> What's wrong with harfbuzz? > > It's just a font-shaping library, needed to correctly render south-asians scripts. [...deletia...] > And ghostscript is needed to be able to print your spreadsheets. If > you package a program for a distribution, you want it to work out-of-the-box.
Gnumeric used to work out-of-the-box with this stuff as *OPTIONAL*. What I'm complaining about is that it's now *MANDATORY*. Why the change, when it used to work just fine? What's next? Pull in the entirety of GNOME, complete with systemd?
It's not just the init, it's also the applications that are being infected with Lennart-ware, e.g. gnumeric. It's a great spreadsheet, but recently it's been picking up various egregious hard-coded dependancies that simply don't make sense. This occurs mostly via GTK, which seems to pull in a significant chunk of GNOME.
I run a minimalist Gentoo desktop, and I notice when additional dependancies are dragged in. The past year or 2 has seen goffice, ghostscript, harfbuzz, dbus, and various other crap become hard-coded dependancies for gnumeric. It was not necessary a couple of years ago. If I had several million dollars, I'd hire a bunch of progragrammers to port gnumeric from being dependant on GTK to being dependant on FLTK (Fast Light ToolKit) http://www.fltk.org/ Some of the money would go to ongoing maintenance.
Another few million dollars, and I'd like to hire a team to hack and slash away at Firefox. I was around when "Phoenix" was forked as a lightweight alternative to the Mozilla web-browser. I savoured that promise. That promise has been dashed into the ground, with a Firefox that's bigger, heavier, and slower than the original Mozilla ever was. Time for a new fork.
It's one thing for trusting/ignorant people to put their data in the cloud, and get it stolen. What's the reaction going to be when everybody's data is forcibly put in the cloud?
> Sorry, you are wrong here. The chips with pid0 works fine with Linux, so > there is no reason, the vendor could not make a working Windows driver.
Sorry, *YOU* are wrong here. The current Windows kernel will not mount a device with pid0, period, end of story. If the kernel won't mount a USB device, no driver will run it. You would need specialized bit-banging software to fix it.
The Linux kernel acted similarly, but there is now a patch out for the kernel to allow fixing FTDI devices.
> They are now being coerced into supporting other chips that are not under their control.
I call bull****. They are not being coerced to do anything, except follow the law. If they detect a clone, they have every right to program their driver to throw an error/exception saying that it's an unsupported device. When they deliberately start bricking hardware, that crosses the line.
An example of "doing it right" is MS Windows checking whether it's a valid copy. If it decides it's not, it goes into reduced functionality mode, and gives you time to verify. It does not go around wiping the hard drive and flashing the BIOS to all zeros. And I'm a linux user, so I'm not exactly an MS fanboi.
> In this case, they haven't "destroyed" anything. The hardware is still there, > with all of the capabilities it used to have, as long as you can find a > driver for it. They just changed the ID on it, and you can change it back.
OK, so how does Grandma change the ID and install an older driver? Note that changing the ID to 0 means that it is *NOT* treated as a USB device by any standard software. You are looking at specialized programming-to-the-hardware to be able to interact with it, in order to try unbricking it.
One difference I've noticed between Windows and Linux...
* in Linux, plug in a USB key, or hard drive, or other USB device, and if you have the appropriate driver, "it just works". One USB "mass storage device" driver works for all USB keys and hard drives
* in Windows... --- plug in a brand X USB key the first time, and Windws goes off onto the internet and installs a special driver --- plug in a brand Y USB key the first time, and Windws goes off onto the internet and installs a special driver --- plug in a brand Z USB key the first time, and Windws goes off onto the internet and installs a special driver
Come on guys, a USB key is a USB key, is a USB key. If it has some esoteric functionality, OK, otherwise don't clog up the registry and the hard drive with drivers for every USB key model that has ever been inserted into the machine..
I have a USRobotics USR5637 http://www.usr.com/en/products... USB CDC "56K" dialup modem for backup on the rare occasions my broadband goes down. It's a hardware modem that works in Windows, Mac, Linux, DOS, etc. Once I set up the kernel options in linux "it just works", without constantly downloading updates. WTF is Windows always updating?
>... the PID can be reset. It's not a brick at all. OP is off the rails. FTDI FTW.
Great. Now let's see Joe Lunchbox or your mother... a) diagnose the rason that a device stopped working b) find, download, and successfully appy a corrective patch
Geek Squad, or whoever, will charge money to fix the problem.
> Except the chip wasn't, as you put it, "killed." The chip is still fully functional with a driver that will support it.
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. The firmware ID in the device is modified so that... a) it doesn't work with the new driver b) it doesn't work with the old driver on the current OS c) it doesn't work with any driver on any other OS
> That FTDI doesn't want to support counterfeited chips with the driver it developed for the real article is reasonable. > > Why should FTDI support chips it didn't make?
When a copy of Microsoft Windows decides that it *MIGHT* be a fake, it goes into reduced functionality mode and gives you 30 days to validate it. It does not wipe your hard drive. If the FTDI driver detected a fake, and merely refused to function, I'd be unhappy, but that would be within their rights. Bricking the device, requiring an estoteric bare-metal binary writer to unbrick it, is crossing the line.
See http://www.carbon49.com/2010/0... for some details of of how everybody else is being ripped off to make solar "profitable" in the pronce of Ontario in Canada...
> Ontario Hydro One will buy the clean energy generated from the program > participants at rates of up to 80 cents/kWh. This is much higher than the > rates Ontario Hydro One sell their energy to the public at approximately > 9 cents/kWh. The idea is to provide financial incentives for private > businesses and communities to invest in renewable energy generation
Yes, that's right. The provincial power utility is paying almost 9 times as much for unreliable solar (and wind) power as it charges the public. Damn well right it's a money-loser. This works like something invented by the "creative accounting" minds at Enron. Imagine 3 neighbours living next door to each other....
Neighbour A) pays 9.3 cents per KWH for his usage
Neighbour B) generates 12% of his usage, and feeds it to his fridge/computers/swimming-pool/whatever. He only has to pay for the remaining 88% of his usage
Neighbour C) generates 12% of his usage and sells it to Ontario Hydro at the super-inflated rate. He then buys back 100% of his usage at the regular retail rate. He effectively pays zero for his electricity, even though he only generates 12% of what he's using.
Wrong. It's more than just GNU coreutils. busybox also normally includes the "ash" shell, although you can build a stripped-down version of busybox withouth ash. ash is very similar to bash, but there are some "bash-isms" that it can't handle.
> If the CRTC would not exist no Canadian artist could ever dream of being > able to broadcast or make anything as american media only care > about american shit even when operating outside of america, fuck them.
Ahemmm... * Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians * Hank Snow * Oscar Peterson * Paul Anka * Ronnie Hawkins (US born, but made it big after moving to Canada) * Leonard Cohen * Joni Mitchell * Neil Young * and a whole bunch of lesser-known artists
All made their mark before the first "CanCon" legislation/rules took effect on January 18, 1971. At that point, Canadian radio started seriously sucking. (Yes, I was around back then; get off my lawn). We heard the same small group of Canadian artists over and over and over. There was a standing joke that "AM Radio" really meant "Anne Murray Radio".
> Ripping out udev? Have fun with you init scripts no longer knowing anything > about device state change. Sure, might be useful if you could guarantee that > devices don't drop in and out of a system, but that's not been true for at least five > years now. I constantly plug and unplug my phone into my laptop (often just > to charge the battery, but sometimes for file transfer or for music) so you're > not capturing the desktop market either. Servers need it for hot swap. Exactly > what benefits are gained in which market? If you can list them, then we will know.
Udev can be replaced by mdev which comes as part of busybox. See https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/M... and also https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/M... Yes, folks, automounting+autounmounting USB keys, without X running, let alone GNOME or KDE. Yes, mdev *CAN* handle device state change. It sets/proc/sys/kernel/hotplug to point to/sbin/mdev
> Yes, but Dre is a respected musician, so his opinion > is given far greater weight than some yahoo on Slashdot > who has no musical credentials whatsoever.
> EVERY mobile device and OS that matters comes with an email client, > do ANY of them come with a Facebook or twitter client out of the box?
Unfortunately, yes. And in some cases, not only do you have to jailbreak the device to delete Fecesbook/Twitter, you have to load a new ROM like CyanogenMod, because they're baked into the firmware by the @$$hole cellphone companies. Do not confuse a pristine Android phone with the crap that you'll get once a cellco has "branded" it.
Speaking of Toronto, here in Canada we have this thing called "winter". Snow falls, sticks to buildings, turns to ice, and eventually falls off. This can be dangerous... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ame...
14% of 2010 Computer Science undergraduate degree recipients at major research universities were women. This compares with 37% in 1985. Why blame Apple?
Besides what qualities do women provide that men don't? Intuitive GUIs? Did you know that Melinda French (who later married Bill Gates) pushed "Microsoft Bob" into production, and that Julie Larson-Green pushed through both the MS Office Ribbon and the Windows 8 Metro interface?
> Almost free communication to anywhere on the planet > is an enormous thing, and it's just one thing of many.
So some guy from India can call me for free, claiming that my linux box is infected with a Windows virus; not to mention all the robocalls about the free cruise to the Bahamas that I've won.
> Pluto is a planet. The definition of a planet is arbitrary, and always will be.
If you can find an astronomy textbook from the 1830's or early 1840's, it'll list 11 planets... Mercury Venus Earth Mars Ceres (discovered 1801) Pallas (discovered 1802) Juno (discovered 1804) Vesta (discovered 1807) Jupiter Saturn Uranus (discovered 1781)
As time went on, more and more asteroids were discovered. Today, there are a few hundred thousand asteroids. To keep the number of planets at a manageable number, the asteroids wwere given their own class. Similarly, there are now almost 1300 http://www.minorplanetcenter.n... known objects in Pluto's vicinity. If you want to think of the solar system having 1300 planets, be my guest.
Scientists occasionally make mistakes, based on incomplete data. When more info becomes available, they correct those mistakes. E.g. they junked the Aether theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... after the Michelson-Morley experiment.
There was *ALWAYS* major doubt about Pluto's planetary status. This article from 1934 http://blog.modernmechanix.com... is an example.
> So that Pluto ranks as the largest asteroid, > rather than the smallest planet;
BTW, it's worse than the article suggested; Pluto is actually less than 1/10th the mass of Titan.
> and the dipshits who insist that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes.
So you think the ancient Greeks were dipshits? And the French who introduced the metric system? The real dipshits are the people who arbitrarily change the meanings of words after thousands of years..
One of the major arguments for IPV6 was that it would eliminate the bloated routing tables that are almost as much of a problem for IPV4 as addresses being all used up. So why does Comcast need 32 ASN's?
> Primarily because the school boards aren't in the business of > writing textbooks or funding the creation of the same.
Classical English literature =================== you can get Shakespeare's works *FREE* from project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebook...
Astronomy ======== http://nineplanets.org/ (yeah, the website name is an anachronism) *FREE* and since it's a website, you don't need to order and pay for a new edition each time new discoveries are made
Dinosaur Specific http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/d... *FREE* and since it's a website, you don't need to order and pay for a new edition each time new discoveries are made
For those fundamentalist schools who don't believe in evolution Project Gutenberg has the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims version
A school district should be able to get a good chunk of its needs free off the web. Most of these sites will easily give permission to download and duplicate. Instead of handing out 16 KG of books to each student, hand out 16-gigabyte USB keys to each student with the necessary e-books and/or mirrored websites.
Slashdot Mirror
> What's wrong with harfbuzz?
>
> It's just a font-shaping library, needed to correctly render south-asians scripts.
[...deletia...]
> And ghostscript is needed to be able to print your spreadsheets. If
> you package a program for a distribution, you want it to work out-of-the-box.
Gnumeric used to work out-of-the-box with this stuff as *OPTIONAL*. What I'm complaining about is that it's now *MANDATORY*. Why the change, when it used to work just fine? What's next? Pull in the entirety of GNOME, complete with systemd?
It's not just the init, it's also the applications that are being infected with Lennart-ware, e.g. gnumeric. It's a great spreadsheet, but recently it's been picking up various egregious hard-coded dependancies that simply don't make sense. This occurs mostly via GTK, which seems to pull in a significant chunk of GNOME.
I run a minimalist Gentoo desktop, and I notice when additional dependancies are dragged in. The past year or 2 has seen goffice, ghostscript, harfbuzz, dbus, and various other crap become hard-coded dependancies for gnumeric. It was not necessary a couple of years ago. If I had several million dollars, I'd hire a bunch of progragrammers to port gnumeric from being dependant on GTK to being dependant on FLTK (Fast Light ToolKit) http://www.fltk.org/ Some of the money would go to ongoing maintenance.
Another few million dollars, and I'd like to hire a team to hack and slash away at Firefox. I was around when "Phoenix" was forked as a lightweight alternative to the Mozilla web-browser. I savoured that promise. That promise has been dashed into the ground, with a Firefox that's bigger, heavier, and slower than the original Mozilla ever was. Time for a new fork.
I want GNU-Linu-x, not GNOME-Lenna-x
"Honed" is a term I've coined in honour of Mat Honan and how his info got owned/wiped... http://apple.slashdot.org/stor...
It's one thing for trusting/ignorant people to put their data in the cloud, and get it stolen. What's the reaction going to be when everybody's data is forcibly put in the cloud?
> Sorry, you are wrong here. The chips with pid0 works fine with Linux, so
> there is no reason, the vendor could not make a working Windows driver.
Sorry, *YOU* are wrong here. The current Windows kernel will not mount a device with pid0, period, end of story. If the kernel won't mount a USB device, no driver will run it. You would need specialized bit-banging software to fix it.
The Linux kernel acted similarly, but there is now a patch out for the kernel to allow fixing FTDI devices.
> They are now being coerced into supporting other chips that are not under their control.
I call bull****. They are not being coerced to do anything, except follow the law. If they detect a clone, they have every right to program their driver to throw an error/exception saying that it's an unsupported device. When they deliberately start bricking hardware, that crosses the line.
An example of "doing it right" is MS Windows checking whether it's a valid copy. If it decides it's not, it goes into reduced functionality mode, and gives you time to verify. It does not go around wiping the hard drive and flashing the BIOS to all zeros. And I'm a linux user, so I'm not exactly an MS fanboi.
> In this case, they haven't "destroyed" anything. The hardware is still there,
> with all of the capabilities it used to have, as long as you can find a
> driver for it. They just changed the ID on it, and you can change it back.
OK, so how does Grandma change the ID and install an older driver? Note that changing the ID to 0 means that it is *NOT* treated as a USB device by any standard software. You are looking at specialized programming-to-the-hardware to be able to interact with it, in order to try unbricking it.
One difference I've noticed between Windows and Linux...
* in Linux, plug in a USB key, or hard drive, or other USB device, and if you have the appropriate driver, "it just works". One USB "mass storage device" driver works for all USB keys and hard drives
* in Windows...
--- plug in a brand X USB key the first time, and Windws goes off onto the internet and installs a special driver
--- plug in a brand Y USB key the first time, and Windws goes off onto the internet and installs a special driver
--- plug in a brand Z USB key the first time, and Windws goes off onto the internet and installs a special driver
Come on guys, a USB key is a USB key, is a USB key. If it has some esoteric functionality, OK, otherwise don't clog up the registry and the hard drive with drivers for every USB key model that has ever been inserted into the machine..
I have a USRobotics USR5637 http://www.usr.com/en/products... USB CDC "56K" dialup modem for backup on the rare occasions my broadband goes down. It's a hardware modem that works in Windows, Mac, Linux, DOS, etc. Once I set up the kernel options in linux "it just works", without constantly downloading updates. WTF is Windows always updating?
> ... the PID can be reset. It's not a brick at all. OP is off the rails. FTDI FTW.
Great. Now let's see Joe Lunchbox or your mother ...
a) diagnose the rason that a device stopped working
b) find, download, and successfully appy a corrective patch
Geek Squad, or whoever, will charge money to fix the problem.
> Except the chip wasn't, as you put it, "killed." The chip is still fully functional with a driver that will support it.
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. The firmware ID in the device is modified so that...
a) it doesn't work with the new driver
b) it doesn't work with the old driver on the current OS
c) it doesn't work with any driver on any other OS
> That FTDI doesn't want to support counterfeited chips with the driver it developed for the real article is reasonable.
>
> Why should FTDI support chips it didn't make?
When a copy of Microsoft Windows decides that it *MIGHT* be a fake, it goes into reduced functionality mode and gives you 30 days to validate it. It does not wipe your hard drive. If the FTDI driver detected a fake, and merely refused to function, I'd be unhappy, but that would be within their rights. Bricking the device, requiring an estoteric bare-metal binary writer to unbrick it, is crossing the line.
Depending which part of the planet you're in, most of your FB tracking attempts will come from one of the blocks below. Firewall them all to be safe.
31.13.24.0 - 31.13.31.255
31.13.24.0/21
IE-FACEBOOK-20110418
Facebook Ireland Ltd
IE
31.13.64.0 - 31.13.127.255
31.13.64.0/18
IE-FACEBOOK-20110418
Facebook Ireland Ltd
IE
66.220.144.0 - 66.220.159.255
66.220.144.0/20
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3
69.63.176.0 - 69.63.191.255
69.63.176.0/20
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3
69.171.224.0 - 69.171.255.255
69.171.224.0/19
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3
74.119.76.0 - 74.119.79.255
74.119.76.0/22
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3
103.4.96.0 - 103.4.99.255
103.4.96.0/22
FACEBOOK-SG
173.252.64.0 - 173.252.127.255
173.252.64.0/18
AS32934
FACEBOOK-INC
204.15.20.0 - 204.15.23.255
204.15.20.0/22
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3
See http://www.carbon49.com/2010/0... for some details of of how everybody else is being ripped off to make solar "profitable" in the pronce of Ontario in Canada...
> Ontario Hydro One will buy the clean energy generated from the program
> participants at rates of up to 80 cents/kWh. This is much higher than the
> rates Ontario Hydro One sell their energy to the public at approximately
> 9 cents/kWh. The idea is to provide financial incentives for private
> businesses and communities to invest in renewable energy generation
Yes, that's right. The provincial power utility is paying almost 9 times as much for unreliable solar (and wind) power as it charges the public. Damn well right it's a money-loser. This works like something invented by the "creative accounting" minds at Enron. Imagine 3 neighbours living next door to each other....
Neighbour A) pays 9.3 cents per KWH for his usage
Neighbour B) generates 12% of his usage, and feeds it to his fridge/computers/swimming-pool/whatever. He only has to pay for the remaining 88% of his usage
Neighbour C) generates 12% of his usage and sells it to Ontario Hydro at the super-inflated rate. He then buys back 100% of his usage at the regular retail rate. He effectively pays zero for his electricity, even though he only generates 12% of what he's using.
This is legislated robbery.
> Busybox replaces GNU coreutils, not GNU bash.
Wrong. It's more than just GNU coreutils. busybox also normally includes the "ash" shell, although you can build a stripped-down version of busybox withouth ash. ash is very similar to bash, but there are some "bash-isms" that it can't handle.
> If the CRTC would not exist no Canadian artist could ever dream of being
> able to broadcast or make anything as american media only care
> about american shit even when operating outside of america, fuck them.
Ahemmm...
* Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians
* Hank Snow
* Oscar Peterson
* Paul Anka
* Ronnie Hawkins (US born, but made it big after moving to Canada)
* Leonard Cohen
* Joni Mitchell
* Neil Young
* and a whole bunch of lesser-known artists
All made their mark before the first "CanCon" legislation/rules took effect on January 18, 1971. At that point, Canadian radio started seriously sucking. (Yes, I was around back then; get off my lawn). We heard the same small group of Canadian artists over and over and over. There was a standing joke that "AM Radio" really meant "Anne Murray Radio".
> CRTC - Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
CRTC - Commission for Repression and Thought Control
Fixed that for ya
> Ripping out udev? Have fun with you init scripts no longer knowing anything
> about device state change. Sure, might be useful if you could guarantee that
> devices don't drop in and out of a system, but that's not been true for at least five
> years now. I constantly plug and unplug my phone into my laptop (often just
> to charge the battery, but sometimes for file transfer or for music) so you're
> not capturing the desktop market either. Servers need it for hot swap. Exactly
> what benefits are gained in which market? If you can list them, then we will know.
Udev can be replaced by mdev which comes as part of busybox. See https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/M... and also https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/M... Yes, folks, automounting+autounmounting USB keys, without X running, let alone GNOME or KDE. Yes, mdev *CAN* handle device state change. It sets /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug to point to /sbin/mdev
> Yes, but Dre is a respected musician, so his opinion
> is given far greater weight than some yahoo on Slashdot
> who has no musical credentials whatsoever.
What about slashers on Yahoo?
>I simply predict that in the future there will be two platforms -
> GNU/Linux and SystemD/Linux.
Actually, they should be called GNU/Linu-x and GNOME/Lenna-x
> His real crime was ending his sentence with a preposition.
Ending a sentence with a proposition is something up with which I will not put. (Sir Winston Churchill)
> EVERY mobile device and OS that matters comes with an email client,
> do ANY of them come with a Facebook or twitter client out of the box?
Unfortunately, yes. And in some cases, not only do you have to jailbreak the device to delete Fecesbook/Twitter, you have to load a new ROM like CyanogenMod, because they're baked into the firmware by the @$$hole cellphone companies. Do not confuse a pristine Android phone with the crap that you'll get once a cellco has "branded" it.
Speaking of Toronto, here in Canada we have this thing called "winter". Snow falls, sticks to buildings, turns to ice, and eventually falls off. This can be dangerous... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ame...
What is the available hiring pool? According to to the National Center for Women and Information Technology http://www.ncwit.org/ in a PDF document http://www.ncwit.org/sites/def...
14% of 2010 Computer Science undergraduate degree recipients at major research universities were women. This compares with 37% in 1985. Why blame Apple?
Besides what qualities do women provide that men don't? Intuitive GUIs? Did you know that Melinda French (who later married Bill Gates) pushed "Microsoft Bob" into production, and that Julie Larson-Green pushed through both the MS Office Ribbon and the Windows 8 Metro interface?
> Almost free communication to anywhere on the planet
> is an enormous thing, and it's just one thing of many.
So some guy from India can call me for free, claiming that my linux box is infected with a Windows virus; not to mention all the robocalls about the free cruise to the Bahamas that I've won.
> Pluto is a planet. The definition of a planet is arbitrary, and always will be.
If you can find an astronomy textbook from the 1830's or early 1840's, it'll list 11 planets...
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Ceres (discovered 1801)
Pallas (discovered 1802)
Juno (discovered 1804)
Vesta (discovered 1807)
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus (discovered 1781)
As time went on, more and more asteroids were discovered. Today, there are a few hundred thousand asteroids. To keep the number of planets at a manageable number, the asteroids wwere given their own class. Similarly, there are now almost 1300 http://www.minorplanetcenter.n... known objects in Pluto's vicinity. If you want to think of the solar system having 1300 planets, be my guest.
Scientists occasionally make mistakes, based on incomplete data. When more info becomes available, they correct those mistakes. E.g. they junked the Aether theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... after the Michelson-Morley experiment.
There was *ALWAYS* major doubt about Pluto's planetary status. This article from 1934 http://blog.modernmechanix.com... is an example.
> So that Pluto ranks as the largest asteroid,
> rather than the smallest planet;
BTW, it's worse than the article suggested; Pluto is actually less than 1/10th the mass of Titan.
> and the dipshits who insist that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes.
So you think the ancient Greeks were dipshits? And the French who introduced the metric system? The real dipshits are the people who arbitrarily change the meanings of words after thousands of years..
One of the major arguments for IPV6 was that it would eliminate the bloated routing tables that are almost as much of a problem for IPV4 as addresses being all used up. So why does Comcast need 32 ASN's?
> Primarily because the school boards aren't in the business of
> writing textbooks or funding the creation of the same.
Classical English literature
===================
you can get Shakespeare's works *FREE* from project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebook...
Astronomy
========
http://nineplanets.org/ (yeah, the website name is an anachronism) *FREE* and since it's a website, you don't need to order and pay for a new edition each time new discoveries are made
Evolution
=======
Tree of Life Project http://tolweb.org/tree/
Dinosaur Specific http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/d... *FREE* and since it's a website, you don't need to order and pay for a new edition each time new discoveries are made
For those fundamentalist schools who don't believe in evolution Project Gutenberg has the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims version
A school district should be able to get a good chunk of its needs free off the web. Most of these sites will easily give permission to download and duplicate. Instead of handing out 16 KG of books to each student, hand out 16-gigabyte USB keys to each student with the necessary e-books and/or mirrored websites.