The OLPC could be the killer "educational" Christmas present that outsells the Wii, Pokemon, Tickle Me Elmo, scooters, and Aqua dots. How long could Walmart keep 1 million of them in stock?
The real question is, how long before somebody at Walmart figures this out? Most people are skeptical the potential for computers as educational tools, and a generation of poorly designed "educational toys" and badly conceived "computer literacy" projects has only cemented that POV. The biggest impact of the OLPC project may be to educate adults.
Here's what the OLPC did right that so many others have done wrong. You don't need fancy technologies or highly-trained teachers. You need to give kids a solid set of learning software tools. Then you need to get out of the way.
"Saying it's so doesn't make it true?" How does that even apply here? I didn't just make a claim, I pointed out some severe limitations in the "guidelines" that haven't changed since I was a volunteer. True there have been some improvements (not using ALL CAPS for italics removes a major eyesore) but it's still pretty much a mess.
I'm glad you linked the 1911 EB, since that's the DP project I care most about. Now, suppose I want to read the article on Sir Thomas Bromley. I have to figure out which file has his article, download the entire 5 megabyte file (remind me not to do that on my cell phone browser!) and then search for his name.
Someday, somebody will get round to breaking these huge EB files into individual articles. That's going to take a lot of manual processing, because the conventions for "new article" are vague and inconsistently applied. A lot of typographical subtleties are lost, because they're not well supported. My particular pet peeve is that non-Latin characters (lots of those in the EB) are handled through transliteration. That might have made sense when Project Gutenberg was started in 1971 (though even then there were better ways of doing it); 36 years later, when even barefoot kids in developing countries have access to graphics displays, it's just stupid.
And hand-formatted tables. I cannot find the words to describe how dumb that is.
True, we can reprocess the files to include this information. But it would be a lot easier to do it on the initial pass.
And let's dispense with the usual lame excuses about limited resources, unskilled volunteers, etc. It wouldn't be that hard to put together a proposal for a set of XML specs that accommodate the various docs that DP and PG deal with, together with some web applications that would allow the most naive volunteers to translate text into structured data. It would be complicated and technically difficult, but with a little hustling for grants, donations, and technically skilled volunteers (I'd be good for the last two, and I'd be happy to hustle my employer for all three), it could be done. It's not even that big a project, as such things go.
So why hasn't it happened? Because the key people at PG and DP know jack about content management technology. They were slightly behind the times in 1971, and they've made remarkably little progress since then. Meanwhile the technology that's available has grown by leaps and bounds. I say again: amateurs.
There's a big difference between a national newspaper and a blogger. And how is sending out a form letter "bad faith"? Do you even know what that means?
I doubt if the OpenBSD thing has anything to do with this. It's more in response to the fact that it's hard to sell SPARC-based systems as long as the CPU is perceived as a Sun-proprietary technology. So Sun opens up the SPARC design, and this allows them to claim that their chips are "commodity", just like AMD and Intel's.
Sending scary letters to quash news of this is reprehensible. Still, a trademark that is not actively enforced can be lost.
They weren't trying to quash news. They were just doing the usual hyperactive bit in response to somebody using their trademark. People who send out these C&D letters don't have any incentive to take the extra effort to figure out whether something is a genuine violation or something that's protected as satire, news, or "not potentially confusing". Indeed, if they overlook somebody they might well lose their job. So they just fire off letters to everybody. Then if the recipient claims an exemption (as laugingsquid did) they fire off another letter apologizing. Since both letters are form/boilerplate, the total cost is a few bucks for certified mail. It's on a par with call centers and other such methods for communicating with people on a pseudo-personal basis. It scales up, and when you're in a high-volume low-margin business, you need things that scale up.
but seriously: this is all a case of people with too much time on their hands: the best buy "actors" in the original "event", AND the lawyers suing them
Dude, litigators charge (a lot) by the hour. For them, there's no such thing as "too much time".
As for the event people: hey it's art. Maybe not to your taste, but no more a waste of time than, say, sports.
Those offsite links are valid, but not until after PG does its nightly cataloging run which places files in the correct locations on their server(s). Why they don't move files into place immediately on posting a text is beyond me, since it should be trivial from a technical standpoint, but since I don't volunteer for them directly, I can't respond to that. Neither "it's not our fault" or "they should work" is more than a silly excuse. If this were my website, I'd work with the other website to make sure the links worked. If that didn't work out, I'd take down the links. Proudly displaying links that don't work, for whatever reason, makes you look like idiots.
Your suggestions would work better in a "professional" environment, but in a volunteer environment, they would fail because the learning curve is too high... In other words, you're not going to use the right tools because you don't think your volunteers could be bothered to learn to use them. Well, here's one volunteer who's lost interest because you insist on using primitive tools.
And the fact is, it's quite possible to design user friendly tools for entering XML. But that would take planning and technical expertise. Your lack of those resources is the real problem, not the learning curve.
Basically, what you're good for is taking a lot of Victorian novels and making them available online. I suppose that's worth doing, but it doesn't qualify DP as a major player in the "citizen science" as discussed in TFA. If you want to do serious stuff, like being old technical works online, you need to break away from the naive concepts you inherited from Project Gutenberg, and acquire some understanding of 21st century document storage technology.
"All-volunteer" is not the same thing as "totally amateur." A number of our volunteers work in library science, proofreading, or other directly related fields. Never said it was. In this kind of context, I think you'll find "amateur" usually means the opposite of "professional". And in this context "professional" doesn't mean "paid", it means "knows what they're doing".
It sound like you last visited DP a long time ago. DP has been standardized on PNG as their page image format almost since the site's inception 7 years ago, though we do allow jpg as an alternative. TIFF has never been an official format there. I don't know what to tell you. I was involved in 2003, and at that time I used a sort of web proofreading tool that used TIFF. Perhaps that was a feature of the particular tool.
Markup for bold and italics is the same as HTML, and markups exist for and are used to indicate marginal notes, footnotes, and the like. You are welcome to argue that a more complex markup is necessary, but considering the amount of outdated information in your comments here, you may wish to stop by and update your knowledge of the the state of the site. We'll happily welcome you back if you do. I just did stop by. All the "recently finished" links on the front page are broken — not the best way to persuade folks you're not amateurs.
I'm glad to see you've starting using markup to indicate bold and italics. But skimming through your Formatting Guidlines, I see a lot of bad stuff that hasn't changed since I was a volunteer. You still use 4 blank lines to indicate a chapter break. You still use that clumsy, hard-to-parse syntax to indicate side notes and footnotes. And you still hand-format tables! I couldn't find the instructions for entering equations, but I'm guessing you still use Tex syntax to record them.
My particular interest was the 1911 Britannica — I spent a lot of time on that one. A lot of people would enjoy a decent online copy. But to be useful, the online version has to be well-structured, so you can pull up a particular article without going crazy. And all that scientific stuff and complicated tabular information has to be recorded in such a way that it can actually be read. I gave up when I realized that the toolset you had 4 years wasn't nearly up to the task. And it still isn't. There have been improvements, but nothing that really dents my original negative assessment.
Distributed proofreaders have been a longstanding success (yet inexplicably failed to get even a mention in the article)
Maybe because it's a totally amateur effort?
I volunteered for DP for a few months. I got buggy TIFFs that my web browser couldn't deal with, so I sometimes had to work outside the DP proofing environment, which was a pain. (My suggestion that they switch to a more portable format, such as PNG, fell on deaf ears.) And they're still stuck on the idea that plain text is a universal format. That's what made me give up: I was proofing the 1911 Britannica, and realized that a lot of information was getting lost. There was no good way to indicate marginal notes. Both boldface and italic are indicated by all caps. (I REALLY find it hard to enjoy books that are FULL of capitalized words; it DESTROYS a lot of the SUBTLETY. And how do you capitalize "1984"?) And equations were managed with a subset of LaTex which I'm sure I mangled because I didn't have a LaTex interpreter to test it on — in fact, the DP instructions didn't even mention that it was LaTex.
If you want to preserve text for the ages, you have to use some serious markup to indicate things that are part of the content but not part of the linear text. Basically, the solution is to use some form of XML. Yes, I know the arguments: hard to enter, not everybody has an XML browser, etc. There are good solutions that deal with these problems, Just throwing away data in order to keep the document "simple" is not a good solution.
If you lasted through 7 volumes, you have more patience than I do. For me, just knowing that there's 10 volumes between the beginning and the end would scare me away. It's not that I don't like long stories (I actually enjoyed War and Peace). But no writer can tell 2+ megawords worth of narrative and maintain a coherent plot. So you just end up with hundreds of disconnected episodes. Boring, unless you just want to be hypnotized — which is what most SF and Fantasy readers seem to want these days. Me, I like an actual story.
Re:All of this talk of scripting vi made me think
on
Hacking VIM
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· Score: 1
Untrue, fortunately. The big difference between vim and EMACS is that EMACS is built with scripts, whereas vim is a vi clone with scripting kludged in. That's both good and bad. The bad part is that vim's scripting language is very clumsy, not just in relation to the fancy functional LISP engine EMACS uses, but in relation to most scripting languages. The good part is that you can be a casual vim user without mastering its scripting language or worrying that some obscure script feature or bug will manifest itself and bite you on the ass.
Well, if just cnn.com did it, they'd lose a lot of traffic, and then whoever made that decision would lose their job, they'd switch back, and that would be the end of it.
Now, if every major media site suddenly started requiring standards-compliant browsers, maybe it would have the result you're trying for. (Though my bet is that a lot of users would rebel and make them back down.) But it would have to be a coordinated effort. I suggest you start lobbying the corporations that own these sites.
However, if you actually have that kind of ability to persuade leading decision makers, then maybe you should apply it to something that affects the future of humanity more profoundly than software standards. Hey, there's probably a Nobel Peace Prize in it for you!
"Two thousand web sites"? That's nothing. There are millions of web sites out there. In order to motivate users to switch, you'd have to persuade most of their webmasters to require standards-compliance browsers. If your powers of persuasion are that good, I am, frankly, afraid of you.
You're not the first to have that thought. It was part of the premise of Greg Bear's SF novel, Darwin's Radio. He, in turn, got the idea from various scientists, cited in the back of the book. (Sorry, no copy at hand.)
As I recall, there were no accusations of ballot box stuffing in Florida. Which is not to say that there was no vote rigging. There were many claims that people from pro-Gore demographic groups finding it hard to cast their ballots.
What I consider more relevant about those days is that as kids we had to be "creators" instead of "users" as it happens today. The most fascinating idea about the computer was that you could "tell it" what to do, and it would just do it. The potential was endless, but you HAD to learn some form of programming language. The more control you wanted to have, the lower in the stack you had to go. I can't emphasize enough how "mind shaping" was learning assembly language on the 6502 (with only 1 accumulator and 2 registers)...
I know a guy who still teaches 6502 assembly language at a community college. He started out with Apple IIs; when those got booted from the computer lab, he switched to an emulator running on PCs.
Point is, we shouldn't need to address every single quirk[1] IE's programmers incorporated; they should conform to standards. Let's get more basic than that: the industry shouldn't be dominated by a single company that destroys competition, ignores standards, and produces so much crappy software. But when you have a job to do, you work according to the way things are, not the way things should be.
Unless we sacrifice a little now to (already belatedly) educate our users, we'll be doing double amounts of work simply because Microsoft doesn't care, and users blame the designers. Education is good. Just don't expect to educate enough people so that you can get away with pretending that most of your users don't run IE.
We should start assigning the blame properly: if a standards-compliant web page doesn't look good in IE, it is Microsoft's fault. So take your case to Microsoft. "My case"? All I said was that IE dominates the browser user base, and that the web developer has to live with that. You want me to be pissed at MS? Fine, I'm pissed. But my web applications still have to work on IE.
I stand corrected. And of course even when the only barrier to SW antennas is a zoning law, many people will find another hobby, rather than go to the trouble and expense of getting the law overturned.
Except that there's no such restriction. Somebody has confused a software feature called "Anywhere Access" with the drive itself. AA is a feature that lets you pull your files over the web. WD, not wanting to waste a lot of effort dealing with takedown notices, won't let you use AA to share media files with other people. (You can use it to access your own media files.) You don't use AA to access files over LAN, so restrictions built into AA don't apply to local access.
This is the thing I hate most about the blogosphere. Some idiot gets his facts wrong, and everybody passes the story along as gospel, without taking 5 minutes to check the facts. Cory Doctorow is particular bad that way, which is why I no longer subscribe to BoingBoing.
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Dude, time to learn a language more advanced than Visual Basic!
Here's what the OLPC did right that so many others have done wrong. You don't need fancy technologies or highly-trained teachers. You need to give kids a solid set of learning software tools. Then you need to get out of the way.
"Saying it's so doesn't make it true?" How does that even apply here? I didn't just make a claim, I pointed out some severe limitations in the "guidelines" that haven't changed since I was a volunteer. True there have been some improvements (not using ALL CAPS for italics removes a major eyesore) but it's still pretty much a mess.
I'm glad you linked the 1911 EB, since that's the DP project I care most about. Now, suppose I want to read the article on Sir Thomas Bromley. I have to figure out which file has his article, download the entire 5 megabyte file (remind me not to do that on my cell phone browser!) and then search for his name.
Someday, somebody will get round to breaking these huge EB files into individual articles. That's going to take a lot of manual processing, because the conventions for "new article" are vague and inconsistently applied. A lot of typographical subtleties are lost, because they're not well supported. My particular pet peeve is that non-Latin characters (lots of those in the EB) are handled through transliteration. That might have made sense when Project Gutenberg was started in 1971 (though even then there were better ways of doing it); 36 years later, when even barefoot kids in developing countries have access to graphics displays, it's just stupid.
And hand-formatted tables. I cannot find the words to describe how dumb that is.
True, we can reprocess the files to include this information. But it would be a lot easier to do it on the initial pass.
And let's dispense with the usual lame excuses about limited resources, unskilled volunteers, etc. It wouldn't be that hard to put together a proposal for a set of XML specs that accommodate the various docs that DP and PG deal with, together with some web applications that would allow the most naive volunteers to translate text into structured data. It would be complicated and technically difficult, but with a little hustling for grants, donations, and technically skilled volunteers (I'd be good for the last two, and I'd be happy to hustle my employer for all three), it could be done. It's not even that big a project, as such things go.
So why hasn't it happened? Because the key people at PG and DP know jack about content management technology. They were slightly behind the times in 1971, and they've made remarkably little progress since then. Meanwhile the technology that's available has grown by leaps and bounds. I say again: amateurs.
There's a big difference between a national newspaper and a blogger. And how is sending out a form letter "bad faith"? Do you even know what that means?
I doubt if the OpenBSD thing has anything to do with this. It's more in response to the fact that it's hard to sell SPARC-based systems as long as the CPU is perceived as a Sun-proprietary technology. So Sun opens up the SPARC design, and this allows them to claim that their chips are "commodity", just like AMD and Intel's.
As for the event people: hey it's art. Maybe not to your taste, but no more a waste of time than, say, sports.
I just took a look at the DP site. As I've noticed in another post, not that much has changed.
And the fact is, it's quite possible to design user friendly tools for entering XML. But that would take planning and technical expertise. Your lack of those resources is the real problem, not the learning curve.
Basically, what you're good for is taking a lot of Victorian novels and making them available online. I suppose that's worth doing, but it doesn't qualify DP as a major player in the "citizen science" as discussed in TFA. If you want to do serious stuff, like being old technical works online, you need to break away from the naive concepts you inherited from Project Gutenberg, and acquire some understanding of 21st century document storage technology.
I'm glad to see you've starting using markup to indicate bold and italics. But skimming through your Formatting Guidlines, I see a lot of bad stuff that hasn't changed since I was a volunteer. You still use 4 blank lines to indicate a chapter break. You still use that clumsy, hard-to-parse syntax to indicate side notes and footnotes. And you still hand-format tables! I couldn't find the instructions for entering equations, but I'm guessing you still use Tex syntax to record them.
My particular interest was the 1911 Britannica — I spent a lot of time on that one. A lot of people would enjoy a decent online copy. But to be useful, the online version has to be well-structured, so you can pull up a particular article without going crazy. And all that scientific stuff and complicated tabular information has to be recorded in such a way that it can actually be read. I gave up when I realized that the toolset you had 4 years wasn't nearly up to the task. And it still isn't. There have been improvements, but nothing that really dents my original negative assessment.
I stand by the word: amateur.
I volunteered for DP for a few months. I got buggy TIFFs that my web browser couldn't deal with, so I sometimes had to work outside the DP proofing environment, which was a pain. (My suggestion that they switch to a more portable format, such as PNG, fell on deaf ears.) And they're still stuck on the idea that plain text is a universal format. That's what made me give up: I was proofing the 1911 Britannica, and realized that a lot of information was getting lost. There was no good way to indicate marginal notes. Both boldface and italic are indicated by all caps. (I REALLY find it hard to enjoy books that are FULL of capitalized words; it DESTROYS a lot of the SUBTLETY. And how do you capitalize "1984"?) And equations were managed with a subset of LaTex which I'm sure I mangled because I didn't have a LaTex interpreter to test it on — in fact, the DP instructions didn't even mention that it was LaTex.
If you want to preserve text for the ages, you have to use some serious markup to indicate things that are part of the content but not part of the linear text. Basically, the solution is to use some form of XML. Yes, I know the arguments: hard to enter, not everybody has an XML browser, etc. There are good solutions that deal with these problems, Just throwing away data in order to keep the document "simple" is not a good solution.
I get my online access at a public library, you ignorant clod!
If you lasted through 7 volumes, you have more patience than I do. For me, just knowing that there's 10 volumes between the beginning and the end would scare me away. It's not that I don't like long stories (I actually enjoyed War and Peace). But no writer can tell 2+ megawords worth of narrative and maintain a coherent plot. So you just end up with hundreds of disconnected episodes. Boring, unless you just want to be hypnotized — which is what most SF and Fantasy readers seem to want these days. Me, I like an actual story.
Untrue, fortunately. The big difference between vim and EMACS is that EMACS is built with scripts, whereas vim is a vi clone with scripting kludged in. That's both good and bad. The bad part is that vim's scripting language is very clumsy, not just in relation to the fancy functional LISP engine EMACS uses, but in relation to most scripting languages. The good part is that you can be a casual vim user without mastering its scripting language or worrying that some obscure script feature or bug will manifest itself and bite you on the ass.
Well, if just cnn.com did it, they'd lose a lot of traffic, and then whoever made that decision would lose their job, they'd switch back, and that would be the end of it.
Now, if every major media site suddenly started requiring standards-compliant browsers, maybe it would have the result you're trying for. (Though my bet is that a lot of users would rebel and make them back down.) But it would have to be a coordinated effort. I suggest you start lobbying the corporations that own these sites.
However, if you actually have that kind of ability to persuade leading decision makers, then maybe you should apply it to something that affects the future of humanity more profoundly than software standards. Hey, there's probably a Nobel Peace Prize in it for you!
"Two thousand web sites"? That's nothing. There are millions of web sites out there. In order to motivate users to switch, you'd have to persuade most of their webmasters to require standards-compliance browsers. If your powers of persuasion are that good, I am, frankly, afraid of you.
Yeah, it was OK. Sort of beats the theme to death.
You're not the first to have that thought. It was part of the premise of Greg Bear's SF novel, Darwin's Radio. He, in turn, got the idea from various scientists, cited in the back of the book. (Sorry, no copy at hand.)
As I recall, there were no accusations of ballot box stuffing in Florida. Which is not to say that there was no vote rigging. There were many claims that people from pro-Gore demographic groups finding it hard to cast their ballots.
I stand corrected. And of course even when the only barrier to SW antennas is a zoning law, many people will find another hobby, rather than go to the trouble and expense of getting the law overturned.
Except that there's no such restriction. Somebody has confused a software feature called "Anywhere Access" with the drive itself. AA is a feature that lets you pull your files over the web. WD, not wanting to waste a lot of effort dealing with takedown notices, won't let you use AA to share media files with other people. (You can use it to access your own media files.) You don't use AA to access files over LAN, so restrictions built into AA don't apply to local access.
This is the thing I hate most about the blogosphere. Some idiot gets his facts wrong, and everybody passes the story along as gospel, without taking 5 minutes to check the facts. Cory Doctorow is particular bad that way, which is why I no longer subscribe to BoingBoing.