From Bowerbird at aol.com Thu May 3 07:51:32 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 May 2007 10:51:32 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] today's great internet meme Message-ID: so there's some big hubbub about this character-string: > 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0 i guess it spells "rumpelstiltskin" in some encoding or other... -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070503/f5454ccd/attachment.htm From robert_marquardt at gmx.de Thu May 3 10:13:51 2007 From: robert_marquardt at gmx.de (Robert Marquardt) Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 19:13:51 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] another pglaf email address created Message-ID: <5s5k33t40pi2qog8adl1jtkodamg99ks01@4ax.com> bookshelf at pglaf.org has been created and forwards to me. It is intended for all those who do not want to volunteer for Wiki work yet know books to add. I got some messages already. More off-topic than not, but that is to be expected. -- Robert Marquardt (Team JEDI) http://delphi-jedi.org From gbnewby at pglaf.org Thu May 3 18:56:39 2007 From: gbnewby at pglaf.org (Greg Newby) Date: Thu, 3 May 2007 18:56:39 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast Message-ID: <20070504015639.GA22212@mail.pglaf.org> I participated in an interview the other day for a new podcast/Web site. -- Greg From: studio at sitescollide.com Subject: Episode Online Dr. Newby, I wanted to let you know that your interview is now online. Feel free to link directly to the show where you appeared: www.sitescollide.com/Podcast/D670D1A2-BE13-49BF-9C1C-1D8A1F436CFE.html OR you can just reference people to the Podcast page where they can subscribe to all of our podcasts: http://www.sitescollide.com/Podcast/Podcast.html I hope you enjoy the final product. I know I enjoyed the interview and think it is a great thing for attracting folks to become active in Project Gutenberg. It's a great project. If you have any questions or issues, please let me know. Thanks again! -- Tyrel McMahan Producer, Sites Collide +48.600.508.440 (Warsaw, Poland) www.SitesCollide.com studio at sitescollide.com ----- End forwarded message ----- From desrod at gnu-designs.com Thu May 3 19:09:48 2007 From: desrod at gnu-designs.com (David A. Desrosiers) Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 22:09:48 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast In-Reply-To: <20070504015639.GA22212@mail.pglaf.org> References: <20070504015639.GA22212@mail.pglaf.org> Message-ID: <1178244588.8655.29.camel@localhost.localdomain> > OR you can just reference people to the Podcast page where they can > subscribe to all of our podcasts: > http://www.sitescollide.com/Podcast/Podcast.html That is... once they fix their website: SC_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR -- David A. Desrosiers - desrod at gnu-designs.com "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now." -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070503/5da13812/attachment.pgp From tb at baechler.net Fri May 4 03:53:56 2007 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 03:53:56 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast In-Reply-To: <20070504015639.GA22212@mail.pglaf.org> References: <20070504015639.GA22212@mail.pglaf.org> Message-ID: <20070504105925.B90ED352630@mail1.pglaf.org> Hi, For those who don't like frames or who just want the file without trying to figure out what link is what, here's a direct link. I don't know if it requires the referer to be set or not. http://www.sitescollide.com/Podcast/D670D1A2-BE13-49BF-9C1C-1D8A1F436CFE_files/src03.m4a From desrod at gnu-designs.com Fri May 4 04:36:26 2007 From: desrod at gnu-designs.com (David A. Desrosiers) Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 07:36:26 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast In-Reply-To: <20070504105925.B90ED352630@mail1.pglaf.org> References: <20070504015639.GA22212@mail.pglaf.org> <20070504105925.B90ED352630@mail1.pglaf.org> Message-ID: <1178278586.8655.32.camel@localhost.localdomain> > For those who don't like frames or who just want the file without > trying to figure out what link is what, here's a direct link. I > don't know if it requires the referer to be set or not. The original link WAS broken, because their server is broken. Hit the main site itself, and you'll see what happens. I tried it in 9 browsers and it fails all in the exact same way. Its definitely not a "problem with disliking frames". > http://www.sitescollide.com/Podcast/D670D1A2-BE13-49BF-9C1C-1D8A1F436CFE_files/src03.m4a Or... not. Not Found http://web.mac.com:2150/technologii/iWeb/SitesCollide/Podcast/D670D1A2-BE13-49BF-9C1C-1D8A1F436CFE_files/src03.m4a The requested URL was not found on this server. ????URL???????????????????? L'URL que vous avez sollicit?e n'a pas ?t? trouv?e sur ce serveur. Die URL, die Sie angefordert haben, wurde nicht auf diesem Server gefunden. -- David A. Desrosiers - desrod at gnu-designs.com "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now." -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070504/1cc2c411/attachment.pgp From joshua at hutchinson.net Fri May 4 05:29:21 2007 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (joshua at hutchinson.net) Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 12:29:21 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast Message-ID: <362094.1178281761988.JavaMail.?@fh1063.dia.cp.net> You know, I missed the part where he was either 1) replying to anything you wrote, or 2) referring to the state of the server. He was just providing a straight link to the file (which was evidentially working when *he* checked it). A common enough courtesy, really. You need to calm down a bit, David. Josh >----Original Message---- >From: desrod at gnu-designs.com >Date: May 4, 2007 7:36 >To: "Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion" >Subj: Re: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast > >> For those who don't like frames or who just want the file without >> trying to figure out what link is what, here's a direct link. I >> don't know if it requires the referer to be set or not. > >The original link WAS broken, because their server is broken. Hit the >main site itself, and you'll see what happens. I tried it in 9 browsers >and it fails all in the exact same way. Its definitely not a "problem >with disliking frames". > >> http://www.sitescollide.com/Podcast/D670D1A2-BE13-49BF-9C1C- 1D8A1F436CFE_files/src03.m4a > >Or... not. >Not Found >http://web.mac.com: 2150/technologii/iWeb/SitesCollide/Podcast/D670D1A2-BE13-49BF-9C1C- 1D8A1F436CFE_files/src03.m4a > >The requested URL was not found on this server. > >????URL???????????????????? > >L'URL que vous avez sollicit?e n'a pas ?t? trouv?e sur ce serveur. > >Die URL, die Sie angefordert haben, wurde nicht auf diesem Server >gefunden. > > >-- >David A. Desrosiers - desrod at gnu-designs.com >"There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, >ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now." >_______________________________________________ >gutvol-d mailing list >gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org >http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > From desrod at gnu-designs.com Fri May 4 06:17:31 2007 From: desrod at gnu-designs.com (David A. Desrosiers) Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 09:17:31 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast In-Reply-To: <362094.1178281761988.JavaMail.?@fh1063.dia.cp.net> References: <362094.1178281761988.JavaMail.?@fh1063.dia.cp.net> Message-ID: <1178284651.8655.42.camel@localhost.localdomain> On Fri, 2007-05-04 at 12:29 +0000, joshua at hutchinson.net wrote: > He was just providing a straight link to the file (which was > evidentially working when *he* checked it). A common enough courtesy, > really. My point was... how can the source of the actual file, any direct link at all, be derived, when the server itself, is misconfigured? It is throwing errors on any and all requests made of it, including valid requests for any resource, not even including the ones provided here? In any case, when they fix the server, we can all try again. :) -- David A. Desrosiers - desrod at gnu-designs.com "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now." -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070504/05bbe91a/attachment.pgp From traverso at dm.unipi.it Fri May 4 08:58:25 2007 From: traverso at dm.unipi.it (Carlo Traverso) Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 17:58:25 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast In-Reply-To: <1178284651.8655.42.camel@localhost.localdomain> (desrod@gnu-designs.com) References: <362094.1178281761988.JavaMail.?@fh1063.dia.cp.net> <1178284651.8655.42.camel@localhost.localdomain> Message-ID: <200705041558.l44FwPK06090@pico.dm.unipi.it> Now the site seems to work BUT it requires a plugin that is available for windows and macintosh and not for linux. Not a brilliant choice for PG. Carlo Traverso From gbnewby at pglaf.org Fri May 4 09:32:26 2007 From: gbnewby at pglaf.org (Greg Newby) Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 09:32:26 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast In-Reply-To: <200705041558.l44FwPK06090@pico.dm.unipi.it> References: <362094.1178281761988.JavaMail.?@fh1063.dia.cp.net> <1178284651.8655.42.camel@localhost.localdomain> <200705041558.l44FwPK06090@pico.dm.unipi.it> Message-ID: <20070504163226.GA4318@mail.pglaf.org> Tyrel's contact info is below, and he's Cc'd. The link worked ok for me (Firefox on Mac) so I didn't look further. Tyrel: - some errors accessing last night - no player for Linux? -- Greg On Fri, May 04, 2007 at 05:58:25PM +0200, Carlo Traverso wrote: > > Now the site seems to work BUT it requires a plugin that is > available for windows and macintosh and not for linux. Not a brilliant > choice for PG. > > Carlo Traverso > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d Tyrel McMahan Producer, Sites Collide +48.600.508.440 (Warsaw, Poland) www.SitesCollide.com studio at sitescollide.com From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 4 09:45:03 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 12:45:03 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast Message-ID: carlo said: > Now the site seems to work BUT it requires a plugin that > is available for windows and macintosh and not for linux. > Not a brilliant choice for PG. oh please. put the p.c. crap away. it's a podcast, for cryin' out loud, not a freaking _policy_decision_... the irrationality around here has grown so ridiculous it's not even funny anymore. -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070504/be955d38/attachment.htm From desrod at gnu-designs.com Fri May 4 10:38:52 2007 From: desrod at gnu-designs.com (David A. Desrosiers) Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 13:38:52 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1178300332.8655.47.camel@localhost.localdomain> On Fri, 2007-05-04 at 12:45 -0400, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: > the irrationality around here has grown > so ridiculous it's not even funny anymore. I'm all ears, Bowerbird. How do you suggest we listen to the podcast then? Since they seem to bury the actual location for the actual stream, mplayer -dumpstream doesn't work, nor does xine, vlc, Firefox's native plugins, mozplugger or anything else I can conjure to massage it to recognize it or play it. -- David A. Desrosiers - desrod at gnu-designs.com "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now." -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070504/bb1555ab/attachment.pgp From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 4 11:41:29 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 14:41:29 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast Message-ID: david said: > I'm all ears, Bowerbird. How do you > suggest we listen to the podcast then? i suggest you _don't_ listen to it. you wouldn't learn anything from it -- correct me if i'm wrong, greg -- so it'd be a big waste of your time... and if you really _must_ listen to it, i'd suggest you buy yourself a mac. a mini can be had for $600 or so, and you can even run linux on it... -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070504/964a967c/attachment-0001.htm From f.fuchs at gmx.net Fri May 4 14:55:42 2007 From: f.fuchs at gmx.net (Franz Fuchs) Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 23:55:42 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Spectrum IEEE: The Technology of Text In-Reply-To: Message-ID: --- The Technology of Text By: Kevin Larson If you?re reading this article on your computer, there?s a good chance you won?t get all the way to the end. Not because you won?t find it utterly fascinating (trust me!), but because it will be hard on your eyes. It?s not sentimentality that makes most people prefer reading books and magazines to squinting at their laptops. The quality of computer text is awful. It doesn?t have to be. The chief problem is the low resolution of computer screens. The color LCD screens on most laptops and desktops today have a resolution of only about 100 pixels per inch. You need at least two or three times that many pixels to begin to approach the quality of the printed page. The output of even a cheap laser printer is six times as good. What?s more, screen resolutions have hardly budged in the last several years, for a variety of reasons. For one, you?d need a lot more computational power to make a difference you could easily see on your screen. Moving from 100 ppi to 200 ppi, for instance, means your computer would have four times as many pixels to fill, and that in turn would probably bog down your ?graphics ?processor or, in a laptop, quickly drain your battery. Moore?s Law will eventually give us faster chips, and new integrated-?circuit designs are getting more power-?efficient. But making computer displays with higher pixel densities is also costly, because you?re more likely to get dead pixels during manufacturing. --- More: http://spectrum.ieee.org/may07/5049 (ca. 4 800 words) Best regards Franz Fuchs From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 4 15:40:17 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 18:40:17 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Spectrum IEEE: The Technology of Text Message-ID: oh man, this piece is a kicker from the very beginning. or at least the second paragraph: > It?s not sentimentality that makes most people prefer > reading books and magazines to squinting at their laptops. i haven't "squinted" at my monitor in a while. blinked back the brightness of a 23-inch cinema-screen, yeah, sure, i've done that. plenty. but i haven't "squinted". books and magazines, on the other hand, i have to hold up about 1 inch in front of my face to read that awful small type. with that cinema-screen, however, i just dial up the point-size until it's positively _roomy_, a _lovely_pleasant_breeze_to_read_. but heck, 72-point type is big even on my 12-inch laptop-screen. face it, 72-point type is easy to read. even halfway across the room. so -- for me, anyway -- this chap has his facts exactly backwards... i squint at print. with the cinema-screen, i just lean back and read. (oops, looks like i just wrote a one-line poem.) > The quality of computer text is awful. i agree with that. > The quality of computer text is awful. It doesn?t have to be. i agree with that too. thus goes the teeter-totter. who knows where the troublesome toddler known as "the truth" will fall off of this bucking bronc? still, it looks to have more value than a podcast, if only because you can skim ahead more easily if things get to be too boring... -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070504/eaca4a2e/attachment.htm From gbnewby at pglaf.org Fri May 4 15:41:09 2007 From: gbnewby at pglaf.org (Greg Newby) Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 15:41:09 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Fwd: Re: gbn interviewed for podcast Message-ID: <20070504224109.GA13544@mail.pglaf.org> Forwarding to the list: ----- Forwarded message from Sites Collide Studio ----- From: Sites Collide Studio To: gbnewby at pglaf.org Cc: traverso at dm.unipi.it, Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion , desrod at gnu-designs.com Subject: Re: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast Hi everyone, Thanks for getting in touch about the audio file. Presently, the show is available via an .m4a file which is chosen for it's good quality and small size. It should play in any current version of QuickTime, Real Audio, or iTunes on the Mac or Windows. It is MPEG4 (aka M4A). I have tested and confirmed this with several friends on Windows XP. On the Mac it works out of the box (at least it did on my macs at home and at work). As for Linux, I have tested it with my friend's OPEN BSD box via mplayer and VLC (both open-source players). On Windows, it may require upgrading Real Audio or iTunes for Windows. I know that sounds inconvenient, but frankly most people that listen to podcasts already have those programs installed (or even upgraded) since they are industry-standard and required in order to listen to most podcasts and media files. Nonetheless, I will do some more testing. I definitely want to find out what the issue is so I can resolve it ASAP. Please feel free to email me your sample system specs (OS version, player version, browser, etc) and/or any error messages you get. As for the web servers, can you email back with an approximate time you had problems (and time zone you are in)? I can investigate that with my web hosting provider. Thanks for the feedback and thanks for interest in the program. :-) Have a terrific day! -- Tyrel McMahan Producer, Sites Collide +48.600.508.440 (Warsaw, Poland) www.SitesCollide.com studio at sitescollide.com On 5/4/07, Greg Newby wrote: >Tyrel's contact info is below, and he's Cc'd. The link worked >ok for me (Firefox on Mac) so I didn't look further. > >Tyrel: >- some errors accessing last night >- no player for Linux? > > -- Greg > >On Fri, May 04, 2007 at 05:58:25PM +0200, Carlo Traverso wrote: >> >> Now the site seems to work BUT it requires a plugin that is >> available for windows and macintosh and not for linux. Not a brilliant >> choice for PG. >> >> Carlo Traverso >> _______________________________________________ >> gutvol-d mailing list >> gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org >> http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > >Tyrel McMahan >Producer, Sites Collide >+48.600.508.440 (Warsaw, Poland) >www.SitesCollide.com >studio at sitescollide.com > ----- End forwarded message ----- From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 4 16:10:50 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 19:10:50 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast Message-ID: > http://www.sitescollide.com/Podcast/Podcast.html i've connected to the podcast successfully, and exported it to several formats, so i can put it up on a site if anyone wants to grab it and can't access it directly from their website. greg was well-spoken, and the host was savvy, and i'd say all of the major highpoints were put, so if you know people who'd like an introduction to project gutenberg via podcast, this will be good. it ain't necessary to make it a high-priority listen, but this is a worthy multi-task listen-in-the-background as you do something else (like writing a post like this). they're talking about the definition of "public domain" now, and this post is done, so it's time for me to bail out. -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070504/cdd576c8/attachment.htm From hart at pglaf.org Fri May 4 18:24:32 2007 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 18:24:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: ned urls for your version, this one gave me a funny Quicktime ad. On Fri, 4 May 2007, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: >> http://www.sitescollide.com/Podcast/Podcast.html > > i've connected to the podcast successfully, > and exported it to several formats, so i can > put it up on a site if anyone wants to grab it > and can't access it directly from their website. > > greg was well-spoken, and the host was savvy, > and i'd say all of the major highpoints were put, > so if you know people who'd like an introduction > to project gutenberg via podcast, this will be good. > > it ain't necessary to make it a high-priority listen, but > this is a worthy multi-task listen-in-the-background > as you do something else (like writing a post like this). > > they're talking about the definition of "public domain" > now, and this post is done, so it's time for me to bail out. > > -bowerbird > > > > ************************************** > See what's free at http://www.aol.com. > From hart at pglaf.org Sat May 5 15:02:42 2007 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Sat, 5 May 2007 15:02:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] "A Better Horse" Message-ID: Speaking of that "better horse" quotation. . . . I just bought one of the earlier TI calculators at a garage sale today, and was reminded by the initials "SR" that it was "a better slide rule." This was from about 35 years ago. . .just about when PG started. . . . When computers were for computing, except for Project Gutenberg, of course. ;-) Michael From desrod at gnu-designs.com Sat May 5 15:20:49 2007 From: desrod at gnu-designs.com (David A. Desrosiers) Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 18:20:49 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] "A Better Horse" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1178403650.8655.61.camel@localhost.localdomain> On Sat, 2007-05-05 at 15:02 -0700, Michael Hart wrote: > When computers were for computing, except for Project Gutenberg, of > course. Does anyone recall when "computers" were actual people who were tasked with doing complex computations, and calculators were the big room-sized variety running complex programs? Funny how the terms are exactly the opposite from what we now use. -- David A. Desrosiers - desrod at gnu-designs.com "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now." -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070505/2120bfc0/attachment.pgp From hart at pglaf.org Sat May 5 15:38:24 2007 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Sat, 5 May 2007 15:38:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] "A Better Horse" In-Reply-To: <1178403650.8655.61.camel@localhost.localdomain> References: <1178403650.8655.61.camel@localhost.localdomain> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 May 2007, David A. Desrosiers wrote: > On Sat, 2007-05-05 at 15:02 -0700, Michael Hart wrote: >> When computers were for computing, except for Project Gutenberg, of >> course. > > Does anyone recall when "computers" were actual people who were tasked > with doing complex computations, and calculators were the big room-sized > variety running complex programs? > > Funny how the terms are exactly the opposite from what we now use. Yes, I remember how they used to joke about the Oxford English Dictionary still giving a definition of "computer" as one who computes. . . . Michael From jon at noring.name Sat May 5 15:50:52 2007 From: jon at noring.name (Jon Noring) Date: Sat, 5 May 2007 16:50:52 -0600 Subject: [gutvol-d] "A Better Horse" In-Reply-To: <1178403650.8655.61.camel@localhost.localdomain> References: <1178403650.8655.61.camel@localhost.localdomain> Message-ID: <1132132627.20070505165052@noring.name> David Desrosiers wrote: > Michael Hart wrote: >> When computers were for computing, except for Project Gutenberg, of >> course. > Does anyone recall when "computers" were actual people who were tasked > with doing complex computations, and calculators were the big room-sized > variety running complex programs? > > Funny how the terms are exactly the opposite from what we now use. My doctoral advisor once told me that when he was doing research in the early 50's, he hired a "computer" to come in and solve a system of non-linear equations to determine chemical equilibrium for rocket combustion. The computer would be a person, usually a graduate mathematics student, who would use a high-precision 'adding machine' to numerically solve the problem. Just solving the set of equations for a single set of parameters would take days and cost a pretty significant chunk of change. So my advisor said he agonized for days at a time before calling in the computer, to make sure he minimized the amount of computing needed and still get a usable answer. Times have certainly changed... When I did similar work in 1981, where I solved a system of 37 non-linear equations in 37 unknowns, I was able to do much more with less money (even though computing in 1981 was still relatively expensive -- and I still remember submitting the punch cards to the computer center -- terminal access to the mainframes was limited to the operators, not those who used the computers for calculations. I guess I agonized, too, but the agony was more to make sure the Fortran code was totally bug-free and solved the problem I wanted solved. Fortunately by that time I had an HP calculator so I was able to verify my results by hand, which I continually did to assure I was getting correct answers.) Jon Noring From hart at pglaf.org Sat May 5 16:16:43 2007 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Sat, 5 May 2007 16:16:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] "A Better Horse" In-Reply-To: <1132132627.20070505165052@noring.name> References: <1178403650.8655.61.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1132132627.20070505165052@noring.name> Message-ID: Still a la the "SR" standing for "Slide Rule" in the first TI caluclatiors: On Sat, 5 May 2007, Jon Noring wrote: > David Desrosiers wrote: >> Michael Hart wrote: > >>> When computers were for computing, except for Project Gutenberg, of >>> course. > >> Does anyone recall when "computers" were actual people who were tasked >> with doing complex computations, and calculators were the big room-sized >> variety running complex programs? >> >> Funny how the terms are exactly the opposite from what we now use. > > My doctoral advisor once told me that when he was doing research in > the early 50's, he hired a "computer" to come in and solve a system of > non-linear equations to determine chemical equilibrium for rocket > combustion. The computer would be a person, usually a graduate > mathematics student, who would use a high-precision 'adding machine' > to numerically solve the problem. Just solving the set of equations > for a single set of parameters would take days and cost a pretty > significant chunk of change. So my advisor said he agonized for days > at a time before calling in the computer, to make sure he minimized > the amount of computing needed and still get a usable answer. Funny that it should have cost so much, since they didn't PAY those grad students even the poverty level salary to live on. . . . I remember helping them steal coal from the power plant to keep warm and that even then the walls of their little tar paper grad housing shacks would be covered with frost on the inside. . .so I wonder if that money was being siphoned off elsewhere. . .??? > Times have certainly changed... When I did similar work in 1981, where > I solved a system of 37 non-linear equations in 37 unknowns, I was > able to do much more with less money (even though computing in 1981 > was still relatively expensive -- and I still remember submitting the > punch cards to the computer center -- terminal access to the > mainframes was limited to the operators, not those who used the > computers for calculations. Hee hee! I was one of those guys behind those stainless steel windows everyone handed in those card through. . .tho I didn't get paid for it other than free computer time for Project Gutenberg's beginnings. . . . Of course, this was a decade earlier, too. . . . > I guess I agonized, too, but the agony was > more to make sure the Fortran code was totally bug-free and solved the > problem I wanted solved. Fortunately by that time I had an HP > calculator so I was able to verify my results by hand, which I > continually did to assure I was getting correct answers.) I used to do the same exact thing!!! I spread my printouts for my thesis on the floor and crawled over the entire thing line by line with my calculator. . . . Did you make as many data entry mistakes as _I_ did??? I knew it was time for a break when I had to run it five times to get the same answer as the computer. Did you ever find a mistake? ;-) > > Jon Noring > Michael Hart > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > From jon at noring.name Sat May 5 16:46:06 2007 From: jon at noring.name (Jon Noring) Date: Sat, 5 May 2007 17:46:06 -0600 Subject: [gutvol-d] "A Better Horse" In-Reply-To: References: <1178403650.8655.61.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1132132627.20070505165052@noring.name> Message-ID: <32396250.20070505174606@noring.name> Michael wrote: > Jon Noring wrote: >> I guess I agonized, too, but the agony was >> more to make sure the Fortran code was totally bug-free and solved the >> problem I wanted solved. Fortunately by that time I had an HP >> calculator so I was able to verify my results by hand, which I >> continually did to assure I was getting correct answers.) > I used to do the same exact thing!!! > > I spread my printouts for my thesis on the floor and crawled over the > entire thing line by line with my calculator. . . . > > Did you make as many data entry mistakes as _I_ did??? Oh yes. It took a few runs (which cost me $$$) to debug my Fortran code (thousands of lines, several levels of subroutines, and called NONLIN, an external subroutine to do the actual non-linear equation solving.) Fortunately I learned from doing computer work back in 1973 (when as a senior in high school I wrote a program which generated the number 'e' to 1000 decimal places), to put in various debug output lines in the code as a matter of writing code -- once debugged I then removed those lines to decrease computing time (which was expensive!) and to decrease the number of pages of paper output (I'd have a two inch thick stack of output for one run when in debug mode.) > I knew it was time for a break when I had to run it five times to get > the same answer as the computer. > > Did you ever find a mistake? > > ;-) Yep! Jon Noring (Fortunately I essentially minored in numerical analysis, so I had a lot of knowledge in numerically solving quite complex mathematical models of systems, and this greatly helped in reducing errors and getting results which I had confidence were accurate. I believe I was the first Ph.D. to come out of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota where the thesis was primarily numerical modeling. My M.S. thesis was all experimental, though, so I was allowed to pursue a Ph.D. thesis which was almost entirely based on numerical analysis. There's a certain satisfaction, at least to me, of correctly solving a system of 37 non-linear equations -- and sometimes quite unstable -- in 37 unknowns. Even though computers are super-fast today, one still has to be careful to understand the numerical stability and other things (such as round-off errors) when using computers to model physical systems. One also has to have realistic input data. A great example is climate modeling -- I had some interactions with the top climate modelers while I was at LLNL in the early 90's, and have a lot of reasons to be skeptical of the "global warming is completely caused by man" point of view some hold today. I'm actually more worried about the acidification of the oceans, pointed out to me by David Cote' at DPP, caused by our CO2 emissions, than I am about global warming *possibly* being *mostly* caused by the same emissions.) From pbenoy at htc.net Sat May 5 16:39:04 2007 From: pbenoy at htc.net (pat benoy) Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 18:39:04 -0500 Subject: [gutvol-d] "A Better Horse" In-Reply-To: References: <1178403650.8655.61.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1132132627.20070505165052@noring.name> Message-ID: hehehehe; I bought an hp-35 in 1973. I had to sell my motorcycle to afford it. Worked my way thru college as a key-punch operator for the Army. BTW the 35 still works ;) Oh and Hi all, new here. On Sat, 05 May 2007 18:16:43 -0500, Michael Hart wrote: > > Still a la the "SR" standing for "Slide Rule" in the first TI > caluclatiors: > > On Sat, 5 May 2007, Jon Noring wrote: > >> David Desrosiers wrote: >>> Michael Hart wrote: >> >>>> When computers were for computing, except for Project Gutenberg, of >>>> course. >> >>> Does anyone recall when "computers" were actual people who were tasked >>> with doing complex computations, and calculators were the big >>> room-sized >>> variety running complex programs? >>> >>> Funny how the terms are exactly the opposite from what we now use. >> >> My doctoral advisor once told me that when he was doing research in >> the early 50's, he hired a "computer" to come in and solve a system of >> non-linear equations to determine chemical equilibrium for rocket >> combustion. The computer would be a person, usually a graduate >> mathematics student, who would use a high-precision 'adding machine' >> to numerically solve the problem. Just solving the set of equations >> for a single set of parameters would take days and cost a pretty >> significant chunk of change. So my advisor said he agonized for days >> at a time before calling in the computer, to make sure he minimized >> the amount of computing needed and still get a usable answer. > > Funny that it should have cost so much, since they didn't PAY those > grad students even the poverty level salary to live on. . . . > > I remember helping them steal coal from the power plant to keep warm > and that even then the walls of their little tar paper grad housing > shacks would be covered with frost on the inside. . .so I wonder if > that money was being siphoned off elsewhere. . .??? > > >> Times have certainly changed... When I did similar work in 1981, where >> I solved a system of 37 non-linear equations in 37 unknowns, I was >> able to do much more with less money (even though computing in 1981 >> was still relatively expensive -- and I still remember submitting the >> punch cards to the computer center -- terminal access to the >> mainframes was limited to the operators, not those who used the >> computers for calculations. > > Hee hee! I was one of those guys behind those stainless steel windows > everyone handed in those card through. . .tho I didn't get paid for it > other than free computer time for Project Gutenberg's beginnings. . . . > > Of course, this was a decade earlier, too. . . . > > >> I guess I agonized, too, but the agony was >> more to make sure the Fortran code was totally bug-free and solved the >> problem I wanted solved. Fortunately by that time I had an HP >> calculator so I was able to verify my results by hand, which I >> continually did to assure I was getting correct answers.) > > I used to do the same exact thing!!! > > I spread my printouts for my thesis on the floor and crawled over the > entire thing line by line with my calculator. . . . > > Did you make as many data entry mistakes as _I_ did??? > > I knew it was time for a break when I had to run it five times to get > the same answer as the computer. > > Did you ever find a mistake? > > ;-) > >> >> Jon Noring >> > > Michael Hart > >> >> _______________________________________________ >> gutvol-d mailing list >> gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org >> http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d >> > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > From desrod at gnu-designs.com Sat May 5 18:07:42 2007 From: desrod at gnu-designs.com (David A. Desrosiers) Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 21:07:42 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] "A Better Horse" In-Reply-To: References: <1178403650.8655.61.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1132132627.20070505165052@noring.name> Message-ID: <1178413662.8655.63.camel@localhost.localdomain> On Sat, 2007-05-05 at 18:39 -0500, pat benoy wrote: > I bought an hp-35 in 1973. I had to sell my motorcycle to afford > it. I was 2 years old in 1973 ;) -- David A. Desrosiers - desrod at gnu-designs.com "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now." -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070505/c2d4ea96/attachment.pgp From hart at pglaf.org Sat May 5 19:08:04 2007 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Sat, 5 May 2007 19:08:04 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] "A Better Horse" In-Reply-To: References: <1178403650.8655.61.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1132132627.20070505165052@noring.name> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 May 2007, pat benoy wrote: > hehehehe; > > I bought an hp-35 in 1973. I had to sell my motorcycle to afford it. Worked > my way thru college as a key-punch operator for the Army. BTW the 35 still > works ;) > Oh and Hi all, new here. Hi. . .! Was that the kind of HP that originally did NOT sell well at $125 and later sold quite well at $450??? Something about finding the right niche of buyers, such as those who employed the last generations of math whizzes that used the CRC tables and sliderules. Oh. . .I bought TWO TI's at the garage sale, along with an antique Frisbee and a carribeaner. . .all for less than TWO sliderules TWO weeks ago. . . Uh. . .lesseee. . .thass THREE TWOS, X must be 2**3, or the like. . . . ;-))) Michael PS I never realized my sliderule answers were often off by a power of ten because I was dyslexic, and it didn't mean ANYthing to me, which end was out! I just learned to do a quick estimate first, so I knew answers approximately. That helped more than you might think. . .I lot of my compatriots put down an answer that was something like a mouse built to military specifications. DARPANet RULES!!! From pbenoy at htc.net Sun May 6 06:50:11 2007 From: pbenoy at htc.net (pat benoy) Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 08:50:11 -0500 Subject: [gutvol-d] "A Better Horse" In-Reply-To: References: <1178403650.8655.61.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1132132627.20070505165052@noring.name> Message-ID: More than you ever wanted to know about hp claculators: http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp35.htm I never heard of them being sold for $125. They came on the market during my first year of Engineering school. I bought mine the next summer when they reduced the price to $295. Do your slide rules do hyperbolics? Come with the leather carrying case that attaches to your belt like a sword? Scarey visualization of swashbuckling nerds ensues. Didn't everyone approximate back in the day. Now you get students giving wildly idiotic answers because "My calculator said so." And don't even get me going about giving all results to 8 significant figures. "I have all these numbers on my calculator, let's use every one!!" Pat (the old crank in the corner) > Was that the kind of HP that originally did NOT sell well at $125 and > later > sold quite well at $450??? > > Something about finding the right niche of buyers, such as those who > employed > the last generations of math whizzes that used the CRC tables and > sliderules. > > Oh. . .I bought TWO TI's at the garage sale, along with an antique > Frisbee > and a carribeaner. . .all for less than TWO sliderules TWO weeks ago. . . > > Uh. . .lesseee. . .thass THREE TWOS, X must be 2**3, or the like. . . . > > > ;-))) > > > Michael > > PS I never realized my sliderule answers were often off by a power of > ten > because I was dyslexic, and it didn't mean ANYthing to me, which end was > out! > > I just learned to do a quick estimate first, so I knew answers > approximately. > > That helped more than you might think. . .I lot of my compatriots put > down an > answer that was something like a mouse built to military specifications. > > DARPANet RULES!!! > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > From hart at pglaf.org Sun May 6 08:11:09 2007 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Sun, 6 May 2007 08:11:09 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] "A Better Horse" In-Reply-To: References: <1178403650.8655.61.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1132132627.20070505165052@noring.name> Message-ID: On Sun, 6 May 2007, pat benoy wrote: > More than you ever wanted to know about hp claculators: > > http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp35.htm > > I never heard of them being sold for $125. They came on the market during my > first year of Engineering school. I bought mine the next summer when they > reduced the price to $295. I think they came on the market in different places at different times, and at quite different prices. . .I saw my first HP around 1971, and I literally begged the owner to let me play with it! > Do your slide rules do hyperbolics? Come with the leather carrying case that > attaches to your belt like a sword? Scarey visualization of swashbuckling > nerds ensues. I never wore my slide rules, nor the dreaded "picket protector," but I /was/ a geninue terror in math and science classes, making up my own equations in the Marvin Minsky mode: "You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way." So my teachers were always having to figure out if they LIKED my equations, since I used a different one in each exam to prove I was not just parroting the one in the book, but actually understood enough to derive my own. [The TAs usually couldn't do this, gave me no point, and I had to go to the full professor to find someone who did more than parroting, himself, and to get the points that I deserved. This was highly disconcerting and left the impression that teaching assistants were NOT the way to run classes.] > Didn't everyone approximate back in the day. No. . .probably no more than half, maybe not even that many, and this was a class for advanced students. . .as was the one mentioned above. . .but, the truth is that the greatest lesson I learned all three/four of those classes was when one teacher showed that even among geniuses, all the students were susceptible to being manipulated by falsehoods perpetrated by the teacher-- and that they could then not be dissuaded from those falsehoods because the minds had been closed to further proofs and information. . . . Quite possibly the best lesson I ever received in all my years of school! Integrity is much rarer than genius. . . . > Now you get students giving wildly idiotic answers because "My calculator > said so." And don't even get me going about giving all results to 8 > significant figures. "I have all these numbers on my calculator, let's use > every one!!" Don't they teach "significant digits" any longer? > Pat (the old crank in the corner) Michael [the old nut in the corner] > >> Was that the kind of HP that originally did NOT sell well at $125 and later >> sold quite well at $450??? >> >> Something about finding the right niche of buyers, such as those who >> employed >> the last generations of math whizzes that used the CRC tables and >> sliderules. >> >> Oh. . .I bought TWO TI's at the garage sale, along with an antique Frisbee >> and a carribeaner. . .all for less than TWO sliderules TWO weeks ago. . . >> >> Uh. . .lesseee. . .thass THREE TWOS, X must be 2**3, or the like. . . . >> >> >> ;-))) >> >> >> Michael >> >> PS I never realized my sliderule answers were often off by a power of ten >> because I was dyslexic, and it didn't mean ANYthing to me, which end was >> out! >> >> I just learned to do a quick estimate first, so I knew answers >> approximately. >> >> That helped more than you might think. . .I lot of my compatriots put down >> an >> answer that was something like a mouse built to military specifications. >> >> DARPANet RULES!!! >> >> _______________________________________________ >> gutvol-d mailing list >> gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org >> http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d >> > > From radicks at bellsouth.net Sun May 6 12:59:58 2007 From: radicks at bellsouth.net (Dick Adicks) Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 15:59:58 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] "A Better Horse" Message-ID: Michael wrote on 5/5/07: >Yes, I remember how they used to joke about the Oxford English Dictionary >still giving a definition of "computer" as one who computes. . . . >Michael And in the late 1800s a "typewriter" was a person who typed on a machine. I'm not sure what the machine was called. Dick Adicks -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070506/8139af26/attachment.htm From tb at baechler.net Mon May 7 01:28:25 2007 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 01:28:25 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] "A Better Horse" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20070507082711.6DEAC35260C@mail1.pglaf.org> Hi, I can't resist pointing out that PG wasn't the only non-serious computing project of the 1970's. Games were available as well. Adventure and Dungeon come to mind but there was also Hunt the Wumpus. No, computers were for other things besides just computing and PG. :-) At 03:02 PM 5/5/07 -0700, you wrote: >Speaking of that "better horse" quotation. . . . > >I just bought one of the earlier TI calculators at a garage sale today, >and was reminded by the initials "SR" that it was "a better slide rule." > >This was from about 35 years ago. . .just about when PG started. . . . > >When computers were for computing, except for Project Gutenberg, of course. > >;-) > >Michael From tb at baechler.net Mon May 7 01:37:27 2007 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 01:37:27 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Fwd: Re: gbn interviewed for podcast In-Reply-To: <20070504224109.GA13544@mail.pglaf.org> References: <20070504224109.GA13544@mail.pglaf.org> Message-ID: <20070507083609.B203E352611@mail1.pglaf.org> I had no problem playing this on Winamp 5.32. Is the original wave file available for conversion to any other format such as mp3 or ogg? At 03:41 PM 5/4/07 -0700, you wrote: >Presently, the show is available via an .m4a file which is chosen for >it's good quality and small size. It should play in any current >version of QuickTime, Real Audio, or iTunes on the Mac or Windows. It From tb at baechler.net Mon May 7 01:38:58 2007 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 01:38:58 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast In-Reply-To: <1178278586.8655.32.camel@localhost.localdomain> References: <20070504015639.GA22212@mail.pglaf.org> <20070504105925.B90ED352630@mail1.pglaf.org> <1178278586.8655.32.camel@localhost.localdomain> Message-ID: <20070507083740.A3DFF352618@mail1.pglaf.org> Oops! The "src" should be "scr" instead. Try again with scr03.m4a and it should work. At 07:36 AM 5/4/07 -0400, you wrote: > > > http://www.sitescollide.com/Podcast/D670D1A2-BE13-49BF-9C1C-1D8A1F436CFE_files/src03.m4a > >Or... not. >Not Found >http://web.mac.com:2150/technologii/iWeb/SitesCollide/Podcast/D670D1A2-BE13-49BF-9C1C-1D8A1F436CFE_files/src03.m4a From tb at baechler.net Mon May 7 01:41:55 2007 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 01:41:55 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] gbn interviewed for podcast In-Reply-To: <1178300332.8655.47.camel@localhost.localdomain> References: <1178300332.8655.47.camel@localhost.localdomain> Message-ID: <20070507084038.5242F35260B@mail1.pglaf.org> Incidentally, I had no problem downloading it with Lynx. At 01:38 PM 5/4/07 -0400, you wrote: >Since they seem to bury the actual location for the actual stream, >mplayer -dumpstream doesn't work, nor does xine, vlc, Firefox's native >plugins, mozplugger or anything else I can conjure to massage it to >recognize it or play it. From tb at baechler.net Mon May 7 01:45:05 2007 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 01:45:05 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Spectrum IEEE: The Technology of Text In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20070507084347.A367E35260E@mail1.pglaf.org> Fortunately, there are now many good software speech solutions to avoid this problem as long as you don't mind words being mispronounced. That's one nice thing about being blind, I can read for hours at a time without eyestrain! :-) At 11:55 PM 5/4/07 +0200, you wrote: >--- >The Technology of Text >By: Kevin Larson > >If you're reading this article on your computer, there's a good chance >you won't get all the way to the end. Not because you won't find it >utterly fascinating (trust me!), but because it will be hard on your >eyes. From schultzk at uni-trier.de Mon May 7 01:47:59 2007 From: schultzk at uni-trier.de (Schultz Keith J.) Date: Mon, 7 May 2007 10:47:59 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Spectrum IEEE: The Technology of Text In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hi All, First I agree with Bowerbirds comment(seperate post). Second, the quality of a monitor/screen is not just based on its resolution alone. There are alot more factors involved. I have be using computers for over 20 years and I can read/work 10-16 hours at a time. The problem is nowadays not so much the quality of the screens, but how they are used. That is, position, brightness and contrast. The longer I am at a screen the darker I set it! The next time I turn it on, normally you can not see anything!! One can get used to working long hours with computers. Most simply do not how to correctly set up their screens. Graphics processing power? C'mon! Any GPU would laugh at the difference between 100ppi and 200ppi for text and the GUI. Though one point you have is more or less right. A book is a lot nicer to cudle up to than a lap-top. Then there is the feel and smell of a book. regards Keith. Am 04.05.2007 um 23:55 schrieb Franz Fuchs: > > --- > The Technology of Text > By: Kevin Larson > > If you?re reading this article on your computer, there?s a good chance > you won?t get all the way to the end. Not because you won?t find it > utterly fascinating (trust me!), but because it will be hard on your > eyes. > > It?s not sentimentality that makes most people prefer reading books > and > magazines to squinting at their laptops. The quality of computer > text is > awful. It doesn?t have to be. > > The chief problem is the low resolution of computer screens. The color > LCD screens on most laptops and desktops today have a resolution of > only > about 100 pixels per inch. You need at least two or three times that > many pixels to begin to approach the quality of the printed page. The > output of even a cheap laser printer is six times as good. > > What?s more, screen resolutions have hardly budged in the last several > years, for a variety of reasons. For one, you?d need a lot more > computational power to make a difference you could easily see on your > screen. Moving from 100 ppi to 200 ppi, for instance, means your > computer would have four times as many pixels to fill, and that in > turn > would probably bog down your graphics processor or, in a laptop, > quickly drain your battery. Moore?s Law will eventually give us faster > chips, and new integrated- circuit designs are getting more > power- efficient. But making computer displays with higher pixel > densities is also costly, because you?re more likely to get dead > pixels > during manufacturing. > --- > > More: > > http://spectrum.ieee.org/may07/5049 > (ca. 4 800 words) > > Best regards > Franz Fuchs > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d From pbenoy at htc.net Tue May 8 17:39:30 2007 From: pbenoy at htc.net (pat benoy) Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 19:39:30 -0500 Subject: [gutvol-d] "A Better Horse" In-Reply-To: References: <1178403650.8655.61.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1132132627.20070505165052@noring.name> Message-ID: > > Don't they teach "significant digits" any longer? > They not only don't teach "significant digits" they don't teach order of operations either. For the record, I got so tired of writing Sig Figs -1 on exams and homeworks I had a stamp made so I didn't have to write it anymore. Anecdote: When my daughter was in middle school she was required to buy a graphing "scientific" calculator. We got her an hp 48G (overkill, I know) and taught her how to use it over the weekend, she was already familiar with RPN. So, she goes to school, the teacher tries to use it like a TI and says "This isn't a scientific calculator, you can't use it for this class it gives the wrong answer." Daughter replies, "You just have to do the calculations in the right order and you get the 'right' answer" and demonstrates. Teacher never heard of doing calculations in the 'right' order!!! [old crank]So my question is, "How can kids who invented text talk like 'c u l8er u r 2 c00l' ever decide that calculating by typing in equations with parens and brackets was in any way efficient?"[/old crank] Finals and DP keeping me busy. ;>) From pbenoy at htc.net Tue May 8 17:42:51 2007 From: pbenoy at htc.net (pat benoy) Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 19:42:51 -0500 Subject: [gutvol-d] Spectrum IEEE: The Technology of Text In-Reply-To: <20070507084347.A367E35260E@mail1.pglaf.org> References: <20070507084347.A367E35260E@mail1.pglaf.org> Message-ID: What software do you use? On Mon, 07 May 2007 03:45:05 -0500, Tony Baechler wrote: > Fortunately, there are now many good software speech solutions to > avoid this problem as long as you don't mind words being > mispronounced. That's one nice thing about being blind, I can read > for hours at a time without eyestrain! :-) > From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed May 9 15:49:51 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Wed, 9 May 2007 18:49:51 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun Message-ID: over on the d.p. bulletin boards, i've begun a demonstration about how z.m.l. can be used as a "master" to generate .rtf, .pdf, and other formats, on the fly, customized to user preferences. some people here have argued with me for _years_ -- quite literally -- about whether or not this was possible. they will shut up now... > http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=321904#321904 -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070509/7f5f37b0/attachment.htm From Catenacci at Ieee.Org Wed May 9 17:56:13 2007 From: Catenacci at Ieee.Org (Onorio Catenacci) Date: Wed, 9 May 2007 20:56:13 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 5/9/07, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: > over on the d.p. bulletin boards, > i've begun a demonstration about > how z.m.l. can be used as a "master" > to generate .rtf, .pdf, and other formats, > on the fly, customized to user preferences. > > some people here have argued with me for > _years_ -- quite literally -- about whether or > not this was possible. they will shut up now... > > > > http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=321904#321904 > Your quiet humility is an inspiration to all of us. -- Onorio From tb at baechler.net Wed May 9 20:18:45 2007 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 20:18:45 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Spectrum IEEE: The Technology of Text In-Reply-To: References: <20070507084347.A367E35260E@mail1.pglaf.org> Message-ID: <20070510031728.48DFE352614@mail1.pglaf.org> Hi, Actually, I use a commercial screen reading package called Window-Eyes for Windows and Vocal-Eyes for DOS. I use an external DEC-Talk Express which cost $1,200 new but is no longer made. Now you can get a DEC-Talk USB for $700. Obviously, that won't help you much although I personally prefer hardware speech synthesis over software. Besides, software puts a drain on memory and processor. For your purposes, you probably want something like TextAloud or similar. It is designed to read text and is probably more specialized to books etc. You also need a SAPI speech engine. Windows XP comes with Microsoft Sam which sounds horrible. You can probably still find Microsoft Mike and Mary but again the sound leaves something to be desired. AT&T Natural Voices sound much better but I think you need to buy them, likewise with Scansoft RealSpeak. On Linux, you can get the software DEC-Talk speech for I think $50 or $75. You're on your own with figuring out how to use it but I think Gnome has support for it. If you want DEC-Talk speech on Windows, you need to buy Access32 for software or an external unit for hardware. The software speech costs around $75. As always, Google is your friend and can probably answer questions better than I since I don't use commercial reading software except my screen readers. At 07:42 PM 5/8/07 -0500, you wrote: >What software do you use? > >On Mon, 07 May 2007 03:45:05 -0500, Tony Baechler wrote: > > > Fortunately, there are now many good software speech solutions to > > avoid this problem as long as you don't mind words being > > mispronounced. That's one nice thing about being blind, I can read > > for hours at a time without eyestrain! :-) > > > >_______________________________________________ >gutvol-d mailing list >gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org >http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d From jon at noring.name Thu May 10 06:33:10 2007 From: jon at noring.name (Jon Noring) Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 07:33:10 -0600 Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1536768227.20070510073310@noring.name> > over on the d.p. bulletin boards, > i've begun a demonstration about > how z.m.l. can be used as a "master" > to generate .rtf, .pdf, and other formats, > on the fly, customized to user preferences. > > some people here have argued with me for > _years_ -- quite literally -- about whether or > not this was possible.? they will shut up now... > >>?? http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=321904#321904 This is a mischaracterization, and one I would say is intentional since I've brought this up before. No one said it was "not possible." Rather, the arguments are that it is not sufficient for all the important needs. Please be more precise in describing those who have not been fully supportive of all your ideas about ZML, etc. Jon Noring From Bowerbird at aol.com Thu May 10 09:19:08 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 12:19:08 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun Message-ID: onorio said: > Your quiet humility is an inspiration to all of us. well, i am pleased to be inspiring, especially to those people who attacked me repeatedly for so many years. -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070510/09662eca/attachment.htm From schultzk at uni-trier.de Thu May 10 23:38:50 2007 From: schultzk at uni-trier.de (Schultz Keith J.) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 08:38:50 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun In-Reply-To: <1536768227.20070510073310@noring.name> References: <1536768227.20070510073310@noring.name> Message-ID: Am 10.05.2007 um 15:33 schrieb Jon Noring: >> over on the d.p. bulletin boards, >> i've begun a demonstration about >> how z.m.l. can be used as a "master" >> to generate .rtf, .pdf, and other formats, >> on the fly, customized to user preferences. >> >> some people here have argued with me for >> _years_ -- quite literally -- about whether or >> not this was possible. they will shut up now... >> >>> http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=321904#321904 > > > This is a mischaracterization, and one I would say is intentional > since I've brought this up before. > > No one said it was "not possible." > > Rather, the arguments are that it is not sufficient for all the > important needs. What are important needs and to whom? Maybe now that the system is it can be modified if the need is really soooo important ! regards Keith. From prosfilaes at gmail.com Fri May 11 05:19:25 2007 From: prosfilaes at gmail.com (David Starner) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 07:19:25 -0500 Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun In-Reply-To: References: <1536768227.20070510073310@noring.name> Message-ID: <6d99d1fd0705110519p2de9c38fi5496b5d8100ef390@mail.gmail.com> On 5/11/07, Schultz Keith J. wrote: > What are important needs and to whom? Maybe now that the > system is it can be modified if the need is really soooo > important ! Important needs to the people who currently produce the books. I suspect instead trying to prove _again_ that our needs really are "soooo important" we'll just continue to ignore ZML. From jon at noring.name Fri May 11 07:38:43 2007 From: jon at noring.name (Jon Noring) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 08:38:43 -0600 Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun In-Reply-To: References: <1536768227.20070510073310@noring.name> Message-ID: <1591598042.20070511083843@noring.name> Keith asked: > Jon Noring wrote: >> Bowerbird wrote: >>> over on the d.p. bulletin boards, >>> i've begun a demonstration about >>> how z.m.l. can be used as a "master" >>> to generate .rtf, .pdf, and other formats, >>> on the fly, customized to user preferences. >>> >>> some people here have argued with me for >>> _years_ -- quite literally -- about whether or >>> not this was possible. they will shut up now... >>> >>> http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=321904#321904 >> This is a mischaracterization, and one I would say is intentional >> since I've brought this up before. >> >> No one said it was "not possible." >> >> Rather, the arguments are that it is not sufficient for all the >> important needs. > What are important needs and to whom? Maybe now that the > system is it can be modified if the need is really soooo > important ! Your first question is a good one, and one that should be discussed if there's interest in doing so. Regarding "modifying the system", that's not the issue. It has to do with encoding the structural and semantic information in the master texts. Bowerbird claims that the various structures he is able to encode in the text using ZML are sufficient for all needs of DP and PG (and therefore probably all texts in the world). Several of us disagree with that assertion. "Zero markup" approaches to unambiguously record *and* machine-recognize the structures/semantics of text is quite limited. XML, on the other hand, has no limits to what it may record. Jon Noring (p.s., certainly ZML will sufficiently characterize the structures/semantics of *some* documents. So the argument is not that ZML [will/doesn't] "work", but whether it is sufficient for all needs of PG and DP. It is sufficient for some texts, but not all of them.] From Catenacci at Ieee.Org Fri May 11 08:04:15 2007 From: Catenacci at Ieee.Org (Onorio Catenacci) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 11:04:15 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun In-Reply-To: <1591598042.20070511083843@noring.name> References: <1536768227.20070510073310@noring.name> <1591598042.20070511083843@noring.name> Message-ID: On 5/11/07, Jon Noring wrote: > Keith asked: > > Jon Noring wrote: > >> Bowerbird wrote: > > >>> over on the d.p. bulletin boards, > >>> i've begun a demonstration about > >>> how z.m.l. can be used as a "master" > >>> to generate .rtf, .pdf, and other formats, > >>> on the fly, customized to user preferences. > >>> > >>> some people here have argued with me for > >>> _years_ -- quite literally -- about whether or > >>> not this was possible. they will shut up now... > >>> > >>> http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=321904#321904 > > >> This is a mischaracterization, and one I would say is intentional > >> since I've brought this up before. > >> > >> No one said it was "not possible." > >> > >> Rather, the arguments are that it is not sufficient for all the > >> important needs. > > > What are important needs and to whom? Maybe now that the > > system is it can be modified if the need is really soooo > > important ! > > Your first question is a good one, and one that should be discussed if > there's interest in doing so. > > Regarding "modifying the system", that's not the issue. It has to do > with encoding the structural and semantic information in the master > texts. Bowerbird claims that the various structures he is able to > encode in the text using ZML are sufficient for all needs of DP and > PG (and therefore probably all texts in the world). Several of us > disagree with that assertion. "Zero markup" approaches to > unambiguously record *and* machine-recognize the structures/semantics > of text is quite limited. XML, on the other hand, has no limits to > what it may record. > > Jon Noring > > > (p.s., certainly ZML will sufficiently characterize the > structures/semantics of *some* documents. So the argument is not that > ZML [will/doesn't] "work", but whether it is sufficient for all needs > of PG and DP. It is sufficient for some texts, but not all of them.] > Good lord. Can't you all let this dead horse rot in peace for once? -- Onorio It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. --Nathaniel Borenstein From desrod at gnu-designs.com Fri May 11 08:35:13 2007 From: desrod at gnu-designs.com (David A. Desrosiers) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 11:35:13 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun In-Reply-To: References: <1536768227.20070510073310@noring.name> <1591598042.20070511083843@noring.name> Message-ID: <1178897713.30977.3.camel@localhost.localdomain> On Fri, 2007-05-11 at 11:04 -0400, Onorio Catenacci wrote: > Good lord. Can't you all let this dead horse rot in peace for once? Some of us have. :) -- David A. Desrosiers - desrod at gnu-designs.com "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now." -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070511/cfdfdcdd/attachment.pgp From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 11 09:34:27 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 12:34:27 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun Message-ID: pay attention, folks. we are passed the stage where we "debate" the efficacy of z.m.l. it's now pudding time. the demo has begun. it's proof by example. everybody's _firmly_ on the record already. noring, for example, predicted z.m.l. would work effectively on 50% of the p.g. e-texts. i'm saying it's more like 97.8%. time will tell. and the end-users will be the final judges... -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070511/e06266f1/attachment.htm From joshua at hutchinson.net Fri May 11 09:49:53 2007 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (joshua at hutchinson.net) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 16:49:53 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun Message-ID: <19854538.1178902193404.JavaMail.?@fh1035.dia.cp.net> Is bowerbird poking the carcass again? It's amazing how much less stressful my life became when I killfiled him. :) Josh >----Original Message---- >From: Catenacci at Ieee.Org >Date: May 11, 2007 11:04 >To: "Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion" >Subj: Re: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun > >On 5/11/07, Jon Noring wrote: >> Keith asked: >> > Jon Noring wrote: >> >> Bowerbird wrote: >> >> >>> over on the d.p. bulletin boards, >> >>> i've begun a demonstration about >> >>> how z.m.l. can be used as a "master" >> >>> to generate .rtf, .pdf, and other formats, >> >>> on the fly, customized to user preferences. >> >>> >> >>> some people here have argued with me for >> >>> _years_ -- quite literally -- about whether or >> >>> not this was possible. they will shut up now... >> >>> >> >>> http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=321904#321904 >> >> >> This is a mischaracterization, and one I would say is intentional >> >> since I've brought this up before. >> >> >> >> No one said it was "not possible." >> >> >> >> Rather, the arguments are that it is not sufficient for all the >> >> important needs. >> >> > What are important needs and to whom? Maybe now that the >> > system is it can be modified if the need is really soooo >> > important ! >> >> Your first question is a good one, and one that should be discussed if >> there's interest in doing so. >> >> Regarding "modifying the system", that's not the issue. It has to do >> with encoding the structural and semantic information in the master >> texts. Bowerbird claims that the various structures he is able to >> encode in the text using ZML are sufficient for all needs of DP and >> PG (and therefore probably all texts in the world). Several of us >> disagree with that assertion. "Zero markup" approaches to >> unambiguously record *and* machine-recognize the structures/semantics >> of text is quite limited. XML, on the other hand, has no limits to >> what it may record. >> >> Jon Noring >> >> >> (p.s., certainly ZML will sufficiently characterize the >> structures/semantics of *some* documents. So the argument is not that >> ZML [will/doesn't] "work", but whether it is sufficient for all needs >> of PG and DP. It is sufficient for some texts, but not all of them.] >> > >Good lord. Can't you all let this dead horse rot in peace for once? > >-- >Onorio > >It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would >ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional >ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to >which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. > >--Nathaniel Borenstein >_______________________________________________ >gutvol-d mailing list >gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org >http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 11 09:55:21 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 12:55:21 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun Message-ID: i said: > i'm saying it's more like 97.8%.? time will tell. > and the end-users will be the final judges.. oh, and the fact that a few people here have tuned out will make absolutely no difference to those final judges. nor will their indifference -- which is understandable as z.m.l. efficacy is a direct contradiction of their fu --- make one bit of difference in regard to z.m.l. uptake... i _do_ think it's funny that they do jump in quickly to say how they're ignoring things now. well, of course, when it comes time for you to be _proven_ to be wrong, it's no surprise you would ignore _that_ particular part. so please, kids, just go stick your heads back in the sand. if you wanted to score any _real_ points in this "debate", we all know you'd simply point to a z.m.l. _shortcoming_ and then show how your better system would handle it. but instances are much too few and far too far between. so you'll settle, like always, for slash-and-burn ad hominem and no-rational-content rejoinders. so even as a "debate", this thread comes up short. just like it has for years and years. -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070511/802fdd3d/attachment.htm From desrod at gnu-designs.com Fri May 11 10:20:18 2007 From: desrod at gnu-designs.com (David A. Desrosiers) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 13:20:18 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1178904018.30977.5.camel@localhost.localdomain> On Fri, 2007-05-11 at 12:55 -0400, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: > oh, and the fact that a few people here have tuned out > will make absolutely no difference to those final judges. I didn't think this was a "contest" to which judging was applied. z.m.l. is just another alternative format for which these works can be represented, like TEI, like ascii text, like XML and so on. -- David A. Desrosiers - desrod at gnu-designs.com "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now." -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070511/139fdf25/attachment-0001.pgp From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 11 11:08:02 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 14:08:02 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun Message-ID: hacker david said: > I didn't think this was a "contest" to which judging was applied. > z.m.l. is just another alternative format for which these works > can be represented, like TEI, like ascii text, like XML and so on. of course it's a contest. there have been _striking_ differences of opinion here on the relative costs and benefits of various workflows. these have been at such variance with each other that it polarized into sides, long before you even _arrived_. and with such a huge gap between the perspectives, one side must be right and one side must be wrong. it's that stark. that's what the end-users -- the judges -- will decide, which side was correct and which side was incorrect... they will put into play their own cost/benefit analysis, and that will determine the path of their journey... -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070511/89bd924c/attachment.htm From desrod at gnu-designs.com Fri May 11 11:23:18 2007 From: desrod at gnu-designs.com (David A. Desrosiers) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 14:23:18 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1178907798.30977.19.camel@localhost.localdomain> > these have been at such variance with each other that > it polarized into sides, long before you even _arrived_. I've been on this list much longer than when you think I "arrived". > and with such a huge gap between the perspectives, > one side must be right and one side must be wrong. > it's that stark. The world isn't that black & white, and never will be. This isn't a place where technology is in a "win" or "lose" situation. When, in any capacity, have you seen a single technology product or piece of software "win", causing all other competing or similar products or applications to just give up and close shop? z.m.l. is an alternative, and one which I'm sure will find its niche, and that's exactly the point. Everyone has a need, and there is no single thing that solves that need for every single person who has it. > that's what the end-users -- the judges -- will decide, > which side was correct and which side was incorrect... Exactly. There will be both winners and losers, and z.m.l. will place among both categories, as will everything else existing or to be created in the future. That's how it works. > they will put into play their own cost/benefit analysis, > and that will determine the path of their journey... With everyone being their own judge, z.m.l. then wins, loses and is disqualified; all of the above, across the users who decide to sample its capabilities. -- David A. Desrosiers - desrod at gnu-designs.com "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now." -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070511/629f60ad/attachment.pgp From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 11 11:58:58 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 14:58:58 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun Message-ID: hacker david said: > I've been on this list much longer than when you think I "arrived". i'd dig up the date of your first post, but it hardly seems worth it. > The world isn't that black & white, and never will be. > This isn't a place where technology is in a "win" or "lose" situation. technologies get left in the dust every day. > When, in any capacity, have you seen a single technology product > or piece of software "win", causing all other competing or similar > products or applications to just give up and close shop? i've got a museum of antiquated stuff sitting right here in this room. need a zip drive? how 'bout some diskettes? a copy of wordperfect? how about a version of pagemaker when it was still made by aldus? > z.m.l. is an alternative, and one which I'm sure will find its niche, > and that's exactly the point. Everyone has a need, and there is no > single thing that solves that need for every single person who has it. perhaps you need to be reminded that the main question _here_ is what format can be used as the "master format" for the p.g. library. in a nutshell, i say the best cost/benefit ratio is produced by z.m.l. other people have different opinions. the divide has become stark. it is possible for _opinions_ to vary. but when it comes down to raw _costs_ and _benefits_, then the question of who will _pay_ for things (even if they "pay" for them with their time and energy and expertise) enters the picture, and then we're out of the realm of pure subjectivity, and in a place where misjudging the amounts can be a severe mistake. > With everyone being their own judge, z.m.l. then wins, loses > and is disqualified; all of the above, across the users who > decide to sample its capabilities. we'll see who wins and who loses with the _vast_majority_ of end-users. i have pointed out several times how i see the preponderance of evidence pointing to a migration _away_ from heavy markup, toward light markup... whether i point it out again, or whether you acknowledge it or not, the fact of the matter is that if people chose light markup, light markup will prevail. you technoids who want to make things as difficult as possible, so that people have to bow down to your expertise, will be disintermediated just as surely as the corporations and the mass-media and the politicians... -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070511/e2520848/attachment.htm From desrod at gnu-designs.com Fri May 11 12:14:30 2007 From: desrod at gnu-designs.com (David A. Desrosiers) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 15:14:30 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1178910870.30977.24.camel@localhost.localdomain> On Fri, 2007-05-11 at 14:58 -0400, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: > whether i point it out again, or whether you acknowledge it or not, > the fact of the matter is that if people chose light markup, light > markup will prevail. And its been pointed out to you many, many times, "people" don't author documents, publishers and writers do. "People" read documents, and they could care less what the underlying format is, as long as the information in the document they're expecting, is conveyed in a way that they understand it, and in a way they can digest. > you technoids who want to make things as difficult as possible, so > that people have to bow down to your expertise, will be > disintermediated just as surely as the corporations and the mass-media > and the politicians... Actually, if you see it as a "technoid" threat, then you're obviously fighting the wrong battle. I'm personally not a fan of doing the same work over and over every time a new device, format, technology or application comes out that doesn't support the previous incarnation. I'd rather do a thing once, and not have to worry about re-architecting that thing multiple times for the same basic outcome. Call me a technoid, but its all about reducing the number of times I have to touch that "thing" to make it work for me and for my target userbase. Shrug. Let's move on. -- David A. Desrosiers - desrod at gnu-designs.com "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now." -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070511/868edf28/attachment.pgp From Catenacci at Ieee.Org Fri May 11 12:58:08 2007 From: Catenacci at Ieee.Org (Onorio Catenacci) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 15:58:08 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun In-Reply-To: <1178910870.30977.24.camel@localhost.localdomain> References: <1178910870.30977.24.camel@localhost.localdomain> Message-ID: On 5/11/07, David A. Desrosiers wrote: > On Fri, 2007-05-11 at 14:58 -0400, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: > > whether i point it out again, or whether you acknowledge it or not, > > the fact of the matter is that if people chose light markup, light > > markup will prevail. > > And its been pointed out to you many, many times, "people" don't author > documents, publishers and writers do. "People" read documents, and they > could care less what the underlying format is, as long as the > information in the document they're expecting, is conveyed in a way that > they understand it, and in a way they can digest. > > > you technoids who want to make things as difficult as possible, so > > that people have to bow down to your expertise, will be > > disintermediated just as surely as the corporations and the mass-media > > and the politicians... > You know Bowerbird, as others have pointed out repeatedly to you, it doesn't matter whether or not zml can handle the various markup chores. The people contributing texts to PG will vote with their feet (so to speak) and so far, it looks like most of them have voted for plain text and html. And I would guess it will continue to be that way for the foreseeable future. Since, as far as I can recall, Michael Hart has basically said on more than one occasion that he's not going to dictate a standard markup format for PG, the question of whether or not zml can handle the markup chores is moot anyway. Unless he changes his mind and decides to declare zml (or tei or whatever) the standard format in which everyone must submit texts, all your debate about the merits of zml vs. other markups is navel-gazing and self-indulgence. Your demonstration may prove that zml is capable of handling all the markup people need for all the texts they want to contribute to PG. Congratulations. You've now demonstrated that you're capable of providing a solution that no one seems to want to use. Where should we send the check? I think it was Yogi Berra who once said something like "If people don't want to come to the ballgame, you're can't stop them." If people don't want to use zml you can crow all you like about how much simpler it is than tei and how you're demonstrating that it works--it doesn't make one whit of difference. -- Onorio It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. --Nathaniel Borenstein From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 11 15:43:00 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 18:43:00 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun Message-ID: hacker-david said: > And its been pointed out to you many, many times, > "people" don't author documents, publishers and writers do. um, didn't you get the memo, david? we're _all_ publishers and writers now. > "People" read documents, and they could care less > what the underlying format is, as long as the information > in the document they're expecting, is conveyed in a way > that they understand it, and in a way they can digest. whoa, nelly. that is an eloquent statement in favor of michael hart's plain-text approach, if i ever heard one. unfortunately, it's not entirely true. we find that in the real world of humans who like to read e-books that they want to convert e-books into a variety of formats. mobipocket, palm, sony, rocketbook, iliad, and more. even plucker. so there's two ways to handle the desire. one, you can make yourself responsible for generating those auxiliary formats. two, you can let the user do it. the former is easier on the user, but gives 'em less control. the latter is sometimes a bit more work, but since it gives the user the ability to customize their e-book, i prefer it. > I'd rather do a thing once, and not have to worry about > re-architecting that thing multiple times for the same basic outcome. so would those end-users. they don't _like_ doing conversions. but it's a funny thing, david. when they do those conversions, they _often_ start out with the p.g. plain-ascii as their seed-bed. because "re-architecting that thing" is usually the simplest way... > Shrug. Let's move on. i have moved on. to real books demonstrating my workflow. you seem to think we're still back in the old "debate" period... -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070511/5aa6f7dd/attachment.htm From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 11 15:48:56 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 18:48:56 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the demonstration has begun Message-ID: onorio said: > You know Bowerbird, as others have pointed out repeatedly to you nobody needed to point this out to me even once, let alone "repeatedly". > it doesn't matter whether or not zml can handle the various markup chores. when my adversaries thought z.m.l. could _not_ "handle the various markup chores", then it was _very_much_ about this so-called "shortcoming". it's only now, when i am making it totally clear that z.m.l. _can_ do the job that, all of a sudden, "it doesn't matter". > The people contributing texts to PG will vote with their feet > (so to speak) and so far, it looks like most of them have > voted for plain text and html.? And I would guess it will > continue to be that way for the foreseeable future. i'm not proposing a shift away from plain-text or from .html. z.m.l. _is_ a plain-text file. a z.m.l. could be submitted to p.g. _as_is_, and would be accepted. indeed, it's already been done. and i'm now demonstrating the ability of z.m.l. to generate .html. let's see how many people "vote with their feet" in terms of doing their own .html markup once they know they have a reliable way to do it automatically, with the click of one button, while using z.m.l. and let's just take this a couple steps further down the line, since that's where the _real_ benefits of a z.m.l. approach will manifest. let's say an end-user wants to custom-modify a d.p. .html-book. he's got to dig into the .html that was hand-coded by a volunteer, and figure it out in order to change it. now let's say that same end-user was using a z.m.l. file instead. he just sets the preferences in my viewer-app the way he likes 'em, and clicks a button to generate his customized .html version. bingo. so, which approach do _you_ think that end-user is going to prefer? i know which way i'm placing my bet. but wait, there's more. let's say down the line, in 5 years or so, there's a new development and all the .html files in the p.g. library need to be changed to accommodate. again, some individual is going to have to go into each file individually -- because each one of them might have been individually tailored -- and use their expertise to decide exactly how to execute the modification. take a look at some of these .html-books to see how difficult that will be. whereas with the z.m.l. mirror of the library, i'll just regenerate the .html. there's only one reasonable way to handle a digital library, and that's to do it in a programmatic fashion. david moynihan has proven it already, by demonstrating that he could handle all the p.g. e-texts -- and more -- by making the input files uniform so that his scripting could manage them. > Since, as far as I can recall, Michael Hart has basically said on more than > one occasion that he's not going to dictate a standard markup format big deal. so what? michael will support any and every format, as long as you are willing to do the gruntwork to make it happen. seems fair to me. > the question of whether or not zml can handle the markup chores is moot if it was a "moot" question, why did some people here spend _years_ fighting it. nope, you're _wrong_. perhaps you don't understand how _revolutionary_ a zen markup format will be. but the limitation of your vision doesn't affect me. > Unless he changes his mind and decides to declare zml (or tei or whatever) > the standard format in which everyone must submit texts who needs to be a format fascist? michael asks people for plain-text. i'm happy to do the work to convert the plain-text files into .zml format. if you actually spend time examining the .zml file i pointed to in this thread -- -- you will see it's remarkably similar to the p.g. e-text. the main changes i made were to add blank lines above the headings, in order to _bring_the_file_into_compliance_ with the actual rules that appear in the f.a.q. (i.e., four blank lines above a chapter-heading and two blank lines below, in case you wonder.) > all your debate about the merits of zml vs. other markups > is navel-gazing and self-indulgence. navel-gazing? self-indulgence? evidently you don't do any actual digitizing, or you'd know that doing it takes some work. to the extent that that work can be minimized, that is a good thing. a very good thing, indeed. certainly not "navel-gazing", or "self-indulgence". > You've now demonstrated that you're capable of > providing a solution that no one seems to want to use. well, we'll see whether anyone "seems to want to use" z.m.l. when we turn it loose on the world. you might be surprised. > If people don't want to use zml you can crow all you like about > how much simpler it is than tei and how you're demonstrating > that it works--it doesn't make one whit of difference. since there was a good deal of discussion for several years here about _whether_ z.m.l. would work -- with most people saying that it would _not_ work, not for a significant percentage of the library, at any rate -- then you can bet your sweet ass that i will continue to prove it does indeed work, for several years to come. if you wanna keep saying it's "moot" for that length of time, feel free. you wouldn't be the first person on this list to sacrifice your credibility. -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070511/ff5786ea/attachment.htm From robert_marquardt at gmx.de Sat May 12 10:36:00 2007 From: robert_marquardt at gmx.de (Robert Marquardt) Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 19:36:00 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] download statistics Message-ID: That "2 B R O 2 B" by Kurt Vonnegut is top is believable, but sometimes the numbers are incredibly high. Is there a bug? I know that someone (probably Marcello) has experimented with the statistics. Maybe something has not been properly restored. -- Robert Marquardt (Team JEDI) http://delphi-jedi.org From Bowerbird at aol.com Sat May 12 14:05:23 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 17:05:23 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] our users Message-ID: i can't remember. are our target-users so smart that they can modify c.s.s. and swap out stylesheets and fiddle with encodings and pipe stuff in linux? or are they so dumb that they don't know how to change line-endings in a file to what they want? i keep forgetting which it is... -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070512/315450b0/attachment.htm From gegut at edwardjohnson.com Sat May 12 16:45:08 2007 From: gegut at edwardjohnson.com (G. Edward Johnson) Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 19:45:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] download statistics In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <36854.69.140.172.223.1179013508.squirrel@webmail8.pair.com> There was an article about it on boingboing earlier this month, that is a pretty high trafic blog so it probably resulted in a lot of downloads. http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/04/vonneguts_2br02b_on_.html Max sez, "2BR02B, a story by Kurt Vonnegut, originally published in sci-fi mag 'World's of If' but never published in book form has turned up at Project Gutenberg." ... Robert Marquardt wrote: > That "2 B R O 2 B" by Kurt Vonnegut is top is believable, but sometimes > the numbers are incredibly high. Is there a bug? > I know that someone (probably Marcello) has experimented with the > statistics. Maybe something has not been properly > restored. > -- > Robert Marquardt (Team JEDI) http://delphi-jedi.org > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > From tb at baechler.net Sun May 13 22:46:00 2007 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 22:46:00 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] FBReader Message-ID: <20070514054430.VCOE1205.dukecmmtar02.coxmail.com@Tony.baechler.net> >Hi, Has anyone looked at this program? I know it runs on FreeBSD because I saw it just added to the ports tree. Presumably it runs on Linux but I don't know about Windows. It at least looks interesting and I'm wondering what people think. Does it require a GUI? Is this something that PG wants to support? > > FBReader is a book reader. Main features: > * Supported formats: fb2, HTML, CHM, plucker, Palmdoc, zTxt, TCR, RTF, > OEB, OpenReader, mobipocket, plain text. > * Direct reading from tar, zip, gzip and bzip2 archives. > * Supported encodings: utf-8, us-ascii, windows-1251, windows-1252, > koi8-r, ibm866, iso-8859-*, Big5, GBK. > * Automatically generated contents table. > * Embedded images support. > * Footnotes/hyperlinks support. > * Position indicator. > * Keeps the last open book and the last read positions for all opened > books between runs. > * List of last opened books. > * Automatic hyphenations. Liang's algorithm is used. Patterns for Czech, > English, Esperanto, French, German and Russian are included in the > current version. > * Text search. > * Full-screen mode. > * Screen rotation by 90, 180 and 270 degrees. > > WWW: http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/ ---------- Tony Baechler Baechler Productions From desrod at gnu-designs.com Sun May 13 23:40:01 2007 From: desrod at gnu-designs.com (David A. Desrosiers) Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 02:40:01 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] FBReader In-Reply-To: <20070514054430.VCOE1205.dukecmmtar02.coxmail.com@Tony.baechler.net> References: <20070514054430.VCOE1205.dukecmmtar02.coxmail.com@Tony.baechler.net> Message-ID: <1179124801.8916.10.camel@localhost.localdomain> On Sun, 2007-05-13 at 22:46 -0700, Tony Baechler wrote: > Has anyone looked at this program? I know it runs on FreeBSD because > I saw it just added to the ports tree. Presumably it runs on Linux > but I don't know about Windows. I just fetched the source, built it up on Linux and ran a few Plucker docs through it. It needs a bit of formatting help, but it does seem to work pretty well. I built the gtk+ version to test. > It at least looks interesting and I'm wondering what people think. > Does it require a GUI? It looks interesting for a multi-arch, multi-format reader, definitely. It needs some sort of GUI to function, and supports Opie, GPE, Maemo, Maemo2, gtk+, qt, qt4, Win32, Qtopia and Palm... not sure how well each of those works though. It isn't "console-based", if that's what you mean. > Is this something that PG wants to support? How would you propose PG support the FBReader project? -- David A. Desrosiers - desrod at gnu-designs.com "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now." -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070514/b98933d1/attachment.pgp From pbenoy at htc.net Mon May 14 05:30:38 2007 From: pbenoy at htc.net (pat benoy) Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 07:30:38 -0500 Subject: [gutvol-d] Spectrum IEEE: The Technology of Text In-Reply-To: <20070510031728.48DFE352614@mail1.pglaf.org> References: <20070507084347.A367E35260E@mail1.pglaf.org> <20070510031728.48DFE352614@mail1.pglaf.org> Message-ID: Tony; Thanks for all the info. Sorry it took so long to reply. RL keeps getting in the way of my E-life. :>) Pat On Wed, 09 May 2007 22:18:45 -0500, Tony Baechler wrote: > Hi, > > Actually, I use a commercial screen reading package called > Window-Eyes for Windows and Vocal-Eyes for DOS. I use an external > DEC-Talk Express which cost $1,200 new but is no longer made. Now > you can get a DEC-Talk USB for $700. Obviously, that won't help you > much although I personally prefer hardware speech synthesis over > software. Besides, software puts a drain on memory and processor. > > For your purposes, you probably want something like TextAloud or > similar. It is designed to read text and is probably more > specialized to books etc. You also need a SAPI speech > engine. Windows XP comes with Microsoft Sam which sounds > horrible. You can probably still find Microsoft Mike and Mary but > again the sound leaves something to be desired. AT&T Natural Voices > sound much better but I think you need to buy them, likewise with > Scansoft RealSpeak. > > On Linux, you can get the software DEC-Talk speech for I think $50 or > $75. You're on your own with figuring out how to use it but I think > Gnome has support for it. If you want DEC-Talk speech on Windows, > you need to buy Access32 for software or an external unit for > hardware. The software speech costs around $75. As always, Google > is your friend and can probably answer questions better than I since > I don't use commercial reading software except my screen readers. > > At 07:42 PM 5/8/07 -0500, you wrote: >> What software do you use? >> >> On Mon, 07 May 2007 03:45:05 -0500, Tony Baechler >> wrote: >> >> > Fortunately, there are now many good software speech solutions to >> > avoid this problem as long as you don't mind words being >> > mispronounced. That's one nice thing about being blind, I can read >> > for hours at a time without eyestrain! :-) >> > >> >> _______________________________________________ >> gutvol-d mailing list >> gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org >> http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > From robert_marquardt at gmx.de Mon May 14 05:36:43 2007 From: robert_marquardt at gmx.de (Robert Marquardt) Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 14:36:43 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] FBReader In-Reply-To: <20070514054430.VCOE1205.dukecmmtar02.coxmail.com@Tony.baechler.net> References: <20070514054430.VCOE1205.dukecmmtar02.coxmail.com@Tony.baechler.net> Message-ID: <2dlg43dsge5p6u40ubcmvnde55i6gj95ds@4ax.com> On Sun, 13 May 2007 22:46:00 -0700, you wrote: >Has anyone looked at this program? I know it runs on FreeBSD because >I saw it just added to the ports tree. Presumably it runs on Linux >but I don't know about Windows. It at least looks interesting and >I'm wondering what people think. Does it require a GUI? Is this >something that PG wants to support? Looks like a good idea to me. http://www.mobileread.com is the website to read. There all sorts of ebook devices and readers are discussed. Also http://naebllc.com where the Baen barflies (Baens Bar being the forum of the SF publisher Baen http://www.baen.com) try to have their own ebook reader custom-built. -- Robert Marquardt (Team JEDI) http://delphi-jedi.org From j.hagerson at comcast.net Mon May 14 05:44:48 2007 From: j.hagerson at comcast.net (John Hagerson) Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 07:44:48 -0500 Subject: [gutvol-d] Syntax based text reformatting Message-ID: <000001c79625$a879f630$1f12fea9@sarek> An article on SlashDot "Scientists Offer New Way to Read Online Text" http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/11/148220&from=rss led to "Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting: A New Method to Enhance Online Reading" http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/r_walker/ The authors assert that a block of text is not the best format for communication. Their software analyzes the syntax of a sentence and reformats the material into shorter lines of varying length and indentation. They claim that this process enhances reading speed and comprehension. A Minnesota-based company has developed and patented the system. They are deciding what to do next with regard to commercializing their research. An approximation of their example text is as follows: When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. From desrod at gnu-designs.com Mon May 14 06:45:50 2007 From: desrod at gnu-designs.com (David A. Desrosiers) Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 09:45:50 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] FBReader In-Reply-To: <2dlg43dsge5p6u40ubcmvnde55i6gj95ds@4ax.com> References: <20070514054430.VCOE1205.dukecmmtar02.coxmail.com@Tony.baechler.net> <2dlg43dsge5p6u40ubcmvnde55i6gj95ds@4ax.com> Message-ID: <1179150350.8916.12.camel@localhost.localdomain> On Mon, 2007-05-14 at 14:36 +0200, Robert Marquardt wrote: > Looks like a good idea to me. http://www.mobileread.com is the website > to read. There all sorts of ebook devices and readers are discussed. I just logged in and it looks like I'm still an editor over there. I should get off my butt and start posting articles again. Thanks for the subtle kick in the pants. -- David A. Desrosiers - desrod at gnu-designs.com "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now." -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070514/631cb7f5/attachment.pgp From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed May 16 14:15:17 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 17:15:17 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] "were you are" Message-ID: i like to use google to find common typos in phrases... a search for "were you are" -- typo of "where you are" -- gets 162,000 hits, fairly big... while some of them are correct -- > realize what an angel you > were. You are my living spirit -- (google's punctuation blindness), but most of 'em are just plain typos. -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070516/4716f9c1/attachment.htm From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed May 16 14:45:56 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 17:45:56 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] "appreciate you sacrifices" Message-ID: if, based on my last post, you google: > "an angel you were. You are my living spirit" you'll come up with this: > I appreciate you sacrifices for me and realize > what an angel you were. You are my living spirit notice the typo of "you" for "your"? so ok, let's google that: > "appreciate you sacrifices" 9 instances of that. -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070516/78d97c7c/attachment.htm From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed May 16 14:53:57 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 17:53:57 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] "were you are" Message-ID: ok, so "were you are" returned 162,000 hits; however, some of them were valid instances: > Even if you only manage ten minutes at the > keyboard and get three paragraphs written, > you are further ahead than you were. You are > priming your pump; so, a search for "you were you are" found 16,800; ok, fine, subtract those from the original 162,000. i then did a search for "they were you are" and... wow, that's really strange. can anyone explain it? -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070516/f82d9778/attachment.htm From mkengel at gmail.com Wed May 16 22:54:04 2007 From: mkengel at gmail.com (Michael Engel) Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 14:54:04 +0900 (JST) Subject: [gutvol-d] Copyright theories and Problems with Copyright and Trade Dress Message-ID: <1034739.36481.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1179381244.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> FYI The Origin of Two American Copyright Theories * --A Case of the Reception of English Law -- Hideaki Shirata http://orion.mt.tama.hosei.ac.jp/hideaki/twocopy.htm and Problems with Copyright and Trade Dress Gregory Aharonian www.patenting-art.com/copyprob/cpyqst-e.htm [Regarding the latter, PLEASE read it first and think about it, and do NOT just report what OTHER people say about him.] If MickyMouse would have been patented instead of copyrighted, it would be public domain since long. Cheers Michael From schultzk at uni-trier.de Thu May 17 23:58:28 2007 From: schultzk at uni-trier.de (Schultz Keith J.) Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 08:58:28 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] "were you are" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hi, Though I quite do not understand what your point is, I did the google "they were you are" and just look at the first twenty results. I would say mark it up to the google punctuation blindness. Keith Am 16.05.2007 um 23:53 schrieb Bowerbird at aol.com: > ok, so "were you are" returned 162,000 hits; > however, some of them were valid instances: > > Even if you only manage ten minutes at the > > keyboard and get three paragraphs written, > > you are further ahead than you were. You are > > priming your pump; > > so, a search for "you were you are" found 16,800; > ok, fine, subtract those from the original 162,000. > > i then did a search for "they were you are" and... > > wow, that's really strange. can anyone explain it? > > -bowerbird > > > > ************************************** > See what's free at http://www.aol.com. > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070518/f0724294/attachment.htm From tb at baechler.net Fri May 18 20:40:20 2007 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 20:40:20 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] FBReader In-Reply-To: <1179124801.8916.10.camel@localhost.localdomain> References: <20070514054430.VCOE1205.dukecmmtar02.coxmail.com@Tony.baechler.net> <1179124801.8916.10.camel@localhost.localdomain> Message-ID: <20070519034032.0A9CE352611@mail1.pglaf.org> Hi, Too bad it isn't console-based, I was hoping but I'm not surprised. It looked like a graphical program. Since it's multiarch and multiformat, I was thinking that maybe PG should mention it on the FAQ pages or something. Maybe "support" isn't the right word since PG doesn't have any official formats, but I'm sure people have asked what program they should use. PG could suggest this since it runs on Windows, FreeBSD and Linux and does plain text as well as many other formats. Oh, and it's open source which is in the spirit of PG. At 02:40 AM 5/14/07 -0400, you wrote: >It looks interesting for a multi-arch, multi-format reader, definitely. >It needs some sort of GUI to function, and supports Opie, GPE, Maemo, >Maemo2, gtk+, qt, qt4, Win32, Qtopia and Palm... not sure how well each >of those works though. It isn't "console-based", if that's what you >mean. > > > Is this something that PG wants to support? > >How would you propose PG support the FBReader project? From robert_marquardt at gmx.de Fri May 18 21:09:22 2007 From: robert_marquardt at gmx.de (Robert Marquardt) Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 06:09:22 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] FBReader In-Reply-To: <20070519034032.0A9CE352611@mail1.pglaf.org> References: <20070514054430.VCOE1205.dukecmmtar02.coxmail.com@Tony.baechler.net> <1179124801.8916.10.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20070519034032.0A9CE352611@mail1.pglaf.org> Message-ID: On Fri, 18 May 2007 20:40:20 -0700, you wrote: >Too bad it isn't console-based, I was hoping but I'm not >surprised. Huh? How could a decent ebook reader be? Anything beyond plain text needs graphic. An alternative could be Plucker, but for that the development needs to go active again. -- Robert Marquardt (Team JEDI) http://delphi-jedi.org From sly at victoria.tc.ca Sat May 19 07:26:39 2007 From: sly at victoria.tc.ca (Andrew Sly) Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 07:26:39 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] FBReader In-Reply-To: <20070519034032.0A9CE352611@mail1.pglaf.org> References: <20070514054430.VCOE1205.dukecmmtar02.coxmail.com@Tony.baechler.net> <1179124801.8916.10.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20070519034032.0A9CE352611@mail1.pglaf.org> Message-ID: Since the PG main web presence is now a wiki, anyone could create a page something along hte lines of Reader Programs for PG texts. Andrew On Fri, 18 May 2007, Tony Baechler wrote: > It looked like a graphical program. Since it's multiarch > and multiformat, I was thinking that maybe PG should mention it on > the FAQ pages or something. Maybe "support" isn't the right word > since PG doesn't have any official formats, but I'm sure people have > asked what program they should use. PG could suggest this since it > runs on Windows, FreeBSD and Linux and does plain text as well as > many other formats. Oh, and it's open source which is in the spirit of PG. > From Bowerbird at aol.com Sat May 19 11:32:09 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 14:32:09 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] FBReader Message-ID: andrew said: > Since the PG main web presence is now a wiki, > anyone could create a page something along > hte lines of Reader Programs for PG texts well, technically, _almost_ anyone... :+) but yeah, that would be a good idea. -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070519/9ef201dc/attachment.htm From schultzk at uni-trier.de Mon May 21 00:20:28 2007 From: schultzk at uni-trier.de (Schultz Keith J.) Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 09:20:28 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] FBReader In-Reply-To: <20070519034032.0A9CE352611@mail1.pglaf.org> References: <20070514054430.VCOE1205.dukecmmtar02.coxmail.com@Tony.baechler.net> <1179124801.8916.10.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20070519034032.0A9CE352611@mail1.pglaf.org> Message-ID: Hi, I am somewhat confused ? If it is not console-based, and it is a program then it is graphical? If it is not graphical and not console-based then: 1) it is a library 2) a background-app ( it is called by other programs) 3) is a server. Or are you trying to say it is a command-line-tool, then it is console-based, but does not have interactive user-interface. Just trying to clear up the langauge use here. regards Keith. Am 19.05.2007 um 05:40 schrieb Tony Baechler: > Hi, > > Too bad it isn't console-based, I was hoping but I'm not > surprised. It looked like a graphical program. Since it's multiarch > and multiformat, I was thinking that maybe PG should mention it on > the FAQ pages or something. Maybe "support" isn't the right word > since PG doesn't have any official formats, but I'm sure people have > asked what program they should use. PG could suggest this since it > runs on Windows, FreeBSD and Linux and does plain text as well as > many other formats. Oh, and it's open source which is in the > spirit of PG. > > At 02:40 AM 5/14/07 -0400, you wrote: >> It looks interesting for a multi-arch, multi-format reader, >> definitely. >> It needs some sort of GUI to function, and supports Opie, GPE, Maemo, >> Maemo2, gtk+, qt, qt4, Win32, Qtopia and Palm... not sure how well >> each >> of those works though. It isn't "console-based", if that's what you >> mean. >> >>> Is this something that PG wants to support? >> >> How would you propose PG support the FBReader project? > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d From mkengel at gmail.com Wed May 23 20:06:02 2007 From: mkengel at gmail.com (Michael Engel) Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 12:06:02 +0900 (JST) Subject: [gutvol-d] German Projekt Gutenberg Message-ID: <1034739.33638.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1179975962.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> Hallo. Does anyone know if there is a download page for the German Projekt Gutenberg ? The situation now (splitted books in HTML) is just annoying. Thanks Michael From sly at victoria.tc.ca Wed May 23 20:23:57 2007 From: sly at victoria.tc.ca (Andrew Sly) Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 20:23:57 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] German Projekt Gutenberg In-Reply-To: <1034739.33638.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1179975962.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> References: <1034739.33638.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1179975962.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> Message-ID: Two main differences you will find is that PG-DE claims some form of copyright on its texts, and only presents them in the split-up html format you have mentioned. I remember seeing reference to a site that had texts from PG-DE reformatted with all the text concatinated in plain text files... Ok, here it is: http://energia.cl-ki.uni-osnabrueck.de/lit/gb_html.php Andrew On Thu, 24 May 2007, Michael Engel wrote: > Hallo. > Does anyone know if there is a download page for the German Projekt > Gutenberg ? > The situation now (splitted books in HTML) is just annoying. > Thanks > Michael > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > From schultzk at uni-trier.de Wed May 23 23:29:24 2007 From: schultzk at uni-trier.de (Schultz Keith J.) Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 08:29:24 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] German Projekt Gutenberg In-Reply-To: <1034739.33638.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1179975962.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> References: <1034739.33638.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1179975962.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> Message-ID: <115ACE5A-C2C1-48A6-ACCF-49CFF1E36770@uni-trier.de> Hi Micheal, To my knowledge the so called German Projekt Gutenberg has no affiliation with Project Gutenberg. They are just using the name. regards Keith. Am 24.05.2007 um 05:06 schrieb Michael Engel: > Hallo. > Does anyone know if there is a download page for the German Projekt > Gutenberg ? > The situation now (splitted books in HTML) is just annoying. > Thanks > Michael > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d From mkengel at gmail.com Wed May 23 23:59:42 2007 From: mkengel at gmail.com (Michael Engel) Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 15:59:42 +0900 (JST) Subject: [gutvol-d] German Projekt Gutenberg In-Reply-To: <115ACE5A-C2C1-48A6-ACCF-49CFF1E36770@uni-trier.de> References: <1034739.33638.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1179975962.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> <115ACE5A-C2C1-48A6-ACCF-49CFF1E36770@uni-trier.de> Message-ID: <1034739.41115.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1179989982.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> > To my knowledge the so called German Projekt Gutenberg has > no affiliation with Project Gutenberg. They are just using the name. Thank you for all comments. There is something fishy about this project, see the corresponding Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projekt_Gutenberg-DE It is a pity that the respectable German magazine "Der Spiegel" is backing it. Best regards Michael From schultzk at uni-trier.de Thu May 24 00:52:03 2007 From: schultzk at uni-trier.de (Schultz Keith J.) Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 09:52:03 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] German Projekt Gutenberg In-Reply-To: <1034739.41115.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1179989982.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> References: <1034739.33638.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1179975962.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> <115ACE5A-C2C1-48A6-ACCF-49CFF1E36770@uni-trier.de> <1034739.41115.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1179989982.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> Message-ID: <59D29E05-D829-4CD4-9045-F8D13AB55023@uni-trier.de> Hi Micheal, There is nothing fishy about it. They use the name. Have absolutely nothing to do with PG. The site is so to say semi commercial even though they give away the text, yet they sell CDs. Am 24.05.2007 um 08:59 schrieb Michael Engel: >> To my knowledge the so called German Projekt Gutenberg has >> no affiliation with Project Gutenberg. They are just using the name. > > Thank you for all comments. There is something fishy about this > project, > see the corresponding Wikipedia entry: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projekt_Gutenberg-DE > > It is a pity that the respectable German magazine "Der Spiegel" is > backing > it. > > Best regards > Michael > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d From ralf at ark.in-berlin.de Thu May 24 00:40:42 2007 From: ralf at ark.in-berlin.de (Ralf Stephan) Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 09:40:42 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] German Projekt Gutenberg In-Reply-To: References: <1034739.33638.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1179975962.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> Message-ID: <20070524074042.GA1192@ark.in-berlin.de> > I remember seeing reference to a site that had texts from > PG-DE reformatted with all the text concatinated in > plain text files... Ok, here it is: > http://energia.cl-ki.uni-osnabrueck.de/lit/gb_html.php Many thanks for that link, earlier I fiddled with wget and lynx to get me the texts. While Gutenberg-DE is not Gutenberg, I think PG should have the above link somewhere on its pages! Regards, ralf From joshua at hutchinson.net Thu May 24 05:14:16 2007 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (joshua at hutchinson.net) Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 12:14:16 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [gutvol-d] German Projekt Gutenberg Message-ID: <16271314.1180008856597.JavaMail.?@fh1063.dia.cp.net> >----Original Message---- >From: schultzk at uni-trier.de > > There is nothing fishy about it. They use the name. > Have absolutely nothing to do with PG. The site > is so to say semi commercial even though they give away > the text, yet they sell CDs. > Well, yes and no. Yes, they are separate from PG. However, Michael Hart gave them specific permission to use the Gutenberg trademark, and so they are, in effect, running under PG's "approval". Personally, I find their methods distasteful under the Gutenberg trademark, but I long ago realized that Michael and I disagree on how the trademark should be used. And since he owns the trademark, his opinion is the one that really matters. Josh From sly at victoria.tc.ca Thu May 24 06:57:14 2007 From: sly at victoria.tc.ca (Andrew Sly) Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 06:57:14 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] German Projekt Gutenberg In-Reply-To: <20070524074042.GA1192@ark.in-berlin.de> References: <1034739.33638.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1179975962.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> <20070524074042.GA1192@ark.in-berlin.de> Message-ID: On Thu, 24 May 2007, Ralf Stephan wrote: > > While Gutenberg-DE is not Gutenberg, I think PG should have > the above link somewhere on its pages! > There are many dozens of other web sites that have collections of texts not found on PG. You would be welcome to make a list of these on the PG site if you wish. Andrew From Bowerbird at aol.com Thu May 24 16:05:16 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 19:05:16 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail Message-ID: these people offer e-books in segments via e-mail: > http://www.dailylit.com can't say for sure, but wouldn't be surprised if they're using project gutenberg e-texts for their content... they also have pointers to amazon to purchase books. the single example that i checked pointed to _dover_, which i guess is better than the other "republishers" who charge for hard-copy of project gutenberg titles. sure would be nice, though, if p.g. could put itself into the revenue stream resulting from printed-copy sales... -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070524/b8701357/attachment.htm From hart at pglaf.org Thu May 24 18:33:45 2007 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 18:33:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, 24 May 2007, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: > these people offer e-books in segments via e-mail: >> http://www.dailylit.com > > can't say for sure, but wouldn't be surprised if they're > using project gutenberg e-texts for their content... > > they also have pointers to amazon to purchase books. > the single example that i checked pointed to _dover_, > which i guess is better than the other "republishers" > who charge for hard-copy of project gutenberg titles. > > sure would be nice, though, if p.g. could put itself into > the revenue stream resulting from printed-copy sales... And what would Project Gutenberg DO with all that money? Do we really need more than enough to pay one full timer, one part time accountant, and pay for the CDs and DVDs we send out around the world, a scanner once in while. . . ? Here's a serious question for everyone: What would YOU havce PG do with a million dollars or two? Michael From Bowerbird at aol.com Thu May 24 22:49:04 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 01:49:04 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail Message-ID: michael said: > And what would Project Gutenberg DO with all that money? i floated the idea so other people could act on it if they wanted to. either way, _i_ am gonna act on it. and the money i collect is gonna go toward buying michael hart some health insurance. because he ain't getting any younger... and last i heard, hospitals won't accept free e-texts as payment. i just have to find a 501(c)3 that i can route the money through, since i presume p.g. wouldn't let mr. hart be such a beneficiary. -bowerbird p.s. besides, it won't be all _that_ much money. ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070525/89269bd5/attachment.htm From hart at pglaf.org Fri May 25 00:40:43 2007 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 00:40:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, 25 May 2007, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: > michael said: >> And what would Project Gutenberg DO with all that money? > > i floated the idea so other people could act on it if they wanted to. > > either way, _i_ am gonna act on it. > > and the money i collect is gonna go toward buying michael hart > some health insurance. because he ain't getting any younger... > and last i heard, hospitals won't accept free e-texts as payment. > > i just have to find a 501(c)3 that i can route the money through, > since i presume p.g. wouldn't let mr. hart be such a beneficiary. Actually, I think they would, but if not, we do have another one that has already talked to me about such thing. . .and healt ins has been on my mind lately. . .I wonder you are telepathic. > > -bowerbird > > p.s. besides, it won't be all _that_ much money. There's always Moore where that came from. Twice as much in 18 months! ;-))) > > > > ************************************** > See what's free at http://www.aol.com. > From traverso at dm.unipi.it Fri May 25 01:27:54 2007 From: traverso at dm.unipi.it (Carlo Traverso) Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 10:27:54 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail In-Reply-To: (message from Michael Hart on Thu, 24 May 2007 18:33:45 -0700 (PDT)) References: Message-ID: <200705250827.l4P8RsQ04050@pico.dm.unipi.it> >>>>> "Michael" == Michael Hart writes: Michael> Here's a serious question for everyone: Michael> What would YOU have PG do with a million dollars or two? Michael> Michael I would pay a few full-time programmers to code the enhancements to Distributed Proofreaders code that have been planned since longtimes and cannot be coded since real life and paid jobs have priority. Carlo Traverso From mkengel at dinj.de Fri May 25 01:46:43 2007 From: mkengel at dinj.de (Michael Engel) Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 17:46:43 +0900 (JST) Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail In-Reply-To: <200705250827.l4P8RsQ04050@pico.dm.unipi.it> References: <200705250827.l4P8RsQ04050@pico.dm.unipi.it> Message-ID: <1034739.19664.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1180082803.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> > Michael> What would YOU have PG do with a million dollars or two? Build a database with authors and books - for the future. Make alerts/lists "book X" of "author Y" is becoming public domain in "year". Program a calculation software; input "book/author" output "public domain in US/CA/GB/DE/..." in "year". Let someone regularly search the internet for textfiles or scans of books which could be digitized in the future. Increase the coverage of languages. From traverso at dm.unipi.it Fri May 25 02:59:35 2007 From: traverso at dm.unipi.it (Carlo Traverso) Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 11:59:35 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail In-Reply-To: <1034739.19664.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1180082803.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> (mkengel@dinj.de) References: <200705250827.l4P8RsQ04050@pico.dm.unipi.it> <1034739.19664.XAMJXAlJE1M=.1180082803.squirrel@webmailer.hosteurope.de> Message-ID: <200705250959.l4P9xZk11327@pico.dm.unipi.it> >>>>> "Michael" == Michael Engel writes: Michael> What would YOU have PG do with a million dollars or two? Michael> Build a database with authors and books - for the future. Michael> Make alerts/lists "book X" of "author Y" is becoming Michael> public domain in "year". Program a calculation software; Michael> input "book/author" output "public domain in Michael> US/CA/GB/DE/..." in "year". www.kingkong.demon.co.uk is already doing a great job on this. If PG decided to give some awards for work useful to PG, kingkong would clearly deserve one. Carlo Traverso From joshua at hutchinson.net Fri May 25 06:44:05 2007 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (joshua at hutchinson.net) Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 13:44:05 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail Message-ID: <20488574.1180100645674.JavaMail.?@fh1038.dia.cp.net> >----Original Message---- >From: hart at pglaf.org > >Here's a serious question for everyone: > >What would YOU havce PG do with a million dollars or two? > I can't be the only one that's sat around on a slow commute dreaming of how to spend millions of dollars from the lottery (and if I actually *played* the lottery, I'd might have a slightly higher chance of winning...) 1 - Fund a full time cataloger. The volunteers we have now are amazing in their work ethic, but everything needs to be overhauled and fixed and rigid standards put in place. 2 - Fund a full time developer (or two) for Distributed Proofreaders. They've always got 10x more work than volunteer developers. 3 - Fund a true database driven, on-the-fly conversion backend for the PG server. Convert everything to a format that supports easy conversion to myriad different output formats with heavy customization settings. Make the conversion process modular so that when format "WhizBangCool v2.0" comes out, we can plug in a conversion module fairly easily to support it. 4 - Create a multi-tiered collection. First tier would be image scans with just machine OCR (think Google books). As fast as we can get our grubby little hands on books and images, they get posted. Then, as DP or single volunteers get to them, they would be converted to proper eBooks like what we are used to seeing PG. 5 - Low-key marketing program to get PG into library catalog systems. If Joe Sixpack goes to the library and searches on Shakespeare, the regular paper copies on the shelf come up, but also links to download PG copies. 6 - Low-key lobby group to fight against stupid copyright laws. Obviously, some of these are higher priority than others (and some, like the lobby group, I'd have to think long and hard on even if I had millions and millions to burn through). Josh PS I notice others have responded, but I wanted to write my ideas before seeing everything elses. From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 25 13:13:51 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 16:13:51 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] rewriting the history of his predictions Message-ID: jon noring has made a comment over on the teleblahg where he tries to rewrite the history of his predictions... for quite a few years, starting in 1995, he predicted that high-resolution screens would be "dirt-cheap in 5 years". he continued repeating this prediction until about 2000, when _i_ started noting that his time-frame of "5 years" _hadn't_changed_ in the last 5 years, and that in 2000 -- just like in 1995 -- the tech was still "5 years away". yet even then, he continued with the "5 years" crap for a few more years, until about 2002, when he dropped it... now -- ironically, _5_years_later_ -- he's back again, except now he's rewriting the history, claiming that his predictions were in "the late 1990s" and he now claims that they gave a time-frame of "5-10 years"... give it up, jon, there's too much stuff on the record, and your credibility is shattered -- just like your crystal ball... are consumers ever gonna get high-resolution screens? well, yeah, it's very likely. a year or two back, i started to put the time-frame at "5 years or so", precisely because we were then _beginning_ to see such screens appearing -- the tip-off was when the macdonalds fast-food joints changed to thin color-screens for their order monitors -- albeit not yet in consumer products or at consumer prices. you know the hardware industry will soak business first -- especially the medical industry, which its huge need for high-resolution color-screens for their imaging -- and then the high-income early-adopter gadget-lovers -- we started seeing screens on g.p.s. devices last year -- before they _gradually_ (i.e., over the course of _years_) lower the price to the mass-consumer level. and _until_ they've squeezed all the dollars out of the marketplace, we're not gonna get _anything_ dirt-cheap from them... heck, apple is gonna charge _$500_ for their phone, which has a high-resolution color-screen the size of _an_index_card_, and they're gonna sell _millions_, so why would someone give us a paperbook-sized screen for anything less than that? especially when the alternative is a grayscale sony reader that's currently going for $300+? so wait for consumer-level high-resolution color-screens that are "dirt-cheap" to come along around 2010-2014... and of course, be ready to laugh at jon noring when he will try to say "i told you so..." with a straight face... -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070525/1c738f53/attachment.htm From jon at noring.name Fri May 25 13:39:03 2007 From: jon at noring.name (Jon Noring) Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 14:39:03 -0600 Subject: [gutvol-d] rewriting the history of his predictions In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1334498718.20070525143903@noring.name> Bowerbird wrote: > jon noring has made a comment over on the teleblahg > where he tries to rewrite the history of his predictions... Amazing how fast you found my comment. You must constantly be reading the TeleRead blog. ***** Anyway, I won't bother to reply to the rest of Bowerbird's mostly off-topic reply to this group, especially because of the vitriolic nature of it. Jon Noring (p.s., for those interested in my comment, here's the link to the article in question: http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=6602 I appreciate whatever thoughts you have on the questions I raise.) From jon at noring.name Fri May 25 14:56:20 2007 From: jon at noring.name (Jon Noring) Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 15:56:20 -0600 Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail Message-ID: <812572726.20070525155620@noring.name> Carlo Traverso wrote: > Michael Hart asked seriously: >> Here's a serious question for everyone: >> What would YOU have PG do with a million dollars or two? > I would pay a few full-time programmers to code the enhancements to > Distributed Proofreaders code that have been planned since longtimes > and cannot be coded since real life and paid jobs have priority. Interesting question by Michael, and interesting answer by Carlo. It is definitely a question that Distributed Proofreaders probably needs to ask of themselves (note that PG and DP are now two different 501(c)3 organizations, even if there are ties between them.) To provide some of my thoughts regarding DP and its long-wanted "next generation" server-side application, let's bring this back to earth and assume that DP won't get a huge pile of money dumped on them right out of the blue to do with as they wish. The first question DP might ask is if such a "next-gen" application (either "as-is" or modified) might be marketable elsewhere, both commercially and for use by other non-profit ventures. (If the application ends up being open source, one can still market it as a finished product, or market the services to adapt the product to the client. OSoft and its dotReader is an example of building a business and revenue model around open source code.) If there is some market out there, one can put together a business plan or proposal and use that to secure funding for the application development. One important goal in the business plan is to develop an ongoing revenue stream to keep the application team together to continue with future DP development needs (as well as develop other marketable products!) In addition, one possible architecture to consider for application development is to not do it "in-house", but rather to spin-off a separate company (either for-profit or non-profit depending upon a variety of factors best answered by competent business and legal advice) and do it there. Then the application would be licensed back to DP, probably by some special perpetual arrangement. So I'd ask the DP folk to think about how their "next-gen" application could be used by others in some fashion, and see if there is an opportunity that can be leveraged. So long as DP only thinks about how the "next-gen" system will work for them, and them alone, it may cause them to miss an enabling funding/revenue opportunity. Jon Noring From traverso at dm.unipi.it Fri May 25 15:23:00 2007 From: traverso at dm.unipi.it (Carlo Traverso) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 00:23:00 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail In-Reply-To: <812572726.20070525155620@noring.name> (message from Jon Noring on Fri, 25 May 2007 15:56:20 -0600) References: <812572726.20070525155620@noring.name> Message-ID: <200705252223.l4PMN0G31374@pico.dm.unipi.it> DP code is GPL-ed, on sourceforge, and is currently used by at least 5 different sites. Carlo From lee at novomail.net Fri May 25 14:36:11 2007 From: lee at novomail.net (Lee Passey) Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 15:36:11 -0600 Subject: [gutvol-d] Conversion of TEI to HTML In-Reply-To: <45EB22F6.6060806@novomail.net> References: <45E1B201.2030702@novomail.net> <61x2vLAn0g4FFwrm@thalasson.com> <156572968.20070225154637@noring.name> <45E33083.7030603@novomail.net> <45E33690.6010808@perathoner.de> <1185955344.20070226124940@noring.name> <45E34093.4010106@perathoner.de> <45E34B6B.6000602@novomail.net> <45E3595E.9080105@perathoner.de> <45E377FF.70706@novomail.net> <45E47ED9.7000403@perathoner.de> <45E49628.50204@novomail.net> <45E4B03C.7070109@perathoner.de> <45EB22F6.6060806@novomail.net> Message-ID: <465756CB.2020306@novomail.net> For those who are interested, I thought I would update you on the progress of the tei2html project. Let's begin with a brief recap of the project requirements: > The goal of the tei2html project is to develop a mechanism to convert > TEI-encoded files to HTML-encoded files, without embedded styles. > > Requirements: > > 1. The converter should work on /any/ TEI-encoded file. PGTEI > extensions can be ignored, but their presence should not cause > failure. > > 2. The output must look reasonably good on user agents which do not > support CSS styling, such as MobiPocket and ?Book. Thus, use of the > tag should be minimized, and "rend" attributes on block-level > elements may need to be refactored into two elements (e.g., '
rend="italics">content
' may need to be transformed into > '
content
). > > 3. Style attributes on individual elements are prohibited. > > 4. The mechanism must be CSS-aware, capable of matching requested > renderings with already declared styles. > > 5. The output will include a reference to a default CSS style sheet > before any embedded style declarations, and will include a reference > to a user CSS style sheet after all other style declarations. > > 6. Source code must be open and available for use by any person for > any purpose. Thus, inclusion of GPL licensed code is prohibited. I am pleased to say that the program is now far enough advanced that, while it is not yet complete, I believe it is nonetheless ready for prime time. An executable program for Microsoft Windows can be found at http://www.passkeysoft.com/~lee/tei2html.exe So far, only requirement #4 has not been satisfied. I discovered while building the other functionality that the plethora of style elements sown throughout the resultant HTML file by the existing XSLT script, which so many of us find objectionable, is generally /not/ a result of the need to preserve TEI rendering, but is, in fact, an artifact of the XSLT script itself apparently by applying the persistent.css style sheet to the source document. Thus, I believe that for in excess of 90% of the existing TEI documents the current program produces acceptable results, even without the sophisticated style sheet processing contemplated by requirement #4. Nevertheless, development of the program will continue until all of the requirements have been satisfied. The program has been tested against Mr. Perathoner's TEI version of _Alice in Wonderland_ (alice.xml, dated 22 October 2005), Mr. Bretheim's draft of _Shirley_ (Bronte-Shirley-draft.tei, dated 16 November 2006) as well as PGTEI texts numbers 15697, 15775, 19810, 20147, and 20840. In all cases the program produced valid HTML (although in some cases there were unrecognized attributes on elements). I've no doubt I've overlooked something, and there will be some valid TEI text which the program does not handle correctly; if anyone comes across this situation, I would appreciated being advised. Most of the "heavy lifting" in the program is handled by the Expat XML parsing libraries, and the DOM API for C DOM manipulation libraries. Source code for these libraries can be found at SourceForge.net. Remaining source code is available via anonymous CVS from www.passkeysoft.com; the module name is "tei2html" and the repository folder is "/var/lib/cvs/root" Feedback is solicited. -- Nothing of significance below this line. From jeroen.mailinglist at bohol.ph Fri May 25 16:42:25 2007 From: jeroen.mailinglist at bohol.ph (Jeroen Hellingman (Mailing List Account)) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 01:42:25 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail In-Reply-To: <812572726.20070525155620@noring.name> References: <812572726.20070525155620@noring.name> Message-ID: <46577461.5070906@bohol.ph> This is an interesting question indeed. I have been promoting some ideas on a next generation DP for quite some time (see my notes on the DP wiki: http://www.pgdp.net/wiki/User:Jhellingman/DP20), and I think, with a small team of smart people, you can really make a nice DP application for a fraction of such money. I have been thinking for some time whether Google (which has the money, and the interests) couldn't be motivated to provide resources for this (if even via their summer of code projects), but, as all know, lack of time has prevented me from pursuing this. For a million dollars, you can set up a small office with all required equipment in the Philippines, and hire a team of 30 programmers for a year, including management overhead. You will still have a hard time finding properly qualified people who understand the philosophy. I have been talking with somebody who owns call-centers and is investing in data processing centers in the Philippines, who is very much interested in such ideas. He is even putting his work force to work on data-entry of old texts to bridge gaps in work-availability and as training materials for his typists and technical team. I have been discussing using technologies as pioneered by DP for distributing the work, and thus lessening the need for large and (relatively) costly data processing centers in a kind of 'cyber cottage industry', etc., and I have been joking that I, using DP's pool of volunteers, actually have Philippine works corrected and entered more cheaply in the US, than he can process out-sourced US data-entry work in the Philippines. Well, I don't want to be guilty of setting up sweat-shops and reinventing 19th century labor conditions, but to answer Jon's question, I do believe the potential to market such tools is real. To give my answer to Michael Hart's question: Yes, I too would invest a good deal of it in improving the DP tools. Another big chunk would go into improving access to the texts: full search facilities, personal annotations, shared contributions, summaries, cross references, geographical and time-line tagging tools, bibliographic information, some of which too would follow the distributed effort philosophy of DP or for example Wikipedia. I would look into tools such as greenstone, to distribute entire libraries to third world schools not yet connected, and see how such things can be integrated into the 100 dollar laptop project. >From a final 100 grand, I would equip a scan-mobile, to tour around in developing countries, and digitize all kinds of one-of-a-kind materials, such as church records, etc. I wouldn't be puzzled on how to spend a million... although getting the best out of it may be difficult. Jeroen Hellingman Jon Noring wrote: > Carlo Traverso wrote: > >> Michael Hart asked seriously: >> > > >>> Here's a serious question for everyone: >>> What would YOU have PG do with a million dollars or two? >>> > > >> I would pay a few full-time programmers to code the enhancements to >> Distributed Proofreaders code that have been planned since longtimes >> and cannot be coded since real life and paid jobs have priority. >> > > Interesting question by Michael, and interesting answer by Carlo. > > It is definitely a question that Distributed Proofreaders probably > needs to ask of themselves (note that PG and DP are now two different > 501(c)3 organizations, even if there are ties between them.) > > To provide some of my thoughts regarding DP and its long-wanted > "next generation" server-side application, let's bring this back to > earth and assume that DP won't get a huge pile of money dumped on them > right out of the blue to do with as they wish. > > The first question DP might ask is if such a "next-gen" application > (either "as-is" or modified) might be marketable elsewhere, both > commercially and for use by other non-profit ventures. (If the > application ends up being open source, one can still market it as a > finished product, or market the services to adapt the product to the > client. OSoft and its dotReader is an example of building a business > and revenue model around open source code.) > > If there is some market out there, one can put together a business > plan or proposal and use that to secure funding for the application > development. One important goal in the business plan is to develop an > ongoing revenue stream to keep the application team together to > continue with future DP development needs (as well as develop other > marketable products!) > > In addition, one possible architecture to consider for application > development is to not do it "in-house", but rather to spin-off a > separate company (either for-profit or non-profit depending upon a > variety of factors best answered by competent business and legal > advice) and do it there. Then the application would be licensed back > to DP, probably by some special perpetual arrangement. > > So I'd ask the DP folk to think about how their "next-gen" > application could be used by others in some fashion, and see if there > is an opportunity that can be leveraged. So long as DP only thinks > about how the "next-gen" system will work for them, and them alone, > it may cause them to miss an enabling funding/revenue opportunity. > > Jon Noring > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > > From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 25 17:33:48 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 20:33:48 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail Message-ID: carlo said: > I would pay a few full-time programmers to code the enhancements to > Distributed Proofreaders code that have been planned since longtimes > and cannot be coded since real life and paid jobs have priority. that wouldn't be a wise investment. it would be smarter to pay them to rewrite the system from scratch. charlez had a _brilliant_ idea -- using the web to cumulate small amounts of proofreading energy from a large number of individuals -- but the way the system was actually _coded_ was suboptimal in a variety of respects... that's totally understandable, because it was one of the very first systems of its kind, so there weren't many models from which to draw experience. but now, with several years of hindsight, it's relatively easy to see where the infrastructure was badly architected. indeed, it's precisely because of the system's bad design that it has been so difficult to build on top of it... one of the worst problems has stemmed from the design parameter that depends upon a specific number of "rounds" for every page in every book. at first, the specification was for two of these "rounds" -- labeled r1 and r2. it's now grown to the point where there are _5_ rounds, 3 to do the proofing and 2 for formatting. (this doesn't count the initial task of "content providing", which involves scanning, when necessary, and other preparatory work, nor "post-processing", which is a book-wide "pulling-together" of the contents that is performed _after_ the 5 "distributed" rounds have all been completed. there is also a "post-processing verification", which is a final once-over, and then the book is sent to p.g., where "whitewashers" give it one more checkout. but the 5 rounds are the ones where work is "distributed" across many people.) the problem with this neat little system is that books aren't nearly so clear-cut. some pages -- maybe the bulk -- in some books are relatively easy to digitize, since they're just text with no complications. indeed, given today's quality o.c.r., it's not surprising to find these pages are perfect. other pages in the same book, however, can be more difficult. and then there are books where _most_ of the pages are difficult to digitize. (think of a dictionary to get a good idea of that.) so what you _really_ want is maximal _flexibility_ in the digitizing of each page. if it's an easy page, and you can dispense with it in a round or two, then do it. if it is a complicated page, which takes more rounds, then you should do that. and if it's an extremely difficult page, you need to do as many rounds as it takes. but the system at d.p. strait-jackets every book into the same number of rounds, so some pages have _more_ rounds than they need, and others have _too_few_... this problem is complicated by the fact that a decision was made that, in order to work in the later proofing rounds, you had to be a better proofer (i.e., pass a test). well, that had the effect that there are now many more proofers in the first round than in subsequent rounds (which are severely undermanned), but since the same number of pages need to go through each and every round, there has grown a large amount of text that has finished p1 but is now _backlogged_ at p2 and p3. after observing how slowly text is moving through p2 and p3, some people have calculated that these books will not be posted to p.g. for _several_years_ (ouch!), which is disappointing and depressing to them, for very understandable reasons. (remember that this is on top of the "sorry, your work isn't good enough for p2" message that many people _felt_ they'd received when told that they would have to pass a test in order to be certified to work in the later proofing rounds, a message that bristled to some of them in view of the fact they are volunteering their time. from my "thick-skin" perspective, people shouldn't take things like that so hard, but over at d.p. with its "praise-only" tradition, you can see why some got hurt.) anyway, so now there are many "experiments" going on to jockey texts through, skipping rounds to engineer around the huge queues. some do look promising, but none of them are likely to work as well as the ideal -- a "roundless" system -- where each page is worked on for as long as it needs more work and then no more. (this is fairly easy to ascertain, as changes are _no_longer_ being made to the page.) the programmers now maintaining the code -- who are pretty sharp cookies -- say that it's simply too difficult to rework the code to install a roundless system. i'm not sure why that's the case, but i have little option but to believe them about it. but i'm sure -- given all the drama at d.p. in the last few years -- that if they _could_ have quickly and easily brought about a roundless system, then they _would_ have... thus, given their inability to do that, i think further building on that code-base would not be a smart idea. given the extensive experience people have with wiki technology (when you think about it, wikipedia itself is a "distributed" system creating tons of text), and the widespread use of web-based-wysiwyg-word-processing, among other things, a much more versatile system could be assembled now. that'd be a better investment... and i am absolutely certain that it could be built at a very minimal cost. indeed, one programmer over at d.p. has set out alone to build a system for dp-canada, and as far as i can tell seems to have made rather good progress with his efforts so far. even more, i'm absolutely certain that _i_ could build such a system, and cheaply. but in the long run, it would be better if d.p. did _not_ rely on paid programmers at all. and i say that as a programmer, one who believes that programmers deserve to be paid, even when much of the world wants us to _donate_ our time and energy to open-source. the reason is that d.p. (and p.g. generally) is _a_volunteer_organization_ where _lots_ of people are donating their time and energy. to pick out one class of people there and say that _their_ contribution deserves remuneration is manifestly unfair and will -- in the long run -- be _largely_ counterproductive to the organization as a whole... -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070525/f4fe4765/attachment-0001.htm From mlockey at magma.ca Sat May 26 02:21:44 2007 From: mlockey at magma.ca (Michael Lockey) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 05:21:44 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20070526095959.1239C352634@mail1.pglaf.org> Here's a serious question for everyone: What would YOU havce PG do with a million dollars or two? -Set up DPs in all major linguistic areas, so PG is global in scope -Hire a recovery team to travel the libraries, monasteries, and other depositories of irreplaceable materials. -Gimme ten million dollars, and develop OCR for Arabic and Chinese... Michael Lockey No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.467 / Virus Database: 269.8.0/817 - Release Date: 5/24/2007 4:01 PM From tb at baechler.net Sat May 26 05:31:32 2007 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 05:31:32 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20070526123131.4067B35263B@mail1.pglaf.org> Hi, This is just my opinion but I would use the money to buy several high-speed scanners and buy or borrow as many pre-1923 books as possible. More than that, I would hire a professional proofreader or two and a couple whitewashers. There's nothing wrong with DP but a professional could supplement their output. I think the whitewashers by far have the hardest job and should get paid if there was money available. By hiring people to scan and getting fast scanners, maybe it would be possible to do 50-100 books per day instead of per week or per month. That would reach the goal of a million books a lot quicker. While we're at it, hire one or two translators to convert PG files into other languages. At 06:33 PM 5/24/07 -0700, you wrote: >What would YOU havce PG do with a million dollars or two? > > >Michael From robert_marquardt at gmx.de Sat May 26 05:59:33 2007 From: robert_marquardt at gmx.de (Robert Marquardt) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 14:59:33 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail In-Reply-To: <20070526123131.4067B35263B@mail1.pglaf.org> References: <20070526123131.4067B35263B@mail1.pglaf.org> Message-ID: <9kbg53974911i0rovtamr954283ndp9uuv@4ax.com> On Sat, 26 May 2007 05:31:32 -0700, you wrote: >Hi, > >This is just my opinion but I would use the money to buy several >high-speed scanners and buy or borrow as many pre-1923 books as >possible. More than that, I would hire a professional proofreader or >two and a couple whitewashers. There's nothing wrong with DP but a >professional could supplement their output. I think the whitewashers >by far have the hardest job and should get paid if there was money >available. By hiring people to scan and getting fast scanners, maybe >it would be possible to do 50-100 books per day instead of per week >or per month. That would reach the goal of a million books a lot >quicker. While we're at it, hire one or two translators to convert >PG files into other languages. I doubt that you can substantially speed up the work of DP. they are as professional as any company. Paying the whitewashers makes sense. Greg Weeks has a very long list to work on. -- Robert Marquardt (Team JEDI) http://delphi-jedi.org From ralf at ark.in-berlin.de Sat May 26 07:01:05 2007 From: ralf at ark.in-berlin.de (Ralf Stephan) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 16:01:05 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail In-Reply-To: <9kbg53974911i0rovtamr954283ndp9uuv@4ax.com> References: <20070526123131.4067B35263B@mail1.pglaf.org> <9kbg53974911i0rovtamr954283ndp9uuv@4ax.com> Message-ID: <20070526140105.GA15540@ark.in-berlin.de> You wrote > I doubt that you can substantially speed up the work of DP. they are as professional as any company. That's why there are so many scientific works among those projects? At least in the case of maths, there are a few amateurs doing professional work, fortunately, else you would have nothing scientific from PG. Regards, ralf (concentrating on german language math postprocessing) From ralf at ark.in-berlin.de Sat May 26 07:04:01 2007 From: ralf at ark.in-berlin.de (Ralf Stephan) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 16:04:01 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail In-Reply-To: <20488574.1180100645674.JavaMail.?@fh1038.dia.cp.net> References: <20488574.1180100645674.JavaMail.?@fh1038.dia.cp.net> Message-ID: <20070526140401.GB15540@ark.in-berlin.de> jhutch wrote > 2 - Fund a full time developer (or two) for Distributed Proofreaders. > They've always got 10x more work than volunteer developers. That's the 2nd plea for DP developers and here Fund a full time developer (or two) for Distributed Proofreaders. They've always got 10x more work than volunteer developers. is the third. ralf From Bowerbird at aol.com Sat May 26 11:44:19 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 14:44:19 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail Message-ID: michael lockey said: > Hire a recovery team to travel the libraries, monasteries, > and other depositories of irreplaceable materials. great suggestion! *** tony said: > buy several high-speed scanners and buy or borrow > as many pre-1923 books as possible. those are good too! *** robert said: > I doubt that you can substantially speed up the work of DP. wrong. they're about _half_ as efficient as they could be. *** ralf said: > and here > ... > is the third. i've already explained the problem with the d.p. codebase. spending money to build on a bad foundation is _unwise_. if d.p. was architected correctly, it would be easy to maintain. in an r.i.a. world, the d.p. infrastructure is an anachronism... and to those who might say that "rich internet apps" are hype, they _are_, at this point. but offline apps that interact fluently with the web -- r.s.s. readers are the best example -- are not. channeling users into the web-browser is now old-fashioned, especially for a thing as fundamentally straightforward as d.p., which reduces to the showing of images and collecting of text. any programmer quoting a price of $25,000+ is robbing you... -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070526/943f489a/attachment.htm From jon at noring.name Sat May 26 12:49:03 2007 From: jon at noring.name (Jon Noring) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 13:49:03 -0600 Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <425399938.20070526134903@noring.name> Bowerbird wrote: > michael lockey said: >>?Hire a recovery team to travel the libraries, monasteries, >>?and other depositories of irreplaceable materials. > great suggestion! A variant on this idea is to assist various institutions and organizations (other than libraries) to digitize their archives of "stuff". For example, local historical societies have huge amounts of items, and usually very little money and zero experience in digitizing what they have. Those who run these organizations usually have no library training, nor are these organizations even tied in with the local library system. A next-generation DP system, when properly designed from the ground up, could be used by such organizations to help create high-quality structured digital texts of their textual items. They should be able to gather a team of local volunteers to assist with scanning and proofing. These people may not be interested in proofing for DP -- old books may bore them -- but they would be motivated to work on content relating to their own community. DP does not need, and should not, centralize the production of digital texts, but rather to build the various tools and provide advice to help all kinds of organizations to digitize their stuff. DP could even evolve into an "umbrella" so that the mother organization oversees the development of tools, training, and integrating the digital content onto the Internet, and then there'd be all these organizations using these tools to do the actual work. For example, this is what is missing with the Internet Archive -- they are not focusing on helping groups to self-digitize their content -- they simply say "we'll archive and make available your digital content -- here's where to upload it. Thanks!" Jon Noring (p.s., as a related note, David Rothman and I have discussed a lot about how local libraries can fit into the digital future. In a highly digital world, many will question the value of local libraries, at least for collecting "books" which can be borrowed or bought from the Internet from anywhere in the world. What we see the value of the local libraries is to *focus* on local content, and to work to get that content digitized and integrated into the Internet. In essence, we give the local public library a new mission: to specialize in the content relating to their own community, rather than just being a warehouse for the same books held by every other library in the country.) From joshua at hutchinson.net Sat May 26 14:02:41 2007 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (joshua at hutchinson.net) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 21:02:41 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail Message-ID: <29487948.1180213361171.JavaMail.?@fh1063.dia.cp.net> >----Original Message---- >From: tb at baechler.net > By hiring people to scan and getting fast scanners, maybe >it would be possible to do 50-100 books per day instead of per week >or per month. Really, the scanning end of things is the least of the bottlenecks. We have more scanned pages than we have even a remote possibility of getting to in the near future. Josh From tb at baechler.net Sat May 26 20:39:18 2007 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 20:39:18 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail In-Reply-To: <200705252223.l4PMN0G31374@pico.dm.unipi.it> References: <812572726.20070525155620@noring.name> <200705252223.l4PMN0G31374@pico.dm.unipi.it> Message-ID: <20070527033917.F2976352644@mail1.pglaf.org> Really? Do they also produce books? What are they doing with the code? I didn't know that. At 12:23 AM 5/26/07 +0200, you wrote: >DP code is GPL-ed, on sourceforge, and is currently used by at least 5 >different sites. From ag737 at freenet.carleton.ca Sun May 27 12:12:04 2007 From: ag737 at freenet.carleton.ca (Wallace J.McLean) Date: Sun, 27 May 2007 15:12:04 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] e-text segments via e-mail Message-ID: <392391396574.396574392391@ncf.ca> Jon Noring ?crit : > DP does not need, and should not, centralize the production of digital > texts, but rather to build the various tools and provide advice to > help all kinds of organizations to digitize their stuff. DP could even > evolve into an "umbrella" so that the mother organization oversees the > development of tools, training, and integrating the digital content > onto the Internet, and then there'd be all these organizations using > these tools to do the actual work. In which case, the tools should be, as much as possible, designed as close as can be to one-time-for-all-time. Endless tinkering is what drove me, for example, from eBay as a useful tool for my purposes, four years ago. From hart at pglaf.org Wed May 23 12:56:13 2007 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 12:56:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Project Gutenberg Milestone [graph included] Message-ID: Project Gutenberg passes another eBooks milestone today, over 23,500 eBooks that have been created by the Project Gutenberg army of volunteers. . . . !!!!!!!My HUGE Congratulations to all the volunteers!!!!!!! This is including over 1500 contributions from Project Gutenberg Australia, and about 500 from Project Gutenberg Europe, but DOES NOT INCLUDE well over 75,000 eBooks dontated via http://www.gutenberg.cc to the Project Gutenberg Consortia Center, for a grand total of 100,000 eBooks. Here is the ASCII graph of the PG growth curve since the first schedule for eBook production was introduced as 1990 gave way to 1991. Note, the margins may be broken by various emailers, so I am also including the graph in an attachment for which you can hopefully set the margins. -90--91--92--93--94--95--96--97--98--99--00--01--02--03--04--05--06--07- 123412341234123412341234123412341234123412341234123412341234123412341234 23.516 on May 23, 2007 23.5k > 05/07 22,519 on February 23, 2007 22.5k > 02/07 22,001 on November 15, 2006 22k > 11/06 21,500 on October 9, 2006 21.5K > 10/06 21,002 on August 30, 2006 21K > 08/06 20,619 on August 2, 2006 20.5K > 08/06 20,000 on June 21, 2006 20K > 06/06 19,538 in May, 2006 19.5K > 05/06 19,020 On March 31, 2006 19K > 03/06 18,500 on February 13, 2006 18.5K > 02/06 Added ~216 from PG of Europe January 01, 2006 18K > 01/06 Added 1 from PG PrePrint Site, January, 2006 17.5K > 11/05 17K > 08/05 16.5K > 06/05 16K > 04/05 15.5K > 02/05 15K > 01/05 14.5K > 11/04 14K > 10/04 13.5K > 08/04 13K > 06/04 12.5K > 04/04 12K > 03/04 11.5K > 02/04 11K > 01/04 10.5K > 11/03 >>> October 15, 2003 >>> 10K > 10/03 9,500 > 09/03 9,000 > 08/03 8,500 > 07/03 8,000 > 05/03 7,500 > 03/03 Note this graph is in 1/4 years 7,000 > 01/03 6,500 > 12/02 6,000 > 09/02 5,500 > 07/02 5,000 > 04/02 4,500 > 02/02 Added PG Australia in August, 2001 4,000 > 10/01 3,500 > 05/01 3,000 > 12/00 2,500 > 08/00 2,000 > 12/99 1,500 > 10/98 1,000 > 08/97 500 > 4/96 100 >12/93 << 12/90 *[This date sometimes written 12/31/90 and sometimes 01/01/91] 12341234123412341234123412341234123412341234123412341234123412341234 QRTRS -90--91--92--93--94--95--96--97--98--99--00--01--02--03--04--05--06--07- Please note that many duplications have been detected and removed, between the various Project Gutenberg sites between 2006 and 2007, so the curve is appearing somewhat less for 2007 than under the old accounting system. Again, HUGE thanks to all the Project Gutenberg volunteers, of all time!!! Give the world eBooks in 2007!!! Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg 100,000 eBooks easy to download at: http://www.gutenberg.org [coming up on 25,000 eBooks] http://www/gutenberg.cc [already passed 75,000 eBooks] http://gutenberg.net.au Project Gutenberg of Australia 1500+ http://pge.rastko.net 65 languages PG of Europe ~500 July 4 to Aug 4 go to http://worldebookfair.com 2/3 million free eBooks, 110,000 commercial eBooks 787,000 total eBook files available Blog at http://hart.pglaf.org -------------- next part -------------- -90--91--92--93--94--95--96--97--98--99--00--01--02--03--04--05--06--07- 123412341234123412341234123412341234123412341234123412341234123412341234 23.516 on May 23, 2007 23.5k > 05/07 22,519 on February 23, 2007 22.5k > 02/07 22,001 on November 15, 2006 22k > 11/06 21,500 on October 9, 2006 21.5K > 10/06 21,002 on August 30, 2006 21K > 08/06 20,619 on August 2, 2006 20.5K > 08/06 20,000 on June 21, 2006 20K > 06/06 19,538 in May, 2006 19.5K > 05/06 19,020 On March 31, 2006 19K > 03/06 18,500 on February 13, 2006 18.5K > 02/06 Added ~216 from PG of Europe January 01, 2006 18K > 01/06 Added 1 from PG PrePrint Site, January, 2006 17.5K > 11/05 17K > 08/05 16.5K > 06/05 16K > 04/05 15.5K > 02/05 15K > 01/05 14.5K > 11/04 14K > 10/04 13.5K > 08/04 13K > 06/04 12.5K > 04/04 12K > 03/04 11.5K > 02/04 11K > 01/04 10.5K > 11/03 >>> October 15, 2003 >>> 10K > 10/03 9,500 > 09/03 9,000 > 08/03 8,500 > 07/03 8,000 > 05/03 7,500 > 03/03 Note this graph is in 1/4 years 7,000 > 01/03 6,500 > 12/02 6,000 > 09/02 5,500 > 07/02 5,000 > 04/02 4,500 > 02/02 Added PG Australia in August, 2001 4,000 > 10/01 3,500 > 05/01 3,000 > 12/00 2,500 > 08/00 2,000 > 12/99 1,500 > 10/98 1,000 > 08/97 500 > 4/96 100 >12/93 << 12/90 *[This date sometimes written 12/31/90 and sometimes 01/01/91] 12341234123412341234123412341234123412341234123412341234123412341234 QRTRS -90--91--92--93--94--95--96--97--98--99--00--01--02--03--04--05--06--07- From richfield at telkomsa.net Mon May 28 04:49:43 2007 From: richfield at telkomsa.net (Jon Richfield) Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 13:49:43 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Whitewashers? Message-ID: <465AC1D7.5080404@telkomsa.net> OK folks, I applaud all of you who have been making (largely praiseworthy) suggestions concerning what to do with oodles of money, (which in our case we have not got, of course) but I humbly confess that in my ignorance of matters concerning the publication professions, I do not know what *whitewashers* are, as opposed to proofreaders, editors and so on. (Please omit any no doubt brilliantly original, but misleading, punny business in reply!) Toleration and elucidation welcomed in roughly equal proportion, Thanks, (The other) Jon From robert_marquardt at gmx.de Mon May 28 11:08:25 2007 From: robert_marquardt at gmx.de (Robert Marquardt) Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 20:08:25 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Whitewashers? In-Reply-To: <465AC1D7.5080404@telkomsa.net> References: <465AC1D7.5080404@telkomsa.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 28 May 2007 13:49:43 +0200, you wrote: >OK folks, I applaud all of you who have been making (largely >praiseworthy) suggestions concerning what to do with oodles of money, >(which in our case we have not got, of course) but I humbly confess that >in my ignorance of matters concerning the publication professions, I do >not know what *whitewashers* are, as opposed to proofreaders, editors >and so on. (Please omit any no doubt brilliantly original, but >misleading, punny business in reply!) Whitewashers clear up the copyright. They check if a work is copyrighted or not. -- Robert Marquardt (Team JEDI) http://delphi-jedi.org From sankarrukku at gmail.com Mon May 28 11:09:52 2007 From: sankarrukku at gmail.com (Sankar Viswanathan) Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 23:39:52 +0530 Subject: [gutvol-d] Whitewashers? In-Reply-To: References: <465AC1D7.5080404@telkomsa.net> Message-ID: Whitewashers are the Posting Team of PG. They post the books submitted to PG and also handle Errata reports. On 5/28/07, Robert Marquardt wrote: > > On Mon, 28 May 2007 13:49:43 +0200, you wrote: > > >OK folks, I applaud all of you who have been making (largely > >praiseworthy) suggestions concerning what to do with oodles of money, > >(which in our case we have not got, of course) but I humbly confess that > >in my ignorance of matters concerning the publication professions, I do > >not know what *whitewashers* are, as opposed to proofreaders, editors > >and so on. (Please omit any no doubt brilliantly original, but > >misleading, punny business in reply!) > > Whitewashers clear up the copyright. They check if a work is copyrighted > or not. > -- > Robert Marquardt (Team JEDI) http://delphi-jedi.org > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > -- Sankar Service to Humanity is Service to God -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070528/2914fb62/attachment.htm From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 28 11:13:14 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 14:13:14 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Whitewashers? Message-ID: whitewashers check the files submitted to p.g. to make sure they comply with requirements... they will also often perform many related chores, like generating auxiliary versions of the e-texts. it's a lot of work, and it's largely "invisible", so they deserve a ton of credit and profuse thanks. hopefully, an actual whitewasher will step in and elaborate on the full gamut of their tasks. but given their modesty and busy schedules, it's altogether possible that might not happen, so i thought i'd sketch a general outline for you. -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070528/0b981c97/attachment.htm From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 28 11:17:08 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 14:17:08 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Whitewashers? Message-ID: blind men, meet elephant... :+) -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070528/d17205b7/attachment.htm From robert_marquardt at gmx.de Mon May 28 11:22:45 2007 From: robert_marquardt at gmx.de (Robert Marquardt) Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 20:22:45 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Whitewashers? In-Reply-To: References: <465AC1D7.5080404@telkomsa.net> Message-ID: <7a7m53dkv6f5k73s297nq9tq7p76lm1go1@4ax.com> On Mon, 28 May 2007 23:39:52 +0530, you wrote: >Whitewashers are the Posting Team of PG. They post the books submitted to PG >and also handle Errata reports. Not much to find on the website about this important team. I think the whitewashers should create a wiki page to step a bit more in the foreground. -- Robert Marquardt (Team JEDI) http://delphi-jedi.org From hart at pglaf.org Mon May 28 13:49:38 2007 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 13:49:38 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Whitewashers? In-Reply-To: <465AC1D7.5080404@telkomsa.net> References: <465AC1D7.5080404@telkomsa.net> Message-ID: Actually, the root of the "Whitewashers" was kind of a pun to start with, so I'm afraid _I_, at least can't answer fully without references to it. This group started when I, who had been doing all the copyright research, and final shepherding of the uploaded files into a suitable format for an electronic dissemination, could no longer keep up with the load, which is rather easy to understand as Project Gutenberg grew from one book a month to two, to four, to eight, to sixteen to thirty-two. . .and just so fast, I went from doing one books per month to one per day, plus one or two for the shorter months, and plus one every Sunday in February. So I put out a general call for help, as I wanted to jump to 64/month and could see no way to accomplish that without an expensive cloning process, not that anyone would have put up with TWO of me, anyway. . . . If you look at the various histories of Project Gutenberg, you will see a pause around 32 books per month, as a struggled under the load, tried for some extra institutional assistance that never materialized, etc. Here is a brief snippet: Year # For Monthly Goals Yearly Goals Actual eBooks Numbered 1991 1 eBook Per month 12 Per Year 22 Total eBook Numbers 1992 2 eBooks Per month 24 Per Year 47 Total eBook Numbers 1993 4 eBooks Per month 48 Per Year 95 Total eBook Numbers 1994 8 eBooks Per month 96 Per Year 191 Total eBook Numbers 1995 16 eBooks Per month 192 Per Year 383 Total eBook Numbers 1996 32 eBooks Per month 384 Per Year 768 Total eBook Numbers [We did one more than scheduled, as we released two Wizard of Oz eBooks in February, hence the change from odd to even numbers at the end of a year.] Year # For Monthly Goals Yearly Goals Actual eBooks Numbered 1997 32 eBooks Per month 384 Per Year 1152 Total eBook Numbers [Due to a lack of resources, we did not double our goal this year] 1998 40 eBooks Per month 480 Per Year 1580 Total eBook Numbers [Due to a lack of resources, we did not double our goal this year] [However, we did 28 more than the 480 that were scheduled = 428] 1999 40 eBooks Per month 480 Per Year 2018 Total eBook Numbers [Again we scheduled 40 per month, this time adding 38 more = 438, in our effort to pass #2,000 by December 10, as we had with #100, 6 years before] Please note this does NOT include the 19 numbers reserved for Britannica or the reservation of 2001 for "2001" with Arthur C. Clarke's permission as having been subtracted out as per our "reserved" newsletter entries-- therefore the the counts after about #200 are a little too high. Thank You!!! Give the world eBooks in 2007!!! Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg 100,000 eBooks easy to download at: http://www.gutenberg.org [coming up on 25,000 eBooks] http://www/gutenberg.cc [already passed 75,000 eBooks] http://gutenberg.net.au Project Gutenberg of Australia 1500+ http://pge.rastko.net 65 languages PG of Europe ~500 July 4 to Aug 4 go to http://worldebookfair.com 2/3 million free eBooks, 110,000 commercial eBooks 787,000 total eBook files available Blog at http://hart.pglaf.org From hart at pglaf.org Mon May 28 13:52:44 2007 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 13:52:44 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Whitewashers? In-Reply-To: References: <465AC1D7.5080404@telkomsa.net> Message-ID: funny. . .in looking over those numbers, I remember how disappointed I was that we couldn't move to 64 per month as scheduled. . .but when I look out on the graphs of our progress I can't even see a little bump there. funny how the past looks sooo smoooth in restrospect. . . . mh From sly at victoria.tc.ca Mon May 28 14:04:57 2007 From: sly at victoria.tc.ca (Andrew Sly) Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 14:04:57 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Whitewashers? In-Reply-To: <7a7m53dkv6f5k73s297nq9tq7p76lm1go1@4ax.com> References: <465AC1D7.5080404@telkomsa.net> <7a7m53dkv6f5k73s297nq9tq7p76lm1go1@4ax.com> Message-ID: Ummm... that suggestions in itself shows a slight misunderstanding. The whitewashers have a large, never-ending backlog of "things to do for PG", and I'm pretty sure putting together a wiki page such as you mention would be a pretty low priority. You can find a mention of them as the "posting team" here: http://pge.rastko.net/faq/V-16 Andrew On Mon, 28 May 2007, Robert Marquardt wrote: > On Mon, 28 May 2007 23:39:52 +0530, you wrote: > > >Whitewashers are the Posting Team of PG. They post the books submitted to PG > >and also handle Errata reports. > > Not much to find on the website about this important team. I think the whitewashers should create a wiki page to step a > bit more in the foreground. > From richfield at telkomsa.net Tue May 29 12:23:36 2007 From: richfield at telkomsa.net (Jon Richfield) Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 21:23:36 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Whitewashers! Message-ID: <465C7DB8.5020509@telkomsa.net> Folks, much thanks to all who contributed explanations, or segments thereof. I am not just grateful for the enlightenment, but humbled by my lack of insight into the whole process and to MH's dedication in carrying the bulk of the burden for so many years. By way of belated amends (amends in anticipation were beyond me, sorry!) I apologise for my role as blind man, in taking all but a fraction of the elephant for granted and heartily thank the rest of the parts of the beast (tree? snake? bell-pull?) for their efforts. Me? I'll stick to scanning my favourites and proofing them. Go well, Jon From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed May 30 13:44:42 2007 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 16:44:42 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] serving light-markup text files (instead of .html) to the web Message-ID: you might or might not recall that a while back, i predicted that we would eventually be serving z.m.l. light-markup files to the web, via an automatic on-the-fly conversion to .html... behold: > http://www.extrapepperoni.com/2007/05/24/markdowncgi-using-markdown-in-apache-httpd/ a programmer has written such a script so he can do just that. the writing on the wall is clear: there is no future for heavy-markup. -bowerbird ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20070530/8486d0f6/attachment.htm