Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Google Earth: Nothing Hidden Now!

Amazing When I was in Paris recently, I went to visit one of my friends house in Belgium on a weekend (if you get a visa for France or Belgium or Germany or Netherlands or UK, you can visit the other four places with the same visa, that means no body will stop you entering the borders of any of these five countries if you carry a valid visa of any one of them). He had recently purchased a big house in a city 110 kms away from Paris so he insisted me to see his house. I was not in a mood to travel back so early as I was tired and wanted to stay there at least for two days. 


No, he said, you will have to see my house and that too right now. And in next 5 minutes we were in front of his house. No surprises please, no plane or fastest of the trains could take us to Paris from Belgium in 5 minutes, but it as done by Google Earth. He just put on the internet connection, clicked on google earth icon on his desktop, typed his place name, then street name, then some zoom ins and we were there in front of his house. We could see it from different angles. The photographs were as good as if we were in front of the house. We could see his lawns, main entrance, walls, surrounding houses, streets, roads, and slightly distant sea with many ships in it.


Frightening Facts Google earth took birth officially on Internet in June’2005 and since then it has received tremendous attention not only from individual but also from governments of several advanced countries. Officials of many countries have raised alarms over its extensively detailed display of government buildings, military bases, nuclear reactor sites and certain other sensitive sites. So the countries that request google with identification of the locations that are not to be shown clearly are shown blurred even if the surroundings can be seen up to street level. This all is done by regular transmission of photographs from Satellites to Google Servers which get updated frequently


What and How You need to download this software from Google.com, as this is a desktop application, after installation, you need Internet to use it. Google earth makes aerial view of every square inch of the globe. You select a place and certain information like topographical, population density, crime rate etc. is available at your finger clicks. Zoom in, zoom out, tilt, rotate, navigation etc.are the other options available for you. The source of this information is satellites and air crafts. Because the data comes from various resources, it is provided at different resolutions, that is why some areas of the globe appear crisp even at street level while others are blurry. US, Canada and most parts of Europe can be seen at street level, and if you zoom further you can view road names and local business offices names (building names).   


Some other features are video Flyover and Sightseeing which must be experienced and enjoyed individually. Actually if you tell it that you want to go from Delhi to Paris, for instance, and press play button, it will move along the aerial terrain an airplane actually passes through while going from Delhi to Paris. In sight seeing, it has a long list of places of visit.Some facts on installation front It may give problems in loading if you have Win 98 operating system, but if you are having win 2k, xp or 2003, it works perfectly.


Do experience it, it is really worth.



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