CompuServe Messages

I have MacWorld CD Ventures "TasteMate Movie Selection Guide CD". I ordered it November 11th and it arrived January 9th, so they were already off to a bad start. The database used for the CD is "Videolog Select" which is a subset of the Videolog books most video stores have and includes 40,000 movies. This subset does not include any of the company or price information in the book. Using this database also means that if the movie isn't available on videotape it's not on the CD. The CD includes twelve quicktime 1.5 previews of recent movies (yawn). The "artifical intelligence" aid in selecting movies is nothing but comparing a list of 3 movies you like selected from a list, to other peoples lists of movies. Here's an example: I selected 'Au Revoir Les Enfants', 'Diary of Anne Frank', and 'Judgement at Nuremburg'. What movies would you recommend, given this list? TasteMate "highly" recommends a list that includes.. 'E.T.', 'Ferris Buellers Day Off', 'Goodfellas', and 'Terminator 2'. TasteMate also provides lists by title, actor, and director. The list are in alphabetical order but are only indexed by the first letter. It also has a "find" feature that works only with whole words- for example "tumbleweed" will not find "Tumbleweeds". Once you find the movie, it does provide a very brief summary,list of catergories (ie. western) major actors and director. You can then find a list of movies for the actor or director, but not the catergory. Also, TasteMate does not appear to be Mac oriented – it supports none of Mac features I expect like copy, print. The only thing you can print is a list of recommended titles. The most positive feature of the disc is that all of it's information is stored in "text" files, so you can write your own program to access the data.