Slashdot Mirror

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.

If you can get the cable provider's PVR box, then go for it.

I recently moved from a Series 2 Tivo to Comcast's PVR (Motorola), and I am very satisfied. Hell, it's even easy to turn-on 30-second commercial skip (BONUS: you don't have to re-enable it every time the DVR loses power), so I'm very satisfied using it.

What you lose:

Tivo Suggestions. A loss, certainly, but one I can live with.
Recordings are not grouped into a category tree. It means more scrolling to reach items not recorded recently.
You cannot skip by 15-minute increments using the skip buttons while FF/RW.

What you gain:

Dual tuners, and no conversion loss. I know you can get this with Series 3, but Series 3 is also much more expensive than Series 2 ever was.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, yes; however, Wikimedia Commons is "A database of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute." Wikiversity is "a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning." Wikibooks can definitely use functional examples.

Wikipedia isn't necessarily going to have audio and video; it may just link to Wikimedia Commons.

In all reality, the title of this article itself is kind of poor. It should really say "Wikimedia Gears Up For Explosion In Digital Media".

Posting anonymous because I can't remember my password.

Followup 4:

Another approach would be to set up a Xephyr multiterminal and run an instance of the game in each with Wine.

You can learn LaTeX easily with http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

Check it out:

http://accu.org/

They also have a discussion list. I think it would be a good idea to see if anyones interested in a "wikibooks" project, i.e. people contribute small articles, and over-time the community edits it into something cohesive.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/WB:FB

When dealing with teaching, one should teach from the ground up. I've seen way too many programming books that assume previous knowledge and most are really bad. I like the zero-to-hero mentality, where you take someone knowing nothing all the way through. But when you write an article that assumes previous knowledge, you outline for others where they should go, what they should read if they are just starting. Too much knowledge is too fragmented, most peoples knowledge is highly fragmented, they need to know all the necessary concepts in order to further understand and use someones understanding, each link in the chain should ideally be easily linked to and found. Since when most people need to start at the beginning and work their way up, and frequently go back and forth for areas they are weak in.

I've been trying to find good 'self-teaching' resources for a while to take someone from absolutely zip understanding all the way through step-by-step, because much programming and programmers, unfortunately have started way too far up the abstraction chain and have little to zip understanding of what is going on.

Andre lamothe has some interesting things going on here, as he too was frustrated by 'dumb developers'

http://www.xgamestation.com/

But I like Slashdot, just not the Anonymous Cowards that make feeble and pathetic threats against me.

You have to go try out responsibility now? You mean you never tried it? Apparently neither have the Anonymous Cowards making threats on me either tried responsibility.

That is the problem with most US Citizens, they never even bothered to try to be responsible. From the minimum wage earners up to George W. Bush and Bill Gates himself, no responsibility at all. That is why our economy is in a big mess.

All I was asking was for people to be responsible for their behaviors and actions, which is why I wrote this guide so that even Dummies like you can understand it.

Why on earth should engineering majors study optics, when so few will work with optics?

Why should a computer science major study operating systems, when scant few of them will actually work on an operating system?

On Slashdot the common refrain seems to be that everything should be taught to everyone - that computer scientists should have an extensive education in math and theory, and data structures, and computer graphics, and processor design, and operating systems, obviously we need to teach about parallelism, and education is the answer to security bugs, people really need to know more about formal methods, don't forget digital signal processing... you get the picture. Then there are other posters saying everyone should be taught C because Java doesn't have pointers. And there's the person saying "I've seen college graduates who can't make a simple GUI in an IDE..."

Now, certainly it would be nice if every college could educate everyone both in depth and broadly, but it's all too easy to say 'yes' to every subject and end up with a set of demands it's impractical to fulfil.

When I was in university I was once reading up on Fourier transforms. The person sitting next to me was... a medical student. Studying Fourier analysis.

Should Fourier analysis be compulsory for medical students? I mean, some doctors end up using it, and they should at least know the basics, right? A doctor just relying on their machine to do it is like a programmer using Java's sorting functions without understanding how they work! Of course doctors should know how Fourier analysis works.

Anyway, here's my point: I agree it's preferable for doctors to know organic chemistry, but we should also be wary of loading people up with a hundred different compulsory requirements, because among the educated it is easier to call a subject important than to call it unimportant.

Here's what I got, so far. Sorry it's not tabbed and cross-referenced...

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/17/224230 -- in case anyone wants this page, too
http://www.quickref.org/
http://gotapi.com/
http://www.regular-expressions.info/ -- regular expressions
http://www.perlmonks.org/
http://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://perldoc.perl.org/
http://www.perlbuzz.com/
http://java.sun.com/reference/
http://forums.sun.com/index.jspa
http://developer.mozilla.org/ -- javascript
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Advanced.html
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/learning
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Tcl
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/webmonkeys/book/c_guide/
http://cprogramming.com/
http://www.cplusplus.com/
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/
http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/
http://en.wikibooks.org/
http://developer.apple.com/
http://cocoadev.com/
http://www.cocoabuilder.com/

Here's what I got, so far. Sorry it's not tabbed and cross-referenced...

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/17/224230 -- in case anyone wants this page, too
http://www.quickref.org/
http://gotapi.com/
http://www.regular-expressions.info/ -- regular expressions
http://www.perlmonks.org/
http://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://perldoc.perl.org/
http://www.perlbuzz.com/
http://java.sun.com/reference/
http://forums.sun.com/index.jspa
http://developer.mozilla.org/ -- javascript
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Advanced.html
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/learning
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Tcl
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/webmonkeys/book/c_guide/
http://cprogramming.com/
http://www.cplusplus.com/
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/
http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/
http://en.wikibooks.org/
http://developer.apple.com/
http://cocoadev.com/
http://www.cocoabuilder.com/

http://www.perlmonks.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(programming_language)
http://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/
http://srfi.schemers.org/
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
http://www.quickref.org/
http://java.sun.com/javase/reference/api.jsp
http://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://cprogramming.com/
http://www.stackoverflow.com/
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/
http://yutaka.is-a-geek.net/
http://www.gotapi.com/
http://www.open-rsc.org/
http://www.users.bigpond.com/robin_v/resource.htm
http://www.geocities.com/orion_blastar/contact/
http://en.wikibooks.org/

For Ada, I like WikiBooks: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada

Also useful
http://www.adaic.org/
http://www.sigada.org/
http://www.adacore.com/
http://www.sparkada.com/
https://libre.adacore.com/ (free GPL'd Ada 2005 compiler)

Wikibooks because if it isn't already there, someone will eventually write one and make it open sourced.

I invite Slashdot readers and posters to write their own ebooks at Wikibooks in an open source license.

Aside from the obvious, there are some interesting papers, essential reading, a mailing list, a tutorial, and even a (reasonably complete) wikibook.

One of the best tutorials and references for Tcl is the Wikibook on Tcl programming.

Indeed, it's one of the best programming texts I've seen in any language.

Is it a book reader? Where are the free books coming from?

It's not hard to find the beginnings of this. Look at wikibooks' WikiJunior for example. There are a number of other online sites with downloadable childrens' books. There seems to be more in Spanish than English, but that may just be a result of where I looked.

One mistake is in thinking that the OLPC project has to supply the books. It's primary design is a network access tool, not as a standalone package. They do supply things like packaged subsets of wikipedia in several languages, with content aimed at younger readers. I recently saw a reference to a 300-MB (compressed) Spanish subset, designed to be loaded into an OLPC central server for use by all the children within range. But again, OLPC doesn't build these; it just works with the local educators to select and package the subsets (and the wikipedia crowd builds all the content).

The OLPC also comes with a browser that brings up the main google page in the local language by default. This is part of the design. The OLPC was designed to primarily provide network access, and the important tools are the ones that help the children find information on the network. Building the content in various languages is Someone Else's Job. Presumably this is mostly the educators, but with network access, anyone (who knows the language) can provide material for the kids.

(And right now they're looking for people who can translate to languages like Quechua and Aymara. So if that's you, get in touch with them. ;-)

One thing I'd worry about would be whether Microsoft will follow such precedents, or whether their UI will try hard to steer the kids in the direction of commercial sites. It wouldn't be very difficult to build in knowledge of the freely-accessible sites, and intercede with suggestions that the kids might want to look at other sites first. Remember that Microsoft is a for-profit corporation, and their software will be much like children's TV shows, primarily a marketing tool and only incidentally educational.

It'll also be interesting to see how Microsoft's DRM software works on the OLPC. That could be a good tool for preventing access to public-domain or other free reading material.

As an IT manager who can write hello world in half a dozen languages

Oh yeah? Big whoop, I can write hello world in over 200 languages!

Indeed. They should take advantage of the open-source textbooks that already exist... either by simply selecting one for their purposes, or putting together the best pieces from various sources into a coherent textbook that serves their purposes. Here are the open-source textbook (or related information) sites I'm aware of:

Pointers to Textbooks and Content:
http://textbookrevolution.org/
http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/
http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Books

Some available lecture notes:
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html#languages
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/

Hows this different from wikibooks? http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Physics_bookshelf Of course, most of the books are very incomplete. The problem is having many books fragments the audience and writers, requiring a lot of duplicate effort when you could just go to wikipedia, which is a single compilation of knowledge. I think a wikibook will only work if one or a few people write the whole damned thing, as a traditional book. The only point of wiki is then to fix the occasional error. The advantage of the book over wikipedia is a cohesive structure, consistency, and progression of complexity. You'll lose a lot of that by having different people write different chapters.

In addition to the free books available on the Internet, Wikibooks has a bunch of textbooks available. The CS ones are here:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Computer_science

BB

browse through the computer section of open source books

Well, your efforts to command the backend of the school network are commendable. Do you recall the most hopeful part of my original post, though?

With any luck, they will also DOCUMENT their journey so it can be repeated by other governments without such huge expenses.

If you wrote a document which lays out the software and infrastructure needed to command an Open Source infrastructure, it would empower others to do what you've done. Obviously, a well-written document would help make it easier to convince others that it is a good idea and your guidelines would include invaluable "Lessons Learned".

Of course, you could start by including your experiences/configuration as a Wikibook to greatly improve your ability to get help from others.

it really supprises me this hasn't been doen before

It has.

Who is going to write these open source textbooks?

The obvious answer is to set up a wiki textbook site. If I were a prof (who isn't getting kickback to push a certain book ;-), I'd look into this. And I'd give extra credit to my students who contributed to keeping it up to date.

It's also pretty obvious that you'd want to exclude anonymous updates. There are just too many people who would want to sabotage such a site, starting with the dead-tree publishers and the creationists. And it's not just the religious folks; you might be surprised (or impressed) by how many math and physics quacks there are out there. To make an online textbook attractive to someone teaching a class, you'd want some assurance that it'll won't be vandalized by "interested parties" during the course.

It's funny that TFA doesn't seem to have any mention of such an idea. But not too surprising, as most people's concept of a "textbook" is probably firmly attached to the model of one (or a small number of) specific authors who make money from the sales of their specific text. Dynamic updating of a "book" isn't really possible for the traditional publishing industry, while online publishing has the problem that it's all too easy.

Excerpt from a wikibook for Physics Study Guide/Optics. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Physics_Study_Guide/Optics.

"Light is that range of electromagnetic energy that is visible to the human eye, the visible colors. The optical radiation includes not only the visible range, but a broader range of invisible electromagnetic radiation that could be influenced in its radiation behavior in a similar way as the visible radiation, but needs often other transmitters or receivers for this radiation. Dependant on the kind of experimental question light - optical radiation behaves as a wave or a particle named lightwave or photon. The birth or death of photons needs electrons - electromagnetic charges, that change their energy."

Now can you see why you need professional writing/editing in order to produce a _good_ textbook? ;-)

I wanted to renew my knowledge of calculus and learn astrodynamics, so I headed on over to http://en.wikibooks.org/ and tried their open source textbooks... I'm sorry to say, the texts I looked at were of very low quality: unedited for spelling and grammar, incomplete in terms of content, missing whole chapters, and without any supporting questions and worked solutions. I wouldn't want to be a first-year calculus student trying to struggle through with this as my textbook. In the end, I dug out my old university calculus text and found it to be *much* more useful.

Who is going to write these open source textbooks?

Already been done! We have Wikipedia...

You mean wikibooks? The problem here is that many if not most of these are incomplete. What we need is some way of paying volunteers to contribute.

I can have LaTeX installed on my Linux box, including all sorts of crazy extras, with less than one uninterrupted minute of effort. It obviously takes a few minutes to download and install, but I don't have to pay attention after getting the ball rolling. I don't know about other "Linux hackers", but I, for one, don't enjoy wasting my time on chores like software installation.

I'm interested to see if this thread reveals any credible alternatives to LaTeX, but in the meantime, there's Getting to Grips With Latex, and the more available Wikibooks copy, for those who need to get it done in LaTeX.

I've taken a couple of stabs at LaTeX through the years. I have no real need for a proper type-setting platform like LaTeX because I am not in the world of academia that demands it, so I was never able to get past the learning curve imposed by LaTeX.

Now, let me say... I get it. I understand how invaluable it is to submit a paper in a format so less time can be wasted "making it pretty" and more can be spent on the meat of the work. That fact doesn't elude me.

What I never figured out was how to download a stinking template from IEEE and start writing a document. I never figured out how to compose my own document type so I could use it to empower the written arts that I am interested in. I never got past the hurdle, so to this day I still use OpenOffice Writer as my word processor and haven't been able to "transcend" to a proper type-setting program so make all the boring formatting tasks easy.

I even read the LaTeX Wikibook a number of months ago and this didn't even get me over the hump on my way to publication.

So, I echo the sentiments of the article submitter. LaTeX is hard, and either better documentation or a better alternative is needed to make it accessible to the rest of us.

Defining things has always been a problem:

The king's three scholars had accused Nazrudin of heresy, and so he was brought into the king's court for trial.

In his defense, Nazrudin asked the scholars, "Oh wise men, what is bread?"

The first scholar said, "Bread is sustenance; a food."

The second scholar said, "Bread is a combination of flour and water exposed to the heat of a fire."

The third scholar said, "Bread is a gift from God."

Nazrudin spoke to the king, "Your Majesty, how can you trust these men? Is it not strange they cannot agree on the nature of something they eat every day, yet are unanimous that I am a heretic?"

(From The Trial of Nasrudin

It's $50. What are you talking about?

• The Assayer
• Open Text Book
• Ink Textbooks
• Free Curricula Center
• Free Textbook Project
• Flat World Knowledge
• Textbook Revolution
• Wikibooks

Tomato is really a great firmware, I think it is the answer to the initial post's problem. It really has a great interface and is easy to configure, DDWRT was nothing but headaches for me, and the QOS (When I used it a year ago) was absolutely broken.

here is a guide on configuring QOS, http://www.decimation.com/markw/2007/10/03/tomato-qos-setup/

Also it has great graphs such as realtime usage (tx and rx) reports http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Image:Tomato_Firmware_-_Bandwidth_Real_Time.PNG

And I can see a graph of exactly what percent of my traffic falls into which QOS classifications. http://www.polarcloud.com.nyud.net:8080/img/ssqosg108.png

I'm able to quickly check if anyone has been abusing the wireless, and see what percentage of my traffic is bittorrent, nntp, gaming, etc, If some device on the network suddenly started flooding traffic over port 25, I would know about it, all in a nice and easy color coded graph, check it out, I bet you will like what you find.

Just recently passed that torch onto someone else. But you're welcome. It was a project I always enjoyed contributing to.

As for learning it... the annoying titled wikibook here is supposed to be a fairly good reference: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States

By contrast, article I, as you pointed out, does lay out a number of war-related powers - and grants all of them to the legislative branch. I've also failed to find anything in article II granting the executive branch any right to intercept communications inside or outside the US under any circumstances - it seems pretty clear that the founders intended any such activity to be under the direction of the legislative branch instead.

Saying you have "faith in the scientific method" is an oxymoron. That's like saying I have faith that the Earth's circumference is 24,901.55 miles. Here, read up on the scientific method: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Scientific_Method

You've got it precisely the wrong way round. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Acoustics/Sound_Speed

Check out WikiBooks. They aren't quite there yet, but some of their stuff is quite good - and being a wiki, your inputs are encouraged.

With cheap laptops/ebook readers on the horizon, and projects like WikiBooks / Project Gutenberg I am hopeful that we are only a few years from prolific material availability.

Also, slightly off topic - but since you mentioned schools I'd like to refer you to Lockhart's Lament. Do we even really need text books?

I tried Splint - relay hard - tried all the annotations - but it was never able to find as many possible problems as an Ada compiler could find. Split was a failure and the project is dead since 2003 [1].

Note that I am fully literate in C and Ada (and C++ and Java) - so I do fully understand the problem.

If anybody does not understand the problem the it's the die hard C programmers who never relay tried another programming language. It's not all syntactic sugar, it's about always knowing how many elements are in an array. With emphasis on "always" - not sometimes - but always.

Have a look at:

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

Last not least, the sad truth is that 80% of all programmers are not smart enough. Note that since you read /. you most likely belong to the other 20% but you should not project your level of C expertise to the other 80%.

Martin

[1] http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=34302&ugn=splint

Maybe pdflatex can handle encapsulated postscript now, but last time I tried, it didn't.

\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
\usepackage{epstopdf}

Its internal references such as links from the table of contents and the index, and \ref{} commands.

There is no guarantee that the HTML output would look acceptable on a Kindle anyway, it was just a 2 minute experiment to see if it might work.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:PHP:SQL_Injection

it also says this important thing:
"Note that MySQL does not allow stacking of queries so the ;DELETE FROM table attack would not work anyway"

and it has a damm side more features the Pascal. Have a look:

http://www.adaic.org/standards/05rm/html/RM-TTL.html
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming

Martin

Has anybody here used any good books that help one learn to use Blender? Online tutorials only do so much good.

As I and other already pointed out VHDL was modelled after the Ada programming language - and as such Ada already has the multitasking features you are looking for:

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

Martin

Well, VHDL is based on Ada, so why not use Ada then? Have a look:

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

Martin

Indeed, before "Worse is better" took off computer science hat better ideas. Have a look at some ideas about multi core / multi threading form 1983:

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

But you can use them - just use "gcc -x ada" ;-) [1]

Martin

[1] You need a fully installed GNU Compiler Collection for it to work.

"mutexes, semaphores" tricky indeed but well there is a far easier alternative called "Rendezvous":

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

And the funny thing is: it's not a new concept - it has been conceived in the late 70th.

Martin

You don't have to go super-high-level languages to get proper tasking support in a programming language:

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

Multitasking programming has been part of a large collection of programming language for quite some time now - Only the generation "worse is better" [1] with there {}-languages [2] made us forget all the cool stuff computer scientist conceived in the 70th and early 80th.

Martin

PS: "worse is better" has the advantage in the short and medium term - but in long term the low priority of Consistency and Completeness will come back to haunt you. Example? Well, how many full featured C99 compiler do you know?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Curly_bracket_programming_languages

I know people will scoff, but plain old widely-despised Ada has tasking built right into the language, not as an add-on library. No, it doesn't prevent common parallel-programming mistakes, but it does try to help you avoid them, and in my experience makes them easier to find when you do make them.

In a lot of other languages, the decision to use threads is a pretty big one, prefaced by a lot of chin wagging, hand wringing, and soul searching. When I'm writing in Ada, tasks are just another tool in the box, to use or not depending on the demands of the app.

I spent the last week or so finally going ahead and learning Haskell, and I am now very sad that I took so long to start.

Haskell is an amazingly enlightening language. When you approach it, like I did, you are likely to hit some overly-academic descriptions of its features, which are extremely hard to understand. Don't let this discourage you, Haskell can be learned without getting a PhD in mathematics.

I recommend Yet Another Haskell Tutorial as a more down-to-earth explanation of what's going on in there.

I find it far more enlightening than Lisp, and that it is quite amazing what a powerful world was built with such simple primitives.

Another note is that most languages (even C and Lisp) are far more similar to one another than they are to Haskell, so even an experienced programmer will take longer to learn Haskell than just any new language.