I've always dreamed of the day that open source developers would throw some real brainweight at a really well optimized Fortran compiler for linux, but it looks like I'll just have to keep dreaming.
There actually is a project writing a G95 front-end for gcc. It's moving along slowly, and could certainly use contributors.
From a quick look at the spec, this is a metadata format, not a filesystem. It's intended for more than CD/DVD media as well, notably flash filesystems, which are different of technical necessity.
It seems to be mostly oriented toward labelling, describing and presenting collections of images. For what a first look is worth it doesn't necessarily suck, either. They mention dublin core metadata.
A nice add on to comments in the jpeg header, anyway.
I would love to have one of those spring-powered radios but the fact is our 'first world' society is so fixed on CO2 production we can't get them here.
The original Blade featured a magic vampire-killing serum called EDTA, which is about equally cute.
Ethylendiaminetetracetic acid is a real chemical commonly used in molecular biology. It's a calcium chelator, meaning it globs onto calcium ions in solution and prevents them from reacting with anything. Calcium ions are how heart (and other muscle) contractions are propagated, so you can see the connection...but not as far as it looking like blue food coloring and making vampires swell up and explode.:-)
With Quantum you at least need Fourier Series and partial Diff. Eq. to solve basic problems. In classical physics you can often get by with just Algebra.
I really think you have that backwards. The only kind of classical physics you can do without calculus is the sort where you plug numbers into equations. $x=(1/2)at^2$. You can do that just as well with QM: the energy states of the hydrogen atom are given by $E=-\frac{\mu Z^2 e^4}{2 \hbar^2 n^2$, what are the first three when Z=2?
On the other hand, the fundamental mathematics of QM is linear algebra, and in its discrete version (matricies) you can go a long long way. Matrix Algebra is commonly taught as part of second-year calculus, but really has little to with the rest of that subject and you could easily teach it first.
I do agree that the cognitive dissonance many students get from the historical progression we use in physics education is unnecessary. I'm not even sure qm is especially counter-intuitive if you haven't just spent a couple years learning to think classically; from a practical point of view they're equally abstract.
There's certainly merit to the suggestion that science could be better taught at the university level. Much of what I've seen in physics education is simple sink-or-swim: there are lectures, and there are homework problems, and it's up to the students to learn to think like a physicist. Some do. The vast majority get fed up, frustrated, and quit.
Which is not to say there aren't those who've dedicated themselves to science education and who do a good job. But many faculty in the older generation seem to honestly believe that calculating the answers to physics problems (while a conveniently measurable skill) has anything to do with passing on the mental tools that physicists use to understand the world. I've often thought the sciences could learn a lot from the arts (and literature) where an essentially intuitive skill is passed on even when we don't have language to talk about it directly.
It's great to see this new miniseries, but why would you adapt TWO stories into one series, rather than preserving the second (actually third) story for an additional miniseries...Strange
The second two books really do go together. The stories follow each other closely in time and the conclusion of the arc really is at the end of the third book. They also share a lot of characters and locations, which makes it advantageous to film them together.
I am worried they'll have to cram more to stay at 6 hours, though.
Can anyone identify the 'egyptian' language used in the film? It sounded a little too real for it to just be empty babble, but I didn't see any appropriate-sounding consulting credits for it to be invented, or an attempt at the real thing. The consonants sounded a bit like that anglicized short-hand egyptologists use for pronouncing hieroglyphic transliteration, but I thought we were all afraid of glottal stops.:)
Likewise, I'd like to hear about the accuracy of the writing in the film. Does the temple wall really say "This way to the Scorpion King"?
Well...no.
If you released your songs under the EFF's Open Audio License and Sony downloaded them and started selling cds, they would have permission to do so. You've given it to them (and anyone else) by licensing your music under the OAL.
And yes, someone could create derived works and sell them without paying anything. But not without your name on it. Sony and random remixers alike must give credit. These two items are the substance of the license we're discussing. There are other ways to "apply the GPL" to music, of course, but I would argue that without freedom to use and derive from a work commercially, you're not talking about the GPL.
If that's not for you, that's fine. You have plenty of other options. But please, say what you mean without fabricating supporting arguments out of thin air.
You're right, it's done on a by-request basis by others in the field (in some cases passed on to students by busy but well-reputed professors) in what amounts to communal work. Or you could say it's payed for by the same people who paid for the research in the first place, and the journal afterward.
And further, you're correct that we've smartly passed the point where cutting out the publisher as an editorial element and coordinating the process online would save everyone money. Maybe not books, but certainly all I ever did to with journal articles was to photocopy them and read them somewhere else; being able to download and print on demand would easily be preferable. Up until 15-20 years ago, I'd say subscription costs did match material and administrative costs pretty well. Since then, publishers have been squeezing a captive market for profit.
But it's not Elsevier's lack of benevolence that's the problem. Most scientists seem woefully unaware of these issues, and even younger ones say "but I must publish in established journals for the sake of my career." Many do take the 'P2P' approach to the copyright assignment and make electronic versions available anyway. But more need to take the next step and ask "how can we fix this?" and "when will those we can't convince retire?"
There is one argument against taking everything online. What many librarians will tell you about paper journals is their archive value. We know how to make books that will last for 500 years, and they'll be just as legible then as now. No system crashes, no technological obsolescence. Of course the exploding volume and cost of academic publications is making this a little moot, but it is one to think about.
I'm not sure what multimedia means anymore. It used to be cdroms, and while there certainly was a 'bad games' component, most of them were very interesting, back before we had the world wide web.
Now apparently multimedia means 'flash' to most people. Fair enough, though I've not seen much that really exploits the medium in the original sense of 'multimedia'. Flash's heritage is of course as a tool for multimedia cdroms, but most designers seem wrapped up it its vector and animation capabilities. That's great and more power to them. OTOH, that's a new medium, not multimedia.
No doubt the lack of reasonable open standards for audio and video compression isn't helping with this. And of course the advantage of vector graphics are their miniscule bandwidth requirements.
Rants aside, I've seen some interesting work content-wise out of amateur film sites--a sort of online version of the bonus materials. crewoftwo is a good example: they made a short film, but most of their website is background and behind-the-scenes material. Everything a fan could want. Some friends of mine are working on a project (blaze xpd) to produce video, audio, and prose fiction serials all set in the same universe, and tie them together as seamlessly as possible through their website. I wish movie and tv websites were as free with their content.
im with scotia bank, if you want to use online banking, you have to load up there propriatary windows authorization client to do so.
They do offer HTTPS however knowone at the bank seems to know about it.
My impression was that they'd just switched. Their website now only describes the ssl method, and the support people had no trouble getting me a password. You're right about the proprietary encryption filter though--it was obnoxious. I think the idea was to make sure everybody had 128 bit security back when you had to jump through hoops to get that version of netcape. So while I trust 56 bit ssl at least as much as the proprietary gadget they'd bought, their hearts may have been in the right place.
I've also been impressed with the signup mechanism. You call, ask to sign up, get authenticating secrets verbally, then they stick you in a queue where a computer tells you your temporary password. That way no employee sees or hears what it is. You then login and change it. Semi-instant gratification.:)
In any case, their ssl interface works fine under Linux/Netscape, probably because they avoid all the cute clientside scripting.
In contrast, I recently opened an account with Bank of America in part because they claimed to use SSL. They're even using JSP, but login in from Linux/Netscape causes an internal server error. Ouch. They said they were aware of the issue and were working on a fix; we'll see what that means in the next couple of weeks.
Another silly thing is that while you can sign up for BofA's online banking online, they snailmail you your login password, which seems an entirely unreasonable delay. It doesn't add anything to security either: searching someone's mail (after sniffing the application) is usually *easier* than tapping their phone.
In a more general sense, copyright (and now license agreements) are to blame. There was a lot of talk in the "early days" about getting lots of stuff online, and it's slowly happening with, for example Project Gutenberg and alt.binaries.e-book. But currently this is slow; OCR technology isn't good enough to process things without an editing pass, and sharing the original scans currently requires institutional resources. That, combined with the periodic extension of copyright terms to cover almost anything created in the 20th Century has put a damper on volunteer efforts.
One would think that libraries would be a great place to start with this at the institutional level. Even without scanning, a lot of recent journals come with electronic versions as part of the subscription. And they're bought and paid for, so copyright isn't an issue (as long as you belong to a subscribing library). But...restrictive license agreements to the rescue! This article on oss4lib describes a situation where librarians are required to scan paper copies of journals they have electronically for interlibrary loan purposes.
Fundamentally, the movement to put a fence around information and charge for every view is at odds with aim to preserve it. If we want hardcopy to be available electronically, or electronic documents to be preserved at all, we have to change the rules, or ignore them. In the meantime, start a private collection in the hope of publishing it someday. Historians will thank you.
As I understand it, the major difference between CCD and film is that the former has a linear response to intensity (gamma of 1) while film is logarithmic (like your eyes). This accounts for the "harsher" quality of light in video.
Of course, you can fix this by post-processing, but to get the same detail-in-shadow, you really want to start with 12 or 16 bits-per-channel. That requires a more expensive ADC, more storage, and either longer exposures or a cooled detector. I guess another option would be to use a logarithmic ADC so your 8 bits are already scaled.
Well, judging by this page pointed out in another thread, they're probably just streaming (Dolby) AC-3. No details about the network part, but the compression spec is here or here.
Same stuff that's on a lot of DVDs.
Just as a head's up, there's a plan to add a more flexible surround encoding to the Ogg Vorbis audio format.
Oh please. Heiroglyphics are not boring! It's quite clever, significantly different from any other wide-spread writing system, and IMHO significantly more legible than roman text. That's not to say that Klingon, Cirth and Tengwar shouldn't also have been in there years ago. (the proposals were submitted at the same time) Oddly enough, I remember ~8 years ago someone asking for help on tolk-lang in putting together a pre-1.0 tengwar proposal, and it dying from lack of interest.:(
Don't tear down someone else's idea to elevate your own.
And how! But look at the submission date. This has been in the queue for almost 3 years. Anybody know who to lobby on these issues?
I'm puzzled by your font comment, though. The font in the proposal is commercially available, and has been for some time. It looks a lot like what's in my Middle Egyptian textbook, but no credit is given.
There are some problems with the proposal. They've essentially presented the encoding used in their font set unchanged; it could probably use an update with current scholarship and input from other parties. The character names are silly, too. I guess it's difficult to find a name for every character since we're not sure what some of the symbols are, but most have conventional names.
Of course it would be really nice if they'd make their font available for free, but that's never stopped the unicode folks before.
Then they take back most of that sum through taxation(OK that's not part of the Chinese Lottery, but it's part of *every* lottery), and everyone's happy.
Niether the Canadian national lottery, nor the local one here in British Colombia are taxed. Different approaches to paperwork, I guess.
why is dvd so successful?
on
DeCSS Update
·
· Score: 2
I think it's amazing, DVD's popularity in the face of the controversy. Compared to CDs, for instance, DAT was great. However, it had the grubby fingerprints of Control on it, players were only made by a few companies, and ultimately it didn't see widespread use. I think this is largely due to freedom and availability of players and copying tech. Meanwhile, CDs, Cassettes and VHS videos, which are easy to copy and have a great many companies distributing players, make tons of cash and see widespread distribution.
Well, for me the issue has always been the longevity and copyability of the format. I've only ever bought a couple of video tapes because they wear out, and I can't make perfect backup copies. It just never made sense to me to buy a movie under those conditions. VHS is fine for renting, but I look on my media collection as a library, not a consumable slowly going bad in the fridge. The same argument applies to audio as well. I've only bought I think two cassette tapes in my life, as compared with something like 300 CDs.
So even though the dvd format is a technical disaster (and because it's a lossy format we'll be stuck with most of its silliness forever) I've started buying movies. Because the discs will last decades and because I'll be able to make backups as new storage media becomes available. Not that I won't buy re-releases in 30 years when a higher-resolution format becomes available.
That's what's motivated me, anyway. I suspect the durability and improved quality of the format has most to do with its success. That and the studios standing behind it, unlike laserdisc. I doubt the average buyer is terribly aware of the CSS controversy.
wow, a very cool service. This would be all I would ask for anyway. If it's in books in print and Ingram's database, it's trivial for any bookstore to order copies. So if people like it, the spreading word will translate into real sales. You can tout it on our home page and point people at amazon for instant ordering. I'm really quite impressed, this is publishing in the internet age. Or would be if they were offering electronic versions for sale.:)
Unfortunately, they require that you sign over exclusive rights to the work for print, electronic, and subsidiary publication. The royalty schedule seems reasonable to me (20% for print 50% for electronic-how does this compare with traditional publisher contracts?) but that's more than I'd personally want to give up. Free software bias and all that.
Publisher's co-op anyone? How much do these on-demand print-and-bind machines cost?
Currently there is no way to create documentation that changes dynamically according to the level and needs of the user. I think we have the technology to begin working towards these sorts of systems, but it will be a while before they're a realistic option.
I've been wanting to write a physics textbook like this for some time, though here this situation is inverted from computer documentation. The advanced readers want <em>less</em> not more information.
Isn't this sort of thing is what hypertext was meant for? "Didn't understand that? click here to see more steps." You still have to write all those levels, but as far as I can anticipate it shouldn't be too hard to do this by adding some kind of level-of-detail tag to docbook/hypertex, or writing it directly in html.
<i>Trying to address all possible audiences within the scope of a single document is simply a recipe for disaster.</i>
Of course, and textbook writers already do address themselves to a particular audience, and in a formal course environment, you usually want everyone reading the same textbook, at least as a baseline. But though you pitch for a specific level, your audience will always vary in terms of how much detail they want/need to follow you. In the physics example, this is especially true in terms of mathematical background, which has a stong effect on the comprehensibility of the steps in a derivation, but tends to be poorly normalized among the students.
I guess this is a more limited example than what Duke or URL was suggesting, because it's easy to share the introductory text between levels and so on. It's more like hiding detail in optional subsections. I'm not talking about something that would work for both 1st-year undergraduates and postgraduate students. But I still think there could be a lot of use for content levels of this sort on a more modest scale. Does anyone know of any actual examples?
I had a lot of trouble trying to actually find this code. It may be in the yellowdog cvs but the server seems to be down, as is the ftp server.
They do say to go to altivec.org to download the gcc and binutils. It's in the tools section behind a "you must sign up for our email forum" form. The packages there include a new binutils, gcc, gdb, and libc to support the altivec extensions.
As a more modern example of the same, I've read all sorts of interesting things opening MS Word documents in a text editor. Usually I was just trying to get the gist of something someone emailed me, but Word's 'fast save' feature often leaves deleted text in the file. This is particularly bad when someone's used a letter to Alice as a template for a letter to Bob.:)
Doing a fresh 'Save As' was a fine work-around, but most people were shocked when I point this out to them.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always dreamed of the day that open source developers would throw some real brainweight at a really well optimized Fortran compiler for linux, but it looks like I'll just have to keep dreaming.
There actually is a project writing a G95 front-end for gcc. It's moving along slowly, and could certainly use contributors.
If you don't want to figure out how to insert a literal ^G, you can try this simple example:
From a quick look at the spec, this is a metadata format, not a filesystem. It's intended for more than CD/DVD media as well, notably flash filesystems, which are different of technical necessity.
It seems to be mostly oriented toward labelling, describing and presenting collections of images. For what a first look is worth it doesn't necessarily suck, either. They mention dublin core metadata.
A nice add on to comments in the jpeg header, anyway.
Problem is I didn't see a CF card slot (for wlan and extra storage) and the site itself being pretty much scary.
The hardware page says it has both an SD (flash) and CF2 slots. The site isn't that under construction.
I would love to have one of those spring-powered radios but the fact is our 'first world' society is so fixed on CO2 production we can't get them here.
Of course they are available. For example, see wind up radio, here or any other link from google.
The original Blade featured a magic vampire-killing serum called EDTA, which is about equally cute.
:-)
Ethylendiaminetetracetic acid is a real chemical commonly used in molecular biology. It's a calcium chelator, meaning it globs onto calcium ions in solution and prevents them from reacting with anything. Calcium ions are how heart (and other muscle) contractions are propagated, so you can see the connection...but not as far as it looking like blue food coloring and making vampires swell up and explode.
With Quantum you at least need Fourier Series and partial Diff. Eq. to solve basic problems. In classical physics you can often get by with just Algebra.
I really think you have that backwards. The only kind of classical physics you can do without calculus is the sort where you plug numbers into equations. $x=(1/2)at^2$. You can do that just as well with QM: the energy states of the hydrogen atom are given by $E=-\frac{\mu Z^2 e^4}{2 \hbar^2 n^2$, what are the first three when Z=2?
On the other hand, the fundamental mathematics of QM is linear algebra, and in its discrete version (matricies) you can go a long long way. Matrix Algebra is commonly taught as part of second-year calculus, but really has little to with the rest of that subject and you could easily teach it first.
I do agree that the cognitive dissonance many students get from the historical progression we use in physics education is unnecessary. I'm not even sure qm is especially counter-intuitive if you haven't just spent a couple years learning to think classically; from a practical point of view they're equally abstract.
There's certainly merit to the suggestion that science could be better taught at the university level. Much of what I've seen in physics education is simple sink-or-swim: there are lectures, and there are homework problems, and it's up to the students to learn to think like a physicist. Some do. The vast majority get fed up, frustrated, and quit.
Which is not to say there aren't those who've dedicated themselves to science education and who do a good job. But many faculty in the older generation seem to honestly believe that calculating the answers to physics problems (while a conveniently measurable skill) has anything to do with passing on the mental tools that physicists use to understand the world. I've often thought the sciences could learn a lot from the arts (and literature) where an essentially intuitive skill is passed on even when we don't have language to talk about it directly.
It's great to see this new miniseries, but why would you adapt TWO stories into one series, rather than preserving the second (actually third) story for an additional miniseries...Strange
The second two books really do go together. The stories follow each other closely in time and the conclusion of the arc really is at the end of the third book. They also share a lot of characters and locations, which makes it advantageous to film them together.
I am worried they'll have to cram more to stay at 6 hours, though.
Can anyone identify the 'egyptian' language used in the film? It sounded a little too real for it to just be empty babble, but I didn't see any appropriate-sounding consulting credits for it to be invented, or an attempt at the real thing. The consonants sounded a bit like that anglicized short-hand egyptologists use for pronouncing hieroglyphic transliteration, but I thought we were all afraid of glottal stops. :)
Likewise, I'd like to hear about the accuracy of the writing in the film. Does the temple wall really say "This way to the Scorpion King"?
And yes, someone could create derived works and sell them without paying anything. But not without your name on it. Sony and random remixers alike must give credit. These two items are the substance of the license we're discussing. There are other ways to "apply the GPL" to music, of course, but I would argue that without freedom to use and derive from a work commercially, you're not talking about the GPL.
If that's not for you, that's fine. You have plenty of other options. But please, say what you mean without fabricating supporting arguments out of thin air.
Is Peer Review funded by the likes of Elsevier?
You're right, it's done on a by-request basis by others in the field (in some cases passed on to students by busy but well-reputed professors) in what amounts to communal work. Or you could say it's payed for by the same people who paid for the research in the first place, and the journal afterward.
And further, you're correct that we've smartly passed the point where cutting out the publisher as an editorial element and coordinating the process online would save everyone money. Maybe not books, but certainly all I ever did to with journal articles was to photocopy them and read them somewhere else; being able to download and print on demand would easily be preferable. Up until 15-20 years ago, I'd say subscription costs did match material and administrative costs pretty well. Since then, publishers have been squeezing a captive market for profit.
But it's not Elsevier's lack of benevolence that's the problem. Most scientists seem woefully unaware of these issues, and even younger ones say "but I must publish in established journals for the sake of my career." Many do take the 'P2P' approach to the copyright assignment and make electronic versions available anyway. But more need to take the next step and ask "how can we fix this?" and "when will those we can't convince retire?"
There is one argument against taking everything online. What many librarians will tell you about paper journals is their archive value. We know how to make books that will last for 500 years, and they'll be just as legible then as now. No system crashes, no technological obsolescence. Of course the exploding volume and cost of academic publications is making this a little moot, but it is one to think about.
My two bits, anyway.
I'm not sure what multimedia means anymore. It used to be cdroms, and while there certainly was a 'bad games' component, most of them were very interesting, back before we had the world wide web.
Now apparently multimedia means 'flash' to most people. Fair enough, though I've not seen much that really exploits the medium in the original sense of 'multimedia'. Flash's heritage is of course as a tool for multimedia cdroms, but most designers seem wrapped up it its vector and animation capabilities. That's great and more power to them. OTOH, that's a new medium, not multimedia.
No doubt the lack of reasonable open standards for audio and video compression isn't helping with this. And of course the advantage of vector graphics are their miniscule bandwidth requirements.
Rants aside, I've seen some interesting work content-wise out of amateur film sites--a sort of online version of the bonus materials. crewoftwo is a good example: they made a short film, but most of their website is background and behind-the-scenes material. Everything a fan could want. Some friends of mine are working on a project (blaze xpd) to produce video, audio, and prose fiction serials all set in the same universe, and tie them together as seamlessly as possible through their website. I wish movie and tv websites were as free with their content.
im with scotia bank, if you want to use online banking, you have to load up there propriatary windows authorization client to do so. They do offer HTTPS however knowone at the bank seems to know about it.
My impression was that they'd just switched. Their website now only describes the ssl method, and the support people had no trouble getting me a password. You're right about the proprietary encryption filter though--it was obnoxious. I think the idea was to make sure everybody had 128 bit security back when you had to jump through hoops to get that version of netcape. So while I trust 56 bit ssl at least as much as the proprietary gadget they'd bought, their hearts may have been in the right place.
I've also been impressed with the signup mechanism. You call, ask to sign up, get authenticating secrets verbally, then they stick you in a queue where a computer tells you your temporary password. That way no employee sees or hears what it is. You then login and change it. Semi-instant gratification. :)
In any case, their ssl interface works fine under Linux/Netscape, probably because they avoid all the cute clientside scripting.
In contrast, I recently opened an account with Bank of America in part because they claimed to use SSL. They're even using JSP, but login in from Linux/Netscape causes an internal server error. Ouch. They said they were aware of the issue and were working on a fix; we'll see what that means in the next couple of weeks.
Another silly thing is that while you can sign up for BofA's online banking online, they snailmail you your login password, which seems an entirely unreasonable delay. It doesn't add anything to security either: searching someone's mail (after sniffing the application) is usually *easier* than tapping their phone.
In a more general sense, copyright (and now license agreements) are to blame. There was a lot of talk in the "early days" about getting lots of stuff online, and it's slowly happening with, for example Project Gutenberg and alt.binaries.e-book. But currently this is slow; OCR technology isn't good enough to process things without an editing pass, and sharing the original scans currently requires institutional resources. That, combined with the periodic extension of copyright terms to cover almost anything created in the 20th Century has put a damper on volunteer efforts.
One would think that libraries would be a great place to start with this at the institutional level. Even without scanning, a lot of recent journals come with electronic versions as part of the subscription. And they're bought and paid for, so copyright isn't an issue (as long as you belong to a subscribing library). But...restrictive license agreements to the rescue! This article on oss4lib describes a situation where librarians are required to scan paper copies of journals they have electronically for interlibrary loan purposes.
Fundamentally, the movement to put a fence around information and charge for every view is at odds with aim to preserve it. If we want hardcopy to be available electronically, or electronic documents to be preserved at all, we have to change the rules, or ignore them. In the meantime, start a private collection in the hope of publishing it someday. Historians will thank you.
As I understand it, the major difference between CCD and film is that the former has a linear response to intensity (gamma of 1) while film is logarithmic (like your eyes). This accounts for the "harsher" quality of light in video.
Of course, you can fix this by post-processing, but to get the same detail-in-shadow, you really want to start with 12 or 16 bits-per-channel. That requires a more expensive ADC, more storage, and either longer exposures or a cooled detector. I guess another option would be to use a logarithmic ADC so your 8 bits are already scaled.
Well, judging by this page pointed out in another thread, they're probably just streaming (Dolby) AC-3. No details about the network part, but the compression spec is here or here.
Same stuff that's on a lot of DVDs.
Just as a head's up, there's a plan to add a more flexible surround encoding to the Ogg Vorbis audio format.
Oh please. Heiroglyphics are not boring! It's quite clever, significantly different from any other wide-spread writing system, and IMHO significantly more legible than roman text. That's not to say that Klingon, Cirth and Tengwar shouldn't also have been in there years ago. (the proposals were submitted at the same time) Oddly enough, I remember ~8 years ago someone asking for help on tolk-lang in putting together a pre-1.0 tengwar proposal, and it dying from lack of interest. :(
Don't tear down someone else's idea to elevate your own.
And how! But look at the submission date. This has been in the queue for almost 3 years. Anybody know who to lobby on these issues?
I'm puzzled by your font comment, though. The font in the proposal is commercially available, and has been for some time. It looks a lot like what's in my Middle Egyptian textbook, but no credit is given.
There are some problems with the proposal. They've essentially presented the encoding used in their font set unchanged; it could probably use an update with current scholarship and input from other parties. The character names are silly, too. I guess it's difficult to find a name for every character since we're not sure what some of the symbols are, but most have conventional names.
Of course it would be really nice if they'd make their font available for free, but that's never stopped the unicode folks before.
Then they take back most of that sum through taxation(OK that's not part of the Chinese Lottery, but it's part of *every* lottery), and everyone's happy.
Niether the Canadian national lottery, nor the local one here in British Colombia are taxed. Different approaches to paperwork, I guess.
I think it's amazing, DVD's popularity in the face of the controversy. Compared to CDs, for instance, DAT was great. However, it had the grubby fingerprints of Control on it, players were only made by a few companies, and ultimately it didn't see widespread use. I think this is largely due to freedom and availability of players and copying tech. Meanwhile, CDs, Cassettes and VHS videos, which are easy to copy and have a great many companies distributing players, make tons of cash and see widespread distribution.
Well, for me the issue has always been the longevity and copyability of the format. I've only ever bought a couple of video tapes because they wear out, and I can't make perfect backup copies. It just never made sense to me to buy a movie under those conditions. VHS is fine for renting, but I look on my media collection as a library, not a consumable slowly going bad in the fridge. The same argument applies to audio as well. I've only bought I think two cassette tapes in my life, as compared with something like 300 CDs.
So even though the dvd format is a technical disaster (and because it's a lossy format we'll be stuck with most of its silliness forever) I've started buying movies. Because the discs will last decades and because I'll be able to make backups as new storage media becomes available. Not that I won't buy re-releases in 30 years when a higher-resolution format becomes available.
That's what's motivated me, anyway. I suspect the durability and improved quality of the format has most to do with its success. That and the studios standing behind it, unlike laserdisc. I doubt the average buyer is terribly aware of the CSS controversy.
wow, a very cool service. This would be all I would ask for anyway. If it's in books in print and Ingram's database, it's trivial for any bookstore to order copies. So if people like it, the spreading word will translate into real sales. You can tout it on our home page and point people at amazon for instant ordering. I'm really quite impressed, this is publishing in the internet age. Or would be if they were offering electronic versions for sale. :)
Unfortunately, they require that you sign over exclusive rights to the work for print, electronic, and subsidiary publication. The royalty schedule seems reasonable to me (20% for print 50% for electronic-how does this compare with traditional publisher contracts?) but that's more than I'd personally want to give up. Free software bias and all that.
Publisher's co-op anyone? How much do these on-demand print-and-bind machines cost?
Currently there is no way to create documentation that changes dynamically according to the level and needs of the user. I think we have the technology to begin working towards these sorts of systems, but it will be a while before they're a realistic option.
I've been wanting to write a physics textbook like this for some time, though here this situation is inverted from computer documentation. The advanced readers want <em>less</em> not more information.
Isn't this sort of thing is what hypertext was meant for? "Didn't understand that? click here to see more steps." You still have to write all those levels, but as far as I can anticipate it shouldn't be too hard to do this by adding some kind of level-of-detail tag to docbook/hypertex, or writing it directly in html.
<i>Trying to address all possible audiences within the scope of a single document is simply a recipe for disaster.</i>
Of course, and textbook writers already do address themselves to a particular audience, and in a formal course environment, you usually want everyone reading the same textbook, at least as a baseline. But though you pitch for a specific level, your audience will always vary in terms of how much detail they want/need to follow you. In the physics example, this is especially true in terms of mathematical background, which has a stong effect on the comprehensibility of the steps in a derivation, but tends to be poorly normalized among the students.
I guess this is a more limited example than what Duke or URL was suggesting, because it's easy to share the introductory text between levels and so on. It's more like hiding detail in optional subsections. I'm not talking about something that would work for both 1st-year undergraduates and postgraduate students. But I still think there could be a lot of use for content levels of this sort on a more modest scale. Does anyone know of any actual examples?
I had a lot of trouble trying to actually find this code. It may be in the yellowdog cvs but the server seems to be down, as is the ftp server.
They do say to go to altivec.org to download the gcc and binutils. It's in the tools section behind a "you must sign up for our email forum" form. The packages there include a new binutils, gcc, gdb, and libc to support the altivec extensions.
Here are the direct links, for the curious:
As a more modern example of the same, I've read all sorts of interesting things opening MS Word documents in a text editor. Usually I was just trying to get the gist of something someone emailed me, but Word's 'fast save' feature often leaves deleted text in the file. This is particularly bad when someone's used a letter to Alice as a template for a letter to Bob. :)
Doing a fresh 'Save As' was a fine work-around, but most people were shocked when I point this out to them.