A Unique Assemblage, CD-ROM companion to Carl Malamud's "A World's
Fair for the Global Village," MIT Press (Cambridge: 1998).

Directions for Unix Users

The CD-ROM is built using the Rockridge Extensions, which allow
a CD to surpass the limitations of 8-letter, DOS-style file names.
If you are reading this readme.txt file off of a CD-ROM on your
computer, then you have Rockridge Extensions.  If you are checking
for another computer, try typing "man hsfs" or "man -k cd | more"
and see if you can find mention of Rockridge Extensions.  Even
simpler, try mounting the cd.

1. The Browser

We assume an environment compatible with that vague subset of
HTML that can be found in the (somewhat incompatible) Netscape
Navigator 3.0 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 browsers.
You can use any browser, but be aware that we make heavy use of
tables, frames, and other features that are sometimes not well
supported in other environments.

We also assume a Java-compatible browser.  The interface will work
without Java, but you will find yourself occassionally in pavilions
that you will not be able to see.  For example, the demonstration
of the Congressional Memory Project (/Pavilions/Congress/house.html)
uses Java.

The typical choice of a browser would be Netscape, which you can get 
at:

	http://www.netscape.com/comprod/mirror/client_download.html

If you don't have a browser, you can still make some use of the
disk by browsing directly from the command line or from a file manager.
Look for audio files, movies, and other components.

2. Audio

This disc makes extensive use of audio.  We have a variety of files
in Sun/Next .au format.  Our .au files are all PCM encoding and
range from 8,000 to 22,000 samples per second.  Some are 8 bit and
some are 16 bit files.  Your computer system, assuming it has sound
support, can probably already support these files.  Try "man audio"
to see the details on your audio support.

We also use Microsoft PCM format, which are .wav files.  These files
go all the way up to 44,100 samples per second.  If you are running
SunOS and can't play .wav files native, you might try the xplay
package, available at:

	ftp://ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/xplay/

The last audio format that we support is RealAudio, both RealAudio
2.0 and 3.0 formats.  Real Audio offers a free version of their
commercial player, which you can access at:

	http://www.real.com/products/player/download.html

3. Video and Movies

We use Quicktime video from Apple.  Unfortunately, Apple doesn't
support a Quicktime viewer for Unix.  The software of choice for
this is xanim, which you can get at:

	http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/

This amazing software also handles the .avi format movies on the
disc.  Note that Netscape sometimes tries to cache an object, even
if the object is local on your cd-rom.  In the case of a 50-megabyte
movie, that can sometimes be a problem.  We have included http-equiv
headers in our html to try and discourage your browser from caching
the files, but if it does, consider running xanim directly against
the movies, which are mostly in the /TheNot/Movies directory.

We also use Shockwave movies, which are a portable web format for
Macromedia Director animations.  Unfortunately, you are sol on
this one.  The Shockwave movies are all .dcr files and we've tried
hard to minimize the use of them.

Finally, there are two screensavers on the disc, which are only
for Win95 and Macintosh system.  We created the screensavers with
Director (natch) and used a commercial utility to change them into
screensavers.  If we were smarter, we would have exported the
Director sequence as a series of bitmaps, turned them into a
Quicktime file, and then written the appropriate X11 utilities to give
you a Screensaver, but we weren't.