In the Internet's defense, how many of us have done the truly random surfing thing since, oh, 1998?
Yes, the.sex domain name is "one such idea." A horrible one, for the reasons described in the article. I don't see any way of classifying content in such a way that it would please the governments of the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Denmark. And it would have to, because the TLDs are meant to be a worldwide service.
So the U.S. passes a law saying that all U.S. porn sites must operate under the.sex TLD. This does almost nothing, because people outside the country are still operating servers wherever they please. Unless there was a crackdown that relegated just about everything into the.[country code] domain names, I don't see a domain name based solution.
Final point: Will Slashdot have to move over to slashdot.sex? Set your filter to -1, and admire the innovative ascii art.
The hardware/software setup doesn't sound very complicated. Administration will be the biggie, as always. But in the bigger picture, how much it costs to maintain isn't relevant; the hope is that the dollar figure will be dwarfed by the savings that come from better software, reduced licensing fees, reduced development costs, and more efficient government services.
The trouble is, it's easy to quantify the costs of running the repository, and much harder to quantify the savings that it produces.
1) Nobody who isn't using the RAID support notices the RAID support. The kernel can be cluttered up with all sorts of features, and nobody would notice.
2) The ARPAnet was never intended to reflect the needs and desires of a single user.
3) You can delete any software you don't want.
4) Huh? Okay, I think I get it now. If you want to stick with throwing-rock technology, there's no end to the supply of pristine, unmelted throwing rocks. The supply of rocks-made-into-tools doesn't interfere with your desire to obtain non-melted rocks.
But with a cell phone, all these extra features that many of us don't want are very visible, and clutter the interface to the point where it's difficult to figure out how to accomplish even the basic tasks. And nobody seems to be selling stripped down cell phones anymore.
Just remember, you're paying for the camera somewhere along the way. It may be hidden in the price of the phone or the monthly fees, but it's there someplace.
I'm a Luddite. I don't want my phone to take pictures, play movies, hook me up with AOL Instant Messenger, play stupid little games, or sing the "Happy Days" theme song whenever someone tries to call me. I'm even iffy about the text messaging thing. I don't even want to think how I'll react when my camera asks me to edit a movie.
Just give me a phone that allows me to send and receive calls, keeps a few dozen phone numbers, and shoots laser beams out of the antenna, and I'm happy as a clam.
Well, thank God we have you to put it all in perspective for us. Frustrated because there's no way to hack the functionality you need into IIS? What the hell do you need it to do that for? westlake doesn't. Suspicious that the bug you keep running into is coming from the Visual Studio compiler, but can't check the source to prove it? Why would you ever want to look under the hood? westlake doesn't.
Be like westlake. If Microsoft hasn't given you a way to do it, it doesn't need doing. You don't want computing to be some sort of all-consuming hobby, do you? Be like westlake, and get a life.
Sorry, but you need some perspective yourself. "Not important to you" is not the same as "not important."
Just to be pedantic, I would point out that it doesn't matter how skilled a brain surgeon you decide to become; if you need brain surgery, you'll need someone else to do it.
Maybe you're stuck in some alternate dimension where a top of the line computer is a P-200 with 64 megs of RAM. Or maybe you're one of those Type A personalities who drums their fingers and complains when a web page takes more than three seconds to load. But for us normal people on our normal computers, spending two or three hours formatting a document in OO means spending an aggregate of three minutes waiting on the computer. The rest of the time, the computer waits on us.
The main "slowness" I notice is in the startup time. On the Athlon 1400 I'm sitting in front of, it takes fifteen seconds to get me from clicking the icon to a functioning cursor. That's about the same as my Celeron 433 at home, so the main bottleneck appears to be loading everything into memory. Close and re-open the app, and it takes about five seconds to get started. Just for comparison, Word took about 7 seconds.
Once OO is up and running, I can't think of any operation that will cause a noticeable slowdown.
I'll admit that fifteen seconds is a lot compared to most computer operations, but since it only happens once per session, it's hard to call it "unacceptable."
Maybe you're thinking of the SunONE IDE. Now there's a piece of software that can remind you how short life really is, and how quickly it slips away.
This may be horrible advice, but this is how I always get X to work:
First, get any distro that gets X to run properly on your system (Knoppix generally does well). Copy the/etc/X11/XF86Config file. When you're done installing the new distro, if X barfs, make a backup of their XF86Config, copy the working file over, and restart X. More than likely, it will work.
Also, if you care about how the config file works, looking at the differences between the two is illuminating.
I know it's silly that you should have to do this, but maybe it will help.
Nope, it's a consequence. After all, the education system itself is one of those "products" designed for the lowest common denominator.
Hmm... the Wikipedia article on the Montissori method reads like a PR brochure. Which says nothing about the method itself, only that someone somewhere accepted it uncritically.
Quick poll: Is there anyone in the United States who doesn't believe that he or she is not from the laughingstock of the nation? Which of our fifty states is indeed the laughing stock of the nation?
I hear that some interesting research is being done to route fiber optic signals without making the light-electric-light conversion at all. I'm fuzzy on how this would be accomplished (I remember something about reflective/refractive balls of liquid, kind of along the lines of inkjet printing technology) but that would certainly get your ping times way down.
Perhaps I'm not X-treme enough for the gaming market. I'm looking for fun gameplay, an interesting storyline, and I want it to run smoothly on my current system without going to Alienware for an upgrade.
The people driving the overclocking movement may buy a disproportionately large share of games per capita, but for every one of them, there are a hundred people who are just going to buy a good, relatively new system, and a thousand who just want to run the game without trading their firstborn for a new graphics card. Ignoring the sub-gigahertz crowd is just asking for financial ruin.
Hy, I'm AOC. I can't tell the difference between 20 and 60 frames per second, and cent for cent my money is every bit as valuable as yours.
I'm a little vague on the precise details (haven't read the books in a very long time), but I do remember one instance where the heroine's ship is attacked by robots. Their "three laws" were intact, but they had been conditioned to believe that anyone from off-planet was automatically non-human.
Great. The one thing I'm dying for is a video game about how the Lead Programmer grew up in a small town in Michigan after the coal mine dried up and left his family with a hefty mortgage and a distant, alcoholic father.
Seriously, you see some pretty innovative games in the shareware scene. Also, the obligatory, marginally helpful link.
Next time, don't go to a website called pointlesswasteoftime.com expecting unbiased, cutting-edge journalism and credible, informed opinions.
Having said that, he does make some excellent points. Ignore the hyperbole about the death of the gaming industry, and the rest makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of unimaginative retreads posing as titles, the incremental improvements in graphics are no longer having a significant effect on user experience, and I can't agree enough with PWOT's thoughtful and considered pronouncements about the state of online gaming.
Finally, the creative insults, especially when levelled against the author by a hypothetical interrogator, were very amusing.
Having to buy something when there is a more efficient way to get the same result doesn't contribute to the economy.
That assumption makes the same mistake that I would be making if I said I was contributing to the economy by wandering down the street smashing in car windows. The mistake is in thinking that, if the victims of my economically-induced crime spree hadn't spent the money replacing their car windows, that money would have been lost to the economy.
In fact, it would merely be re-routed, either into other goods and services, or into a bank account (which isn't lost to the economy either, since the bank just loans it out again).
I find #4 especially interesting. The budget for computer maintenance is primarily intellectual, not financial. People just don't want to be bothered with understanding how the computer actually works, and I just don't get it. People put all this valuable data onto their machines, and then do nothing to ensure that the data is protected.
I tried to set my mom up with a limited use account, but then my brother installed a D-Link wireless card. The software started popping up these weird errors, and would continue to pop up one every thirty seconds or so, making life miserable.
I let my brother take a stab at solving it. His solution (which he found on a "helpful" tech forum) was to give the account admin privileges. I argued with them for a while, but the only solution I could come up with was to uninstall the software and try a different product.
The sad thing is, to this day, I don't believe my mom has ever used her laptop in an area with a wireless network.
Good thing my brother hasn't been 'round these parts in a few months.:)
As I understand it, the last time the Hubble tried something like this was the Hubble Deep Field, which looked out to approximately 10% of the guesstimated age of the Universe. The full press release for the new UDF is here. and they indicate that what we're looking at is about 400-800M years after the Big Bang.
Generally, the galaxies appear way more active than what we see locally, which is to be expected. But I--total amateur that I am--think it's a bit odd that the galaxies got slapped together so quickly. Whether it draws any of our assumptions about the Big Bang itself into question remains to be seen.
Since we don't actually know much about this kid, the best I can do is try to address some common problems.
First, the kid is smarter than just about everyone around him. Way smarter. You know it. He knows it. Make sure that he understands that just about everyone else already knows it as well, and those who are too dumb to recognize it aren't worth impressing. So he doesn't need to beat them over the head with the fact.
Tact is often 90% of the battle. People who are intellectually gifted but socially maladapted tend to be insecure about it, and will retreat into whatever they feel they excel at. So it's pretty frequent that "the smart guy" is the one who ends up jumping down peoples' throats over minor errors. It's not a good friend-winning strategy, but people tend to build themselves up by tearing others down.
So, he has this brain on him. How to get him to use it for good instead of evil? How about teaching him how to tutor his classmates? If you can drill into his head that he needs to be forgiving of mistakes, and compliment people for their effort, it could lead to some positive interactions. For geeks his age, positive social interactions are often few and far between.
Fashion shouldn't be too hard. He doesn't need the $50 jeans or the $200 shoes. Just throw away everything that's too threadbare, or actively hideous. The goal isn't to turn him into a GQ model, but to simply raise his fashion sense to the point that his clothes aren't a limiting factor. The same goes for hygiene. Get him to do something with his hair. Doesn't much matter what.
He might want to take up weight lifting or running or cycling. Something to give him a bit of confidence in his own body. Karate might be cool as well. If he can find something he enjoys in the way of team sports, all the better.
Now the word we've all been waiting for: Girls. I can't say I'm wise in their womanly ways, but let's get a few of the serious no-no's out of the way. Treat them with respect, show interest in their hobbies, don't insult their friends, and for god's sake, don't bitch and moan about how girls all want guys who treat them like dirt. That attitude is both insulting and wrong, and I've seen way too many guys who do it. Occasionally, it's true, but far more often it's just a defensive measure to keep the guy from having to evaluate what he did wrong.
Find something he likes, and find a way for him to get others involved in it (even if it's "just" his fellow geeks).
Just remember that you won't be able to do anything without his cooperation. If he's totally stubborn, help him with the scholastics and hope that he figures the rest out on his own.
I notice that you focus in on my (admittedly guesstimated) statistic, while completely ignoring the major points I was trying to make.
Dude, I could print and "bind" a thousand page book for $15 (BYOBinder). Give me the PDF, I'll provide the paper. Toner is going to be the biggest cost. Any small business with a really good laser printer could probably do it for $10, no strings, no frills.
The argument that the results wouldn't be as good as current publishers can provide is of only marginal relevance. If you'd rather spoil yourself and buy the $40 book instead, there will be some printer out there who will be happy to meet you at that price point.
But that's not going to happen until open books are seen as a viable alternative, and "reprinting" is seen as a viable business model. Reciting an unjustified, kneejerk mantra of "open books will always be crap, and the publishers are actually doing you a favor by charging $120 for a calculus book that will become 'obsolete' within eighteen months" isn't helping to accomplish that.
It's a problem, all right. But imagine how much worse it is for some urban calculus class which has to save money by using the same book for five years or so. How does the teacher go about finding replacement books when our fellow urban geeks get their books flushed down the toilet? Sorry, that edition isn't being printed anymore.
Unfortunately, none of the options are good. Share books? Upgrade the entire class to the next edition? Spend ten minutes each day trying to reconcile the two? Scour eBay? Let the photocopier do its copyright-infringing thing?
For the people who can afford to live with the textbook scam, it's only an irritation. But for those who can't, it's a major setback to the process of education. And the last thing an already poor person needs is another setback.
I think that educational materials shouldn't be subject to the same market forces as other goods. Of course, they take physical and creative effort to make and distribute. But their purpose is to teach people how to do stuff that they couldn't do before. So the more they're used, the better our society as a whole becomes. Every barrier we can lower that stands between a person and an education, we should lower.
If something is necessary for learning, it should be as free, as convenient, and as high quality as we can make it.
To the naysayers, don't feel sorry if the entire copyright-based textbook publishing system* is decimated. If it does happen--which is probably unlikely--then it will be because free books are serving all the same functions that the old publishing system did, and the old publishers never figured out how to provide anything new. So there wouldn't be any loss.
* Obviously, there will still be a need for physical printing and binding. When I say "copyright-based," I mean that you can only get Book X from Publisher Y because nobody else has the right to print it.
With a free book, many publishers could get in on the act. One could provide a quality product in glossy color for $45, and another could provide a big stack-o-xeroxed-pages for $15. People could choose whatever level of quality best suited their needs. Capitalism at its finest.
Of course, you didn't actually read any of the books. It's hard to tell if you even read the reviews. When a college physics/astronomy teacher says "I wish I'd learned Calculus from this book," that's pretty high praise.
Publishing books doesn't need to be expensive. The physical printing and binding of a thousand page textbook should be around $15. That's a service that many, many businesses are equipped to provide.
Nor does it matter how many free textbooks there are with crapp formatting, no illustrations, and a haphazard and clumsy teaching style there are. The reason is, there only needs to be one quality book. The also-rans will fall by the wayside. The "vehicle to reach a wide audience" exists.
I keep hearing that "the community" will never be able to match the sort of quality that for-pay textbooks provide, and that it is foolish to try. I'm convinced that they can, and that there will be a big push towards this kind of textbook within the next few year.
But I would also guess that there are some poorer school districts out there who would be grateful for even the worst of these books--right now--if they were only aware of their existence.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're making a living as a stockholder, you generally don't care whether their employees are making money. In fact, it's better that they're not.
Hmm... methinks I woke up on the cynical side of the bed today.
No, no. It's not plagarism. The link was just slashdotted!
Er, wait. No it wasn't.
Damned cut-n-pasters.
In the Internet's defense, how many of us have done the truly random surfing thing since, oh, 1998?
.sex domain name is "one such idea." A horrible one, for the reasons described in the article. I don't see any way of classifying content in such a way that it would please the governments of the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Denmark. And it would have to, because the TLDs are meant to be a worldwide service.
.sex TLD. This does almost nothing, because people outside the country are still operating servers wherever they please. Unless there was a crackdown that relegated just about everything into the .[country code] domain names, I don't see a domain name based solution.
Yes, the
So the U.S. passes a law saying that all U.S. porn sites must operate under the
Final point: Will Slashdot have to move over to slashdot.sex? Set your filter to -1, and admire the innovative ascii art.
The hardware/software setup doesn't sound very complicated. Administration will be the biggie, as always. But in the bigger picture, how much it costs to maintain isn't relevant; the hope is that the dollar figure will be dwarfed by the savings that come from better software, reduced licensing fees, reduced development costs, and more efficient government services.
The trouble is, it's easy to quantify the costs of running the repository, and much harder to quantify the savings that it produces.
None of these analogies are appropriate.
1) Nobody who isn't using the RAID support notices the RAID support. The kernel can be cluttered up with all sorts of features, and nobody would notice.
2) The ARPAnet was never intended to reflect the needs and desires of a single user.
3) You can delete any software you don't want.
4) Huh? Okay, I think I get it now. If you want to stick with throwing-rock technology, there's no end to the supply of pristine, unmelted throwing rocks. The supply of rocks-made-into-tools doesn't interfere with your desire to obtain non-melted rocks.
But with a cell phone, all these extra features that many of us don't want are very visible, and clutter the interface to the point where it's difficult to figure out how to accomplish even the basic tasks. And nobody seems to be selling stripped down cell phones anymore.
Just remember, you're paying for the camera somewhere along the way. It may be hidden in the price of the phone or the monthly fees, but it's there someplace.
I'm a Luddite. I don't want my phone to take pictures, play movies, hook me up with AOL Instant Messenger, play stupid little games, or sing the "Happy Days" theme song whenever someone tries to call me. I'm even iffy about the text messaging thing. I don't even want to think how I'll react when my camera asks me to edit a movie.
Just give me a phone that allows me to send and receive calls, keeps a few dozen phone numbers, and shoots laser beams out of the antenna, and I'm happy as a clam.
Well, thank God we have you to put it all in perspective for us. Frustrated because there's no way to hack the functionality you need into IIS? What the hell do you need it to do that for? westlake doesn't. Suspicious that the bug you keep running into is coming from the Visual Studio compiler, but can't check the source to prove it? Why would you ever want to look under the hood? westlake doesn't.
Be like westlake. If Microsoft hasn't given you a way to do it, it doesn't need doing. You don't want computing to be some sort of all-consuming hobby, do you? Be like westlake, and get a life.
Sorry, but you need some perspective yourself. "Not important to you" is not the same as "not important."
Just to be pedantic, I would point out that it doesn't matter how skilled a brain surgeon you decide to become; if you need brain surgery, you'll need someone else to do it.
Maybe you're stuck in some alternate dimension where a top of the line computer is a P-200 with 64 megs of RAM. Or maybe you're one of those Type A personalities who drums their fingers and complains when a web page takes more than three seconds to load. But for us normal people on our normal computers, spending two or three hours formatting a document in OO means spending an aggregate of three minutes waiting on the computer. The rest of the time, the computer waits on us.
The main "slowness" I notice is in the startup time. On the Athlon 1400 I'm sitting in front of, it takes fifteen seconds to get me from clicking the icon to a functioning cursor. That's about the same as my Celeron 433 at home, so the main bottleneck appears to be loading everything into memory. Close and re-open the app, and it takes about five seconds to get started. Just for comparison, Word took about 7 seconds.
Once OO is up and running, I can't think of any operation that will cause a noticeable slowdown.
I'll admit that fifteen seconds is a lot compared to most computer operations, but since it only happens once per session, it's hard to call it "unacceptable."
Maybe you're thinking of the SunONE IDE. Now there's a piece of software that can remind you how short life really is, and how quickly it slips away.
This may be horrible advice, but this is how I always get X to work:
/etc/X11/XF86Config file. When you're done installing the new distro, if X barfs, make a backup of their XF86Config, copy the working file over, and restart X. More than likely, it will work.
First, get any distro that gets X to run properly on your system (Knoppix generally does well). Copy the
Also, if you care about how the config file works, looking at the differences between the two is illuminating.
I know it's silly that you should have to do this, but maybe it will help.
Nope, it's a consequence. After all, the education system itself is one of those "products" designed for the lowest common denominator.
Hmm... the Wikipedia article on the Montissori method reads like a PR brochure. Which says nothing about the method itself, only that someone somewhere accepted it uncritically.
Quick poll: Is there anyone in the United States who doesn't believe that he or she is not from the laughingstock of the nation? Which of our fifty states is indeed the laughing stock of the nation?
As a native Utahn, I vote for us.
I hear that some interesting research is being done to route fiber optic signals without making the light-electric-light conversion at all. I'm fuzzy on how this would be accomplished (I remember something about reflective/refractive balls of liquid, kind of along the lines of inkjet printing technology) but that would certainly get your ping times way down.
Perhaps I'm not X-treme enough for the gaming market. I'm looking for fun gameplay, an interesting storyline, and I want it to run smoothly on my current system without going to Alienware for an upgrade.
The people driving the overclocking movement may buy a disproportionately large share of games per capita, but for every one of them, there are a hundred people who are just going to buy a good, relatively new system, and a thousand who just want to run the game without trading their firstborn for a new graphics card. Ignoring the sub-gigahertz crowd is just asking for financial ruin.
Hy, I'm AOC. I can't tell the difference between 20 and 60 frames per second, and cent for cent my money is every bit as valuable as yours.
I'm a little vague on the precise details (haven't read the books in a very long time), but I do remember one instance where the heroine's ship is attacked by robots. Their "three laws" were intact, but they had been conditioned to believe that anyone from off-planet was automatically non-human.
Great. The one thing I'm dying for is a video game about how the Lead Programmer grew up in a small town in Michigan after the coal mine dried up and left his family with a hefty mortgage and a distant, alcoholic father.
Seriously, you see some pretty innovative games in the shareware scene. Also, the obligatory, marginally helpful link.
Next time, don't go to a website called pointlesswasteoftime.com expecting unbiased, cutting-edge journalism and credible, informed opinions.
Having said that, he does make some excellent points. Ignore the hyperbole about the death of the gaming industry, and the rest makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of unimaginative retreads posing as titles, the incremental improvements in graphics are no longer having a significant effect on user experience, and I can't agree enough with PWOT's thoughtful and considered pronouncements about the state of online gaming.
Finally, the creative insults, especially when levelled against the author by a hypothetical interrogator, were very amusing.
Excluding #2, I agree.
Having to buy something when there is a more efficient way to get the same result doesn't contribute to the economy.
That assumption makes the same mistake that I would be making if I said I was contributing to the economy by wandering down the street smashing in car windows. The mistake is in thinking that, if the victims of my economically-induced crime spree hadn't spent the money replacing their car windows, that money would have been lost to the economy.
In fact, it would merely be re-routed, either into other goods and services, or into a bank account (which isn't lost to the economy either, since the bank just loans it out again).
I find #4 especially interesting. The budget for computer maintenance is primarily intellectual, not financial. People just don't want to be bothered with understanding how the computer actually works, and I just don't get it. People put all this valuable data onto their machines, and then do nothing to ensure that the data is protected.
I tried to set my mom up with a limited use account, but then my brother installed a D-Link wireless card. The software started popping up these weird errors, and would continue to pop up one every thirty seconds or so, making life miserable.
:)
I let my brother take a stab at solving it. His solution (which he found on a "helpful" tech forum) was to give the account admin privileges. I argued with them for a while, but the only solution I could come up with was to uninstall the software and try a different product.
The sad thing is, to this day, I don't believe my mom has ever used her laptop in an area with a wireless network.
Good thing my brother hasn't been 'round these parts in a few months.
I disagree. The cute harmlessness of Tux is great for dispelling fear.
Plus, he's memorable. I showed a co-worker a picture of Tux once, and afterwards she would occasionally ask me how "Penguin Buddha" was doing.
As I understand it, the last time the Hubble tried something like this was the Hubble Deep Field, which looked out to approximately 10% of the guesstimated age of the Universe. The full press release for the new UDF is here.
and they indicate that what we're looking at is about 400-800M years after the Big Bang.
Generally, the galaxies appear way more active than what we see locally, which is to be expected. But I--total amateur that I am--think it's a bit odd that the galaxies got slapped together so quickly. Whether it draws any of our assumptions about the Big Bang itself into question remains to be seen.
Since we don't actually know much about this kid, the best I can do is try to address some common problems.
First, the kid is smarter than just about everyone around him. Way smarter. You know it. He knows it. Make sure that he understands that just about everyone else already knows it as well, and those who are too dumb to recognize it aren't worth impressing. So he doesn't need to beat them over the head with the fact.
Tact is often 90% of the battle. People who are intellectually gifted but socially maladapted tend to be insecure about it, and will retreat into whatever they feel they excel at. So it's pretty frequent that "the smart guy" is the one who ends up jumping down peoples' throats over minor errors. It's not a good friend-winning strategy, but people tend to build themselves up by tearing others down.
So, he has this brain on him. How to get him to use it for good instead of evil? How about teaching him how to tutor his classmates? If you can drill into his head that he needs to be forgiving of mistakes, and compliment people for their effort, it could lead to some positive interactions. For geeks his age, positive social interactions are often few and far between.
Fashion shouldn't be too hard. He doesn't need the $50 jeans or the $200 shoes. Just throw away everything that's too threadbare, or actively hideous. The goal isn't to turn him into a GQ model, but to simply raise his fashion sense to the point that his clothes aren't a limiting factor. The same goes for hygiene. Get him to do something with his hair. Doesn't much matter what.
He might want to take up weight lifting or running or cycling. Something to give him a bit of confidence in his own body. Karate might be cool as well. If he can find something he enjoys in the way of team sports, all the better.
Now the word we've all been waiting for: Girls. I can't say I'm wise in their womanly ways, but let's get a few of the serious no-no's out of the way. Treat them with respect, show interest in their hobbies, don't insult their friends, and for god's sake, don't bitch and moan about how girls all want guys who treat them like dirt. That attitude is both insulting and wrong, and I've seen way too many guys who do it. Occasionally, it's true, but far more often it's just a defensive measure to keep the guy from having to evaluate what he did wrong.
Find something he likes, and find a way for him to get others involved in it (even if it's "just" his fellow geeks).
Just remember that you won't be able to do anything without his cooperation. If he's totally stubborn, help him with the scholastics and hope that he figures the rest out on his own.
I notice that you focus in on my (admittedly guesstimated) statistic, while completely ignoring the major points I was trying to make.
Dude, I could print and "bind" a thousand page book for $15 (BYOBinder). Give me the PDF, I'll provide the paper. Toner is going to be the biggest cost. Any small business with a really good laser printer could probably do it for $10, no strings, no frills.
The argument that the results wouldn't be as good as current publishers can provide is of only marginal relevance. If you'd rather spoil yourself and buy the $40 book instead, there will be some printer out there who will be happy to meet you at that price point.
But that's not going to happen until open books are seen as a viable alternative, and "reprinting" is seen as a viable business model. Reciting an unjustified, kneejerk mantra of "open books will always be crap, and the publishers are actually doing you a favor by charging $120 for a calculus book that will become 'obsolete' within eighteen months" isn't helping to accomplish that.
It's a problem, all right. But imagine how much worse it is for some urban calculus class which has to save money by using the same book for five years or so. How does the teacher go about finding replacement books when our fellow urban geeks get their books flushed down the toilet? Sorry, that edition isn't being printed anymore.
Unfortunately, none of the options are good. Share books? Upgrade the entire class to the next edition? Spend ten minutes each day trying to reconcile the two? Scour eBay? Let the photocopier do its copyright-infringing thing?
For the people who can afford to live with the textbook scam, it's only an irritation. But for those who can't, it's a major setback to the process of education. And the last thing an already poor person needs is another setback.
I think that educational materials shouldn't be subject to the same market forces as other goods. Of course, they take physical and creative effort to make and distribute. But their purpose is to teach people how to do stuff that they couldn't do before. So the more they're used, the better our society as a whole becomes. Every barrier we can lower that stands between a person and an education, we should lower.
If something is necessary for learning, it should be as free, as convenient, and as high quality as we can make it.
To the naysayers, don't feel sorry if the entire copyright-based textbook publishing system* is decimated. If it does happen--which is probably unlikely--then it will be because free books are serving all the same functions that the old publishing system did, and the old publishers never figured out how to provide anything new. So there wouldn't be any loss.
* Obviously, there will still be a need for physical printing and binding. When I say "copyright-based," I mean that you can only get Book X from Publisher Y because nobody else has the right to print it.
With a free book, many publishers could get in on the act. One could provide a quality product in glossy color for $45, and another could provide a big stack-o-xeroxed-pages for $15. People could choose whatever level of quality best suited their needs. Capitalism at its finest.
Of course, you didn't actually read any of the books. It's hard to tell if you even read the reviews. When a college physics/astronomy teacher says "I wish I'd learned Calculus from this book," that's pretty high praise.
Publishing books doesn't need to be expensive. The physical printing and binding of a thousand page textbook should be around $15. That's a service that many, many businesses are equipped to provide.
Nor does it matter how many free textbooks there are with crapp formatting, no illustrations, and a haphazard and clumsy teaching style there are. The reason is, there only needs to be one quality book. The also-rans will fall by the wayside. The "vehicle to reach a wide audience" exists.
I keep hearing that "the community" will never be able to match the sort of quality that for-pay textbooks provide, and that it is foolish to try. I'm convinced that they can, and that there will be a big push towards this kind of textbook within the next few year.
But I would also guess that there are some poorer school districts out there who would be grateful for even the worst of these books--right now--if they were only aware of their existence.