There is no such thing as a "local html backup of wikipedia" (the wikipedia dump is encoded in xml and is b2zipped, it could never fit your PSP anyway if you did not compress it).
What you need is a server that uncompress the pages (encodes them in html) and handles them to the browser, but I do not think the PSP has enough juice to run the server and the browser at the same time.
The idea behind the iPod implementation is to have a single lightweight program that search the compressed archive and displays you the page with some basic markup (italic, bold, links).
This approach would fit the PSP very well (while the solution used in the article is a quick solution for a workstation), the main problem is that there is non gui toolkit for the psp, so writing an interface is quite hard (for me, anyway:)
for the iPod; also the Encyclopodia Ebook format (basically an indexed b2zipped articles or blocks), is far better suited for portable devices. Now if any PSP/DS/Palm developer is reading this...
A PSP is very portable (fits in your sweater/backpack), hackable, and has up to 8Gb of storage. I have been dreaming for an year about porting wikipedia to it. Unfortunately I'm not familiar with the kind of programming needed and I could never find the time...
Also cheap hardware pseudo-RNG (random number generator) can easily output a sequence of 10^35 random bits (resulting in a random playlist orders of magnitude longer than your life) before repeating itself. I'll have to correct myself on this one... The ipod cpu apparently only has 32 bit precision, witch will give you about 10^10 bit -> ~1 bilion random songs before cycling, good luck with that:)
Also cheap hardware pseudo-RNG (random number generator) can easily output a sequence of 10^35 random bits (resulting in a random playlist orders of magnitude longer than your life) before repeating itself.
Finally, just so you know, you can build a perfect natural number generator just using the noise at the ends of a resistor. The quality of your random numbers in this case is courtesy of the Heisenberg indetermination principle itself:)
Your captcha can be defeated by a simple parser + google. Just see if "food+pink" has more hit than "food+hamburger".
Also you would need a small army of people to write the question in the first place (actually you could try to generate category/item couples from a statistical analysis of wikipedia).
Now that I think of it... it's just too easy to beat your captcha randomly (1/4 chances is not that bad for a script).
On a funny note... captcha similar in spirit to the one you propose is http://www.hotcaptcha.com/ based on hotornot. At least it's worth a laugh:)
Also, I do not have the £40 to spend on some wannabe game without testing... how am I suppose to see if I like that game?
This is the reason I download most of my games via some 'illegal' channel first, I play most of them for less than 1 hour. I usually end up buying the ones I really love sooner or later (but not always:).
OTOH online demo system like the one built for PS3 and Xbox360 could make this kind of pirating pointless.
The playpen balls were a reference to one of xkcd's more popular comics, Grownups. The message on the playpen balls was a reference to some of xkcd's comics "My hobby...".
Why do the "boring" part of telling people how to use it when you can set up a wiki, tell everyone that the answers are in there, and let your users write the documentation for you?
'cause nobody would write the documentation anyway. If there is a wiki there is at least one places where info are supposed to be. If you can't find them you can bug the programmer once and then add it so that those who will follow won't have to do it over and over again.
Am I really the only one having a fantasy about living in a cold (Not humid) and dark server room with only a 14" screen, an old Keytronic Cherry keyboard, unlimited supplies of coca-cola, insane bandwidth and hundreds of servers at my rootly disposal through ssh?
I started a pledge at pledgebank.com http://www.pledgebank.com/buysealand the goal is to collect 10.000$, if it works I'll donate and create a larger pledge maybe aiming at 100.000$.
If you like piratebay's idea and plan to donate then sign up the petition, please, pledges with less than 25 subscribers are not even shown on the website!
Conversely, it empowers group 3. If they're getting 'bribes' and still criticizing Microsoft? Well, gosh, they must be of sterling moral fibre, or something.
You forgot the moral issue for group 3... do I keep the laptop or do the honest thing and give it back?
This will split group 3 (and possibly group 1 too) in two.
I wish I could underclock the nvidia 6400 mounted on my laptop to make it suck less power, the same way I underclock and undervolt the cpu, do you know if there's a way?
Huge changes in the system are very likely to spark a lot of problems, the easiest way to overcome this is to to upgrade a few packages at a time, for example by keeping your system up to date with the unstable release.
That's why my system is sync'd with unstable more-or-less every few days. I'm a Debian user, but I suppose this would apply to Ubuntu too.
While working on my phd I stopped doing that for a few months and the when I dist-upgraded again I had to do some real magic to avoid massive problems (like the python transition that tried to uninstall most of my python software)
Under some conditions it is safer to run unstable every day than to upgrade to a whole new release every 6 months.
On a side note apt developers could try to make "dist-upgrade" more similar to a day-by-day upgrade than to a single massive "apt-get install", trying to keep track of what package affect what other with every new version and than try to use all the information to recognize an update path that could be longer than the "massive install" but safer.
Well this doesn't even sound simple on paper, implementation would probably be a nightmare:)
Why did they wait for Firefox to be released before posting this points? If they really wanted to contribute they could have done that criticizing the beta version as loud as they are killing the official one now. This was probably made on purpose... I really feel this is just a (well executed) flame-bait attempt.
Ehi, if you can squeeze wikipedia in ~2Gb You could fit it in a PSP! A memory stick can hold 4Gb and imagine telling your mum that you are taking it to school 'cause it's a pocket encyclopedia! (not that it'd matter to me, I'm a little older, but still...)
Now I'm really waiting for someone to port wikipedia to my PSP.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no such thing as a "local html backup of wikipedia" (the wikipedia dump is encoded in xml and is b2zipped, it could never fit your PSP anyway if you did not compress it).
:)
What you need is a server that uncompress the pages (encodes them in html) and handles them to the browser, but I do not think the PSP has enough juice to run the server and the browser at the same time.
The idea behind the iPod implementation is to have a single lightweight program that search the compressed archive and displays you the page with some basic markup (italic, bold, links).
This approach would fit the PSP very well (while the solution used in the article is a quick solution for a workstation), the main problem is that there is non gui toolkit for the psp, so writing an interface is quite hard (for me, anyway
The thing is, a portable version of wikipedia has been already developed:
http://encyclopodia.sourceforge.net/en/index.html
for the iPod; also the Encyclopodia Ebook format (basically an indexed b2zipped articles or blocks), is far better suited for portable devices.
Now if any PSP/DS/Palm developer is reading this...
A PSP is very portable (fits in your sweater/backpack), hackable, and has up to 8Gb of storage. I have been dreaming for an year about porting wikipedia to it. Unfortunately I'm not familiar with the kind of programming needed and I could never find the time...
The ipod cpu apparently only has 32 bit precision, witch will give you about 10^10 bit -> ~1 bilion random songs before cycling, good luck with that
Sir, you have just given us a perfect example of confirmation bias.
:)
Also cheap hardware pseudo-RNG (random number generator) can easily output a sequence of 10^35 random bits (resulting in a random playlist orders of magnitude longer than your life) before repeating itself.
Finally, just so you know, you can build a perfect natural number generator just using the noise at the ends of a resistor. The quality of your random numbers in this case is courtesy of the Heisenberg indetermination principle itself
Apparently nobody notice that the particle discovered at Fermilab is the BSD (as in Bottom Strange Down)
:)
(and yes, I know that you should not identify a baryon only by its quark content but...
Your captcha can be defeated by a simple parser + google. Just see if "food+pink" has more hit than "food+hamburger".
:)
Also you would need a small army of people to write the question in the first place (actually you could try to generate category/item couples from a statistical analysis of wikipedia).
Now that I think of it... it's just too easy to beat your captcha randomly (1/4 chances is not that bad for a script).
On a funny note... captcha similar in spirit to the one you propose is http://www.hotcaptcha.com/ based on hotornot. At least it's worth a laugh
This is the reason I download most of my games via some 'illegal' channel first, I play most of them for less than 1 hour.
I usually end up buying the ones I really love sooner or later (but not always
OTOH online demo system like the one built for PS3 and Xbox360 could make this kind of pirating pointless.
The playpen balls were a reference to one of xkcd's more popular comics, Grownups. The message on the playpen balls was a reference to some of xkcd's comics "My hobby...".
care to post a link to your work? I'd be courious to take a look at it...
Or do you have paper copies only?
naaaah... thunderbird is Han Solo, of coures; fighting the same war, on another field and with different weapons!
'cause nobody would write the documentation anyway.
If there is a wiki there is at least one places where info are supposed to be.
If you can't find them you can bug the programmer once and then add it so that those who will follow won't have to do it over and over again.
I rheard first of the guy with a magnet in his finger in this presentation:
http://www.ambiguous.org/quinn/bodyhacking.html
it's kinda disturbing (and gross at times), but IMHO it's very interesting anyway
Fool! :)
you can get your psp for 170$ and Locoroco for free from the nearest bittorrent tracker NOW
the place where the survivors of Atlantis escaped after the fall of their civilization :)
well you should, the whole idea is strikingly similar, even in the graphical description.
The WP article is here: We3.
IMHO it's one of the best Grant Morrison comic.
no, really
On the other hand if you don't need a reference then you should definitely read this Little Gamers strip.
I started a pledge at pledgebank.com
http://www.pledgebank.com/buysealand
the goal is to collect 10.000$, if it works I'll donate and create a larger pledge maybe aiming at 100.000$.
If you like piratebay's idea and plan to donate then sign up the petition, please, pledges with less than 25 subscribers are not even shown on the website!
You forgot the moral issue for group 3... do I keep the laptop or do the honest thing and give it back?
This will split group 3 (and possibly group 1 too) in two.
I wish I could underclock the nvidia 6400 mounted on my laptop to make it suck less power, the same way I underclock and undervolt the cpu, do you know if there's a way?
Huge changes in the system are very likely to spark a lot of problems, the easiest way to overcome this is to to upgrade a few packages at a time, for example by keeping your system up to date with the unstable release.
:)
That's why my system is sync'd with unstable more-or-less every few days. I'm a Debian user, but I suppose this would apply to Ubuntu too.
While working on my phd I stopped doing that for a few months and the when I dist-upgraded again I had to do some real magic to avoid massive problems (like the python transition that tried to uninstall most of my python software)
Under some conditions it is safer to run unstable every day than to upgrade to a whole new release every 6 months.
On a side note apt developers could try to make "dist-upgrade" more similar to a day-by-day upgrade than to a single massive "apt-get install", trying to keep track of what package affect what other with every new version and than try to use all the information to recognize an update path that could be longer than the "massive install" but safer.
Well this doesn't even sound simple on paper, implementation would probably be a nightmare
Why did they wait for Firefox to be released before posting this points?
If they really wanted to contribute they could have done that criticizing the beta version as loud as they are killing the official one now.
This was probably made on purpose... I really feel this is just a (well executed) flame-bait attempt.
Ehi, if you can squeeze wikipedia in ~2Gb You could fit it in a PSP!
A memory stick can hold 4Gb and imagine telling your mum that you are taking it to school 'cause it's a pocket encyclopedia!
(not that it'd matter to me, I'm a little older, but still...)
Now I'm really waiting for someone to port wikipedia to my PSP.