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Farewell, Google Maps

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#321

Post by paganel »

jayd16 wrote: post #284
hueving wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable. If startups need a giant subsidized operating system for free or else they weren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable. Do you see how ridiculous that argument is? >As it turns out, yeah, there's a lot of value we as a society can derive from low cost pervasive mapping.…

>Do you see how ridiculous that argument is? What? Your counter-counterpoint doesn't make sense at. Lots of startups can afford the per seat cost of OSX or Windows. If your business can't recoup the cost of an os per employee then yeah...maybe it's not a worthwhile venture.

> Lots of startups can afford the per seat cost of OSX or Windows.

On the desktop side of things that only happens because of Linux, otherwise (if guys like Ballmer would have had their way at the end of the '90s - early 2000s) those startups would now be paying hundreds of dollars per Windows license per each machine (and maybe more depending on the number of cores? the sky would have been the limit, the same as Oracle did in their field). And not to mention the server side of things, I'm pretty sure the costs for server OS licenses would have been prohibitive for the vast majority of startups without the alternative free OS solutions.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#322

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

atr2 wrote: post #318
ripdog wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't that be subpixel anti-aliasing? Besides that, there's nothing difficult to believe about that experience with google. And besides THAT, there's a far more trivial method of 'forging' an email - using the devtools to modify the DOM. No need to bust out photoshop at all. Your accusation makes no sense and is based on almost nothing.

No, it's not subpixel anti-aliasing. It's a completely different font. It looks like Roboto to me, while the rest of the email is written using Helvetica. DOM manipulation, of course. But not everybody knows about it. So most people default to Photoshop, which is what these people did. This email is FORGED, and I'd like to know why.

If you’re going to manipulate the DOM (typically via the dev console) it seems vanishingly unlikely you’d insert a new span with a different font rather than just overtyping the text.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#323

Post by atr2 »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #322
atr2 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not subpixel anti-aliasing. It's a completely different font. It looks like Roboto to me, while the rest of the email is written using Helvetica. DOM manipulation, of course. But not everybody knows about it. So most people default to Photoshop, which is what these people did. This email is FORGED, and I'd like to know why.

If you’re going to manipulate the DOM (typically via the dev console) it seems vanishingly unlikely you’d insert a new span with a different font rather than just overtyping the text.

You misunderstood. I am affirming, they have used Photoshop to insert text in that screenshot, and they have mistakenly used another font, Roboto. It's easily noticeable, as it's narrower, and some glyphs (like that "g") are different.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#324

Post by cup-of-tea »

jrockway wrote: post #137

> Google Maps is objectively the best product on its market, in many regards positioned light years ahead of its competitors. Why would they not increase the price, then? Something I've realized as I've gotten older: sometimes you can't afford the best. That is why there is a market for the cheaper options.

It's not really the best, though. The article cited to back that up compares Google only to Apple maps and almost entirely focuses on building shapes which add little useful information to the map. Proper street geometry seems more important to begin with.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#325

Post by spapas82 »

linsomniac wrote: post #94
spapas82 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally recommend hosting your own tile-server using open street map if you have the resources . Creating your own tile-server is not as difficult as it may sound however it is really resource intensive, especially if you want to cover large areas. For a single EU country it shouldn't be that resource intensive. I have set it up on a Centos 7 server using more or less the instructions from here https://switch2osm.o…

Tile generation wasn't THAT bad. We only cover Colorado and Wyoming, and generating the tiles for those at the zoom levels 5-18 takes around 7 hours to pre-render (using "render_list_geo.pl"). The end result is around 25GB of rendered meta-tiles. Much better than the NAIP aerial imagery, which takes around 3TB for the source data, 280GB for the resulting tiles, and around a full day to generate.

Yes it wasn't bad for a single area (we cover only Greece and it was quick and easy for such a small country). However I couldn't imagine of the resources needed to cover the whole world!

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#326

Post by geggam »

jhall1468 wrote: post #309
foobarbazetc wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one business that can absorb a 20x increase in a component cost.

Name one billion dollar business that is a success today when 80% of its product is an API call to an externally owned service? I get the frustration and pain with this, but let's be honest, if your business was totally reliant on Google Maps it probably wasn't a great business to begin with. Way too many eggs in a basket you don't own.

AWS is an API

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#327

Post by zaarn »

atr2 wrote: post #318
ripdog wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't that be subpixel anti-aliasing? Besides that, there's nothing difficult to believe about that experience with google. And besides THAT, there's a far more trivial method of 'forging' an email - using the devtools to modify the DOM. No need to bust out photoshop at all. Your accusation makes no sense and is based on almost nothing.

No, it's not subpixel anti-aliasing. It's a completely different font. It looks like Roboto to me, while the rest of the email is written using Helvetica. DOM manipulation, of course. But not everybody knows about it. So most people default to Photoshop, which is what these people did. This email is FORGED, and I'd like to know why.

If the email was forged I would expect more occurences than a single letter. This may simply be an artifact of either compression or the font renderer.

There is also a lack of google employees in this thread coming forward to confirm it's a fake.

In the screenshot you can clearly see they blanked out the email, subtle changes in the image may have resulted from this blanking process (for example if resolution has been changed, which I suspect is the case)

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#328

Post by truthwhisperer »

What i don't fully understand is the rationale behind. Google Maps is a good datasource to be 'included' onto a website so you can track customers, preferences and adapt your ads based on those preferences.

So, what we could learn is either: 1) Google has enough data-entry points (based on Javascript hosting, font hosting, (still free) analytics), android etc

or 2) Data gathered from ip/device is not worth considering the costs of running/hosting the maps/infra. Result of EU privacy guidelines?!

or

3) They think their solution is superior in the market

--

All possible answers imply that the next bunch of services which have the same sort of properties will also become paid in my opinion, such as analytics.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#330

Post by cbolton »

stevefan1999 wrote: post #297
ericd wrote: post #7

"Sudden change of policy by Google, which is directed specifically at startups (as smaller web sites should largely remain below even the new lower thresholds), is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor. In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick. For ex…

Remember when Google once said “Don’t be evil” as their motto? Well what Google did at this instance and on nowadays is evil. But on the other hand, I think it is necessary, because at the end of the day Google is still a company that needs to make money and most importantly compete with each other, I’m really disappointed at Google to abuse their trust to hurt others.

Well what Google did at this instance and on nowadays is evil

What do you mean it's evil? People call Google evil for so many things that are hardly evil at all, that the word has lost its meaning in the context of Google. For example I honestly cannot tell if you're calling them evil for increasing Maps pricing (thereby hurting maps-consuming startups) or for previously asking a low price (thereby hurting startups that offer maps).

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