Cd Rom

A West Hills man was ordered to pay $1,450 in fines and court costs after pleading no contest to selling CD-ROMs containing obscene material last fall at two computer shows at Cal State Northridge, the city attorney announced. Jalin Chi, 36, also was sentenced to two years' probation after he entered his plea in Los Angeles Municipal Court on Tuesday to one count of distributing obscene materials, Deputy City Atty. Deborah Sanchez said.

A Harvard University professor has created a multimedia CD-ROM that she hopes will enliven the study of religion in colleges, high schools and houses of worship. The CD, "On Common Ground: World Religions in America" (Columbia University Press), is the result of a three-year effort by the Pluralism Project, a research organization funded by the Lily Endowment to examine ways religious diversity is affecting America.

CD-ROM buyers are given four words of advice by a recent survey of prices: You better shop around. Price tags from superstores to warehouse clubs and discount department outlets varied by as much as 30%, according to a report by PC World, a San Francisco-based monthly magazine about personal computing. The magazine looked at shelf prices for major titles such as Lion King, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Myst and Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia.

In lieu of any Python reunions, the cult will have to make do with "Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time," a CD-ROM that has just been issued (in Windows format only, so far) and already taken its place as one of the most delightful uses of that particular home-computer format yet.

For 13 years, from 1981 to 1994, Greg Williamson, Chris Carlsson and Jim Swanson devoted much of their time and energy to producing a unique, anti-establishment magazine called Processed World. The publication offered stinging critiques of the corporate world and the dehumanizing dimensions of computer technology, and the printed magazine was often distributed with street theater to underscore the point.

Technicolor Inc.'s Camarillo plant has added a compact-disc duplicating unit to its video operation, and is already turning out 65,000 CDs and CD-ROMs daily. Since the operation was launched in February, the company says it has produced 2 million CDs and CD-ROMs--1 million of them in the past month alone. CD-ROMs, which account for 60% of the output, look like ordinary CDs but combine audio, video and text content. The expansion has added 110 new workers at the former Everest & Jennings Inc.

Going somewhere? You might not want to rely too heavily on your Mac for help. Mapping and travel Web sites such as MapQuest and Expedia work just fine on Macs, as do online reservation and airline sites. But the selection of travel-planning CD-ROM packages for the Mac is sparse, and the programs that are available take a back seat to their Windows counterparts.

A CD-ROM player is a necessity for business computing these days, not a frill. The wealth of business data available on CD-ROM discs is growing at near exponential rates. And it is increasingly popular for software publishers to sell their wares on a CD-ROM instead of on multiple floppy disks. For instance, OS/2 Warp, IBM's latest incarnation of its 32-bit operating system, comes on CD-ROM. So does Windows NT Advanced Server network operating system.

Graphix Zone, which provides computer services and markets high-tech equipment, is getting into the publishing business with its first CD-ROM title, "Guided Tour of Multimedia." The Irvine company has established Zone Publishing as a separate subsidiary that will focus on publishing about two titles a year on CD-ROM, or compact discs that use the same technology as compact disc players. The contents stored on CD-ROM discs can be read by special drives and displayed on personal computer screens.