As I have finished watching the show, it's like it is hyped up at a certain point. It's quite interesting, but as a developer, some terms don't make sense.
‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
41–50 of 84 posts
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#42How did they get were able to acquire and digitize so many maps in just 4 months according to the show. That part was stange. They say they hacked it from Nasa site, but i think its made up, could not find the source.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#43Started watching the show, it is way too dramatized but still interesting. The actual demo of Terravision is indeed mind blowing if you remember how powerful computers in 1994 were: http://www.joachimsauter.com/img/big693.mp4
I tried hard to enjoy it. I did like the characters, but the dramatized story really didn't work for me. I guess it was a win though, because previously I had never heard about Terravision.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#44After reading the article it wasn’t clear to me. Is this Based on a real story or is it entirely fictitious.
Displayed on the end of episode #1:
“Terravision was a joint project from Weathernews International (Hiro Ishibashi, Andreas Schneider), ART+COM and DeTeBerkom. The series is a fictional adaptation of the events at that time and arose from the court transcripts as well as conversations with Joachim Suater, Pavel Mayer, Axel Schmidt, Gerd Grüneis, Martin Sibernagl.”
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#45Started watching the show, it is way too dramatized but still interesting. The actual demo of Terravision is indeed mind blowing if you remember how powerful computers in 1994 were: http://www.joachimsauter.com/img/big693.mp4
> Started watching the show, it is way too dramatized but still interesting. I don't mind dramatization, but 4.5h seems quite steep for such a simple video that seems like it could be covered in a 20m Youtube video. Do you have a rough review if you ended up watching more of it if it's just really dragged on or actually contains a lot of content?
I actually found it quite appropriate, specially after it picked up pace from the end of the first episode... didn't feel at all like it was dragging on.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at the federal court decision [1], it looks like the patent was predated by an implementation that was demonstrated at SIGGRAPH, and apparently the creator of that gave the source code to the plaintiffs?! "Lau further testified that, at the SIGGRAPH '95 conference, he performed live demonstrations of SRI TerraVision to at least 500 people, and in fact “gave [ ] the source code to TerraVision” to Art+Com emplo…
Didn't Art+Com demo their version in 1994? The court case was based on the patent date? which would be later?
Kyoto (first demo) was at the end of 1994.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#47There were a lot of 3D globe products being created in the 90s. I was one of the creators of Electronic Arts 3D Atlas which shipped in spring 1994. It sold two million copies on Mac and won many awards. EA was the publisher but we developed it in London working at a BBC spinoff called MMC and getting the planetary data from UCL. This UCL unit eventually spawned Planetary Visions, a startup we worked with to supply da…
Yes, but they they did all use different indexing schemes than the patented one for Terravision.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly encourage you to try and achieve this in less than 24 working hours with the hardware and software that was available at that time. Even if you "cheat" and use high-end workstations and ~25 years of new knowledge and hindsight, even a talented programmer would likely struggle with this problem for multiple months.
Hmm, tech from '95... using VESA BIOS extension and high/extended memory modes, you might be able to modify Doom source code for the optimized 3D operations, but you'd still need to create a LODed-megatexture database and an API to serve it, unless you want users to "Insert CD 23 and press Enter".
Haha, just do a planet sized doom level. Easy peasy.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#49I worked on Google Earth for a while, some years ago. It doesn't really make sense to talk about it in the way the article (and presumably movie) does. There are lots of "algorithms" in Google Earth which are critical to its operation.
Probably the biggest unsung algorithmic hero of GE is the image processing and serving pipeline. The actual client tech itself was largely worked out by the time Keyhole was bought (hence the high age of this lawsuit), and the biggest upgrades to the client came mostly in the form of optimizations and support for new features like 3D buildings. What wasn't visible was the enormous amount of work in the infrastructure required to actually process and serve the whole globe's worth of imagery. At the time, Keyhole's processing and serving pipeline just didn't scale to the amount of imagery actually available for purchase. That's no knock on their engineering skills: imagery is expensive and given their business model there simply wasn't a need to process all the imagery that existed. But once Google bought them, they were given a blank cheque and told to quite simply acquire it all. The infrastructure of the time (MapReduce, BigTable etc) were a perfect fit for this problem and allowed a rapid drain of the imagery backlog that had by then accumulated. Over time more and more of the calculations done to the raw sensor data (like ortho-rectification) were pulled in house for cost reasons and to allow further scaling - the satellite imagery providers could easily become CPU bottlenecked themselves.
This sort of article/movie seems ultimately to have some sort of ideological driver, given that its opening thesis is "for every winner, there are lots of losers; the people who blazed the trail for the others to ruthlessly make billions from their efforts". I mean, that's not true is it? This blasé statement implies the tech industry is negative-sum but it isn't even zero sum, it's positive sum: the whole reason it's successful is that it's a massive creator of wealth. The assumption that the big winners in the tech industry got there simply by aggressively stealing everything is so far from reality it surely makes the article closer to propaganda than anything else.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly encourage you to try and achieve this in less than 24 working hours with the hardware and software that was available at that time. Even if you "cheat" and use high-end workstations and ~25 years of new knowledge and hindsight, even a talented programmer would likely struggle with this problem for multiple months.
Hmm, tech from '95... using VESA BIOS extension and high/extended memory modes, you might be able to modify Doom source code for the optimized 3D operations, but you'd still need to create a LODed-megatexture database and an API to serve it, unless you want users to "Insert CD 23 and press Enter".
Good luck trying to do any sort of 3D rendering in Doom ;)