HI Bill,
I wonder if you might skip the DVD for Guide 9.0 and just put it on a memory stick which is less prone to physical wear and tear scratches and can hold a lot more information and can be used on most computers. 16 Gigabyte memory sticks are getting cheap. I am unsure how you could mass produce your software on them but perhaps there is a way.
Also as I look at older posts you were nearly finished with Guide 9.0 over a half a decade ago. Hope you can get it out in the next couple years.
Patrick

--- In guide-user@yahoogroups.com, Bill J Gray <pluto@...> wrote:
>
> Hi Oliver,
>
> Guide 9 will be distributed on a new DVD. This is necessary
> mostly because I wanted to include UCAC-3 as the basic star
> catalog for the new version. Even with some very good compression,
> the whole thing comes to about 2.5 GBytes.
>
> So yes, you'll need to buy a new disk. I'll be posting details
> on this on the Web site, once I get a little closer to actually
> being able to specify a release date. I also want to do a few
> things such as set up a secure on-line ordering system... thus far,
> I've been sufficiently busy just trying to get the software (and
> help system and manual and such) done, that I've not done much
> to bring the Web site up to date.
>
> Incidentally, some people have mentioned that the use of a
> DVD could be a problem, because they've got an older system
> that is CD-only. (Especially common because people sometimes
> like to take an elderly laptop and use it in the field; that
> way, if something bad happens to it, it's not much of a tragedy.)
> The only workaround I see at present for this is to copy the DVD
> to a memory stick, and run it from that. You can then install
> to your hard disk and delete everything from the memory stick.
> 4 GByte memory sticks are getting to be quite cheap, and I doubt
> many people are running systems that don't support them.
>
> -- Bill
>