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You might want to take a look at these projects:

Wikibooks
Wikiversity

• Here is a good wikibook about learning blender.
• Here is the definitive list of Blender tutorials.

• Here is a good wikibook about learning blender.
• Here is the definitive list of Blender tutorials.

• Here is a good wikibook about learning blender.
• Here is the definitive list of Blender tutorials.

If you want to learn Blender, check out my book on wikibooks.org:

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

Thanks!
spidey

There already is a project for that, Wikibooks, many of which are developed enough such that you can download them as a PDF and study from them. Nobody's going to buy a textbook if there are other free ones, and if Wikibooks becomes a paid service, nobody's going to be happy.

Unless you're talking about distributing Wikipedia articles in text form. It's interesting, and is already being planned (the page mentions releasing WP 1.0 in text, CD, or DVD form), except that once again, I'd rather buy a CD version of the best of Wikipedia than heavy, heavy textbooks of the same.

I know I repeat myself:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Taski ng

Programming languages with build in multitasking have been around for a long time. They just haven't made it into the "top ten". Mind you: Ada has a firm place in the top twenty ;-).

Martin

The problem is that programs written in your normal languages (C, C++, Java, C#, basically anything you've ever heard of) are totally synchronous; you can not proceed on to the next statement until the previous one completes.

I heard of one more:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Taski ng

And with it comes another approach: rendezvous based tasking. I found it a lot easier to used then semaphore based threading.

C and all it's descendent's have been a step back. C 73's most notable feature was "fit's into 8 kb of memory".

Martin

In Java threading is a library feature controlled by the Thread class, in Ada threading is a first class language feature:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Taski ng

But more importantly: Ada uses rendezvous instead of semaphores which are a lot easier to handle and more elegant to look at.

Martin

>WhatWGs stuff...is XForms on steroids
I don't think WHATWG's work is XForms on steroids, and I don't think WHATWG thinks it either. WHATWG explicitly rejects XML and explicitly rejects the separation of data from presentation (if I understand what I read correctly). Their emphasis is on incremental addition of attributes to HTML4 to add new behaviors that add incremental value but aren't required.

XForms starts with the premise that XML is the data format, and that you want to keep your data in one place (XForms calls them "instances"; you might think of them as loadable XML data islands if you're doing XMLHTTPRequest stuff).

In the HTML head, you declare the instances, give each an id attribute, and populate them either inline or by a src attribute with a URL. Then you write the UI in the body, using input elements for input, output elements for outputting values inline in text, and a few other controls for menus and sliders. For each of these form controls, you specify which part of which instance you want it bound to with a "ref" attribute using a pathname-like notation (/a/b/c would give you the nested element "c", for example).

When the user interacts with the form controls, it changes the values in the XML data. If you have two controls bound to the same place in data, they'll both change at once.

Eventually, you'll want to submit your data; you do this by writing a "submission" element in the head with many of the same attributes that are on the HTML "form" element (action, method, etc.). When you press a submit button tied to one of these submissions, it POST the data (usually as XML though you have control) back to the server. You have the option to take back the response to this POST as another XML document, and leave your who web page alone...just the data changes. (You can think of this as postback-free posting.) The UI automagically adjusts to the changes in the data, and if the data changes its whole shape, for example, you have have different divs of your UI appear automatically based on what XML appears.

Want to know more? Take a look at the http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XForms site or read one of the online books on XForms from O'Reilly or Addison-Wesley.

Wow, you can write a basic calculator in only 300 lines of xforms code! That's so much better than the 30 lines of javascript it'd take!

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XForms/Calculator

I can't wait!

Try XForms. It's vendor independent, standard, and aims to obviate 80% of scripting.
In the Mozilla implementation, it uses XBL to allow you to write behind-the-scenes JavaScript (a la XUL) to implement presentation stuff that keys off the appearance and data type declarations to enhance the presentation.

See http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XForms

Wikimedia Foundation agrees with you.

for the site to come back, you can use this.

>There's absolutely no reason in the world why we shouldn't have a complete set of open content textbooks covering all of a basic liberal education
Agreed, tho the $100M you mention seems more than should be needed; Wikipedia just raised nearly $1M all from small donations. I can't believe that textbooks for the basic 4 subjects, math, reading, science, history, for 1-8th grade, couldn't be written by a small group of writers in a year for $1M. I bet if you offered a bounty, like 'RentACoder' on two smaller projects, one that created the 'table of contents' for the books, then another to actually write all the chapters, you'd end up with free-to-use e-books that could be used by any district that wished.

Maybe some of these 'free textbook' sites are a good place to start:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.businessbookmall.com/Free%20Business%20 Books.htm
http://digg.com/tech_news/Hundreds_of_Free_Textboo ks_on_one_website
http://www.textbookrevolution.org/

Which is another problem that needs to be fixed. There's absolutely no reason in the world why we shouldn't have a complete set of open content textbooks covering all of a basic liberal education. Public and private schools spend ridiculous amounts of money on books that contain basic knowledge that's been known for decades, even centuries, and there's no good reason for it other than to line the pockets of scholastic publishers.

Sure, writing books takes effort, but it's an effort that only needs to be performed once. Rather than buying what the publishers have to offer, the public school systems should commission the creation of the necessary texts, hiring the writers directly and placing the result in the public domain. Then, when they need printed texts, they should put out a request for competitive bids and buy the books from the publisher who can produce the printed, bound copies for the best price and with adequate quality (and durability). The cost of printing a high-quality, hardcover textbook is less than ten dollars, but schools presently pay three to five times that much because they're buying the content, not just the printing.

US public schools collectively spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on textbooks. If we're very conservative and assume that it's only $100M per year, and that paying for printing only, not content, only reduces the price by 50%, that still leaves $50M per year for commissioning of new or updated texts. You can pay more than 200 full-time textbook writers and editors for that much.

And for students who can use e-books, the printing costs can be eliminated as well! Finally, given a reasonably well-written basis to start from, much of the maintenance and enhancement of open-content textbooks can be done by the teachers themselves, a la wikibooks. The schools would probably be wise to pitch in a little cash and hire some professional editors and subject matter specialists to oversee the process, but that would cost very, very little when divided across, for example, all of the school districts in all of the states in the US.

Bringing this back to the OLPC project, the solution is obvious. The same nations that buy these laptops for their kids should also set aside a little of their textbook budget every year for producing open-content textbooks to be delivered in electronic format (or in printed format for kids that don't have the laptops). Particularly with international cooperation and the assistance of the teachers (and perhaps even the students!), after only a few years there would be a complete set of native-language texts for basic education.

Please look at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Making_an_Island for some further information and sources.

In the early 1970's, there was a Las Vegas developer who ended up going to an atoll that was technically in unclaimed international waters and "built" an island by dumping extra material on this group of submerged rocks to the point that there was a portion that stayed above water during high tides, technically new territory just as you have suggested.

BTW, this was also near the Tongan islands, so this is also relevant in this situation.

What happened afterward was that a group of Tongan soldiers "invaded" the newly formed island and asserted sovereignty by "occupying" the island in the name of Tonga. Instead of formenting an international incident, the developer relented and gave up his attempt to build his own South Pacific version of Monaco.

I'm not sure what would have happened if this developer had his own "army" that would have defended the island, but it certainly seems like Tonga would consider it justifications for going to war if it happened near one of their islands. I'm curious what the Tongan government may have to say about this new island in their general domain.

1.Mormons#Scholarly usage

2.Five-second rule#Research

3.Grilled cheese sandwich and Cookbook:Grilled_cheese_sandwich

When all else fails, Wikipedia:Reference desk
easy really.

Here you go.

"The only difficulty I can see is that you would have to explain what an object is first (same problem with Java)."

You can program Python procedurally and could certainly get new programmers comfortable and acclimatized to the language without covering OO stuff first. Python is a great language with an excellent object model, but in contrast to Java it doesn't push you to do everything the OO way. As a simple example, Compare and contrast the Java hello world program with Python's.

"The only difficulty I can see is that you would have to explain what an object is first (same problem with Java)."

You can program Python procedurally and could certainly get new programmers comfortable and acclimatized to the language without covering OO stuff first. Python is a great language with an excellent object model, but in contrast to Java it doesn't push you to do everything the OO way. As a simple example, Compare and contrast the Java hello world program with Python's.

Almost - procedures don't need the "body" keyword and modern Ada programmers don't CAPS any more. Modern Ada style is lowercase for keywords and Camel_Case for everything else.

Correct, up to date version ;-):

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

Martin

There is a strong physiological underpinning to burnout, as years of constant stress and little sleep take their toll on the brain (in fact, the last stages of burnout are very much like those of a clinical depression). It is possible to recover, but it can take *years* and it's a difficult process.

A while back I wrote an article for Kuro5hin on this same subject, and that got plenty of positive responses. It was later expanded and wikified into a Wikibook which you might find interesting: Demystifying Depression

(Yeah, sorry for the shameless plug, but this is important stuff that all of us in IT should be aware of. Besides, the link is to a public wikibook, not to my personal blog or anything.)

Personally I don't use OO because I can't swap files with people with whom I co-author scientific articles. MS Office and Open Office equations STILL don't work right (and before you LaTeX fanatics step in, neither of us speak that language).

Get Prokhor Zacharov on the phone immediately!

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

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

Considering that there already is an existing Wiki effort supported by the Wikimedia Foundation for textbook writing, the infrastructure to accomplish this is already in place, except for the process of trying to pay for the effort.

If I were given the opportunity to make a decision in this regard (and my voice does carry some weight in the Wikibooks community) I would perhaps try to offer "prize" money for something like an X-prize type competition for textbooks that have been written on Wikibooks that achieve certain established academic standards. And finding those standards isn't particularly difficult either, as many have already been identified on Wikibooks as well.

The point here is that anybody can claim to start a book like this, but the problem is trying to get it into a final polished form that can be useful. There are several texts on Wikibooks right now that are oh so very close to being useful in a classroom, but for the find bit of polish needed from people with professional expertise, or at least strong editorial skills.

In addition, a very consistant theme by Jimbo Wales has been a democratization of content creation as well. Having letters at the end of your name is not necessarily a sign that you have the skills necessary to write a textbook. Hiring professionals to write content through a traditional book contract would, IMHO, provide inferior content and tend to stratify the user base in ways that can be quite damaging to any future projects.

In terms of how to provide accounting to determine who gets the money from such a process, there are already systems in place to help determine who has written a given percentage of the content from a Wiki edit. While the system can be gamed, safeguard can be in place to ensure that those who really are responsible for the majority of the content will be rewarded, or at least to be able to identify what "charitable" cause they want their winnings to be sent to.

I've heard (no, I'm not a graphics artist and I've never used either product, but I have talked to designers) that Blender's interface is counterintuitive. Granted, the people I've talked to have all used mostly 3D Studio Max and Maya, so 'counterintuitive' to them might be just 'really different from what I'm used to'. But that is the whole point anyway.

Todays batteries are not good (and cheap) enough for the market. Li-ion,poly,whatever and NiMH batteries can be charged only by a small current, taking an eternity until you're back on the road again.
High capacitance capacitors, on the other hand, seem to have a huge problem with storing energy over a longer period of time and voltage drops proportional to theammount of stored energy. All of these problems with capacitors can be circumvented. btw. short-circuiting one of those might give you a bad (suborbital flight) experience :)

As for the rest of the stuff, brushless motors can give you up to 95% efficiency.
check this out: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Electric_Vehicle_Conv ersion

The strongest typed language which I am aware of is Ada - and Ada indeed does not allow implicid type convertins between types. However Ada also has the concept of subtypes and will implicidly convert between them and allows for explicid type conversion. See:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Type_ System

All in all I consider the Ada type system very praktical indeed. It allows me express my typing needs in a way I have never seen in any other programming language.

Martin

Strange - I like vim for the very same reason. In Vim it's the different modes which make the different keyboards. And more so then in vanilla Vi because Vim supports more key combinations and more modes. See:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Learning_the_vi_edito r/Vim#Modes

Especialy the visual mode is cool. Select some text and you have a whole new set of commands to operate on selected text.

And of corse you can customize the key mappings for each mode seperatly - another feature missing from Vi.

Martin

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Learning_the_vi_edito r/Vim#Omni_Completion

(Damm, now I can't use my moderator points any more...)

Nice list. :)

Comcast w/ Motorola 3412/6312, go go gadget 30 second skip!

What we really need is a Red Hat High or OLPC High. The school could be a remodel of an intercity school and could maximize the use of donated computers and systems. It should support the OLPC initiative by providing each student with an OLPC. Text books should be mostly replaced using electronic, open electronic text books.

This would demonstrate several items that contrast with the Microsoft school:

1) A very useful and functional school can be wired with very good, but donated/reclaimed gear at low cost.
2) Techniques such as Linux Terminal Server Project provide more value than Microsoft:
      -- k12 LTSP
3) Open source can accomplish what Microsoft can't -- a technology-oriented school at a reasonable price
      (no shiny new electronic whiteboards or brand-new Dell computers, just use modern white boards).
4) OLPC is very useful in the US (yes, it's not just for the 3rd world):
      -- OLPC
5) Many digital texts and E-books are viable and ready for school use:
      -- Wikiversity
      -- Wikibooks
6) The cost to rewire such a school is more than made up through the use of e-books and through the
      use of donated/reclaimed equipment.
7) The students can make contributions back to the education process (text books, software,
      school architecture, etc.).
8) Open source can interoperate with those that have MS Word/Excel at home and can provide full,
      unrestricted access for those that can't afford to pay for MS software.
      -- OpenOffice
9) The ongoing costs to maintain such a school would be far lower than for Microsoft's proposed school
      (text books, software licenses, hardware support, etc.).

Key points are: Availability, OLPC, free/inexpensive digital text books, student contributions,
lower up-front costs, and lower maintenance costs.

Of course, the down side is that much of the windows-only learning software won't run on Linux, like Magic School Bus (TM). Also, you can't play a DVD on Linux without illegal software (or is it gray-area software?).

Questions: How well do those applications run under Wine? What software really is required for a school?

Note, here in VA, we still have a school board rule that kids can be suspended for 10 days if they "alter, destroy, or erase computer data, or remove computer data or programs". They technically can't boot a computer (altering the logs), erase a file they created (destroying data), copy a file to a floppy (remove computer data), etc. Basically, the school board is clueless....

The reason nobody has heard of it is probably the evil college bookstore cartel.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to blame college bookstores for this. They're mostly nonprofit. It's the publishers who are really being evil.

They will break your hands with hammers if they find out you have been using free textbooks instead of the ones they sell.
I'm currently typing this with two unbroken hands, after 9 years of using free textbooks in my physics classes.

There are already hundreds of free college textbooks on the web:

• theassayer.org (a catalog of free books in general, not just textbooks; accepts user-submitted reviews)
• textbookrevolution.org (a site specifically devoted to free textbooks)
• libertytextbooks.org (a selection of high-quality free textbooks)

Wikibooks was originally envisioned as a project that would have textbooks as its main raison d'etre, but IMO it's failed at that goal. Although there are quite a few textbooks at the wikibooks site, almost none of them are of high enough quality to be widely adopted for classroom use. I don't think that's particularly surprising, because the wiki method is simply unsuited to the task of writing textbooks. The killer app for wikibooks right now seems to be books about video games.

"A new initiative spearheaded by a University of Georgia professor aims to produce a library of 1,000 wiki textbooks by tapping the collaborative power of wiki. Inspiration for the project came from a computer science course that wrote its own textbook on XML"

A very cool idea in principle, but if the XML book they've done is typical, they should stop now. Just for grins, I opened to a subject I know quite well, which is XML and Schemas. There we find:

"Entities are basically the objects a Schema is created to represent. As stated before, they have attributes and relationships. We will now go much further into explaining exactly what they are and how to write code for them.

There are two types of Entities: simpleType and complexType. "

Well no. That's about as wrong as you can be. The term "entity" in XML has a rather precisely defined meaning and it has very little to do with simpleTypes or complexTypes. Entities are a really fundamental concept in XML. While it's no doubt tempting to someone who views the world in entity/relation terms to use "entity" in that sense (which I suspect is what the author had in mind), that's no excuse for writing textbooks that are wrong. Whoever wrote this section obviously didn't have a student's much less a textbook author's grasp of XML details.

As it stands, this example suggests that wikibooks are at risk of producing some strikingly inaccurate teaching materials, and that's very troubling. Looks like some much for serious fact checking will be needed if books like this are to to more good than harm. Too bad, because the idea of wikibooks does seem very appealing.

"Broken hands" and "fired teachers" comments are joke comments made to disrupt useful conversation about the real failings of paper texts and the academic publishers. While some greed heads at my University might have a cow at the thought of anyone giving away their precious "intellectual property", the vast majority of professors remember that part of their mission is education. Collaborative, electronic textbooks are sure to overtake traditional publications in the same way free software has overtaken non free. In the end, wiki texts are just a more efficient way to do the job.

I like you class notes. Have you seen or thought about using them as the basis for a wikibook?

how would you reference the texts? Would the editors have finalized 'editions' that go into an uneditable archive mode, and only the 'latest' editions are wiki-able?

Yes. Wikibooks makes PDFs for "completed" texts.

That would at least be managable from a referencing point of view, but would detract a bit of the credibility from the 'work in progress' copies.

If only dead tree publishers had that kind of credibility for text books. The rate of minor and meaningless changes to create new "editions" is outrageous. I'm looking forward to wikibooks being an island of stability in the academic publishing world.

Can I put in a vote for Highschool textbooks as well as University. There is one wikibook so far that looks particularly good for students http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Algebra_I_in_Simple_E nglish. Clear, highschool level textbooks would be just fantastic. Cheers.

You mean like this?

While the idea is interesting, the project is still in its early stages (only 3 books are available, 2 are incomplete).
Wikibooks has progressed farther, but as TFA notes, this one operates on slightly stricter policies that might be useful for academic books.

Wiki based educational books on just about everything.

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

Well, there are also lots of policies about what should stay and what may be deleted, and newcommers don't always know those either. Optimally, existing contributors may be able to detail exactly what sort of content might be better, or where your content might be better suited (eg. your aunt's favorite recipe doesn't belong on Wikipedia, but it does belong on wikibooks), but often you'll just get a link to a general policy or a mention of it. If you're contributing articles about something not directly related to you (eg. not about your band, your company, or your favorite blog), then don't get discouraged, try to spend a more time reading existing articles and try to model new articles after those (though ignore the pokemon articles, all of wikipedia isn't totally enamoured with them).

The list of completed books is pretty small, but Wikibooks is working on open textbooks. I see they even have PDF version of some of their books. Maybe at some point, it will be reasonable for a professor to use one of those. Then again, it seems like the only time when professors really absolutely require a book is when they assign homework out of it. In that format, it is hard to make the instructor's solution manual difficult to obtain. :)

First off, Africa is a very diverse place. As the article notes, there are some languages with a very low number of literate speakers, but others have a lot of literate speakers. Some places, like Chad, are very underdeveloped. Others, like South Africa, are highly industrialized. In some cases, developing countries can leapfrog over technologies that are irrelevant to them. For instance, in many places in Africa, landlines are almost nonexistant, and instead everybody uses cell phones. It may be the same way with encyclopedias. These languages may never get a dead-tree encyclopedia. Their first encyclopedia will be Wikipedia. It would be interesting to see whether they also bypass print textbooks for their schools, and use electronic books instead. If OLPC comes in at $100, and several kids can share one laptop, the effective cost of a laptop could be, day, $30. If you could then use that laptop to access hundreds of free electronic books, it could be very cost-effective. It's not such a fantasy to imagine that many free books out there. There are already hundreds of free, high-quality, college-level textbooks in English (see my sig). There are already some free high school texts in English aimed at South African schools (e.g., http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/FHSST_Physics). It makes sense to imagine Wikipedia as part of the final picture.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/How_to_use_a_Motorola _DVR I've had a motorola dvr for almost 2 years with comcast and I've had HDTV for 7 months. So far I'm pleased with all of it. However my first box did crash, Second box had HDMI but it wasn't setup correctly and I had no indicaction or manuals of how to make it work right. I took that box back and got a new one. The tech at comcast's office showed me how to access the more "pro/advanced" features and since then the new box has been excellent. When I first got the last box which I use now it was slow for a couple weeks. Now it's responsive and works much better. It's a much better box than some people give it credit for. I too am disgusted that I can't use anything but firewire to get video off it. However it's not critical for me as I tend to watch things and delete them.

Who's providing the free textbooks?

Wikibooks, among other things

But surely you wouldn't have called someone ignorant without doing a little research

The "STFU" was in response to the DRM bit as well. Or, in fact, it was almost entirely in response to the DRM bit, because the only way someone could possibly think this project would even consider using DRM is if they were entirely ignorant about it. FYI, the people designing the thing are huge advocates of Free Software, Creative Commons, etc. There's no way in Hell they'd consider putting DRM in the thing -- they even rejected all non-Free software!

The only other possibility -- that he did know the background of the project and said what he said anyway -- means that he would have been intentionally spreading FUD.

what did they end up using for these laptops in Thailand?

Not built-in hand cranks!

(In other words, I don't know -- but I'm not going to pretend that I do, unlike the guy I replied to.)

Thermite!! Problem solved.