On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 11:22:10PM -0400, Ivan Krstic wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
FWIW I think a bootable linux+Wikipedia would be *awesome*. But, the data needs to be accessible from an existing OS as well (and not all of us are running an x86 machine!) or we get the above scenario of extremely limited usefulness.
Brion is dead-on here, as usual. While a bootable knoppix disc is a great idea, the WP data residing on the disc needs to be kept in a format that can be read by multiplatform reader applications that are also on the disc.
Agreed.
For instance, something like RealBasic [http://www.realsoftware.com/] will compile an application for both Mac and Windows, so if it can also live on the CD, I think the combination (Mac, Windows, Linux) is very satisfactory coverage. An alternative, of course, is Java - but I think sticking red-hot needles into our respective eyes might be more pleasurable.
Hold on there - what's the necessity of having to use this kind of thing just for writing a cross platform app? Perhaps you like the "integrated database" feature, but couldn't we just bundle MySql with the app? But I wonder whether we need to do all that. Couldn't a simple mozilla plugin which implements untarring and unzipping do the job, assuming that the files are stored on disk in the form of a few tens of articles per compressed tarball?
Arvind