This should keep a lot of the urban crowd and suburbanites happy, but what about the outdoor set? They'll be happy to hear that terrain imagery in 3D is available for the entire world (the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York are gorgeous). The 15 3D destination cities available at launch are Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Fort Worth, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle, with others to be added over time. Broadband connectivity is strongly recommended. You'll also need to have hardware acceleration set to full. Your system also needs to have a video card (compatible with at least Microsoft DirectX 9) with 32MB or greater of dedicated video memory. You'll need to be running Internet Explorer 6 or 7 and adjust your security settings so that you've enabled Microsoft ActiveX controls or will receive a prompt to run them (if this means nothing to you, don't worry, the latter is the default setting-this warning is for power users and geeks who tweak their settings). In fact, this addition helps keep the Editors' Choice for local search. As far as I'm concerned, VE 3D is a doozy of a reason to use. Why? Simple: In terms of online-search market share and advertising revenue, Microsoft lags behind Google and Yahoo! So anything that persuades more eyeballs and fingers to use their search will benefit Microsoft's bottom line. Getting back to Live Search with Virtual Earth 3D, mapping and geography geeks (like me) will just want to visit the maps.live site and fly around and explore (as people do with Google Earth), but the folks at Microsoft would prefer you to access it via a search at. Now that would be an unbeatable combination for things local. What would top even that would be for Google to acquire Yahoo! Local and the technology Yahoo! in turn absorbed and integrated from its acquisition of. Let me add that, in the future, when the folks at Google can find some way of overcoming the technical challenges of melding the richness of Google Earth and its amazing community with its own local search, they'll have a shot at the title.
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