You're listening to episode 749 of A Very Spatial Podcast, November 3rd, 2024. Hello and welcome to A Very Spatial Podcast. I'm Jesse. I'm Sue. I'm Barb. And this is Frank. And this week, we're going to be talking about news items, I think, but maybe also Geography Awareness Week. We'll see what happens.
But with that, we'll get started by saying that Last time three weeks ago whenever it was that we talked we talked about ai and so of course right after that Google has to say well, you know what we're going to put a whole lot of generative ai into our mapping products and so you have Not specifically for the map per se But for the map things so whenever you find businesses and things like that, there's going to be a lot more gemini generated Discussions about those things within the
pop ups and those type of things they are Adding conversational route impedances. I don't know the thing. Whenever you're on a trip and you tap on ways and say, this is where I saw a car on the side of the road. Those type of things. You're gonna be able to do that conversationally as opposed to having to go through the interface. While driving. Yeah. It's just always you don't do that. Just don't do that. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Unless you have a, a passenger who can do it for you.
Yeah. So there's, there's things coming that are using AI and that was kind of one of the big things that they talked about at the end of, of October. And of course, everybody was releasing everything in October because it's October. So if you don't get released in September, you get it released in October. And apparently they went with the end of October. And then on an American schedule, you're just off for the holidays from November until February.
It's like, well, and of course, if you don't announce it by October, how are you going to sell it in November? Yeah. And Christmas. Yeah. So I just want to talk a minute about this. Okay. First of all, Google is incorporating Gemini. I'm curious how many people on the listening podcast go. What's a Gemini? Which is an unfortunate? Yeah. Sarcastic comment on the state of AI and where Google sits, right? I like.
It's just kind of not there's chat GPT and then there's co pilot and we know Google has a thing But it was called barred and then they moved to Gemini. It's it's unfortunate that they're not really Embracing this as fully as I think Google has the ability to do And I'll be honest. I think AI is going to be at some level the future But I also wouldn't surprise me if Google kills it like the other 17, 000 useful things. They've killed 10 years or so and just ends up using somebody else's.
It's a little, it's really cool in the industry that people are starting to do this, like we talked about last week, but or last podcast, but I'm not as confident that Google is going to do it. I mean, pull it off and what you guys think.
Oh yeah, I don't necessarily, well, I don't necessarily have a comment on On the, yeah, on the Gemini and sort of Google's issues when that mine was more that I just noted something else that, that's coming that's going to use Gemini that I was just really like, Oh, hey, I might actually use that. Apparently you're holding that off until, well, no, I mean, I thought we got past that. So I was just gonna let it go, but I saw the waze thing.
Only that I think that for Google, it's going to be a matter of the, the popularity of, of what they're putting out with Gemini and the, the use of it, whether, They decide to go with something else like they do sometimes or grow what they're doing. I think they're going to stick with being a major player. It's just. I think it'll take time to see if they're going to stick with Gemini. Okay. So now I'll jump in with mine.
The, I think the thing that Frank is kind of alluding to is the fact that folks like Apple, who just released quote unquote Apple intelligence is using chat GPT and some local generative technologies as well on. iOS 18. 1 and beyond. And so I assume that you're kind of talking about, they're going to do something like that where they're using somebody else's. But on the other hand, I think Gemini is actually doing a fairly good job and they're doing a terrible job of marketing it kind of.
So I think the thing that they've done a really good job of, of, Getting out there and getting a lot of people talking about is notebook LM, which is part of Gemini But they don't really talk about that Just everybody's talking about notebook LM and how you can bring things into it and I'll do summaries and then you can create an audio Podcast from that summary that's being generated by the AI and so yeah I it it's weird because they've Done a good job.
I will say that maybe they're still distancing themselves from it because the Gemini responses at the top of your search results are still a little if either getting better because, of course, is being trained, but it's still a little iffy. And on top of that, they're, they're sometimes not really wanted, right? Because a lot of times you're asking for, like, I'm You're trying to get a website and you're like, I Lowe's and then it'll go out Lowe's as a store that does something.
I know what it is. I just need to, now I've got to scroll past you. Go away. Yeah. And I just want to find the damn website. That's what I was Google searching for. It wasn't, what is it? But yeah, you're, you're absolutely right. It's good. And that's what frustrates me because Google hangouts, I would argue was pretty good too, but then they got rid of it, you know? So there's lots of things that Google has made that are quite good. And they've gone, you know what?
We're just not going to do that anymore. And it's always annoying from a. Reliability standpoint, if from a personal standpoint, I can play with something and that's awesome. But from a, you know, from a business, you have more production level standpoint. I have to go. Is this going to be around in 2 years? In which case is it worth my time to get?
You know, up to speed on it, and then I'm going to move to a related comment to just driving directions in general is my biggest frustration right now, and I don't understand why. I feel like we're just like, it's there. It's right there. Why don't you just take that extra step is little quality enhancements. Like, it's really awesome that it goes. Okay. It's going to tell you some added stops for interesting landmarks or things you can stop at. That's kind of nifty.
And it's cool that I can tell it. Hey, by the way, there's a thing over here. Just letting everybody know. And that's nice. But why can't I still say I'm going to go pee now and I'll go, okay, I'm just, I'm going to bother telling you where to go then. That's the most annoying thing about all these driving directions is that you get off the road and it goes, look, you need to get back on the road. And then you go, well, I'm going to go to the, you know, get some gas.
And I go, okay, turn around here. Cause you're off route. And you're like, I understand. I'm just going to go to the gas station. I don't know why we can't give it that sort of pause. Particularly verbally. That's my biggest annoyance with routing. So one of the other things that is coming that is AI is routing suggestions and changing routing. So adding in, find me a, you know, at a nearby restaurant or things like that. I don't think it's going to add pausing still.
Yeah, but the fact that you can do some of these things, yeah. In theory, and again, we haven't seen this yet. This is announced. I don't even think it's rolled out into ways yet. Or at least I haven't used ways since it did roll out if it has. So yeah, we're waiting to see how some of these things actually work. And again, they'll be terrible at the beginning and give it a few months of millions of people training it and it'll be awesome next up in the news.
Unity six is now out for those of you that that work in development with the unity platform.
Like I do now, I'm not necessarily going to upgrade right away, but this is the, the first release since the big dust up over, you know, energy changing its pricing structure and causing some issues, people leaving the platform some of which have actually returned and, and some stayed I was one that stayed just for a lot of reasons but there's some new Functionality coming in, especially looking at moving your workloads to the GPU. So improving some graphics and adding a few things.
And interestingly, as an educator, there's a couple things that they're adding alongside the release that actually, And that is some new learning resources. So some of the learning resources that Unity's had, haven't kept up with releases of the, of the platform. So it creates a problem if you move along. But they got a couple of really cool things being add to learning resources, including TimeGhost and the Metro City, which lets you build a multiplayer. So those are pretty cool. And the.
Change that took away the the runtime fee actually didn't happen until September. So not that long ago. So be curious to see how unity is will be doing with that change. And maybe people coming back or getting some new people well, since they more or less rolled all those changes back almost all of us, most of them. But I believe that the actual end of the runtime fee was wasn't until like this past September. Yes. Basically, it was a year after.
They announced it that they kind of said, okay, we're not gonna do that. And then they released six because they wanted people on it. Yeah, I mean, it was it was kind of tough to make this some decisions on that. So as an educator, I don't use it for for profit, but I mean, it was really potentially going to be.
An issue but some people that migrated away from unity found difficulties and working with things like a dough or some of the options are moving to unreal is a is a big change for for a lot of reasons well I think the trickier pit bit here is that the get into games just for a second I know a bunch of games I played just moved to unreal.
And did like massive amount of work to do that and they're not going to move back so I imagine they won't move back unless something changes massively in the unreal Sphere the interesting thing is I actually haven't dug into like what esri does because they had really good bridges.
They started developing really good bridges to unity and for last year because of my professional direction I haven't messed with that much I'm kind of curious if they kind of went Okay, that's there we're not going to blow it out too hard or, or they said, you know what, you know, these things are G. I. S. is costly. You know, you just have to pay that fee and not worried about it. So it is kind of curious in the geospatial realm.
How many just sort of, you know, decided to glide across the pond, so to speak, or some, how many went, no, we're going to restructure this. My sense is in the G. I. S. realm. There wasn't like a rip out and put a different engine in approach. It was unlike the gaming world. It is like, well, it is what it is. And then now it is what it isn't.
So what I like about it is that there have are releasing some new environmental you know, for the, like, recreating the environment and they've added different types of global lighting. I know I've seen a trend. I don't know what happened in the technology, but I'm seeing in several products, this improved lighting capability to create realistic lighting effects. And I think that's something that really adds to the feeling of remissitude. Is that how you pronounce it? Verisimilitude.
Yeah. Verisimilitude. Verisimilitude. Also, we all three said it differently. Yeah, well, it just, it adds to that sense of place and it's nice to see them, them adding it because it does make a huge difference. MapQuest has released private maps for Android. They are going back, they say, to the time when, you know, you were doing transportation mapping and it was transportation mapping alone.
So, this would be something where they are not sharing your, your information, it's going to be private. They say that it protects your privacy and keeps your data away. They're going to have a way to do anonymous mode. So your search history stays on your device only and then clears automatically when you close the app. When you do private favorites, it's only going to save to your device.
And they're also going to have anonymous analytics, which means they still are going to use data to make the app better, but they're going to do it with anonymous data. So MapQuest, you know, one of the first online mapping, Solutions that was out there. And now they are moving into this private mapping experience as they call it So I have two comments about this one.
I can't get the vision of map quest and paper out of my head like They're just conjoined because the way it would use for those who may not be aware of map quest or remember at all, because it was for your time is that you would go to map question. You say, I'm going to get from here to Pittsburgh, wherever it may be, and it would give you a long list of directions and you didn't tend to have things like PDF readers on your phone or anything like that.
So you'd have to print them out on pieces of paper and you would take the pieces of paper with you to get from here or there and. It was so to me, it was always paper based. Oddly enough, even though it was online, it was sort of like looking up a recipe and printing out the recipe sort of. That was the workflow because we didn't have digital things that we could carry around with us. Yeah. And secondly, I feel like I use some other mapping thing before MapQuest, but maybe I didn't.
I mean, they're claiming the world's first and that I don't have any reason to dispute them. But I felt like there was something I used earlier on and then something else came along. But my memory was the first web based one. There may have been a CD based one. Maybe that's what I'm thinking from delorme or somebody like that. But again, it wasn't, it wasn't exactly what we're used to today, which even then map quest wasn't because we didn't have web 2. 0 yet, but it was getting that direction.
Yeah, well, and, and I don't remember having like, you know, 1, 2, 3 high street necessarily levels of. Specific directions like you didn't have all the points sorted out. It was doing a lot of interpolation of like blocks and things like that. So it should be right here, but it's sort of assumed at the end that you're able to figure it out. Well, I mean, that's that's true until about a decade ago. We were using address averaging as opposed to point based locations.
That's a fairly new thing for us using point based locations. Yeah, but what I'm really saying is I don't remember having all the addresses in the world in there, even if it was I just remember going like I can get you to Pittsburgh, but after that you're on your own I can get you to you know, this major road in Pittsburgh, but good luck. No It could get you to the block back in the day.
It doesn't matter moving on planet In our continuing of of things that have been released recently they have released their own analysis ready planet scope product, which is basically them taking their data, normalizing the data so that you can look at it between captures 3. 7 meter data, they say near late near daily. So I assume that in the averaging, you know, that's going to that's having some impact. Yeah, and so this product, you can go, you can use it. It's giving you time series.
You can use machine learning. I, I'm, I don't remember from my quick read if it was just their machine learning algorithms or if you could pull it down and use your own. Machine learning. But yeah, if you're interested in it, head over to the planet's website and find out more in their planet's insights platform. This is this is really interesting. I clicked on the site and I'm kind of looking into it.
The reason it's interesting is because with this is specifically interesting is is Barbara and are involved with the national security program at Fairmont State University. And one of the things that they you. That program is just now getting into spatial analysis as part of the former formal curriculum, which is good because they should be doing that more.
But 1 of the things that they, they somewhat struggle with apparently is looking at change analysis because they don't, they don't have the geospatial background to know that there are sources out there that they can get things on a 16 week basis. You know, of course, the sea change analysis when they're examining a particular place, something like this is an interesting platform, particularly has a, I didn't, I'm assuming it's for cost.
I haven't looked at the expenses, but it's interesting if they can make like an educational bit that sort of brings this together into a package for those kind of non geospatial. Geospatial users that aren't inherently geospatial, you know, to kind of branch into that, use it sort of as a taster thing. So it's an interesting little site. Yeah, I mean, it is it is for a cost. But of course, planet has contracts with all the multi letter. Agencies and so they can get to them.
And Sue was just last week talking about some of the educational opportunities from planets, but I can't remember what you were saying. Was it just data access? I don't know. Oh, yeah, that's what you're looking into. Yeah. So yeah, you guys should look into reach out to them because they do have an educational Okay. Component. Yeah, I think it was like a grant thing. Grant. Yeah, just general access, whatever it might be for students.
And yeah, well, the call grant, but I think it was for data access. Yes, for educational purposes. Yes, planet labs. Check it out. All right, so if you're on Windows 10, you should be aware that October 14 2025 Windows 10 support goes away. It's at end of life. You need to move to Windows 11. The problem is, is that many people either don't want to because they don't like windows 11 or like, for example, the computer That i'm on right now is incapable of moving to windows 11.
So Microsoft is starting 30. You could pay 30 and you can keep using windows 10 securely Which means that you'll have security updates and that's going to go through It's annual it's annual 30 annual and that's going to go through some end date I'm going to presume it's going to be you know Three to five years, I'm gonna assume as long as they're still making 30 a year from a handful of people. They'll go. Yeah, you say that. But, you know, even Windows 7 had a, you know, you're done date.
That's how they're gonna they're gonna have some debt. But, you know, 30 a month for basically security upgrades. It's interesting that on the enterprise side, they do already have this in place in some form or fashion. To extend this deadline. That's why I remember there being a deadline on the enterprise side. So I'm assuming the consumer one will be similar, but I don't know what it is.
This is a this is a is a very different thing to pass windows in my opinion, because before there was a minimum spec for windows. But basically, if you can get it to run. Great go nuts. That doesn't bother us in the slightest. So you could upgrade to windows from XP to 7 to 7 to 10, whatever it may be, as long as your computer could run it. If it was old enough, it would be ugly and terrible and slow and all that sort of stuff. But if you want to live with it, it was your business.
This is they they've got very strong dividing line for whether or not windows 11 or run on your computer. And it's not based upon performance. It's based upon essentially security. There's a TPM, which I never remember what TPM stands for, but It has to be able to run there. It has to be able to run that 1 and 2. It has to be a certain generation of processors.
So, for example, my laptop that I'm on right now, my older laptop is in fact 1 generation earlier than this cut off, even though I'm pretty sure that windows 11 will. In fact, run on it without too much trouble. So it's a little maddening. And I'm, I personally, I'm not going to pay 30 a month for windows machine running in, in secure conditions. And I'm a little honestly miffed at Microsoft for making me bin a perfectly reasonable laptop. Well, I mean, there's always Linux. No, there isn't.
No, thank you. So. Yeah, I mean, this is a questionable thing especially given the fact that people are concerned about various portions of what's going on with Windows 11, especially around the AI, especially around things like recall and their questionable decisions, which it hasn't rolled out in theory. Totally yet. I think it should just be the A. I. P. C. S. But I haven't actually checked mine to see if it's even done. The latest 24 H 2 or not.
But, yeah, there's there's question marks with 11. So they're like, well, if you don't want to give us your information to use for our A. I. Content, then you can give us money. Yeah, and it's actually more money than getting, I think office through 65, which is ridiculous. No, it's it's it's for a individual user. It's still less than yeah. But if you do like the family, I don't know, I pay, I pay like 10 a month for office three 65. Well, that's 120 a year.
Yeah. But you said it was 30 or 30 as an annual answer. I thought, well, even then 30 a year is obnoxious. Any fee is ridiculous to fix the things that you didn't fix the first time. That's just, I'm just going to put that out there.
And then finally this week in the news, Those of us who are GISPs, I guess, are now also supported by the fact that GISP, sorry, the GISCI Which is the home of the G. I. S. P. has been accredited by the Council of Engineering and Scientific Specialty Boards C. E. S. B. And so, yeah, we're not a standalone certification. We've now been recognized as something by another body that has a lot of other organizations.
Whenever we look at it, they themselves in the news release that is G. I. S. P. R. G. S. C. I. Note that the ASPRS certifications for agronomic technologists, remote sensing technologists and the GIS LIS are part of the CISB membership, but as an associate member GSCI is a member member and there's, you know, there's everything from engineering to health to forensics to hazardous materials groups that are members of this accreditation body.
You know, gives it a little bit more stance in a broader community, as opposed to just in the geospatial community. Yeah, and I see that maybe just said this as PRS is actually an associate member. I didn't know that either. I did say they mentioned that it, you know, this adds to their rigor, which is good. It's also another reason why with The students I work with and also with our association is and I'm still working. I have to take my, I'll be honest. I haven't got my DSP. I need to study.
I need to take it. I could have been grandfathered in, but didn't pay the money. But it is a good idea to start sooner than later building your portfolio for it. Am I the only 1? No, I have 1. Oh, okay. I'm in Barb's boat, but I didn't finish the. The last bit of it. Yeah, you never plan to do it. So I'm not sure why well I did I've I assembled all the materials and then I saw how much was gonna cost and at the time I did not do it So, yeah, of course you have to take that's on me.
That's the same boat. I am I assembled my materials I got my letter to send in and then I went how much yeah exactly. I did. I even had the letter Yeah, it's probably somewhere but that was back in the old system. So so the I just looked at the what I think everyone on this podcast 1st, well, maybe not Jesse, but the rest of us definitely never heard of the council of engineering and scientific specialty board before. No, I haven't okay. Well, we said, maybe he did.
I don't know, but we said, and so I was kind of curious and I didn't find the answer, but I was sort of curious who does the professional the PE professional engineering Certification like I'm assuming it's a board or nonprofit of some sort and I was curious if they were, if they were the ones, but the, the, the C. E. S. B. was formed in 1990. And I know that he, he goes back before 1990. So I'm not sure exactly what it is. They certify, but it's kind of cool. I, the, this is expanding.
I think that whoever does, you know, serving certifications now, admittedly, that's usually done at the state level to get a license or something, but. Really the GISP needs to get kind of in that zone a little bit so that to give that authenticity to people beyond the GIS realm. That's just my opinion. Of course Every country is going to be different. So whatever makes sense in your country.
I will say that looking at the list of organizations that are members of the CESB, it does look like most of the P E because there's different things, of course, that you can do professional engineering in. And so the civil engineering certification board incorporated, whatever you call it is in there. The yeah, there's, there's different, there's a lot. Yeah, there's a bunch of environmental engineers and scientists, American Academy of. Academy board certified environmental professionals.
Oh, wait, that's environmental professionals. Yeah. So. Yes, it looks like the examiners for engineering and surveying and the national society for professional engineers. Yeah, those are associate members. So, you know, and a bet a bet is the one that does accreditation for most of our technical school stuff at Fairmont state. I'm assuming many others, but a better one that are associate members. So, yeah, that's pretty impressive. They also are offering a internship.
Program that you can get started while you're in college or university to start building your portfolio. Who are they? G. I. S. Certification Institute. Oh, okay. So they've decided to roll that out. This is a separate news item now. So, so they rolled that out, they rolled that out. Okay. They were talking about it before. I didn't, I didn't know if they had officially made it. I just think it's funny. There's an association of American society professional estimators.
Yeah. Yeah, we think we're good enough. I was going to make that joke. Because you're like the P. E. exam. Like, well, I could say professional estimators. It's on there. But I did not. So the question is, do we want to continue on and talk about Geography Awareness Week or call it and head into the events corner? I think head into the events corner. I vote B. Okay, so that's it for this week. We're going to head into the events corner. Of course, we encourage you to check out all these events.
There's only one event and this event for 11 months and some from now, because unless I had forgotten, I was not aware that there's an international GNSS day. So if you want to recognize global navigation satellite systems, then you can do so annually on October 23rd, which is just the beginning. At the end of, or just after earth science week. So it makes sense, but I just was not aware of it. It's unfortunate too, because it really, I mean, it makes sense.
There is one, it's just one of those things that it's such an important part of everything we do. I mean, our first news item essentially is GNS GNNS based when you get down to it. It's such an important part of everything we do. That's kind of cool. And it makes a really nice transition from the earth science into geography awareness. If you'd like us to add your event to the podcast, send us an email at podcast at veryspatial. com.
If you'd like to reach us individually, I can be reached at suetveryspatial. com. I can be reached at barb at veryspatial. com. And you can reach me at frank at veryspatial. com. I'm available at kindaspatial, and of course, you can find all of our contact information over at veryspatial. com slash contact. As always. We're the folks from Very Spatial. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in a couple weeks.
Autumn leaves falling down low Feel the breeze swelling so slow But hold my hand we'll walk down Humming songs Orange twirls all around As you're dancing And I'm not alone. Mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm. Mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm. The aching that has no source. Oh, missing what you never lost. Ooh Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh Hold my hand, sit and watch the old fade away Cycles turn as we own every day Oh, Oh, Oh,