51–60 of 84 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was thinking it's funny the literal globe interface you use and then this knob you turn that's held by this arm.
> knob you turn That's a 6-dof spacemouse, still widely used today in CAD and 3d modeling.
Er... it's not entirely clear, but apparently the infringement claim was based on "the ability to zoom from the globe graphic all the way down to a particular neighborhood"?! So something a mildly talented programmer could come up with in (generously estimated) 1-2 days tops? And sure it looks cool, but claiming this animation is original enough to be patentable is stretching it a bit...
Is this what you imagine? ``` import gis gis.renderGlobe() ``` the actual tiling logic, data storage requirements, performant rendering in something like a shitty 1990s browser... I don't think you have an appreciation for the difficulty of bootstrapping this ex nihilo .
Started 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
That didn't run on a PC, it ran on Onyx servers, which had over 10 graphic processors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was thinking it's funny the literal globe interface you use and then this knob you turn that's held by this arm.
> knob you turn That's a 6-dof spacemouse, still widely used today in CAD and 3d modeling.
What an interesting input device.
(I haven't seen The Billion Dollar Code or listened to the podcast yet, but apparently the character Juri is (loosely?) based on Pavel: https://twitter.com/pavel23/status/1447622978859061252 )
If you understand German and like 4 hour long podcasts, Tim Pritlove just released a CRE episode about Terravision where he speaks with Pavel Mayer: https://cre.fm/cre222-terravision (I haven't seen The Billion Dollar Code or listened to the podcast yet, but apparently the character Juri is (loosely?) based on Pavel: https://twitter.com/pavel23/status/1447622978859061252 )
I 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 (he…
Er... it's not entirely clear, but apparently the infringement claim was based on "the ability to zoom from the globe graphic all the way down to a particular neighborhood"?! So something a mildly talented programmer could come up with in (generously estimated) 1-2 days tops? And sure it looks cool, but claiming this animation is original enough to be patentable is stretching it a bit...
The series portrays these guys as the heroes, but in reality they just seem to be patent trolls who fortunately lost.
A lot of really cool retro tech stuff to spot though, they certainly weren’t lazy with this even if the politics of it seem weird.
Started 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?
It was also a nice way of teaching my wife about what the world of computers was like in the 90's.