Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 380.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2000 22:07:51 +0000
From: Paul Brians <brians@mail.wsu.edu>
Subject: Re: 13.0377 CD-ROMs in libraries
CD-ROMs are not only headaches for libraries. I recently received a free
sample CD-ROM for a World Civilization text. Installing it cluttered my
hard disk with 100 megs of files and then it tried to establish a live
connection to the Internet without any action on my part. Such ill-behaved
CD-ROMs are all too common. I've had one install an older version of
QuickTime into my System Folder, wiping out the newer version that was
already there. No option to avoid installing QuickTime was provided.
CD-ROMs at the least should be self-contained, and not require that files
be installed on hard drives or permanent links be available to the
Internet. Ideally they would also be bootable disks, with their own
operating systems. But they would still grow out of date, of course, as
hardware changes. I agree the CD-ROM in its present form is a clumsy
dinosaur.
Paul Brians, Department of English
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-5020
brians@wsu.edu
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians
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