Customer Reviews

Isaac Asimov's Library of the Universe and Planetarium Platinum

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Though it's possible there's more to this software than I've discovered (a DVD by the way, not a CD), what I've seen so far is pitiful. It's like I cut out pictures from astronomy magazines, scanned them, then watched them as a slide show. There's nothing that would qualify as computer graphics; and nothing truly inter-active. And the representation of the solar system: a series of drawn concentric circles representing the planets' orbits with various sized circles representing the planets - it literally looks like a bulls-eye target. The only thing at all interesting is a comparative sizing of various stars. All in all, a waste of money.

The original recordings are there, but there is nothing really new to offer. All of the old high-expectation "space exploration on Mars" biases and outdated 80s information are still there... there is not even any mention of any of the following topics: Gravitational lensing, Type Ia supernovae, or the various new evidence for the accelerating Universe. The old estimates of "15 to 20 billion years" for the age of the Universe are retained, when we now can estimate down to a new decimal (currently in "13.7 billion years").

Stellarium is included in the DVD, but it's an open-source application that you can download for free on the internet already, and even then, you have to know the keyboard operations fairly well to use it effectively. And the supplied version has no Daylight Saving Time support.

There is, also, a very serious programming flaw with the package. I've tested the software on an iMac G5 and my intel MacBook. As soon as I open the package on either machine, my CPU processing goes to a maximum load. There is an infinite loop in this software that will force the processor to keep processing some kind of information (no idea what, but it's not even crucial to the program) recursively until you close the program. And yet... the whole showcase is just a bunch of slideshows, a frame rate of maybe 1 new frame every 30 seconds with a bunch of 176 kbps .wav files supplying the commentary. The CPU load should thus be closer to 5% or 10%, nowhere near "the maximum amount possible."

Overall, this product offers essentially nothing new compared to the spectacular 1995 debut and is not even complete from a programming standpoint. The producers had 12 years to come up with something decent. This effort fails dramatically. Just dig up your old Library, put the .wav files on your iPod, and listen to them as you would an Audiobook. That's as "new" as you're going to get.

Finally, the 1995 debut really is a spectacular introductory slideshow/review of the Universe, suitable for introductory Astronomy students, but the problem is that it comes on 6 CDs and has to be played on older platforms. Apparently this lousy 2007 effort is the producer's "Screw you" response to update their software just so it can be played on OS X/Vista, and the various AMD/Intel hardware.

This a fantastic softwear program. I love it.
It installs easy and not only that it is user friendly.