I can't really comment as the features I can see at the moment don't seem to include our area of interest at the moment, so this enhancement is yet to be of value here.
The other problem is that I steadfastly refuse to download and install Silverlight (which bing mapsmaps now demands for these new features), and it will take more than this to convince me I either need or want it (since Google mapping already has most of these "new" features anyway). I've only got one site complaining that Silverlight is not installed and imploring me to add yet more bloat - and that, surprise surprise - is another Microsoft page, which I only look at rarely.
I've already had to spend ages getting rid of their .NET environment (and hundred upon hundred of Activex entries which bloated by registry) after having it forced on me for one page view, and can't even get rid of a database manager that keeps attracting security updates I don't need or want
If anyone else is running it or finds it useful, then of course, any comments would be appreciated.
Microsoft teams with Navteq to expand their Streetside coverage
by mickey on December 7, 2009
When Microsoft launched Streetside a few days ago (a direct competitor to Google’s StreetView), I wondered how they could possibly catch up with the huge amount of coverage that Google already has in place. Their answer: Navteq.
Navteq has vehicles on the road all the time, collecting road data (speed limits, bridge heights, etc). Microsoft plans to “strap a few cameras on their vehicles to record some photos”. It certainly seems like a great way to start playing catch-up. I still imagine it’ll be quite a while until they have anywhere close to as much imagery as Google, but this gives them a solid plan to start gaining some ground.
They also revealed that they’ll be doing monthly releases of new Streetside imagery, similar to their monthly aerial/satellite releases. Those releases tend to be rather impressive is their coverage, so we’ll see if their Streetside releases can match that.
Like most of these kinds of battles, the winner will be you. Both companies will work hard to add better features and greater coverage, and we get to reap the benefits. Kinda nice.
You could get the photo-archive, the map seems to show little detail unless you go to one of their more detailed services.
There are a lot of pics though, mostly of rocks
There are some gems - and I don't actually mean of the geological type - as some of the pics relate to mines and similar types of production, but I couldn't track any down to any of the quarries we have mentioned in our areas of interest.
Maybe needs a bit more digging, or better selection of search terms to find something.
The map was up again by this morning, but just seemed to show very large scale overview, so once seen, not much reason to go back - unless I'm missing something obvious that shows more detail
Access to their data seems to be the real giveaway.
If they need that level of instruction, I think it would be a good idea to check that any guests from the area had been on the toilet training course before inviting them to your home.
Can you imagine them with a GPSr?
And why do the two country rangers look like male and female version of Arnold Rimmer?
Seriously, this reminds of the day me next door neighbour proudly announced he had a computer and would be going on the internet in a few weeks - as he had signed up for a series of evening classes over a period of something like four weeks, which would teach him how to use Internet Explorer, and email.
I was... lost for words, smiled, and wished him good luck.
And the government is going to teach kids how to safely use the Internet - first lesson, don't trust any site with .gov.uk" in the URL and definitely don't trust any sites connected to the Labour Party though these can be harder to spot.
It's sounds stupid but the level of ignorance is amazing - someone was on Watchdog or You & Yours talking about getting ripped off by a company selling dodgy concert tickets online. He said he did a Google search by the name of the artist and chose the top match on the screen!
(The "how to use a mobile phone" is even better than how to use a map)
Seem we now also have to train cyclists to look where they are going... (probably shouldn't come as any surprise if you watch some of them, they shouldn't be let out in a pair of shoes, let alone in charge of a bike):
The Edinburgh tram installation seems to be a bit of a joke - looking at the state of the road surface at the track edges, regardless of the spokesperson's suggestion that the weather meant they were unable to seal the edges.
Nothing new about tram tracks though these particular ones seem to be very poorly finished off. Cyclists seem to have managed with them for many years, perhaps in a period when there were many more cyclists around.
I worked in Eindhoven for a couple of months many years ago and I am sure there were trams and railway track in the road there. There would be thousands of cyclists coming out of the factory but we seemed to cope OK.
People that really do follow SatNav instructions off cliff/hillsides, or drive huge heavy artics up muddy country tracks.
People that need video instruction on how to dial a phone
And who has bought a battery operated product from Lidl?
You will be treated to the best part of an A4 page on the dangers of batteries and explosion if they are not handled and disposed of correctly - anyone would be forgiven for thinking they had been sold a small bomb!
There's news of a new development being tacked on to Google Earth (it's not a part of GE as such) which aims to taps the huge database of ever-updated webcams streaming views from every part of the world to keep the virtual world more up-to-date.
Austin Abrams, a PhD candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, has developed a method to replace the usually static "skin" of virtual buildings and other features with images from the Archive of Many Outdoor Scenes (AMOS), a collection of live feeds from nearly 1000 webcams streaming from various sites around the world.
Drawing on AMOS images, Abrams's browser-based application, called Live3D, maps 2D webcam images onto a 3D model of a location or landmark. For example, at night it clothes the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, with the same light-studded darkened surface seen by the webcam.
It's too much for my tiny little broadband connection to cope with, and I've barely been able to wait long enough for all the graphics of the building etc in 3D to be delivered, but I think it seems to work.
You can have a try if you have something faster than me, from the Live3D link in this article:
I paassed this farm a couple of weeks ago and couldn't quite work out what the sat nav sign meant but on reflection I have theorised that some systems might send idiotic drivers over a hill through somebody's garden. At least thats what I think it means.
Expect to see the media go into overdrive soon, as the technically challenged hacks get their hands on the forthcoming sunspot maximum and predict all sorts of gloom, doom, and disaster as they foretell of the failure of GPS, and another Y2K meltdown.
The rest of us will, of course, just carry on as if nothing is happening.
I offer my advice from experience of the last maximum - which was not noticed then either - between 2000 and 2003.
Oh, beware of any that name a specific day, as the maximum is something that occurs over a period of years, not on one "dangerous" day.
I was using GPS before 1998, which was the year the receivers could be finally be purchased with basemaps onboard for a reasonable, if still horrendous, price. Before that, al you got was your position, navigation between waypoints, and a breadcrumb trail if you were lucky. Adding maps meant navigation directions that could be related to real roads, unfortunately... it also led to to the birth of its bastard child from hell: SatNav.
I was very active using GPS between 2000 and 2003, (typically covering around 14,000 miles per year to places in Scotland I had never been to before) and we users were also watching the accuracy and performance of out GPS systems very closely at that time, because the US Government had just turned off the deliberate degradation of the system accuracy (which had been built in from the start to prevent terrorists and other naughty people benefiting from GPS when it was unique, rare, and expensive). This introduce a systemic, random error of up to 100 metres in the reported position from a civilian GPS receiver, and I can assure they did allow it to use that whole 100 metre allowance. The difference when they switched this off was gob-smacking, and I went from being able tu use my GPS to "confirm" I was somewhere near my own house while I was parked in the drive, to being able to compare day-to-day positions of where I stopped my car in the drive. Most of the time, it was able to fix positions to about 1 metre repeatably, and that's impressive when you've had to use smart processing to improve a potential position error of 100 metres.
Suffice to say, if the sunspot maximum was screwing things up in the period 2000 to 2003, then it's being doing it ever since 2003, as I've seen no real difference in performance since then, better OR worse.
Let's watch and see what kind of panic the media tries to provoke this time round, and how many hacks generate bonus cheques for making articles that get lots of attention, and generate needless fear.
But the following video gives away the existence of the backpack camera, as well as the trike and the car.
I'd love to embed the following, but you're just going to have to follow the link that's coming.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas recently shared some new Bing Maps features with the audience at TED, and he showed off some amazing stuff. The way that Flickr images (and even video) are incorporated into the StreetSide imagery using PhotoSynth technology was stunning, as was some other features.
This eight-minute video is absolutely worth the time to watch it.
You might want to place a soft cushion below your jaw too
I can only guess that the Thugs of Broughton are holding collections and raffles in their local pubs and clubs, and organising fund-raising events to hire a small army of hit-men to take out Blaise and his team.
If you can bear to watch The Gadget show nowadays, and not find yourself looking for a tall building or high cliff (I begin to lose the will to live as the presenters fall over one another as if they were god's gift to technology and and the world), you will have spotted something similar in the "augmented reality" features of the phones they tested tonight, which can overlay map views and the camera view, and which can follow the view as the camera is moved, thanks to accelerometers fitted within the "phone", and the application of GPS and cell sensing to determine where the owner is standing.
It doesn't take the greatest leap of the imagination to marry this with the previous item.
Flashearth isn't much use since the writer removed the Google aerial views - he was "stealing" the imagery without having asked their permission to use them with his own code, and they eventually requested he remove the Google view, which he complied with.
Now that the other maps, Bing, Google, and Google Earth have been optimised and work much faster than they used to, I don't really have any need to look at Flashearth, especially since it no longer offers the easy switching between Virtual Earth and Google aerial views.
I still suspect it has the occasional problem with the accuracy of the lat/lon returned (but don't use it enough to know for sure, so have no confidence), and has a tendency to "go Inca" and return to irritating degrees minutes and seconds, instead of useable decimal degrees.
Because the method is so simple, but the potential result so devastating, I've never openly raised the subject of GPS (or SatNav, for the mentally challenged) jamming. However, for those with an inkling of electronic or radio knowledge, then the fact that GPS devices do not operate indoors, or even under the covering of leaves ins a wood or forest, is enough of a clue as to how to kill the system.
Quoted Text
Criminal gangs have begun using GPS "jammers" imported from China to help them steal expensive cars and lorries carrying valuable loads – and there are fears that terrorists could use more powerful versions to disrupt air traffic, a conference in London will hear on Tuesday.
The "jammers" put out radio signals at the same frequency at the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, overwhelming the timing signal that in-car devices use to plot their position. That means a tracker device built into a lorry with a valuable load, or a car with an anti-theft GPS device which should report its position if stolen, cannot distinguish the correct GPS signal.
"It disappears from the radar," said Professor David Last, of the University of Wales at Bangor, who has been a police expert witness in a number of cases over the past 18 months in which GPS jammers have been seized.
Some German drivers are also believed to use such jammers to try to evade GPS-based road charging, which was introduced for trucks in 2005. There have also been robberies in Russia where such jammers have been used against both GPS systems and mobile phones on lorries to prevent the driver from contacting the authorities.
In Germany, as in the UK, it is illegal to sell or use such jammers – although it appears to be legal to import or own them.
Satnav devices rely on being able to "see" at least four of the 30 satellites orbiting about 20,200km (12,550 miles) above the earth: by correlating the very precise timing and identification signals they transmit, a ground-based device can calculate its own location to within about 1 metre. However, the jamming devices do not have to put out a strong signal to disrupt GPS reception.
"The problem is that the signal from the satellites is extremely weak – it's the equivalent of picking up the light output of a 25-watt bulb on the satellite,"
As usual, the lowest common denominator of low-life ruins things again, as criminals could use a small jammer to blank out the GPS and possibility og tracking over the area of the Thames Estuary to make drug deliveries, and jeopardise aircraft heading to major London airports.
Non-GPS navigation has been run down and even removed in some cases (clarification: benn declared obsolete, closed down, and removed from service in some cases), but there is now advice to the effect that that these systems supplement one another (in safety critical applications), rather than be seen as replacements, as each uses different technology, and each has strengths and weaknesses - some of which include resistance to terrestrial jamming.
Bing has just made a major update to its mapping imagery, with more than 6.7 million square kilometres of fresh imagery.
Our cut... not a lot:
Aerial: United Kingdom 15,221 square kilometres
and
Bird's Eye oblique: United Kingdom 13,094 square kilometres
They added a load of new imagery in the Russian Federation, Australia, Mexico and many places in the United States, also a lot of new Bird’s Eye imagery in Sweden.
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