On 10/13/05, Brian reflection@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@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.orgfor 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.
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