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Farewell, Google Maps

inderapotheke.de

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#401

Post by jadavies »

imhoguy wrote: post #316

OpenStreetMap example looks superior but I think it didn't get enough research for this article. Anyone can use Leaflet together with OpenStreetMap for free* for heavy commercial purposes[0] if you make your own mirror/render of OSM tiles. Also simple reverse proxy cache[1] can keep public servers usage acceptable. Styles can be also modified at render stage, e.g. [2]. *The cost is only your one time setup work and t…

Agreed, if I needed an alternative to Google Maps then OpenStreetMap would be my first stop even if it meant some work setting up my own server. That way you largely insulate yourself from random price hikes like this.

My recent experience in various parts of the UK and one trip to northern Finland is that the OSM is superior to Google maps anyway. And with something like OSMAnd it's trivially easy to use offline.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#402

Post by ddnb »

beerlord wrote: post #370
majewsky wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The worst thing that people can point to that this kind of advertising has caused is fake news on Facebook The worst thing about targeted ads is that we're building an insane surveillance infrastructure that the government is already eager to tap into, and will be even more eager if one of our governments devolves into dictatorship. I'm from East Germany; and while I'm too young to have experienced it myself, the S…

If you're German, you now have a significant minority of your population (invited into your country directly or indirectly by your own politicians) who have set out to defraud, rob, kill, rape or terrorise you. Don't you think some kind of monitoring apparatus is appropriate for that?

Are you talking about the refugees? I was wondering if you have any numbers or sources about them setting out to rob, kill and rape. Here in Belgium you hear about them looking for jobs and learning the language and stuff, never actually met a refugee IRL however. It could be entirely possible that they start robbing and raping after they get home from work ofcourse...

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#403

Post by bjoli »

sanderjd wrote: post #247
emodendroket wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially the Google Reader effect, right? Where killing their offering basically killed the entire medium.

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) and has been down once since I started it 5 years ago (power outage).

Reader was to me the absolute best example of the good old web. Since then it seems like the web became insane with the idea of reinventing UI, which was then forced down our throats for both web and desktop, ruining two paradigms that worked just fine.

I am old,I know.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#404

Post by BruceBlacklaws »

Haha - this is actually on my curriculum vitae...

"Get Country Data (GCD) A microservice that returns a country's geographical location information.

I developed Get Country Data because I wanted to reduce the amount of costly calls my apps were making to the Google Geocoding/Places API and I wanted to know additional information like currency names, currency acronyms, currency symbols (HTML entities), international telephone calling codes.

The data came out of multiple other projects I was working on. The data is not read from any external source or a local database but rather it's kept in-memory. The code base contains 42 472 lines of code.

Get Country Data is running in Google App Engine on PHP 5.5."

Would someone like to assist me in growing this?

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#405

Post by lagadu »

paganel wrote: post #321
jayd16 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 Ora…

We pay a lot more than that for MSDN licenses (which includes the OS if it's only used for development).

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#406

Post by gregknicholson »

spapas82 wrote: post #83
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…

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…

Would it be possible to put Free map tiles in something like DAT or IPFS, to share the load? Kind of like Peertube, but for maps.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#408

Post by ryanmercer »

wwweston wrote: post #16
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…

While I've experienced the frustration of having a formerly free service develop paid tiers (and policies that put me in those tiers), of all the changes a software service can make, this is the one that frustrates me the least, or at any rate less than: * shutting down the service entirely because the user base never grew into customers who actually valued the service * changing your terms of service to forbid an ac…

>A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service.

See this is the important thing. Sustainable. People and companies use these free services that take quite a bit of work to maintain and then when the company decides it needs to stop hemorrhaging money they start charging, often a fairly modest fee, and people lose their damn minds "ermagerd, you're evil, I need this, you can't expect me to pay!". The simple fact that adding a price, or increasing the price, creates such an outrage is indicative, more oft than not, that it is a fair move because the service or good has obvious value to the user.

People lost their damn minds when Netflix increased prices a year or two ago and I'm like "erm, I get way more value out of this than cable and it's a tenth the price, shut up".

>When it comes to Google, I'm more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim.

I've been a Project Fi user for 2 and a half years now. This has been my worry every, single, day. Especially since they still owe me like 800$ in statement credits ha.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#409

Post by chiefalchemist »

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…

Re: "...is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor..."

I was under the impression the trust for Google evaporated a long time ago. Sure, alternatives can be few at times. But anyone committed to and in bed with Google has to be sleeping with one eye open.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#410

Post by beagle3 »

hueving wrote: post #279
ajross wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If players with the resources of Apple and Microsoft are lagging here, it's not because Google "made it hard", it's because it's a hard problem. Yet they are competing, and that's a good thing. Google is just better. And you want it for free. And thus we get back to the cry-me-a-river bit.

Companies with deep pockets trying and failing to gain a meaningful share in a market is more proof of a monopoly or other anti-competitive behavior, not less.

They are failing to provide comparable service, and thus failing to get meaningful share. I heard Apple maps is recently ok, but a couple of years ago when I tried it, it was still bad. Google has about 10 times more info than Apple or bing per building I look up (though, surprisingly, OSM is 90% of the way there for me).
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