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Comments on: Featured Freeware: WikiTaxi

The idea behind WikiTaxi is so simple that the utility of it should be obvious: take Wikipedia offline. How cool is that? The real question is, though, does it work?

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by BrianZachary August 25, 2008 10:55 AM PDT: I am trying this program as it seems to be a cool concept to have Wikipedia on the computer without going online. I only wish I had some warning as to how long it was going to take to download this program, over an hour, and that's with using a download accelerator, and a cable connection. It also would have been nice to know that even after it takes that long to download, what you download isn't the complete program. In order to use WikiTaxi, you also have to download one of the database files, and depending on which one you choose, that, too, could take awhile to get. I chose the full English one because I figure what's the point of having this unless you have all the information available you can get.

So, now after you download the database file, you have to extract it using the WikiTaxi Importer that came with the program, a seperate exe file. When I started that at 5 AM this morning, it said time remaining over an hour and a half. When I got up after 11, more than 6 hours later, it still had 3 minutes and 15 seconds left to go, mostly because it was going at the time when all my anti programs were scheduled to do their daily scans, but that's not the point. After shutting down a few running programs, the WikiTaxi Importer was still at 3 minutes and 15 seconds remaining and it wasn't moving.

I had to restart my computer and the first thing I did when it came back up was start WikiTaxi Importer and just let that get done. It's still going because I'm doing other things on the computer at the moment. Oh and my resources are down to 20% of the RAM it's normally at, so I can see WikiTaxi Importer is trying to use up everything my computer has available. I just hope the WikiTaxi program itself doesn't do that, so we'll see.

So, just a warning to anyone else who might be interested in this program what they are getting into. Don't even try to get this program unless you are doing nothing else on the computer at the time and have no scheduled scans.

Oh and I guess I should mention that once you get this program and the database file, you don't have to do it again on a different computer. Since the program doesn't install on the computer, you can just copy it to a different drive or disc and run it from there, even copy it to a friend's computer for them, even use it on a flash drive, if it's big enough.

That's my rant for today.; Like this Reply to this comment

by TomTester August 25, 2008 2:47 PM PDT

@Brian: You should have your cable modem checked. The program is 1.63MB and took all of 30 seconds to download on a slow ADSL line. Secondly, it would not surprise most people that 8GB (see review) would take a while to download... (very roughly 80,000Mbits, so divide by whatever speed your line is supposed to be running at to get the # seconds, then divide by 360 to get the number of hours). On my ADSL (1.5MBit) if would take roughly 14.8 hours at full capacity...

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by BrianZachary August 26, 2008 12:52 AM PDT: My point, Tom, is that it was never mentioned how long this whole thing would take the average user to download everything needed and set the whole thing up. I, like everyone else, use the computer and internet for more than just one thing at any given time. I do not have time to let one program do it's own thing while I sit and wait for it to finish in order to do other things. If I have some kind of warning that it may take awhile to do one particular thing, I can better plan a time to let the one thing do its thing while I do something else.

And if that isn't confusing enough, after all the time it took to go through everything with WikiTaxi, I ended up removing it from my computer anyway. I realized that this isn't something I need or will get much use out of. I don't use Wikipedia enough to make it worth my while to have this huge program eat up my resources or take up a huge chunk of my hard drive. If I need to look something up, I can just go to Wikipedia and even get pictures. Plus the fact that any page on Wikipedia loads a lot faster than WikiTaxi does. The program just wasn't for me.

And let me tell you, it took a lot less time to get rid of the program than it was to get it.; Like this


by batchaesir May 16, 2009 9:14 AM PDT: all is perfect ,but math expressions could not be displayed well,for example:<math>f'(x_0)=\lim_{\Delta x \to 0}\frac{\Delta y}{\Delta x}=\lim_{\Delta x \to 0}\frac{f(x_0+\Delta x)-f(x_0)}{\Delta x}</math>; Like this Reply to this comment