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Already happened. MS advertises Silverlight 2 beta heavily while there is no OS X version of it on sight. Linux/FreeBSD? It is up to their lover, Icaza if they share specs.

They even time it wrong, this game should have started after crashing Flash with questionable deals (like Olympics), not before it is taken serious, even by them.

Well, while they are playing their rich kid games, I already bought my first Adobe Air based commercial application. Upgrade to Earth Browser ( http://www.earthbrowser.com/ ) and I already made "Adobe Media Player" on machines a default install, Windows and OS X.

Let them keep playing with Ruby and newbie geeks minds. Adobe Air is already up and running.

Earth Browser recently got a major upgrade which runs in Adobe Air environment. http://www.earthbrowser.com/

It promises a future option, embedded customized/earthbrowser to put into websites for registered users. I think it will happen thanks to Adobe Air's flash roots.

It is a shareware program.

I would, but their website requires Javascript. Is this some kind of joke? What year is this?

Maybe you could just tell those of us who won't visit them what it is.

Their webmaster is an idiot, by the way, because the javascript required page went into an endless loading loop. Just what he needs, everyone who visits his page to generate a bunch of spurious page loads that won't produce any revenue.

Check http://www.earthbrowser.com/ . An application dates back to MacOS 9 days. Matt Giger, single author of it upgraded to version 3 and it runs on both Windows and OS X without a single glitch. It was originally a C application, it was converted to Adobe AIR and the day Linux has a stable Adobe AIR (soon I think), it is also automatically shipped to Linux/FreeBSD.

That is the opportunity Sun missed with their Webstart/Java. People and industry looks at results, not promises. You can ship a full feature commercial application RIGHT NOW using Adobe AIR Framework. Most of your customers (like me) will be amazed at the fact that it uses LESS CPU compared to "real" previous version.

If they don't make stupid mistakes, Adobe also has a full feature multimedia player/content downloader which also perfectly works both on Windows and OS X. It will be huge in couple of months.
http://www.adobe.com/products/mediaplayer/ . It is -of course- possible thanks to Adobe AIR. Needless to say, it is also automatically shipped to Linux when Adobe Air for Linux stable ships.

What did Silverlight do except bribing to some known figures to promise outdated versions emulator or abusing the panic state of Nokia? Right, Nokia says they will ship Silverlight too but everyone who is experienced on handheld/PDA knows that just by shipping a framework, you don't guarantee people who will code for it or use it. Why would established Flash developer use it instead of using Flash Lite which will be in third generation soon?

I got Silverlight on my Virtual PC 7 running XP SP2. I almost felt sad for Microsoft, shipping as a "optional windows update" with a "KB" number? Sigh.

As a side, cautionary note, Silverlight adds a potential security issue to Mac OS X since it installs as User 502 which people always use as secondary, "non admin" account. Hope they fixed it. That is MS for you and no, I am not confusing it with MS Office 08 bug.

There is Earthbrowser on OS X (and win32) for ages. I don't think it is same with Google earth but it is much more educational and fun program.

They now added satellite photos feature so makes it more cool.

It is installed on many schools,universities but doesn't make it "boring". Especially on hurricane season. ;)

Check yourself

http://www.earthbrowser.com/

I registered EarthBrowser when I first saw it .. its maybe not the right degree of detail (yet), but it sure is fun to surf webcams with ..

(I already commented somewhere else but as usual it was more than 5 minutes after the article got posted, so it's buried).

EarthBrowser is a close analog to Hiro's software, except that it really exists.

Earthbrowser isn't a simulation, so I suppose it's quite different from the military's project -- but it is a very nice take on the user interface for such a thing.

It's been done.

Admittedly, not with these Blue Marble photos.

There's a commercial version already, for both Mac and Windows, called EarthBrowser. Includes weather, cloud patterns, webcams, earthquakes, volcanoes, and shows the terminator. The demo version is free, but feature-restricted; only costs USD 19.95, though.

Of course, an open-source version could be set up with some really nice plug-ins, and then you'd have a really extensible feature set. I'm looking forward to seeing one someday.

A much simpler one that just shows the terminator, time and position of the sun can be had as a screensaver for Mac OS X: Technichron.