There’s a new version of Google Earth, the mapping program that’s more fun than a game. It’s a little slow at the moment.

It’s not officially supported on Vista, but I can’t really slap Google’s hand, because Microsoft has lots of software that’s not supported on Vista yet. It does run, though. It’s just a little buggy. On my newer Dell D820 laptop with the NVidia video adapter, graphics are flakey in DirectX mode. OpenGL works, but it’s wicked slow. On my older Vista laptop, there’s no flakiness. The big problem is that textured buildings don’t work in Vista (as shown working correctly in the picture above). 3D buildings show up, but without textures enabled.

Update: Textures are working now. I think the server that provides them was just overburdened for a moment.