Wikipedia In Your Pocket, $99 412
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.
Discussed this earlier with some peeps (Score:3, Informative)
The form factor is a bit wonky. Adding just a little more functionality would have made it worth twice as much. Right now it looks like you have to depend on the community to provide delta-updates, they want you to dump 4GB. There are numerous tools [makeuseof.com] for gathering your own wiki subset.
Re:Solution looking for a problem (Score:5, Informative)
We don't all want to pay for data plans.
Re:Mostly Harmless (Score:1, Informative)
Got a Kindle already (Score:3, Informative)
Wikipedia online plus Google, the interwebs, and books too.
Re:Is this a derivative work? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Mostly Harmless (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/ [bbc.co.uk]
Not exactly what you asked for but it's good stuff and it predates Wikipedia.
Re:a 4G+ file? (Score:4, Informative)
Project Gutenberg (Score:4, Informative)
Somebody please hack it to contain the complete works of Project Gutenberg, or at least a worthwhile subset.
Re:Cool gift (Score:1, Informative)
Having heard this argument a hundred times as a teacher here we go again:
Wikipedia is not a valid source because it is dynamic.
Whether or not the information is good is irrelevant. The point of your references is so that people can go look at what you based your research on. If that source can change at any point in time than it is worthless.
There are a myriad of problems associated with this idea when using wikipedia.
For example: I'd like to write a paper on deforestation. I don't have the money, time, etc, to travel to each forest in the world and observe it over time. Lucky for me, other people are doing similar things to me, so I can use their observations. I pick Joe Schmo's paper on deforestation in North America for statistics he gathered over the course of 10 years of research. If someone 8 years from now decides that my data doesn't make any sense, or wants to know how it was collected, etc, they can go to Joe Schmo's report and look it up, etc, etc.
Now. If I base my results on wikipedia I might find the very same information from Joe Schmo's report. So I use that and cite wikipedia.
Now, 10 years from now someone decided they don't like my data. So they go look up the reference in wikipedia and lo and behold, the mods have removed Joe Schmo's data to replace it with new data gathered by Jane Doe. They either A) Decide my paper is worthless trash since it does not even match the source, or B) realize what happened, but have no way to find the information that I used, the original source, or anything else.
Data stamping can only take you so far, and honestly is a poor idea. Who is going to keep an archive of the internet for a decade? (Don't say the internet archive, because who are they accountable to?)
Hopefully this helps stop you the next time you go to use wikipedia. The value of citation is not "how accurate it is" but "can it be found". You have always been able to cite debunked, out of date, horrible sources. The other side is that you can always look up these sources.
Remove the ability for the reader to vet your work themselves and you've lost the point of research.
Re:a 4G+ file? (Score:4, Informative)
Any instructions on how to build a local mirror?
Here's [wikimedia.org] enough to get you started. They also link to a program (Wikix) that builds scripts to download images should you desire them.
I've found that in most cases just the text is good enough, but if I had the hard drive space and bandwidth I'd download the images too.
Re:Solution looking for a problem (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/ [apple.com]
http://collison.ie/wikipedia-iphone/ [collison.ie]
Re:Solution looking for a problem (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [google.com]) 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.
Needs pictures. (Score:2, Informative)
I'll buy it when it includes images. The text is wonderful, but there are definitely some things that require a picture, or at least a diagram.