"What I am saying is that many people don't understand why highlighting something would copy it. Take a minute to think about that. Shouldn't you have to take some sort of action to copy something?"
I see the X-window way of copying as much more natural. If you highlight something, you don't copy it. You just mark it for some sort of action. Then you either press a key and delete it, or press another key and change it to uppercase, or middle click somewhere and insert a copy of the marked text. You don't actually copy anything until you middle click.
I was always confused by the windows terminology: first you "copy" something, and then you still have to "paste" it? When you "copy" it, where is the copy? I don't see it. Clipboard? What's a clipboard?
There is no reason to use a clipboard for such a simple operation as copying a piece of text. Of course, sometimes you run into a situation where you highlight something for copying, then you realize you want to erase something first. That's when you use a clipboard, to temporarily hold a copy of your text while you highlight something else.
The author of the original article could just as way complain about something like this:
"When I select a text to make it bold, and then decide I need to erase something first, I loose the original selection as I select the text to be erased."
The parent also said:
"But for Linux to really take hold, it needs to adopt functionality that will allow users coming from other UI worlds to function in a reasonably similar environment instead of having to adopt all sorts of strange new conventions."
I cannot believe I cannot use my whip to make my car go faster. Instead, I need to step on some sort of pedal. For cars to really take hold, they needs to adopt functionality that will allow people used to riding horses to function in a reasonably similar environment instead of having to adopt all sorts of strange new conventions.
Of course the real problem is that many new gui applications break the standards and mess up the whole x-window way of copying, mixing up primary selection and clipboard.
In the city of Olomouc in Czech Republic they produce a kind of extremely smelly cheese, which is considered by to be a great delicacy. A czech emigree living in Canada once got a phone call from his post office that there they have a package for him they would like to deliver. They wanted to know if he was going to be at home. He was rather surprised, because it was Sunday morning, when the post office is normally closed. When the package arrived, he discovered that the package was full of this cheese, fully ripe. They said it was stinking up the whole building.
This was the Canadian post office, though, not the USPS.
Calculus may not have change that much, but what changed is the way we use it.
That, however, does not justify the insane "upgrade cycle" of the textbook industry.
On the other hand, sometimes important changes are made to the way the material is presented. I just got a new edition of my favorite discrete math textbook, and some parts of the book are completely rewritten, I think the new edition really is worth.
Sometimes the new edition is actually worse than the old one. Couple years ago I was looking for a algebra and trig textbook for my class, and I found a very nice book by Lars Hormander. When I tried to order it, they sent me the new edition. It was bad, virtually indistinguishable from any other bad algebra and trig textbook on the market.
Interesting? Maybe I don't quite understand your description, but it seems to me that something like that could be easily achieved with pretty much any unix MTA and a well wtitten.forward file.
> However, with software - which is what I assume > you're talking about - all the "finches" want to
> exploit the same "resource" of customer dollars.
This is like saying that all the real finches want to exploit the same resource: food. There are huge differences between consumers. With some consumers, it is easy to extract their money with Windoze, some consumers are not going to pay a penny for it. If nobody liked Gnome better than KDE, Gnome wouldn't even be born. If nobody prefered KDE, all KDE development would cease.
The point is, in a free market, just like in nature, problems like this are not really problems. If a finch develops that doesn't have any food to eat (how can that happen? What caused the development of that particular finch at the first place?) it will die.
What you and Doug Miller are advocating is central planning. That have been tried many times already, and it simply doesn't work (not to speak about the fact that it is completely unamerican;)). Do you think you could design better finch than nature, "Misrosoft Finch (TM)"?
I agree, writing a term paper in emacs sounds horrible enough. I would definitely use vim.
Seriously, though, I don't think that learning on Linux machines would be a big problem. It's not like the kids learn something really deep. If you put KDE on, most of them probably won't be able to tell the difference. And those that would notice will be the smarter kids, who will benefit from learning Linux anyway.
It doesn't matter which particular brand of word-processor and spreadsheet are you going to learn. The basic ideas are the same, and figuring out the location of buttons and menus is no big deal.
You described your experience from college, I am going to counter with my experince from grad school. Ohio State has pretty big math department, several hundred computers, and as far as I know, there is not a single windows computer in any of the buildings. It's all solaris and macs. I have very rarely seen students using the macs, and if they did, you could be pretty sure that they are telneting to the server, and use the mac as an expensive character cell terminal. As for the machines in prof's offices, it was about half and half macs and sparcs. In general the older profs had macs, the younger ones sparks.
My choice for writing pretty much anything, be it a paper, proposal, letter, or anything else, would be vim and raw LaTeX. In my experience it is faster and gives you better results than any wordprocessor, be it msword, star office, wordperfect or whatever else. The only remotely wordprocessor like application i am willing to tolerate is LyX. It makes much more sense. Every time I try to make decent looking numbered or bulleted lists in msword I want to scream. And don't even get me started on the equation editor!
> People like ewhac have been busy spreading their communist manifestos for years,...
Let me just point out that most communist governments were extremely fond of controlling contents and ideas. Hell, things like free exchenge of information and open contents are the communist's worst nightmares. There were even countries where it was illegal to own an unregistered typewriter.
If there is a project you like, but the code is to large and complex, chances are there is whole bunch of people in the same situation. So it may be useful to document the code, api, internals or whatever. Pick a small piece of the code, go through it, figure out what is going on and document it. Then continue with another piece. This way you will produce something very valuable, and chances are that somewhere in the middle, you may find a bug or a way to do things better.
Appendix C.9.1 in Leslie Lamport's LaTeX - A Document Preparation System has very nice explanation of this problem and possible solutions.
My wifes dissertation had about 300 pages, and about 150 or so images, initially we had a little problem with image placement, but after reading the above mentioned appendix, it was very easy to make everything come out exactly right.
I love TeX! Every time I had to use some wordprocessor, I wish I could use TeX instead. I admit it took me years to really learn - I started in college with plain TeX, switched to LaTeX in grad school, now I use LaTeX all the time at work.
I also agree that it would be nice to have things like named variables instead of \count0... I guess TeX is kind of arcane programming language, but it works great for me. With a powerful editor like vim, it is easier to use, faster, and produces better results than any WYSIWIG wordprocessor I have ever used.
> 1)What happens if I release my thesis into the public domain under the GPL before I hand it in to my professor?
As others said, they may refuse to accept you theses, and you may have to write new one.
I would also like to point out that if in fact they do hold a copyright to your work, either sole or sharing it with you, *you have to ask for their consent before you release it under any kind of license*, otherwise your act may be invalid!
Read the actual GPL, in the section "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs", it says:
"You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary." After that there is a sample.
If they insist on keeping the copyright, they can still agree in publishing the program under GPL. For example, any file in the ucblogo source tree (which I just happen to have here) contains the following text:
"Copyright (C) 1993 by the Regents of the University of California. This program is free software; you can redistribute and... under the terms of the GNU General Public License..."
I wonder how many of the supposedly GPL published programs out there are not realy GPL published, because their authors forgot to get a consent of their employers/schools, who hold the copyright.
>It is their time, if you are a graduate student. Grad students are paid by the university, so you are, in a sense, working for them.
That's still not so simple:
1) If I was paid by a software company for cleaning bathrooms, and while doing that I developed some software, they could hardly claim it. They would have a point if they could prove that I used their ideas or their equipment, but that's it. Most graduate students are paid for teaching, not software development. If you are on a fellowship, then it would all depend on the exact terms of the fellowship.
2) If they don't pay you, it is also not that easy: usually when working on thesis/dissertation, you have an advisor who picks the topic for you and helps you with the work. You also use their resources - computers, network, library. So it is not surprising that they want a share.
3) OK, so what if you pay them? You pay for your advisors help and the facilities. Doesn't that take care of that problem? Aren't you basically paying consultant, rent on equipment and library fees? Try to go and actually hire a consultant, rent a computer etc. Then compare the price with your tuition. Than add the fact that no consultant is going to give you a degree, not to speek about all the other classes you take in college or grad school.
Somebody suggested that if your school wants the code of your dissertation, they should pay you an hourly rate. OK, but are you willing to pay your
advisor an hourly consultation fee?
It looks like I received the same mail. The court document is interesting, it answers a lot of questions that were raised here in this discussion, and, IMHO, does not show CRC Press in very good light. As a matter of fact, it answered the only question that bothered me a lot: I was affraid that maybe CRC Press approached WR and asked them to put an add on the site or something like that add WR refused. In fact, it seeems that WR even offered to put and add for CRC Press there.
In short, I am continuing my boycot of CRC Press, and I invite everybody else to join me.
Here is one very interesting part from the file:
"Finally, a preliminary injunction serves the public interest in maintaining the integrity of
copyright law. See Igram v. Page, 1999 WL 705895, *2 (N.D. Ill.). Defendants contend that the
public interest would be disserved by the issuance of a preliminary injunction because those who
access MathWorld via the Mathematica website will be losing a valuable resource. However, t he
vast majority of the content of the Encyclopedia is st ill available through CRC in both the?Encyclopedia and CD-ROM. The public?s interest in free access to this information does not outweigh the public?s interest in maintaining the integrity of copyright law."
This completely misses the point of having the encyclopedia online. It is not free access, it is the fact that it is availeble on the net for everybody, ban be linked to, and can be continually improved. This is the main difference between the online version and printed/cdrom version. Printed/cdrom version can't replace the functionality of the online version. It seems to me that as usually in the cases when dealing with the net, the court completely misunderstood how internet works.
Furthemore, is it just me or are other people also under the impression that "integrity of copyright law" id becaming more and more of an oxymoron?
You are right, CRC probably has the right to do any damn thing they please with the encyclopedia (leaving aside problems like contributions of third parties). I also agree that it was mistake to sell them all the rights (if that's what actually happened). Yes, they probably have the right (its up to the court to decide). If I buy a large piece of forest and turn it into a parking lot, or just cut it down so it wouldn't compete with my nearby hunting resort, I will also have complete right to do it. But I can't be surprised if people get pissed at me for that.
We are not discussing whether CRC had the right to do it (as I said, it is not up to us to decide), but whether it was morally right thing to do (which may not be the same). I understand that they had a problem with the site. Wolfram Research is not completely of the hook - if I remember correctly, the site had plenty of links to WR, but none whatsoever to CRC - I can see how that can piss CRC off. But I still think that shutting down the site was very wrong and inconsiderate thing to do. And from the marketing point of view, it probably wasn't even very clever thing to do. Unless they manage to convince people that it was actually Eric's or WR's fault, there will be quite a bit of mathematicians and other scientists mad at them for quite a while.
>I was expecting to see the book priced at
>$3000 or so and then get all agitated. It's
>only $99.00 on cdrom. I realize that it *was*
>free, but, what are you going to do?
It's not about price. The two great thing about the site were that you could link to it from other pages, and that you could contribute to it. You cannot link to a printed book. I guess CRC may give you some deal that if you pay them extra, you can put some parts of the cdrom online and make them available to your students on a password protected page or something. Even if they let you make them available worldwide, it is still a static, non-developing text.
The great thing about MathWorld was the centralized encyclopedia where you could contribute, add things, correct things and so on.
With a book on CD, you will always have to wait for new CD, and pay for it, to get updated version.
Slashdot Mirror
The parent said:
"What I am saying is that many people don't understand why highlighting something would copy it. Take a minute to think about that. Shouldn't you have to take some sort of action to copy something?"
I see the X-window way of copying as much more natural. If you highlight something, you don't copy it. You just mark it for some sort of action. Then you either press a key and delete it, or press another key and change it to uppercase, or middle click somewhere and insert a copy of the marked text. You don't actually copy anything until you middle click.
I was always confused by the windows terminology: first you "copy" something, and then you still have to "paste" it? When you "copy" it, where is the copy? I don't see it. Clipboard? What's a clipboard?
There is no reason to use a clipboard for such a simple operation as copying a piece of text. Of course, sometimes you run into a situation where you highlight something for copying, then you realize you want to erase something first. That's when you use a clipboard, to temporarily hold a copy of your text while you highlight something else.
The author of the original article could just as way complain about something like this:
"When I select a text to make it bold, and then decide I need to erase something first, I loose the original selection as I select the text to be erased."
The parent also said:
"But for Linux to really take hold, it needs to adopt functionality that will allow users coming from other UI worlds to function in a reasonably similar environment instead of having to adopt all sorts of strange new conventions."
I cannot believe I cannot use my whip to make my car go faster. Instead, I need to step on some sort of pedal. For cars to really take hold, they needs to adopt functionality that will allow people used to riding horses to function in a reasonably similar environment instead of having to adopt all sorts of strange new conventions.
Of course the real problem is that many new gui applications break the standards and mess up the whole x-window way of copying, mixing up primary selection and clipboard.
A story I once read on usenet:
In the city of Olomouc in Czech Republic they produce a kind of extremely smelly cheese, which is considered by to be a great delicacy. A czech emigree living in Canada once got a phone call from his post office that there they have a package for him they would like to deliver. They wanted to know if he was going to be at home. He was rather surprised, because it was Sunday morning, when the post office is normally closed. When the package arrived, he discovered that the package was full of this cheese, fully ripe. They said it was stinking up the whole building.
This was the Canadian post office, though, not the USPS.
Did you check out www.logofoundation.org ?
They have quite a bit of links to some good software and even more links to other pages.
I like your reasonning. Can you please explain that to my students, my dept. chair, and our school's administration?
Calculus may not have change that much, but what changed is the way we use it.
That, however, does not justify the insane "upgrade cycle" of the textbook industry.
On the other hand, sometimes important changes are made to the way the material is presented. I just got a new edition of my favorite discrete math textbook, and some parts of the book are completely rewritten, I think the new edition really is worth.
Sometimes the new edition is actually worse than the old one. Couple years ago I was looking for a algebra and trig textbook for my class, and I found a very nice book by Lars Hormander. When I tried to order it, they sent me the new edition. It was bad, virtually indistinguishable from any other bad algebra and trig textbook on the market.
Interesting? Maybe I don't quite understand your description, .forward file.
but it seems to me that something like that could be easily
achieved with pretty much any unix MTA and a well wtitten
If they could make garbage trucks that use that kind of engine...
> However, with software - which is what I assume > you're talking about - all the "finches" want to
;)). Do you think you could design better finch than nature, "Misrosoft Finch (TM)"?
> exploit the same "resource" of customer dollars.
This is like saying that all the real finches want to exploit the same resource: food. There are huge differences between consumers. With some consumers, it is easy to extract their money with Windoze, some consumers are not going to pay a penny for it. If nobody liked Gnome better than KDE, Gnome wouldn't even be born. If nobody prefered KDE, all KDE development would cease.
The point is, in a free market, just like in nature, problems like this are not really problems. If a finch develops that doesn't have any food to eat (how can that happen? What caused the development of that particular finch at the first place?) it will die.
What you and Doug Miller are advocating is central planning. That have been tried many times already, and it simply doesn't work (not to speak about the fact that it is completely unamerican
I agree, writing a term paper in emacs sounds horrible enough. I would definitely use vim.
Seriously, though, I don't think that learning on Linux machines would be a big problem. It's not like the kids learn something really deep. If you put KDE on, most of them probably won't be able to tell the difference. And those that would notice will be the smarter kids, who will benefit from learning Linux anyway.
It doesn't matter which particular brand of word-processor and spreadsheet are you going to learn. The basic ideas are the same, and figuring out the location of buttons and menus is no big deal.
You described your experience from college, I am going to counter with my experince from grad school. Ohio State has pretty big math department, several hundred computers, and as far as I know, there is not a single windows computer in any of the buildings. It's all solaris and macs. I have very rarely seen students using the macs, and if they did, you could be pretty sure that they are telneting to the server, and use the mac as an expensive character cell terminal. As for the machines in prof's offices, it was about half and half macs and sparcs. In general the older profs had macs, the younger ones sparks.
My choice for writing pretty much anything, be it a paper, proposal, letter, or anything else, would be vim and raw LaTeX. In my experience it is faster and gives you better results than any wordprocessor, be it msword, star office, wordperfect or whatever else. The only remotely wordprocessor like application i am willing to tolerate is LyX. It makes much more sense. Every time I try to make decent looking numbered or bulleted lists in msword I want to scream. And don't even get me started on the equation editor!
> People like ewhac have been busy spreading their communist manifestos for years, ...
Let me just point out that most communist governments were extremely fond of controlling contents and ideas. Hell, things like free exchenge of information and open contents are the communist's worst nightmares. There were even countries where it was illegal to own an unregistered typewriter.
If there is a project you like, but the code is to large and complex, chances are there is whole bunch of people in the same situation. So it may be useful to document the code, api, internals or whatever. Pick a small piece of the code, go through it, figure out what is going on and document it. Then continue with another piece. This way you will produce something very valuable, and chances are that somewhere in the middle, you may find a bug or a way to do things better.
Fire up vim (you all use vi improved, don't you? Emacs go home!:-)) and type ':help uganda' for an idea.
Appendix C.9.1 in Leslie Lamport's LaTeX - A Document Preparation System has very nice explanation of this problem and possible solutions.
... I guess TeX is kind of arcane programming language, but it works great for me. With a powerful editor like vim, it is easier to use, faster, and produces better results than any WYSIWIG wordprocessor I have ever used.
My wifes dissertation had about 300 pages, and about 150 or so images, initially we had a little problem with image placement, but after reading the above mentioned appendix, it was very easy to make everything come out exactly right.
I love TeX! Every time I had to use some wordprocessor, I wish I could use TeX instead. I admit it took me years to really learn - I started in college with plain TeX, switched to LaTeX in grad school, now I use LaTeX all the time at work.
I also agree that it would be nice to have things like named variables instead of \count0
> 1)What happens if I release my thesis into the public domain under the GPL before I hand it in to my professor?
... under the terms of the GNU General Public License ..."
As others said, they may refuse to accept you theses, and you may have to write new one.
I would also like to point out that if in fact they do hold a copyright to your work, either sole or sharing it with you, *you have to ask for their consent before you release it under any kind of license*, otherwise your act may be invalid!
Read the actual GPL, in the section "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs", it says:
"You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary." After that there is a sample.
If they insist on keeping the copyright, they can still agree in publishing the program under GPL. For example, any file in the ucblogo source tree (which I just happen to have here) contains the following text:
"Copyright (C) 1993 by the Regents of the University of California. This program is free software; you can redistribute and
I wonder how many of the supposedly GPL published programs out there are not realy GPL published, because their authors forgot to get a consent of their employers/schools, who hold the copyright.
>It is their time, if you are a graduate student. Grad students are paid by the university, so you are, in a sense, working for them.
That's still not so simple:
1) If I was paid by a software company for cleaning bathrooms, and while doing that I developed some software, they could hardly claim it. They would have a point if they could prove that I used their ideas or their equipment, but that's it. Most graduate students are paid for teaching, not software development. If you are on a fellowship, then it would all depend on the exact terms of the fellowship.
2) If they don't pay you, it is also not that easy: usually when working on thesis/dissertation, you have an advisor who picks the topic for you and helps you with the work. You also use their resources - computers, network, library. So it is not surprising that they want a share.
3) OK, so what if you pay them? You pay for your advisors help and the facilities. Doesn't that take care of that problem? Aren't you basically paying consultant, rent on equipment and library fees? Try to go and actually hire a consultant, rent a computer etc. Then compare the price with your tuition. Than add the fact that no consultant is going to give you a degree, not to speek about all the other classes you take in college or grad school.
Somebody suggested that if your school wants the code of your dissertation, they should pay you an hourly rate. OK, but are you willing to pay your
advisor an hourly consultation fee?
It looks like I received the same mail. The court document is interesting, it answers a lot of questions that were raised here in this discussion, and, IMHO, does not show CRC Press in very good light. As a matter of fact, it answered the only question that bothered me a lot: I was affraid that maybe CRC Press approached WR and asked them to put an add on the site or something like that add WR refused. In fact, it seeems that WR even offered to put and add for CRC Press there.
In short, I am continuing my boycot of CRC Press, and I invite everybody else to join me.
Here is one very interesting part from the file:
"Finally, a preliminary injunction serves the public interest in maintaining the integrity of
copyright law. See Igram v. Page, 1999 WL 705895, *2 (N.D. Ill.). Defendants contend that the
public interest would be disserved by the issuance of a preliminary injunction because those who
access MathWorld via the Mathematica website will be losing a valuable resource. However, t he
vast majority of the content of the Encyclopedia is st ill available through CRC in both the?Encyclopedia and CD-ROM. The public?s interest in free access to this information does not outweigh the public?s interest in maintaining the integrity of copyright law."
This completely misses the point of having the encyclopedia online. It is not free access, it is the fact that it is availeble on the net for everybody, ban be linked to, and can be continually improved. This is the main difference between the online version and printed/cdrom version. Printed/cdrom version can't replace the functionality of the online version. It seems to me that as usually in the cases when dealing with the net, the court completely misunderstood how internet works.
Furthemore, is it just me or are other people also under the impression that "integrity of copyright law" id becaming more and more of an oxymoron?
You are right, CRC probably has the right to do any damn thing they please with the encyclopedia (leaving aside problems like contributions of third parties). I also agree that it was mistake to sell them all the rights (if that's what actually happened). Yes, they probably have the right (its up to the court to decide). If I buy a large piece of forest and turn it into a parking lot, or just cut it down so it wouldn't compete with my nearby hunting resort, I will also have complete right to do it. But I can't be surprised if people get pissed at me for that.
We are not discussing whether CRC had the right to do it (as I said, it is not up to us to decide), but whether it was morally right thing to do (which may not be the same). I understand that they had a problem with the site. Wolfram Research is not completely of the hook - if I remember correctly, the site had plenty of links to WR, but none whatsoever to CRC - I can see how that can piss CRC off. But I still think that shutting down the site was very wrong and inconsiderate thing to do. And from the marketing point of view, it probably wasn't even very clever thing to do. Unless they manage to convince people that it was actually Eric's or WR's fault, there will be quite a bit of mathematicians and other scientists mad at them for quite a while.
>I was expecting to see the book priced at
>$3000 or so and then get all agitated. It's
>only $99.00 on cdrom. I realize that it *was*
>free, but, what are you going to do?
It's not about price. The two great thing about the site were that you could link to it from other pages, and that you could contribute to it. You cannot link to a printed book. I guess CRC may give you some deal that if you pay them extra, you can put some parts of the cdrom online and make them available to your students on a password protected page or something. Even if they let you make them available worldwide, it is still a static, non-developing text.
The great thing about MathWorld was the centralized encyclopedia where you could contribute, add things, correct things and so on.
With a book on CD, you will always have to wait for new CD, and pay for it, to get updated version.