On Thursday 31 May 2007 08:16, Robin Monks wrote:
The weird thing is, with the dawn of cheap broadband, and wifi-covered cities, planes, trains and buses, noone is actually offline to enjoy this now.
As one who travels a lot on business, I have to disagree. Specifically, * A fair number of airports that offer wifi only do so at an exorbitant fee. Instead of spending a few thousand dollars on hubs for a multi- billion-dollar airport, they leave it to private contractors who by definition have a profit requirement. * I know of at least one international airport where the wifi contractor is a local company rather than a large multinational like Verizon or T-Mobile, meaning anyone who lives outside that community has to pay for an account just to use their wifi once. (My guess is that someone's brother-in-law is a city alderman...) * Wifi in hotels can be spotty, because (1) they don't always have enough hubs in place to cover the building and (2) the local staff usually don't know how to fix problems. * Wifi on aircraft is not yet widely available, and where available is almost never free. * I've heard about commuter trains with wifi, but I've yet to be on one even though I've recently been in both NYC and San Francisco. Perhaps this is yet another area where the enlightened Europeans and Asians are leaving the US in the dust. (And that is intended as a snark at my own country, not Europe or Asia. We in the USA just don't "get it" about the economic benefits of public wifi.) * Rural areas are still not well-served for broadband Internet of any kind. Try getting broadband in the Rocky Mountains, away from large cities. Robin, I really wish the world you envision were here, or that I could believe it's coming soon, but I'm afraid it's a long, long way off. To bring the discussion back to Drupal, I think offline capabilities would be a very strong feature to add to Drupal. On my largest Drupal sites, registered users are allowed to submit comments and stories, but nothing is published without editorial review. That being the case, the ability to suck down the editorial queue, review and edit offline, then upload the changes including scheduling items (using scheduler.module) for publication would be doubleplusgood. Scott -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Syscrusher (Scott Courtney) Drupal page: http://drupal.org/user/9184 syscrusher at 4th dot com Home page: http://4th.com/