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Farewell, Google Maps

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#501

Post by coderesearch »

spapas82 wrote: post #448
linsomniac wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are looking at moving to Vector tiles after the deployment of openstreetmap raster tiles is completed. We need to look at the performance closely though because on some devices it was slower with Vector tiles. I think we still want to go that direction we just have to quantify some of the performance.

The difference between raster tiles and vector tiles is that in raster tiles the rendering (conversion to actual images) is done on your server (either when each tile is loaded for the first time or you may initialize a bunch of zoom levels for your area yourself; this may take hours to days depending on your area size) while for vector tiles you just send the descriptions/shapes and the inages are created on the cli…

which tileserver are you using?

would it be possible to learn more about your setup?

Thanks!

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#502

Post by nova22033 »

google_censors wrote: post #236
kirchhoff wrote: post #45

It's as much as a 28x increase in price. For Street View imagery, the cost has gone from $0.5 per 1000 views to $14 / 1000. Unlike with maps, Street View lacks a real alternative. I'm seeing my own costs, for a site which I run on my own, rise from $1,500 / month to around $30,000 / month. Their rationale is essentially that they did not want commercial users abusing their free tier. Before this change, they had been…

Please contact the US Department of Justice and let them know about how the price increase is affecting you in regards to Street View. They seemed to buy into my reasoning that Google has effectively made sure that they won't have any Street View competition by artificially keeping prices low for years. The more people that complain, the sooner the DOJ will probably take action. For European users I recommend complai…

>They seemed to buy into my reasoning

We're going to need a bit more detail from an account that clearly has an agenda.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#503

Post by unreal37 »

hoffs wrote: post #384
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…

If you are relying on other services that heavily, it sounds like you didn't have such a great business to start with

Google was subsidizing their startup. Makes sense that they have to pay at least something.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#504

Post by fauigerzigerk »

ryanmercer wrote: post #479
bad_user wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogies make no sense. We’re talking of Google Maps the platform and its B2B offering whereas Netflix, cable and phone companies are services for consumers with fixed and reasonable consumer-level monthly subscriptions. If you haven’t built an app on top of Google Maps, then you pretty much have no idea how much it costs and have zero valuable input you can give. Also, this isn’t the first time Google is doing…

>Also, this isn’t the first time Google is doing this bait and switch. It isn't a bait and switch. It's introductory pricing. They attracted developers and businesses to a product people essentially weren't using, they let people work with it at or near a loss and now that they have a customer base they are trying to make it profitable. Yes, they'll lose some of their users that want a free ride. They'll also retain…

You seem to have read an entirely different story. The customer Google is losing here is clearly willing to pay, not expecting a free ride.

And there is absolutely no similarity between your MailChimp example and what Google has done in this case. The customer didn't complain about costs rising as the number of users starts to exceed an existing threshold.

That said, I wouldn't be so quick to call for the regulator. All businesses have a responsibility to select suppliers carefully and manage their dependency on any one of them. It appears to me that the value of contracts has been forgotten.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#505

Post by anarazel »

Retra wrote: post #174
komali2 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warning: completely unrelated to thread topic. Poor grandparent got nuked in the votes, but I actually think this is an interesting discussion. It ties to my thoughts about politeness and behavior on the internet, which ties to my thoughts about the same IRL. Dale Carnegie, "How to Win Friends" type stuff. Is it effective to "hedge" your arguments/posts/words with a "now I might be wrong" / "you may know more about t…

A lawyer wouldn't have to hedge and say "IANAL." Why would we expect Torvalds to hedge? He's the expert in change of his project. Etc..

Sure, but a lawyer / Torvalds / any SME might want to hedge that their opinion is strong or not.

There's a pretty darn big difference between "my gut feeling is that this approach is too complicated, but I've not analyzed the problem sufficiently to know whether my gut is correct" and "there's no way this is the right architecture, it'll have harmful impact, and there's lots of better ways to do it".

It's imo especially important to do so from positions of authority where others might be less critical in accepting ones statements as truth.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#506

Post by dom96 »

lucb1e wrote: post #165
dom96 wrote: post #60

Google really needs to stop treating their customers and users so badly. Slightly offtopic: I have been trying to get Google to fix the location of my flat on Maps for years now. I have reported it multiple times to them and it is still unfixed. Does anyone know a more direct way I can get in touch with them?

Try openstreetmap.org, there user contributions are always welcome :)

Yes, I already made modifications on it. As far as I can tell openstreetmap is the only map that successfully finds the location of my address.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#507

Post by Bedon292 »

coderesearch wrote: post #431
linsomniac wrote: post #65

I'm just finishing spinning up OpenStreetMap servers in EC2 as one of the last stages of our testing, and they look great. We almost went with Mapbox, which is probably a pretty good alternative. But as part of that move I decided to try OSM tiles and I had them up and running in an afternoon via a docker image, created an Ansible role for deploying virtual machines that evening, and had tiles for our region built th…

Thank you very much, may I ask two questions: * what is the workflow to update the OSM data? * what is your recommendation for a good geocoder?

Updating is easy, the tooling built around OSM takes care of all of it.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim is an OK geocoder, definitely worth trying out at least. Though the pay services will definitely be better.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#508

Post by spapas82 »

coderesearch wrote: post #501
spapas82 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between raster tiles and vector tiles is that in raster tiles the rendering (conversion to actual images) is done on your server (either when each tile is loaded for the first time or you may initialize a bunch of zoom levels for your area yourself; this may take hours to days depending on your area size) while for vector tiles you just send the descriptions/shapes and the inages are created on the cli…

which tileserver are you using? would it be possible to learn more about your setup? Thanks!

I am using more or less the instructions from switch2osm https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-18-04... however for a Centos 7 server (we use Centos in my organization).

This results in having a tile server that generates & serves raster tiles using:

* carto to generate a proper stylesheet

* mapnik to create the tiles

* apache with the mod_tile module to serve the tiles

* renderd to be used as a bridge between apache/mod_tile and mapnik

* Postgres/PostGIS as a database to host the data

The actual data is an OpenStreetMap pbf file downloaded from http://download.geofabrik.de/ which is inserted to the database through osm2pgsql.

The above are used for the raster tile server only.

In addition to this, I am using geoserver (http://geoserver.org/) which is a Java web app (runs in tomcat) that is used to view/edit and (mainly) serve geospatial data. What I usually do is that when I need to display a new shape (shp) file I use shp2pgsql to insert it to a table in my PostGIS database (using something like this shp2pgsql -s SRID SHAPEFILE.shp SCHEMA.TABLE | psql -h HOST -d DATABASE -U USER) also another good tool is ogr2ogr which can convert between various formats (it also supports kml, for example ogr2ogr -f "PGDump" koko.sql test.kml).

After the shp file is inserted to the database, I can create a datasource for this dataset from GeoServer and publish this dataset to the web (i.e the dataset will have a URL of the form http://1.2.3.4:8080/geoserver/Dataset/wms); it can then be consumed by client applications (in javascipt) using leaflet or openlayers. Notice that GeoServer can easily publish various file formats for example an SHP directly (you don't need to insert it to the PostGIS; this is something I do for better control of my datasources).

PostGIS is the component that supports the vector tiles (http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/extensions/vectorti...) so I want to integrate it the OpenStreetMap data that is hosted in my PostGIS (which is used for the raster tiles); I haven't found the time yet though.

I think it's a great setup and it works great for the needs of the organization I work for; actually, I like it so much that I want (for a long time) to write a rather comprehensive tutorial on how to set ip up along with some notes on how to do various PostGIS things but I don't know when (and if) I'll find the time for something so large :/

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#509

Post by dewey »

auslander wrote: post #269
hedora wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cooking meth if you have a valid driver's license is actually legal, I am a lawyer this is legal advice Saying things like that could get you disbarred.

Possibly not. HN sits behind Cloudflare. Your SSL connection terminates at Cloudflare to plaintext, and new SSL connection to HN is created. Your login and password, IP and User-Agent and other bits, are in cleartext to Cloudflare. Much less likely if you have VPN, did not give email and made random login/password. OPSec.

What are you trying to say? Cloudflare doesn't give you any more privacy.

In the highly hypothetical case that someone would actually investigate this they'd get this IP from HN's host or Cloudflare, then get their identity and then go forward with removing him from the bar association if found guilty.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#510

Post by amorousf00p »

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…

Why you cannot trust this model 101: because it's practitioners understand the value of the labor/product, capitalize on the OSS ideal and then push it to the unsuspecting.

I don't know how many bait and switch episodes from google I need to see but by 2008 I was done with them -- for the first time. Ad-nauseam.

If you boycotted and didn't use Google they would wither and die and stop being something to worry about: for immediate google specific free offerings that are sucker bait. Also for self aggrandizing standards/inclusions and buying the overt talent. But whatever. The HN community is full of dupes and buy ins, culture whores and fifth columnists. True belief in OSS died when everyone else took it and got rich.

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