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Print-on-demand was my way of publishing a textbook of Open-Source Artificial Intelligence.

Google Scholar makes the AI4U textbbok available through the Google Print Publisher Program -- so far, so good.

Amazon lets people write vicious reviews full of ignorance and lies -- not good.

Rebuttals of Amazon reviews are called for but nobody seems to care -- why not?

Association for Computing Machinery publishes the truth, but Amazon won't.

Top-notch AI researchers come to the rescue.

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/307824.307853
ACM Sigplan Notices 33(12):25-31 Mind.Forth: Thoughts on AI and Forth

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1052883.1052885
ACM Sigplan Notices 39(12):11-16 Forth and AI Revisited: BRAIN.FORTH

http://www.sl4.org/archive/0205/3829.html

http://pub.ufasta.edu.ar/ohcop/curso2003/27-Activi dad12.ppt

http://books.iuniverse.com/viewgiftoc.asp?isbn=059 5654371&page=1

True AI does not need a phony, artificially contrived contest to prove itself. The Turing Test is much too great an ordeal and a torture for an infant AI Mind to be put through. An Aleph with infinite information or a superintelligence might pass the Turing Test, but it is too difficult and too downright "camp" for primitive AI Minds like MindForth. A better test would be if YOU, Slashdot Reader/slash/Lurker, run Mind.Forth in front of your smartest known acquaintance and discuss with said acquaintance (or classroom full of brainy high school students) whether the AI Mind is actually thinking, or just faking it. Report back here on Slashdot, like Andrew L. Ayers did. The Andrew L. Ayers Test is far better than the Turing Test for evaluating either an AI or a book about AI. The honest, candid assessment by Ayers of Mentifex AI and of why he keeps a copy of the AI4U textbook on his shelf of twenty-odd AI books, earns a sincere thanks from Mentifex. Mod me to the moon.

Mind.Forth is the world's first open-source, public-domain, no-charge-to-use True AI that you may adapt and modify to use as an electronic brain to know facts about your business and to not only answer questions but also to advertise your business when you modify the AI source code and pass it on further with your advertising messages embedded in the free, educational artificial intelligence.

914 PC BOTS is a discussion forum where you may share information about installing the free Mind.Forth software in your own PC BOT robot employees and customer service representatives.

It's all described in the free-to-read-online AI4U alternative textbook of open-source artificial intelligence.

I would love to see a similar idea for books and print media. Printing/binding on request would save a LOT of storage and manufacturing costs, even if it does increase the cost of maufacturing each book.

Something like Lulu or iUniverse should probably be possible to set up nearly some large book store. It wouldn't be as fast as burning a CD but probably doable in some reasonable time.

This is off-topic: I've followed your link to iUniverse (quite frankly I thought that it was a link to some book by David Brin, posted as a joke). I'm starting to write a book which I am going to self-publish using one of those print-on-demand services. It's a lot of time but I want to be up to date with different options. So far I was considering mostly Lulu or CafePress. Lately I've found also Zazzle which seems nice for printing artwork but there are no books yet. Generally instead of looking for those services myself I just save links to those which I find others using. Could you please tell me why would you personally suggest iUniverse instead of Lulu or CafePress, for both the cheapest options possible as well as standard books with ISBN and everything? Have you used them yourself? Thanks.

"If you get angry -- even at injustice and murder -- it will automatically and immediately transform you into an unalloyedly evil person!"

I have watched these scenes and thought about them some. It is possible the author never intended the depth I attribute to them but here goes.

The Emperor is lying. He wants Luke to join the dark side and a big part of that is convincing Luke that he has already gone over. If Luke believes he has already joined the dark side he will stop resisting and embrace it.

So, while hate and fear may make someone more susceptible to the dark side, it does not take away their power of choice. Anakin does not learn this until the very end when he sees Luke defeat the dark side in the battle of wills.

(and yes, that is very long. you should write a book)

in chapter 6 of proudly serving my corporate masters, Adam Barr explains the details of a tech demo at Softimage

29.4.3. Achieve and demonstrate the sort of Vulcan mind-meld which
logic dictates should be possible when two artificial Minds pool
their shared memories or knowledge-bases and co-experience events
such as dreams, hallucinations or the remote sensing of scenery.
Establish protocols for deciding questions such as which entity
shall lead the stream of consciousness in the virtual or shared
reality of the mind-meld, and who shall remember and who shall
forget all that transpires during the merging of consciousness.

The sine qua non of geekery is el cheapo AI textbook AI4U: Mind-1.1 Programmer's Manual.

This brand-new November-2002 open-source artificial intelligence resource book needs to be reviewed here on SlashDot.

The Robot AI Mind is freeware, not shareware, and is listed in the Free Software Donation Directory as an open source AI project not crying for gimme-gimme money-money but rather as quasi-shareware where you get something in return: potentially the rare Gutenberg Bible of public domain AI leading to the Technological Singularity.

Accordingly, the extra request is made here that AI geeks obtain two copies of AI4U : one for themselves, and one that they register with BookCrossing.com and then leave surreptitiously in locations where other AI-prone geeks and wannabe's will find the AI-secrets AI4U textbook. Merry Xmas.

[This is an excerpt from chapter 2 of my book.]

"Waterloo is considered the premier engineering school in Canada, and is most famous for its co-op program, in which students alternate school trimesters with work trimesters for five years. By the time they graduate, students have accumulated six different four-month work assignments. Some students wind up spending three or four of these co-op terms as Microsoft interns and then hire on full-time when they graduate. "Co-op" and "intern" mean the same thing in this case--one is the Waterloo term and one is the Microsoft term--but because of how the Waterloo schedule works, Waterloo co-ops will show up for Microsoft internships not only during the summer, but also from January to April and September to December.

Waterloo students have a reputation at Microsoft for being the crème de la crème among interns. In fact, for a while Waterloo interns were given special email addresses. While interns from all other schools had email addresses that started with "t-" (to visually distinguish them from full-time employees), Waterloo interns were given the unique prefix "w-". In the world of Microsoft that was high status indeed. Having grown up in Canada and knowing many people who went to Waterloo, I will state that there is nothing particularly magical about Waterloo students. Waterloo certainly does attract some of the best engineering students from all across Canada, but the admission standards are unquestionably lower than at the Ivy League universities, MIT and other top U.S. schools. Waterloo does a fine job of educating its students, but the curriculum is the same standard engineering courses offered elsewhere.

Despite this, Microsoft will happily turn down honors graduates from top U.S. schools, while drooling over Waterloo students. Why is this? It is because of the co-op program. But what is it about the co-op program? First of all, let's separate the students who did co-op terms at Microsoft, and lump them together with students from other universities who did internships at Microsoft. Those students are treated differently from others interviewing--Microsoft does recognize previous work experience at Microsoft as a valid input to the hiring process. One of the main goals of the whole internship program is to conduct extended, real-world evaluations for future full-time employment. If you have worked as an intern at Microsoft in the past and gotten good reviews from your boss, that is considered prima facie evidence that you will do well as a full-time employee and will factor into your interview after college. In fact it may become harder and harder for others to get full-time jobs at Microsoft, because hiring former interns carries so much less uncertainty.

But what about the students who have not interned at Microsoft before? Microsoft interviewers love to hear about specific tasks that were worked on by the candidate, with clear goals and results. Waterloo co-op jobs are great for this, so they give the students much more to talk about during interviews. This gives the Waterloo students a huge advantage over those from other schools, without indicating that they are likely to do any better once they are hired. The real ability they have is the ability to interview well at Microsoft.

I once asked a former Microsoft recruiter what she thought about Waterloo. Her first instinctive reaction was "a top school for technical candidates." But after thinking about it for a bit, she commented, "Outside of Microsoft, I've never heard of Waterloo."

Microsoft used to have a very bad attitude towards universities in general, viewing them merely as (imperfect) training grounds for students. Graduate degrees, with the exception of MBAs, were viewed as a waste of time. One senior manager, discussing recruiting students who were considering graduate school instead of Microsoft, once said, "We fully know how bogus [graduate school] is." This has improved recently (Microsoft now gives grants to schools without trying to dictate exactly what the money will be used for), but the bias against theoretical work and in favor of applied work still remains. Trying to figure out the relevance of a school project during an interview is hard--it is too dissimilar from the work done at Microsoft. Much easier to discuss co-op terms with a Waterloo candidate, and much less risk to recommend "hire" on one. So the myth of Waterloo persists."

This book by Adam Barr (available online here) talks about the Microsoft interview process and how the dynamic evolved, including some discussion on trick questions.

Full text of Proudly Serving my Corporate Masters here...

Just in case you wanted some more insight into working for the company. Fascinating stuff.

It would be more accurate to say Microsoft bought Softimage for unclear reasons, tried to Microsoftify it to some extent, decided it wasn't really worth owning, and found Avid as an exit strategy. Softimage was completely owned by Microsoft, and the decision on what to do with Softimage was made by Microsoft.

So how are things up there in the tundra...is Marche Michel still around?!?

- adam

Okay, so the author missed a little bit. But he's opened a clear dialogue and that can't hurt.

I just read Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters (buy it or read it online at http://books.iuniverse.com/viewbooks.asp?isbn=0595 161286&page=fm1) and Breaking Windows (http://breakingwindows.net) and I think a key lesson from both is the importance of evangelism. Win the developers and you win the battle. Network effect/tipping point is key here and with time and continued effort (and probably a little good luck) Linux will reach the necessary level to be at leas a co-equal desktop platform.

Other posters have questioned if Linux should be (at least in part, or have the capability of being) a Windows clone. I agree with those who say it shouldn't but then again that's the beauty of this open source world cuz those who think otherwise are welcome to go for it.

My thought is that the Office paradigm is 10 years old as a GUI and 20 years old (+-) in the sense of L1-2-3/WordPerfect apps. Haven't we learned enough over these years to devise a better way of helping people get ordinary business tasks done? Should the community invent an improved combustion engine or a practical fuel cell?

Soegaard does point out, more or less, that Office forces users to adapt their work processes to its features/capabilities. Better software would, at a minimum, be adaptable to those processes instead. Mark Hurst's GoodEasy system for the Mac (http://www.winterspeak.com/columns/goodeasy.txt) points to one small step in this direction but I don't feel it goes near far enough.

Brainstorm, people!

The thing that holds them back I think is not so much the price of the hardware, but the lack of content.

But that is changing as current publishers are putting most of their new stock into electornic format that would be suitable, and places like iUniverse build libraries of titles available on demand.

iUniverse is cool - they will take any book you own the intelectual property for and make it available to all bookstores with an ISBN and standard ordering systems, for basically nothing. If you have a book that you wrote that went out of print, send them a copy and they scan it and for free, it is now back in and you can earn roalties. If you just wrote a new book and want it published, they'll do that too for a few hundred bucks send you a few copies and make your book available.

iUniverse doesn't do editing or promotion or anything like that, but that could be handled by a standard publisher. When Amazon or someone else orders up some copies, iUniverse prints them out and ships them off, on demand with no wasted money for storage of unwanted books.

They have a number of titles that would otherwise be unavailable, and will have those titles available "forever".

From what I understand, they seem to be set up to publish one's books in perpetuity. After they get a book together (manuscript, cover, edits, etc.) they make it available via the web, phone order, as well as through any traditional bookstore or places like Amazon.com via the standard ISBN ordering abilities. Whenever they get an order for a book, they print one, send it off, and cut a cheque for the author.

I don't think they do any promotion of the books, but for out of print books by previously published authors they also don't seem to charge any fee, so it seems like a no-risk (or at least minimal risk) type of activity.

Their different publishing programs are here

There might be similar places around, and I don't know how good this place is, but I do know of at least one very good technical Macintosh book who's author is using this service.

The thing that holds them back I think is not so much the price of the hardware, but the lack of content.

But that is changing as current publishers are putting most of their new stock into electornic format that would be suitable, and places like iUniverse build libraries of titles available on demand.

iUniverse is cool - they will take any book you own the intelectual property for and make it available to all bookstores with an ISBN and standard ordering systems, for basically nothing. If you have a book that you wrote that went out of print, send them a copy and they scan it and for free, it is now back in and you can earn roalties. If you just wrote a new book and want it published, they'll do that too for a few hundred bucks send you a few copies and make your book available.

iUniverse doesn't do editing or promotion or anything like that, but that could be handled by a standard publisher. When Amazon or someone else orders up some copies, iUniverse prints them out and ships them off, on demand with no wasted money for storage of unwanted books.

They have a number of titles that would otherwise be unavailable, and will have those titles available "forever".

From what I understand, they seem to be set up to publish one's books in perpetuity. After they get a book together (manuscript, cover, edits, etc.) they make it available via the web, phone order, as well as through any traditional bookstore or places like Amazon.com via the standard ISBN ordering abilities. Whenever they get an order for a book, they print one, send it off, and cut a cheque for the author.

I don't think they do any promotion of the books, but for out of print books by previously published authors they also don't seem to charge any fee, so it seems like a no-risk (or at least minimal risk) type of activity.

Their different publishing programs are here

There might be similar places around, and I don't know how good this place is, but I do know of at least one very good technical Macintosh book who's author is using this service.

I figured this would be pretty much common knowledge among /. readers, but I guess not.

Iuniverse.com has been using something similar for quite a while to allow people to self-publish. For $99 or so, your book gets put in a format these machines understand, assigned an ISBN number and entered in the Ingram book database. Amazon and BN then can sell your book. The books only get printed when someone orders one and then shipped out. The more successful ones sometimes end up on BN shelves in the brick-n-morter stores.

A great many of the books have been utter drek, but for those looking to get a few copies of their novel out, it's worth it. They are also targeting companies for internal manuals and custom books, professors who write their own texts, authors whose books are out of print, etc. If Amazon or your local Borders got one of these machines, it's still likely that a service like this would exist to get your book into the system.

for those that don't want to shell out for the book, you can read it here. That's certainly what I've been doing.

I have to applaud your open-mindedness after years of Microsoft bashing...I heartily agree, since a lot of what you say in this essay is what I say in chapter 13 of my book. - adam

Another thing to do if you support this experiment with free (-as-in-beer) information is to write a review of one of these books on The Assayer, which is a nonprofit site I run for user-submitted book reviews with an emphasis on free books. All reviews are copyleft licensed, and the site is noncommercial.

All ten of the Baen books are now listed (so far without reviews) in the site's literature section.

One of the main arguments people have made against free books is that without a publisher, you have no filter in place to get rid of the junk. The Assayer aims to disprove that argument by providing a forum for people to discuss which free books are good and which are bad.

</self-promotion>

By supporting Baen in this experiment, you'll also be helping encourage publishers to take the next step, which is to publish books that are free-as-in-speech, or at least partially free-as-in-speech, e.g. using OPL with the A&B options that prevent other print publishers from selling the same book in print. Until they take that step, there's always the possibility that publishers will make free-as-in-beer books not free again. This has happened with about 30 Macmillan computer science titles. You'll find them all listed on IPL as if they were free, but when you click on the link, you get a message saying they're no longer available for free.

You also have to realize that the publishing industry really doesn't know how this is going to play out. They'll try stuff and see if it works. They'll try antibooks. They'll try lame stuff like putting books online, but only with every single page as a bitmap, so that it's completely impractical to read them. (iUniverse, Dorling Kindersley, and Electric Press do this.)

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

$30,000 or $99 through Iuniverse.com and your distributers are Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble Online, and any bookstore that orders from the Ingram catalog in whatever size runs they want. The books are printed on demand and available as quickly as most other books. Limited to 6" x 9" paperback format, but that's not much of a restriction. You may not be on the shelves in the local Borders by default, but no other publishing method guarantees that either. I've seen several of the titles published in this program on endcaps in my local B&N.

LetterJ