Cd Rom

A California company called Knowledge Adventure Inc. has done a strange and wonderful thing with the IMAX movie called "The Discoverers," now playing on a five-story-high screen at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.They have reduced the movie from the giant screen at the Omnimax Theater to a 4.5-inch-by-5.5-inch screen on your computer monitor. In the process, they have made the big-screen movie even bigger.Of course, anybody who ever has had the pleasure of watching an IMAX movie (and who hasn't?

The nearly 5,000 delegates arriving at next week's Republican National Convention have already received personal welcomes to New York from the city's mayor, two of its former mayors, top tourism officials - and a company from Pikesville. Kol Rom Multimedia produced an interactive CD-ROM that New York City officials have mailed to thousands of delegates, journalists and other visitors for the political gathering that begins Monday. How a company with six employees in a small suite tucked behind the auto shops and budget hotels of Reisterstown Road landed a supporting role in the Big Apple's red-carpet rollout is a story about entrepreneurial pluck, the power of a promising idea and the value of a well-placed contact.

Maryland children soon will be able to learn about libraries -- by computer.A multimedia CD-ROM developed by the Baltimore County library system will be delivered next week to every library and public and private school in the state, giving children an interactive tour through public libraries.Called "Lift Off to the Library," the CD-ROM allows children to visit "Fictionville" and "Biographyburg" and read, write and listen to stories. A yellow robot named VIRG -- Very Important Robotron Guide -- leads the tour, which is aimed at children ages 4 to 11.Short videos of library staff explaining areas of the library are interspersed with games, jokes and colorful displays.

With its measly 1.44 megabytes of storage capacity, the 3.5-inch diskette is an anachronism in a world of 20-gigabyte MP3 players, DVD burners and tiny memory cards that can hold hundreds of digital photos. Yet like a lingering party guest who hasn't realized that it's time to go home, it somehow holds on as a form of removable storage. Diskette drives are still found on most computers, even though few people make much use of them. According to Disk/Trend, a company in Mountain View, Calif.

CD-ROM, a technology that used to be as exciting as a 10,000-page statistical data base, is trying to enter the consumer and education markets on the coattails of its flashier cousin, the audio compact disk.To be successful in the consumer world, CD-ROM -- compact disks carrying information that can be read but not edited -- must prove itself to be colorful, musical, flashy, entertaining and inexpensive.Sony Corp. of America, maker of the Sony Laser Library CD-ROM system for IBM PC-compatible computers, appears to be on the right track.

The history of beer-making and a guide to the best-brewed beers in America are topics of a new CD-ROM called the Beer Hunter.Published by the Discovery Channel, the $40 CD-ROM lists the top 24 premium beers surveyed by British beer connoisseur and author Michael Jackson. The CD-ROM is available now for PCs and soon for Macintosh computers.The CD-ROM is a manifestation of a resurgence in beer-making as a business and a hobby."There has been a virtual renaissance of small brewers nationwide, and California and the Pacific Northwest are leading the trend," said Andreas Heller, brew master at Tied House Cafe and Brew Pub in Mountain View, Calif.

First Union Corp. is giving its shareholders a free ride into cyberspace.The nation's sixth-largest banking company yesterday began mailing a high-tech version of its annual report on a CD-ROM computer disk to 200,000 shareholders.The disk, tucked inside the company's 50-page annual report, brings the report to life with sound, video clips of senior management, data and graphics, and it automatically connects the user to the Internet.The Charlotte, N.C.-based company says it is the first financial services company in the nation to develop such a cutting-edge version of an annual report.

Tomorrow -- 27 years after a cumbersome two-projector system allowed the audience to vote on the ending of a movie at the Montreal Expo's Czech Pavilion -- the interactive CD-ROM version of a feature film will premiere at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.Digitized images of Margot Kidder, Brian Keith and Russell Means in "Under a Killing Moon" propel the action on 25 17-inch screens as viewers make choices by computer. Tapping into the increased storage capacity of CD-ROMs (each of which stores the equivalent of 300,000 typewritten pages or 1,100 floppy discs)

HOW WILL STUDENTS be effected (sic) by the new technologies?" asks a recent CD-ROM concerned with the future of computers and communications. The answer given, unfortunately, is "Every student will have more opportunity than the most privileged student had just a decade ago," not "They will rely too heavily on spelling checkers."

Washington. -- It is the least that Harvard could do. Having saddled the Clinton administration with many of the people and ideas under which it is sagging, Harvard has now produced an alibi for the sagging: Ronald Reagan had a better beginning because he was dumb. Bill Clinton is too smart. Hence his diffuse focus and, according to most critics, his themeless presidency.The author of this alibi, Professor Michael Sandel, a political philosopher and a gentleman, put it delicately:''The risk is that he [Mr. Clinton]

Three days after a Kenwood High School junior left an anatomy class because she refused to dissect a cat, the Baltimore County school system let her return to the honors course yesterday and perform simulated dissections on a computer. "I'm relieved," Jennifer Watson, 16, of Essex said after learning the school system had purchased a CD-ROM so she can perform virtual dissections during her fifth-period class, rather than taking a standard-level class she didn't want. Watson said the turnabout will help many other classmates interested in learning physiology without cutting up dead animals.

Three days after a Kenwood High School junior left an anatomy class because she refused to dissect a cat, the Baltimore County school system let her return to the honors course yesterday and perform simulated dissections on a computer. "I'm relieved," Jennifer Watson, 16, of Essex said after learning the school system had purchased a CD-ROM so she can perform virtual dissections during her fifth-period class, rather than taking a standard-level class she didn't want. Watson said the turnabout will help many other classmates interested in learning physiology without cutting up dead animals.

If you have any felt-tipped markers in your home or office, you'd better think twice about keeping them - they could get you booked on a federal felony rap. It seems that these low-tech writing implements are actually tools that can crack the high-tech copy protection schemes that some music companies have adopted for their CDs. As a result, the possession or sale of felt-tips could violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which may not be the...

When I put my disks in my D drive to play a game, it does not run automatically. I am working with Windows 98. How do I get this to turn back on? I had it before. Your question lets me point you and other readers to the Device Manager in Windows, a feature that lets one browse all the hardware devices connected to a computer, from its hard drives to its keyboards, its mice to any modems and, of course, CD-ROM drives. In your case, a tool called auto insert notification has been turned off for that D (CD-ROM)

You don't have to go far to find documentation on the decline of the printed encyclopedia. All you need is an Internet connection. And therein lies the problem. As the Net's popularity has risen, the public's interest in shelling out thousands of dollars for dozens of leather-bound reference books has dropped. But don't take our word for it: Check out the "Electronic encyclopaedias" entry at Britannica.com: "By the 1980s and '90s," the entry says, "the phenomenal growth of telecommunications networks and personal computer systems presented a new possibility to the publishing industry - the delivery of encyclopaedic databases through a medium other than the printed page ... "As computer technology continues to develop and is used with greater sophistication, there exists the further possibility that the electronic encyclopaedia will become less a version of the print set than a product in its own right, presenting the database in a manner best suited to exploit the advantages of the electronic medium.

Stretching into a new market, a Baltimore-based Web design and interactive technology firm announced yesterday that it has landed two major sporting companies as clients: Puma AG and AMF Bowling Inc. "The last two weeks have been phenomenal," said Billy Twigg, president and chief executive of Alexander and Tom Inc. "These are very significant for us in that we have made a push in this one market, which is sporting goods and entertainment." Alexander and Tom, founded in 1996, is based in Canton's Emerging Technology Center.

Madison Avenue it's not, but David Troy has managed to turn Toad Computers at the Park Plaza shopping center into a local advertising mecca.Troy, founder and president of his computer store, has created a CD-ROM that features ads from area businesses and an assortment of information about Severna Park."

I HOLD IN MY HANDS an iridescent artifact from a civilization of the future. The civilization, or so the global entertainment, electronics and computer industries would have us believe, is our planet's, just 11 months from now. The artifact, which I acquired at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, looks for all the world like a compact disk. But no CD or CD-ROM player can decipher the information on it.The artifact is a new medium, a direct descendant of the compact disk that is read by similar laser technologies.

The title of Hoyle's "Solitaire & Mahjongg Tiles" is a little misleading. What you get is not the old Chinese game of mahjongg, but rather a group of puzzles that use mahjongg tiles. Sierra has packed 50 solitaire games and 60 mahjongg-tile puzzles onto this CD-ROM ($20). That's not quite as impressive as it sounds because many of the games are simply slight variations on a theme. But for a compulsive game player, the variety is welcome. The game requires a 90 MHz Pentium PC with 16 megabytes of RAM and a 2X CD-ROM.

NEW ORLEANS - From the darkness of history they emerge out of a silver spinning disc: two black slaves sold by a sugar plantation owner named Levi Foster on Feb. 11, 1818, to his in-laws. The first slave, named Kit, was 28, and was sold for $975. The other, Alick, was 9, and was possibly Kit's son. He was sold for $400. For nearly two centuries, the names of those two slaves were lost in time, along with the names of tens of thousands of others who worked the sugar and cotton fields of Louisiana.