Any manager who signed off on a software upgrade plan without the possibility of an abort and fallback procedure made about the most basic mistake possible.
So maybe Tribune management decided it was just cheaper to inconvenience their subscribers and eat crow.
While I don't strenously agree or disagree with your first paragraph, I do strenously disagree with your assessment of the causes of the "Dark Ages." The decline of Meditereannean Civilization in northern and western Europe was due to many factors and very few had anything to do with the Catholic Church's control of information. Population migrations, resultant influx of epidemics and depopulation. The rigid social structure imposed by the late Western emperors (you inherited your profession from your father)and maybe worst of all was the self-perpetuating cycle of moving wealth and investment from the risky West to the safer East. Also, in fact, the Catholic Church was not any where near as dominant a social structure it was in later Medieval times. It was often an amelioration for some of the worst effects of the decline of the Western Roman Empire, providing hospitals, schools and message services when the old civil society was breaking down.
You would find more support for your postion of the free exchange of knowledge among late Medieval churchmen than the nacsent entrepeneur class of the time.
I can't believe I am on the same side of an issue as Dick Armey. Is it a principled stand or another knee-jerk anti-Clinton/Reno reaction? In other words, how far can I trust him as an ally.
I am a long time Dune reader as well. I have checked out the trailers as well and have no real opinion on the quality of the series.
What I did want to comment on was that the visuals (costumes, settings) in the trailer reminded me too much of the old Flash Gordon serials (which BTW I loved watching as a kid). The visuals in the Lynch movie were the only thing that rang authentic with the novel series. I thought the "steam engine" Navigator habitats were so right on capturing succinctly in a visual statment the aging clankiness of the Empire just ripe for revolution.
There is already a quite lively trade going on in "open source" books. The Gutenburg Project (http://www.gutenberg.net) has a long history of archiving expired copyright texts in ascii. I built a simple XML tag set for these and some macros in my favorite editor and created an XML document and a couple of stylesheets that I use to transform those into html or PDF using formatting objects.
I later found that the Oxford Text Archive (http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/) has done something similar but much more extensive with a large markup language and XLST files for converting to html. It wouldn't take too much mork to create the FO to generate PDF.
I read the html texts on my Pilot with one of the freeware transformer/browsers. I am one of those types who holds an almost sacred relationship with books. I have found while reading on my Pilot is not quite as aesthetically pleasing an experience as reading a paper and cloth text, it has one of the most essential aspects of it, portability. I can read it in bed.
I have also started to author simple texts in the same manner. Writing poetry seems to fit better the hierarchical structure of XML and flows better than prose. Nonfiction outline type material (most academic style writing) works flows pretty naturally as well. Telling the story in writing with XML markup is disastrous. It really interrupts my thought process.
In my experience the motivating experience for most authoring is to "share" with the notable exception of "how-to" books of all genres including those saints of the Open Source movement, O'Reilly & Assoc.. If the point is to share a story, an explanation of research or an idea or a thought or image, it seems we have overcome the impediment economic motivation. It is a gift economy type of thing.
Most academic journals in my experience are fantastically expensive for a subscription but make no money for their sponsors. It is the intermediary activities, not the authoring or editing (those are largely volunteer activities), that add this expense. I also think that most fiction authors write out the love the "telling" of the story in the authoring event rather than the recognition and fame. Who knows what possesses poets to write but it isn't for money.
Academic, scholarly writing has been essentially open source for centuries. There are well known rules for citation and formal and informal sanctions against improper appropriation prior work.
So an Open Book movement is already well underway and not that differnet a paradigm from what has proceeded it. It seems, then, that all that is required is the standardization of an authoring and reading infrastructure with tools that are already in hand. Let those who seek to publish from economic motivations worry about the economics of printing and or distribution. For an interesting take on this see the goReader (http://www.goreader.com) electronic text book.
Slashdot Mirror
Any manager who signed off on a software upgrade plan without the possibility of an abort and fallback procedure made about the most basic mistake possible.
So maybe Tribune management decided it was just cheaper to inconvenience their subscribers and eat crow.
While I don't strenously agree or disagree with your first paragraph, I do strenously disagree with your assessment of the causes of the "Dark Ages." The decline of Meditereannean Civilization in northern and western Europe was due to many factors and very few had anything to do with the Catholic Church's control of information. Population migrations, resultant influx of epidemics and depopulation. The rigid social structure imposed by the late Western emperors (you inherited your profession from your father)and maybe worst of all was the self-perpetuating cycle of moving wealth and investment from the risky West to the safer East. Also, in fact, the Catholic Church was not any where near as dominant a social structure it was in later Medieval times. It was often an amelioration for some of the worst effects of the decline of the Western Roman Empire, providing hospitals, schools and message services when the old civil society was breaking down.
You would find more support for your postion of the free exchange of knowledge among late Medieval churchmen than the nacsent entrepeneur class of the time.
I can't believe I am on the same side of an issue as Dick Armey. Is it a principled stand or another knee-jerk anti-Clinton/Reno reaction? In other words, how far can I trust him as an ally.
I am a long time Dune reader as well. I have checked out the trailers as well and have no real opinion on the quality of the series.
What I did want to comment on was that the visuals (costumes, settings) in the trailer reminded me too much of the old Flash Gordon serials (which BTW I loved watching as a kid). The visuals in the Lynch movie were the only thing that rang authentic with the novel series. I thought the "steam engine" Navigator habitats were so right on capturing succinctly in a visual statment the aging clankiness of the Empire just ripe for revolution.
There is already a quite lively trade going on in "open source" books. The Gutenburg Project (http://www.gutenberg.net) has a long history of archiving expired copyright texts in ascii. I built a simple XML tag set for these and some macros in my favorite editor and created an XML document and a couple of stylesheets that I use to transform those into html or PDF using formatting objects.
I later found that the Oxford Text Archive (http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/) has done something similar but much more extensive with a large markup language and XLST files for converting to html. It wouldn't take too much mork to create the FO to generate PDF.
I read the html texts on my Pilot with one of the freeware transformer/browsers. I am one of those types who holds an almost sacred relationship with books. I have found while reading on my Pilot is not quite as aesthetically pleasing an experience as reading a paper and cloth text, it has one of the most essential aspects of it, portability. I can read it in bed.
I have also started to author simple texts in the same manner. Writing poetry seems to fit better the hierarchical structure of XML and flows better than prose. Nonfiction outline type material (most academic style writing) works flows pretty naturally as well. Telling the story in writing with XML markup is disastrous. It really interrupts my thought process.
In my experience the motivating experience for most authoring is to "share" with the notable exception of "how-to" books of all genres including those saints of the Open Source movement, O'Reilly & Assoc.. If the point is to share a story, an explanation of research or an idea or a thought or image, it seems we have overcome the impediment economic motivation. It is a gift economy type of thing.
Most academic journals in my experience are fantastically expensive for a subscription but make no money for their sponsors. It is the intermediary activities, not the authoring or editing (those are largely volunteer activities), that add this expense. I also think that most fiction authors write out the love the "telling" of the story in the authoring event rather than the recognition and fame. Who knows what possesses poets to write but it isn't for money.
Academic, scholarly writing has been essentially open source for centuries. There are well known rules for citation and formal and informal sanctions against improper appropriation prior work.
So an Open Book movement is already well underway and not that differnet a paradigm from what has proceeded it. It seems, then, that all that is required is the standardization of an authoring and reading infrastructure with tools that are already in hand. Let those who seek to publish from economic motivations worry about the economics of printing and or distribution. For an interesting take on this see the goReader (http://www.goreader.com) electronic text book.