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Say 'Cheese' to Google Satellite at 10AM
13.7BillionYears writes "Google's recent purchase of Keyhole and its jaw-dropping 3D earth-browsing software has apparently netted them ownership of an imaging satellite as well, now named 'gSat.' This Friday, April 1st, gSat will be capturing a new dataset (neighborhood of 1meter/pixel), passing over each time zone between 10 and 11AM. If you stand outside and wave you will supposedly show up as a blurry fleck. Even better news is that the dataset will be available within months not only to Keyhole but also to the equally jaw-dropping and open source NASA World Wind. It all seems aimed at answering a question that has plagued mankind for ages: What foolishness can we wreak upon the Earth on the Day of Fools with only 3 days' notice? I'm guessing the obscene stuff will be Photoshopped out. Thanks to the World Wind Forum for the tip and let's hope those April showers come late."
Thanks for the timely posting, Slashdot. Oh, and sorry to all the non-Americans (continents) that missed it.
...you only show up as a 'blurry fleck,' how are you supposed to do something obscene?
First April Fools Post
........
..........go for the First Post !!
Troll Reuniting Day is here! It has arrived at last!
Hi, I'm The_Fire_Horse and you might remember me from such posts as
"Why am I IP banned?", and
"George Bush - The great man who saved the world."
but today is a special day - all trolls, old and new must post a troll somewhere on slashdot. This is my pathetic contribution. I know it isnt much, but I started writing and got writers block - DAMN IT. Why are you still reading it? I just said I have nothing funny to say. Come on, there must be over 2000 posts a day added to slashdot and you are still reading this one - GIVE IT UP - MOVE ON. Look, if you insist on reading crap you could at least contribute and post a troll yourself - go on. Just this once. It is April Fools day after all and you wont be modded down...
Join us on the dark side
Oh, and a big HAPPY TROLLING REUNITING DAY to all the trolls on Slashdot!!!
Ah yes, April 1st on Slashdot. If every single story is an April Fools joke, we will just fool people over and over again because it totally isn't predictable!
I suggest we have Google take over the Hubble project, and have them turn that on us! Then we'll see what's really going on down here... ;)
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
If a guy mugged me tonight I'd just look at him with an uncertain smile until he shot me. I hate april fools. :-/
If the cat can't experience its own death, nothing will ever kill you. (No, really!)
I can see my house from here!
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
because today is April 1 and this lame excuse for an April Fool's Day joke won't work unless you're gullible enough to do it.
I keep going outside and waving but I don't see myself.
Can't somebody come up with better April Fool's jokes??? The ones I've seen so far this year are just embarassing.
Wishing I was a millionaire since 1969.
If they're capturing all of each timezone at 10-11AM of each day, gSat must either be shaped like a curved tube stretching from pole to pole, or orbiting the earth from pole to pole once every hour.
What happens if some real news happens today? Nobody will believe it.
and make an elongated smear
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Be sure to be drinking or holding a bottle of Google Gulp when they take the picture.
and the next thing you know some vanilla copycat release from Redmond is kicking their butt
:-)
WOAH!!! hello! what a sniping remakr at Microsoft! oooouch!! call in the lawyers!
Full at : GOogle Gulp Faq
Maybe we're jaded, but we've seen all these other companies leap headlong into 1.0, thinking their product is exactly what they've been dreaming of all their lives, that everything is perfect and hunky-dory - and the next thing you know some vanilla copycat release from Redmond is kicking their butt, the Board is holding emergency meetings and the CEO is on CNBC blathering sweatily about "a new direction" and "getting back to basics." No thanks, man. We like our freedom.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Do you know , im running out of things to say i will eat
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
So what are you supposed to do, wave for the entire hour? I can see it now, hundreds of geeks running outside and waiving up in the air everyday between 10 and 11. That's a scary thought ....
Isn't April Fools Day just the best? =] For a 'full' list of sites pulling pranks today check out this list here
Here is a sample:
kellyosbourne.org - Sanctuary records group shut us down
nukefreezone.net - Making fun of atrios.blogspot.com
weebl.jolt.co.uk - Replaced with Cats-By-Mail
telecom.co.nz - Click 2 Brick
ytmnd.com - (NSFW) hacked by teens for christ
wingus.ampedhost.com - Site converted into Mingus' Gently-Used Furniture store. Oh dear. Why won't he be kind?
homestarrunner.com - Now a pay service.
whirlpool.net.au - Australia's biggest Luddite to head Australia's largest telco
thinkgeek.com - Fake product listings.
theregister.co.uk - Bush twins to join Air Force tech unit in Iraq
creativebits.org - Site purchased by Microsoft
ocremix.org - Now partnered with EA (or something like that). Called EA ReMix.
spacedaily.com - Bush Cancels Space Shuttle Program
planet.gnome.org - Switched sites with planet.kde.org
planet.kde.org - Switched sites with planet.gnome.org
ietf.org - RFC: Efficient Transformation Formats of Unicode
beejaysworld.de - Gentoo dropping livecds for x86
nature.com - Apollo bacteria spur lunar erosion
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov - Water On Mars
smh.com.au - (Free Reg Req) SMEGmail offers 1 terabyte storage
smh.com.au - (Free Reg Req) Linux looks to Hilton for exposure
thetoque.com - Canada Builds Own Missile Defense Shield
onion.com - U.S. Dog Owners Fear Arrival of Africanized Fleas
chron.com - Bush Twins in Maxim
ask.com - Jeeves has been replaced by a robot
animenewsnetwork.com - Viz Unlicenses Naruto
uninventthewheel.co.uk - New BMW technology to get around the EU ban on right hand drive cars in Europe.
newgrounds.com - changing to numagrounds.com
neopets.com - neopets adds 50 new pets
www.firstloox.org - The Loox is being recalled
packages.gentoo.org - Adobe doesn't sell products for Linux
pc.ign.com - Microsoft World of Wordcraft (Extremely Obvious)
spamusement.com - Page full of spoof banner ads
gentooexperimental.org - Gentoo using the NT kernel
moddb.com
Belive in Technology and AMAZE yourself. -- RIP ZDTV/TechTV
1) 1.3 has been released in early march /. this time... You brought JPL to it's knees last time.
2) An update 1.3.1 is in the testing phases but can be downloaded so you can get some big improvements from the 1.3 release.
3) Servers should be able to withstand the
4) High-rez, close up images are of US locations only (we get asked that 30 times a day..)
5) New NLT images of LandSat are color improved and cover the entire globe down to 10,000 meters.
If you want to capture all of me :-)
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
If you stand outside and wave you will supposedly show up as a blurry fleck.
This ahs to be a april fools joke i seriously doubt that it has that high res.
Slashdot is accumulating all the tech related April Fool's jokes onto one page for my easy access.
In Soviet Russia, asses suck this joke.
When did the earth start spinning the wrong way to allow for timezone capture...
This is great. Now I can go to google and enter "find my lost car keys" and get a nice picture. Thanks again, Big G!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Great! Now after a night on the tiles google will not only find you a cab but also remind you where your house is.
You don't have to post the same post for every article that appears of slashdot!!! Check out his/her/it's past messages.
The hubble's already been taken over! http://tu.solinus.com/?agyc
It would be different if they were remotely funny or at least interspersed with real articles.
Google does not own a satellite. I Do!! Bow to me as I expand my search for Waldo to a Global scale!
This sig has been removed pending an investigation.
Now as a bonus question: Given an equatorial orbit, what altitude would the satellite have to be at in order to orbit the world in approximately 24 hours. Describe the imaging system necessary to resolve a one meter square object at ground level.
Announced today: Playboy's Technology Division has created a new technology called, "Asshole." It's a special camera designed to fly over women who have the potential to become a Playboy Centerfold. So, ladies, if you see the camera coming your way, be sure to bend over and smile.
Now this is a funny joke. The only thing is that it isn't a joke. This is a new low for dorkdom.
Google gulp soft drinks beta programme!
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
I have just done that, I really want to see what it looks like.
Can any body help me finding it with Google? Are there any language I can describe my face in the search box? Any standard? Don't RT?M, because I have just google but found none that satisfy.
Thanks in advance.
Hope you all get a good time. Until next.
if this picture is done successfully, it should be run again during World Jump Day >.>
Remember children, all generalizations are wrong.
mirror. Aimed right back at it.
rewriting history since 2109
Your 'pranks' would be much more effective if there was an actual article to link to.
--
"Stop reading slashdot, and get back to work!" - my boss
bar
But what if this story gets duped tomorrow and/or the day after tomorrow? Would you believe it then?
What would they call it? Gooble? Gobble? Hoogle?
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk
Hopefully, Google will buy and greatly enhance the Ask Jeeves technology soon. It would make it most useful if you could enter "find car keys" into Google, and minutes later a butler taps you on the shoulder and hands them to you.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
next youll be telling us that TITANIC was the highest grossing movie, like anything with a soundtrack by celine dion could turn a profit.....
It should only take two for F150 trucks and a VW bug to show a " /. " Everyone who does this should post the coordinates.
To a politician, one email equals one voter.
Hi guys, I'm one of the people behind this and I jus t peered closely at the images and realised they showed content which most /.'ers won't recognise - so I've cleaned up the images :)
I think I had my eyes closed on that last one.
Sweet informative mod.
Couldn't we not turn it around and point the big lens at the sun and get a nice little death-ray happening.
Suck pretty hard if they lost any more of the gyros though, because when you put "deathray" between "random" and "action" it's not as appealing as it was before. People would have to get reflective umbrellas, or wear tin foil hats. Mind you, that means that half the slashdot crowd is already prepared.
But crispy little paris hilton dogs, birds from the sky (as opposed to birds from the ground) and forest fires would all tremble before the deathray.
Until bill gates blots out the sun that is. And no, you can't fit it on a fricken shark's head.
Sigh, another April 1, and another visitation of the annual useless Slashdot day is upon us. It's Friday so expect more than the usual crop of articles like this.
Kriston
Depending on where you are in Asia, that is white and pretending to be white. Ever hear of the Caucasian race? The Caucasus region is located at the Euro/Asian border, actually. A huge number of Asians are white: much of the north and west of the continent. Asia is not just China. Check a continent map.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
i'll be out there with my aluminum foil hat 'on'.
april fools stories
goddamn it
Not "two for F150"! I meant "two Ford F150".
To a politician, one email equals one voter.
i for one, welcome our new all-seeing, all-knowing, low-orbiting space overlords
I hope they fry that bastard who creamed him with a minivan. Now we'll never see the last Dark Tower books!!!!!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The sun runs windows?
And you kids! Get off my damn lawn! Dang hoodlums... mumble, mumble...
They spend all day rolling their eyes and posting complete snark just to show the whole world they weren't fooled. "I WASN'T FOLLED YOU KNOW --- THIS SI APRIL FOOLS DAY AND SLASHDOTT IS TEH SUCK
Idiots.
Get 30 of your closest friends and stand in formation spelling "Google". Next, drop your pants, moon the sky, and hold it for an hour.
I say I ain't giving you no tree fiddy you goddamned Loch Ness monster, get yo own goddamned money!
Why don't we get a random generator to give us random April's fools day.
I.e. Every April 1st, will be different every year.
Now, that would a good April's fools joke: no predictability and we'll get 1/365 or 1/366 (leap year) probability of actually being on an April fools prank...
Esta es una firma en Espanol.
Has no one noticed that gmail's quota is going up literally every second you are logged in?
https://gmail.com/
It is raining here -- how are they going to see me? Or does Google have infrared cameras on that satellite? I bet they can see through houses! Talk about Spyware...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
I guess so, but an open source project that uses a proprietary framework (.NET) that targets a single platform via a closed video driver spec (DirectX) strikes me as missing the point somewhat. It's a bit like an open source project coded in PPC assembler.
Yes, it is true that there is the possibility that non-Windozers could port the source to Mono, and perhaps there exists a DirectX-to-OpenGL converter such that a sufficiently talented and determined band of coders could, in theory, create working versions of this impressive project that would run somewhere other than the indicated system requirements, but it seems like a long shot to me.
---
System Requirements
* Windows 2000, XP Home, or XP Professional
* Intel Pentium 3, 1 GHz, or AMD Athlon or higher
* 256 MB of RAM
* 3D Graphics Card
o nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra
o ATI Radeon 7500
o Intel Extreme Graphics 2
* DSL / Cable connection or faster
* 2 GB of disk space
---
And yes, I am an envious OS X user -- pretty much a first for me, being envious of a Windows software project.
ugh
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Windows? no way, Sun runs Java, only something with a lot of bloat can cause fusion via it's own mass.
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oh man, this is going to be modded troll faster than you can say "frist piss", but in my defence I know all the arguements about java and its speed. It's a joke, laugh.
Is it just me, or is April 1st slowly evolving away from a "joke news" day and turning into a kind of "Christmas" for Adults/Geeks?
I am going to mow my resume into my lawn. Maybe then I will be considered for a job at Google. They like the creative thinking types right?
Wow, this software is great. I figure at 1 pixel per meter, assuming say 1 byte per pixel, that's about 100 Tb worth of data. So no real time viewing at full resolution I guess, unless you have a NASA supercomputer handy. In a few decades though, we'll all have that much HD on our laptops and the processor to crunch it.
Pity there's no Mac verson. I've written a little OS X app to view astronomical images on a globe interactively with OpenGL (only about 10^7 pixels at most...). I wonder if I can grab a low resolution version of the satellite data somewhere to paint on the sphere,,
The world is everything that is the case
TopoFusion: It is much more powerful than Keyhole and here is a good writeup talking about both of them.
- Teja
I'm almost two meters tall. Does that mean if I go lay on the ground and wave my arms and legs I'll get to be two blurry pixels?
she takes up TWO pixels!
It's really an alien mothership that will abduct you and give you repetitive anal probes and return you to the exact time and location, with a sore ass.
Dude - lay down and wave! Then you'll end up as ~2 blurry flecks, not just one! ;)
The latest series of the real Keyholes are basically Hubbles pointed earthward, minus some cosmic instruments, plus some close-up optics. If you ever get a look at a picture of one they are strikingly similar looking.
But then they'll have to kill you...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Wow.. Who dupes more? The editors or the /.'ers?
1 08267
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144495&cid=12
Yes but, can it find my keys? (Score:5, Funny) by rhennigan (833589) on Friday April 01, @02:13AM (#12108267)
Looks like they are getting closer and closer to being able to locate my keys in my house for me. Awesome.
All over the world, we Rasterbate obscene images.
Need I say more?
Signature.
How did The Onion make the list? This is just another day for them.
What both World Wind and Keyhole lack is exactly global high resolution data. :-/
It's the main weakness in both softwares.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
hahahha at all the geeks rumping and waving outside... heheh ...
phew btw. jumpign and waving takes a lot of work -- not that I would know
-Alex. http://bit.ly/1iVPtfA
It's cloudy.
dead yet?
The worldwind.arc.nasa.gov link for the World Wind 1.3 download appears to be slashdoted. Here's a list of mirrors on SourceForge:
_ Wind_1.3_Full.exe?use_mirror=cogent
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/nasa-exp/World
gmail is now offering 2 gigs of space, through a continuous addition of space. See the gmail homepage for the current count.
if you ask me something sounds fish about this all ... but wouldn't it be neat to use a bunch of black stuff to write a message in your driveway. even a simple "Hi" would be awesome.
ALL YOUR SEARCH ENGINES BELONG TO US!!! ;)
p.s.: And yes dumb lameness filter, it was yelling!
my mistake...
I live underground you insensitive clod!
Keyhole is jaw dropping only for slack jaws!!
I do a fair bit of game design and programming and what key hole is, is not JawDropping. It is so not bleeding edge it is a bandaid. If you could go to a building and 360Deg zoom around it and see realtime IR imaging of it that would be jawdropping for the next year. Ask your local NSA rep what cutting edge is. He'll say what??? and you then simplify the question for his feble mind. Lets see your latest NRA survalace photos. Ohh OK.
This article was posted so late! How will I ever have time to build the giant goatse out of sticks and stones in my backyard?!
Google knows all, Google tells all
i am a soviet space shuttle
Dosen't this seem a little farfetched? I have a feeling this is an gFool joke. But just in case, I'm painting 'WTF?' on the roof of my house....
shut the fuck up nerd and go back to masturbating to women who've had more "beauty" surgeries than is your age in years
Nice joke... here's another either really funny, or really scary one... Has anyone considered that Google==Big brother?
It's Hoggle!
Before modding, see:
This and this and Finally, This
This reminds me of a gag pulled by some radio station in the 80's. Cabbage Patch Kids dolls were in huge demand and low supply. People were fighting over these things in stores. Some radio station announced that people wanting a Cabbage Patch Kid doll should go to a stadium and hold their credit card up to the sky. Staff flying overhead would record the credit card number and drop down a doll to the person. People actually showed up apparently!
Check out the new capacity of GMail and Google's new soft drink.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Awe, Man! This is a joke? I spent the last 45 minutes outside waving my arms like a chicken in a blender.
I'm glad Paris Hilton is going to be the new Linux chick, though. Maybe she'll hook up with Sidd Finch?
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
This one is *NOT* work-friendly...
dont forget to visit #worldwind on freenode to thank the devs in person, and visi the main community hub at http://www.worldwindcentral.com
But I am lactose intolerant you insensitive clod
(funny thing is I really am)
The real reason they obtained the Gsat was to find the Gspot.
Watch for the announcement of the new rebranded MSNASA coming to you via MSNBC. They need some time to paint the "Designed for Windows" logo on the tail of the Space Shuttle.
I've found Waldo. It's a little town just west of Sheboygan, WI.
They seem to be all sold out of those funny looking hats though.
I do heard Google talking about the Keyhole, so it is real, but about the gSat .... I wonder how much does it cost to own a satellie ... Cause I want one too.
Btw, for you country folks, sorry. You guys seems out of luck to be "seen" by keyhole, becasue
Will I be able to see my house?
That depends. While Keyhole does cover the entire globe with satellite imagery, we do not have high resolution imagery for the entire globe. We have focused on larger, US metropolitan areas initially, and will be adding much broader coverage in high-resolution detail over the coming months. See the following charts for a comprehensive list of available high-resolution cities.
http://www.keyhole.com/
I am Who I am. http://www.happyam.com
Here are some satellite pictures of my house - my guess is that Google has even better image quality ... ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Must be something obscene going on there...
take a look