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This is the code that was involved in the Sega v Accolade case, that Sega tried to assert copyright protection over:

. move.b $A10001,d0
. andi.b #$0F,d0
. beq.b version_0
. move.l $'SEGA',$A14000
version_0:

Source: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Genesis_Programming#TMSS

For what it's worth, pre-TMSS consoles are not very common in the US. This was added even before the rear comm port was removed.

The trademark was included in the code, not shown. The trademark display was a Dreamcast thing and came dramatically later. Go read up on SvA on Wikipedia please.

Didn't the original Gameboy require the Nintendo logo to be in the cartridge? If you turned it on without a cartridge, a black rectangle would scroll up the screen instead of the logo.

Why would anyone bother with a ebook reader. The smallest computer I would read a book on is a net book preferably twelve inch screen. In most instances I would not even bother to read the whole book, just the parts I am interested in. There is so much fiction on typical websites there seems hardly any point in reading a novel any more.

Typical of Murdoch, he would blithely destroy more trees and, create far more pollution simply because it is more profitable for him, basically damn the rest of the planet as long as he can make more more. His attitude is disgustingly short sighted and driven by nothing but insatiable self serving greed, when will ass hats like him ever have enough.

I am all for open electronic books, where people from all over the planet contribute and everyone has free access http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page, it will take time, perhaps even the life of existing copyright but all that dead tree literature will be die. Publishers and their B$ PR machine have simply reached the end of their useful (often quite useless) life, they really serve no other other than to enrich themselves and impoverish everyone else.

Then again, why do you need to line up the text in the first place? Why not just put the open comment on a different line, which is what I often do. Or simply let the second line be two spaces further in than the first, that's not going to crack open the sky and bring disaster to us all.

There are existing conventions in place (meaning, everyone else already does it that way) for some languages out there which require lining things up. Have a look.

Yes, for C/C++/C#/Java, I normally only indent lines at start, which does not preclude tabs.

Just because some languages made a poor style decision, doesn't mean that we should all suffer. That cascading function definition is awful, keep it on one line.

It's not about function definitions in Haskell. It's things like this:

let x = 1
    y = 2
...

Here is a more detailed description of rules and conventions. F# is quite similar.

I assume that you have a web site for that government agency? While you cannot say you use open source software to save tax money, or even donate to open source projects, what you can do is use open source file formats on your agency web site for when you give out government documents. Save them in OpenOffice.Org and ODF format as well as RTF and MS-Word format, claim you are doing so for "accessibility" to many different types of software. If you have an audio file use MP3 and OGG formats, etc.

Ask your boss about beta testing software, if he says yes you can beta test the many open source projects. You don't need to be a programmer to be a beta tester. Tell your boss you are "evaluating" possible software your agency can use in the future to save money. I am sure he will say yes to that. While you cannot endorse open source software, you can test it.

Write user manuals and documentation for open source software, tell your boss you are writing "training manuals" to make the software better understandable. Use an open source license on the manuals and documentation so that open source organizations can use your words and modify them to make better manuals and user documentation. Write some eBooks in PDF and ODF and RTF format and submit them to Legal Torrents from your home system, not your work system. Wikibooks is another place to write those books in provided you learn HTML codes and Wiki markup. But if you do join, send me a message and I can try to help you out. I have Wiki markup and HTML and XML skills and I am glad to teach it to someone willing to learn or at least find Internet web sites that can help out on that matter.

I assume that you have a web site for that government agency? While you cannot say you use open source software to save tax money, or even donate to open source projects, what you can do is use open source file formats on your agency web site for when you give out government documents. Save them in OpenOffice.Org and ODF format as well as RTF and MS-Word format, claim you are doing so for "accessibility" to many different types of software. If you have an audio file use MP3 and OGG formats, etc.

Ask your boss about beta testing software, if he says yes you can beta test the many open source projects. You don't need to be a programmer to be a beta tester. Tell your boss you are "evaluating" possible software your agency can use in the future to save money. I am sure he will say yes to that. While you cannot endorse open source software, you can test it.

Write user manuals and documentation for open source software, tell your boss you are writing "training manuals" to make the software better understandable. Use an open source license on the manuals and documentation so that open source organizations can use your words and modify them to make better manuals and user documentation. Write some eBooks in PDF and ODF and RTF format and submit them to Legal Torrents from your home system, not your work system. Wikibooks is another place to write those books in provided you learn HTML codes and Wiki markup. But if you do join, send me a message and I can try to help you out. I have Wiki markup and HTML and XML skills and I am glad to teach it to someone willing to learn or at least find Internet web sites that can help out on that matter.

I say bullshit. You could write a book about Einstein.

Wikibooks. I'm in the inclusionist camp myself, but there's no reason highly detailed works can't be structured as wikibooks linked from Wikipedia articles.

You mean something like wikibooks?

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

A few years ago I came across a study in relative difficulty of learning languages. It ranked all of the world's major languages on a difficulty scale, measuring things like regularity and similarity to other languages.

This isn't that study, but I did find it interesting. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers

Here is the list I think you're talking about, and there is no category 5, nor is there an entry for English, since the list is categorizing the difficulty of learning languages for native English speakers.

I'm the primary author of this wikibook: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Sociology (Introduction to Sociology). I wrote the initial version as a graduate student when: (1) I felt really guilty about making non-Sociology majors buy $100 textbooks that I was pretty sure they would never use again and sell back to the bookstore for about $10. (2) I came across Wikibooks and realized they had all the tools I needed to create a good textbook, plus, you can copy content from Wikipedia to get yourself started. (3) I had not experienced the textbook publisher's most effective tool for keeping professors assigning expensive books - complimentary copies for professors. I now receive dozens of "free" books every year from publishers. They, of course, give them to us for free so we don't know how much they will cost our students. (4) I was also really annoyed by the new-edition-every-other-year approach of the big publishers, which is just a ploy to make them more money!! Less than 5% of the content changes in textbooks that are published every other year. It's not about "the latest research"; it's about money for the publishers. I wrote up my initial experience with my textbook and published it here: http://www.sociology.org/content/2007/_cragun_futureoftextbooks.pdf If you have specific questions about this process, I'll happily answer them. As for your general questions about the experience... Well, you've already written a textbook, so you know it can be very time consuming. That's the first issue. The second issue is one that other people have mentioned - free, electronic books aren't always considered "legitimate" by academics. Why $$$=quality in the minds of professors, I don't know, but it seems to. As a result, people aren't always keen to adopt your book. Plus, and this isn't really an issue for you as you aren't in an academic position, despite the fact that my book is being used at 10-15 universities and has even been translated into a couple of different languages, it doesn't count as a publication. I'm not sure why. Once I get tenure, I will lobby for ebooks to count as publications for junior colleagues. Another major issue - if you do go the collaborative route (e.g., wikibooks), don't expect tons of collaboration. I don't know why more people haven't contributed to the text, but if you check the edit history of my wikibook, almost all of the editing has been done by yours truly. I even know a couple of the people who have adopted my text and they have said they will contribute, but they haven't done much (there are some exceptions, of course). So, I wouldn't expect a lot of collaboration unless you arrange it ahead of time. I'm still hoping that it will happen one day. Any other questions?

I love NASM... I really do. What Wikibooks offers that is different is to provide a repository of several open source texts on one place, on a wide variety of topics. See: http://en.wikibooks.org/

Having written a few wikibooks myself, throwing up some documentation and trying to turn it into a real textbook are two different tasks, even though they are related. Getting good, well written content is an important step, and without the content is it hard to create the textbook. But unfortunately you are only at about the 40% mark of getting the textbook into a polished form once the content is fully written and you have created or identified all of the illustrations for that book.

Wikibooks closes the gap by another 10% with some PDF publishing tools that are being used by some of the advanced users on the site. I like to hand tweak the text myself using a word processor like Open Office, but the automated tools on Wikibooks are getting better and can use the wiki markup language more directly to get the desired results (via templates and some other cute tricks).

Have you looked at Wikipedia?

Or, more specifically, Wikibooks?

But I hope we don't resort to wiki textbooks which anyone can edit.

What do you have against Wikibooks, especially if you use the revision as of a given date that the instructor has approved?

Quick answer:

Introduction to Information & Communication Technology - Using Free Software and Open Technologies
Edited By: Will Brady
http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/index.xhtml

The Non-nerds Guide to Computers
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-nerds_Guide_to_Computers

But seriously spend half an hour going through results of Google search on these terms: open textbooks computing

You will have to go through the texts yourself but there are many out there at many different levels.

Here are the main resources.

Wikibooks
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Computing
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-nerds_Guide_to_Computers
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Computers_for_Beginners

Flat World Knowledge
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

MIT Open Courseware
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_OpenCourseWare
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/index.htm

Make Textbooks Affordable open textbooks
http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/statement.asp?id2=37833

Student PIRGs
http://www.studentpirgs.org/open-textbooks-catalog#computersci

List at Walla Walla Community College
http://www.wwcc.edu/CMS/index.php?id=2835

The Assayer free books list
http://theassayer.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbrowsesubject.cgi?class=Q#freeclassQAc

California Learning Resource Network (only math and science)
http://clrn.org/FDTI/index.cfm

OER Consortium
http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/#Computer

Open Book Project
http://openbookproject.net/
http://www.openbookproject.net/courses/

Introduction to Information & Communication Technology - Using Free Software and Open Technologies
Edited By: Will Brady
http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/index.xhtml

O'Reilly Open Books
http://oreilly.com/openbook/

Textbook Revolution
http://www.textbookrevolution.org/index.php/Book:Lists/Subjects/Computer_Science

http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://freelearning.bccampus.ca/openTextbook.php?page_id=221&bookmark=Computing

Quick answer:

Introduction to Information & Communication Technology - Using Free Software and Open Technologies
Edited By: Will Brady
http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/index.xhtml

The Non-nerds Guide to Computers
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-nerds_Guide_to_Computers

But seriously spend half an hour going through results of Google search on these terms: open textbooks computing

You will have to go through the texts yourself but there are many out there at many different levels.

Here are the main resources.

Wikibooks
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Computing
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-nerds_Guide_to_Computers
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Computers_for_Beginners

Flat World Knowledge
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

MIT Open Courseware
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_OpenCourseWare
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/index.htm

Make Textbooks Affordable open textbooks
http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/statement.asp?id2=37833

Student PIRGs
http://www.studentpirgs.org/open-textbooks-catalog#computersci

List at Walla Walla Community College
http://www.wwcc.edu/CMS/index.php?id=2835

The Assayer free books list
http://theassayer.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbrowsesubject.cgi?class=Q#freeclassQAc

California Learning Resource Network (only math and science)
http://clrn.org/FDTI/index.cfm

OER Consortium
http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/#Computer

Open Book Project
http://openbookproject.net/
http://www.openbookproject.net/courses/

Introduction to Information & Communication Technology - Using Free Software and Open Technologies
Edited By: Will Brady
http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/index.xhtml

O'Reilly Open Books
http://oreilly.com/openbook/

Textbook Revolution
http://www.textbookrevolution.org/index.php/Book:Lists/Subjects/Computer_Science

http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://freelearning.bccampus.ca/openTextbook.php?page_id=221&bookmark=Computing

Quick answer:

Introduction to Information & Communication Technology - Using Free Software and Open Technologies
Edited By: Will Brady
http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/index.xhtml

The Non-nerds Guide to Computers
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-nerds_Guide_to_Computers

But seriously spend half an hour going through results of Google search on these terms: open textbooks computing

You will have to go through the texts yourself but there are many out there at many different levels.

Here are the main resources.

Wikibooks
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Computing
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-nerds_Guide_to_Computers
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Computers_for_Beginners

Flat World Knowledge
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

MIT Open Courseware
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_OpenCourseWare
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/index.htm

Make Textbooks Affordable open textbooks
http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/statement.asp?id2=37833

Student PIRGs
http://www.studentpirgs.org/open-textbooks-catalog#computersci

List at Walla Walla Community College
http://www.wwcc.edu/CMS/index.php?id=2835

The Assayer free books list
http://theassayer.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbrowsesubject.cgi?class=Q#freeclassQAc

California Learning Resource Network (only math and science)
http://clrn.org/FDTI/index.cfm

OER Consortium
http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/#Computer

Open Book Project
http://openbookproject.net/
http://www.openbookproject.net/courses/

Introduction to Information & Communication Technology - Using Free Software and Open Technologies
Edited By: Will Brady
http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/index.xhtml

O'Reilly Open Books
http://oreilly.com/openbook/

Textbook Revolution
http://www.textbookrevolution.org/index.php/Book:Lists/Subjects/Computer_Science

http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://freelearning.bccampus.ca/openTextbook.php?page_id=221&bookmark=Computing

Quick answer:

Introduction to Information & Communication Technology - Using Free Software and Open Technologies
Edited By: Will Brady
http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/index.xhtml

The Non-nerds Guide to Computers
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-nerds_Guide_to_Computers

But seriously spend half an hour going through results of Google search on these terms: open textbooks computing

You will have to go through the texts yourself but there are many out there at many different levels.

Here are the main resources.

Wikibooks
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Computing
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-nerds_Guide_to_Computers
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Computers_for_Beginners

Flat World Knowledge
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

MIT Open Courseware
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_OpenCourseWare
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/index.htm

Make Textbooks Affordable open textbooks
http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/statement.asp?id2=37833

Student PIRGs
http://www.studentpirgs.org/open-textbooks-catalog#computersci

List at Walla Walla Community College
http://www.wwcc.edu/CMS/index.php?id=2835

The Assayer free books list
http://theassayer.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbrowsesubject.cgi?class=Q#freeclassQAc

California Learning Resource Network (only math and science)
http://clrn.org/FDTI/index.cfm

OER Consortium
http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/#Computer

Open Book Project
http://openbookproject.net/
http://www.openbookproject.net/courses/

Introduction to Information & Communication Technology - Using Free Software and Open Technologies
Edited By: Will Brady
http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/index.xhtml

O'Reilly Open Books
http://oreilly.com/openbook/

Textbook Revolution
http://www.textbookrevolution.org/index.php/Book:Lists/Subjects/Computer_Science

http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://freelearning.bccampus.ca/openTextbook.php?page_id=221&bookmark=Computing

Considering this is an introductory class, writing a whole book might be a little much when it's unlikely the students are familiar with the subject. I'm not saying the students can't contribute their notes to an existing project, but making the whole class be just writing the book....
.
I would have recommended this link instead:
Wikibooks:Featured books
.
The problem with Wikibooks is much the same problem with open source in general. While finding a books related to the subject you are interested in is easy, finding one that was completed to a usable state before being abandoned is a different matter.
.
These two look like they might be a good starting point for the author:
Basic Computing Using Windows
How To Assemble A Desktop PC
.
There's also the much overlooked:
http://en.wikiversity.org/
And Wikiversity Featured resources
.
This one might also be useful as well:
Introduction to Computers

Considering this is an introductory class, writing a whole book might be a little much when it's unlikely the students are familiar with the subject. I'm not saying the students can't contribute their notes to an existing project, but making the whole class be just writing the book....
.
I would have recommended this link instead:
Wikibooks:Featured books
.
The problem with Wikibooks is much the same problem with open source in general. While finding a books related to the subject you are interested in is easy, finding one that was completed to a usable state before being abandoned is a different matter.
.
These two look like they might be a good starting point for the author:
Basic Computing Using Windows
How To Assemble A Desktop PC
.
There's also the much overlooked:
http://en.wikiversity.org/
And Wikiversity Featured resources
.
This one might also be useful as well:
Introduction to Computers

Considering this is an introductory class, writing a whole book might be a little much when it's unlikely the students are familiar with the subject. I'm not saying the students can't contribute their notes to an existing project, but making the whole class be just writing the book....
.
I would have recommended this link instead:
Wikibooks:Featured books
.
The problem with Wikibooks is much the same problem with open source in general. While finding a books related to the subject you are interested in is easy, finding one that was completed to a usable state before being abandoned is a different matter.
.
These two look like they might be a good starting point for the author:
Basic Computing Using Windows
How To Assemble A Desktop PC
.
There's also the much overlooked:
http://en.wikiversity.org/
And Wikiversity Featured resources
.
This one might also be useful as well:
Introduction to Computers

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Computing Add another AskSlashdot to the pile that's 30 min of google research time.

First, there's Wikibooks http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page which includes a large number of references, but the quality isn't always superb.

Then, there's Flat World http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/ (A relatively new, growing site) that contains not as numerous titles as Wikibooks, but the writing is thorough and usually better than the textbooks themselves. The big downside to Flat World is that in your case (since it's still developing), it doesn't contain a computer science section, but it's being worked on and is expected to be released soon.

Though I have not personally used Wikibooks and Flat World extensively, I've heard from others that they're amazing resources.

And get the class to help. Contributions count towards the class grade, of course. http://en.wikibooks.org/

In any case, streams are a really poor example (or good, if you are after spreading FUD) - it's the single worst thing in terms of size of compiled code (and performance, actually) in the entire C++ standard library.

There are programs that do nothing but call one method in this "single worst thing". C++ primers tend to push such programs as the first example of C++ code that someone ever reads.

Sounds like a house rule created to make you think twice about mortgaging properties, though its not mentioned here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Monopoly/House_Rules

That seems to be one split between the various different monitoring systems out there. Either it's intended for the network guys and its only understanding of host/server metrics is what it can poll out of SNMP, or it's SA-focused but has few of the broad, large-scale network features that the network guys want.

Personally (as an SA), I've been very satisfied with Xymon (nee Hobbit, which was a fork/rebuild of Big Brother). Performance is great, even with 5000+ devices, it's got an open and simple-to-parse protocol, and an incredibly extensible architecture. As an SA, being able to script up a monitor and throw it into a data stream as plain text makes it very easy to develop new tests (or add simple monitoring/logging/rrdgraphing) out of pre-existing scripts. Don't limit yourself to what SNMP gives you if you're dealing with servers, services, and higher-level app testing. KISS: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Hobbit_Design_Document

Whatever you do, pick something you can easily customize: Hack together three different monitoring systems to come up with a best-of-both worlds solution. Everyone's monitoring needs are different, after all.

Perhaps a history lesson is in order.

"The core of Apple's Mac OS X (and its predecessor NextStep) is Darwin, which contains a lot of BSD code, especially FreeBSD 5 code."

"XNU's BSD component uses FreeBSD as the primary reference codebase (although some code might be traced to other BSDs). Darwin 7.x (Mac OS X 10.3.x) uses FreeBSD 5.x. As mentioned before, BSD runs not as an external (or user-level) server, but is part of the kernel itself."

"Darwin integrates a number of technologies, most importantly Mach 3.0, operating-system services based on 4.4BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), high-performance networking facilities, and support for multiple integrated file systems."

Lather, rinse, & repeat....

If schools really cared about anything but profits, then we'd have a mandatory open-source textbook market where academia would be free to create and modify textbooks. These textbooks would cost nothing. Certainly, there would still be a need for private market textbooks (on arcane and/or rapidly changing subjects) but I can see a substantial portion of textbook requirements displaced by an open system.

The "mandatory" part doesn't make a lot of sense. You can't force authors to write books for free. And although a lot of free textbooks do exist already (see my sig), you can't guarantee that for a particular subject, the best book will always be a free book rather than a non-free.

But other than that, what you're suggesting seems similar to something California is doing now. Motivated by the California state budget crisis, Governor Schwarzenegger has announced a Free Digital Textbook Initiative, which has gathered a list of free, online high school math and science textbooks that are aligned with state content standards. The intention is to have the books used in classrooms in fall 2009. This article has some useful background, but it mistakenly suggests that the arduous state adoption process will be an obstacle to the FDTI; statewide adoption only applies to K-8, but FDTI is doing high-school books. There was a previous, unsuccessful effort called COSTP, which tried to produce a history textbook using Wikibooks. Here is a BBC article about the present effort, and here is a newspaper opinion piece by the Governor. This is a transcript of a speech by the Governor, with some interesting Q&A at the end. Twenty books were submitted (press release, links). The four books from traditional publisher Pearson are consumable workbooks, not actual textbooks.

You forgot Wikibooks

Sorry to follow up to myself. A quick search for open source K-12 textbooks got me to here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

Sounds like that might be a good starting point for the Governator.

How about harnessing the power of something like WikiBooks -- but rather than using online access, school districts could print relatively inexpensive paper copies using a contract printing service. Those who don't have the money to afford Internet-enabled devices can use what's tried and true, and the various districts wouldn't be saddled with supporting more infrastructure when they can barely handle what they have already.

Note: I only used WikiBooks as a for-instance; currently, most subject areas seem a bit half-baked to be used in schools.

I'm participating in the CLRN Free Digital Textbook Initiative as the author of a physics book. When this was discussed on slashdot recently, I posted skeptically. The same day, I got an email from Brian Bridges, the director of CLRN, saying that he'd seen my slashdot post, and he wanted to reassure me that it really was going to happen. They'd already made a list of potential candidates who they wanted submissions from, and I was on it. I had to go through my books and figure out how they correlated with the list of topics (Word document) that the state standards say are supposed to be covered in high school physics. Then there was a process where I had to set up an account on their server, fill out some online forms, and upload the Word file showing how my topics correlated with the standards.

There does seem to be somewhat of a fog of uncertainty surrounding this whole thing. One thing I've noticed is that although Schwarzenegger has named three top-level state education officials who are supposed to carry this out, some of these people are actually his political opponents. In case anyone hasn't noticed, this is all motivated by the hellish California state budget situation. This article has some useful information about California's dysfunctional textbook selection system, and a previous, unsuccessful free-textbook effort called COSTP, where the state tried to produce a history textbook via wikibooks.org. The present effort seems to be doing a pretty good job of eliminating the bureaucratic obstacles; Bridges sent me a detailed email explaining how to fill out all the forms, saying what it was safe to leave blank, etc.

One thing that I wasn't very clear on before was whether they envisioned this as something that would involve traditional textbook publishers, individual authors who'd put their own stuff on the web, or both. Although I'm sure they don't want to arbitrarily tell certain private entities, like the traditional publishers, that they can't participate, it seems clear to me now that it's aimed at the nontraditional folks like me. Note the word "free" in the name of the initiative. No traditional publisher is going to give their book away for free in digital form. It's true that the big college and high school textbook publishers are very actively involved in an effort to distribute a lot of their books in digital form, but not for free. From what I've observed at the community college where I teach, the idea seems to be to get students to rent DRM'd textbooks. When the student stops paying the rent, they can no longer use the book. This would have the effect of eliminating the used book market, which the publishers hate with a passion. (That's the reason they bring out new editions so frequently.) So no, I don't think any traditional publishers will participate. The general picture really does seem to be that they're doing this as an alternative to the traditional publishers. Further circumstantial evidence comes from the fact that the state has already tried to do a collaboration with wikibooks. One big question in my mind is whether there will be a giant push-back from the traditional publishers to keep this from happening. Seems like a no-brainer if it really advances to the stage where their market is threatened.

A lot of the slashdot posts so far have been about the issue of how students will access the books. Since the initiative has "Free" in the name, I don't think we're going to see too many barriers to access here (rentals, DRM, logging in to a web site to access the book, etc.). Taking my own books as

No like this:

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

Each state could even maintain their own wiki and have it the school board approve changes before they post. Why are we paying millions in tax dollars to publishing companies again? Can't they just die already?

Well there is a non interpreted i.E. compiled language where the language designers did not shy away from tasking:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Tasking

And tasking had been there since the original standard in 1983. Only problem: Ada was always considered heavy weight and difficult. In my opinion both is not true - after all the ISO standard for C and Ada are only a few pages apart in size.

Martin

I use http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX as a reference a lot of the time. Besides that, there are numerous sites dedicated to LaTeX, and I've only stumbled upon a problem once that wasn't solvable with some Google-fu.

Wikibooks has texts covering most of these areas. Quality varies, not unlike Wikipedia in the early days.

>Hopefully this initiative and wikibooks work together: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

They do.

>Hopefully this initiative and wikibooks work together: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

They do.

While I took a japanese course one semester, my teacher decided to forgo the required text, a classic 300 page textbook for the course, and gave us this short booklet - probably about 50-75 pages long (I forget). Being Japanese herself, she said that it was the atypical school book in Japan, being good for 6 weeks of study. We got a second one half-way through.

I really liked having a short workbook. It was disposable (paper covers) and much like the Schaum's outlines here (a bit shorter, those outlines cost about less than $15 a subject, don't see why textbooks cost like 8x that and up). It also helped studying because everything in the booklet was relevant to the course and you could keep up with ease.

Math books especially have that problem of being mini-tomes of info. My calculus book in highschool could also cover Calc II and Calc III courses. I don't see why I have to lug all that around at once.

Hopefully this initiative and wikibooks work together:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

Good one! I see it's freely licensed - you considered putting this up on Wikibooks?

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Klingon/Sounds_of_Klingon

Speaking as a student at the University of Helsinki, nearly all textbooks I need are offered by one of the libraries, who keeps a number of copies of each textbook around so that students can take them out, do the course, and then return them at the end of the semester. Until I read this, I never imagined that university students in this country ever have a hard time getting access to textbooks and would need some kind of outside service like that.

I went to a community college for some outside classes one summer (foreign language, an extra math course, a purely self-indulgent history course since the Prof was interesting). As the name implies, Community Colleges tend to be the cheapest option, the most friendly to the not-so-rich, although they can be pretty good in quality depending on the affluence of the county they are in. They had a humongous library, must have cost millions, however, they never had the books for the courses - which could be some grand conspiracy or just due to the number of courses they offered. They told us that the professor/teacher had to donate them. On those professor's salaries (they got paid less than highschool teachers) that wasn't likely. Sometimes they had the book, but it was editions out of date - you could likely learn the same material from them but were out of luck if the professor was a stickler for work problems (as that was switched around). You also couldn't sign them out no matter what. The math book, sold by the Barnes & Noble run college store, cost $180 new or $150 used if you were lucky.

About the only relief College Students got was half.com and when Amazon.com's used book offerings came online earlier in the decade. That was win/win since college bookstores made it a point of pride to give you nearly nothing to "sell" the book back to them. The Pirate Bay has books sometimes, but often not what one needs.

I often wish for a netflix of books, a digital online library that one can subscribe to, "sign out" any books for a fee if necessary besides membership. I wonder, if the library has a physical copy, if that would be legal. Otherwise media mail is nice and cheap in this country. Google books is nice but often censored.

I would encourage people to contribute here:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

But there is a difference in the "ease of use" between a language feature and a library feature. That is unless you use a language like smalltalk where everything is library.

Think of how error prone printf is. If parameters and the little % stuff does not match all goes havoc.

And more so in multithreading. Here the bugs are often sporadic and extremely difficult to find. And a programming language which support it natively is a great help. See:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Tasking

So you know what I understand in "natively".

Java does not support multithreading - java.lang.Theads a library function does. Have a look here:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Tasking

See, not a library but language keywords. Note that I a fluent and Java and Ada and have designed and implemented larger projects in both.

[snip]
Maybe I'm just being naive but firewalling off an entire country (noted exception: China) seems really impractical.

What are you smoking?

I use gimp in conjunction with blender, inkscape, video editors, and other FOSS. I just recently discovered a new plugin for FFT. The greatest advantage to me is the fact that all the FOSS tools are integrated and I can modify them at source level, if I need to have something special.
I quite often get the source package and make changes to make it more effective. This is something you can't do with PS or other closed source. I think this is the greatest advantage , if you are a programmer and graphics artist.
Here is a link to gimp FFT if anybody might find it interesting.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_GIMP/Remove_coherent_noise
gimp FFT

I use gimp in conjunction with blender, inkscape, video editors, and other FOSS. I just recently discovered a new plugin for FFT. The greatest advantage to me is the fact that all the FOSS tools are integrated and I can modify them at source level, if I need to have something special.
I quite often get the source package and make changes to make it more effective. This is something you can't do with PS or other closed source. I think this is the greatest advantage , if you are a programmer and graphics artist.
Here is a link to gimp FFT if anybody might find it interesting.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_GIMP/Remove_coherent_noise
gimp FFT

What kind of LaTEX do you need to be writing? If it's just mathematics, and you're on linux or osx, you may want to consider LaTeXiT. It renders equations to pdf and image formats, one of which I know for sure you can embed in a google document. It also lets you maintain libraries of equations, so you can modify them later.

I used it recently, in conjunction with Apple keynote for the Mac. It was far easier to deal with just the math LaTEX subset, and only at points where I needed it. I imagine a non-technical audience may agree.

Laequed purports to do something similar for windows. Haven't tried it myself.

Although something of the scope that you describe certainly does not exist yet, there are projects along those lines. The main such projects I know of are MIT's OpenCourseWare, which apparently has spread to some other universities (Wikipedia page). In a similar, but currently much smaller project, Cornell has begun putting videos of some lectures online, but it appears to be only for Cornell students. Hopefully that will change.

Getting away from just college-level materials, there are a lot of collections of free textbooks, as revealed by a quick Google search (and remembering from prior Slashdot discussions on the topic), but I am not familiar with any of of them, so I do not know which ones are actually worth looking at. Specifically, the Wikibooks sister project to Wikipedia and its subproject (which I had not seen before) Wikijunior may interest you.

I am not sure how you feel about the MediaWiki projects, but that seems like a natural place to put in your efforts. If not, perhaps one of those other links may point you towards a project you are interested in helping with. Depending on how complete and high quality the existing material is, a better project might be one of making easier to find and encouraging people to actually use free educational materials, which could lead to more people contributing to those projects.