Hi Mark,
Mark Wieder wrote: > > Yeah, that was the one case I thought of where it might be useful to > have a static, albeit somewhat outdated, snapshot of the data. Of > course, considering that Wikipedia doesn't for the most part require > broadband access where dialup would do, the following chart is > probably more to the point: > http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm > The key word is cost, not velocity. Talking with teachers from public schools, i have learned that many of their student's families could afford one computer for the whole family, (here exist an enormous market for second-hand computers) but these families could not pay the monthly cost of Internet service that starts at US$60 dollars for 256KB... Costly, as you noticed. Their economy allows these students to pay for an hour of internet access in an internet center for US$1 (one dolar) or more. In theory, every public school should have free internet access. In practice, the number of public schools with internet access is disminishing not increasing, although newspapers constantly publish news that said otherwise. (Just talk with the teachers and students) Two CD (for texts and images) will cost US$0.66 cents or less and could hold a whole encyclopedia. This is less than a single hour of internet access. (A single 4.5 Gb DVD could be still cheaper, but not everyone have a DVD reader in their computer) No matter how you calculate this. It's an economically sound decision to distribute the Wikipedia for offline use among public school students. Members of this community have the skills to build this project. The only remaining question is: Could we lend a hand to collectively create this project, as a gift from this community to students everywhere? Goals and direction should appear from consensus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus :-D For this project, I believe that we should be able to contribute with Password protected libraries, for specific functions or features. In this way, your code is protected but still available for use in this project. I could write some code and test the application in Windows XP and Vista. Alejandro -- View this message in context: http://n4.nabble.com/Looking-for-volunteers-to-create-Wikipedia-on-CD-application-tp1288518p1311164.html Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
