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Google Earth Pro Now Available Free
HughPickens.com writes Google has long offered a Pro version of Google Earth for $399 per year that includes some pretty cool extras not found in the free version. Now Rick Broida reports at Cnet that you can get Google Earth Pro absolutely free. All you have to do is download the installer, run it, then sign in using your e-mail address (as your username) and license code GEPFREE. Features include: Advanced measurements: Measure parking lots and land developments with polygon area measure, or determine affected radius with circle measure; High-resolution printing: Print images up to 4,800 x 3,200 pixel resolution; Exclusive pro data layers with Demographics and traffic count; Spreadsheet import: Ingest up to 2,500 addresses at a time, assigning place marks and style templates in bulk; and Movie-Maker: Export Windows Media and QuickTime HD movies, up to 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution. If you've ever been involved in a property dispute, you'll know how acrimonious they can get. Google Earth Pro includes parcel data that definitively defines property boundaries. "Do you really need this? Probably not, as Pro was created with business/enterprise users in mind," writes Broida. "Let's be honest, [Google Earth Pro has] entertainment value that's virtually impossible to measure."
I see that bloody Slashdot Deals stupid posting so many times I just autoclick it away now :-/
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
Just as Google Maps and friends has saved millions of man-hours and probably hundreds of millions of dollars from people not being lost sufficiently wide adoption and awareness of these advanced features may save an immense amount of temporal and fiscal expense.
Common usage combined with other services can, for example, create self-aware communities, allow public input for city planning, resolve boundary arguments, help individuals planning to, for example, install a swimming pool, and provide data for planning crop layouts.And that's just off the top of my very non-expert head. I think the implications of this are far broader than may be immediately recognized.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
The prevalence of hyperbole in modern journalism is virtually impossible to measure.
The "GEPFREE" password wasn't announced, and there were issues with the licensing site
I did a malware scan (3 common engines) on the file and it checks out, the thing works for free.
Slashdot deals is at least as valuable to me as Amazon and e-bay. In fact it has a few added benefits of only display things of relative geekiness that might interest me, rather than Amazon who tend to display every related item i might have ever clicked on in the last 5 years. Also Slashdot deals will show you prices that guarantee you can buy the same item somewhere else for 20% less.
Neither do i disable advertising. Flooding the internet with my inane preference tracking cookies to be stored and backed up on hundreds of servers is the surest way to overwhelm the probabilistic failure rate of raid 6 and force manufactures back to offering 5 year warranties standard. - C'mon people, help keep Slashdot free - Clickit!
parcel data that definitively defines property boundaries.
BOGUS statement.
As soon as I downloaded this I zoomed in on the area
I live in (somewhere in N. Galveston CO. , Texas)
and saw immediately the property lines were wrong.
Not by a small margin either. All property lines along
the road I live along were shifted by offset of around 20 to 30 feet.
A further look at neighboring streets showed similar
offsets.
In the linked article to the story the blog clown stated
this wondrous GM Pro could cheaply solve property disputes (or words to that effect).
Yah, right. Nope. Might cause trouble but not a tool to cheaply determine property boundaries.
Unreliable, therefor useless.
Anyone else care to check theirs? I imagine it varies region to region how useful it is but bottom line if wrong in this area it is most likely wrong in other far flung areas.
Something between the lines jumps out and bites your arm off. Soltan Gris / London
Sadly not Linux.
They use Linux on all their servers, they build Android on top of Linux, but they can't be bothered giving back Linux support on their products.
How pathetic is that?
https://dl.google.com/earth/cl...
If their product wasn't crushing you at $400, it won't crush you at free.
$400 is not a lot of money for the enterprise market, I'm shocked it was so cheap.
It says "Mac and PC" (not "Windows PC") - we've been complaining for years that "PC" doesn't mean "Windows PC", looks like Google for once got the message.
When you click through you do get a "GoogleEarthLinux.bin", or at least, I did. (downloaded on x86_64/Arch Linux/Firefox)
I haven't tried it yet, so I don't know yet if it actually WORKS (unlike the previous version of "regular" Google Earth for me) but it looks like they are handing out Linux versions.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Why make a Linux version when Linux is simply not enough of a market to be worth serving?
Yes, they use Linux to run their servers, it is a great server OS. It sucks as a desktop OS.
I knew I shouldn't have put my pitchfork and torch away so quickly. Friggin' Google. As much as I love playing with maps, Google can take a long walk off a short pier - I'm not desperate enough for their "product" to mess around with WINE.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
What part of "close and don't show me this again" don't you understand? 3rd week in a row now I've see that crap pop up. I hope this isn't going to be a nightmare like it was with /. beta plaguing everyone.
If you keep clearing your cookies, it will keep popping up. Idiot.
No, it appears to be the kind of cookie they're using. Every time I restart my browsers, I see this advertisement again. Clearly, the cookie is only being set for the session. Also, why the fuck is this not stored in the database, instead of in the cookie? It's trivially easy to associate this with the logged-in userid. Now, this is Slashdot, so odds are good that we can attribute this to incompetence rather than malice. But....
... But they also keep showing this to users (like myself) who have taken them up on their own offer to turn advertising off, which is really fucking stupid. As I wrote elsewhere, 'I probably wouldn't have cared about Slashdot Deals anyway, but now I fucking hate it. It's that asshole creep at the bar that won't leave your friend alone.'
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
That is surprising, I agree.
An alternate suggestion if you want to keep the existing System Preferences: right-click ('ctrl-click') on the binary to bring up the context menu, then select 'Open". This will invoke the same warning, but will also allow you to authenticate -- allowing this binary to run (here and thereafter) without complaining.
High-priced products are a corporatist conspiracy.
Free products are a corporatist conspiracy.
This is starting to sound like when the Church of Warminetics predicts that carbon warming will cause flooding and droughts.
So, in other words, if I'm having a property dispute especially one involving the court system, I DO want a survey. When court is involved, the person who's being cheap is the one who tends to lose. Ask all those people who thought they were smart enough to defend themselves in court, or who thought the court-provided lawyer was actually going to do anything.
You want a surveyor to be involved in ANY property issue, whether it goes to court or not. If you want to build a fence, remove a tree near a lot line, whatever, you should have a thorough survey done to know where your boundary lines are for your property, if one hasn't been done before you bought the property. Surveyors have centimeter or less accuracy GPS units and can tell you EXACTLY where your lot lines (and corners) are within that accuracy. We've never had that level of accuracy before GPS and it has had a major impact on real estate.
I cannot tell you how many people I've known over the years that have put fences in (in particular) and found out a few years later when the property next to them goes up for sale and a modern survey is done that their fence is on the neighbors property. It costs thousands to get that fixed, legally. I won't even go into the idiots that built additions near lot lines and ended up on the wrong side or too close to the line and had to demolish or "emend" the addition. Nightmare.
Heck, even reviewing the agreement is difficult.
Does the Mac OS License include the onerous section that is in the IOS developer agreement about making public statements? See the EFF All Your Apps Are Belong to Apple: The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement page.
As I can't review the agreement without either giving them a credit card number or committing fraud, I can't seem to find out.
Certificates do not have much value, especially for smaller firms. Say an app from a smaller vendor or an individual is signed, but turns out to be malicious. What's Apple going to do, other than revoke the cert and try not to give that vendor or individual a cert in the future?
That said, I'm glad it is possible to download Google Earth without enabling automatic updates. I downloaded GE in January and there was no way to run it without automatic updates running. I removed Chrome because it automatically updates. I need a bit more control over my machine than that.
Sketchup Pro is not a Google product, so begging Google to release it for free is not likely to go anywhere. Now why Trimble bought Sketchup from Google in the first place I'll never know. Setting up Google Earth Pro to be free *before* Google sells it off is probably a good move for users. Too bad they didn't do that with Sketchup before they sold it.
"Google Earth Pro includes parcel data that definitively defines property boundaries."
No, Just no.... I work in GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and I can GUARANTEE that a vast majority of the property lines displayed in the program do not "definitively defines property boundaries". Some may not be far off, some may not be too bad, most will only be in the ball park and some will be horribly off, the only way to be sure one way or another would be a title search and a survey and even then once in a while things can go wrong. Property description is insanely complicated, in my area the property records go back into the 1840s and technically to be sure someone has to trace and map every sale from now back to then. Since that is extremely time consuming most title companies these days only trace it back 40-60 years and then rely on insurance to pick up the tab if the issue exists further back. Most GIS maps don't try to do ANY of that, they grab the tax records or maps if they exist and digitize (scan them, electronically rubber sheet them to a rough geographic base and then draw some digital lines on top of the scans hand drawn ones) them making your average digital property line map at best 5-50' accurate. Even with organizations that go the extra distance and rebuild the parcel layer off of certified orthophotos (3' accuracy for 90% of surveyed points) you're only improving to about 5-10' accuracy. In a very few rare circumstances you may get some parcels where employees actually went out to properties that happened to be surveyed and then you're probably getting sub-centimeter accuracy for about 0.00000000002% of the parcels.
and those in the us can go to the usgs national map viewer and download high res orthoimagery (aerial imagery modified to the correct coordinates unlike google earth) for most of the us for free already. and it includes other interesting data sets like elevation, ground cover etc.
Yes, they should support all their products on every platform all the time, no matter how tiny the marketshare, and no matter how tiny the revenue stream, compared to the revenue from their core advertising products.
After all, Google is a non-profit semi-governmental organization that is only designed to do things for the common good in the fairest-seeming possible way. Also, I don't think that the Google employees themselves will mind being pulled off their current Android embedded Linux project, or their Autonomous car project, or their server-side project, to start working on this major piece of critical revenue-generating Google Earth Linux-client infrastructure. Developers are just like sheep. Just push them towards a new different direction each week, and they'll gladly follow that new direction until you tell them otherwise. That's how obedient they are.
LOL, http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/... must be getting hammered right now. It done got /. to death.
Correction to my previous post: Trimble is still updating Sketchup. They just released a new version. gogo Twilight Zone effect. That's good news though!
Typical whiner. It was a for profit product. If it had been selling in your country, it probably would have been available with the data there as well. But go ahead and pile on because you got something for free that doesn't have everything you wanted.
Just another day in Paradise