http://flatworldknowledge.com/ has an interesting model. You can read the book online for free, and you pay extra for the dead-tree version and extra student material. Their books are CC/BY/NC/SA, and they have, as their site puts it, "an easy-to-use editing platform called MIYO (Make It Your Own)" to customize a book.
Full disclosure: I'm using one of their books in a course that I teach.
...and we still have one or two labs on XP. This is actually a good thing, as some of our students have really old machines, and we need at least some XP machines to test web sites, etc. to make sure they display properly with older browsers (Internet Explorer 7, to be specific).
I was hoping that HP would open source WebOS, but I don't think there's much chance of that happening if Amazon takes it over. Too bad. Of course, I can't really fault HP for trying to make money from Palm / WebOS if they can.
I have done this one: put two different colored books in the center of a table, one on top of the other (say, a blue book on top of a green book). Then tell the students that you are a robot that can follow only these instructions:
1. Move forward one step
2. Turn clockwise (90 degreees; demonstrate)
3. Turn counterclockwise (90 degrees; demonstrate)
4. Pick up a book
5. Put down a book
The robot can hold only one book at a time. Tell the robot how to switch the books so that the green book ends up on top of the blue book, and the books still have to be in the center of the table. Either have the students work in teams and come up with a list of instructions and then follow them, or -- more fun -- have them give you instructions on the fly and act them out.
Yes, there are differences, but are they statistically significant? If the people who did this study are a "Psychometric Consulting Company," the very least I would have expected to see in the PDF was the result of an Analysis of Variance.
What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person who speaks one language? An American.
From their website: http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora
"DISCLAIMER: THIS IS PRE-ALPHA SOFTWARE AND SHOULD BE TREATED ACCORDINGLY. "
So if you're expecting a world-class program that clearly outshines Facebook, I think you're being a tad premature.
Re:DocBook - like HTML 1.0, only dumber
on
DocBook 5
·
· Score: 1
A short look at the Docbook element reference (about halfway down the page at http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/docbook.html ) will show some of the elements that are relevant when publishing a *book*; elements for citations, bibliographies, indexing, callouts, glossaries, etc. HTML does not provide these elements.
I download the Free version for installation on the 30 computers in the Linux lab at the college where I work; I buy PowerPack as a way of supporting Mandriva.
Note that the instructor wants to teach computer *literacy*, not computer *science*. Those are not one and the same. The MIT course is excellent indeed, but it does not cover such topics as "what is a database" or "what is a LAN and how do I set one up for my home" or "what is the difference between Open Source and shareware". These are topics which don't belong in an introduction to computer science, but would be appropriate for a computer literacy course.
This was the premise of "The P Factor," by Curt Siodmak, published in the September 1976 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, except the urine was used as a replacement for gasoline rather than a way to produce hydrogen.
That's great, but aren't there already more people equipped with computer skills than the market needs?
You'd be surprised. I'm teaching at a community college, and I figured that the students, especially the younger ones, would know how to do word processing. I was wrong. The idea of headers and footers are a novel concept to many of them, and the difference between "Save" and "Save as..." eludes others.
"IBM has 2 people on the payroll who's sole purpose is to trash OOXML (Rob Weir and PJ)."
Incorrect. Rob Weir is also a contributor to the ODF specification (see appendix H here and is co-chair of the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Technical Committee, so he does more than just "trash OOXML."
I know that 5, 10, 20 years from now I would still be able to open the files, though I have no idea why I would want to.
Governmental bodies, corporations, and other institutions may indeed have a need to keep their documents available and readable for more than 20 years. (Imagine birth certificates stored in a obsolete, proprietary, undocumented, binary format on media that can only be read on equipment that is no longer available. Hilarity ensues.)
Having spent several hours today tracking down a CSS interaction between style="vertical-align: middle" and dir="rtl", (works in Mozilla, fails in IE7, fails miserably in IE6), I am in total agreement with your sentiments.
Decent Software - But the Marketing?
on
KDE 4.0 RC 1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I did a quick test with a KDE 4.0 LiveCD a couple of days ago; it worked well, and I like the way it looks. But who decided on the code name?(from the press release):
KDE Project Ships First Release Candidate for Leading Free Software Desktop, Codename "Calamity"
I'm going to lose all my karma points, but here goes...
From this (and other comments in the previous postings about Android), one might get the impression that the people at Google are a bunch of idiots who just didn't do any basic research. Why, if only they had read Slashdot occasionally, they'd know that Java is slow, has 10^6 different versions, is very slow, is inferior to C++, is extremely slow, takes up too much memory, is abominably slow, is a programming language that no real programmer uses any more, and in general is teh sux0rz. <grin/>
Yes, I agree. Here are a couple of examples, one is from lecture notes for an XML class: http://evc-cit.info/cit041x/lecture8.html, the other is a book about OpenDocument Format: http://books.evc-cit.info/odbook/book.html, which includes lots of examples. Obviously, the same formatting and presentation could be used in a Word document.
Slashdot Mirror
The Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society Open Source Software for Windows CD (and DVD) seems to have a larger selection than the VALO offering.
http://flatworldknowledge.com/ has an interesting model. You can read the book online for free, and you pay extra for the dead-tree version and extra student material. Their books are CC/BY/NC/SA, and they have, as their site puts it, "an easy-to-use editing platform called MIYO (Make It Your Own)" to customize a book. Full disclosure: I'm using one of their books in a course that I teach.
...and we still have one or two labs on XP. This is actually a good thing, as some of our students have really old machines, and we need at least some XP machines to test web sites, etc. to make sure they display properly with older browsers (Internet Explorer 7, to be specific).
http://ttcsweb.org/osswin-cd/index.htm
I was hoping that HP would open source WebOS, but I don't think there's much chance of that happening if Amazon takes it over. Too bad. Of course, I can't really fault HP for trying to make money from Palm / WebOS if they can.
I have done this one: put two different colored books in the center of a table, one on top of the other (say, a blue book on top of a green book). Then tell the students that you are a robot that can follow only these instructions: 1. Move forward one step 2. Turn clockwise (90 degreees; demonstrate) 3. Turn counterclockwise (90 degrees; demonstrate) 4. Pick up a book 5. Put down a book The robot can hold only one book at a time. Tell the robot how to switch the books so that the green book ends up on top of the blue book, and the books still have to be in the center of the table. Either have the students work in teams and come up with a list of instructions and then follow them, or -- more fun -- have them give you instructions on the fly and act them out.
Yes, there are differences, but are they statistically significant? If the people who did this study are a "Psychometric Consulting Company," the very least I would have expected to see in the PDF was the result of an Analysis of Variance.
...in this comment 13 years ago; just not so eloquently.
What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person who speaks one language? An American.
From their website: http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora "DISCLAIMER: THIS IS PRE-ALPHA SOFTWARE AND SHOULD BE TREATED ACCORDINGLY. " So if you're expecting a world-class program that clearly outshines Facebook, I think you're being a tad premature.
A short look at the Docbook element reference (about halfway down the page at http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/docbook.html ) will show some of the elements that are relevant when publishing a *book*; elements for citations, bibliographies, indexing, callouts, glossaries, etc. HTML does not provide these elements.
Yes, I remember reading an article (I think it was in Time magazine) that described lasers as "a solution in search of a problem."
I download the Free version for installation on the 30 computers in the Linux lab at the college where I work; I buy PowerPack as a way of supporting Mandriva.
+1. "The Cold Equations" is one of my all-time favorites. Unhappy ending, but the story would not have worked otherwise.
Note that the instructor wants to teach computer *literacy*, not computer *science*. Those are not one and the same. The MIT course is excellent indeed, but it does not cover such topics as "what is a database" or "what is a LAN and how do I set one up for my home" or "what is the difference between Open Source and shareware". These are topics which don't belong in an introduction to computer science, but would be appropriate for a computer literacy course.
This was the premise of "The P Factor," by Curt Siodmak, published in the September 1976 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, except the urine was used as a replacement for gasoline rather than a way to produce hydrogen.
That's great, but aren't there already more people equipped with computer skills than the market needs?
You'd be surprised. I'm teaching at a community college, and I figured that the students, especially the younger ones, would know how to do word processing. I was wrong. The idea of headers and footers are a novel concept to many of them, and the difference between "Save" and "Save as..." eludes others.
...it needs jobs to put those people in to.
+1
'From now on, contract with the BIG BOYS in Linux, Red Hat, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Suse. No more gOS. no more *insert Bizzare distro no one has ever heard of here* distro.' In fact, Mandriva is offering to OEMs a version called (see http://www.mandriva.com/enterprise/en/company/press/mandriva-announces-a-new-solution-for-netbooks-mandriva-mini") Mandriva Mini which will be customized for their particularly hardware.
"IBM has 2 people on the payroll who's sole purpose is to trash OOXML (Rob Weir and PJ)."
Incorrect. Rob Weir is also a contributor to the ODF specification (see appendix H here and is co-chair of the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Technical Committee, so he does more than just "trash OOXML."
I know that 5, 10, 20 years from now I would still be able to open the files, though I have no idea why I would want to.
Governmental bodies, corporations, and other institutions may indeed have a need to keep their documents available and readable for more than 20 years. (Imagine birth certificates stored in a obsolete, proprietary, undocumented, binary format on media that can only be read on equipment that is no longer available. Hilarity ensues.)
Having spent several hours today tracking down a CSS interaction between style="vertical-align: middle" and dir="rtl", (works in Mozilla, fails in IE7, fails miserably in IE6), I am in total agreement with your sentiments.
I did a quick test with a KDE 4.0 LiveCD a couple of days ago; it worked well, and I like the way it looks. But who decided on the code name?(from the press release):
KDE Project Ships First Release Candidate for Leading Free Software Desktop, Codename "Calamity"
I'm going to lose all my karma points, but here goes...
From this (and other comments in the previous postings about Android), one might get the impression that the people at Google are a bunch of idiots who just didn't do any basic research. Why, if only they had read Slashdot occasionally, they'd know that Java is slow, has 10^6 different versions, is very slow, is inferior to C++, is extremely slow, takes up too much memory, is abominably slow, is a programming language that no real programmer uses any more, and in general is teh sux0rz. <grin/>
Yes, I agree. Here are a couple of examples, one is from lecture notes for an XML class: http://evc-cit.info/cit041x/lecture8.html, the other is a book about OpenDocument Format: http://books.evc-cit.info/odbook/book.html, which includes lots of examples. Obviously, the same formatting and presentation could be used in a Word document.
Actually: http://www.theopencd.org/
For the past few semesters, I've been handing out copies at the "campus groups on display" day, and the reception has been quite positive.