Slashdot Mirror

Why bother with the postage when you can simply e-mail the guide (or at least the link): http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Aspies_Book

Of all of the content on Wikimedia projects, this one is certainly something to really look at. I'd dare you to even try and make an edit on the page as well (although the author likely has moved on to something else.... but you are warned!)

Actually, astronaut Buzz Aldrin has considered it:

http://buzzaldrin.com/space-vision/rocket_science/aldrin-mars-cycler/

There are scientific papers on possible orbits, and I am putting the idea of transfer habitats in the book I am writing:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/Interplanetary

The tricky part is dealing with the Earth, Transfer Habitat, and Mars all having different orbit periods that are not simple multiples of each other. That makes it hard to line up for transfers.

I have a solution for that. Combine scoop mining of the Earth's atmosphere and mining the debris belt for raw materials/working parts/satellite refuel and repair station:

* http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/Resource_Extraction#Scoop_Mining

* http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/Orbital_Mining2

The first gives you a relatively cheap source of fuel for your electric thruster to putter around orbit, the second makes use of that fuel to do something useful. Depending on the state of the dead satellite or debris you can either:

- Lower it's orbit enough to re-enter quickly if you can't make any other use of it
- Feed it into a processing unit as raw materials
- Salvage it for working parts
- Repair broken parts to return satellite to operation
- Refuel satellites that are otherwise functional and just ran out of fuel.

It's basically the same service a tow truck and garage provides on Earth, except in space. If we never picked up road debris on Earth, it would be a mess too. What we were lacking is an efficient way to pick up space debris, and the combination of mining air from low orbit + electric thrusters is around a 100 times improvement in propulsion efficiency.

I have a solution for that. Combine scoop mining of the Earth's atmosphere and mining the debris belt for raw materials/working parts/satellite refuel and repair station:

* http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/Resource_Extraction#Scoop_Mining

* http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/Orbital_Mining2

The first gives you a relatively cheap source of fuel for your electric thruster to putter around orbit, the second makes use of that fuel to do something useful. Depending on the state of the dead satellite or debris you can either:

- Lower it's orbit enough to re-enter quickly if you can't make any other use of it
- Feed it into a processing unit as raw materials
- Salvage it for working parts
- Repair broken parts to return satellite to operation
- Refuel satellites that are otherwise functional and just ran out of fuel.

It's basically the same service a tow truck and garage provides on Earth, except in space. If we never picked up road debris on Earth, it would be a mess too. What we were lacking is an efficient way to pick up space debris, and the combination of mining air from low orbit + electric thrusters is around a 100 times improvement in propulsion efficiency.

I know this is a problem, and I imagine smart people are trying to figure something out.

We already have. Orbital scoop mining for fuel supply:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/Resource_Extraction#Scoop_Mining

Use the fuel for electric tugs to collect orbital debris, salvage dead satellites, or repair/refuel ones that can be fixed. Anything that cannot be recycled/reused gets brought down to air mining altitude, where it will quickly de-orbit. The problem until now was debris was in such scattered orbits you could not afford to go collect it. The combination of mining the upper atmosphere for fuel and electric thrusters is so much better, that now you can.

For those who don't understand how the scoop works, you are collecting air at 7.5 km/s inlet velocity, and your thruster works at 30-50 km/s exhaust velocity. So you only use part of your collected air mass to make up for drag and keep the rest. You do this at ~200 km altitude, which is still a vacuum by ordinary standards, but is just low enough that you can collect and pump it into a tank. You need healthy size solar arrays to power the thrusters.

That sounds fine, and I know a person who can recommend books for 6-12 mathematics. The problem is that when I search for wikibooks for K-12 mathematics, I find zero "Completed" books and only one nearing completion. I can't advise this person to recommend a book that's not finished to the school district.

By dropping the non-free textbooks entirely and switching to freely licensed textbooks developed using resources provided by Wikimedia Foundation.

Nevada Cayembe in Ecuador is the best place to leave from. It's the highest point on the Equator, and thus the best place on the planet to launch from. The altitude and reduced air pressure helps your rocket efficiency. Of course, once the Stratolaunch vehicle gets going, they can start a rocket higher and moving faster than any point on Earth. Nevertheless, Cayembe is a great place to put an accelerator type system:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/Human_Transport#Low_Acceleration_Guns

http://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-_izqCR4nsS0/T6bJLGsngcI/AAAAAAAAC1c/zA2p3C2doqA/s1577/Cayambe%2520Topo%2520Map.jpg

It's still there. They just don't enable it by default. (Your remote may vary)

Only the simplistic single noodle stationary space elevator (devised in 1895 for gosh sake) needs Unobtainium for building materials. For a more practical design see this page in a space engineering textbook I have been writing (along with anyone else who contributes, but mostly me so far):

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/Space_Elevator

The short version is that both rockets and space elevators get exponentially more massive with increased velocity. Therefore if you split the velocity to get to Earth orbit between the two methods, they *both* are much less massive than either by themselves. Thus a Skyhook type elevator that provides 2.4 km/s has a mass ratio of 16 times the arriving vehicle mass using existing carbon fiber and reasonable design margins (2.8:1 on the bare cable strength).

The rocket coming from the ground performs the remaining 6.6 km/s ideal velocity, and has a 13% payload fraction assuming LOX/H2 propellant. The ideal velocity is 27% lower than an unaided Single-Stage-to-Orbit rocket needs to do, which accounts for the higher payload. The Skyhook has a landing platform at the tip which the rocket does a vertical landing on. When returning to Earth, the rocket merely drops off the landing platform, and now has to dissipate slightly less than half the kinetic energy as returning from full orbit, so the heat shield problem is that much easier.

You're moving the goalposts, as you said "It is my understanding that they simply search for "X programming" for all X values in the set of programming languages." [emphasis mine]

They routinely go beyond that, and what they do changes from time to time with material impact. That's a simple statement of fact, so you cannot naively rely on TIOBE to be self-consistent.

The other problems, which you haven't addressed are:

• "add rank inputs like new search engines"
• "the search engines underneath them change their methods over time, and these don't necessarily correspond to what TIOBE is trying to measure -- language popularity."
• "have "a manually determined confidence factor" that they apply"

Also, even if they were self-consistent, that doesn't change the fact that their measurements are crude and prone to false positives for a language named "C". For example, I don't see any exceptions for C, yet if I do a Google search for "C programming" and I click deep enough I see a hit for Objective-C. The rise in the popularity of Objective-C alone could be inflating C's rank.

What are they going to find on a rock in space that is not already available on THIS rock in space?

61 MJ/kg of potential energy for one thing (the depth of the Earth's gravity well). Raw materials to bootstrap space industry for another. Your average space rock is 40% oxygen. If you use VASIMR type plasma thrusters to fetch the space rock, and you use oxygen as fuel, you burn 2.3% of the total rock mass to haul it back. Thus the remaining 97.7% of the rock, including a lot of oxygen, is available to use or sell to other people *in orbit*, where any mass is worth $5000/kg at the moment.

Any mass you cannot convert to useful items like water, O2, or steel, still has value as radiation shielding, and stockpile for later processing. At first you will only be making a few products, but add more over time. The key point is as soon as you can extract a little O2 from the first space rock, you are self sufficient on fuel *Forever*.

If you want technical details, you can look at the 80% complete wikibook I have been working on: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods

Have you been reading the book I've been working on?

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods

If not, you may want to, and even contribute. It's a wiki project, so help is welcome, as long as you know what you are talking about.

A more complete step by step plan. Robotic/Automated/Remote controlled equipment is used throughout to prepare the way ahead of large numbers of humans:

(1) Advanced Manufacturing - Using modular automated systems that can bootstrap much of their own construction. This has a goal of lowering manufacturing cost by a large factor. It is first used on Earth to build the factories to build the first space systems, and then later used in space to leverage local energy and materials resources.

(2) Hypervelocity Launcher - This is a low development cost device for launching bulk cargo. Delicate cargo and humans still travel by conventional rockets. At the moment there is enough cost savings to justify such a launcher, but if other vehicles get cheap enough, it may not be needed.

(3) Orbital Assembly - Assemble larger space systems from smaller components launched from Earth, or later manufactured in space. Smaller components means you can use smaller launch systems from Earth, which have lower startup cost.

(4) Electric Thrusters - These have about 10 times the fuel efficiency of existing rockets, and enable highly leveraged mining and processing.

(5) Orbital Mining - Mining small asteroids in orbits close to the Earth for raw materials. The mass return ratio is so high, especially with getting fuel from the next step, it dramatically affects all subsequent cost.

(6) Processing Factory - Converts raw materials mined in space into useful inventory such as fuel, oxygen, structural parts, etc.

(7) Space Elevator - This allows using the highly efficient electric thrusters in place of rockets for much of the transport job in gravity wells, starting with the Earth's.

(8) Human Transport - This improves the methods for transporting humans and cargo which cannot withstand the high acceleration of the hypervelocity launcher.

(9) Lunar Development - With our in-space infrastructure well developed, we can now access the Moon in a robust fashion and start to use it's relatively large mass and surface area.

(10) Interplanetary Development - Transfer habitats in orbits between Earth and Mars. Since they don't move, they can have heavy shielding and greenhouses. Crews use small vehicles to get from habitat to planet orbit at each end of the trip

(11) Mars Development - Use materials from Phobos to build elevator to Mars surface, and start to build up Mars.

More details here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/Combined_Systems

citing 'copyright infringement,' as the company is making similar textbooks using open material.

You're textbook has 1+1=2 in it?
Ours had it first, so we're going to sue you now.

I'll just leave this here: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/English_Grammar. It's free!

The has also been a WIkibook on OpenSSH out for a year or so. The prose may not be the best but the tips are there.

I'm writing a book on that subject. There are way more than gravity slingshots. That's #73 out of 83 on the list so far, and I'm only 1/3 of the way to a first draft:

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

Hi Geoffrey,

Don't forget to put pivoting airfoils on the lower 20km of the struts. That reduces wind loads by about a factor of ten. Also check out the reference book I'm collecting if you have time: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods (it's about 1/4 of the way to a first draft).

There are permutations of the concepts in database theory that have not been tried, at least not that I know of, but NoSQL and this NoSQL 2.0 idea are not amongst them.

A short, and not comprehensive, list of underlying database structures
Another short list, describing a few others
A short list of some file organization methods (ie: access methods)

A truly novel combination of existing structures and access methods would be worthy of a new name. A truly novel form of structure or file organization - assuming it is actually useful - is worthy of not just a new name but a new name writ large on the front page. A repackaged version of an existing combination might want a new marketing name, but it should be recognized that that is all it is - a name to sell by.

Well, there's wikibooks.

Wikibooks has been around for a while, it just lacks collaboration from real experts. MIT open courseware has some textbooks. Scientific papers are becoming openly available in many cases. The evolution is just not complete. But take it from someone who has written technical reports and is working on a space propulsion online textbook ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods ), the hard part is the human writing and editing, not which software you do it on. Apple could have a slick program with a "make pretty" button, and people like me would still have to do all the same work to create the content.

Your mac address is as easy to set as you IP on Linux and unlike IP address on wifi you can pick whatever you like (though most are obviously fake).
Take your pick:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Changing_Your_MAC_Address/Linux

Its also pretty easy on any other *NIX

Just windows does not come with a built in to do it.

But when was the last time soneone showed up to revise a textbook while a student was using it?

Which is why the school board would collect a particular revision of each chapter and use those revisions as the textbook. Wikibooks already implements a "pending changes" system, where anonymous users can't see edits except from users who have made at least 100 edits to 10 different pages, been around a couple months, and flooded Recent Changes at least once. There have been times when it has taken weeks for one of these editors to "sign off" on a revision.

But when was the last time soneone showed up to revise a textbook while a student was using it?

Which is why the school board would collect a particular revision of each chapter and use those revisions as the textbook. Wikibooks already implements a "pending changes" system, where anonymous users can't see edits except from users who have made at least 100 edits to 10 different pages, been around a couple months, and flooded Recent Changes at least once. There have been times when it has taken weeks for one of these editors to "sign off" on a revision.

In the global scale of time, we've barely even begun. Here's a relative timeline of the universe for your consideration. Source: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/General_Astronomy/Short_History_of_the_Universe

Formation of structure begins: 2 days
Earliest stars and galaxies form: 6 years
Sun and Earth form: 37 years
First evidence of life on Earth: 47 years
Advanced life forms on Earth: 57 years
First dinosaurs: 58 years
Dinosaurs become extinct: 4 months ago
Humans appear: 8 hours ago
Writing is developed: 15 minutes ago
Modern scientific thought: one minute ago
Present day: 59 years
Human lifetime: ten seconds
The Sun dies: 80 years

We call them "black blocks", they are dumb violent anarchists ...

Why do you think they are anarchists? i.e. consider this

Indeed, the question of violence is relatively unimportant to most anarchists, as they do not glorify it and think that it should be kept to a minimum during any social struggle or revolution. All anarchists would agree with the Dutch pacifist anarcho-syndicalist Bart de Ligt when he argued that "the violence and warfare which are characteristic conditions of the capitalist world do not go with the liberation of the individual, which is the historic mission of the exploited classes. The greater the violence, the weaker the revolution, even where violence has deliberately been put at the service of the revolution." [The Conquest of Violence, p. 75]

For an interesting discussion that eventually led to my leaving Wikibooks as a regular contributor, I'd point out this following discussion:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Reading_room/Archives/2006/May#Gaming_manual_as_a_textbook

Mind you, the wheel warring here was absolutely atrocious.... and note who started the whole thing.

Also, look at this edit:

http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikibooks%3AWhat_is_Wikibooks&action=historysubmit&diff=281147&oldid=265973

Again, note who made the change, and also note that he did not achieve consensus on this edit, but simply made a policy change. If that isn't wheel warring, I don't know what else I can call it. This edit was reverted by the community too! Mind you, check out this particular user's list of contributions on the site. Not exactly a major player in the community either. And no, he didn't "own" the servers as the WMF had long since taken control of those pieces of hardware.

I'm just saying that in hindsight action were taken which drove substantial numbers of people from at least this sister project, and I can point out similar kinds of anti-new user policies which drove people from Wikipedia under the presumption that the new users would continue to come and that instead we had to hold back the tide to keep them from overrunning the place. Now they simply stopped coming altogether. It was also during this particular episode that if you look back at inflection points in terms of the growth of new users, that the number of new users coming into the projects pretty much stopped growing. Wikipedia was trying to become "more professional" so it lost the initial spark of energy which kept it growing.

I could point to a real wheel war I got into with none other than Brion Vibber, but that goes beyond the scope of what I'm talking about here. I did get kind of sick of the whole thing and there were other situations I got involved with too involving other "admins" that kept reverting stuff I was involved with by imposing page blocks on content I wanted the community to edit, reverting blocks, blocking users that I unblocked, and other really horrible practices. It opens old wounds for me, so I try not to go searching for it, but the stuff is there to look at and in the project archives.

For an interesting discussion that eventually led to my leaving Wikibooks as a regular contributor, I'd point out this following discussion:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Reading_room/Archives/2006/May#Gaming_manual_as_a_textbook

Mind you, the wheel warring here was absolutely atrocious.... and note who started the whole thing.

Also, look at this edit:

http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikibooks%3AWhat_is_Wikibooks&action=historysubmit&diff=281147&oldid=265973

Again, note who made the change, and also note that he did not achieve consensus on this edit, but simply made a policy change. If that isn't wheel warring, I don't know what else I can call it. This edit was reverted by the community too! Mind you, check out this particular user's list of contributions on the site. Not exactly a major player in the community either. And no, he didn't "own" the servers as the WMF had long since taken control of those pieces of hardware.

I'm just saying that in hindsight action were taken which drove substantial numbers of people from at least this sister project, and I can point out similar kinds of anti-new user policies which drove people from Wikipedia under the presumption that the new users would continue to come and that instead we had to hold back the tide to keep them from overrunning the place. Now they simply stopped coming altogether. It was also during this particular episode that if you look back at inflection points in terms of the growth of new users, that the number of new users coming into the projects pretty much stopped growing. Wikipedia was trying to become "more professional" so it lost the initial spark of energy which kept it growing.

I could point to a real wheel war I got into with none other than Brion Vibber, but that goes beyond the scope of what I'm talking about here. I did get kind of sick of the whole thing and there were other situations I got involved with too involving other "admins" that kept reverting stuff I was involved with by imposing page blocks on content I wanted the community to edit, reverting blocks, blocking users that I unblocked, and other really horrible practices. It opens old wounds for me, so I try not to go searching for it, but the stuff is there to look at and in the project archives.

For an interesting discussion that eventually led to my leaving Wikibooks as a regular contributor, I'd point out this following discussion:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Reading_room/Archives/2006/May#Gaming_manual_as_a_textbook

Mind you, the wheel warring here was absolutely atrocious.... and note who started the whole thing.

Also, look at this edit:

http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikibooks%3AWhat_is_Wikibooks&action=historysubmit&diff=281147&oldid=265973

Again, note who made the change, and also note that he did not achieve consensus on this edit, but simply made a policy change. If that isn't wheel warring, I don't know what else I can call it. This edit was reverted by the community too! Mind you, check out this particular user's list of contributions on the site. Not exactly a major player in the community either. And no, he didn't "own" the servers as the WMF had long since taken control of those pieces of hardware.

I'm just saying that in hindsight action were taken which drove substantial numbers of people from at least this sister project, and I can point out similar kinds of anti-new user policies which drove people from Wikipedia under the presumption that the new users would continue to come and that instead we had to hold back the tide to keep them from overrunning the place. Now they simply stopped coming altogether. It was also during this particular episode that if you look back at inflection points in terms of the growth of new users, that the number of new users coming into the projects pretty much stopped growing. Wikipedia was trying to become "more professional" so it lost the initial spark of energy which kept it growing.

I could point to a real wheel war I got into with none other than Brion Vibber, but that goes beyond the scope of what I'm talking about here. I did get kind of sick of the whole thing and there were other situations I got involved with too involving other "admins" that kept reverting stuff I was involved with by imposing page blocks on content I wanted the community to edit, reverting blocks, blocking users that I unblocked, and other really horrible practices. It opens old wounds for me, so I try not to go searching for it, but the stuff is there to look at and in the project archives.

LaTeX is ideal for knocking out a quick letter. It has a letter class that does everything you need and looks great. The margins need a little tweaking, but you only have to do that once.

I think asian countries are a bit different. At least in Japan, they don't heft heavy tomes of text books around, but use 6-8 week pamphlet that have their lessons/content for that period of time in that subject. I'm under the impression that those are owned by the school system.

If wikibooks or similiar took off, no reason that can't happen in schools. After all, there is no reason to really update algebra/calc books all that much. It was pretty much the same today as 100 years ago.

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

I'm no MS apologist ( I run slack on my laptop and Ubuntu server at work, eucalyptus cloud), but there is a whole lot of inaccuracies here. Any kernel level malware invalidates your "literally impossible" file replacement argument.

And yet, you fail to explain how. And yes, the rest of your comment firmly labels you as a Windows (or at least Windows Registry) apologist.

The original execution of the registry was poor, but the concept of a fast and reliable btree key-value store for all your program settings isn't that idiotic (think dbus, gnomeconf, etc).

ANY centralized database of critical configuration information is inherently fragile. Period. And doubly so with the Windows registry, because it is such a mess.

The modern windows registry has plenty of permissions built in the important areas, although it is admittedly a mess of disorganization still.

Permissions are only good until the filesystem is tricked into ignoring them with a privilege escalation. And since most Windows users still run as Administrator, that isn't even necessary.

There are plenty mechanisms to restore a registry; in fact it can be rebuilt in parts if need be. You can walk the structure and recreate the index. UBCD has an excellent one, for example.

That assumes you both know which of the hundreds or thousands of keys have been affected, and then, what you need to set those keys' values to.

If you want to get on a soapbox against MS, there are plenty of arguments why the OS sucks, from a bone-headed approach to library version control, to ugly API's like the MFC, inconsistent handling of kernel mechanisms/calls, a still evolving/broken application install system, extension based file types, a complete lack of usable logs and diagnostic tools built into the OS, the command line is a joke... I could go on and on.

Please! Don't let me stop you...

But please, don't give the windows guys a swiss cheese argument... there are some smart ones out there, if we want to point and laugh we need to go at them with facts :)

I personally don't think that pointing out the Registry as a big, steaming pile of Windows vulnerability is anything like "swiss cheese", and neither do these people.

I co-founded Wikipedia partner site http://en.wikibooks.org/ for exactly this type of use. There are some high school science books already on there which you can reference, or even better, have your students edit and expand themselves. This can be done with a whole class or just for a group of top students or for extra credit. I believe this is the best way to capitalize on the online aspect, not just passively reading someone else's material, but actively participating in creating and editing the learning texts.

Every English textbook that you learned English grammar from was the "fee".

They're working on fixing that.

Right.

And when should we start worrying then? When it's too late to make an orderly and not as expensive transition?

The ICE of the Prius is required only when speeds exceed 42 mph. Below that, it will maintain a constant speed using only electric power until the battery discharges (at which time the ICE restarts, the battery recharges, and the cycle repeats -- especially if the driver uses an off throttle shift to put it back into electric mode). At 40 mph one can go a mile or so on level ground without using the ICE, solely on electric power.

...and cheaper to just set up their own micronation platform using something like http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Making_an_Island/Construction_Guides? All they'd need is a relatively shallow site not in territorial waters. A (largely) unmanned site could be left sealed tight when heavy weather is coming, and could otherwise be maintained by a couple of guys. Armed guys, copyright law being what it is. But, hey, machine guns would be legal! http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle551-20100103-03.html

For example, Magic: The Gathering has exactly that property where you can spend money to buy better cards. Is it that they've balanced it better, so the proportional effect of card-buying is less (you can't purely buy yourself victory)?

I used to be an M:tG addict a few years ago (12 to be specific), and I think on the tournament scene, the best most competitive and interesting games weren't the ones you played with pre-built decks (unless there were ceiling rules like say, only uncommon and common cards) but the games that involved everyone buying a set of packs and either: making a deck from those (which, while fun did involve more luck) or doing a booster draft competition.

Even more fun is getting together with some of your friends or the in-store gang and doing a "pass the trash" tourney (similar to booster draft) which re-used the spare cards that no one really needed anymore but were still fun to play with.

Money was always an issue, but compared to other activities like skiing, skateboarding, etc, this was not that expensive if you didn't get sucked into the whole trading aspect. Plus you could sell off your unused/unwanted cards... they were still physical items.

And don't even get me started about all those shady companies that rebrand free and open source software and sell them as new, awesome software products.

And what's wrong with that exactly?

Selling OSS software is nice and legal as long as the customers know what they're getting. As long as people see you're selling, say, Ubuntu CDs and you just make clear that people could download and burn them themselves if they wanted, it's all nice and dandy.

But rebranding the software to something else and then charging a huge price is dishonest. There are companies that take open source software, call it something else, and then mention in very tiny print that the software you're actually buying is the same old free thing. It's technically legal as long as they follow the license, but it's still dishonest.

This is what I'm talking about. On a first glance, you might think that the page is selling "3DMagix® 3D Animation Software", written by some guy called Cody Langdon. Amazing product art. Nice examples what you can do with the software. Amazing three-day introductory offer that closes in two days, so you'd better hurry. (But don't worry, it was probably there in 2009 when the site was first spotted, too.)

Then, you read it a bit closer and notice the page mentions a few times off hand that the software is actually called "Blender", and the "3DMagix®" part refers to the bundled documentation and the tutorial videos. Off-hand mention of a "Noob to Pro" guide, which makes me wonder if the tutorial texts have been haphazadrly downloaded from the Web, again thanks to GFDL/Creative Commons content.

Now, I wouldn't mind this product if it was called "Blender Megapack" or whatever, and specifically advertised itself as a professionally formatted and edited Blender guide ("Just like Wikibooks, only in a convenient and better-formatted printed form") and training course with awesome videos. Throw in a couple of DVDs worth of freely-usable textures and models and it might be awesome. As it stands, it's barely fulfilling the legal requirements and it's 100% deliberately deceptive, and uses common scam marketing tactics.

The "Real Estate Photo Editor for Realtors" example was similar: It was an obvious attempt to niche-market an application to realtors ("you can, um, take photos of houses, and um, edit them in this software") with a mention of the GIMP buried in some far-off FAQ page.

What about Wikibooks (a Wikipedia sister project)? The only problem is that most of the books are half finished, if that.

at least in school (can't speak for higher education). The have softcover booklets, with about 8-10 weeks worth of material. That means they are about 100 pages long, maybe shorter. Plus, they contain the practice problems and you can write in them. I never understood the practice of carry these heavy tomes called textbooks around, especially even after a year, that half of it is never relevant to the course in many instances. You also get to keep the booklets and don't have to go through the nonsense of putting covers on them or otherwise.

As for online books, I always thought wikibooks was a worthy effort:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

But people aren't as eager to write textbooks/practice problems as they are to make articles about their obsession. I wish Wikimedia Foundation made use of their mature efforts like Wikipedia and allowed a single banner ad per page (clearly labeled as sponsor, offer a no-ad subscriber version) and then funnel the money toward immature efforts such as these.

Old School:

.MODEL Small
.STACK 100h
.DATA

      db msg 'Hello, world!$'
.CODE

start:

      mov ah, 09h

      mov dx, offset msg

      int 21h

      mov ax,4C00h

      int 21h

end start

I just found this too: Hello World

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Fortran/Fortran_variables

Because variables beginning with i..n are in teger variables in FORTRAN.

Here's the amicus brief written by the IEEE-USA president Professor Lee A. Hollaar. I direct your attention to footnote #28, which reads in relevant part:

It is unfortunate for purposes here that the early developers of programming language made their calculation-and-assignment statements look like mathematical equations so that they would seem familiar to scientists and engineers. But the common programming statement I = I + 1, which increments the value stored at location I, is essentially nonsense as a mathematical equation. Similarly, a computer program is a series of calculation-and-assignment statements that are processed sequentially, not a set of simultaneous mathematical equations that are solved for their variables.

(Freshly transcribed from the PDF; feel free to check for typos.)

Yes, I wrote it wrong when I said 1+1 instead of I+1 before. But however you write it, we're dealing with the successor function (either in general, or the successor of 1). It's related to the second Peano axiom as a function that helps us define the natural numbers (and thereby, the integers, rationals, reals, etc.).

But you knew that already, right? That's why you just threw up a [citation needed] rather than actually respond?

I suppose you must be two of a kind, with him calling the correspondence between programs and mathematics "cosmetic" rather than actually addressing it. To be fair, I suppose that proving the Curry Howard correspondence wrong would be a bit more of a challenge.

I mean, how do you disprove it or consider it "cosmetic" when the fine folks at MetaMath are writing out the foundations of mathematics as a computer program?

If you simulate a physical process on a computer, say, the sun going nova, you can look out the window and the sun will still be there (it hasn't actually gone nova). If you "simulate" a mathematical process on a computer, you end up with the same result as if you'd done it by hand (assuming you don't screw up).

Anon because I've already moderated several times in this story thread.

MIT OpenCourseWare (That's their silly capitalization, don't blame me.)

Wired story about Flat World Knowledge, a company that provides free online and cheap printed copies of college texts that sells study aids and practice quizzes to support the business. Online browsing is free, PDF is about $20, and printed books cost about $60 or less if the pricing I read about is still current.

Wikibooks has books of several levels.

Here's a list of open books for undergraduate mathematics as recommended by Robert Beezer at University of Puget Sound

US House Bill 4575 is an attempt to authorize government grants to publishers of open-source college texts, as widespread affordable education is seen as good thing for the country as a whole. There's also a Senate version.

There's a consortium for Open Educational Resources among community colleges. They have lists of many titles under many categories. There's still a lot of work to be done, but some of the books have been peer-reviewed and they clearly mark which ones those are.

LibrarianChick links to all sorts of books and all sorts of sites that links to all sorts of other books. Some of these are texts, but there's also reference, fiction, tutorials, and more. Several of the linked works are university-level. There are also links to non-books, like search engines, research results pages at places like Harvard, and open online encyclopedias other than Wikipedia.

Textbooks Free is a fairly ugly site with beautiful content: links to textbooks by subject, links to other open textbook projects, and even an Amazon affiliate link so when you buy what non-open books you want you can support open textbooks. They also have links to open course materials like audio and video lectures. Their links include material from MIT, Johns Hopkins, University of California at Irvine, Tufts, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon.

Bookboon has ad-supported free textbooks. For those of you who won't get too distracted from studies by the ads, I think that's not a bad model. These are free but not open and you have to give them your email address to download the books.

Free Book Centre has links to lots of open and public domain texts. They are mostly CS, engineering, and mathematics but they have some medical books too. There are some books linked that are free-but-closed, and some of those are only free for non-commercial use or only in electronic format (sometimes only by browsing the book on the author's web site without even saving a local copy). Some of the links are currently broken, too. Overall, it's a pretty useful site if you're looking for CS/math/EE/medical materials. One additional note of caution: at least one "book" is just a detailed ToC for a book by someone else, some "books" are just sample chapters for closed books for sale, a few are lecture notes for specific courses collected but not necessarily edited into textbook form, and there are a handful that seem to be pirated copies of commercial books from the likes of O'Reilly. You have been warned.

Creative Commons has a tag for news items about open textbooks to help us k

Sure but's been backronymed so many times I tend to think of it as an acronym now. The best part is depending on mood and how coding is
going there are a plethora of acronyms to choose from!

Perl - A high level scripting language common on Unix-like systems, with the common backronym of "Practical Extraction and Report Language", but jokingly referred to as the "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister". Both expansions appear on the man page. More recently, "Parse Every Random Line", in honor of the extensions proposed for Perl 6. Another less colorful one is "Pathetic Excuse for a Real Language"

from: wordIQ.

Textbooks that aren't licensed freely are a luxury. If there isn't yet a good free book on a given subject, whose fault is that?

Wikipedia math articles tend to be terse and designed for people who need to look something up that they already know something about.

what are the best resources to learn math?

That depends on what you want to learn, and where you want to start, but there are some resources available at Wikibooks. There's a lot missing there, but plenty to learn. If you want complete resources, I would suggest buying a book--for the full learning experience, possibly taking a class at a local community college or university (just one class, mind you). I don't know about other countries, but it is far from unheard-of in the US (which by your singularization of math is probably your nationality if not your location).

Actually I'm in Europe. I used 'math' because Americans don't have a clue when I mean when I say 'maths'.

I'm really not sure about community college's or their equivalent. Classes move along at the speed of the slowest member and seem to be focused on nothing more than memorizing enough to pass an exam. I grew up in Thatcher's Briton where education was a matter of 'sit down, shut up, and don't ask any awkward questions.'

I'd much prefer a good book. Do you have any recommendations that start with an understandable introduction to calculus? I've searched and found everything either far too easy or depending on knowledge I don't have.

Wikipedia math articles tend to be terse and designed for people who need to look something up that they already know something about.

what are the best resources to learn math?

That depends on what you want to learn, and where you want to start, but there are some resources available at Wikibooks. There's a lot missing there, but plenty to learn. If you want complete resources, I would suggest buying a book--for the full learning experience, possibly taking a class at a local community college or university (just one class, mind you). I don't know about other countries, but it is far from unheard-of in the US (which by your singularization of math is probably your nationality if not your location).

Speaking of a usable, platform independent method of concurrent programming, you forgot Ada.