I don't know what is the situation with college bookstore in California, but many colleges nationwide are getting rid of their bookstores and outsourcing them to large booksellers. We outsourced ours two years ago, since we just couln't keep up with the cost. As far as I know, most colleges sink considerable amount of money into their bookstores every year, and the money is typically only partially offsett by selling college brand merchandise in the bookstores.
Actually, he isn't. When they calculated the price of american beer, they averaged the various prices weighted by the consumption. So when you calculate quality, you should do the same. So on average, when we take consumption into account, american beer is very bad, despite of amricans having some of the best beers in the world.
An art history book without photos is like a mathematics book without numbers.
Hmm, let me see: on my shelf, I have about 50 math books. They all have some numbers in them, namely the page numbers, but more than half of them don't really have more than that. You probably would not find a math book with only page numbers, but there are math books that do perfectly fine with just numbers 0 and 1 (and I don't mean digits 0 and 1, I mean numbers 0 and 1).
Anyway, when I was in college, all textbooks, including the art history ones, were printed on the cheapest available paper, with very bad black and white reproductions of whatever graphics was necessary. Most of the art works were not available on the internet, either, and students were usually referred to either the actual works, if they were in a local museum, or to a high quality prints in a book that was on reserve in the library.
It is pretty clear what happened. They are using a system that automatically downloads and inserts the images at the time the book is typeset. On the final run just before printing, someone accidentally switched on the draft mode. Nobody checked the pdf file, and they ended with several hundreds printed textbooks with placeholders for all the images.
They wanted to throw them away, but someone had the brilliant idea to pretend it was done on purpose, because of copyright issues.
My stats book comes with a cd that contains all the datasets referred to in the text, plus some stat software. The same contents is available online from the publisher (you do not need any code, its freely available to anyone, although it is probably of little use to someone who does not have the book). The other day I asked my students how many of them use the CD. It turned out in two classes of 30, there was not a single person using the CD, everybody just got the stuff online. Most people didn't even take the CD out of the sleeve in the back of the book.
It would be cheaper for the publisher not to include the CD, and simply point students to the online resource. One would hope that it would reflect in the price of the textbook.
According to the summary, it was not an art appreciation book, it was an art history textbook. So your comparison to a pron dvd does not fit. It would be more like buing a book about anatomy and psychology of sex, and instead of images of sexual acts to illustrate the text, they would put in links to pron sites.
I think 180 is ridiculus, but if the text was good, $50 is, IMHO, not unreasonable. It would be better if it was an electronic version, with clickable links, though.
With a text input box you can specify any degree of precision you want.
I am usually a command line and text only interface fanatic, with 20 rxvt windows opened, using dmenu to launch programs, vim for editing, mutt for mail, fvwm configured in such a way that I never have to touch the mouse, and pentadactyl is my favorite firefox plugin. I agree that with text input box (or even better, a command line), I can specify any precision I want, but I would imagine that sound editing involves a lot of experiemntation. I do not have any experience with sound editing, but I do a lot of photo editing in GIMP, and I use sliders all the time. There are a lot of situations where you have to experiemnt with the correct setting. For example, I would drag the opacity slider in the layers dialog around until the image looks approximately right. Then I may use the text input to make final small adjustments. It would be much harder to do this kind of experimenting if you had to type in the new opacity level every time you wanted to change it. I can see that a knob combined with a textbox could be better than a slider with a textbox, because I could do more precise adjustments without switching from mouse to keyboard. One of the reasons I use vim, pentadactyl and have fvwm configured in a special way is so that I do not have to constantly switch from keyboard to mouse. It works the other way, too, when I am using mouse, I would prefer not to have to switch back to keyboard every time I want to make some very fine adjustments.
I think there should be some sort of credibility built into the system. For example, if more than 20% of your take-down notices are false, you loose credibility, and switch over to a regime where you actually have to prove the ownership befor the material will be taken down.
Should't that be a function of the operating system? It always seemed to me that GNOME and KDE were taking over functions that were originally implemented in the OS, and doing them their own way, incompatible with everything else. That was one of the reason why I gave up on them long time ago, and purged as many GNOME and KDE components from my system as i could, while still the few applications that I find useful.
As far as I can tell, most window managers are fairly small projects. I use FVWM, which does have a good number of contributors, but is nowhere near the size of the projects I listed before.
... seem to work just fine as free software projects. There are actually only three large general projects that I personally use regularly: Linux, Firefox and GIMP. In addition to those, I use hundreds of small very targeted utilities on daily bases. These are typically one or two developers with a handful of additional contributors type of affair, and most of them have been working that way perfectly well for years or even decades. And a quick glance at sourceforge or any other free software repository will show similar results. It seems to me that the author of the article has no idea what he is talking about.
I f you want "I want focus follows mouse" then you are using the mouse a lot?
Not necesarily. I have been using FFM (actually, mostly sloppy focus) for for most of my windows for like 17 years now. I can also switch focus with the keyboard (in several different ways, although not with the TAB key). I am not a heavy mouse user, I use VIM as my editor, pentadactyl extension for browsing, and other than that spend most of the time in a terminal window, but every time I have to use a system that does not have FFM, it drives mne nuts.
I don't think that's the reason, at least not the only reason. My parents both worked, and so did the parents of most of my friends. I had great time with my parents on weekends and evenings, but during the day, I had equally great time with my friends, roaming the streets and parks, doing all sorts of stupid things. Some of our shennanigans, if done today in american schools, would probably have us suspended from school for life.
I cannot think of a large scale secular organization that parallels the function of Boy Scouts that is more inclusive in this respect.
In US, there does not seem to be one. Which is kind of strange, since most countries in Europe have several organizations similar and parallel to Scouts, with different emphasis. Ignoring the fact that in number of those countries, Scouts actually are inclusive in this respect.
For some reason, US does not have any significant alternative to Scouts, not even on a state level. There are some local organizations, some of them trully excellent, but there are very few of them and they are pretty much isolated.
You are (most of the time) talking about different entities extracting the fees. Tuition money goes to the college. The money you pay for a textbook goes to the textbook publisher.
Back when price of textbooks were reasonable, professors would select textbooks according to their contents. Since in some areas there are many textbooks with comparable contents, publishers started competing in providing "perks" to teachers with their textbook: a test generator, an online gradebook, an online homework system etc. Now there are teachers who select textbook not so much by contents, but by availability of such "additions". Now publishers are trying to abuse this system to stop people from byuing what they call "pirated" (meaning used) textbooks. Some professors are not aware of that, and the publishers keep using the "additions" and "perks" to trick them into selecting such textbooks. Some of us are very aware of that problem, and refuse to ever assign a book like that. I have never heard about a professor or a college actually conspiring with a publisher in order to extract more money from students. It may actually be illegeal to do so.
If the classes you are taking in college are at such a low level that you do not actually need a professor teaching them, you did not study hard enough at high school.
I have fairly extensive experience with academia, and I have never seen a school that would have a rule prohibiting professors using their own books. I have also never seen professors having an agreement like the one you talk about. When I was an undergraduate student, about half my professors required their own textbooks, that were mostly available at the university store for a nominal price as mimeographed copies.
As far as publishers coming up with a bogus "new" edition of a textbook every few years, I can assure you that professors hate that practice as much as students do.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what is the situation with college bookstore in California, but many colleges nationwide are getting rid of their bookstores and outsourcing them to large booksellers. We outsourced ours two years ago, since we just couln't keep up with the cost. As far as I know, most colleges sink considerable amount of money into their bookstores every year, and the money is typically only partially offsett by selling college brand merchandise in the bookstores.
Actually, he isn't. When they calculated the price of american beer, they averaged the various prices weighted by the consumption. So when you calculate quality, you should do the same. So on average, when we take consumption into account, american beer is very bad, despite of amricans having some of the best beers in the world.
An art history book without photos is like a mathematics book without numbers.
Hmm, let me see: on my shelf, I have about 50 math books. They all have some numbers in them, namely the page numbers, but more than half of them don't really have more than that. You probably would not find a math book with only page numbers, but there are math books that do perfectly fine with just numbers 0 and 1 (and I don't mean digits 0 and 1, I mean numbers 0 and 1).
Anyway, when I was in college, all textbooks, including the art history ones, were printed on the cheapest available paper, with very bad black and white reproductions of whatever graphics was necessary. Most of the art works were not available on the internet, either, and students were usually referred to either the actual works, if they were in a local museum, or to a high quality prints in a book that was on reserve in the library.
It is pretty clear what happened. They are using a system that automatically
downloads and inserts the images at the time the book is typeset. On the final
run just before printing, someone accidentally switched on the draft mode.
Nobody checked the pdf file, and they ended with several hundreds printed textbooks with placeholders for all the images.
They wanted to throw them away, but someone had the brilliant idea to pretend it was done on purpose, because of copyright issues.
My stats book comes with a cd that contains all the datasets referred to in the text, plus some stat software. The same contents is available online from the publisher (you do not need any code, its freely available to anyone, although it is probably of little use to someone who does not have the book). The other day I asked my students how many of them use the CD. It turned out in two classes of 30, there was not a single person using the CD, everybody just got the stuff online. Most people didn't even take the CD out of the sleeve in the back of the book.
It would be cheaper for the publisher not to include the CD, and simply point
students to the online resource. One would hope that it would reflect in the
price of the textbook.
According to the summary, it was not an art appreciation book, it was an art history textbook. So your comparison to a pron dvd does not fit. It would be more like buing a book about anatomy and psychology of sex, and instead of images of sexual acts to illustrate the text, they would put in links to pron sites.
I think 180 is ridiculus, but if the text was good, $50 is, IMHO, not unreasonable. It would be better if it was an electronic version, with clickable links, though.
I did not read the article yet, but my guess is that it is some journalist's lame attempt to "explain" category theory to laymen.
With a text input box you can specify any degree of precision you want.
I am usually a command line and text only interface fanatic, with 20 rxvt windows opened, using dmenu to launch programs, vim for editing, mutt for mail, fvwm configured in such a way that I never have to touch the mouse, and pentadactyl is my favorite firefox plugin. I agree that with text input box (or even better, a command line), I can specify any precision I want, but I would imagine that sound editing involves a lot of experiemntation. I do not have any experience with sound editing, but I do a lot of photo editing in GIMP, and I use sliders all the time. There are a lot of situations where you have to experiemnt with the correct setting. For example, I would drag the opacity slider in the layers dialog around until the image looks approximately right. Then I may use the text input to make final small adjustments. It would be much harder to do this kind of experimenting if you had to type in the new opacity level every time you wanted to change it. I can see that a knob combined with a textbox could be better than a slider with a textbox, because I could do more precise adjustments without switching from mouse to keyboard. One of the reasons I use vim, pentadactyl and have fvwm configured in a special way is so that I do not have to constantly switch from keyboard to mouse. It works the other way, too, when I am using mouse, I would prefer not to have to switch back to keyboard every time I want to make some very fine adjustments.
I think there should be some sort of credibility built into the system. For example, if more than 20% of your take-down notices are false, you loose credibility, and switch over to a regime where you actually have to prove the ownership befor the material will be taken down.
Should't that be a function of the operating system? It always seemed to me that GNOME and KDE were taking over functions that were originally implemented in the OS, and doing them their own way, incompatible with everything else. That was one of the reason why I gave up on them long time ago, and purged as many GNOME and KDE components from my system as i could, while still the few applications that I find useful.
That's not really new, I remember JWZ commenting on his webcollage xscreensaver hack, noting how much of the web is really just images of text.
As far as I can tell, most window managers are fairly small projects. I use FVWM, which does have a good number of contributors, but is nowhere near the size of the projects I listed before.
... seem to work just fine as free software projects. There are actually only three large general projects that I personally use regularly: Linux, Firefox and GIMP. In addition to those, I use hundreds of small very targeted utilities on daily bases. These are typically one or two developers with a handful of additional contributors type of affair, and most of them have been working that way perfectly well for years or even decades. And a quick glance at sourceforge or any other free software repository will show similar results. It seems to me that the author of the article has no idea what he is talking about.
I f you want "I want focus follows mouse" then you are using the mouse a lot?
Not necesarily. I have been using FFM (actually, mostly sloppy focus) for for most of my windows for like 17 years now. I can also switch focus with the keyboard (in several different ways, although not with the TAB key). I am not a heavy mouse user, I use VIM as my editor, pentadactyl extension for browsing, and other than that spend most of the time in a terminal window, but every time I have to use a system that does not have FFM, it drives mne nuts.
I don't think that's the reason, at least not the only reason. My parents both worked, and so did the parents of most of my friends. I had great time with my parents on weekends and evenings, but during the day, I had equally great time with my friends, roaming the streets and parks, doing all sorts of stupid things. Some of our shennanigans, if done today in american schools, would probably have us suspended from school for life.
I cannot think of a large scale secular organization that parallels the function of Boy Scouts that is more inclusive in this respect.
In US, there does not seem to be one. Which is kind of strange, since most countries in Europe have several organizations similar and parallel to Scouts, with different emphasis. Ignoring the fact that in number of those countries, Scouts actually are inclusive in this respect.
For some reason, US does not have any significant alternative to Scouts, not even on a state level. There are some local organizations, some of them trully excellent, but there are very few of them and they are pretty much isolated.
He is a hungarian, not a roma. He probably does not really know how tu use a towel properly!
You are (most of the time) talking about different entities extracting the fees. Tuition money goes to the college. The money you pay for a textbook goes to the textbook publisher.
Back when price of textbooks were reasonable, professors would select textbooks according to their contents. Since in some areas there are many textbooks with comparable contents, publishers started competing in providing "perks" to teachers with their textbook: a test generator, an online gradebook, an online homework system etc. Now there are teachers who select textbook not so much by contents, but by availability of such "additions". Now publishers are trying to abuse this system to stop people from byuing what they call "pirated" (meaning used) textbooks. Some professors are not aware of that, and the publishers keep using the "additions" and "perks" to trick them into selecting such textbooks. Some of us are very aware of that problem, and refuse to ever assign a book like that. I have never heard about a professor or a college actually conspiring with a publisher in order to extract more money from students. It may actually be illegeal to do so.
Did they also recreated the salt mines?
Seems like he was some sort of dude in an american TV show sometimes in the last century. I am over 40 years old and I never heard of him either.
Who in the hell is Ross Perot?
"Honestly, professor, I searched for all these things that you told us to search for, but none of these links you are showing us ever came up!"
If the classes you are taking in college are at such a low level that you do not actually need a professor teaching them, you did not study hard enough at high school.
I have fairly extensive experience with academia, and I have never seen a school that would have a rule prohibiting professors using their own books. I have also never seen professors having an agreement like the one you talk about. When I was an undergraduate student, about half my professors required their own textbooks, that were mostly available at the university store for a nominal price as mimeographed copies.
As far as publishers coming up with a bogus "new" edition of a textbook every few years, I can assure you that professors hate that practice as much as students do.
No kidding. As far as I can tell, it is also the only mail reader (at least out of those that I tried) that gets threding and sorting right.