On 10/13/05, Brian <reflection(a)gmail.com> wrote:
That would take a dedicated geek! Purchasing hard
drives, downloading the
dumps (and old is gigantor), doing it in many languages, keeping stocked on
packing supplies, dealing with shipping, creating a dynamic website. Erik
and I actually "joked" about this at some point :)
A dynamic website? You're right about all the rest. Providing an
email address to write to ask for this would help. It does take
dedication, but every person you serve is one more person who now has
reliable, fast access to the information, for years to come -- which
is both rewarding in its own right and a core project goal.
Once you stock up on the right packing supplies and are used to a
regular shipping schedule, it's not a great hassle; you set a
particular dump to copy over (you shouldn't have to download it more
than once per dump-cycle, if you do this regularly) from one drive to
the next; address the package; take a week's worth of packages to the
post at the same time. last I checked, aduni charged $20 extra
(beyond hardware and shipping) per drive.
We should set up bittorrent streams for the most popular dumps, if
they don't exist; which will be useful in its own right.
To reply to Jeremy: Fernanda V. is in Boston; Gordon I believe is near London.
SJ
On 10/13/05, SJ <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Can we set up a "db dumps by mail" system, for people to get a full db
dump on a hard drive by mail? That's the most efficient way to get
the dumps out to people on slow connections.
We have done this for the <80GB of content on
aduni.org <http://aduni.org>for a
few
years; charging a bit over the cost of materials for making each
drive, to support our bandwidth. It has been extremely popular,
particularly in Asia... I am sure the same would be true of a similary
WP/WM program.
In particular, two people (Gordon Joly and Fernanda Viegas) have asked
me in the last week if there were such an option.
-- ++SJ
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Cheers,
Brian Mingus
AIM, Skype: BReflection
Google talk: reflection(a)gmail.com
Phone: (720) 771-2599
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++SJ