, the veteran Communist – nearly twice as many as predicted. One in 10 voted for Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the rightwing political showman. We may not like these results – it is always disconcerting when people fail to vote the way you think they should. But it is very different from what happened in Kazakhstan in 2006, when President Nursultan Nazarbaev, who had been in power for 17 years, was re-elected for another seven by 95 per cent of the voters.

Democracy is about throwing the rascals out and most Russians are reconciled to their current rascals. It was different in March 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev organised the first contested elections in any Warsaw Pact country, under an electoral system of mind-boggling complexity designed to preserve the Communist party’s monopoly of power. But the voters recognised the rascals all right. They voted tactically and with great sophistication to throw out the bosses of Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, a quarter of the regional party secretaries, a heap of generals and a large number of unpleasant people throughout Russia.

This remarkable democratic experiment then went wrong for a number of reasons: the sense of national humiliation that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ensuing poverty, the inability of the liberal intelligentsia (the self-styled “conscience of the nation”) to agree on any effective course of action, the determination of the hard men in the army and the party to get their own back.

That does not mean the Russians are “genetically” incapable of democracy. Their history and their culture are not propitious: Russia has indeed for most of its history been a closed and imperial autocracy. But here, too, the Indian example is instructive. A country with a far larger population, an even more heterogeneous culture and an un­broken history of autocratic and imperial rule has run a remarkably successful democracy for the past 60 years.

Although Russians today do not enjoy our kind of democracy, they do enjoy an unprecedented, if precarious, degree of personal prosperity, of access to information, of freedom to travel and even – within limits – to express their views. To argue that they cannot go on to construct their own version of democracy is a kind of racism. It may take decades, even generations; the construction of democracy always does. But if the Indians can do it, so can the Russians.

George Kennan, that great Russia-watcher, got it right when he wrote in 1951, at the height of the cold war: “When Soviet power has run its course . . . let us not hover nervously over the people who come after, applying litmus papers daily to their political complexions to find out whether they answer to our concept of ‘democrats’. Give them time; let them be Russians; let them work out their internal problems in their own manner. The ways by which people advance towards dignity and enlightenment in government are things that constitute the deepest and most intimate processes of national life. There is nothing less understand­able to foreigners, nothing in which foreign influence can do less good.”

It is the wisest advice – blissfully ignored by our policymakers who, like latter-day Christian missionaries, believe that we have a duty to spread the gospel of democracy, if necessary by military force (for which they are unwilling to pay). Not only Russians find that proposition distinctly suspect.

Sir Rodric was British Ambassador in Moscow during the fall of the Soviet Union. His latest book is Moscow 1941: A City and its People at War (Profile Books, 2006)

[Feb 15, 2008] nginx 0.5.35 (Stable)  by nuut

About: nginx is an HTTP server and mail proxy server. It has been running for more than two years on many heavily loaded Russian sites, including Rambler (RamblerMedia.com). In March 2007, about 20% of all Russian virtual hosts were served or proxied by nginx.

Changes: The STARTTLS in SMTP mode is now working. In HTTPS mode, some requests fail with a "bad write retry" error. The "If-Range" request header line is now supported. uname(2) is now used on Linux systems instead of procfs.

[Feb 12, 2008] Richard Stallman scared of Russia

webplanet.ru

The visit of the Free Software Foundation leader Richard Stallman to Russia in March 2008 could be canceled because of the problems with too-late visa application. A part of the trouble appeared to be Stallman's rejection to get help from Victor Alksnis, the State Duma member and the only Russian politician who helps Free Software and Open Source movements in Russia. Alksnis promoted Stallman's upcoming visit thru his blog posts, and said he could help with "administrative issues" as well. However, the moderator of linux.org.ru Sergey Udaltsov (who lives in Ireland not Russia) wrote a letter to Stallman saying Alksnis is a bad guy for Free Software, because of "his fight against the independence of the Baltic countries" in late 80s. Udaltsov also says Alksnis wants to use GNU/Linux for his own political goals including the creation of Russian "National OS" (independent from Microsoft). After this letter, Richard Stallman said he didn't want Alksnis to organize his visit to Russia. Perhaps, Stallman won't come at all. We at Webplanet.ru think the rout of this problem in not politics but the "language barrier" we already described. Western folks don't know much about Russian IT situation 'cos they don't read Russian. The only information channel for them is "former Russians" who live abroad and speak English - like Irelander Sergey Udaltsov who controls linux.org.ru. But these "foreign Russians" usually get pretty paranoid about their "former motherland" calling it a dictatorship daily (perhaps as an excuse for their departure). So we hope Russian linuxoids find some sane local leaders. No need to marry free software and politicians, it's true. Yet we don't see why Free Software activity in Russia should be killed by some old-fashioned Cold War rhetoric from Ireland.

[Jan 17, 2007] Outsourcing The Russian Revelation by Stan Gibson

June 12, 2006 (eWeek) When Daniel Marovitz sought an offshore partner, he scanned the globe. "We talked about Canada, Ireland and low-cost locations in the United Kingdom. But it really came down to India and Russia," said Marovitz, chief technology officer for global banking at Deutsche Bank's investment banking unit, in London.

Marovitz soon found the approaches of companies in those two countries could not be more different—and that a Russian outsourcing provider would best satisfy Deutsche Bank's needs in maintaining and enhancing its 5,000-user "client-first" CRM (customer relationship management) system for investment bankers.

Want to have applications built in Russia?

As Marovitz learned, the thing to remember is that you're not in India, where you may become accustomed to seeing hundreds of workers assigned to a project that they will dutifully attempt to execute according to instructions, cheerfully saying "yes," even when they have doubts about the methodology or the deadlines.

In Russia, it's the opposite: You won't find big companies with big teams willing to say "yes" to your every whim.

Instead, you're likely to find a small team of experts ready to grill you with tough questions. It may be jarring at first, but for certain projects, it can be just what the doctor ordered.

[Dec 31, 2006] Twenty-five Signs of a Completely Americanized Russian Programmer

S novyim Godom !!!

[Sept 5, 2006] SWsoft, the company that is sponsoring the OpenVZ and that sells a fuller-featured commercial version called Virtuozzo announced that its container management tools will also be able to manage Xen virtual machines, said Chief Executive Serguei Beloussov.

[Sept 4, 2006] Scientists aim to take the heat off computers UW engineer uses ionic wind to create cooling chip

By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER

Alexander Mamishev believes he has just the thing for the hottest new computer chip.

A microscopic air conditioner.

"It's based on a phenomenon that's been known for hundreds of years," said Mamishev, an electrical engineer at the University of Washington. "But for the first several hundred years, nobody put it to much use. We are putting it to use."

The phenomenon he and his colleagues are exploiting is variously known as corona discharge, ionic wind or electrostatic fluid acceleration. (There's a good reason most engineers don't moonlight as song lyricists.)

They are using it to cool down microchips. The digit-crunching work done by computers produces a significant amount of heat. Efforts to increase computing chip power and capacity continually run up against this limiting factor of excess heat production.

"Their speed is often limited by how hot they get," said the Ukrainian-born director of the UW's Sensors, Energy and Automation Laboratory.

Heat is why desktop PCs have fans and why Apple's Power Mac G5 incorporated the time-proven method of using water as a coolant. The problem with fans is they are noisy and not too efficient. The risk of using water, or any liquid, as a coolant is that liquids and electronics tend not to play well together.

Many researchers are working on the problem and have come up with a number of potential solutions. Most represent a more sophisticated and miniaturized twist on standard approaches to cooling and thermal management.

Mamishev, a high-voltage physicist in Ukraine before coming to the U.S., is taking a different approach. As someone who also dabbles in robotics and is writing a book on "fringing electric sensors" (the kind of sensor at work in those stud finders -- for locating wood behind plasterboard walls), he might be expected to do so.

"I came at this from my high-voltage physics background," he said.

A corona discharge is basically the product of some seriously electrified (or more accurately, "ionized") air molecules, also known as a plasma. St. Elmo's fire, which electrical storms sometimes create around wires or poles, is a form of corona discharge or plasma -- one that sailors have witnessed for as long as there have been boats with masts.

Besides sometimes creating visible light and wreaking electrical havoc, corona discharges make the ionized air molecules move. A popular high-tech air cleaner made by Sharper Image uses this phenomenon in a fan-filter combination sold on late-night TV.

"It's very simple in concept," Mamishev said. "The ions push the air."

A few years ago, he and UW doctoral students Nels Jewell-Larsen and Chi-Peng Hsu began looking around for financial support to pursue this at the microchip level.

Nobody wanted anything to do with it. But Mamishev, as a new UW professor, was able to cobble some funds together and, later, get support from the UW's Royalty Research Fund -- a pot of money created by the university's patent income typically used to "advance new directions" in UW research.

"They fund the crazy stuff," Mamishev said.

That was in 2001. With the new money, he and his team began working on the microchip air conditioner. Earlier this summer, after years of work, they presented findings at a major meeting. Now, the funders were listening. Mamishev and his UW team received part of a $100,000 grant from the Washington Technology Center to further their work in collaboration with Intel Corp.

So far, the UW chip coolers have only developed a prototype. But they have proved that it's possible to create an incredibly small "ionic air pump" that works by electrically inducing a corona discharge.

"We should be able to integrate this right into the chip," Mamishev said.

Such an integrated and tiny cooling system should allow for much more efficiency in cooling, he said, and for applications not previously considered feasible.

The UW's "cooling chip" has two parts, an emitter and a collector. The emitter, which is one-three-hundredth of the width of a human hair, creates the ionic air flow. The collector captures the ions at the other end of the chip. This ionic motion carries away heat and cools the chip. The level of cooling can be controlled by how much voltage is applied to the system.

All this is still in the experimental stage, Mamishev emphasized, and there is much more to be done before they can claim to have accomplished their goal. "At this point, we have just demonstrated the physics and our ability to manufacture it."

The next step will be to test their cooling chip after it is incorporated into functioning microchips in a computer. It's still not clear, Mamishev said, how best to manage all of the different cooling chips that would be operating at the same time in a computer. He and his colleagues are working on the mathematics of that one.

[Apr 14, 2006] The ACM-ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest Web Site

The 30th Annual ACM-ICPC World Finals sponsored by IBM will be hosted by Baylor University at the Hilton Placio del Rio in San Antiono Texas, April 9-13, 2006. Participating teams consist of three contestants sharing a single computer for five grueling hours. Only eighty (80) teams will advance the the World Finals from nearly 1,500 universities in over 70 countries who fielded over 3,800 teams at over 130 sites during regional competition. In addition to the actual contest, there will be many novel and challenging activities including the ICPC Java Challenge, festivities, and cultural activities. Please browse through this website for more information about the World Finals, San Antiono, and Baylor University .See also the 2006 World Finals Problem Set (PDF). If you are interested in practicing ACM problems please check out the Spanish ACM Archives. (http://acm.uva.es/ [acm.uva.es] Pick a problem and submit it to the online judge and see how it is. The trick to a lot of these problems is the mathematics of the solution--not necessarily any 'computation'. Why compute something recursively, when there's a theorem that can provide the answer immediately? The problems are designed to capitalize on 'tricks' like this.

Rank	Name	Solved	Time
1	Saratov State University	6	917
2	Jagiellonian University - Krakow	6	1258
3	Altai State Technical University	5	681
4	University of Twente	5	744
5	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	5	766
6	St. Petersburg State University	5	815
7	Warsaw University	5	820
8	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	5	831
9	Moscow State University	5	870
10	Ufa State Technical University of Aviation	5	980
11	University of Alberta	4	479
12	University of Waterloo	4	636
13	Instituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica	4
13	Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology	4
13	Peking University	4
13	Sharif University of Technology	4
13	University of British Columbia	4
13	Zhejiang University	4
19	Information & Communications University	3
19	KTH - Royal Institute of Technology	3
19	Kyoto University	3
19	Lund University	3
19	National Taiwan University	3
19	Petrozavodsk State University	3
19	Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro	3
19	Seoul National University	3
19	Simon Fraser University	3
19	Sofia University	3
19	South Ural State University	3
19	St Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics & Optics	3
19	Taras Shevchenko Kyiv University	3
19	Technische Universität München	3
19	The University of Hong Kong	3
19	Tsinghua University	3
19	University of Science and Technology of China	3
19	University of Tokyo	3
19	University of Toronto	3
19	Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) University	3
39	Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology	2
39	California Institute of Technology	2
39	DePaul University	2
39	Fudan University	2
39	Fuzhou University	2
39	Princeton University	2
39	Renmin University of China	2
39	The Chinese University of Hong Kong	2
39	Universidad Nacional de Colombia	2
39	Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya	2
39	University of Adelaide	2
39	University of Cape Town	2
39	University of Maryland - College Park	2
39	Vinnytsia National Technical University	2
39	Washington University in St. Louis	2
39	Yaroslavl Demidov State University	2
39	École Nationale Supérieure des Télécom Paris	2

2006 ACM Programming Contest Complete

Dartmouth College engineering professor Victor Petrenko, not to be confused with one of the Champions on Ice, has devised a way to use a burst of electricity to remove ice caked on walls or windows. For surfaces coated with a special film, the jolt gets rid of ice in less than a second, far less time than it takes to hack at it with an ice scraper.

While drivers might find easy-cleaning windshields convenient, the technology--called thin-film pulse electrothermal de-icing, or PETD--could have significant economic impact if widely deployed. It could, for example, cut the costs of repairing power lines downed by ice storms and keep plane windshields frost-free, decreasing fuel consumption.

In Sweden, civil engineers have tested PETD and decided to cover the Uddevalla Bridge in a 12-millimeter-thick PETD foil to keep it from icing over.

"Frost-free refrigerators can approximately reduce energy consumption by a factor of two. Billions of dollars are spent each year on running refrigerators and air conditioners. If you can cut that, it's great," Petrenko said. "In ice makers, we can cut the ice-harvesting cycle and increase the productivity of ice makers by 30 (percent) to 40 percent."

A refrigerator for the residential market sporting PETD will likely come out soon. The technology will also be incorporated into the windshield of an upcoming commercial jet, according to Petrenko. Aerospace parts supplier Goodrich, an investor in and one of the seven licensees of Petrenko's Ice Engineering company, is also promoting the concept among utilities as a way to keep wind turbines de-iced.

PETD can go in reverse, too. By varying the electric pulse, the technology can cause ice to stick better to surfaces. That could help snowboarders and skiers better manage the friction with the slope, for greater or lesser traction, as needed.

The technology essentially takes advantages of the inherent properties of ice. Ice, it turns out, is a semiconductor, meaning that it conducts an electrical charge under certain circumstances. Unlike silicon, which conducts negatively charged electrons, ice conducts protons, the core of hydrogen atoms that are part of the water molecules.

Video: Ice control technology
Dartmouth professor Victor Petrenko and team have developed new ways to control or alter ice, making it sticky or slippery. Here, a look at the technology. 

"(An) ice surface has an enormously high electric charge," Petrenko said.

As a result, ice doesn't simply cake onto surfaces--it bonds to them in three ways: via the hydrogen atoms themselves, via an electrostatic bond caused by the current, and via comparatively weak van der Waals forces.

PETD works by breaking the first two bonds. An electric charge lasting a few milliseconds heats the surface buried in ice just long enough to melt about a micron or two of the surface of the ice. Once the ice is melted, the hydrogen and electrical bonds break. The resulting water then acts as a lubricant, allowing the mass of ice to slide away.

"With short pulses, the heat doesn't have time to diffuse. It is all released on the interface," Petrenko said.

To get ice to stick to a surface, the pulse is shortened--first the ice melts, then refreezes. The resulting bond between the material and the ice is even stronger than before.

Why hasn't anyone already come up with this?

"I don't know," he said. "It is a very common story: People for centuries miss a very simple principle. When it's found, people say, 'How could we miss it?'"

Traditional ice removal methods don't address how to reverse the electrical bonds, which explains why they don't work that well. Ice scrapers essentially tear away ice from the outside. Material to repel ice also fails because ice will invariably bond. Companies have thrown money at trying to develop ice-resistant surfaces, but the results have been mediocre.

Petrenko himself worked on a project funded by a generous federal grant. "We concluded that it is against the laws of nature to have an ice-phobic material," he said. "Ice is very strong glue. It is a universal adhesive."

The difficulty with PETD lies in power delivery. The surface only has to be heated to about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, but a broad surface has to be heated simultaneously.

Still, an ordinary car, while running, could provide enough energy to remove the ice. It also takes less energy than heating the windshield.

The intellectual property at Ice Engineering mostly concerns developing power distribution systems and thin films, which coat the surface and conduct heat to the ice material interface. The composition of the films varies. In the case of windshields, Ice Engineering employs a layer of clear indium oxide. "It is the same thing on laptop displays," Petrenko said.

Ice machines and refrigerators, meanwhile, can rely on titanium or carbon fiber composites, which are more durable, because transparency isn't an issue.

The research, so far, has yielded 14 U.S. patents, and several more are pending. Dartmouth owns the patents but markets them through Ice Engineering.

Petrenko came to studying ice by accident. For years, he worked as a semiconductor researcher at Moscow's Institute of Physics and Technology. While on an exchange at Britain's University of Birmingham, he happened upon that school's ice research department. His life changed after that.

"We built a solar cell made of ice," he recalled. "While it is not as efficient as a silicon solar cell, it costs a penny a square mile."

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Luria, A. R. (Aleksandr Romanovich) The Mind of a Mnemonist A Little Book about a Vast Memory