Hi folks,
Berthold asked about FakeCD... I did a little searching, and found
almost nothing. The few comments I found suggested that Virtual CD is a
real improvement over FakeCD. Searching for Virtual CD gave me this link:
http://www.iexpress.net.au/~mattmw/virtual.htm
The actual download is about 1767 KBytes.
As to the suggestion that using such a system will cut down on hard
drive use, by minimizing "dead space": There is something to this
argument. Guide currently would consume 676 MBytes if DOS/Windows didn't
waste bytes in dead space.
On a CD-ROM, files are allocated in 2K clusters, and this causes
Guide to consume 678 MBytes.
The following assumes you're using the old DOS "FAT16" type of file
structure. Many people are using the Win95 and greater FAT32 allocation,
which I believe evades the dead space issue pretty well (and means Virtual
PC won't do much for you). If you're using FAT32, you can ignore the
following three paragraphs:
If you copied Guide onto hard drive partitions with 16K, 32K, and 64K
cluster sizes, the result would consume 691, 710, or 748 MBytes.
If the hard drive partition consumes less than one GByte, you've got
16K clusters and are "wasting" about 25 MBytes in dead space. On a drive
with more than one but less than 2 GBytes, the waste goes up to 34 GBytes.
On one with more than 2 GBytes, the waste is 72 GBytes.
However, this is still something to think about with other CDs. Some
developers make CDs with millions of tiny files, knowing that little
space will be wasted on the CD. Copy it to the hard drive, and it
can "expand" horribly. RealSky disks are an example. I've had a couple
of calls asking me why, when copied to hard drive, a 680 MByte RealSky
disk has consumed over 2 GBytes.
Jost asked: "How it's with running Guide on several computer systems,
but only one system at time (means taking the CD-ROM from the computer at
home to the computer at observatory)?" People do this a bit... I don't
object very much. As long as you're lugging the CD around, you're
basically a "single-user licensee".
A warning, though: I think my attitude in that regard is unusually
generous. If you did this with Microsoft products, I'm sure Bill Gates
would object. So don't immediately try this with every program you own <grin>.
Jost also mentioned: "I would like, that you can give Guide the paths
of each CD (USNO, Real Sky, Clementine etc.) or better each data
file/path. Using Virtual CD-ROM you can put as much as 21 virtual CD-ROMs
onto your system!" And the idea of putting all of USNO Ax.0 or of RealSky
on a hard drive is completely reasonable now. It is certainly an issue
I will have to address. I think most people would put, say, all the
Ax.0 data on one "normal" hard drive partition (the files are _enormous_,
and there will be little dead space).
I've been thinking about the "satellite rise/set/in-shadow" listings
for a bit today... the way to do it best is coming together in my mind,
and I expect it (along with the Czech version) to be the next update on
the Web site.
-- Bill