You're right. Geospatial is already everywhere (pun intended) and will just become more and more omnipresent. This might interest you: http://slashgeo.org/
The site has thousands of daily readers but the user participation is rather low at the moment. It has even been closed the last two weeks after two years online, but we're reviving it no less than tomorrow.
And oh... Slashgeo added GeoRSS and OpenLayers/Google Maps support to slash... but the Slashdot team has not contributed to the development of this plugin... yet!;-)
I'm probably not alone curious and wanting to download this free app to (re)discover which OSS is installed on my computers... You can download it from here: http://www.openlogic.com/discovery/new_download_re gister.php?ls= and you need to give your name, email, location and some more before downloading the beast.
You're not the first to complain about Slashdot's regular coverage of "minor Apple news". If you don't like this, or any other/. topic, you can go to your/. prefs and identify which topics you want on your main page. The slash prefs allows you to customize your/. experience.
That would be great, no? Here's a previous/. discussion on GeoRSS. The GeoRSS plugin for Slash is almost complete, it already works, but some efforts are required to finalize it, and I bet the Slashdot team has way more resources than my small team!:-)
And hey, we even have OpenLayers with Google Maps maps within stories. Same story as GeoRSS for Slash, this Slash plugin works (example here (temporarily disabled)), and not much is required to make it fully complete!
This is a dear subject to me; we have no TV, no car, no microwave, no dishwasher, only one cell phone (my wife needs it for her job), etc. The minimal amount of "gadgets". Since things we own require attention. Requiring attention is not necessarily a bad thing, but you don't chose the time when your hard disk will fail and you'll need to take care of another hardware-related issue.
The main thing left is computers. We have three. I really want to spend less time in front of computers (especially since my day job requires me to be in front of one most of my work time), but the problem (challenge?) is that a lot of my hobbies / dreams / projects are tied to computers. (change computers in the last sentence for your favorite gadget so that I'm not too off-topic;-) I have fun with computers for playing music, for documenting / advancing personal projects, communicating with friends and relatives, etc. I hear you say (or is this myself?) that we all need balance. I already play outside on a mostly daily basis... but what happens when gadgets are the hub of your life? What's the point of starting new hobbies (woodworking?) if my most dear personal projects require gadgets and computers? Have I become a pseudo-slave of gadgets.
Having no TV (for the last 8 years and we don't miss it at all) makes sure I'm not hypnotized by it, however, computers and Internet (/. anyone?) succeeds in swallowing me way too often...
Ah.... challenges of a life surrounded by gadgetry...:-)
"if companies like Flickr keep an e-mail address for those seeing their photos online" You haven't mentioned it, but I guess you already know about FlickrMap. Flickr is part of Yahoo!, and they're not going out of the competition vs Google / Microsoft and alternatives on the mapping stuff and photos.
This might not be real-time, it remains still impressive: read this recent story on "How Online Maps Update Their Data After Major Road Closures", the summary: "Several blogs discussed the re-routing of webmapping directions that happened after a freeway connector collapsed. It started with the Brain Off blog, Mapping Hacks and All Points Blog providecomments. The Map Room shares additional links (yes, I did copy TMR's entry title). From the article: "Some services reflected the altered landscape right away, some needed a few days, and some still don't show that anything has changed. Even some of the Web sites that show alternative routes around the melted MacArthur Maze don't give the same directions that Caltrans and the city of Oakland have asked people to take. [...] Satellite services like GPS provider Magellan don't update their maps, but customers who pay extra for traffic updates would see that the road is closed. Drivers can also tell their devices that they need an alternative route.""
I'm not related to the author at all, but this book about ambient findability well suits the discussion. From wikipedia: "Findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable. At the item level, we can evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or locate. At the system level, we can analyze how well a physical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval."
There's the OpenSceneGraph project. Not all 3D is Blender/Maya, it really depends on what you want/need to do. If we stick to the title "3D modeling", I guess even some 3D game engines can fit in!:-) "The OpenSceneGraph is an open source high performance 3D graphics toolkit, used by application developers in fields such as visual simulation, games, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modelling. Written entirely in Standard C++ and OpenGL it runs on all Windows platforms, OSX, GNU/Linux, IRIX, Solaris, HP-Ux, AIX and FreeBSD operating systems."
Related see this audio maps project (via C). Fron the former link: "In the case of geo-referenced data where users need to combine demographic, economic or other data in a geographic context for decision-making, we designed iSonic, an interactive sonification tool that allows users to explore in highly coordinated table and choropleth map views of the data. Sounds of various timbres and pitches are tied to map regions and other interface widgets to create a virtual auditory data display."
I had such a conversation with friends recently... does such analysis includes: - The time computers can be effectively used (Apple computers have a significantly longer lifespan on my desks than the PCs) - The waste of time / energy required to manage the computer (security, virus, etc) - The user-efficiency related to the operating system itself - The differences in sleep modes and energy consumption at low usage - The longevity and eco-friendliness of laptop batteries - etc etc etc.
See also this previous/. story and Green My Apple. In short, I believe not everything is black or white, it's rather grey. Of course, I agree that all computer producers should improve their eco-friendliness, but measuring this eco-friendliness is not a simple task.
Oh, and by the way, instead of using the Google Maps API to show them on your website, I invite you to try OpenLayers, which does the same thing, except that it's open, supported by the OSGeo and allows you to toggle from Google data to Microsoft or Yahoo or any WMS server easily.
Surprised by the bad translations in the comments, here's a more appropriate one (no, online translation tools are not as good as humans): Je, quant à moi, souhaite la bienvenue à nos nouveaux maîtres OVNIs.
Additionally, it's not "secoupe volante" pour rather "soucoupe volante" (flying saucer) (see other comment on parent). And if they wanted to be our masters and already made contact, since they would have the technology to reach us, I guess they'd already be our masters. (well, looking at our politicians' behavior, maybe they already are!;-)
Usually, I read/. for the comments. But in that case (ok, I'm an Apple satisfied customer), reading the whole entries is really worthed. FTA: "Clearly, market share is meaningless taken out of context, and anyone insisting that market share "speaks for itself" probably has good reason to avoid explaining things." In our fast pace life, to understand the big picture, we must take time to learn about the context of events...
right here. This very discussion made me wonder if the Apple is ready for the enterprise, customer-service wise.
That said, I'm personally thinking of bringing my old Mac Mini from home to work (and buying a new one for home;-) even if the organization won't pay for it. Why? Mainly Mail and Spotlight. Those two really make me more efficient, yes, to the point of buying one for work on my personal money. (the only challenge is making IT to allow this Mac on the network)
I agree. In geospatial technologies (e.g. satellite imagery, aerial photography, GIS, topography, etc.) the GeoTIFF format is commonly used for georeferenced raster data. Additionally, the BigTIFF format proposal comes to the rescue to circumvent TIFF's 4 gigs maximum size.
I tried to find additional info about location embedding but haven't succeeded so far. From the wikipedia page, the XML code includes url type="http" location="uk" preference="90">http://www.example2.com/example.ex t/url, the part I don't get, as a geospatial professional (see sig), is why the location is encoded as the country code. What are the reasons? Does it make more sense to encode location with a simple lat-lon values (similar to, say, the georss standard do). Some countries being so large, I fail to see the country as a good indicator of distance between computers. What did I got wrong?
Ok. I just had to follow some more links to realize that the open source cross-platform alternative doesn't offer MacOS X binaries yet, one has to compile from source. That's a showstopper for most Mac users... well, with Metalink getting more attention, I'm not worried, mature clients will come soon.
Strangely enough, the OpenOffice distribution page links to a pay-for Metalink client for the Mac, but hopefully, just two links above, there's the cross-platform open source client. That's confusing. I clicked on the Mac client, thinking I would end up at a Mac-oriented free (even open source?) client, but no, one must choose the cross-platform. Nothing really wrong there, only that it's confusing.
Unrelated, I saw numerous attempts of such integrated p2p downloads. The part that got me from the Metalink main page: "Metalink is an Open Standard". This makes me believe I will join the bandwagon. And yup, the Wikipedia Metalink page is (surprisingly?) informative.
Well, such headlines won't stop me from using FF. At least vulnerabilities are attended to in a way I believe (wrongly?) faster than most mammoth companies would. That said, this point from the article is interesting, making me believe researchers should (?) have incentives to disclose security bugs to Mozilla first and to the public only when the fix is distributed: "Although Snyder said she would prefer it if Zalewski and other researchers would disclose vulnerabilities to Mozilla before taking them public, she said the company relies on such experts to help it keep customers protected from attacks, as painful as the reports may be."
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. Geospatial is already everywhere (pun intended) and will just become more and more omnipresent. This might interest you: http://slashgeo.org/
;-)
The site has thousands of daily readers but the user participation is rather low at the moment. It has even been closed the last two weeks after two years online, but we're reviving it no less than tomorrow.
And oh... Slashgeo added GeoRSS and OpenLayers/Google Maps support to slash... but the Slashdot team has not contributed to the development of this plugin... yet!
I'm probably not alone curious and wanting to download this free app to (re)discover which OSS is installed on my computers... You can download it from here: http://www.openlogic.com/discovery/new_download_re gister.php?ls= and you need to give your name, email, location and some more before downloading the beast.
It's Yahoo! behind Delicious, and delicious is very useful (at least to me!).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us
You're not the first to complain about Slashdot's regular coverage of "minor Apple news". If you don't like this, or any other /. topic, you can go to your /. prefs and identify which topics you want on your main page. The slash prefs allows you to customize your /. experience.
That would be great, no? Here's a previous /. discussion on GeoRSS. The GeoRSS plugin for Slash is almost complete, it already works, but some efforts are required to finalize it, and I bet the Slashdot team has way more resources than my small team! :-)
And hey, we even have OpenLayers with Google Maps maps within stories. Same story as GeoRSS for Slash, this Slash plugin works (example here (temporarily disabled)), and not much is required to make it fully complete!
or at least that was they said in Fight Club.
;-) I have fun with computers for playing music, for documenting / advancing personal projects, communicating with friends and relatives, etc. I hear you say (or is this myself?) that we all need balance. I already play outside on a mostly daily basis... but what happens when gadgets are the hub of your life? What's the point of starting new hobbies (woodworking?) if my most dear personal projects require gadgets and computers? Have I become a pseudo-slave of gadgets.
:-)
This is a dear subject to me; we have no TV, no car, no microwave, no dishwasher, only one cell phone (my wife needs it for her job), etc. The minimal amount of "gadgets". Since things we own require attention. Requiring attention is not necessarily a bad thing, but you don't chose the time when your hard disk will fail and you'll need to take care of another hardware-related issue.
The main thing left is computers. We have three. I really want to spend less time in front of computers (especially since my day job requires me to be in front of one most of my work time), but the problem (challenge?) is that a lot of my hobbies / dreams / projects are tied to computers. (change computers in the last sentence for your favorite gadget so that I'm not too off-topic
Having no TV (for the last 8 years and we don't miss it at all) makes sure I'm not hypnotized by it, however, computers and Internet (/. anyone?) succeeds in swallowing me way too often...
Ah.... challenges of a life surrounded by gadgetry...
I'm surprised TFA does not mention the newly announced by Amnesty International "Eyes on Darfur" website. Oh, Beirut imagery has been updated to reflect the situation after the 2006 Lebanon War.
Here's a few stories in the same vein:
Documenting Humanitarian Crisis with Google Earth
New Google Earth Layers: Darfur and more
The Israel-Lebanon Conflict in Google Earth
Beirut Destruction Through Remote Sensing
Israel - Lebanon Conflict and Geospatial Data Access
Is welcomed when trying to figure the best date to buy new Apple hardware...
Right here.
For the paranoiacs, Paronamio has been acquired by Google this week (more info here).
"if companies like Flickr keep an e-mail address for those seeing their photos online"
You haven't mentioned it, but I guess you already know about FlickrMap. Flickr is part of Yahoo!, and they're not going out of the competition vs Google / Microsoft and alternatives on the mapping stuff and photos.
This might not be real-time, it remains still impressive: read this recent story on "How Online Maps Update Their Data After Major Road Closures", the summary:
"Several blogs discussed the re-routing of webmapping directions that happened after a freeway connector collapsed. It started with the Brain Off blog, Mapping Hacks and All Points Blog provide comments. The Map Room shares additional links (yes, I did copy TMR's entry title). From the article: "Some services reflected the altered landscape right away, some needed a few days, and some still don't show that anything has changed. Even some of the Web sites that show alternative routes around the melted MacArthur Maze don't give the same directions that Caltrans and the city of Oakland have asked people to take. [...] Satellite services like GPS provider Magellan don't update their maps, but customers who pay extra for traffic updates would see that the road is closed. Drivers can also tell their devices that they need an alternative route.""
TFA doesn't mentions GeoRSS. Sad since Google already supports GeoRSS and it would be more than appropriate for global news diffusion...
I'm not related to the author at all, but this book about ambient findability well suits the discussion. From wikipedia: "Findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable. At the item level, we can evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or locate. At the system level, we can analyze how well a physical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval."
There's the OpenSceneGraph project. Not all 3D is Blender/Maya, it really depends on what you want/need to do. If we stick to the title "3D modeling", I guess even some 3D game engines can fit in! :-)
"The OpenSceneGraph is an open source high performance 3D graphics toolkit, used by application developers in fields such as visual simulation, games, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modelling. Written entirely in Standard C++ and OpenGL it runs on all Windows platforms, OSX, GNU/Linux, IRIX, Solaris, HP-Ux, AIX and FreeBSD operating systems."
Related see this audio maps project (via C). Fron the former link: "In the case of geo-referenced data where users need to combine demographic, economic or other data in a geographic context for decision-making, we designed iSonic, an interactive sonification tool that allows users to explore in highly coordinated table and choropleth map views of the data. Sounds of various timbres and pitches are tied to map regions and other interface widgets to create a virtual auditory data display."
I had such a conversation with friends recently... does such analysis includes:
/. story and Green My Apple. In short, I believe not everything is black or white, it's rather grey. Of course, I agree that all computer producers should improve their eco-friendliness, but measuring this eco-friendliness is not a simple task.
- The time computers can be effectively used (Apple computers have a significantly longer lifespan on my desks than the PCs)
- The waste of time / energy required to manage the computer (security, virus, etc)
- The user-efficiency related to the operating system itself
- The differences in sleep modes and energy consumption at low usage
- The longevity and eco-friendliness of laptop batteries
- etc etc etc.
See also this previous
A previous poster already mentioned that Google's Picasa is a free and easy tool to add geolocation to the EXIF metadata of photos and then publish them on Google Earth or Google Maps. Of course, there are plenty of other tools to do just that. Examples include this one for the mac, or this other one specifically for iPhoto. You'll get much more photo geocoding tools examples here.
Oh, and by the way, instead of using the Google Maps API to show them on your website, I invite you to try OpenLayers, which does the same thing, except that it's open, supported by the OSGeo and allows you to toggle from Google data to Microsoft or Yahoo or any WMS server easily.
Surprised by the bad translations in the comments, here's a more appropriate one (no, online translation tools are not as good as humans): Je, quant à moi, souhaite la bienvenue à nos nouveaux maîtres OVNIs.
;-)
Additionally, it's not "secoupe volante" pour rather "soucoupe volante" (flying saucer) (see other comment on parent). And if they wanted to be our masters and already made contact, since they would have the technology to reach us, I guess they'd already be our masters. (well, looking at our politicians' behavior, maybe they already are!
Usually, I read /. for the comments. But in that case (ok, I'm an Apple satisfied customer), reading the whole entries is really worthed. FTA: "Clearly, market share is meaningless taken out of context, and anyone insisting that market share "speaks for itself" probably has good reason to avoid explaining things." In our fast pace life, to understand the big picture, we must take time to learn about the context of events...
right here. This very discussion made me wonder if the Apple is ready for the enterprise, customer-service wise.
;-) even if the organization won't pay for it. Why? Mainly Mail and Spotlight. Those two really make me more efficient, yes, to the point of buying one for work on my personal money. (the only challenge is making IT to allow this Mac on the network)
That said, I'm personally thinking of bringing my old Mac Mini from home to work (and buying a new one for home
I agree. In geospatial technologies (e.g. satellite imagery, aerial photography, GIS, topography, etc.) the GeoTIFF format is commonly used for georeferenced raster data. Additionally, the BigTIFF format proposal comes to the rescue to circumvent TIFF's 4 gigs maximum size.
I tried to find additional info about location embedding but haven't succeeded so far. From the wikipedia page, the XML code includes url type="http" location="uk" preference="90">http://www.example2.com/example.ex t /url, the part I don't get, as a geospatial professional (see sig), is why the location is encoded as the country code. What are the reasons? Does it make more sense to encode location with a simple lat-lon values (similar to, say, the georss standard do). Some countries being so large, I fail to see the country as a good indicator of distance between computers. What did I got wrong?
Ok. I just had to follow some more links to realize that the open source cross-platform alternative doesn't offer MacOS X binaries yet, one has to compile from source. That's a showstopper for most Mac users... well, with Metalink getting more attention, I'm not worried, mature clients will come soon.
Strangely enough, the OpenOffice distribution page links to a pay-for Metalink client for the Mac, but hopefully, just two links above, there's the cross-platform open source client. That's confusing. I clicked on the Mac client, thinking I would end up at a Mac-oriented free (even open source?) client, but no, one must choose the cross-platform. Nothing really wrong there, only that it's confusing.
Unrelated, I saw numerous attempts of such integrated p2p downloads. The part that got me from the Metalink main page: "Metalink is an Open Standard". This makes me believe I will join the bandwagon. And yup, the Wikipedia Metalink page is (surprisingly?) informative.
Well, such headlines won't stop me from using FF. At least vulnerabilities are attended to in a way I believe (wrongly?) faster than most mammoth companies would. That said, this point from the article is interesting, making me believe researchers should (?) have incentives to disclose security bugs to Mozilla first and to the public only when the fix is distributed:
"Although Snyder said she would prefer it if Zalewski and other researchers would disclose vulnerabilities to Mozilla before taking them public, she said the company relies on such experts to help it keep customers protected from attacks, as painful as the reports may be."