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Wikipedia In Your Pocket, $99
An anonymous reader notes the announcement by Sean Moss-Pultz (Openmoko, Inc.) of a new geek device: The $99 WikiReader. All of Wikipedia in your pocket with no Internet connection required. Works in bright sunlight. 3-button interface. You can update the information in the WikiReader either by mail (they ship a microSD card) or by downloading a 4+ GB file.
Finally we have a hitch hiker's guide to Earth!
Great! Now I can regale and browbeat others with authoritative sounding misinformation wherever I go. Cafe discourses and dinner discussions will never be the same again!
May the Maths Be with you!
[citation required]
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Love the idea but I'm a little cautious of Wikipedia's search engine. Not sure if they're rendering the php the same way and using MediaWiki's built in search engine but I have problems with that if they are. For instance if I search for hottest pepper the answer is the seventh result. On Google, it's the second result but also found in the first (being on the page for Scoville scale on Wikipedia).
The time this would be really useful to me is when I get into arguments at bars or restaurants with friends. I'm a bit concerned about how well the search part of this device will work for that, I'd probably need to rethink a lot of my searches to start at an obvious Wikipedia page and then lead me to my answer.
Probably wonderful for just reading through Wikipedia on a bus or plane though, too bad it doesn't seem to have the images, videos or audio.
My work here is dung.
Have these people never heard of a diff? How about just letting me download the changes! The Wiki can tell them what they are.
That's worse than useless if I have to redownload all of wikipedia to keep it up to date.
Luckily I have a smart phone with internet access.
Three points to consider:
- It's openmoko based, so it's extremely hackable.
- It uses standard AAA batteries. I can't overstate how important this is to me.
- No contract, hard copy of reference information, safe to give to a kid.
This seems like a good gift solution for
a. hackers
b. travelers
c. parents
The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. - Einstein
We don't all want to pay for data plans.
According to the rules of open source... all derivative works must also be open source.
This is hardware. Does that mean that the design, specifications and technology used are also open source?
That's an easy question! Answer: No.
First, the hardware is not derived from Wikipedia. That's just silly. Second, even if it were "derivative" in some sense of the word, hardware itself is not copyrightable, and thus not subject to the GPL in any meaningful sense.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
yeah, there's no use for an encyclopedia with detailed information on all edible plants out in the middle of nowhere where there's no cell access.
and you couldn't possibly find yourself in a situation where you need information but can't access your wireless, despite being in a 'covered' area, cell phone coverage is, practically, perfect.
Oh, also, power outages. Infrastructure is all well and good, but having all the knowledge you need about the world around you at your fingertips regardless of the state of the outside world is great.
I'd say the places that matter the most are precisely the places that don't have cell access.
No contract, hard copy of reference information, safe to give to a kid.
I'm actually wondering about this part. Their website seems to be clearly positioning it at children, and yet Wikipedia is quite deliberately not censored for children. I smell a lawsuit there once some 7yro Johnny, driven by curiosity, starts with anime, and ends up diving into the depth of interlinked mesh of articles on yuri and lolicon...
Read the site, rather than just looking at the pictures ;-)
For Parents: WikiReader offers an easy way to protect your child from adult-oriented content.
<flamebait>I wonder if there's "American mode" (hiding all the articles about sex) and "European mode" (hiding all the articles about guns).</flamebait>
Three points to consider:
- It's openmoko based, so it's extremely hackable.
[citation needed]
It's produced by some of the Openmoko people but it's a very different software stack that shares little (if any) code with their phones. It doesn't run Linux.
Source code is available (seems to be at http://code.google.com/p/wikipediardware/) so there is some potential for hacking and community development, but so far I haven't thought of any interesting applications except for an e-book reader. It doesn't have any of the interesting peripherals that come with the Freerunner (WiFi, GPS, accelerometer, USB, etc).
I do appreciate the AAA batteries and the sunlight-readable screen. Those are the reason that I'm still using my Palm III to read science-fiction magazines.
1) Huge compendium of human knowledge.
2) Runs off of commonly available, easily stockpiled batteries
3) Runs for a whole year off of one set of batteries (swap Lithium for alkaline, it should run for a decade)
4) Sunlight-readable
5) Compact, sturdy and durable
Hell, at those kind of power usage levels, you could hack a small solar cell into it and it should work anywhere you've got sunlight. Imagine a complete breakdown of civilization as we know it. Books are heavy and inconvenient and make good kindling. Without electricity, compact digital forms of information retrieval become impossible. What do we use to rebuild civilization after a couple generations of this send us back to the dark ages? This thing! It's PERFECT.
Wikipedia vs Choosing Randomly.
hmmmmm
"His name was James Damore."