P3D Stereo World on ONE CD?

[jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Gabriel Jacob)]

Okay with all this talk about Dan's CD project and the 
discussion about SW content, it got me to thinking (which
is not bad!). 

I remember Dr.T asking about how Dan could squeeze so much
stuff on ONE CD and how much can one CD hold. Of course the
answer was about 600Mbytes, which is quite alot. Dr.T recently
mentioned how he now has ALL the back issues of SW (congrats!).
Now I don't expect to be quite as fortunate, to be able to
aquire ALL the issues of SW as he did. I was wondering if
there was any other way of ever aquiring such a collection!

Well the answer was right under my nose. National Geographic
recently has been putting out their back issues on CD-ROM.
The entire collection (quite a few CD's) is available for
about $100 US (if you shop around). This is a pretty good
investment for someone that wants to have all the issues
of National Geographic ever produced but doesn't have the
space, money, or time tracking all those back issues!

The pages on the National Geographic CD are presented as
scanned jpg images (they do include a search engine). This
takes quite a few CD's since the average scanned page is
100k bytes. This might seem as a not too efficient way of
converting the paper version to CD but might not be the
case for SW.

Assuming 100k per page. 50 pages per issue.  4 issues per
year. Therefore a 600M byte CD could comfortably hold 6000
pages, 120 issues, or 30 years of Stereo World. That's more
than enough room, since SW hasn't been out for that long.

So personally, I will still try to collect as many original
SW back issues as possible since I don't like photocopy
version (this is nevertheless a very useful service when
there isn't anything else). But now with CD-ROM there is an
alternative and another potential revenue making venture for
the NSA. I know I would buy one!

Gabriel


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