Author: James

Zillow.com estimates draw fire, state ban – Arizona Republic (may require free registration)

An Arizona regulatory board has ordered Zillow.com to stop offering its online estimates of home values.

The Arizona Board of Appraisal has issued two cease-and-desist letters to the popular real estate Web site, claiming Zillow needs an appraiser license to offer its “zestimates” in Arizona.

“It is the board’s feeling that (Zillow) is providing an appraisal,” said Deborah Pearson, Board of Appraisal executive director.

Yea I too don’t see how anyone could confuse an automated valuation with an appraisal, but we are a wacky breed here in Arizona.

If it’s all the same to you, Honey, I think I’ll skip this little get together, slip out with the boys and knock back a couple of appraisals.

Having just bought my wife a 24” iMac for her birthday, I’ve got a nice Dell PC ready to do something with. I figure since my son is now 4, he’s ready for his first computer of his own (I think I was 8 when my Dad passed his Apple ][ down to me). I’m taking the Windows XP license off of that computer so my wife can run Parallels with it so I figure Linux is a good choice for him. I’ve looked at Edubuntu a couple times and it appears like it will be perfect for him, but I’m wondering if anyone else have any experience using it. Should I bother or would it be better to just install Ubuntu itself?

Brian Flood has finally (j/k Brian) released Arc2Earth Publisher. Many have been part of the beta and have seen the power of publishing ArcGIS maps online without using complicated or expensive servers.

Arc2Earth is a single program that comes in 4 different versions: Standard, Professional, Publisher and Enterprise. When you buy one of these versions, your serial number will unlock different functionality in Arc2Earth. Each higher version contains all the functionality of the previous version. For instance, if you have Publisher, it also includes everything that’s available in Standard and Professional. Please look at the feature grid here to see the differences between each version.

Brian’s also announced a new Arc2Earth blog and appears threatening to blog more about general GIS topics again.

The demo is here.

It looks like ESRI has rolled out their new support pages.

It is a little easier to manage than the previous setup. The search still hasn’t been improved IMO and a search for ArcSDE still results in ESRI offering “Did you mean: arcade “. Now if they can get the backend search product up to 2007 standards, we’ll have something here. Someone on the support team needs to get on the ball and offer up RSS Feeds for the “Latest Additions” section. I’ve heard from multiple people at ESRI that they _code their RSS feeds by hand_ so I suspect that is why they haven’t offered this as an RSS feed as the person who would have to maintain this code would be busy 24/7.

Most of ESRI’s RSS feeds don’t validate anyway, but that is another issue altogether.

Interesting*

Use Google Earth Pro – A software solution for viewing GIS data

Hmm, for about half the cost of Google Earth Pro, you could have Manifold…

• Fortunately searching for Goo doesn’t not result in Google trying to pimp their Goo….

Ed, congratulations on the new job.

Private sector clients of ours can’t or won’t use Google Earth as a client to our products until the EULA is fixed, can you address this? If Google Earth is to be more than a tool to locate flying airplanes in satellite imagery, we’ll need to see this addressed very soon.

Thanks,

James (Concerned GIS Professional)

The Keynote Presentation by Mark Driver of Gartner Research about the strengths and weaknesses of the Java and .NET environments is now available for download. I missed most of the presentation so I can’t really say how valuable it was, but it appears it was well received by those who attended.

All Points Blog brings up a topic that I’ve touched on a couple times over the past year. If we are to perform an sort of analysis using these free online tools, we’ll need to know more about the metadata and sources (and accuracy). As Adena points out, people are beginning to see the need for it and are calling for GYM to start providing it.

Is IBM the Next Major GIS Player?

…ESRI, though Mr. Dangermond shows no signs of retirement, could make an interesting acquisition given the long-standing ESRI-IBM partnership.

As I’m sure many of you who subscribe to ESRI’s email announcement list saw, ESRI is planning to release ArcGIS 9.2 SP2 sometime near mid-april. For those who missed it, you can view the changes here. One thing to keep in mind is ESRI’s definintion of a Service Pack may be different then yours. These aren’t just bug fixes, but feature releases (especially ArcGIS Server). So you’ll want to start paying attention to these Service Pack announcements in the future (remember there is a planned SP3 due later this summer) so that you’ll not miss out on new features.