Can't see high resolution imagery in NASA World Wind? Well, you can with this great plugin. It allows you to use Microsoft Virtual Earth high rez imagery directly in NASA World Wind. If you wonder, yes, Microsoft agreed to this.
I'm a NWW enthusiast, even if I never really used it on a regular basis... (I'm waiting for the Java version... I hope I won't be deceived).
NASA World Wind sadly never had the media coverage GE had. This is kind of sad. People seems to forget, or ignore, that you can't use Google Earth in a work environment. Well, more precisely, you can't legally install the free version Google Earth in any work environment, not even the Plus version (20$US), you need the Pro (400$US) or the Enterprise version. Why am I underlining this? Because I believe this should have helped NASA World Wind to capture mind share. Should, because not a lot of people care about that fact and Google will not enforce this, since they benefit from the number of people using it, a little like Microsoft did not care about Windows being copied some centuries ago. Oh, this change in the license came with version 4 of the GE beta, launched last summer.
"Why then, don't we have a world weather computer?"
Read my other comment. There are several reasons. One is that models runs at higher resolutions for specific regions. i.e. Canada runs higher resolution models over Canada, a thing which, obviously, France or Britain won't do. There are also numerous products (e.g. marine, aviation, emergencies, etc.) which are more or less region-specific (or that no one wants to produce for the whole world).
There are countries, Australia is an example, which decided to partner with another 'big' country for their weather forecasting products instead of having to run their own at a great cost.
That said, maybe I'm too much an optimist, but things are being more and more interoperable and there is more and more collaboration between international weather centres. There will be a need for multiple 'weather computers' for a long time, but general efficiency/collaboration is definitely going up.
(the fact that you must post quick at Slashdot or your comment will be buried really lowers post quality since people (or at least I) sometimes rush their comments uselessly...;-) Additional comments (after reading parts of TFA).
We must not forget online forecasting websites often offer a trend for a whole day, but (in Canada's weather office case, see parent) it is worthed to read the accompanying text to know how the weather will evolve throughout the day. If you need close to real-time observations, use radar information, such as this one for Toronto.
Also, one must be aware that global-scale models are computed at a "low" spatial resolution (one point every kilometer 33 km in Canada) (don't forget, those models run in real 3D, not in 2.5D, thus adding several points in the vertical axis). There are various higher resolution models which are also ran: in Canada (IIRC), the 'regional' model runs at a 15km horizontal spatial resolution. I underline this only because it is important to know that models at this time can't tell you the weather for your own neighborhood specifically. (I am however working on weather projects at the city-scale, 5m spatial resolution!!! but those models are run over an urban area on a need-to-run basis, computers aren't fast enough for meteorologists;-).
(I work at the Canadian Meteorological Centre, but I am not a meteorologist myself)
One thing that struck me is the 'abnormal diversity' of weather information sources. In Canada, weather models are computed in one place, a ~1000 processors computer in a basement which does only one thing: forecasting weather (the constant real-world observations that are ingested are used to adjust the models). Only one 'real' source (of course, there's the american, british, french, etc. official forecasting models to which we compare 'scores' on a daily basis). However, there's plenty of other canadian websites which will give you weather forecasts (one example). From what I know, these "other websites" have a significantly smaller workforce of meteorologists to interpret the models results than the Meteorological Service of Canada (the CMC is part of the MSC). That's why I would favor the 'original' source instead of a 'second-hand' source. I must however admit, commercial online sources of weather forecasting sometimes offer value-added products, such as the number of ski trails opened, offer general weather information capsules, etc.
The wikipedia entry is quite informative. With OpenID, unlike XNS.org (for those who remember), you need an 'identity provider': A service provider offering the service of registering OpenID URLs or XRIs and providing OpenID authentication (and possibly other identity services), and here's the official list of identity providers. And while we're at it, the list of services that support OpenID.
You get Montréal and Toronto already geocoded photographies. And it's clear from their press release, they're going after the U.S.: "Over 4 million photographs were taken of the Toronto area, as well as 3 million more for Montreal, providing visitors a unique perspective on two of Canada's most popular urban areas. VirtualCity plans to expand into the United States before the end of the year, beginning with Miami and continuing into the New York, Chicago, and Boston markets in 2007."
All voice recognition software, no matter what platform, would suffer from this supposed "exploit".
Some time ago already, MacOS 9 used a voice recognition authentication to login (voiceprint passwords). Your mac recognized you. Such a exploit would not have worked.
This feature was dropped from OSX. But the principle remains. I'm not sure about identifying the user for all voice commands, but why not?
The Slashgeo.org story: All Points Blog tells us Google unexpectedly acquires data over Sydney, for Australia Day 2007. From this other article: "On Friday, an aircraft hired by Google will be doing a series of low-level swoops over parts of Sydney, photographing the ground and waters below. [...] "It's a bit of an experiment and if it's a success, we'll probably do it in other places [around the world]," Mr Rasmussen said, indicating that Google would work on organising similar flyovers in places like Paris on Bastille Day or over cities in the United States on Independence Day." Update: 01/26 16:40 GMT by S:The Google Earth blog tells usMicrosoft too will acquire data over Sydney.
Ok, interesting, but how does this space launch site compares to the previously slashdottly discussed Nova Scotia site? (yes, already in other comments, but no links provided as far as I could find)
"This provides us with Europe's first obvious place for suborbital space flights," said Susan Newsam, spokeswoman at Virgin Galactic, who adds that "flying into the aurora borealis has never been done before." Ok, I don't get it. What's the point? I thought the closer to the equator the better (less energy required to reach "space"), thus ESA's space launch site at Kourou, French Guyana.
Well. I guess most users will want to upgrade to Leopard (isn't that why some use the mac instead of XP/Vista/Ubuntu, the OS itself?). If you don't want to, 29$ looks like a fair price (and you can stick with the beta version afaik if you don't want to shell out money at all).
There are now great alternatives. Boot Camp, Parallels, CrossOverMac, Wine. Competition is great (even if cooperation is better;-).
As much as some can hate Microsoft, this is good and others should follow. At least good for the environment, less hardware, less energy used for shipping. Of course, the ability to burn an Install and Crash/Recover DVD is essential. It even allows reaching the customers faster. I guess it would also be appropriate to continue shipping physical copies for those with limited Internet access and/or want the user manual. (I don't think this will significantly impact piracy. Piracy will occur anyway.)
Dunno if you've read my other comments in this thread? I am really happy people such as you replied and filled parts of my ignorance gap.
I only seriously started using linux two and a half years ago on Debian because of my new job (at the canadian government). I was already a fan of Linux (because I've been using and contributing to open source software for about 10 years) before using it. However, my limited knowledge, and I consider myself way above average joe-citizen, concluded Linux is not there yet. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's there, but it's just nobody knows it's there! Is that the shame? Linux having similar features to OSX but the average computer user does not know about it?!
I'm 'stucked' with Debian stable without root access and limited privileges because of my employer. Maybe I should install Ubuntu at home to play with it, but my macs works well and I don't have that much free time. And yes, iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, Garageband *are* software I use and want to use on my computer. There is pseudo equivalents on Linux, but it's probably not as well integrated into the system. I also use some professional software which only runs on some specific OSes.
Thank you for opening my eyes. I'll divert some additional time to learn more about Ubuntu.
More on wifi geolocation here. Yes, it's a shameless plug, but I believe it's relevant. Slashgeo focuses on geospatial technologies, with a tendency to cover items related to open source and community-related geospatial projects. Here's the 'Open source community' topic. And more related to this story, here's the GPS and RFID topics too. And why not the Google one. There's already plenty of GPS/Wifi/Google existing geospatial tools/apps that will rock the world. It's only a matter of time:-)
I'm surprised by your comment. Most of my friends (ok, we're a bunch of 10+ years of Apple users:-) do more than liking spotlight. Spotlight is faster than the dock to launch apps (and no need for the mouse). Finding email has never been as easy and as fast as with spotlight.
I agree the interface itself has room for improvements, but hey, that was only the first version. Leopard will improve Spotlight (even if we don't know yet -how- it will be improved!).
When I show the Mac OS to new people, I always show the power of spotlight. Generally, they're very positively impressed.
Don't take me wrong. I am happy to be corrected and seeing Linux is better than what I know, however, I can't believe "But I do think Linux is the best we've got right now." Linux is a pain in many areas and the required level to effectively use Linux is high.
Thanks for telling me Beagle exists. This should be *included* in the Linux installs. Defaults software is very important since rare are the ones whom will search hours on the net to learn and test every app there is.
Another example. I can't find a descent media player for Debian stable. The VLC build is years old and MPlayer has no Debian compile yet. I know you can provide a solution, but my point is: how come Debian does not come with one that works? Ok, now you'll tell me that's our corporate install that is wrong. Maybe so, but I believe this would not have happened if we had macs.
Working well out-of-the-box is important. And Linux is not there yet in my opinion. I'll be more than happy the day I'll be able to tell myself I can install Linux and expect it to work with all the features I want from the other OS without too much hassle. Maybe I'm ignorant, but gosh, I read too much on computers and I'm still with the crowd which believe Linux is not ready for the casual desktop user.
I just wish your enthusiasm will help Linux gain ground faster.
"OS X will generally absorb some of the good ideas from Linux in the next release of their OS [...] Linux will always have more features than anything else, and OS X will always be perceived as "easier" in some way."
I work with Debian all day, but at home, it's OS X. I tend to disagree with Linux having more features than OS X. Maybe, but if so, Linux does not have the features *I* want. Example: where's Spotlight in Linux? Where's the email app with spotlight-like search? Why does my USB key does not load in Debian while it works flawlessly on OS X (or even XP) (it's probably related to our corporate Debian installation, but it just shows Linux has rough corners). Where's the default Expose-like windows switching? Etc. I prefer the philosophy of linux and it doubtlessly has features other OSes don't. But it's not true that Linux has the perfect mix of features for all users.
Isn't this strange. Why don't they wait for the just-around-the-corner Leopard to compare with Vista. At least they would be comparing apple with oranges instead of pineapples and watermelons!;-)
Wow. Slashdot users do surprise me! The joke is funny, but using 'microsoft' on the new tagging system for this story is misleading! (I guess/. editors will have to tweak the threshold values for the number of times a tag must be set for a specific story to be considered valid)
Nobody mentioned NASA World Wind yet. But read this insightful entry from a NASA WW enthusiast. A part of it: "This is for a new joint NASA / Google application to bring data to the masses.. I guess NASA forgot there is NASA World Wind already to do this." Two other entries are interesting, one from Ogle Earth and the other from the Google Earth blog.
I never thought clip arts were important, maybe because I don't use them, until my wife (yes, even on/.) really required Clip Arts, and since I'm the pseudo-geek-of-the-house-using-open-stuff-whenever -possible, I had to find public domain clip arts.
My 10 minutes search on the Internet two weeks ago gave no that much interesting results. Only now I can understand how OpenOffice must also, somewhere amongst the priorities, continue to add clip arts and templates.
There's often a confusion between passive and active tags, which have different types of uses and different capabilities, read about it on wikipedia. Additionally, Slashgeo (yup, plug) has a section on RFID tags.
From TA: "RFID has also made an appearance in the army to try and reduce casualties from 'friendly fire' incidents."... let's not forget the actual range limitation of most RFID tags.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't see high resolution imagery in NASA World Wind? Well, you can with this great plugin. It allows you to use Microsoft Virtual Earth high rez imagery directly in NASA World Wind. If you wonder, yes, Microsoft agreed to this.
I'm a NWW enthusiast, even if I never really used it on a regular basis... (I'm waiting for the Java version... I hope I won't be deceived).
NASA World Wind sadly never had the media coverage GE had. This is kind of sad. People seems to forget, or ignore, that you can't use Google Earth in a work environment. Well, more precisely, you can't legally install the free version Google Earth in any work environment, not even the Plus version (20$US), you need the Pro (400$US) or the Enterprise version. Why am I underlining this? Because I believe this should have helped NASA World Wind to capture mind share. Should, because not a lot of people care about that fact and Google will not enforce this, since they benefit from the number of people using it, a little like Microsoft did not care about Windows being copied some centuries ago. Oh, this change in the license came with version 4 of the GE beta, launched last summer.
Here's the interesting Google Earth vs NASA World Wind comparison, on the WW Central website.
I know TFA really indicates v2.0, but this "new OpenOffice 2.0" sounds strange considering OpenOffice 2.1 has been in the wild for a while.
"Why then, don't we have a world weather computer?"
Read my other comment. There are several reasons. One is that models runs at higher resolutions for specific regions. i.e. Canada runs higher resolution models over Canada, a thing which, obviously, France or Britain won't do. There are also numerous products (e.g. marine, aviation, emergencies, etc.) which are more or less region-specific (or that no one wants to produce for the whole world).
There are countries, Australia is an example, which decided to partner with another 'big' country for their weather forecasting products instead of having to run their own at a great cost.
That said, maybe I'm too much an optimist, but things are being more and more interoperable and there is more and more collaboration between international weather centres. There will be a need for multiple 'weather computers' for a long time, but general efficiency/collaboration is definitely going up.
(the fact that you must post quick at Slashdot or your comment will be buried really lowers post quality since people (or at least I) sometimes rush their comments uselessly... ;-) Additional comments (after reading parts of TFA).
;-).
We must not forget online forecasting websites often offer a trend for a whole day, but (in Canada's weather office case, see parent) it is worthed to read the accompanying text to know how the weather will evolve throughout the day. If you need close to real-time observations, use radar information, such as this one for Toronto.
Also, one must be aware that global-scale models are computed at a "low" spatial resolution (one point every kilometer 33 km in Canada) (don't forget, those models run in real 3D, not in 2.5D, thus adding several points in the vertical axis). There are various higher resolution models which are also ran: in Canada (IIRC), the 'regional' model runs at a 15km horizontal spatial resolution. I underline this only because it is important to know that models at this time can't tell you the weather for your own neighborhood specifically. (I am however working on weather projects at the city-scale, 5m spatial resolution!!! but those models are run over an urban area on a need-to-run basis, computers aren't fast enough for meteorologists
(I work at the Canadian Meteorological Centre, but I am not a meteorologist myself)
:-).
One thing that struck me is the 'abnormal diversity' of weather information sources. In Canada, weather models are computed in one place, a ~1000 processors computer in a basement which does only one thing: forecasting weather (the constant real-world observations that are ingested are used to adjust the models). Only one 'real' source (of course, there's the american, british, french, etc. official forecasting models to which we compare 'scores' on a daily basis). However, there's plenty of other canadian websites which will give you weather forecasts (one example). From what I know, these "other websites" have a significantly smaller workforce of meteorologists to interpret the models results than the Meteorological Service of Canada (the CMC is part of the MSC). That's why I would favor the 'original' source instead of a 'second-hand' source. I must however admit, commercial online sources of weather forecasting sometimes offer value-added products, such as the number of ski trails opened, offer general weather information capsules, etc.
And by the way, the official Environment Canada weather website is the most visited website in Canada (or at least, that's what they tell us, the employees!
The wikipedia entry is quite informative. With OpenID, unlike XNS.org (for those who remember), you need an 'identity provider': A service provider offering the service of registering OpenID URLs or XRIs and providing OpenID authentication (and possibly other identity services), and here's the official list of identity providers. And while we're at it, the list of services that support OpenID.
You get Montréal and Toronto already geocoded photographies. And it's clear from their press release, they're going after the U.S.: "Over 4 million photographs were taken of the Toronto area, as well as 3 million more for Montreal, providing visitors a unique perspective on two of Canada's most popular urban areas. VirtualCity plans to expand into the United States before the end of the year, beginning with Miami and continuing into the New York, Chicago, and Boston markets in 2007."
All voice recognition software, no matter what platform, would suffer from this supposed "exploit".
Some time ago already, MacOS 9 used a voice recognition authentication to login (voiceprint passwords). Your mac recognized you. Such a exploit would not have worked.
This feature was dropped from OSX. But the principle remains. I'm not sure about identifying the user for all voice commands, but why not?
The Slashgeo.org story:
All Points Blog tells us Google unexpectedly acquires data over Sydney, for Australia Day 2007. From this other article: "On Friday, an aircraft hired by Google will be doing a series of low-level swoops over parts of Sydney, photographing the ground and waters below. [...] "It's a bit of an experiment and if it's a success, we'll probably do it in other places [around the world]," Mr Rasmussen said, indicating that Google would work on organising similar flyovers in places like Paris on Bastille Day or over cities in the United States on Independence Day." Update: 01/26 16:40 GMT by S:The Google Earth blog tells us Microsoft too will acquire data over Sydney.
Ok, interesting, but how does this space launch site compares to the previously slashdottly discussed Nova Scotia site? (yes, already in other comments, but no links provided as far as I could find)
While we're at it. The Sweden launch site on Google Maps.
"This provides us with Europe's first obvious place for suborbital space flights," said Susan Newsam, spokeswoman at Virgin Galactic, who adds that "flying into the aurora borealis has never been done before."
Ok, I don't get it. What's the point? I thought the closer to the equator the better (less energy required to reach "space"), thus ESA's space launch site at Kourou, French Guyana.
Well. I guess most users will want to upgrade to Leopard (isn't that why some use the mac instead of XP/Vista/Ubuntu, the OS itself?). If you don't want to, 29$ looks like a fair price (and you can stick with the beta version afaik if you don't want to shell out money at all).
;-).
There are now great alternatives. Boot Camp, Parallels, CrossOverMac, Wine. Competition is great (even if cooperation is better
As much as some can hate Microsoft, this is good and others should follow. At least good for the environment, less hardware, less energy used for shipping. Of course, the ability to burn an Install and Crash/Recover DVD is essential. It even allows reaching the customers faster. I guess it would also be appropriate to continue shipping physical copies for those with limited Internet access and/or want the user manual. (I don't think this will significantly impact piracy. Piracy will occur anyway.)
"Many people may not know that MIT has initiated OpenCourseWare [...]"
MIT OpenCourseWare Now Online
On September 30th, 2002 with 179 comments
And more much other older stories.
Dunno if you've read my other comments in this thread? I am really happy people such as you replied and filled parts of my ignorance gap.
I only seriously started using linux two and a half years ago on Debian because of my new job (at the canadian government). I was already a fan of Linux (because I've been using and contributing to open source software for about 10 years) before using it. However, my limited knowledge, and I consider myself way above average joe-citizen, concluded Linux is not there yet. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's there, but it's just nobody knows it's there! Is that the shame? Linux having similar features to OSX but the average computer user does not know about it?!
I'm 'stucked' with Debian stable without root access and limited privileges because of my employer. Maybe I should install Ubuntu at home to play with it, but my macs works well and I don't have that much free time. And yes, iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, Garageband *are* software I use and want to use on my computer. There is pseudo equivalents on Linux, but it's probably not as well integrated into the system. I also use some professional software which only runs on some specific OSes.
Thank you for opening my eyes. I'll divert some additional time to learn more about Ubuntu.
More on wifi geolocation here. Yes, it's a shameless plug, but I believe it's relevant. Slashgeo focuses on geospatial technologies, with a tendency to cover items related to open source and community-related geospatial projects. Here's the 'Open source community' topic. And more related to this story, here's the GPS and RFID topics too. And why not the Google one. There's already plenty of GPS/Wifi/Google existing geospatial tools/apps that will rock the world. It's only a matter of time :-)
I'm surprised by your comment. Most of my friends (ok, we're a bunch of 10+ years of Apple users :-) do more than liking spotlight. Spotlight is faster than the dock to launch apps (and no need for the mouse). Finding email has never been as easy and as fast as with spotlight.
I agree the interface itself has room for improvements, but hey, that was only the first version. Leopard will improve Spotlight (even if we don't know yet -how- it will be improved!).
When I show the Mac OS to new people, I always show the power of spotlight. Generally, they're very positively impressed.
Don't take me wrong. I am happy to be corrected and seeing Linux is better than what I know, however, I can't believe "But I do think Linux is the best we've got right now." Linux is a pain in many areas and the required level to effectively use Linux is high.
Thanks for telling me Beagle exists. This should be *included* in the Linux installs. Defaults software is very important since rare are the ones whom will search hours on the net to learn and test every app there is.
Another example. I can't find a descent media player for Debian stable. The VLC build is years old and MPlayer has no Debian compile yet. I know you can provide a solution, but my point is: how come Debian does not come with one that works? Ok, now you'll tell me that's our corporate install that is wrong. Maybe so, but I believe this would not have happened if we had macs.
Working well out-of-the-box is important. And Linux is not there yet in my opinion. I'll be more than happy the day I'll be able to tell myself I can install Linux and expect it to work with all the features I want from the other OS without too much hassle. Maybe I'm ignorant, but gosh, I read too much on computers and I'm still with the crowd which believe Linux is not ready for the casual desktop user.
I just wish your enthusiasm will help Linux gain ground faster.
"OS X will generally absorb some of the good ideas from Linux in the next release of their OS [...] Linux will always have more features than anything else, and OS X will always be perceived as "easier" in some way."
I work with Debian all day, but at home, it's OS X. I tend to disagree with Linux having more features than OS X. Maybe, but if so, Linux does not have the features *I* want. Example: where's Spotlight in Linux? Where's the email app with spotlight-like search? Why does my USB key does not load in Debian while it works flawlessly on OS X (or even XP) (it's probably related to our corporate Debian installation, but it just shows Linux has rough corners). Where's the default Expose-like windows switching? Etc. I prefer the philosophy of linux and it doubtlessly has features other OSes don't. But it's not true that Linux has the perfect mix of features for all users.
Isn't this strange. Why don't they wait for the just-around-the-corner Leopard to compare with Vista. At least they would be comparing apple with oranges instead of pineapples and watermelons! ;-)
Wow. Slashdot users do surprise me! The joke is funny, but using 'microsoft' on the new tagging system for this story is misleading! (I guess /. editors will have to tweak the threshold values for the number of times a tag must be set for a specific story to be considered valid)
Nobody mentioned NASA World Wind yet. But read this insightful entry from a NASA WW enthusiast. A part of it: "This is for a new joint NASA / Google application to bring data to the masses.. I guess NASA forgot there is NASA World Wind already to do this." Two other entries are interesting, one from Ogle Earth and the other from the Google Earth blog.
I don't know the answer, but I can direct you to OpenLayers.org and to the Open Source Geospatial foundation to look for answers. I'm interested to the answer because we want to geolocate visitors for slashcode itself, and I copied your question on Slashgeo.org, which may help attract more answers to this /. story.
While your at it, GeoRSS is also open and, in my opinion, the future of RSS. Learn more about it here.
I never thought clip arts were important, maybe because I don't use them, until my wife (yes, even on /.) really required Clip Arts, and since I'm the pseudo-geek-of-the-house-using-open-stuff-whenever -possible, I had to find public domain clip arts.
y
http://www.openclipart.org/
http://www.wpclipart.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Clip_Art_Librar
My 10 minutes search on the Internet two weeks ago gave no that much interesting results. Only now I can understand how OpenOffice must also, somewhere amongst the priorities, continue to add clip arts and templates.
There's often a confusion between passive and active tags, which have different types of uses and different capabilities, read about it on wikipedia. Additionally, Slashgeo (yup, plug) has a section on RFID tags.
... let's not forget the actual range limitation of most RFID tags.
From TA: "RFID has also made an appearance in the army to try and reduce casualties from 'friendly fire' incidents."
Yes, RFID is one of the geospatial technology which will have a significant impact on our lives. The "100% organic matter RFID chip developed in Korea, costing only 0.5 cents" kind of headlines will only be seen more often in the near future.