[Foundation-l] One Wikipedia Per Person (regarding the distribution of and the ability to read Wikipedia)

[Anthony]

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/5/31 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> >> Wikipedia over TV would never work. There isn't the bandwidth for it.
> >
> >
> > So only broadcast a subset.
>
> A very small subset.
>

A single channel can broadcast over 5Mbps.  That's 52 gigabytes per day,
enough to broadcast all of Wikipedia in a few days on one channel, and all
updates as they come in live on a second channel.

TV's with hard drives are a pretty new in the developed world and
> presumably all but non-existent in the developing world


Who said anything about using a TV?


> So, you would have to give people these hard-drives,
> so you might as well fill them before you hand them out. So, what you
> are suggesting is the same idea as Brian suggested but with the
> ability to update articles over TV transmissions - not a bad extension
> to the idea, but it's the same basic idea.


Thanks.  I also suggested not using hand-held devices, though.  Too
expensive.


> > By the way, I'm not really sure what you mean by "TV is a broadcast
> > medium".  But presumably anyone without Internet access but with TV
> access
> > is receiving the TV signal through a broadcast, so I can safely ignore
> this
> > nitpick.
>
> By "broadcast medium" I mean a one-way transmission of information.


I don't know about yours, but my TV uses two-way transmission.  So a
statement that "TV is a broadcast medium" is just not correct.  True, it's
probably correct in the vast majority of situations, but, blah blah blah, I
think you see what I'm getting at...

The TV people choose what you broadcast and you just choose to either
> pick up what they send or don't. You can't request specific
> information like you can online.


Umm, yes I can.  But like I said, I was nitpicking.  TV isn't a medium, and
it isn't necessarily broadcast.