I gave a seminar today on “Blogging and the new media ecosystem” at the new Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford. Afterwards, Paddy Coulter, Director of the Reuters Fellowship, entertained us to tea and gossip. As usual, I tried to capture the moment using David Hockney’s ‘joiner’ approach. As usual, I failed. Sigh. Joiners are much more difficult to do than you’d think — or than Hockney makes them appear.
Hmmm… According to Playfuls.com,
A comparison between Google Earth and Virtual Earth 3D is inevitable. And the conclusion is that Virtual Earth is so restrictive that it cannot even be considered a Beta version.The first annoying thing that all users outside the US or England will probably encounter is that you are not allowed to install Virtual Earth 3D yet in your native language.
In order to be able to install Microsoft’s VE3D you’ll have to change your settings (if you are in Windows XP) from Control Panel-Regional Settings and make your computer have a default English language. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to test the program on Linux, Solaris or Mac, but I am not that naïve to think it will work on those operating systems…
My apologies to Microsoft if that is not the case…The second annoying thing makes me again remember why everybody considers MS’s policy as arrogant, tyrannical and often stupid. You will not be able to view 3D maps if you don’t have Internet Explorer 6 or 7. To tell you the truth I do have IE7 installed on my computer but I don’t use it because I am a FireFox and Opera user. Well, Microsoft thought at that and made me cry in anger when I first tried to download the .msi installer for VE3D: nothing budged!… I asked through Skype a friend and he told me the same thing about FF: no pop-up, no warning, nothing! He eventually gave up but I had more patience and in the end I discovered that only IE is available (for now, I hope…) for this option…
If only it didn’t run under Windows.
Er, why are we not surprised? Here’s a Forbes.com report…
A lawyer stood with a cellphone in one ear, a landline connected to the other, all while typing on his BlackBerry. Twenty phones weren’t enough to handle the calls streaming into the election protection center monitoring Ohio.The lawyer was one of 20 volunteers manning calls from Ohio voters in a conference room at the New York offices of law firm of Proskauer Rose. By early afternoon the hotline had received over 500 calls reporting problems in Ohio alone, according to coordinating lawyer Jennifer Scullion.
Ohio wasn’t the only state facing voting difficulties in the most fully automated election in the nation’s history. Electronic or optical scan systems, operating in about 90% of precincts, caused problems across the country. The new voting machines often froze or failed to turn on. In multiple states, voters faced long lines as poll workers scrambled to find extra paper ballots. New laws requiring voters to show their ID also caused confusion…
