Velocity is relative, but acceleration is NOT relative. An orbiting body is in constant acceleration, so A orbiting B is not the same as B orbiting A.
Actually, in general relativity acceleration is relative too. For instance, if you're in an elevator accelerating upward, general relativity allows you to say that you're at rest, and the rest of the universe is accelerating downward. You attribute that to a gravitational field permeating the entire universe.
Really ? Your ISP is down for nearly 5 hours out of every single day ?
No, they're not down for hours at a time, they're down for minutes at a time. It does add up to about 20% unavailability, though.
Exactly. I'm desperately unhappy with the horrible uptime of my home ISP. Forget about five nines, or even three nines -- I don't even get one nine. I'd say my uptime is roughly 80%. What the hell am I going to do about it? Time-Warner has a local monopoly. I call the phone company every year or so and ask if they're ever going to bring DSL to my neighborhood; the answer is always, "not yet, maybe someday." The most viable alternative where I live is satellite, and it's not really very viable at all. Wildblue.com will sell me a 500 kbit/s satellite system for $50/mo, with a $368 setup cost. (The bandwidth would be lower in rainy or cloudy weather.)
...not to use a cell phone to browse the web. But I didn't really need another reason. The screen is way too small. Almost no web pages are designed for cell phones. There's no mouse or keyboard. I don't need another monthly bill.
Personally, if I'm going to have an assignation, I'll typically do it in a romantic restauraunt, or maybe a motel. Public parking lots? I guess those Italians are pretty hot-blooded.
Re:just tried the instructions in that technowizar
on
Building a Green PC
·
· Score: 1
This was all enabled for me by default in ubuntu gutsy. I didn't have to do anything special. The article you linked to appears to be relevant to older kernels.
I think Heinlein had the solution to that (he used it for real property). You declare a value, you pay taxes based on that, and anybody can force you to sell it to them at that price.
I think there's a fatal flaw in this idea, which is that people don't always make one transaction to buy a copy of one piece of IP. For instance, if you buy a fiction anthology, often you'll see on the copyright page that each author is the copyright owner of his own story. Say one of the stories is longer than another; should that have to pay copyright taxes in proportion to the number of words he contributed? This could clearly get completely unmanageable for, e.g., a piece of software where hundreds of people might own individual copyrights on their one-line diffs.
Even if you give up on the Heinlein scheme, I think this problem with the combinability of IP cripples any IP property tax concept. For instance, suppose you just say that the copyright owner must pay some token fee like 10 dollars every 10 years to renew the copyright. I guarantee you that one thing that will happen is that people will aggregate large blocs of IP in order to minimize their copyright fees. For instance, I could form a corporation with 100 other people, and every year we could all register the copyrights on our works as one big work, so we'd split the fees.
Rather than a property tax, I think a more manageable solution might be something like this. When you register a copyright, you have to supply the government a copy (which is already a requirement for most types of copyrights), and that copy has to be in digital form. At intervals of no more than 30 and no less than 40 years, you have to show up in person at a government office, and click a mouse on every single copyright you want to keep registered. For a professional author, songwriter, etc., this means a minimum of one trip every decade to keep all your works in registration. (Exceptions if you're in a nursing home, etc.) If you ever fail to show up to do the mouse click, then the government ends your copyright, and everyone who wants to can download digital copies for free from the government.
We've had two answers in this thread: $0 and 30 googolplex kg of gold. I think the real answer is that it doesn't matter at all, because Linus doesn't need to sell copies of Linux the way Disney sells Mickey Mouse t-shirts. When's the last time you bought a copy of Linux from Linus? I sure as hell never did. What's happened is that Linus has offered me a license that allows me to copy Linux free of charge. There was never any sale. I just accepted the license. Legally, I don't think there's any such thing as a sale for $0. That's why you get the silly legal formula "for one dollar in hand, and other valuable considerations." Linus's sales volume of Linux is 0. Always has been and always will be. If you have zero sales, it doesn't matter what your unit price is.
Re:Want a real green pc for free?
on
Building a Green PC
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Then keep the machine you have and turn on system standby/sleep functions.
One practical issue I've run into here is that power management support on linux is simply horrible. I've never, ever had power management work properly on any pc hardware with linux. And to be fair, I don't think it's the fault of the kernel developers or the distros. Apparently the hardware manufacturers refuse to publicly document the registers that need to be saved when their chipsets go to sleep. One thing that really does work well in linux is AMD's cool'n'quiet technology, which makes the cpu use dramatically less power when it's idle.
I have some experience with building low-power systems. The system I'm posting on uses 62 W when I get up for a cup of coffee and let the screen go blank, leaving the cpu idle. Peak is 105 W. This is a snappy, modern dual-core x64. Basically the advice in the ars technica article is correct. I do have two quibbles with their advice, though.
(1) The most important piece of advice missing from the article is to get a power meter such as a kill-a-watt, and take some actual measurements. For instance, I had no idea until I took measurements that the set of speakers I was using was drawing 24 W all day and all night, even when the computer was turned off.
(2) Telling people to buy SSDs is simply ridiculous at this point. As they say in the article, a 2.5" platter drive draws about 1 W when it's not being accessed (which is almost all the time). Paying hundreds of extra dollars to shave milliwatts off your power consumption is just silly. There's a lot more low-hanging fruit to pick.
Perhaps this is the reason why you can't use gnash to use youtube, you may not have drivers that give you hardware acceleration support for your VGA.
Ah, I see. That would make sense. I'm just using the onboard video on my mobo, no external video card at all, and I'm not using the closed-source nvidia drivers. Thanks for the info!
I'm using Ubuntu, by the way
Huh. So am I. I wonder why gnash works for you on youtube, but doesn't work for me. We're both using x64, and we're both using ubuntu. What version of ubuntu are you running? I'm on gutsy.
I found this, which is micro emacs + some enhancements bundled with it (like syntax highlighting). It's definitely faster than the original emacs and more useful (at least for me) then straight micro emacs.
Interesting. It's GPL, so I wonder why there doesn't seem to have an ubuntu package. It looks like the history is that mg and micro emacs are actually forks of the same project.
I don't know, I have the x86-64 gnash binaries from my distro's repos and they allow me to watch youtube videos just fine
Interesting. I wonder why it works for you and not for me.
Edit: BTW, if you are using Adobe's flash plugin, doesn't that mean that you are using ndiswrapper and a 32-bit browser?
I don't know. I do an apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree, and it Just Works.
Okay, so first off, I thought it was cool that RMS was one of the better dancers in the video:-)
But from the comments, the purpose of the video seems to be to get people to try gnash. So okay, I removed the adobe flash plugin, installed the ubuntu mozilla-plugin-gnash package, went to youtube, and the video no longer worked. The getgnash.org site does say that youtube support is something that's currently under active development, so I tried the latest nightly snapshot, but no joy because they don't compile them for my architecture (x64). Tried compiling from CVS, and got syntax errors.
Am I missing something? It seems unlikely that RMS would do a video like this if the video couldn't be played using free software.
I like mg, which is a tiny, fast clone of emacs. I only revert to using emacs on the rare occasions when I need to do something fancy that mg can't do. On my (pretty fast) system, emacs -nw takes 2 seconds to start up, which is annoying and totally unnecessary when all I want to do is some simple text editing. I also found that with emacs, I was spending a lot of time websurfing for information on how to turn off features that I didn't want (syntax coloring, automatic indentation,...). "Open the pod bay doors, Hal!"
Saying things like this...is the best way to keep people out of physics, and to keep the general public terrified of nuclear power, wireless communication, power lines, etc.
Maybe spreading misinformation and acting like a know-it-all are also not the best ways of getting an informed public.
To those who would then say "Aha! So clearly photons do interact with gravity!", it's important to note that photons may be affected by the curvature of spactime, but they don't have mass and thus don't interact gravitationally. For instance, photons cannot attract each other gravitationally (whereas matter does), and a photon won't attract matter gravitationally.
Nope. In general relativity, the curvature of spacetime, as measured by the Einstein tensor, is related to the stress-energy tensor, T. The T00 component of the stress-energy tensor is a mass-energy density. Mass and energy are equivalent in relativity, E=mc2. So a photon with energy E creates the same gravitational field as a material particle of mass E/c2. If it worked the way you're suggesting, with matter attracting photons but photons not attracting matter, it would violate conservation of momentum.
In my experience, the issue has been siblings and friends. For example, my daughter (then age 7) told her friend her Club Penguin password, after which her friend told it to her older sister, who logged on as my daughter and got her temporarily banned for cussing. Tweens will also want to, e.g., keep private diaries where they write down their feelings about the Jonas Brothers, and know that their siblings won't have access to them.
As far as parental access... both my kids have $200 ubuntu boxes in their rooms. They have accounts with admin privileges, and so do I, but I never need to use my privs. They ask me for help when they need it.
I make sure they habitually apply security updates. I've explained how to pick passwords that are not vulnerable to dictionary attacks, and I don't know, and don't need to know, their passwords. Even if they don't pick completely secure passwords, it's not really the end of the world, because we're behind a router.
I suppose a lot of parents are worried that their kids will connect with child molesters online. I think that's a sad commentary on the level of parental paranoia, and on people's inability to evaluate risks properly. Statistically, the big risk is getting hit by a car, which you deal with by teaching them to look both ways when crossing the street.
Axiom and maxima both work fine for me. Admittedly, I don't use them for much more than the occasional nasty integral.
Wolfram is evil. I once bought a copy of the mac version of Mathematica from them, to run on MacOS 6, IIRC. When I upgraded to MacOS 7, it stopped working. Called Wolfram, they said I should pay for a new version of Mathematica.
Java and XML are similar in that both of them got over-hyped. They're also similar in that sometimes they really are the right solution -- just not as often as PHBs seem to think. I've had exactly one application where I started designing the file format, and realized, "Oh heck, I'm reinventing XML," so I went with XML and it was the right choice. For config files, the advantage I can see is that although XML may not be optimal for every type of config file, it does provide an alternative to the traditional Unix philosophy of having a different, goofy syntax for every single program's config file. Re Java, what was really a disaster, in hindsight, was applets. They were overhyped, the CPUs weren't fast enough to give acceptable performance, the VM and its libraries are still too huge to give attractive startup times, AWT was a botch and had to be replaced, and implementations of browser plugins still suck -- in fact, my browser crashes every single goddamn time I visit this applet. Because Sun blew it so bad with applets (with a little help from MS), we've ended up instead with the de facto standard being flash, which is basically a totally proprietary system. (Yeah, I know about Gnash, Haxe, etc. Let me know when you can buy a Flash book and make the examples work using a totally open-source software stack.)
Ouch. Another horror story: At the school where I teach (physics), the math department has a course where the required text is only available in DRM'd digital form. You can only access the text in IE. (Spoofing the user agent string in Firefox doesn't work.) Oh yeah, and the book evaporates at the end of the semester so the student loses access to it. Obligatory link to Stallman's The Right to Read.
Translation is hard work, and people tend to underestimate how much work it is. My physics textbooks, in English, are free online. Over the years, I've had four or five people contact me, acting extremely enthusiastic about translating them into other languages. One of them translated one chapter into French and then stopped. None of the others actually did any translation. It's the same logic as any open-source software project; although you hear a lot about collaborative development, the bazaar model, etc., actually the vast majority of OSS projects never attract any developers other than the original one.
There are also significant technical obstacles. Producing a high-quality illustrated textbook requires a fairly complicated software setup, and that means that the translators have to be able to reproduce that setup. If you're using proprietary software, you have a problem, because prospective translators aren't going to pay for a copy of it so they can have the privilege of translating a free book for free. If you're using an OSS software stack, then you have the issue that some of the OSS software for this kind of thing is not yet totally mature (e.g., Inkscape is great, but it's still quite new and under heavy development), and some of it is fairly hard to use (e.g., my LaTeX class file for my textbooks runs to 2400 lines of code, plus a few thousand more lines of custom perl scripts).
What's needed are the professors and students to do this.
See my sig for a whole bunch of examples that already exist.
So of the best textbooks I had in college were published through the University printing department for the cost of materials.
My experience is that these days, that kind of thing tends to be much more expensive and inefficient that simply putting pdfs on the web. That's what I do for my students, and self-service laser printing on campus only costs them 4 cents a page (which is basically what it costs the school for paper and toner, and is much, much less than it would cost for the ink on a home inkjet printer). If I did it through my campus's bookstore, it would cost more like 8 cents a page. Part of the reason for that is that bookstores normally operate in a system where any books they don't sell, they just return to the publisher for a full refund. But course packets can't be returned, so the bookstore has to eat the extra cost of producing any copies they produced that ended up in a dumpster. To keep from taking a loss, they raise the price. Another factor that raises costs is that the course packs are being produced by paid workers, not by students on a self-serve basis, so the price has to include that labor cost. AFAICT, there are only three reasons any professors are still doing these course packs the old-fashioned way: (a) they don't own the rights to all the materials, and are paying the publisher for permission to use them, (b) they did their materials on a typewriter in 1962, and haven't gotten around to modernizing, or (c) they want to make a royalty. I think c is completely unethical when you're selling to your own students. There's a massive conflict of interest when you can force your students to buy something that puts money in your own pocket. If you want to make royalties from your writing, then ethically you really need to make those royalties from sales to other schools.
Slashdot Mirror
Velocity is relative, but acceleration is NOT relative. An orbiting body is in constant acceleration, so A orbiting B is not the same as B orbiting A.
Actually, in general relativity acceleration is relative too. For instance, if you're in an elevator accelerating upward, general relativity allows you to say that you're at rest, and the rest of the universe is accelerating downward. You attribute that to a gravitational field permeating the entire universe.
Really ? Your ISP is down for nearly 5 hours out of every single day ?
No, they're not down for hours at a time, they're down for minutes at a time. It does add up to about 20% unavailability, though.
Exactly. I'm desperately unhappy with the horrible uptime of my home ISP. Forget about five nines, or even three nines -- I don't even get one nine. I'd say my uptime is roughly 80%. What the hell am I going to do about it? Time-Warner has a local monopoly. I call the phone company every year or so and ask if they're ever going to bring DSL to my neighborhood; the answer is always, "not yet, maybe someday." The most viable alternative where I live is satellite, and it's not really very viable at all. Wildblue.com will sell me a 500 kbit/s satellite system for $50/mo, with a $368 setup cost. (The bandwidth would be lower in rainy or cloudy weather.)
...not to use a cell phone to browse the web. But I didn't really need another reason. The screen is way too small. Almost no web pages are designed for cell phones. There's no mouse or keyboard. I don't need another monthly bill.
Personally, if I'm going to have an assignation, I'll typically do it in a romantic restauraunt, or maybe a motel. Public parking lots? I guess those Italians are pretty hot-blooded.
This was all enabled for me by default in ubuntu gutsy. I didn't have to do anything special. The article you linked to appears to be relevant to older kernels.
I think Heinlein had the solution to that (he used it for real property). You declare a value, you pay taxes based on that, and anybody can force you to sell it to them at that price.
I think there's a fatal flaw in this idea, which is that people don't always make one transaction to buy a copy of one piece of IP. For instance, if you buy a fiction anthology, often you'll see on the copyright page that each author is the copyright owner of his own story. Say one of the stories is longer than another; should that have to pay copyright taxes in proportion to the number of words he contributed? This could clearly get completely unmanageable for, e.g., a piece of software where hundreds of people might own individual copyrights on their one-line diffs.
Even if you give up on the Heinlein scheme, I think this problem with the combinability of IP cripples any IP property tax concept. For instance, suppose you just say that the copyright owner must pay some token fee like 10 dollars every 10 years to renew the copyright. I guarantee you that one thing that will happen is that people will aggregate large blocs of IP in order to minimize their copyright fees. For instance, I could form a corporation with 100 other people, and every year we could all register the copyrights on our works as one big work, so we'd split the fees.
Rather than a property tax, I think a more manageable solution might be something like this. When you register a copyright, you have to supply the government a copy (which is already a requirement for most types of copyrights), and that copy has to be in digital form. At intervals of no more than 30 and no less than 40 years, you have to show up in person at a government office, and click a mouse on every single copyright you want to keep registered. For a professional author, songwriter, etc., this means a minimum of one trip every decade to keep all your works in registration. (Exceptions if you're in a nursing home, etc.) If you ever fail to show up to do the mouse click, then the government ends your copyright, and everyone who wants to can download digital copies for free from the government.
We've had two answers in this thread: $0 and 30 googolplex kg of gold. I think the real answer is that it doesn't matter at all, because Linus doesn't need to sell copies of Linux the way Disney sells Mickey Mouse t-shirts. When's the last time you bought a copy of Linux from Linus? I sure as hell never did. What's happened is that Linus has offered me a license that allows me to copy Linux free of charge. There was never any sale. I just accepted the license. Legally, I don't think there's any such thing as a sale for $0. That's why you get the silly legal formula "for one dollar in hand, and other valuable considerations." Linus's sales volume of Linux is 0. Always has been and always will be. If you have zero sales, it doesn't matter what your unit price is.
Then keep the machine you have and turn on system standby/sleep functions.
One practical issue I've run into here is that power management support on linux is simply horrible. I've never, ever had power management work properly on any pc hardware with linux. And to be fair, I don't think it's the fault of the kernel developers or the distros. Apparently the hardware manufacturers refuse to publicly document the registers that need to be saved when their chipsets go to sleep. One thing that really does work well in linux is AMD's cool'n'quiet technology, which makes the cpu use dramatically less power when it's idle.
I have some experience with building low-power systems. The system I'm posting on uses 62 W when I get up for a cup of coffee and let the screen go blank, leaving the cpu idle. Peak is 105 W. This is a snappy, modern dual-core x64. Basically the advice in the ars technica article is correct. I do have two quibbles with their advice, though.
(1) The most important piece of advice missing from the article is to get a power meter such as a kill-a-watt, and take some actual measurements. For instance, I had no idea until I took measurements that the set of speakers I was using was drawing 24 W all day and all night, even when the computer was turned off.
(2) Telling people to buy SSDs is simply ridiculous at this point. As they say in the article, a 2.5" platter drive draws about 1 W when it's not being accessed (which is almost all the time). Paying hundreds of extra dollars to shave milliwatts off your power consumption is just silly. There's a lot more low-hanging fruit to pick.
Perhaps this is the reason why you can't use gnash to use youtube, you may not have drivers that give you hardware acceleration support for your VGA.
Ah, I see. That would make sense. I'm just using the onboard video on my mobo, no external video card at all, and I'm not using the closed-source nvidia drivers. Thanks for the info!
I'm using Ubuntu, by the way
Huh. So am I. I wonder why gnash works for you on youtube, but doesn't work for me. We're both using x64, and we're both using ubuntu. What version of ubuntu are you running? I'm on gutsy.
I found this, which is micro emacs + some enhancements bundled with it (like syntax highlighting). It's definitely faster than the original emacs and more useful (at least for me) then straight micro emacs.
Interesting. It's GPL, so I wonder why there doesn't seem to have an ubuntu package. It looks like the history is that mg and micro emacs are actually forks of the same project.
I don't know, I have the x86-64 gnash binaries from my distro's repos and they allow me to watch youtube videos just fine
Interesting. I wonder why it works for you and not for me.
Edit: BTW, if you are using Adobe's flash plugin, doesn't that mean that you are using ndiswrapper and a 32-bit browser?
I don't know. I do an apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree, and it Just Works.
what's an example of something fancy that mg can't do?
syntax highlighting
Okay, so first off, I thought it was cool that RMS was one of the better dancers in the video :-)
But from the comments, the purpose of the video seems to be to get people to try gnash. So okay, I removed the adobe flash plugin, installed the ubuntu mozilla-plugin-gnash package, went to youtube, and the video no longer worked. The getgnash.org site does say that youtube support is something that's currently under active development, so I tried the latest nightly snapshot, but no joy because they don't compile them for my architecture (x64). Tried compiling from CVS, and got syntax errors.
Am I missing something? It seems unlikely that RMS would do a video like this if the video couldn't be played using free software.
I like mg, which is a tiny, fast clone of emacs. I only revert to using emacs on the rare occasions when I need to do something fancy that mg can't do. On my (pretty fast) system, emacs -nw takes 2 seconds to start up, which is annoying and totally unnecessary when all I want to do is some simple text editing. I also found that with emacs, I was spending a lot of time websurfing for information on how to turn off features that I didn't want (syntax coloring, automatic indentation, ...). "Open the pod bay doors, Hal!"
Saying things like this...is the best way to keep people out of physics, and to keep the general public terrified of nuclear power, wireless communication, power lines, etc.
Maybe spreading misinformation and acting like a know-it-all are also not the best ways of getting an informed public.
To those who would then say "Aha! So clearly photons do interact with gravity!", it's important to note that photons may be affected by the curvature of spactime, but they don't have mass and thus don't interact gravitationally. For instance, photons cannot attract each other gravitationally (whereas matter does), and a photon won't attract matter gravitationally.
Nope. In general relativity, the curvature of spacetime, as measured by the Einstein tensor, is related to the stress-energy tensor, T. The T00 component of the stress-energy tensor is a mass-energy density. Mass and energy are equivalent in relativity, E=mc2. So a photon with energy E creates the same gravitational field as a material particle of mass E/c2. If it worked the way you're suggesting, with matter attracting photons but photons not attracting matter, it would violate conservation of momentum.
Huh? How many people's ISPs allow their customers to run servers? Not many, AFAIK.
In my experience, the issue has been siblings and friends. For example, my daughter (then age 7) told her friend her Club Penguin password, after which her friend told it to her older sister, who logged on as my daughter and got her temporarily banned for cussing. Tweens will also want to, e.g., keep private diaries where they write down their feelings about the Jonas Brothers, and know that their siblings won't have access to them.
As far as parental access ... both my kids have $200 ubuntu boxes in their rooms. They have accounts with admin privileges, and so do I, but I never need to use my privs. They ask me for help when they need it.
I make sure they habitually apply security updates. I've explained how to pick passwords that are not vulnerable to dictionary attacks, and I don't know, and don't need to know, their passwords. Even if they don't pick completely secure passwords, it's not really the end of the world, because we're behind a router.
I suppose a lot of parents are worried that their kids will connect with child molesters online. I think that's a sad commentary on the level of parental paranoia, and on people's inability to evaluate risks properly. Statistically, the big risk is getting hit by a car, which you deal with by teaching them to look both ways when crossing the street.
Axiom and maxima both work fine for me. Admittedly, I don't use them for much more than the occasional nasty integral.
Wolfram is evil. I once bought a copy of the mac version of Mathematica from them, to run on MacOS 6, IIRC. When I upgraded to MacOS 7, it stopped working. Called Wolfram, they said I should pay for a new version of Mathematica.
Java and XML are similar in that both of them got over-hyped. They're also similar in that sometimes they really are the right solution -- just not as often as PHBs seem to think. I've had exactly one application where I started designing the file format, and realized, "Oh heck, I'm reinventing XML," so I went with XML and it was the right choice. For config files, the advantage I can see is that although XML may not be optimal for every type of config file, it does provide an alternative to the traditional Unix philosophy of having a different, goofy syntax for every single program's config file. Re Java, what was really a disaster, in hindsight, was applets. They were overhyped, the CPUs weren't fast enough to give acceptable performance, the VM and its libraries are still too huge to give attractive startup times, AWT was a botch and had to be replaced, and implementations of browser plugins still suck -- in fact, my browser crashes every single goddamn time I visit this applet. Because Sun blew it so bad with applets (with a little help from MS), we've ended up instead with the de facto standard being flash, which is basically a totally proprietary system. (Yeah, I know about Gnash, Haxe, etc. Let me know when you can buy a Flash book and make the examples work using a totally open-source software stack.)
Ouch. Another horror story: At the school where I teach (physics), the math department has a course where the required text is only available in DRM'd digital form. You can only access the text in IE. (Spoofing the user agent string in Firefox doesn't work.) Oh yeah, and the book evaporates at the end of the semester so the student loses access to it. Obligatory link to Stallman's The Right to Read.
Translation is hard work, and people tend to underestimate how much work it is. My physics textbooks, in English, are free online. Over the years, I've had four or five people contact me, acting extremely enthusiastic about translating them into other languages. One of them translated one chapter into French and then stopped. None of the others actually did any translation. It's the same logic as any open-source software project; although you hear a lot about collaborative development, the bazaar model, etc., actually the vast majority of OSS projects never attract any developers other than the original one.
There are also significant technical obstacles. Producing a high-quality illustrated textbook requires a fairly complicated software setup, and that means that the translators have to be able to reproduce that setup. If you're using proprietary software, you have a problem, because prospective translators aren't going to pay for a copy of it so they can have the privilege of translating a free book for free. If you're using an OSS software stack, then you have the issue that some of the OSS software for this kind of thing is not yet totally mature (e.g., Inkscape is great, but it's still quite new and under heavy development), and some of it is fairly hard to use (e.g., my LaTeX class file for my textbooks runs to 2400 lines of code, plus a few thousand more lines of custom perl scripts).
What's needed are the professors and students to do this.
See my sig for a whole bunch of examples that already exist.
So of the best textbooks I had in college were published through the University printing department for the cost of materials.
My experience is that these days, that kind of thing tends to be much more expensive and inefficient that simply putting pdfs on the web. That's what I do for my students, and self-service laser printing on campus only costs them 4 cents a page (which is basically what it costs the school for paper and toner, and is much, much less than it would cost for the ink on a home inkjet printer). If I did it through my campus's bookstore, it would cost more like 8 cents a page. Part of the reason for that is that bookstores normally operate in a system where any books they don't sell, they just return to the publisher for a full refund. But course packets can't be returned, so the bookstore has to eat the extra cost of producing any copies they produced that ended up in a dumpster. To keep from taking a loss, they raise the price. Another factor that raises costs is that the course packs are being produced by paid workers, not by students on a self-serve basis, so the price has to include that labor cost. AFAICT, there are only three reasons any professors are still doing these course packs the old-fashioned way: (a) they don't own the rights to all the materials, and are paying the publisher for permission to use them, (b) they did their materials on a typewriter in 1962, and haven't gotten around to modernizing, or (c) they want to make a royalty. I think c is completely unethical when you're selling to your own students. There's a massive conflict of interest when you can force your students to buy something that puts money in your own pocket. If you want to make royalties from your writing, then ethically you really need to make those royalties from sales to other schools.