I was surprised that this shift in Paradigms has such a big handicap to be considered for future developments. And if you believe you are "old-fashioned", how about a 70 year old guy that started in Computer Development in 1970, and whose big boss predicted: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." (Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943!) You may have some more laughs on http://www.pcworld.com/article/155984/the_7_worst_tech_predictions_of_all_time.html).
Thus let me comment on the most controversial replies out of my sight: I admit: Also I still read my Newspaper in hardcopy during breakfast - but for more details I follow the advise (or QR-code) inside the daily Newspapers or TV-news to look up details on their homepage. And surely a professional designer must study lots of hardcopy books (and pay lots of money for those!) - but I do not believe that nowadays any PC-USER of a "hobby-product" (may he be high or low skilled) will go to a Public- or University-Library for details! (Remember: We talk about a "getstart for a hobby" - not a "Masters-Degree in..."). And I am pretty sure that not many users of FlightGear print the "getstart.pdf" - and they will do so even less in the future! And even if it gets printed, it is printed on standard PC-Printers! Or can I buy that book anywhere with a superior Print-Quality? And do I get a printed update for new versions? (Now every 6 month?) Did you notice that most products you buy today, do not have a real "User-Manual" any more - but tell you an Internet-Address to look it up? (A modern way to avoid the law to provide those manuals in the national language!) Anyhow: Did you ever try e.g. (with Firefox 10.0.2) "http://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:_Using_QGIS_and_satellite_pictures": --> mouse-click "File" --> "Print" (or "Print Review") and compare that to the "getstart.pdf"? Do you see a significant difference in printing/reading quality? I would support the need for an "authoritative raw source" - if there is the manpower to maintain it! - over decades? It surely would be a good reference for all upcoming versions. I admit: Page-Referencing (and especially the old style Indexing) is a problem for HTML -- if reading hardcopy! In the reverse it is impossible to reference between multiple PDF-documents to unique text-positions! So neither approach is the "Golden Egg" in a mixed environment. I tried to compromise for that with: Smaller "books" (so headers are enough - no real need for page-numbers). The amount of cross-referencing may have some negative side effects, when reading top to bottom and jumping to each and every reference - but surely it is extremely positive having the possibility to jump to more details (when wanted/needed) and directly return to the place you were -- all of that with two mouse-clicks instead of wetting your fingers and search through lots of paper-pages!). In addition those smaller books with a lot of referencing ensure that each subject needs to be described only in one chapter - thus changes have to be "updated" only once - and not in several books and/or chapters. Especially the aspect of controlling changes promotes the use of WIKI, because whoever is concerned can set a mark to be notified about any changes made by anybody - and can delete or correct changes made -- see the history options in the FGFS-wiki. So you may have lots of observers! To the end: I was surprised not seeing any comments to the problem of "multi-lingual" support - which was the starting point for this controversial work of mine. I am sure nobody explicitly wants to restrict FlightGear just to people being able to read and write English. But I guess this point is an unsolved question for todays "getstart.pdf". So I guess there is no problem if I just input my German version into the FGFS-WIKI - not as an "authoritative raw source" - but hoping it may help some other "Tongues" for their translations. joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Virtualization & Cloud Management Using Capacity Planning Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing also focuses on allowing computing to be delivered as a service. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51521223/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
