Britannica is an encyclopedia, if you are at all familiar with north american contemporary encyclopedias, if youve been to high school in north ameriki, then you know about this voluminous set of books. They've digitized it a while back, and Ive got me paws on a copy.
So my friend buys 'Encyclopedia Britannica 2003 Ultimate Reference Suite' (sounds impressive dont it) and he lends it to me. Oh there goes the law.
Anyhow, I install it and lo and behold, its got so much great info that I'm loving it... cept the interface just plain old stinks. It's a java based UI with all the excesses of the late 20th century: xml is dead already folks, stop beating that dead horse.
In any case, I want to actually read the text with antialiased fonts (ive got a 400mhz computer, come on already! antialised fonts should be mandatory for a program that is 99% text!) and I want to read it without buying a two-thousand dollar computer ;) So what do i do...
give up.
Ooops, you've got the wrong dude.
So I'm going to understand the data format, by reversing the java trash, and figure out how the data is obscured, write a new UI and voila, I'm in .biz (yes, that's pronounced dot-biz).