Microsoft's Google Earth. Don't you fell betraied?
 

Google is launching the Google Earth service, where you can (could) get satellite images from all over the planet; but look at this from the FAQ:

Let's see what we can get from that text:

1- PCs and Window are the same; you don't even need to mention the Windows Word.

2- But if by any chance you can't use it, maybe it is because you have some old hardware.

3- And if there is any other option, that would be Macintosh. And they are clear : it won't work.

4- Linux doesn't even exists to be denied.

That would be OK from any Microsoft paper, but it is SO BAD to see that coming from Google.

How many people has google's logo in their sites, from the time when they were nothing, and now we see this happening...

They could:

1- Offer the service on-line, so it won't depend on the OS;

2- Open the code, so people would DO it for them, by free, and it would even work better, even the version for the other system.

Some time ago this kind of thing was just like a marketing war... but now it is close to become discrimination.

A Company can of course choose not to spend money with minorities, but today, in Computerland, they don't necessarily need to, like in this case.

The feel is something like: 'Someone is paying them to DO NOT let me use the service and , what is ten times worse, THEY ARE ACCEPTING!!!'

They think they are winning more, when they close the doors to millions of Linuxers.

And yes, we do are millions, and we should show them what we think about that kind of actitude.

What do you think about it?

Google is just as evil as Microsoft - -they're just not large enough for people to take note of it. Yet.

I think Google is simply allocating its resources to make its Earth project available to the largest user base (ie, Windows users) first. If you are selling something (as Google is) it's only logical to spend the bulk of your budget (time, money, and resources) on the largest audience. To use an analogy - suppose you developed a product that prevented tires from going flat. Would you market your product to bicycle owners first, or unicycle owners first? Granted, it's a pretty bad analogy, but the point is that it makes sense to develop a product that serves 90% of the audience before developing a product that serves single digit percentages of the audience. (Believe me, I wish Linux had a 50%+ market share, but we're just not there yet)

Overall, Google is a for-profit company, and therefore will do whatever is necesary in order to return maximum value to its shareholders. If that means Linux takes a back seat, so be it.

Not that I'm happy about it. But I understand it -- J.W.

hehehe :-)
 

Sorry...

1- but that is like to say that if they get my blood also, no problem... they are just working and making money...

2- We can find a lot of problems with google: just look for it in eff.org (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

We have problems with Gmail, orkut, usenet, cookies, " Google's endless data retention policy." and etc.

3- Most of all: whem you say that you are not considering the difference between the regular windows users, like people in offices, millions of them, who barely knows how to send an e-mail, and linux users, some of us btw 'helped' google creating their directories and etc during years.

4- And one more: if you read my post, you will see that I said that if they open the code, they probably would have ot working for linux and for windows, and better.

But you said: "... it's only logical to spend the bulk of your budget (time, money, and resources)..."

Isn't it more logical to have it spending LESS and with better quality?

Well, by myself, I do not send mail to gmail accounts, do not open gmail e-mails, do not accept google cookies and do not use orkut.

Google only means one thing to me - search ;).

I thought google do use Linux?

http://www.internetweek.com/lead/lead060100.htm

Perhaps they are releasing it to Windows first, and then "considering" a Linux version. Just wish companies that say that would actually get it done.

Obviously it will not be long before the Linux community has developed compatible software... if it does not already exist somewhere. Both the Macintosh and the Linux communities are "easy" because both are fundamentally "Unix."

There do seem to be a lot of services that Google is offering lately which erroneously assume that the target user is running "Internet Explorer as an Administrator on a Windows-XP box." This may be a plausible initial target to shoot for in one's alpha product-rollout, but even Windows users are wising-up very fast. They're turning off Active Scripting, setting up non-administrative accounts for themselves, and using browsers like Firefox. This because they're tired of having their systems hijacked. It is actually harder than ever before to launch a web-site that "every potential customer" can use.

Sundial has a point. I keep saying that Microsoft has a harder time keeping up with the bug fixes than Linux users because:

A: More people are willing to view the code of Linux and fix it.
B: It is much much harder to hack Linux or send a virus do to the vast amounts of variations in the code. Heck, my Linux isn't the same as the original cpy of the one I downloaded.
C: Microsoft is slowly declining in popularity. More people are seeing alternatives to Windows based software.
D: MAC OS is now going to the Intel architecture. It's a happy three ring circus. Cue the elephants!

Re: Microsoft's Google Earth. Don't you fell betraied?
 

Supposed computer "geeks" need to get over their "ever big technology company is evil" policy. Sure, Linux is much better, but any computer "geek" who has a computer-related job probably capitalizes from average Joe Windows users not knowing how to use their computers. Microsoft has some pretty bad policies, no doubt, but their popularity alone should not be criticized, it's the ultimate goal of any software company. And now you're cutting into Google, a company I've had very few complaints about. Your criticism of Google Earth's "requirements" is unfounded:

PC's and Windows aren't the same, but "most PC's" and "Windows" are. Whether or not you like it, it's true.

Nothing wrong with this, it's impossible to create a useful 3d program that will work on Pentium Pro's. Again, this is not their fault.

Assumedly, the second most-used PC operating system is Macintosh, and they're clear it won't work because it won't. What's the big deal? Welcome to a little something called most software--this isn't an "evil" Google just cooked up.

Neither does BeOS, Unix, Solaris, PalmOS, or even Microsoft's own Windows CE! If it's not mentioned, we can assume it's not supported.

...

It's called Google Maps. It doesn't have all the features of Google Earth, but it's still very nice and completely Linux-friendly (with Firefox and probably others).

They don't want other people DOING it for them, and remember that this is just a free version of a commercial piece of software. Other posts are correct to remind that Google is a public company that wants to make money.

There are no laws or obligations requiring Google or any company to not discriminate against users of a certain operating system. We Linux users need to accept the fact that our OS is in the minority, and moreover embrace it. The day Linux owns 90% of the market share and Microsoft and everything else is sitting in 10% is probably the day Linux is what Microsoft is now: relatively closed, buggy, attack-prone, and the bane of computer hobbyists everywhere.

You're seriously suggesting Google is being payed or enticed to NOT release Google Earth for Linux? That's just preposterous, and for all you know they eventually will, but it's perfectly natural to release it for Windows first. Haha, perhaps they value us Linux users after all, and are using the huge Windows user base to do free beta testing for the Linux version!

No, but they're surely "winning" more from Windows users than they are from Linux users, it's a simple fact.

I reiterate: while we are perhaps millions, Windows users are millions more. I don't expect special treatment as a Linux user, and neither should you.

In conclusion, the only real possible complaint I can glean from Google Earth is not one you mentioned. I'm referring to previous paying Keyhole users who suddenly find the software they've been paying good money for has been essentially rebranded and released for free. But while I don't know, I would guess that they can simply cancel their subscription and download Google Earth, or perhaps their software has extra features added that's exclusive to their payed version.

Linux users need to stop expecting special treatment for being in the more "elite" computer community. They should stop considering evil toward Linux users as "evil," but evil toward Microsoft and Windows users (such as widespread worms and DoS attacks) as "getting what they deserve". Evil is evil regardless of the victim.

Has anyone even tried google earth? It's the coolest thing since they invented the map. Maybe wine would run it? Can someone port this program to Linux fast?!

Google acquired Keyhole 2 LT in October of 2004 and renamed it to "Google Earth" so it's not like Google is trying to piss on Linux users. They are just working with what they have. Some of you are writing your posts as if Google developed this program themselves and decided not to accomodate Linux users. My impression is more like they just took the code and slapped their label on it. In that regard, yes, they are similar to Microsoft. And yes, it doesn't help that they have all these example graphics on their FAQ depicting the Windows OS.

I'm pretty sure they did some fairly major redesigning, not just relabelling after they acquired Keyhole. And yes, I have tried the program and I agree it's awesome. NASA World Wind is similar, if not better, and open source, you guys should check it out too. It's got many more map sets, including an older 1m black and white satellite photo set and some interesting animations of thing like hurricanes, wildfires, etc. What I can't quite figure out is why Google Earth is 10 meg and World Wind is something like 300 meg, because they both get all content from the net anyway.

From the release notes:

Google does not acknowlege GNU/Linux
 

I see that many posters are replying things like:
Whether I can complain or not is a different problem. What the original poster is saying is that google simply IGNORED the sole existence of something different from Windows or Macintosh.

Not that it would not have made me mad either, but they could have said:

What about the good things google has done to promote the open-source community? Has anybody ever heard of "Google Summer of Code"? They are paying students $4500 to write open source software for approved open source organizations. The organizations are acting as mentors for the students and the 200 accepted coders are getting fat paychecks to learn and write open source code for the summer. It's not like they are trying to piss on linux users, it's business. Quit looking for reasons to deprecate companies when you haven't looked into why you should promote them.

Quoted For Truth.

Google is an avid supporter of Open Source. Realize that Google Earth is still in it's early stages, and probably cannot be made open source, in that it is most likely interfacing with proprietary software. It cannot be web-based, as it is too large and relies heavily on graphical rendering capabilities of your video card. The only way to do this would be using Java3D, and there may be a problem with the software interfacing there, or the speed (seeing as it looks like the program was written in C/C++/C#).

Ok then, as we can all see here, Google is doing something that is helping the Open source community! Three cheers!

maps.google.com - stop the bitching.

ironicly google servers run *nix systems, or am i wrong in that point?

There is hope for us..
 

Hey, folks, check out on

http://earth.google.com/earth_fusion.html
and
http://earth.google.com/earth_server.html

These things only run on Linux (SuSE to be exact). It means they DO recognize *NUX systems, at least as a professional platform :D

Tymon, I love you! You just brought up a point that really means this: All of you whiners: SHUT UP about Google being Windows Only! They do acknoledge us in other ways! So Rejoice.

"And yes, we do are millions, "

sorry...but that just struck me as incredibly funny...

Has anyone seen the movie The Corporation? The director of that movie is very careful to make a distinction between calling a corporation "evil" and calling it "amoral and dangerous."

Truth is that believing corporations are evil is too simplistic and almost not cynical enough. A true commitment to evil involves having principles and sticking to them (warped principles, granted, but principles nonetheless). Corporations sometimes do things to benefit the community. Sometimes they do things to harm the community. Sometimes donations are a tax write-off. Sometimes they're good public relations. Google is neither evil nor good. Google is Google. Some of the things it does benefit the global community. Some of the things it does harm the global community.

Every large corporation is ultimately motivated by profit, though.

Re: hehehe :-)
 

EFF google search result

^ Is a search on EFF about google.

Ironicly enough, EFF PAYS google to have their search engine feature on their site.

Pretty funny.

*crosses fingers*

I do believe that you are out.

Good phrase for a signature ;)

can i just say one small thing

The three largest operating system groups in the world are Microsoft, Macintosh and Linux (not in any order)

before anyone shouts at me, most of the time when i say Linux, I refer to anything remotley related to the penguin and the open source operating project so apps like Unix, SuSE, BeOS Slackware (and the other 200 odd of them)

i do feel yers it would have been nice for them to say "currently linux is not supported, there are currently no future plans to change this"

but we have to face the fact that there are indeed alot of companies that wont acknowledge the existnce of linux or related apps, and that like it or not, noone has to either. Sure there is a huge number of people taking to linux but it is still a dramatic minority (in some cases at least)

theres no requirment for anyone to even mention ANY os, so lets take a step back and look at it, in a different manner

This isnt a problem,. its an opportunity for us to show just how good we are and say "hey, look, we cost NOTHING and we made their program work, we made all these programs work" lets get linux on the names of everything, on the back of every propriatry device that ever comes out

the only way we are going to do that is if we view little things like this as an opportunity, to get up, shout about it and say look! we can do it too!

Opportunities are everywhere, If a company like google wont acknowledge it (which im not saying they will or wont), so what?. Sod em! The Open source community is strong enough to get up and say "ok, we'll do it better then"

I agree with your post but only applying it to a general point of view. But in the particular case of Google Earth there are some statments which are (or seems to be) wrong;

AFAIK Google Earth uses the QT library. Google itself is a Linux-based enterprise and also sponsor of a variety of proyects. I would say that Google is one of the mayor breeders of the actual FOSS movement.

Why would Google then decide not to support something which is already half ported (QT) and to operating systems (at least Linux) which they use and develop for?

It seems that there are other reasons to restrict the OS choice of Google Earth, as you can read here there is also no support for Win98, 98SE and ME, which still are a real big userbase, surely larger than the Linux, *BSD and Mac users toghether.

But.... Why not ask Google themselves?:

The answer to the Linux-support question is simply that they haven't had time to do but one version for a single architecture and postposed the rest for a later date. That's all.

Isnt there free alternatives at various websites where you can get sat images anymore?
I used them in the past without haveing to downloading anything.

As said above,google to me(as well) means "search"!
I only use google for search and probably will only use them for this.

I'm personally not specially interested, but AFAIK there are sites where you can grab not only sat images, but also maps with which you can render 3D models...

Oh! In this case you will miss Web 2.0 !!! Web 2.0 is the future of mankind, we will develop a collective intelligence and subscribe 'en masse' to Wired News and Cosmopolitan and get a telepathic interface to Flikr and Blogger and there will be strippers and a beer volcano... ups, sorry, the latter is from a different story. ^_^

Maybe we're being just a bit harsh about these guys? I mean, isn't it plausible to get something running (if it's fairly client-browser sensitive) on one platform first? Then maybe move to the others?

There is an awful lot of stuff out there that is highly dependent upon "plug-ins" that they want you to just blithely download from the Internet ... what am I supposed to do, trust them? :rolleyes: ... and without that bag of software on the system it just doesn't work. And, unless you happen to have the one version of Microsoft (Of Course) Windows that the developers managed to test it on :cool: ... it still doesn't work!

So what do I do with that stuff? Simple: I don't! :tisk:

Heck, even if I did have the MS(OC)W Version "Latest and Greatest," I still wouldn't do it. Just look at how many people "trusted" Sony Music, and wound up with an un-installable friggin' root kit! :D

So, those guys who can't run software that I am able and willing to run, spend a lot more money on whiz-bang stuff than they ought to, and still don't get any dollars out of my pocket. Reckon that's their problem, though, not mine: I Am The Customer. :D

And I run Linux.

Sure. Well, unless your name is Microsoft. Then it is evil.

Do you all remember google's summer of code? They were all about premoting open source. yet when it comes to google making a linux native version of their software, they dont do it. If im not mistaken, its not as if they dont have the ability or resources to - theres an option to use openGL for rendering, so surely its mostly just a case of making its other features linux compatible?

I totally agree with you, Everal. I haven't heard of google earth, but I'll try it.

I feel offended when websites say things like "if this website doesn't work, upgrade your browser. Here are the only two links you will need: microsoft.com/..., netscape.com/...", or when a website with pdf files says "These pdf files require adobe software." I mean, what part of public domain do they not understand?

Yes, google has every right to write their software to target Windows. Plenty of other Windows and Linux developers do the same. Some people on this thread don't seem to understand that if a developer is going to target an OS for their software, they should say what OS their software works on. Not say that it doesn't work on Mac, but imply that it will on every PC based OS, if it doesn't. If it works only in Windows, they should say so, and would have to mention Windows to do that. At least that is the opinion that the OP expressed, and I agree.

On the same note, nobody should be saying that adobe software is required for pdf files. It would be nice if those websites would link to adobe as well as a few other pdf readers, but it is a lie and a demonstration of their ignorance when they say something like, "adobe software is required". Webmasters who write their websites for Internet Explorer with Medium Security running as administrator on Windows XP should be shot.

Stupid people offend me. It is their right to be stupid (to an extent), but it is also my right to (want to) kill them.

Hey guys ... I hope I can make an end to this flameware - I just checked out the website of Google Earth and was astonished to see them already offering a Macintosh-Beta-Version for download (sorry, they won't let me post the link coz this is my fist post in the Forum)

Anyway, Google DOES seem to MEAN it when it sais, it wants to make GoogleEarth available for Mac (and in longer term perhaps also for Linux) :)

Google Earth for MacOS
 

Yes, it is there! And it works great.. Let's hope they make a Linux version soon.. Now that they made a MacOS port, it should not be long

First of all as said about it says "PC" not windows and it stated that it excluded mac out, not linux. Secound of all because I can now post links let's not forget how much google and microsoft hate each other

I think that we have no idealogical enemy in Google, who runs their entire operation on Linux ... but we do have a demonstration of the quandary that faces the software development community, and Microsoft in particular.

Google Earth, as deployed now, as developed with Microsoft's software development and deployment systems, runs only on (current) Microsoft platforms ... and this is rightfully perceived as being a problem. A rather substantial and growing segment of the PC market -- the Linux users, the Macintosh OS/X users, both of these being "Unix-based" users who can quite easily share software among themselves -- is locked out. Try as they might, Google cannot sell to them. Not without spending millions of dollars on re-engineering the code (which, for all I know, they might well be doing).

We can't afford to be doing two parallel development-efforts to get to the same goal-post. We all have to be playing the same game, the same way, and spending the millions of dollars that we do spend every year on software development, doing the job once.

Of the two, the Linux/Unix community offers considerably more long-term promise. Not Windows. Windows is proving to be an immensely complex, extremely bloated system that has very poor backward-compatibility even with itself. It's published by one monolithic company that is, more and more, long on promise and short on delivery. And, to top it all off, extremely hardware-constrained.

These limitations point to only one inescapable conclusion, as I see it, and the garland will go to the one who grabs it first: in the long run, Windows will lose. Not the operating-system per se, but rather the whole concept of a "OS-dependent software development strategy." We can't afford to write software that is "locked in" to a single platform any more.

this is a very good topic. It does kinda make me feel ill will against google but they are a public company and the bottom line is making money for it's investors. stock goes up people get happy. the fastest way to grab attention is to market it to windows first.

they could've however coded it for other *nix and osx at the same time. maybe they need a few million emails asking them if they will code a linux version :p

IIRC, I recently read an article on slashdot about Google collaborating with CodeWeavers to make a linux compatable version of Picasa. Which means they're trying to make some of their stuff compatable. Which then, could mean that Google Earth may be coming around, eventually

Just to clarify - Linux format magazine has stated:

"In other Google news, the company has released a version of Google Earth for MAC OS X, and a spokesman suggested that a Linux version is nearing release".

(Issue 78 page 11)

Google earth through wine

There have been over 40 posts regarding this topic, and nobody has mentioned this Linux-compatible alternative yet...

http://www.flashearth.com

Mmmmm - requires Javascript and flash.

Another one bites the dust ...

Why? I'm sure you can install/enable both on your system.

Any see Google Mars?

Took a look at the site, everything comes up fine-of course I'm using mepis so java and flash are no problem (also easy to install for any debian user)

I took a look at the Flash-Site and worked fine.

That's a nice site, thanks! As I think I mentioned just this morning, Google Fusion Server runs on SLES servers at my company. Though we don't have a Wintendo client yet, at least it is a start. AFAIK, Earth is a Qt applicaiton, so it shouldn't be too hard to port to *nix, if they did things right.

Here's an image of phone GPS data from a Nextel application overlayed on Google Earth data in our servers. It is my house and the corresponidng GPS locaitons of my cell phone. (We think satellite wobble cause the location points to not be exact, since the phone was actually stationary during the testing.)

http://www.perfectreign.com/stuff/kai_gps_home.jpg

...and a closer look...

http://www.perfectreign.com/stuff/kai_gps_home_zoom.jpg

http://www.broom.org/epic/
or
http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/

Ever since Ive seen that little Nostradamus-like skit.. I've been taking notice :)
If that link doesnt work, just yahoo epic 2014. Should get a few mirrors.

I have tried http://www.flashearth.com/ using Mozilla and it works beautifully. I did not even have upgrade Java or Flash. Apparently I did it the first time right. Usually that doesn happen.

Still I have the idea though that Google Earth provides a bit higher resolution. I GE I could see the individual houses in my place, in FE not.

jlinkels