401–410 of 442 posts
Here's a little story: I run a tiny digital agency. Our clients are all non technical. They all want maps of some form. Until Google did their infamous pricing thing, all was well: we could set up as many nice embedded maps on websites as needed, clients all happy. Then the price / key requirement thing happened. Turns out you have to navigate through the absolute hell hole that is Google Cloud Console or whatever th…
Have you tried Mapkit JS?
I worked at a company that heavily used the maps API in 2018. The 1,400% price hike really was an eye opener. It wasn't just the money involved, which was large, but the fact that it came so suddenly and with so much magnitude. Google's choice to bump these prices made me realize that they could do the same thing with their compute cloud pricing or other APIs, again with little notice. That, in turn, led to the reali…
> Google's choice to bump these prices made me realize that they could do the same thing with their compute cloud pricing or other APIs, again with little notice. That, in turn, led to the realization that we needed to remove our reliance on Google's entire stack, and quickly, or we'd be in a terrible bargaining position later. Yes. You are right. The whole cloud deal is a try to rule out on premise infrastructure an…
These are changes that are happening on a timescale much larger than the average lifespan of a cloud-based product/system. I think people building things in the cloud know it, or at least feel it, and so just don't care about long-term - because in the long term they expect to be rich and/or doing something else. In the meantime, ooh cheap compute, billable as opex - let's build everything on it!
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I think there's a risk here but I'm not sure it goes as far as you suggest. There are still plenty of entities, particularly larger ones, that buy their own metal because at some scales it becomes far cheaper to run in a COLO (at least acc to near monthly articles posted on HN). I'd therefore put the risk that only big vendors will be able to buy hardware as low. That said, as ARM or custom chips gain market share wi…
If those entities would be any risk, they would already be bought. Or they will be long gone due to google/aws/microsoft price dumping. In meanwhile, the openly accessible technology / know-how will be gone or hired by them and there will be no one left. Just look around, how many people you know that are capable of handling on-premise server? What about farm of servers without using any of google/aws/microsoft techn…
I see people frequently quoting the bit about how the Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear war. But that quote was about packet switching. I.e. layer 2/3. Not layer 7. Application layer is, as you nicely demonstrate, very centralized, and was never immune to nuclear war.
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The Apple maps debut in 2012 was when Google maps was removed from the Apple store. Maybe there was a way for Apple maps to do train/subway directions then but the UI was ridiculously bad- giant stations equivalent to Grand Central were hardly visible and highway names were highlighted.
>Google maps was removed from the Apple store They actually removed it entirely? You couldn't install google maps in any way?
Timeline:
Sep 19, 2012 - iOS 6
Dec 13, 2012 - Google Maps launched on App Store
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Every AWS product I've used has gotten cheeper over the years (excluding the free tier / beta free periods)
This is true per "equivalent" unit of generic computing, but some older instance types have gone up in price (presumably to encourage people to migrate their stuff onto newer hardware). This is completely reasonable - but a pain when you have a box that works perfectly and you have to upgrade the software to cope with a new hypervisor driver/layer.
I really want to use Apple Maps full time on my iPhone, just because of how much clutter Google Maps has accumulated on the screen. If anything tells me Google is losing the ability to innovate it's the newly added pill buttons for pre-set searches and branded POIs on the map. I remember when this was added to MapQuest circa 2010, and was the transition from trying to have an excellent mapping experience to just addi…
What issues do you have with Apple maps? I started using it a few months ago and haven't even bothered to install google maps. The only things I have seen lacking is traffic data which I don't really care about and street view which I just use the web version for.
- Their data isn't as good. Easily half the businesses are missing, and most businesses don't have details like hours. Even the road type and quality is unreliable in some areas, leading the routing to prefer bad roads that are technically shorter in length but worse in time in reality.
- No reviews, although it's coming in the future it seems.
- Speed limits aren't indicated.
- Speed traps aren't indicated.
- No cycling directions even in major cities, although it's coming slowly.
- It doesn't display areas of interest, like Google Maps does in yellow. That is essential in a city you're not familiar with, to know where to go to find active streets.
- No street view in most places, although it's also coming slowly. I find it very useful quite often, like finding a street with free parking before navigating there.
- Transit directions use theoretical schedules, not real-time. Google Maps doesn't either, but Citymapper/Transit does.
- It doesn't have data on "busy times".
I wish there was a way to contribute more efficiently to the map. That app is improving slowly but it could be much faster with trusted local mappers (or local employed mappers).
In my opinion Apple Maps could "easily" get a significant lead on Google Maps if they added toll prices, especially if it optimized your route for time vs price. It's a major feature missing from every service now.
I live in London and for commuting around via public transport OR walking I always use Citymapper, which is massively superior than Google Maps for directions. I suspect they are using Googles APIs underneath it all, but their UI is better than Google maps and also their recommended public transport directions are orders of magnitude better than Google Maps. Citymapper will get you between any two locations in London…
Citymapper is so much better in Paris where Google Maps is very poor for public transport. I'm extremely impressed. It can not only tell you which exit you need to take (extremely important in Paris) but also which car to board to be the closest to the proper exit or line change. Multimodal routing is also extremely impressive. They properly implement the city bike sharing system including how much bikes and empty sp…
I really want to use Apple Maps full time on my iPhone, just because of how much clutter Google Maps has accumulated on the screen. If anything tells me Google is losing the ability to innovate it's the newly added pill buttons for pre-set searches and branded POIs on the map. I remember when this was added to MapQuest circa 2010, and was the transition from trying to have an excellent mapping experience to just addi…
>I really want to use Apple Maps full time on my iPhone, just because of how much clutter Google Maps has accumulated on the screen. Apple Maps UI: A big map, with a search bar at the bottom. Simple and nothing but the essentials. Google Maps UI: A page full of ads, a map full of ads and ads masquerading as recommendations. Plus five tab bar buttons at the bottom to not accomplish very much. I've switched to Apple Ma…
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> Google's choice to bump these prices made me realize that they could do the same thing with their compute cloud pricing or other APIs, again with little notice. That, in turn, led to the realization that we needed to remove our reliance on Google's entire stack, and quickly, or we'd be in a terrible bargaining position later. Yes. You are right. The whole cloud deal is a try to rule out on premise infrastructure an…
These two comments make me see SaaS more like paying rent for housing: If we become fully dependent on a service (shelter) and then the provider (landlord) jacks up the price, we may be quickly forced to switch services (homes) or be out of business (homeless).
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Does OSM support address-based resolution of places? AFAIK, Google is getting things like store hours when it crawls websites. Which, of course, it's doing anyway for indexing. As long as it can figure out the address and the store hours from the website, it can put them on the map. In the meantime, OSM generally doesn't even have place addresses in my experience. If I could resolve addresses to places in OSM, then I…
> In the meantime, OSM generally doesn't even have place addresses in my experience. As @matkoniecz pointed out, OSM is quite capable of having place addresses mapped to a specific spot. If your experience has been that they are missing, then that is most likely because no one has added them to OSM for the area's in which you have looked. But the good part about OSM is that anyone, including you, can add those detail…