Re: opening up work on the BeOS client

Stephen van Egmond (svanegmond nospam at home.com)
Fri, 25 Jun 1999 09:16:05 EDT

>> BeOS masquerades everything via the CAM driver, including ATAPI. I
>> posted some mail on a followup to the topic of some confusing lba's
I'm
>> getting from the system, but the mail system bounced it with:
>
>Such a unification sounds like a good idea to me.
>
>Any links to CAM you recommend?

None that I'm aware of. It turned out the problem was that the TOC was
not being returned indexed by lba (as I suspected) but rather minutes/
seconds/frames. I grabbed the conversion function from FreeBSD.

>I would esp. like to find out what systems support it and if it covers
>non SCSI devices too. Right now I know of BeOS, FreeBSD and old
faithful
>OS/2.

"Common Access Method". I suspect so.

>SCSI is interesting for some other reason too. It offers access to
>the raw bit stream and I am eager to get some CD in my hands that
>features CD Text information in its sub channels.

The last one I knew of was one by the Information Society, and that may
not have even been CD-text.

>For a wide range cdi lib I have to think of some strategy to
>identify the abilities of the system and then choosing some
>aproporate driver access, be it native, CAM or raw SCSI.. depending
>what yields most information.

I'm not sure which problem you're referring to here. The problem of
identifying a disc, or describing the returned cdindex data to the
calling application?

The existing platform-independent layer with one platform-dependent
function works excellently. There are platform-independent xml
parsers; do all supported platforms support BSD sockets? Best not to
assume, and write a platform-call for that one as well.

>> Oh, great. I've stopped reading the comments on /. - total waste
of
>> time.
>
>Funny is the technical devolution involved, what a waste of
>resources compared to net news to serve those large amounts of
>HTML..

I have often wondered why they don't run /. on a news server, and save
the web server for strict news.

/Steve