Bhuvan brought victory and a tax waver for a period of 3 years to his team, as well as all his fellow villagers in the movie lagaan by winning a cricket match against the britishers.
But now, the same name has brought a pride moment for the entire nation on the Independence Day. ISRO’s new beta Bhuvan promises to do a lot more than G-Earth for India-specific users. It offers quicker data refreshment (the satellite pictures will be newer). It offers better streetby- street (indeed house-by-house) coverage with resolutions that will eventually be significantly better. It also offers a load of useful metadata ranging across climate, weather, demographics,and the historical values of above. It allows easy measuring and scaling and one-click snapshot of maps. This is brilliant. The next version incorporates Chandrayaan-data, including shots of the dark side of the moon..
But, Bhuvan requires a 10.7Mb download from the ISRO site. The site has not been mirrored and it has been down near- continuously due to high traffic since the launch. That was three days ago, and 72 hours is long enough for even beureaucracies to take corrective action. The GoI has both the technological ability and the bandwidth. The Election Commission and the Railways, for instance, handle humongous traffic. Anyway let’s assume a user gets there when the site is working, goes through the tedious registration downloads and completes set-up. Bhuvan can only be run off the site, post-login. This means permanent traffic jams. You will get kicked off regularly. It can only be run off broadband connections that are at least 756Kbps in speed.
Bhuvan suffers heavily vis-a-vis Google Earth and associated programs like Wikimapia. The image-mapping software from ISRO is clunky. It has many potentially useful and impressive features but it is being delivered in a condition that makes even hardened beta-users sweat. “Beta” carries large built-in disclaimers.
So Let’s hope that all these changes would be made soon and Bhuvan comes out with flying colors.
Happy Independence Day.
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Karthik
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