Here's a sad laugh. The new filtered National Elevation Dataset (NED, at http://gisdata.usgs.gov) is not available in either the good old *standard* DEM format, nor is it available in that new, irritatingly difficult SDTS format that we've recently had to embrace like a saguaro cactus (and how much trouble have we all gone to already to work with the established standards?!?.) No, these data come in ArcGrid format, a proprietary ESRI standard. Officially it is also available in GRIDFLOAT (an open ASCII format also designed by ESRI) and bil format which is a common non-prop graphics standard too, but just try getting a large area (like a whole state or the whole country) in anything other than ArcGrid. The USGS can't do it yet. Or at least there's a long wait. With so many open and published GOVERNMENT standards that support elevation data, why can't they produce NED in one of their own so all of us get a fair shot at it? It's really too bad that the USGS has to use software that doesn't support their own formats and they no longer have enough technical people to provide data in any of these published formats. I wonder what the world would be like today if the USGS had embraced the Open Source concept, gone with GRASS and other open software to produce and maintain our national data assets. I hope they are considering the idea of migrating to a full Open Source solution before the commercial-dependence shackles get welded on too tightly to shake off. In the meantime, we now have ANOTHER freakin' format to write translators for!!! rant... rant... sputter... @#%$&*!! - Bill Thoen ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put "unsubscribe MAPINFO-L" in the message body, or contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
