Microsoft measures up

German legal metre!?

This could have something to do with a shift in definition of an SI metre some years back, when they dropped the "this particular stick in Paris" definition. The now define it as the distance light travels in 1/2.99792548E8 s. This may have thrown the legal "stick in Berlin/Bon/wherever" definition used in Germany by a staggering 13.6 micron.

stick with linguini

outdated concept: speed of light

Light has been shown to travel at different speeds in different parts of the universe - we could do with returning to the good ol' reliable reference "stick" so as not to confuse matters :-p

Meat and drink

Yes, this is all meat and drink to spatial IT types. When you try and squish a round earth onto a flat map you end up with all sorts of hideous complications. It isn't helped by the fact that the earth actually isn't round. And no, it's not exactly an (oblate) spheroid either. It's all lumpy and squished in funny ways. Dealing with those complications (and the historical legacy of past attempts) makes for interesting times and very ugly maths. A telling datapoint, the list of coordinate systems on my laptop (/usr/share/proj/epsg) lists over 3,200 different options (ok, so that includes projected and unprojected as opposed to the 388 unprojected from MS). Projected and unprojected? Yes, another wrinkle. Is it any wonder seasoned spatial operatives sigh when non spatial people proclaim it can't be all that hard and launch another wreck-in-waiting?

As to the second part of the article being the more informative, that's a matter of opinion. MS is so late to the spatial game, they're not going to make a huge difference. My feeling is at best they're going to stem migrations away from existing SQL Server environments where new apps require a spatial focus. Hopefully the benefit of this article may well be to stop general IT types from assuming spatial is a piece of cake, and consider calling in someone who's done it once or twice before.

@Colin Wilson

Outdated concept, speed of light? Any proof of that (like Science or Nature papers, not Wikipedia or blogosphere stuff)? As Einstein (and Lorentz) would have it, and they may of course be wrong, it is not the speed of light in vacuum(!) that changes, it is the metric of space-time itself that changes in the presence of concentrations of mass/energy. I know there are theories out there stating speed of light may vary, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. In any dielectric medium, the speed of light differs from that in vacuum by a factor given by the index of refraction.

BTW the so-called superluminal expansion of certain quasars is NOT proof the light speed is different there, it can readily be explained by special relativity.