Find Your House

[clagar777]

I could actually see my house and school and....

http://www.terraserver-usa.com/



Neat stuff! Show us what you find!

Clay

[Lew]

The images from this site are very old. My current house is 4 years old and all they show for our neighborhood is trees. Google maps is much more current.

This reminds me of the news story that I read recently that when you use Microsoft's equivalent service to find Apple headquarters all it shows is an empty lot. They claim that it was just due to dated photos, but sounds like wishful thinking to me.

[Leland]

This reminds me of the news story that I read recently that when you use Microsoft's equivalent service to find Apple headquarters all it shows is an empty lot. They claim that it was just due to dated photos, but sounds like wishful thinking to me.

Those Apple-less satellite pics looked like they were outdated to me. Not only was One Infinite Loop an empty lot, but so was the housing subdivision to its north.

Just another example of Micro$loth putting a new dressing on outdated "code"...

[Chuck(G)]

The Google maps satellite views are often in color and seem to be a bit more recent.

[Doug@GT]

Google may be more current and in color, but there are places where it does not have clear, detailed photos, my house being one of them. Terraserver brings it up nice and clear, albeit from 1999 and in B&W. I guess it's a trade off. Of course, I searched for my address and it put the red locator dot on the house next door to mine

Doug "who thinks all of these map systems have a long way to go to match the accuracy of a good Rand McNalley book"

[Leland]

anybody who hasn't checked out Google earth yet is so 2001.

It's cool, you can zoom in from outer space, tilt and rotate the picture, overlay road names, and add 3D buildings.

SOOO COOOLL!

That would be nice once they compile it for Mac.

[ThomasDodd]

Google earth

That would be nice once they compile it for Mac.

Or any OS besides recent M$ crap.

Anyone try it on Win95/98 ?

[Joe Baker]

Google earth

That would be nice once they compile it for Mac.

Or any OS besides recent M$ crap.

Anyone try it on Win95/98 ?

And yet it perfectly illustrates why most of us choose to use PCs.

I thought the Mac "always works".
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Joe Baker, who has no love for Bill Gates, but who uses a PC to get things done.

[ThomasDodd]

That would be nice once they compile it for Mac.

Or any OS besides recent M$ crap.

Anyone try it on Win95/98 ?

And yet it perfectly illustrates why most of us choose to use PCs.

I thought the Mac "always works". :roll:

I wouldn't know. Never owned anything from Steve.

I get my work done with Linux. My play doesn't involve a computer.

[Joe Baker]

Or any OS besides recent M$ crap.

Anyone try it on Win95/98 ?

And yet it perfectly illustrates why most of us choose to use PCs.

I thought the Mac "always works".

I wouldn't know. Never owned anything from Steve.

I get my work done with Linux. My play doesn't involve a computer.

Sorry, Thomas. That Mac crack was (playfully) pointed at Leland.
_____________________________
Joe Baker, who figures everyone is using what suits them best.

[Leland]

I thought the Mac "always works".
_________________________________
Joe Baker, who has no love for Bill Gates, but who uses a PC to get things done.

Let's see... no spyware, no viruses, no malware, no popups, no need to defrag & reformat & reinstall, haven't needed to reboot in ages, great memory management, painless OS upgrade installation, free image, video & DVD editors, once ran 25 applications simultaneously "just to see if it could do it", regularly have between 15-20 windows open,...

Change keyboard layouts on the fly, Automator, Spotlight, jump onto Wi-Fi easier than anyone else, Simple Finder (great for restricting other users), easy music streaming (takes longer to explain than it did to set up, and it only involved one step), wake from sleep in under three seconds, drag n' drop everywhere,...

Sounds like it "just works" to me. Not Apple's fault that Google is dragging their butt on their Earth browser.

[Chuck(G)]

Let's see... no spyware, no viruses, no malware, no popups, no need to defrag & reformat & reinstall, haven't needed to reboot in ages, great memory management, painless OS upgrade installation, free image, video & DVD editors, once ran 25 applications simultaneously "just to see if it could do it", regularly have between 15-20 windows open,...

Ah, the times they are a changin'. Yesterday, I got a call from a friend with a Mac who was in a panic. She'd received an email that pretty much rendered her system unusable (and no, she didn't even open it--it kicked in when she tried to delete it). Thing grabbed the cursor and wouldn't let go--you couldn't select or click on anything. I was able to restart her system and go in manually and clobber the message in her inbox sufficiently for her to delete it.

She was running OS X, but I didn't get the version. The attachment to the email was about 30K long.

OTOH, it's the first time I've ever seen this sort of thing happen with a Mac, so folks is getting cleverer...

[Leland]

Ah, the times they are a changin'. Yesterday, I got a call from a friend with a Mac who was in a panic. She'd received an email that pretty much rendered her system unusable (and no, she didn't even open it--it kicked in when she tried to delete it). Thing grabbed the cursor and wouldn't let go--you couldn't select or click on anything. I was able to restart her system and go in manually and clobber the message in her inbox sufficiently for her to delete it.

I take it you didn't need to erase & reinstall everything, right? Any evidence that it's self-propagating?

It almost sounds like that Flash animation with the dude that gets annoyed when you hover your mouse cursor over his nose. After a few seconds, he "eats" it out of spite, and you're apparently cursor-less until you wave it off the animation's window.

Could she still use the keyboard to select & delete stuff?

[Chuck(G)]

Ah, the times they are a changin'. Yesterday, I got a call from a friend with a Mac who was in a panic. She'd received an email that pretty much rendered her system unusable (and no, she didn't even open it--it kicked in when she tried to delete it). Thing grabbed the cursor and wouldn't let go--you couldn't select or click on anything. I was able to restart her system and go in manually and clobber the message in her inbox sufficiently for her to delete it.

I take it you didn't need to erase & reinstall everything, right? Any evidence that it's self-propagating?

It almost sounds like that Flash animation with the dude that gets annoyed when you hover your mouse cursor over his nose. After a few seconds, he "eats" it out of spite, and you're apparently cursor-less until you wave it off the animation's window.

Could she still use the keyboard to select & delete stuff?

Nope, once she attempted to delete the email, things were pretty much fubar. Very strange--I have no idea why deletion would activate the thing. Didn't appear to leave anything behind, so it's fairly harmless. Just surprised me that it happened.

[Leland]

Nope, once she attempted to delete the email, things were pretty much fubar. Very strange--I have no idea why deletion would activate the thing. Didn't appear to leave anything behind, so it's fairly harmless. Just surprised me that it happened.

Wow, interesting. I'll keep my ears open -- I haven't heard anything yet about something like this.

I'm surprised that TubeNet seems to be on the leading edge of tech news for once.. lol

[Rick Denney]

Let's see... no spyware, no viruses, no malware, no popups, no need to defrag & reformat & reinstall, haven't needed to reboot in ages, great memory management, painless OS upgrade installation, free image, video & DVD editors, once ran 25 applications simultaneously "just to see if it could do it", regularly have between 15-20 windows open,...

Pretty much describes my laptop, which is running XP Pro. I rebooted it a month ago, and am a little light on open apps at the moment--there are only eleven. Yes, I do have to clean off adware every now and again. Since using The Bat! as an email client, I've never had a virus. I did get a worm infection once because I followed a link in a phishing email that I knew I should not have.

It did take Microsoft a long while to get it right, I'll admit. But then, they didn't have control over the hardware the way Apple did, so they couldn't hide the price of all that OS work in the hardware price. They've skated on being obscure and therefore not a target for attackers for a while now, too.

Rick "thinking that Sean only THINKS politics can be contentious--wait'll he sees a good Mac vs. PC flame war" Denney

[windshieldbug]

I don't know what you guys are worried about! My Commodore 64 has never had malware, spyware, worms, viruses, pop-ups, registry, or even disk problems (although I DO have to replace the cassette tape once in a while... )

[Leland]

It did take Microsoft a long while to get it right, I'll admit. But then, they didn't have control over the hardware the way Apple did, so they couldn't hide the price of all that OS work in the hardware price. They've skated on being obscure and therefore not a target for attackers for a while now, too.

Now, Rick, you know that those are just excuses. For the most part, hardware is hardware, and Apple's been using some of the same components that other computer makers have had available. And, many people (smart people, including DoD and CIA security types) have tried hacking into OS X and failed. That's what an underlying OS that's been through over 20 years of refinement can get for you. It's just the way it's built, not because it has a smaller installed base.

Yesterday, I got a call from a friend with a Mac who was in a panic. She'd received an email that pretty much rendered her system unusable (and no, she didn't even open it--it kicked in when she tried to delete it). Thing grabbed the cursor and wouldn't let go--you couldn't select or click on anything. I was able to restart her system and go in manually and clobber the message in her inbox sufficiently for her to delete it.

I did a little bit of asking around, and the best guess was that the email could have been HTML and trying to load up more content. There haven't been any alerts for a malicious piece of Mac-targeted email (believe me, both Mac- and Windows-centric news sites & forums would light up within an hour if there was).

I can count the number of worms, viruses, and malware that I've received over the past six years on.. oh, zero fingers or toes.

[Rick Denney]

Now, Rick, you know that those are just excuses. For the most part, hardware is hardware, and Apple's been using some of the same components that other computer makers have had available. And, many people (smart people, including DoD and CIA security types) have tried hacking into OS X and failed. That's what an underlying OS that's been through over 20 years of refinement can get for you. It's just the way it's built, not because it has a smaller installed base.

Yes, and what I said was that Apple has owned their architecture and sell the software and hardware in a package price. Thus, you don't know what you are paying for that software, but based on the prices I see, it's a lot more than what MS users are paying for theirs.

My issue with Apple is simple: The closed architecture made it too hard to program for engineering application software, so everyone in my business used computers with a more open architecture. These decisions were made long before the Internet made virus vulnerability much of an issue outside the defense realm. Thus, if I want to run PASSER II, Synchro, TRANSYT 7, SimTraffic, VISSIM, Paramics, CORSIM, or any of the other signal timing optimizations and simulations I'm expected to use, I'm stuck with the MS platform. Since I had a hand in programming some of those, I know why they are on the MS platform in the first place--because one could program on that platform easily. That was before Windows, but that's when MS earned its market share.

In terms of administration, they are all a bitch nowadays. But there are no real-time traffic management systems that run on Apple. They all run the GUI on Windows and the kernel either on Windows (since NT and especially 2000) or Unix/Linux. There's a reason for that, too. Who wants to build a system that can only be run on equipment available from a single manufacturer? That won't pass muster with most public agency procurement rules, including that of your employer. The Defense guys have more ability to break those rules than the transportation guys I work with.

Rick "who thinks MS became popular precisely because of the open architecture that made it vulnerable" Denney

[Joe Baker]

I thought the Mac "always works".
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Joe Baker, who has no love for Bill Gates, but who uses a PC to get things done.

Let's see... no spyware, no viruses, no malware, no popups, no need to defrag & reformat & reinstall, haven't needed to reboot in ages, great memory management, painless OS upgrade installation, free image, video & DVD editors, once ran 25 applications simultaneously "just to see if it could do it", regularly have between 15-20 windows open,...

Change keyboard layouts on the fly, Automator, Spotlight, jump onto Wi-Fi easier than anyone else, Simple Finder (great for restricting other users), easy music streaming (takes longer to explain than it did to set up, and it only involved one step), wake from sleep in under three seconds, drag n' drop everywhere,...

Sounds like it "just works" to me. Not Apple's fault that Google is dragging their butt on their Earth browser.

The only thing you mention that I'd give a nickel for that I don't already have is the ability to start in 3 seconds. Usually takes me about 8. I've never had a virus, have software that I paid $15 for that keeps me spyware & malware free, have no problems at all with pop-ups (one website I visit regularly does manage to pop up a window, but I know it's coming and just kill it as soon as it puts a frame up). I USUALLY keep at least 10-15 applications open at once (at the moment... ah, exactly 15), OFTEN have over 30 open at once. Never any problems. Oh, did I mention that my laptop cost a little over $600 after rebates?

That doesn't mean I think the Mac is crap; but the old days when PCs were crap are over. The PC is rapidly becoming not only less expensive and easier (to my brain, anyway) to understand, but really a good, solid runtime environment. The blue-screens of years gone by are a vague and distant memory now. I still don't like Bill Gates personally very much, but they do now make a pretty good OS, and when bundled with hardware it comes at a darned competitive price.

But why is it Google's responsibility to make their product work on any particular hardware/software platform? They're free to cater to any market sector they choose. They -- like so many other software companies -- have looked at the Mac marketshare and responded with a shrug. That's all I was saying about a computer that "just works" or doesn't: if the software isn't available for your computer, you're "just SOL".
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Joe Baker, who is experiencing tremendous satisfaction with his new Compaq (low-end!) notebook computer running Windows XP.