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Also wikibooks.org

Although I use the web for a huge amount of my research and entertainment reading these days, I still also depend heavily on "textbooks" for more in-depth treatment of material. While I'm sure that using good old-fashioned books will not actually stop, I wonder if the lack of emphasis is a bit of a slippery slope: less demand for textbooks will lead to less production of good textbooks which will feed back to less demand for textbooks. Even with such projects as Gutenberg, Wikibooks, and others, is it possible to have the same quality of material online? Different types of material surely (e.g. multimedia), but I think that the format, physicality of books is something that we need to hold onto.

It probably can't play harmonics either.

On the topic of downloadable literature about rapidly-accelerating technology, Charlie Stross's newest novel is available for free download. Here's the relevant info (from another one of my slashdot submission attempts):

Programmer-novelist and Hugo nominee Charles Stross has gotten permission from his publishers to make his newest novel, Accelerando, available as a free download in several formats. As described by one reviewer: 'Accelerando fast forwards a not-so-average family through three generations and into a future in which humans seem far more alien than any critters from outer space. With heart, humor and extreme technophilia, Stross embarks on a voyage that unwires humanity and rewires readers to experience the Singularity. As the novel can be somewhat dense in novel technical ideas, I've started a Technical Companion on wikibooks to help provide more information on the relevant concepts.

It's an excellent question. In case the other post didn't fully answer your question, check out this how-to guide.

Using an IR-blaster to change the channels on your set-top box may seem like a bit of a strange hack, but I'm doing it and it works great. I no longer bother watching "live TV"... I just program it to record shows, it changes the channels as needed, and I watch everything time-shifted. Works like a charm.

• http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity is precisely such a thing. It is young, and parts of it that I have seen are quite lame, but the intent is good, and the structure is there. The content requires ... effort.
• accreditation would be an issue. If you think that's silly, then contemplate what lack of accreditation or safety standards would mean for air travel.
• Quite a few universities have stepped up to the "online degree" watering hole, and they have discovered that:
  • it is relatively easy to put up crappy content that no one will buy, and which will sully the University's good name.
  • it is remarkably expensive to put up quality content which is actually worthy buying; the cost rivals or exceeds bricks & mortar conventional courses.
  • there is usually very little incentive for regular faculty to participate in online course delivery, unless the enrollment is very high (why? because it is a lot of extra work). So, if you're looking for that extra special course in kinetic theory of plasmas with application to incoherent scatter, well, don't hold your breath.
  • Likewise, universities have "entrepreneurial" units to go develop stuff for online course delivery. This inevitably begets warfare with the Department that "owns" the course. Example: my university offered a "certificate program" of four courses in electrical engineering. This is just dandy, until the Electrical Engineering Department discovered (by accident) that someone else was offering their courses. The "entrepreneurial" unit hadn't quite bothered to check with the home Department...
• To expand upon a topic in the previous list, the authoring tools for WWW-based content delivery are ... extremely poor, at least in relation to what you're trying to do. In a classroom, there is opportunity for detailed and remarkably complex interaction with a functioning expert system (the professor) as well as the other students. Just try to capture that functionality in some 'bot. Along those lines, see the recent James Fallows article explaining just how poor modern search engines are in answering questions. Google is wonderful! But it's also remarkably primitive compared to what we'd like to be able to do.
• If you have ever wondered why there are so few really good WWW-based demos available, consider this: A really good, effective demonstration takes a minute or two to show to the class. However, it can easily take 12 hours of development time to prepare a quality demo that will be used one time, and fill 1 minute of lecture. It doesn't take long to realize that that development time is unjustifiable. (At my own university, there is the very real danger that the computer projection equipment will simply be out of order. There is no satisfaction in wasting 5 minutes of lecture time to show a 1 minute demo).
• ... and for all you l33t h4korz or however you spell it, there is more to a college education than learning how to program good (as Derek Zoolander might have put it.) The economic forces which create a faculty work force continue to develop a faculty which, however haphazardly, values breadth and experience and (yes) literature and history in addition to being able to log on and hack.
  
  A college degree is not a commodity (yet); it is not like 87 octane gasoline dispensed at the pump. The college degree represents a period of time in which you study a lot of useless things in the hope that some of them will surprise you by being interesting; that the depressing or boring things will at least teach you how to wade through depressing or boring material for the rest of your life. It is a period of time when people stop being te

Another interesting project is Wikibooks. Given time, I believe that this project will mature quite nicely into something which could at least put some pressure on the publishing houses to justify the near exorbitant prices which are often charged for merely mediocre books.

Given the growing popularity of Wikibooks, the books that we not only can comment on, but also write and edit, it would seem that at least in terms of non-fiction writing, in just a few short years, we may not ever have to spend another nickel on such books again.

Heck, you can do your gaming on Linux as well.

The SNES was the apex of good game design, anyway. After the SNES, everything had to include FMV and 3D everything. Pfeh.

Well, you probably want a console if you're not a curmudgeon like me.

--grendel drago

I think you have things just as confused.

I will admit that baud rate is not completely the same as data transmission rate, but there is a strong correlation between the two. When you are using a modem connection at 1200 baud, you only get a hundred characters (or bytes) per second for transmission. When you go up to 2400 baud, that transmission rate doubles.

Also, modems are rated at baud rate because the initial modems that connected to computers were external devices (you can still get some this way) that connected to your computer via serial communication link, usually RS-232 protocol. This was not simply bits per second, but a true baud rate because it included stop bits and parity check bits. When you had a 2400 baud modem or a 4800 baud modem... the baud rate was a very accurate measurement of what the data rate to that modem required. Even now, communication over a modem requires programming for the 8250 chip (and its successors... there are many). These are usually wrapped up in the driver-level operations, but still there.

I will agree, however, there was a difference between internal (i.e. between the CPU and the modem) data transfer rate and the data rate between modems. Another thing to keep in mind is that a typical POTS line can only handle 9600 baud communications for a simple serial data transmission method. When you are transmitting at a higher "baud rate" over a modem, the protocols are sending multiple bits simultaneously to overcome limitations of POTS systems. Most modern telephone modems still are only transmitting at 9600 baud, but the data rates are much more. This doesn't change the internal serial data lines to the modem, however, so the baud rate going to the modem (i.e. 28,800 baud) is still an accurate baud rate of the modem, even if the serial "transmission" is only across a 1/4" wire on a PCI card.

For a more complete explaination, visit this Wikibook

sorry yim, that's not correct. momentum is not a square of velocity, but a linear function commonly referred to as P where P=mv NOT mv^2.

force is needed to change momentum. the relationship between momentum and force is determined by the time over which the momentum is changing. This is easy to see from the fact that acceleration is the change is velocity over time (a=v/t).

so... F=ma & a=v/t & P=mv
therefore F=mv/t (substitute for a)
and then F=P/t (substitute for mv)
This means force and changes in momentum are related in that a change in momentum requires a certain force, but this is related to the speed of the change (how quickly it happens) and not according to the square of the velocity of the object. It takes just as much force to slow a 10lb weight by 5mph in 5 seconds, regardless of how fast it was going when it started.

learn more about momentum here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/FHSST_Physics_Momentu m:What_is_Momentum

(for all you physics buffs... i know i skipped the deltas - it just got too complicated)

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_P ro

What inventions do slashdoters think are too important not to share?
Those related to health, medicine included. If you can't trust closed source software there is no way you can trust closed source food or medicine. If I gave you a clear liqiud and said "Here, drink this". Would you? I wouldn't. I would first ask what it was. If the provider refused to say what the liquid was he has something to hide, and if its worth hiding its probobly not worth ingesting.

Also, a tangent, I think an online wikpidia like open cooking database would be a cool project.
Open source cookbook
Wiki cookbook

From the same people who brought you Wikipedia, it's Wikibooks

There's some fairly neat things over at Wikibooks and you can of course feel free to contribute!

WikiVersity School of Mathematics

Here you go:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/German

There is actually an entire wiki dedicated to collaborative writing of books already.

I think this is the perfect (and intended) use for Wikibooks.

One book that might be useful: Windows XP for Beginners.

I think this is the perfect (and intended) use for Wikibooks.

One book that might be useful: Windows XP for Beginners.

Wikipedia, Wikibooks, plus various wikis and websites all over the web for more detailed texts, like TLDP, Internet FAQ Archives etc. Good luck!

Also with screenshots.

I've seen people ditching the Gnome preferences approach, but then the idea of having advanced preferences separate from the common ones is a very good idea that could be used by every user interface.

I realize this is a joke, but people reading should know that meet-in-the-middle is indeed a type of cryptographic attack. It has nothing to do with man-in-the-middle, which attacks a protocol instead of a cryptographic algorithm.

There's actually a Wikipedia-related project called Wikibooks, dedicated to using the wiki process to collaboratively create textbooks. I think the OP's work would be an excellent contribution to this project.

http://www.wikibooks.org/

To Jimmy Wales, everything looks like a job for a wiki.

Wikipedia was a smashing success, and that surprised a lot of people, including me. But if we step back and analyze why it was successful, I think there are some very specific things that made it work, and that don't apply so much to other types of work:

1. instant gratification -- You can be the one to create the article on Green Day, or crustaceans, or whatever you happen to be interested in, and there you go, half an hour later, it's something useful that you've given to the world.
2. permanent value -- You can tell yourself that your article on crustaceans will be something that will always be there for other people to read, albeit with modifications over the years.
3. factuality -- The job of an encyclopedia is mostly just to describe the world as it is. You don't need to be creative, you just need to describe the facts.

Well, wikinews fails criterion #2, and probably #3 as well -- its writers probably aren't going to be flying to Fallouja to report first-hand, so all they'll have to contribute is their own opinions about the news. The one place where wikipedia really falls flat on its face is topical and controversial articles, i.e., wikinews' entire prospective subject matter.

Then there's wikibooks, which fails criterion #1. There may be some healthy, thriving books in there, but as for the physics textbook I've been checking on now and then, nobody seems to have the long-term motivation to write anything past the first chapter.

I am curious how you your goals compare with wikibooks: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

What do you think of wikibooks? How closely does the focus of your project line up with the closest wikibook? Is the breadth and depth of the content similar?

In mentioning a wiki manual, maybe it could belong here. I'm guessing one could possibly put instructions on how to remove Internet Explorer in a Windows text book. Then it could be referenced from within the Wikipedia article.

uhm, 2000 books is very few.

Project Gutenberg sports over 13,000 books (these are legal)

if you go to your local alt.binaries.ebooks or just #ebook you can easily double or triple Gutenberg count (my current library has around 30,000 books). Ofcourse would not so legal to download/own as they still would technically be under a copyright. But then, some of the books are easier to download illegaly than to get them at a library (as soon as I found out that my library has Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card I signed up and was waiting for over 7 months till I downloaded it).

and if are a maniac (as I am) of reading, but prefer to read legal things, then you could/should go with the lower quality writtings that are provided through various BBS archives various pr0n archives, as well as fan finction. Heck, there is even wikibooks.

What is needed is some project that makes a global internet library out of all of these resources. Where we have things rated per genre (tied with the iblist or, ugh, amazon) But for all the texts, not just published/bookstore works.

In summary, you are describing what I call the "leader vs follower" business approach. Note that there probably is a better name for it, I've never studied economics, and have only really started thinking about how business and markets work over the last few years.

"Leaders", while they take assume higher risks, expect higher rewards, as compensation for taking those risks. A typical situation is that they end up creating a new market, which, because they are the creators, they end up holding a monopoly in it. Because they have a monopoly, they are free to charge what they like, as up until the point where what they produce looses its value when compared to what the customer is willing to pay.

Of course, "followers" are looking for less risk, so they choose to existing markets, rather than creating new ones. Also, because the market already exists, the competitive point of distinction between them and others within the market is usually "commodity" - something that all their competitors can also usually do, such as cheaper pricing, different locations, closer to customers, which also reduces prices etc.

Markets typically evolve over time from being new and monopolised by the creator, to common and existing, with a number of "follower" type competitors.

An interesting book which I've realised relates to this is The Science of Getting Rich. Although it doesn't directly describe markets, what it does describe, as one of the "sciences" of getting rich is change from a competitive mindset to a creative mindset. It criticises a competitive mindset because in competition there is always a winner and a loser. A competitive mindset has a destructive component, as one of the things it creates are losers. It suggests that to become a rich individual (primarily financially, and also more generally), in your area of financial endeavour, you should only create, rather than compete. As soon as you find yourself in a competitive situation, abandon it, and again move into a creative situation.

As a side note, the book is pretty philosophical, and, as probably was common for books written in 1910, includes a religious / spiritual sub-theme. This sub-theme isn't all that overt, and you can generally accept it with the view that all the measures suggested have good "karma". I still think the book is worth reading.

Companies that have a "creative mindset" fit in with the philosophy of this book. Not only do they create new things, which creates new markets, they are a monopoly within the market. As they hold a monopoly, they don't have any competitors. As they aren't competing with anybody, their aren't any losers.

A completely "creative" environment would create a world where everything would be proprietory. All products would have high prices, as there would only be one supplier. I'm not necessarily saying that situation would be ideal. Competition does have value, in the sense that it does drive the price down for products which have a large number of consumers. What you can do though is use the products of the "competitive" producers, and combine them in new, creative ways. The world then becomes a combination of "competitive" and "creative", with "creative" leading, and at the leading edge of the market.

Well, it already has, to a small degree.
In music, there is the Creative Commons.
And, in books, there is WikiBooks.
So, yes, it does seem to want to expand to other things.

How can you deny the goodness of the master theorem?

Does anyone know why the Creative Commons license was used instead if the GNU Free Documentation License? Are those licenses compatible? For example, would it be possible to made that work available on Wikibooks and parts of that documentation incorporated into relevant Wikipedia articles? I hope so, becuase it is going to be a magnificent project and Wikipedia is a central respository of free knowledge today.

Also try Wikimedia Cookbook. Try the Lembas Bread recipe.

Also try Wikimedia Cookbook. Try the Lembas Bread recipe.

While opentextbook is an interesting start up, you may want to consider WikiBooks. It is already in a huge number of languages and covers many more topics. Not to mention the other Wiki's available.

PS. If you run your own linux box, set up a mediawiki on it. I use mine for doing research, homework and keeping course notes. Very nice!

Opentextbook.org has very little content-- the link I meant to include is http://en.wikibooks.org

open source text books, perhaps developed wiki style.

Try this. Exactly what you mentioned. Hopefully the idea will catch on, and information hoarding will cease to cost students so much money.

I think this is what you're looking for:

Book For Geeks
Getting a Girl

I think this is what you're looking for:

Book For Geeks
Getting a Girl

I would love to have my users collaboratively developing the user manual - what do I need to get this going?

You could set up your own wiki using the same software as the Wikipedia.

As an experiment you might like to start a Lilypond book at Wikibooks (the textbook/manual/howto sister project of the Wikipedia).

If you want to try and make the wiki world a better place you could help develop a Lilypond plugin for the wikipedia software.

The bible commentary idea is part of Wikisource rather than Wikibooks. See Wikisource:Religious texts where people have started uploading the bible and other religious texts.

Angela.

Very interesting idea. A wiki-style bible commentary would probably be a good fit at wikibooks. Otherwise, you can ask the foundation mailing list. As far as new projects in the works, to my knowledge, there aren't any right now.

There is a sister project to Wikipedia called Wikibooks. The goal of Wikibooks is to create student textbooks and distrubte them under the GNU FDL (a GPL-like licence). Another project that is in planning stages is Wikiversity, which aims to use content from Wikipedia and other open source sources to create reuseable/modular learning content.

That project looks great! I'd also like to mention the newly created Arts bookshelf, which currently includes textbooks on topics like Graphic Design, Guitar, and Game Design and Programming. In the future, it'll hopefully include textbooks on Paper Airplanes and LEGO Design. If you're knowledgeable about any of these areas, please contribute!

Here are some other textbooks slashdot readers may be interested in contributing to:
* Bourne Shell Scripting
* Computer Programming
* Intelligence Intensification
* Book for Geeks
* Getting a girl

That project looks great! I'd also like to mention the newly created Arts bookshelf, which currently includes textbooks on topics like Graphic Design, Guitar, and Game Design and Programming. In the future, it'll hopefully include textbooks on Paper Airplanes and LEGO Design. If you're knowledgeable about any of these areas, please contribute!

Here are some other textbooks slashdot readers may be interested in contributing to:
* Bourne Shell Scripting
* Computer Programming
* Intelligence Intensification
* Book for Geeks
* Getting a girl

That project looks great! I'd also like to mention the newly created Arts bookshelf, which currently includes textbooks on topics like Graphic Design, Guitar, and Game Design and Programming. In the future, it'll hopefully include textbooks on Paper Airplanes and LEGO Design. If you're knowledgeable about any of these areas, please contribute!

Here are some other textbooks slashdot readers may be interested in contributing to:
* Bourne Shell Scripting
* Computer Programming
* Intelligence Intensification
* Book for Geeks
* Getting a girl

That project looks great! I'd also like to mention the newly created Arts bookshelf, which currently includes textbooks on topics like Graphic Design, Guitar, and Game Design and Programming. In the future, it'll hopefully include textbooks on Paper Airplanes and LEGO Design. If you're knowledgeable about any of these areas, please contribute!

Here are some other textbooks slashdot readers may be interested in contributing to:
* Bourne Shell Scripting
* Computer Programming
* Intelligence Intensification
* Book for Geeks
* Getting a girl

That project looks great! I'd also like to mention the newly created Arts bookshelf, which currently includes textbooks on topics like Graphic Design, Guitar, and Game Design and Programming. In the future, it'll hopefully include textbooks on Paper Airplanes and LEGO Design. If you're knowledgeable about any of these areas, please contribute!

Here are some other textbooks slashdot readers may be interested in contributing to:
* Bourne Shell Scripting
* Computer Programming
* Intelligence Intensification
* Book for Geeks
* Getting a girl

That project looks great! I'd also like to mention the newly created Arts bookshelf, which currently includes textbooks on topics like Graphic Design, Guitar, and Game Design and Programming. In the future, it'll hopefully include textbooks on Paper Airplanes and LEGO Design. If you're knowledgeable about any of these areas, please contribute!

Here are some other textbooks slashdot readers may be interested in contributing to:
* Bourne Shell Scripting
* Computer Programming
* Intelligence Intensification
* Book for Geeks
* Getting a girl