Re: CD-ROM (was Discography)

[uli@zoodle.robin.de (Ulrich Grepel)]

Chris says:
>   I received e-mail about MS "help" files. It's a compiled .RTF file, so
> NeXt and MS-DOS/Windows shouldn't be too hard. A poll to find the most
> popular formats is called for. Does anyone have polling software set-up,
> the sort used for newsgroup creation? Should we create a CD-ROM project
> mailing list off-shoot?

Fine, that merges MS-rtf and MS-help and even brings hypertext capabilities
to MS-rtf. Now MS-rtf and NeXT-rtf seem to have the same capabilities. So
it should only be a case of converting it.

I don't think we need a poll. I vote for using the favourite format of oneself
(rtf, at the moment) and then convert it to the other formats. On CDs we won't
get capacity problems with that.

Mailing list? Who can do this? But I don't think it's neccessary. There aren't
too many people involved in it at the moment. And I don't think we will have
that much discussion going on to justify it. If we have something to distribute
to the project people we can do it by normal email. If we have something
ready for the CD we can email it too. The problem with going to a separate
mailing list might be that we are soon 'forgotten' by the 'normal' gaffans.
If we stay on gaffa with smaller discussions we can perhaps find other 

contributors/co-workers.

Of course there are a few problems that just HAVE to be solved before beginning.
Is there anyone who is able to offer enough hard disk space to hold the
contents of the CD? We have to make a tape with the complete contents of
the CD at some time before mastering it. And we will need software to produce
the file system of the CD. I would be able to provide some disk space, but
unfortunately not that much.

Ron asked how much the production of such a CD would cost. Well - the actual
cost of pressing a CD is not that high. That's the second big advantage of
CDs (next to its capacity). If we make 500 copies the cost of a single CD 

would be less than 3-4 US$. Not included are any costs that arise due to 

preparing the data of the CD. Ron: Get a CD-ROM player! They aren't that 

expensive too and they surely ARE the future (or even present) medium of 

software distribution.

Bye,

Uli

BTW: Another fine piece of data for the CD would be something that's evolving
at the moment on Ecto: The Ectophiles Guide To Good Music. It (will) contain(s)
a lot of opinions about good (mostly?) female artists.