help! need URL's & guidance for K-12 demo Friday

Marc Andreessen ([email protected])
Thu, 29 Apr 93 02:37:26 -0500


Strata Rose writes:
> I have just grabbed the xmosaic binaries and report so far so good
> on a Sun 4/330 running 4.1.3. Haven't tested sound stuff yet, will
> try it on a Sparc2 tomorrow. I have some questions, though....
>
> First of all, where can I find some good multimedia stuff for a demo
> of Mosaic to a local K-12 unified school district? I just got dragged
> into this at the last minute, you know how these things are. There's
> some good stuff in the Mosaic demo document, but I'm hoping to find
> stuff for both teachers and kids elsewhere, preferably at least some
> of it education related. Are there URL's for good GIF sites,
> especially anything Space related? I would love JPL or shuttle
> images, and sound files of astronaut stuff would go over really well.
> We'll be doing this over a T1 link, and are assuming a T1 for this
> particular site, so the more the merrier, and huge files are not a
> problem!

Hopefully others can help with more general recommendations, but I
suggest you take a look at.....

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/evl/Welcome.html

.....although there are some SGI-only images and animations in there,
it's got a lot of good, impressive, content-filled (I can say that
since I didn't create it) multi/hypermedia stuff that can be viewed on
any color platform.

> A source for reading netnews via XMosaic would be good as well, I
> want to test the news interface but got a "disallowed" message when
> I tried to enter any of the groups in the netnews page. I want to
> demo the "kids" and "sci" groups in particular to these folks; if
> the news interface is like the rest of mosaic, I feel pretty
> confident that K-12 can handle it trivially. This was in the demo
> doc, by the way-- the "Usenet" under the Documents menu doesn't even
> get me that far.

If you have a valid NNTP/netnews server available to you, set
environment variable NNTPSERVER to it before starting Mosaic and then
you can access any group with URL's of form......

news:alt.hypertext

......or whatever.

> This brings me to another question-- a number of the most important
> documents in the "Documents" menu seem to be inaccessible. The
> "Information by Subject" "Data Sources by Service" and some other
> "meta-lists" are refusing to serve the documents. Some sites may be
> inaccesible, but (for instance) I am seeing plenty of other stuff from
> info.cern.ch so why not these documents?

CERN (the source of those documents) had machine problems today. I
see they're back up now (2:30am Central time).

> Has anyone prepared an initial document which has resources for K-12
> teachers and students? How about for small businesses or independent
> researchers? The Gopher interface is great, but you can't easily
> distinguish between full-text documents, book reviews, and so on. The
> folks who were looking over my shoulder this afternoon were quite
> disappointed when much of "the good stuff" turned out to be course
> descriptions, not documents.

Others can maybe help there -- the global answer is that the Internet
isn't yet a library in any reasonable sense of the word is because
nobody's paying anyone to make it a library. Hopefully through the
use of technology like WWW/WAIS/Gopher etc. this will one day happen.
But there are pockets of definite non-technical content here and
there.

> With respect to WAIS, I keep getting these WAIS pages that say <big
> type> foo.bar.baz is a WAIS server for some topic, but where do I go
> from there? The "search keyword" is grayed out, even when the text
> says "a WAIS server which supports keyword searches on such and so".
> What might I be doing wrong? Clicking in the "Search Keyword" area or
> actual box sometimes gets me a text prompt but it just beeps when I
> type!

Suggest you contact us directly ([email protected]). Sounds like
a strange problem.

> Given the cynicism of much of today's youth, you can understand why I
> want to overcome some of these issues before the demo Friday morning!
> Any help is much appreciated!
>
> One more question-- the school system in question may decide that it
> wants these (and other) tools but doesn't want to maintain their own
> Unix hosts, just to connect via Xterms or somesuch. I have looked at
> the Mosaic copyrights and it looks like it would be legal for one of
> the commercial providers to put the binaries up or run a web server or
> whatever for the school system. But what if the commercial provider
> wanted to let their regular customers use it too? Would that still be
> legit, as long as their customers are buying an account, not buying
> Mosaic or any specific rights to use it? I don't want to install this
> for some provider and then find out that I'm helping to violate UIUC's
> copyright! Guidance on this would be appreciated....

Suggest you contact us directly wrt this too -- the threshold from our
side is that if a commercial concern is distributing and/or modifying
Mosaic in a commercial context, as part of commercial activities, then
it's probably be a good idea to come talk to us. Everything else is
free (including internal company use, btw).

> Thanks for any help on any of these; probably best to send to me and
> not the list. I'll be happy to summarize the URL info if I get any,
> and will certainly pass on any K-12 demo-style document I end up
> generating.

Great!

> _Strata
>
> M. Strata Rose
> Unix & Network Consultant
> [email protected]

Cheers,
Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
[email protected]