Re: Megabytes

[GRAHAM.G.R.DOMBKINS@BHPMELMSM.BHP.bhpmel04.telememo.au]

Hi all,

    I tried to post this a few days back BUT my Mac blew up and I was too put
off to write it all again till now.

In article <s8FN5B1w165w@netrun.cts.com> ronald hill, rhill@netrun.cts.com
writes:
>        People have been talking about the various files in the 
>archives.  Cloudbusting is currently 2 megs, Deeper Understanding will 
>be about 5 megs, and "The Garden" is about 2 megs (if you include the 
>un-edited interviews, it will be even larger if we add all the ones 
>I've typed in).  So that comes to about 10 megs total.  The archives of 
>past messages are something like 70 megs.  SO that's less then 100 megs 

    Way to go! We got space to burn here...

>for everything, plus there would only need to be one version of the 
>archives (TEXT :-).  The current "standard" for Cloudbusting, The 
>Garden, and Deeper Understanding is Wordperfect, though only 
>Cloudbusting makes much use of WP features like underlining, bold, etc. 
> I'm not sure if the Wordperfect version of Cloudbusting Edition 2 ever 
>quite made it to the archives.

    We should be catering to a fair number of standard WP's across different
platforms. As well, we should have a bulk standard TEXT version of everything
just in case.

>        How much does it cost to make CDROMS?  How many people would be 
>interested and capable of using one (I don't have a CDROM player 
>myself!)  Fortunately the files are "relatively" small, so that if you 
>have ten megs on your hard disk you can have everything, even less if 
>you don't include the Garden "interview" files.

    You'd be surprised how cheap they're getting. I've been looking into
getting our own CD-ROM mastering unit here at work. At the moment they are
anywhere between ?16,000 to ?8,000. I believe that this will become even
cheaper soon. Actual Master CD-ROM's go at ?50 a pot. You can send one of these
off to be copied at a CD manufacturing service for about ?5 a copy. Runs of
500's(?)

    Apple is about to release its own CD-ROM mastering unit in the low ?1000's
range. I believe that they are working on a deal with Kodac such that anybody
can bring their master in and get as many copies as they want at ?1/copy!!

    If you don't have a CD-ROM mastering unit you can get use of somebodies
else's at about ?250 a go. Thus at today's costs we could get this thing made
at...

- ?250 for use of machine,
- ?50 to by one master,
- ?5/copy  for each CD-ROM.

    ... thus if at least 300 people wanted a copy it would cost us ?6 per unit!
Cheap!!

In article <1upic7INN2ns@paprika.csv.warwick.ac.uk> Mr E D G Robertson,
msubu@csv.warwick.ac.uk writes:
>	Would be a better idea to use plain ASCII, as then it's equally usable
>for people that don't use PC's and WordPerfect.

    As I suggested, we should try and cater for EVERYBODY. That would mean we
need to find out just how many different PC platforms are used by those who
read gaffa and would buy our CD-ROM.

In article <yjc-050693070451@b61539.student.cwru.edu> Jerome 'TofuSoft' Chan,
yjc@po.cwru.edu writes:
>How about LaTeX or RTF? RTF files can be read on both PC and Macs. I'm not
>too sure about Amigas, C64s and Ataris.

    Hu?? Amigas and Ataris are cool BUT can you even get a C64 kitted out with
CD-ROM!!?? BTW RFT is OK but it's like the poor mans idea of compatibility. We
got space to burn here guys, use it.

In article <1utssj?rgt@access.digex.net> Joe Broz, jbroz@access.digex.net
writes:
>A lot. You could count on spending anywhere from ?3,000 to ?10,000 to
>master a CDROM using your PC. Plus, you'd need "accessories" that you probably
>don't have, including a hard disk at least as big as the CD itself (650M
>or so.) 
>The archives are nice the way they are though I agree with other articles
>I've seen, perhaps an ASCII version would be nice.

    I don't want to add or subtract ANYTHING from the archives. Just supply a
more convenient method of accessing and using them.

In article <m0o2bxC-000ilhC@fciad2.bsd.uchicago.edu> chris williams,
chrisw@fciad2.bsd.uchicago.edu writes:
>   Not really. A local BBS, "You Can Call Me Ray," one of the best Ray
>Tracing BBS's ran out of hard-disk space they needed to delete the older
>files. So they offered to make a CD-ROM available to the users. They are
>able to offer the CD-ROM to as few as 30 people for ?50.00 a piece.
>A Macintosh company offers to create *single* CDs from 4 88-meg Syquest
>carts, for less than the cost of four Syquest carts. So no, it isn't
>really that expensive. I have access to a number of different data 
>formats, and could find an inexpensive format to do the transfer to 
>the CD-ROM masterer.
>    I mean, music CDs don't cost that much to master, and
>data CDs are simpler to create than music CDs. 
>
>   I'll take this opportunity to offer Jon a chance to mention his CD
>and discuss the costs involved in making a music CD. Jon?
>
>>The archives are nice the way they are though I agree with other articles
>>I've seen, perhaps an ASCII version would be nice.
>
>   The archive are a holy *mess* the way they are, and ASCII hardly does
>justice to Kate. Information in the archive is repeated in endless
>fashions - the same interview may exist in several forms in the
>Love-hounds archive files, IEDs "The Garden," Ron Hill's various
>projects, etc. 

    Hmmm... I thought long an hard about this on the weekend and came up with
the following ideas. Tell me what you think.

    I want to collect ALL the archives into a from where they become a useful
source of information for those of us that have the tools to use it. There is a
HUGE amount of material out there that has been collected over the past 8 years
or so. A lot of it is interesting, extremely useful and informative. A lot is
simple crap. I DON'T want to cull the archive and decide on what stay's or what
goes. All you need is the data stored in some manageable form with some
specialised readers that can access it, search and retrieve. At the same time
it would be nice to leave the data in a normal TEXT format such that it could
be accessed by those with don't have/can't run the reader applications.

Data
====
    Store the data in a manageable meaningful form.

/archive/1984/jan84
/archive/1984/feb84
etc...

    Each of the data files is textual and contains gaffa for that month in the
form...

Subject:
From:
Date:
Text:

    Now I make an assumption. If you've got a CD-ROM drive on you machine then
you've got memory to burn. The easiest (and quickest) way for our archive
readers to access the data would be to have all out various indexes pre-built
and stored. Then all the reader need do is access the correct index list
dependent for how the data is to be sorted. As there are only 3 criteria that
need be sorted upon (Subject, From, Date) there need only be 6 index lists to
take into account all possible permutations of sorting. Load what-ever one is
required according to sort criteria and voile.

Archive Readers
===============
    So long as we all agree on what platforms the readers need to be written we
could supply a folder on the CD-ROM for every PC platform with it's own archive
reader. What do we need? Amiga, Macintosh, PC-DOS, PC-Windows, NExT, Atari,
Pro-DOS... any others? I got the Amiga, Macintosh, PC-DOS, PC-Windows and
Pro-DOS covered. Who could do others?

    All we need do is agree on what the data would look like and what the
applications should do. I've detailed my idea for the data above. I believe the
readers need to perform the following....

1\ List View:
A presentation of a list of the currently found data set. Basically a big list
of [Subject...Date.... From]. From this view one should be able to...
    a\ Sort the data in what ever key and subkey required. The pre-defined
       indexes make this very fast.
    b\ Search on each field. This could be (Subject is "RE: Stuff", From
       is not "graham@bhp.com", Date is "19/03/87-22/12/91", Text contains
       "Kate") obviously there are a lot of things to think about on this
       and I don't want to detail them all here. One could find/omit with
       successive searches on the archive to home on on the sub-list
       required.
    c\ Print List/Articles
    d\ Save List/Articles
    e\ Read currently selected article.

2\ Article View:
A presentation of the currently selected article. Should be just like reading
the news, with a header section (that can be hidden) and the text section. From
this view one should be able to...
    a\ Print article
    b\ Save article
    c\ Read next
    d\ Read previous

    That's it. If you can think of anything else that might be needed then let
me know!

    Sooooo, now we have our CD-ROM not-so-full of archives that anybody can get
at with some nice archive readers. Still plenty of space. Obviously we should
have a copy of "The Garden", "Cloudbusting" and "Deeper Understanding" in
simple text format and in some standard WP format's according once again to
platform.

    What else... Well how about a pictures section with subsections for things
like

1\ A scan of every album front and back. Includes all singles and maybe boots?
2\ A scan of EXACTLY WHERE each of the hidden KT's are!!
3\ A "Family Album" section with Kate and friends through the years
4\ A "Scrapbook" section with lots of different KT shots.
5\ A KateCon section!

    Can anybody think of anything else here? I feel the best format to use with
pictures is GIF since it's SO universal. Every platform I can think of has GIF
viewers.

    How about a Sound section? Various interesting Kate sound clips. (Like her
talking, the Sensual World "laugh" and "yeah". Maybe clips showing hidden
messages/sounds from various songs. I'm not sure how to store these. Amiga
could use 8SVX, Mac 'snd ' and PC a .WAV, but what about the rest? Maybe we
could store them all as one type of sound and include some public domain
convertors for all other platforms. This would save on space.

    What else? We could have the up-to-the-minute Kate FAQ's (the very detailed
version). Maybe the complete Kate Discography. Maybe an introduction to the net
and how to find rec.music.gaffa or love-hounds-request. Address for other
fanzines and KBC... I don't know, I'm running out of ideas. So what do you
think guys? Do we give it a go?? I imagine a nice white CD case with a BIG KT
logo on it. Maybe written on the spine 'Gaffa: 10 years of
Love-Hounds-Request.'

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               :  Graham Dombkins
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      "Hello Earth!!                    "I'm out chasing
       hello Earth..." - KT              nuns in the yard..." - TA
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