491–500 of 545 posts
For the client library, it's interesting that they are bullish on leaflet rather than mapbox-gl-js. After playing with their respective demos, I found that the latter seems much smoother and prettier.
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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
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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.
I a billion dollar business the only definition of a successful one?
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Bing Streetside and OpenStreetCam are a thing. They just aren't very good. There's a huge up-front investment for street view images that other companies didn't want to take. Microsoft invested in it, released a product and the product wasn't as good as the market leader. That's not predatory.
Other companies didn’t want to make that huge investment BECAUSE of Google. Google offered the same service for free, which meant they had no recourse for recouping that investment. Now that has changed, and the lack of standing competitors is a direct result of that history.
There are several competitors, the issue at hand is they have an inferior product. If your argument held any water, literally everyone would use TMobile because they are so much cheaper. Reality is, a products quality matters and Google Maps were both more cost effective AND a better product.
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Bing Streetside and OpenStreetCam are a thing. They just aren't very good. There's a huge up-front investment for street view images that other companies didn't want to take. Microsoft invested in it, released a product and the product wasn't as good as the market leader. That's not predatory.
Just because there are competitors in a field does not mean that one company does not hold a monopoly. There were other oil companies in existence when standard oil was broken up.
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> But the other mapping services will very soon adjust their prices also. It makes no sense to be 10x cheaper than Google when 2x cheaper does the same. There's a great deal of competition and that generally results in a race to the bottom. The market leader just removed themselves from the market and the best way to capitalize is stay low and build your userbase. We won't see price changes by any of these companies.…
When you have a service that’s ten times cheaper than the best service, people start to raise eyebrows. They perceive it to be much worse. It isn’t always true, but it’s not uncommon either. I doubt companies are going to race to the bottom.
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Right, just using the plain gmaps tiles in a Leaflet tile layer is against the google TOS. But there is a Leaflet plugin that puts the whole google map component in a TOS-compliant way as a layer into leaflet and keeps both in sync with DOM observers. Sounds pretty weird but works perfectly in production. https://gitlab.com/IvanSanchez/Leaflet.GridLayer.GoogleMutan...
Probably spirit vs letter of the law there. Hopefully performance has improved since the last time I looked (3 years ish)
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How does Mapbox stack up against what we've built? Well, they have way more people working on the problem, so there's going to be more support and more eyes on the problem. I didn't directly compare map tiles, that was a couple other people on my team. We decided to try moving forward with our own OSM-based tiles, so the conclusion I've come to is that it compares favorably. How difficult would it be to build a compe…
Mapbox also offers geocoding and navigation, which are quite a bit more difficult than just setting up a server that can host OSM tiles. Obviously, if all you need are maps, that's fine. But if you need maps with search, which I suspect most people do, rolling your own is tougher (though projects like pelias are pretty good).
Everything google does is to generate data points. Although the rest of the world raises prices to cover costs, increase profits, etc., Google plays with APIs, pricing, availability as a way to generate data to model the behavior of its customers. Simply raising prices to make more money is besides the point. Although the price hike may have been instigated by mundane factors, the way they do it is to understand who…
On a side note, that frog in the water on the stove metaphor is a myth. >According to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a frog that is gradually heated will jump out.[3][4] Indeed, thermoregulation by changing location is a fundamentally necessary survival strategy for frogs and other ectotherms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
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I'm always so confused by this. I switched to Feedly the day Reader went away. It was just as good then and is better now. I subscribe to way more stuff now than I did then. I've never understood how this "killed the entire medium".
I use RSS daily, but I am very much anomaly among my friends. For most people I know RSS just withered and died and got replaced by Facebook or whatever asocial media they are on. I ended up rolling my own server (in scheme using sxml) and writing some minimal clients for it (tui, Emacs and web). It is running on a raspberry pi 2 and is currently using about 5mb of memory (the guile runtime is a large chunk of that)…
I don't understand why you rolled your own server. Feedly works great. If you did it because it's a fun project, that's awesome! But it certainly isn't necessary if your goal is just to subscribe to RSS feeds.