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Domain: andamooka.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to andamooka.org.
Comments · 20
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Re:Safety
If you happen to grab a DC power line this is especially dangerous, as an AC line with throw you off while a DC line will cause you to simply grab harder and you can't let go.
From http://www.andamooka.org/reader.pl?pgid=liecDCDC_3 , AC will tend to induce fibrillation of the heart, while DC will tend to 'freeze' it. A 'frozen' heart is more likely to regain a normal beat than a fibrillating (rapid, irregular beat) heart. Either way, not a 'Good Thing'.
Note to the wise: Wherever possible, always approach a circuit with the back of your hand. If it is DC, the muscle reaction in case of contact/shock will tend to pull your arm away. If it is AC, same thing will happen. Depending on the voltage present on the conductor, you may even feel the hairs on the back of your hand react to the field produced, i.e., they will 'stand up'.
CPD. -
Classics...
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
- Common Lisp HyperSpec
- Common Lisp the Language, 2. ed
- Common Lisp - A gentle Introduction to symbolic computation
- The Scheme Programming language, 2. ed
- Reflections on trusting trust
- Lisp: Good News, Bad News. How to Win Big
- John McCarthy's homepage
- Dennis Ritchie's homepage
- Various classic papers it's a shame ACM never bothered to continue adding to
- Another list of classic papers (this time related mostly to programming language design)
- GTK-Gnome Application Development (not a classic, though, as the field is too young)
- KDE 2.0 Development (not a classic though, as the field is too young)
- Eric Weissteins Mathworld
- Compilers and compiler generators - an introduction with C++ (although I'm not too sure if it deserves being called a classic...)
- Parsing techniques - A practical guide
- Art of assembly language programming (never was a dead tree, but good anyway)
- Paul Carters 386 assembly book (same comment as above)
- An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation (see comment above)
- How to design programs - An introduction to programming and computing (not a classic, yet!)
- The Gutenberg archives contains much non-copyrighted classic fiction in ASCII format
- Sacred texts has copies of or links to many religious text for various major (or minor) religions
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Classics?I'm not sure what you mean by "classics". Is MathWorld a "classic"? I don't mean that pejoratively -- I tend to think of a "classic" as something old and dusty, and MathWorld has only been around for 6 years or so.
If you're just looking for online books, there are lots of them; e.g., here and here and here. Of course, almost all books for which the copyright has expired are online somewhere -- although very few, if any, IT books would fall into that category.
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Re:Clearinghouse for editorial contributorsAre there resources that list projects like the one above looking for editorial assistance? If not, should there be one?
I don't know if there is, but I certainly think it would be a good idea to set one up. Contact me if you don't know where to start.
Meanwhile, I contribute my own favorite open document site: Andamooka
It's a slash site, so people can login and contribute annotations. I don't think it has any provision for copy editing yet, but I think it should have.
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It's on andamooka, slash site for annotationsThere is also an electronic version of this book available [here] which is a living version of the printed book
Another site that carries it is the slashcoded Andamooka (with which I am not associated), which has the dual advantage of carrying many more open source books and permitting registered users to enter their own annotations on line.
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other sites
- For free hosting of free-as-in-speech books, see Andamooka. They also allow you to give annotations and comments.
- For a catalog and reviews, see my site, The Assayer.
- Opencontent.org - licenses, and a directory of open-content works
- Internet Public Library
- Project Gutenberg
- ibiblio - an archive of free information
- On-Line Books Page and Book People mailing list - has an emphasis on old books that have fallen into the public domain
- Samizdat.com hosts a bunch of free books, plus lots of good articles and links
- Association des Bibliophiles Universels - hosts PD texts in French
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Re:Troll?Still looking for the bill MS charged me for the MFC license--- oh wait, there ISN'T ONE!
Fine. Send me a licensed copy of Windows for free. Or, to end this thread and spell it out for you - you pay for it when you *buy* windows. You know - when you slap down your money at CompUSA, or what Dell charges you to cover what they pay Microsoft per computer shipped.
*Sigh*... Plus, as others have pointed out in this thread, MS is even moving away from this, charging seperately for developers for the
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Evan -
Other nice free books
Andamooka has a nice amount of books freely available online, and they're annotatable too. Worth checking out.
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Re:A place to start on free text books.QUESTION:
STALLMAN: No, I don't.
That was really bizarre. There are tons of free textbooks on the web. Check out The Assayer and Andamooka as starting places. It's particularly strange that Stallman would say this, since he's a computer scientist, and computer textbooks (and manuals) are the biggest single category of free books.
Continuing on the same topic, Stallman says
I started proposing this free encyclopedia and learning resource a couple of years ago, and I thought it would probably take a decade to get things rolling. Now we already have an encyclopedia that is rolling.
The most charitable way to describe this statement is that Stallman must have a horrible memory. As discussed ad nauseum on Slashdot a few months ago, Nupedia came first, then Stallman contacted them, then they agreed to GFDL it, then Stallman went ahead and tried to muscle his way in anyway with the confusingly named "Gnupedia."
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Open Content RepositoryAndamooka is a repository of Open Content books. Readers can read, annotate, and discuss the books online.
Many of the books relate to open source software. KDE 2.0 Development , GTK+/GNOME Application Development by Havoc Pennington, and The Cathedral & The Bazaar by ESR are among them.
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Open Content RepositoryAndamooka is a repository of Open Content books. Readers can read, annotate, and discuss the books online.
Many of the books relate to open source software. KDE 2.0 Development , GTK+/GNOME Application Development by Havoc Pennington, and The Cathedral & The Bazaar by ESR are among them.
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Open Content RepositoryAndamooka is a repository of Open Content books. Readers can read, annotate, and discuss the books online.
Many of the books relate to open source software. KDE 2.0 Development , GTK+/GNOME Application Development by Havoc Pennington, and The Cathedral & The Bazaar by ESR are among them.
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Open Content RepositoryAndamooka is a repository of Open Content books. Readers can read, annotate, and discuss the books online.
Many of the books relate to open source software. KDE 2.0 Development , GTK+/GNOME Application Development by Havoc Pennington, and The Cathedral & The Bazaar by ESR are among them.
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Visibility is the keyReally, you were very lucky to find out about this at all. I think the first line of defense against this kind of abuse is to make sure people know where to find actual copylefted stuff. The more visible the project, the more immune to abuse it is. Linux is so highly visible, it's completely immune. I mean, imagine somebody trying to sell a proprietary unix clone that was really just Linux. Good luck! But with a less visible project like yours, it could easily have happened that nobody would have run strings on it, or would never have realized the significance of the results.
As the author of a free book, worries about this kind of abuse are one of the most common reactions I get when I talk to people who aren't familiar with free information. The crucial point is that the internet is the perfect tool for publicizing free information projects and giving people a place to check whether the thing they're paying for might really be available for free. In the case of books, people should know to check the IPL, On-Line Books Page, Andamooka, and the site immodestly listed in my sig. I'm not as familiar with the equivalents for software, but I imagine SourceForge would be a good starting point.
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Write a better bookWell, I'm one author ( KDE 2.0 Development ) who thinks this is quite an unreasonable and self-harming request that the authors are making. Don't the authors want their work to be read? If a book gets sold as used, that means that two people will have an opportunity to read it instead of just one. Maybe the second person will enjoy it and/or find it useful. S/He might then tell a friend about how good the book is, or buy your next book new.
If you want to make more money, I'd suggest you write a better book.
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Open content is idealIf you want (and the poster does) to collect and customize content, rather than creating it all from scratch, open content is ideal.
What we need is to collect open content (see Opencontent web site, Andamooka) and create online tools for organizing and redistributing it.
This worked for open source software (who doesn't reuse other people's code?), but open content is a little different b/c the typical content re-user isn't technically proficient like typical code-reuser (programmer) is. Those who are need to create the necessary tools. This is part of the discussion going on in the FreeBooks project.
Dave
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Charge and give awayMaking your book free as in speech is perfectly compatible with charging for printed, bound copies. O'Reilly has published some free-as-in-speech books. KDE 2.0 Development is a good example of this type of book. For that matter, most of the books on Andamooka are both free-as-in-speech and available in print.
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Charge and give awayMaking your book free as in speech is perfectly compatible with charging for printed, bound copies. O'Reilly has published some free-as-in-speech books. KDE 2.0 Development is a good example of this type of book. For that matter, most of the books on Andamooka are both free-as-in-speech and available in print.
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Re:Downloading whole book?
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This book is non-free - uses OPL option B.Quoting from the copyright notice here:
Distribution of the work or derivative of the work in any standard (paper) book form is prohibited unless prior permission is obtained from the copyright holder.
In other words, only Sams Publishing has the right to distribute printed copies. This might sound fair enough, but it suffers from the same problem as the QPL: incompatibility with itself. If you want to merge portions of this book with portions of another, similarly licensed book from someone else, then nobody has the right to print the resulting derivative work. If a C++ book, say, was released under this license by Que, say, and you used the C++ book and the KDE book to create a derived work, "Learn C++ for KDE", then neither you nor Que nor Sams Publishing have the right to print that book.