Larry,

of course, ascii files are longer.
Anyway i don't want to criticize your choices for Winquake and sdr
but only to examine practical aspects.

About the increasing of disk space i think this is not a big problem.
Using compressed archives (with winzip for example) the size become very
small.

On the expandibilty of PSN4 format (touchè) i'm not examined it well
even if the expandibilty of a binary record is not too easy to manage
especially
for people that wants to stick one standard but is not so much expert on
programming tecniques.

Larry, really i don't want to criticize your PSN4 format. I did not
discussed it
when you done it with other psn members, i was'nt expert enough to do it.
Now i am more expert and after analized the needs of the seismic amateurs
i believe that an open, clear, easy to read, user friendly format is needed,
even if
it is very long in space. Hard disk space is very cheap now. You can
purchase a 10 Gbytes
for 120 dollars! You can have a CD disk for 0.5 dollars and purchase a CD
writer for less than 200 dollars.
Space is not (in my opinion) a problem.

Using archive compressor the 8 char filename length is a problem.
Your winquake when access a database of events do a great work analizying
and reporting
date time location and comments on the file you're opening.
If the events file are compressed you cant'do that with winquake.
Using long names you could create a database readable with Computer Resource
of windows
creating filenames like:

20000701_145023_PG_E-W_KURILI-ISLANDS_M6.5.TXT

I think you should modify SDR to use long names.
If i'm not in wrong SDR is DOS based and this can't be done.
Anyway this is my viewpoint:

Files should be:, readable, portable, opened, not closed to a single
application.
This is a REAL need here in Italy (maybe in your country PSN has different
needs.)
but here, where each university uses a different format, we must mantains
all things more portable.
Surely this can cause more confusions but any kind of problem will be solved
in a few moments
by an expert person without expending a lot of time and resources to
understand one format
or one another.

PS: In 6smowin i archives logger files daily in binary format (pure 16 bits
format) it generates an ASCII text
reference for each binary file with info about how that data has been
collected.
Raw data are in binary user data are in ascii...

Warmly
Mauro


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