Hi, All!

Okaaaay... as Bill predicted, my attempts to make a better CITIES dataset (2
million place names) failed miserably...

I removed all duplicate entries, assigned proper ISO country codes, split
the dataset into one file per UTM grid zone ("30T" and such), and sorted the
entries by longitude... unfortunately the result is really no better than
the original (Well, for my own purposes, I *do* have a nice SQL-queriable
database now, so the effort wasn't all in vain).

BUT!

Check out the alternative ECU.TDF file I came up with:

http://www.telefonica.net/web/arturorm/cielos/guide/guide.html

All I did was to edit the original ECU.TDF file to remove all labels ("text"
fields) and to draw each place as a single-pixel gray dot... and WOW!

Here's a screenshot showing most of Europe:

http://www.telefonica.net/web/arturorm/cielos/guide/ECU-ALT_TDF.jpg

(Note: I renamed GUIDE8/GEO/GEO.DAT to _GEO.DAT so that Guide wouldn't find
it, because the map doesn't look nearly as nice with continent/river
outlines)

"Oh, my God! It's full of..." places! ;-)

Think about it... 2 million named places... that's like having a proper name
for each and every star up to magnitude 11!