CD-ROM music

CD-ROM music

[dmr]

  The road database is really cool, but I am a bit disappointed that
  Austin, TX is not in the database.....

  Where can the common man obtain additional database entries?

The database was crunched down from something like 44 CD-ROMS
constituting the Census bureau's Tiger database.  The full
database as we store it is something like 880MB, which is
why it's not all there.

There's no particular reason why it shouldn't be made
visible to the outside.

	Dennis

CD-ROM music

[Dave]

| Speaking of play-value, has anyone gotten themselves far enough
| out of VGA hell to try the sky catalog or the geographic/road
| databases?

The road database is really cool, but I am a bit disappointed that
Austin, TX is not in the database.  We used to live in Naperville, Il,
and it was even more frustrating that the database stops within a
couple of miles of Indian Hill.  It was, however, interesting to see
the location of y'all's espresso machine....

Where can the common man obtain additional database entries?

-- Dave

CD-ROM music

[Borja]

> 
> Speaking of play-value, has anyone gotten themselves far enough
> out of VGA hell to try the sky catalog or the geographic/road
> databases?

	Yes, I have tried them :-)

	The bin/aux/mapd program wasn't included in binary form 
(at least for 386, didn't check the others). After compiling it, 
I tried "mapdemo" and some of the maps weren't produced. Sometimes
it said "Cannot mount; no resources" but I think it's a memory problem.
(I have 8 MB but with a 40 MB partition - edited "prep" to have a big
partition). Sometimes the program crashed.
After that, I started to draw maps with it. 
At first, as I'm only a "map user" (mainly topographic) I had to fight
with the parameters for the different projections, but at last it
produced some nice maps. It would be great to obtain high resolution
data for the mountain zones in the Basque Country to produce my
own custom maps :-) (I will try to get it) 
And perhaps my caving group will use it to produce
cave maps. (We measure the caves and then draw maps).

	The road database works very well (I had no problems with it).
Only need a plane and a GPS to use it :-) Some time ago I heard that 
to flew to a Unix conference using a portable with Plan 9 "connected
to the flight instruments". So you used games/road in your plane?

	The sky database is also very nice. It works without problems
(only tried to map some constellations) other than lack of memory.

	These programs make a good set for impressing friends.

	Regarding the VGA hell... I guess that programming such
horrible devices has been more dificult than designing the
OS... I have installed the system at 800x600x8. I was unable to
get it working at 1024x768x?. (My monitor needs interlacing).o

	Regards,



	Borja.



-- 
*******************************************************************
Borja Marcos               | Preferred: borjam@we.lc.ehu.es
Alangoeta, 11, 1. izq.     | Others:    borjamar@mx.sarenet.es
48990 - Algorta (Vizcaya)  |            100015.3502@compuserve.com
SPAIN                      | CIS:       100015,3502
******************************************************************
(c)1995 by the author.
This message cannot be transferred to the Microsoft(tm) Network.

CD-ROM music

[dmr]

 ... what happened to the music?

To explain and expand a bit: a group next door to us has
algorithms that do compression of audio signals using
ideas collectively known as PAC (perceptual audio coding).
They are able to take (e.g.) 44KHz CD stereo and compress
it by a factor of about 12 with virtually no perceptive
loss.  Ken Thompson and Sean Dorward helped them with
code-smashing and system design to make the algorithms
more practical in use.  This work was independent of Plan 9.

Our hope was that the Plan 9 release would not only advertise
this technology (on behalf of the acoustics folk next door)
but also provide added play-value to Plan 9 by including
not only the whole Plan 9 distribution, but also several
hours of CD-quality music on the one CD-ROM.

The two problems that developed were that the people who
want to sell or license the PAC technology began to
feel uneasy about releasing the algorithms, and also
that the lawyers began to feel uneasy about getting
into music publishing.  All the material we had
did come with letters saying "I release this,"
but they began to think about what would happen
if someone else came along and said "You didn't have
rights to release it, it's my tune."

We were disappointed at the time, but as things worked
out it's probably just as well.  We spent enough time
working intellectual-property issues on our own turf
without taking the battle onto others'.  (My favorite
example: Rob is on good terms with the guy who owns
the rights to the Ed Wood films, including Plan 9 From
Outer Space.  It turned out his rights didn't quite
include using movie publicity stills to advertise
operating systems.  To use a picture of Bela Lugosi
in conjunction with Plan 9™ the operating system,
we would have to negotiate with Lugosi's estate.
How much time should one spend on this?)

Speaking of play-value, has anyone gotten themselves far enough
out of VGA hell to try the sky catalog or the geographic/road
databases?

	Dennis