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-
- A Unique Assemblage, CD-ROM companion to Carl Malamud's "A World's
- Fair for the Global Village," MIT Press (Cambridge: 1998).
-
- Directions for Unix Users
-
- The CD-ROM is built using the Rockridge Extensions, which allow
- a CD to surpass the limitations of 8-letter, DOS-style file names.
- If you are reading this readme.txt file off of a CD-ROM on your
- computer, then you have Rockridge Extensions. If you are checking
- for another computer, try typing "man hsfs" or "man -k cd | more"
- and see if you can find mention of Rockridge Extensions. Even
- simpler, try mounting the cd.
-
- 1. The Browser
-
- We assume an environment compatible with that vague subset of
- HTML that can be found in the (somewhat incompatible) Netscape
- Navigator 3.0 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 browsers.
- You can use any browser, but be aware that we make heavy use of
- tables, frames, and other features that are sometimes not well
- supported in other environments.
-
- We also assume a Java-compatible browser. The interface will work
- without Java, but you will find yourself occassionally in pavilions
- that you will not be able to see. For example, the demonstration
- of the Congressional Memory Project (/Pavilions/Congress/house.html)
- uses Java.
-
- The typical choice of a browser would be Netscape, which you can get
- at:
-
- http://www.netscape.com/comprod/mirror/client_download.html
-
- If you don't have a browser, you can still make some use of the
- disk by browsing directly from the command line or from a file manager.
- Look for audio files, movies, and other components.
-
- 2. Audio
-
- This disc makes extensive use of audio. We have a variety of files
- in Sun/Next .au format. Our .au files are all PCM encoding and
- range from 8,000 to 22,000 samples per second. Some are 8 bit and
- some are 16 bit files. Your computer system, assuming it has sound
- support, can probably already support these files. Try "man audio"
- to see the details on your audio support.
-
- We also use Microsoft PCM format, which are .wav files. These files
- go all the way up to 44,100 samples per second. If you are running
- SunOS and can't play .wav files native, you might try the xplay
- package, available at:
-
- ftp://ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/xplay/
-
- The last audio format that we support is RealAudio, both RealAudio
- 2.0 and 3.0 formats. Real Audio offers a free version of their
- commercial player, which you can access at:
-
- http://www.real.com/products/player/download.html
-
- 3. Video and Movies
-
- We use Quicktime video from Apple. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't
- support a Quicktime viewer for Unix. The software of choice for
- this is xanim, which you can get at:
-
- http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/
-
- This amazing software also handles the .avi format movies on the
- disc. Note that Netscape sometimes tries to cache an object, even
- if the object is local on your cd-rom. In the case of a 50-megabyte
- movie, that can sometimes be a problem. We have included http-equiv
- headers in our html to try and discourage your browser from caching
- the files, but if it does, consider running xanim directly against
- the movies, which are mostly in the /TheNot/Movies directory.
-
- We also use Shockwave movies, which are a portable web format for
- Macromedia Director animations. Unfortunately, you are sol on
- this one. The Shockwave movies are all .dcr files and we've tried
- hard to minimize the use of them.
-
- Finally, there are two screensavers on the disc, which are only
- for Win95 and Macintosh system. We created the screensavers with
- Director (natch) and used a commercial utility to change them into
- screensavers. If we were smarter, we would have exported the
- Director sequence as a series of bitmaps, turned them into a
- Quicktime file, and then written the appropriate X11 utilities to give
- you a Screensaver, but we weren't.
-
-
-