Re: About dinosaur CD-ROM's

[Stephen Okay <sokay@snm.com>]

On Thu, 4 Jan 1996, Jarno Peschier wrote:

> At 18:16 2-01-96 -0500, you wrote:
> 
> >>                         3.Software:  Is there anything covering Dinosaurs
> >in
> >>greater depth than Microsoft does?
> >
> >I don't know of any. To cover dinosaurs in depth requires lots of research (I
> >oughtta know), which in turn takes time, which in turn requires $$$. You're
> >not likely to find non-trivial dinosaur information on the Internet for free.
                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                      *SIGH*, in another time, not too many years ago, 
you could have probably. Now that the 'nets all about money, I have to agree.

But I digress...
You might want to take a look at Dinosaur Discovery from American Optical 
Media(I think). I got $$ for NNDGGS(National Non-Denominational Gift 
Giving Season)and picked it up with some of that. Its pretty cool. Large 
selection of dinos, and some 
pretty cool pictures too. I really like the "Comparison" button which 
will pull up a list of other dinos that are similar to the one you're 
currently looking at.  Like if you're looking at Scelidosaurus and are
looking in the classification section, you can click on Family, Order, 
Superorder, etc. and depending on which one you'd clicked you'd get a
list of other Thyreophorans or Nodosaurs. 

The only down side is that the description window is quite small. A 
couple lines of 24-pt. text at max fit in the textual window, so the fact 
that a dinosaur has 8 "pages" of info means that it really only adds up 
to probably half a page of real text. But what do you want for $15?

Key selling  points are that it is bereft of fancy, disposable packaging and 
had Dinogeorge's name on the back as a key contributor/conspirator. That
to me said that while it may be short on textual content, what was there 
was at least likely to be correct.
Money well spent IMHO.....

It might involve quite an effort, but having something like "The 
dinosauria" on CDROM with subscription updates would be very handy and 
well worth the price whatever it was...


----Steve