The book wasn't distributed under the CC BY 3.0 license until the Saylor Foundation awarded the prizes. The copyright notice was changed after the prizes were announced. The texts were freed.
A rhetorical question. The telecoms have accepted billions in government subsidies to build out the internet infrastructure, but now when we, the people, need it, it isn't there. This isn't a game; it's fraud when people take the money from the government for infrastructure and don't provide the it.
The insurers want information that will enable them to remove expensive-to-insure people from coverage where possible, or at least to put them in a much more expensive pool.
No, they do not. They refuse to audit medical statements made on application for insurance (not minding when they collect your premiums) and then they want this information to deny claims when it comes time for your insurance to pay out when you're sick.
There are, by now, many free online resources of good quality, especially in fields like mathematics.
For example, although Ben Crowell, the original poster, doesn't mention it, he himself founded The Assayer, a site that lists free books, carries reader reviews, etc.
Since 2001, I've been publishing a number of original mathematics textbooks as ebooks at the Trillia Group, all of which are DRM-free and freely licensed for student's self study. I'd hoped to license the "bits", rather than use dead trees as DRM, and have universities buy perpetual site licenses for $300. That business model hasn't worked; American universities are used to paying nothing for the textbooks they use in the classroom (even the books that the professors and teaching assistants use to teach the course are given to the universities free by the publishers), and for the most part the universities can't comprehend transferring the small cost for a site license for a text from the students to themselves.
Some academic publishers, including Cambridge University Press, allow some of their mathematics authors to distribute texts freely on the web even while the book is published in hard-cover editions. Perhaps this will become more common in the future.
For those who read French here is a press release about a team of Scheme hackers headed by Marc Feeley participating in a Quebec security competition who won both the first prize for keeping the other nine teams out and the second prize for finding the most security problems in the other teams's servers.
So why shouldn't there be a CTO?... Congresscritters... should have a non partisan agency to advise them about these issues
They do. It's called the Congressional Research Service, and it's part of the Library of Congress. Their job is to write reports on issues that are of concern to members of congress. Reports are confidential unless and until a representative or senator decides to release them.
While the CRS doesn't seem to have a web site,
manyothersites contain lists of reports that are available to the public.
The Seed Media Group publishes Seed magazine, which explores the interaction of science and culture. Cory Doctorow says "The writing in this magazine -- mostly by scientists -- is stellar...best new magazine I've read since I picked up my first issue of Wired". Newly revived, the current issue is available, and needed, now.
News.com seems to have forgotten the history of the Olympics. Long before Olympic athletes from all countries became quasiprofessionals, the Eastern European countries were seeing to it that training for the Games was their athletes' full-time job, giving them a major advantage over other nations' athletes.
Some nations, or some individual universities, make similar time commitments in the ACM contest. Xu Jun, a public-affairs officer at the school, which fielded this year's first-place team in the programming contest from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, put it in Olympian terms: "All their time was spent in preparation except for their class work."
Which is obviously why the team from the University of Waterloo from Soviet Canuckistan got a gold medal this year.
In developing (not undeveloped) economies, as currently exist in China and Eastern Europe, science and technology training is a way for people to advance themselves. In developed economies, it may be through business, law, or moving money around. It seems a natural progression to me.
OK, I'll reply to some of these "comments". (Now I really know what "Anonymous Coward" means.)
If you look at the timeline, you see that Schlaich Bergermann und Partner probably learned of the device from the patent publication---no patent, no publication, no prototype in Spain in 1981/82. Now Schlaich Bergermann are the consulting engineers on the project.
As someone who works in the academic world, where the currency is credit for ideas, I would have liked to see some credit going to my father, when, for example, Time chose this project as one of its Best Inventions of 2002 (with Joerg Schlaich listed as "inventor"!).
My father invented and patented
this idea; the US patent, granted in 1981, was originally filed in 1975. He never got a dime out of it, and the patents, in Canada, Australia, Israel, and the US, have all expired. I guess he was ahead of his time. More information here.
It would be nice if they released a client in portable C.
They need to ensure that the results that are sent back are actually what they expect to be computed, and there's no easy way to test this if they accept results from clients that have been compiled from source and possibly compromised.
I, too, think these projects should have sparc clients, though.
After SofTech Microsystems was founded to support UCSD Pascal I offered to rewrite the elementary function routines (sqrt, sin,...). The negotiations were interesting; Mark Overgaard said something like "Well, here's the thing---if we're going to do business then you'll have to visit in person, and during the visit there will have to be these vibrations, and they'll have to be good vibrations..." I laughed so hard on the phone I nearly fell out my chair, but anyway the deal got done and delivered around June 1981.
Later I bought an IBM PC and after testing the elementary functions in MicroSoft Basic (they were crap) I offered to rewrite them. MicroSoft replied that they had already shipped that product, they weren't fixing anything in it now, they were on to other things. I thought that any company that had such a cavalier attitude to quality could never do well in the market; boy, was I wrong.
A few years later some bit of random testing showed that double-precision floating-point multiplication in MicroSoft Basic sometimes returned results accurate to only single precision. But, hey, the product was shipped and paid for, they were on to other things!
The best magazine I've seen in years is
Maisonneuve, an English-language, Montreal-based magazine. Think Atlantic, Harpers,..., only sharper, more thought-provoking, and more interesting. If you want to get unstuck from the US media sludge, try this.
Been reading Adbusters for years. You want an anti-coporatist, Fight Club periodical, you've got it here. (Out of Vancouver, for the Canadian connection.)
For what my wife calls raw, "urban literature", try SubTerrain out of Vancouver. If you happened to pick it up by chance you might be offended by the topics, or just wonder what the hell was going on, but this is well written and explores topics and issues you just won't find in the mainstream press.
Finally, Geist, probably the most overtly Canadian of the bunch. Started reading this one before Maisonneuve and SubTerrain, but now the self-deprecating humor and somewhat provincial view-point is starting to sour a bit.
Corporations have two ways to make money---reduce the cost of their inputs and increase the (perceived) value of their outputs. Corporate inputs are commodities when they are completely interchangeable, in which case they compete solely on price
Corporations have succeeded in turning programmers into commodities by breaking programming tasks down into such small, standardized, pieces, using "standard" languages and standard protocols that any one of thousands of programmers can do the job in an interchangeable way. Besides lowering perceived risk (if one "Lego Mindstorms" programmer leaves, another one can be hired the next day without jeopardizing the project), this process has turned programming into a commodity. You can't fight it.
The only way US sugar and cotton farmers, other commodity producers, can sell in the US market in the face of more efficient global competition is through massive and inefficient subsidies. I predict that this will be the only way that US commodity programmers will be able to compete. Or people can stop thinking they can make a first-world living by writing middle-end glue to connect MySQL databases to web front ends.
I was going to write that people could try to get a better education and offer corporations higher value than commodity programmers, but that market is much smaller, and it is not clear that such an education is widely available, given the past corporate influence on computer science programs in this county.
We recently had a similar discussion among the CS faculty at Purdue recently. It was prompted by the following:
[insert name of large US company here] is not recruiting CS undergrads from Purdue or in
the US, generally. This is true for a number of other
multinational companies. The stated reason? Those
companies can get graduates of similar quality from schools in India,
China, Russia, and elsewhere in the world -- and they can be employed
after graduation for 1/3 of the cost of a US employee. This is why
[said company] is relocating their IT operations outside of Northern Europe
and the US. They still recruit from the very best undergrad
programs in the US, but even that is in smaller numbers.
My response:
Companies like to turn their economic inputs into commodities, and add as much
(chargeable) value as possible to their outputs. To them, programmers are
commodities (by using "standard" languages, having mediocre goals, demanding
interchangeable skill bases, etc.), and commodities compete on price alone.
If we want our graduates to be able to compete in such a market, we have to
make sure they have skills that raise them above the "commodity" level.
The proposed Broadcast Flag Mandate would allocate to a few
corporations a valuable government monopoly to produce and manipulate
digital media. This is a vast theft from the American people and I
strongly oppose its adoption.
I already see the affects of similar government mandates in the area
of book publishing. I own a small company that produces electronic
texts distributed over the internet. The Bowker company has a
government-granted monopoly to sell and distribute ISBN numbers.
Bowker in turn has developed policies that greatly favor large
companies over small startups; for example, they sell 10,000 ISBN
numbers for $3,000 ($.30 per ISBN), while requiring $800 for 100 ISBN
numbers ($8.00 per ISBN).
Similarly, the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, which has
a government monopoly on copyright registration and assignment of
catalog information for the Library of Congress, has a list
of priorities for books that it will catalog for its collections.
At the top of the list are books published by large publishers, which
get their books cataloged through the Catalog in Publication program
even before the books are published. Officially, as a small
publisher, books I send to the copyright office have the lowest
priority for cataloging.
This is relevant because I can compete with large publishers with
a computer and free software for designing, typesetting,
and distributing digital media in the form of electronic books.
If the Broadcast Flag Mandate goes into effect, I will be legally
prevented from acquiring or developing hardware and free software
to compete with large corporations in other areas of digital media.
This would encourage anti-competitive activities and monopolies,
while discouraging innovation and free development of new products.
Mike Stump at Apple helped me find the answers.
There is little real documentation, the documentation is in the CVS sources for the compilers, and you have to download more than one source tree to be able to figure out what's going on.
First, you need to find the versions of the compiler that Apple shipped. Second, there are two different versions depending on whether the -fast option is given or not: 1493 and 1610.
Then if you download the current sources (see file:///Developer/Documentation/DeveloperTools/gcc -3.3/gcc/Source-Code.html for instructions), you can find the precise cvs tags for builds 1493 and 1610 (fast) by searching the cvs status of version.c for 1610 and 1493.
Now that you have the precise names, you can check-out the sources for these two branches. If you want to know what -frelax-aliasing does, for example, you grep for that in the 1610 sources, find it sets flag_relax_aliasing and grep for flag_relax_aliasing in the sources. Not perfect, but it works.
The one truly wierd thing is that what little documentation was written is not in either of these source versions, but in version gcc-1495 in the file AppleReleaseNotes.html in the main directory. Since you probably only want this one file from this CVS directory, you can get it separately.
That's all, folks!
Note added after trying to submit---what the hell's this lameness filter? Is technical information lame? To get this thing to actually be submitted, I had to take out all the commands you need to do to actually get this information.
Anyone know what these options mean? They are mentioned as being turned on by the new -fast option, but they seem to be Apple-specific and don't appear in the documentation
file://Developer/Documentation/DeveloperTools/gcc- 3.3/gcc/index.html
That last one sounds like a good one;-), but I'm wondering if it can screw up my programs that might rely on stricter semantics, so I'd like to know what it does.
The Assayer already online book information source
on
An IMDb for Books
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Check out "The Assayer" for online book information.
I teach math and computer science at Purdue, and
don't kid yourself, grade inflation is a fact
in all areas. I was educated in Canada, which
tends to have somewhat more rigorous requirements
for a university education (and fewer students
attending university), so perhaps I get less caught
up in the grade inflation pressure.
But it is true that having nuclear or civil
engineering students in your classes tends to
remind you that you don't want to have standards
slip too much;-).
I formed an online publishing house and am in the
middle of publishing a three-book series of mathematics
texts. No, I won't link to it, you can find it easily
enough if you want.
It cost $1400 to produce the first 203-page book,
for a technical typist and copy editor.
It also took about three months of my time (over
three years) to
produce the book. Formatting, design, hyperlinks,
index, figures, fonts,
adding white space so it was readable.
Web design, contracts, logos, registering copyrights, distribution.
And it took the author's daughter quite a bit of
time to proofread the book and do the first pass
on the index. In the end we distribute it on
the internet free of charge for students using
it for self-study and with site licenses available
if some college wants to use it for a text.
We've rescued a series of books that someone spent
30 years writing and rewriting, but that ended
up lost in his papers after his death,
and we've distributed well
over 10,000 copies, to over 70 countries,
the first 18 months it
was available.
So now I'm talking with a major academic publisher
about publishing paper copies of the book because
college libraries just haven't figured out what
to do yet with online content that doesn't come
with an annual invoice. And I'll get a cut if
paper editions do appear.
It took a while to justify to myself the idea
that I should get a cut from the paper copies.
After all, I didn't create the main body of the
content. Finally, I realized that I was acting
as some sort of (super) literary agent. I believed
in those books. I tooked manuscripts typed
margin-to-margin on a manual typewriter and turned
the content into something that was readable and
usable. Luckily, the author's daughter agreed
in my quixotic scheme to publish the books online,
and played the author's role in producing the
book.
This experience showed me that content, though
necessary, is not everything. Publishers will play an important role in selecting,
producing, marketing, and distributing books,
even in the online world.
Slashdot Mirror
The book wasn't distributed under the CC BY 3.0 license until the Saylor Foundation awarded the prizes. The copyright notice was changed after the prizes were announced. The texts were freed.
There is no chemistry book among the four texts chosen in the first round of the Open Textbook Challenge.
A rhetorical question. The telecoms have accepted billions in government subsidies to build out the internet infrastructure, but now when we, the people, need it, it isn't there. This isn't a game; it's fraud when people take the money from the government for infrastructure and don't provide the it.
No, they do not. They refuse to audit medical statements made on application for insurance (not minding when they collect your premiums) and then they want this information to deny claims when it comes time for your insurance to pay out when you're sick.
For example, although Ben Crowell, the original poster, doesn't mention it, he himself founded The Assayer, a site that lists free books, carries reader reviews, etc.
Since 2001, I've been publishing a number of original mathematics textbooks as ebooks at the Trillia Group, all of which are DRM-free and freely licensed for student's self study. I'd hoped to license the "bits", rather than use dead trees as DRM, and have universities buy perpetual site licenses for $300. That business model hasn't worked; American universities are used to paying nothing for the textbooks they use in the classroom (even the books that the professors and teaching assistants use to teach the course are given to the universities free by the publishers), and for the most part the universities can't comprehend transferring the small cost for a site license for a text from the students to themselves.
Some academic publishers, including Cambridge University Press, allow some of their mathematics authors to distribute texts freely on the web even while the book is published in hard-cover editions. Perhaps this will become more common in the future.
For those who read French here is a press release about a team of Scheme hackers headed by Marc Feeley participating in a Quebec security competition who won both the first prize for keeping the other nine teams out and the second prize for finding the most security problems in the other teams's servers.
They do. It's called the Congressional Research Service, and it's part of the Library of Congress. Their job is to write reports on issues that are of concern to members of congress. Reports are confidential unless and until a representative or senator decides to release them.
While the CRS doesn't seem to have a web site, many other sites contain lists of reports that are available to the public.
See also The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney.
From Sony: http://cell.scei.co.jp/e_download.html
In developing (not undeveloped) economies, as currently exist in China and Eastern Europe, science and technology training is a way for people to advance themselves. In developed economies, it may be through business, law, or moving money around. It seems a natural progression to me.
If you look at the timeline, you see that Schlaich Bergermann und Partner probably learned of the device from the patent publication---no patent, no publication, no prototype in Spain in 1981/82. Now Schlaich Bergermann are the consulting engineers on the project.
As someone who works in the academic world, where the currency is credit for ideas, I would have liked to see some credit going to my father, when, for example, Time chose this project as one of its Best Inventions of 2002 (with Joerg Schlaich listed as "inventor"!).
My father invented and patented this idea; the US patent, granted in 1981, was originally filed in 1975. He never got a dime out of it, and the patents, in Canada, Australia, Israel, and the US, have all expired. I guess he was ahead of his time. More information here.
Re:
They need to ensure that the results that are sent back are actually what they expect to be computed, and there's no easy way to test this if they accept results from clients that have been compiled from source and possibly compromised.
I, too, think these projects should have sparc clients, though.
After SofTech Microsystems was founded to support UCSD Pascal I offered to rewrite the elementary function routines (sqrt, sin, ...). The negotiations were interesting; Mark Overgaard said something like "Well, here's the thing---if we're going to do business then you'll have to visit in person, and during the visit there will have to be these vibrations, and they'll have to be good vibrations ..." I laughed so hard on the phone I nearly fell out my chair, but anyway the deal got done and delivered around June 1981.
Later I bought an IBM PC and after testing the elementary functions in MicroSoft Basic (they were crap) I offered to rewrite them. MicroSoft replied that they had already shipped that product, they weren't fixing anything in it now, they were on to other things. I thought that any company that had such a cavalier attitude to quality could never do well in the market; boy, was I wrong.
A few years later some bit of random testing showed that double-precision floating-point multiplication in MicroSoft Basic sometimes returned results accurate to only single precision. But, hey, the product was shipped and paid for, they were on to other things!
Been reading Adbusters for years. You want an anti-coporatist, Fight Club periodical, you've got it here. (Out of Vancouver, for the Canadian connection.)
For what my wife calls raw, "urban literature", try SubTerrain out of Vancouver. If you happened to pick it up by chance you might be offended by the topics, or just wonder what the hell was going on, but this is well written and explores topics and issues you just won't find in the mainstream press.
Finally, Geist, probably the most overtly Canadian of the bunch. Started reading this one before Maisonneuve and SubTerrain, but now the self-deprecating humor and somewhat provincial view-point is starting to sour a bit.
Corporations have succeeded in turning programmers into commodities by breaking programming tasks down into such small, standardized, pieces, using "standard" languages and standard protocols that any one of thousands of programmers can do the job in an interchangeable way. Besides lowering perceived risk (if one "Lego Mindstorms" programmer leaves, another one can be hired the next day without jeopardizing the project), this process has turned programming into a commodity. You can't fight it.
The only way US sugar and cotton farmers, other commodity producers, can sell in the US market in the face of more efficient global competition is through massive and inefficient subsidies. I predict that this will be the only way that US commodity programmers will be able to compete. Or people can stop thinking they can make a first-world living by writing middle-end glue to connect MySQL databases to web front ends.
I was going to write that people could try to get a better education and offer corporations higher value than commodity programmers, but that market is much smaller, and it is not clear that such an education is widely available, given the past corporate influence on computer science programs in this county.
The PowerPC 750GX has a 1MB Level 2 cache and no AltiVec. I doubt that these are in the Ibook.
This is what I sent the FCC last January.
The proposed Broadcast Flag Mandate would allocate to a few corporations a valuable government monopoly to produce and manipulate digital media. This is a vast theft from the American people and I strongly oppose its adoption.
I already see the affects of similar government mandates in the area of book publishing. I own a small company that produces electronic texts distributed over the internet. The Bowker company has a government-granted monopoly to sell and distribute ISBN numbers. Bowker in turn has developed policies that greatly favor large companies over small startups; for example, they sell 10,000 ISBN numbers for $3,000 ($.30 per ISBN), while requiring $800 for 100 ISBN numbers ($8.00 per ISBN).
Similarly, the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, which has a government monopoly on copyright registration and assignment of catalog information for the Library of Congress, has a list of priorities for books that it will catalog for its collections. At the top of the list are books published by large publishers, which get their books cataloged through the Catalog in Publication program even before the books are published. Officially, as a small publisher, books I send to the copyright office have the lowest priority for cataloging.
This is relevant because I can compete with large publishers with a computer and free software for designing, typesetting, and distributing digital media in the form of electronic books. If the Broadcast Flag Mandate goes into effect, I will be legally prevented from acquiring or developing hardware and free software to compete with large corporations in other areas of digital media. This would encourage anti-competitive activities and monopolies, while discouraging innovation and free development of new products.
First, you need to find the versions of the compiler that Apple shipped. Second, there are two different versions depending on whether the -fast option is given or not: 1493 and 1610.
Then if you download the current sources (see file:///Developer/Documentation/DeveloperTools/gcc -3.3/gcc/Source-Code.html for instructions), you can find the precise cvs tags for builds 1493 and 1610 (fast) by searching the cvs status of version.c for 1610 and 1493.
Now that you have the precise names, you can check-out the sources for these two branches. If you want to know what -frelax-aliasing does, for example, you grep for that in the 1610 sources, find it sets flag_relax_aliasing and grep for flag_relax_aliasing in the sources. Not perfect, but it works.
The one truly wierd thing is that what little documentation was written is not in either of these source versions, but in version gcc-1495 in the file AppleReleaseNotes.html in the main directory. Since you probably only want this one file from this CVS directory, you can get it separately.
That's all, folks!
Note added after trying to submit---what the hell's this lameness filter? Is technical information lame? To get this thing to actually be submitted, I had to take out all the commands you need to do to actually get this information.
-frelax-aliasing
-fgcse-mem-alias
-floop-transpose
-floop-to-memset
-fload-after-store
-fgcse-loop-depth
-fdisable-typechecking-for-spec
That last one sounds like a good one ;-), but I'm wondering if it can screw up my programs that might rely on stricter semantics, so I'd like to know what it does.
Check out "The Assayer" for online book information.
But it is true that having nuclear or civil engineering students in your classes tends to remind you that you don't want to have standards slip too much ;-).
It cost $1400 to produce the first 203-page book, for a technical typist and copy editor.
It also took about three months of my time (over three years) to produce the book. Formatting, design, hyperlinks, index, figures, fonts, adding white space so it was readable. Web design, contracts, logos, registering copyrights, distribution. And it took the author's daughter quite a bit of time to proofread the book and do the first pass on the index. In the end we distribute it on the internet free of charge for students using it for self-study and with site licenses available if some college wants to use it for a text. We've rescued a series of books that someone spent 30 years writing and rewriting, but that ended up lost in his papers after his death, and we've distributed well over 10,000 copies, to over 70 countries, the first 18 months it was available.
So now I'm talking with a major academic publisher about publishing paper copies of the book because college libraries just haven't figured out what to do yet with online content that doesn't come with an annual invoice. And I'll get a cut if paper editions do appear.
It took a while to justify to myself the idea that I should get a cut from the paper copies. After all, I didn't create the main body of the content. Finally, I realized that I was acting as some sort of (super) literary agent. I believed in those books. I tooked manuscripts typed margin-to-margin on a manual typewriter and turned the content into something that was readable and usable. Luckily, the author's daughter agreed in my quixotic scheme to publish the books online, and played the author's role in producing the book.
This experience showed me that content, though necessary, is not everything. Publishers will play an important role in selecting, producing, marketing, and distributing books, even in the online world.