Todd, The CD's that were created in advance were the mini-cd's. When we ran out of those, we used regular CD's. When I saw that this was happening, I did indeed make a new image that included Maxima and Emacs, but this was not done for all the big CD's. Maybe next time we could try a targeted approach--make CD's for general users and CD's for more specific audiences.
I do know that I talked to a couple people who seemed genuinely glad to have someone hand them a free Office program---one guy said, "This is great---I just erased my copy of Microsoft Office" (how does that happen?). Don ran into the same kind of thing. Scott On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 08:54:22AM -0500, Todd Hammond wrote: > Congratulations to everybody on the success of the free CDs. A couple > of opinions about the CD for next time. > > I'm not sure, but it looked to me like there might have been space on > the CDs (which seem to be the 80min/700MB type) to squeeze on maxima > after all. My Calc students (Calc I and Calc II) would be more > interested in this than Octave, though I'd hope that both could be > included. This may be another 40 or so students per year that might be > drawn towards open source. (PS: emacs also integrates well with maxima, > if you'll pardon the pun.) > > Although it seems important to have things like OpenOffice as a matter > of principal to tell people that they can avoid many Microsoft products, > as a practical matter most windows users would probably continue to use > the products they already have. On the balance, I'm not sure as a > practical matter whether all the space is worth it; we could promote > still more free software with that space. > > Could I suggest including (a real version of) emacs next time? There are > different windows versions on http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/windows/, > including a "barebin" version of only 4.2 M. (I don't know what > xemacs/setup.exe is on the CD, but it can't be the real thing, I think, > in only 185K.) There are also fuller versions if space would permit. > It is certainly one of the first programs I have installed on the > occasions when I have been stuck using windows; a good fraction of the > unix/linux world probably feels the same way. Emacs also does some (for > me) common editing jobs that I don't think vi does; e.g., except for > pc-write for dos, I don't know of another program that does such good > job editing text in columns, so might be of interest even to hard core > vi users. I also regularly use the emacs outline mode, etc. At any > rate, not every emacs user will find it appealing to have just vi. > > Todd > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > To get off this list, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with Subject: unsubscribe > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > -- Scott Thatcher Assistant Professor of Mathematics Truman State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- To get off this list, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with Subject: unsubscribe -----------------------------------------------------------------
