Google Earth - Home

Google Earth - Home

This type of application has been available for at least five years now... I believe the original work to put this stuff on the web was done by Microsoft as proof of technology for their "Terraserver" (tm) software or whatever... they were trying to show how well Microsoft servers dealth with a database that was terrabytes in size.

A terrabyte used to seem so incredibly huge. I remember a friend of mine back when I was working at Ohio State University's Computer Science department, name of Eric Osborne, astonished me to the core when he told me that while working at the now defunct Digital, he had personally worked on a database server that had over a terrabyte of disk space. I remember grilling him fiercly when he told me that because I thought for sure he was pulling my leg.

Fast forward seven or eight years and I almost have a terrabyte of disk space for my home PC network. Times are changing, and I like this kind of change.

Google seems to be branching into a vast number of projects, none of which are necessarily forced to tie in with the rest. Its as if google has its software engineers pick a project they think is cool, and then they find some kind of monetary angle, however nebulous or tenuous, and then the team goes to work and makes it so.

I think it must be really great to work at google. I have a few friends at Microsoft who talked about their friends at google, and from those conversations I have the sense that google is about as hip and geek-friendly a company to work for as exists on this planet.

Well, enough of this blogging to myself, back to work....

-Michael