Slashdot Mirror
Google's Satellite Map Gets a 700-Trillion-Pixel Makeover (theatlantic.com)
An anonymous reader writes: On Monday, Google Maps has received a makeover with 700 trillion pixels of new data added to the service. The Atlantic reports: "The new map, which activates this week for all users of Google Maps and Google Earth, consists of orbital imagery that is newer, more detailed, and of higher contrast than the previous version. Most importantly, this new map contains fewer clouds than before -- only the second time Google has unveiled a "cloudless" map. Google had not updated its low- and medium- resolution satellite map in three years. The new version of the map includes data from Landsat 8, the newer version of the same satellite (Landsat 7, the U.S. government satellite which supplied the older map's imagery data), letting Google clear the ugly artifacts. Google's new update doesn't include imagery at the highest zoom levels, like the kind needed to closely inspect an individual house, pool, or baseball field. Those pictures do not come from Landsat at all, but from a mix of other public and private aerial and space-based cameras, including DigitalGlobe's high-resolution satellites. The image processing for this most recent map was completed entirely in Google Earth Engine, the company's geospatial-focused cloud infrastructure. In fact, the entire algorithm to create the cloudless map was written in Javascript in the Earth Engine development interface."
US government releases new 700 trillion pixel images with fewer clouds. Groups using old US government data (including Google Maps) upgrade to new data.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
but what would we do with all that empty space?
I have the CEO of Starbucks on line 3 for you, sir.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Yes I know.. Java is a prime example of that.. Not that it is a bad language, but that byte-code interpreted thing is kind of a performance killer over the likes of C/C++ (And I'm only talking about performance here youngsters...)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
In my neighborhood, it looks like Google Earth was processed through some kind of bad Instagram filter designed to make things look blurry. I can tell the images are new because of the solar panels on our house. And I noticed that all of the trees have had geometric shaped boundaries applied, all sharp edges and precise angles, curiously not applied to the shadows cast on the ground! Nearly everyone's lawn looks like a patch of dirt. It honestly looks like something out of a 10-15 year old video game.
source --> bytecode --> native still incurs a large penalty.
I'm just hoping this update gets rid of the ugly sprite trees. At some point the earth view of Google Maps stopped serving actual images where it thinks trees are, and started rendering sprites instead. So you try to zoom in and get these big ugly jagged vectors instead of image data.
"If there was a gay Afro-Puertorican Linux distribution, I'd give it a try" ~lucm
This is why they're called a "Just in time compiler"
Something of a mischaracterization. It is really a "Better late than never" compiler.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Sadly, these days, most people graduate with engineering degrees without knowing how to actually program. I work with grad students and student interns all the time, it's a very poor, sad situation in Collegeville. Only a few decades ago, when I graduated, we at least knew how to program a Z80 and a good portion of TurboPascal (and in some situations even C/C++). Engineering students I interact with see exactly 1 week per programming language (Verilog, C, MATLAB, Java...) and that is supposed to teach them how to code by simply making the program slightly more complicated each time they see another language, but they never expand on how to actually program beyond the "make text appear on the screen" and the most difficult thing they end up seeing is a few nested loops or recursive function calls.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
So they can afford to buy new satellite imagery to replace three-year-old images, but they can't afford to consult a human interface expert to get the UI back to a usable state?