Aryeh Gregor wrote: > Actually, there are more assumptions: you have to assume that humanity > *ever* recovers, and within a period of time when people will still > understand written English. You'd have to calibrate the magnitude of > a catastrophe *very* carefully to get a situation where civilization > collapses, to the extent that none of the hundreds of millions of > computers on the planet remains functional for long enough to print > out any needed info (even using wood/biomass-powered backup > generators, or emergency fuel supplies) . . . but you still have > people who can read English around. People are more fragile than > computers, and not much more numerous.
In that futuristic approach I find it more likely that there will be no paper / printer, but instead everthing will be stored into computers/PDAs and transfered between them. So in the event of the catastrophe you'd be only able to access it with the surviving devices. Suppose that it does happen *today*. All electronic systems collapse but the ones at your home. Also, you cannot produce new ones. You have a copy of wikipedia on your hard disk. You can access it. But your computer lifetime is finite. And you also don't know for how much time you'll still have electric current. What do you do? Were I in such situation, I wouldn't have enough paper or ink to do so. I wouldn't either be able to do so in the needed timeframe before the electric current is cut. Also, I don't think my hardware is prepared to handle such amount of work. >From [[en:Printer_(computing)]] > However, printers are generally slow devices (30 pages per minute is > considered fast; and many inexpensive consumer printers are far > slower than that), and the cost per page is actually relatively high. That's 0.5 pages per second. Let's assume out printer is able to print a page per second. Suppose that on each page we can print 120 lines, with 200 characters per line. Thus we can store 24000 bytes per page and each second save 24000 bytes from oblivion. eswiki-20090504-pages-meta-current is 4.721.723.604 bytes. So it would take 196738,4835 seconds to print them with such configuration. 2 days, 6 hours 39 minutes. Doable in terms of time, specially if the printer is faster. You would still need 196.739 sheets, though. And they would weight 983 kg! _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
