What you want, then, is a Coleco ADAM.
If you booted the ADAM up without a game cartridge, it loaded up its word processor, and you could print to the attached printer.
If you had a casette tape in the machine when it booted- it would run the casette.
And if you had a game cartridge in during boot time, you could play the game.
I guess it's good they're doing charity, but it's just so creepy.
The issue isn't equipment, it's storage and bandwith.
If you collect a small city's worth of data, you'll have quite a lot of images. Maybe only a terabyte, if you're lucky, but probably several terabytes. Now extend that to an entire state/province, or a small country. You'll quickly be racking up terabytes and pedabytes of data.
"No problem, storage is cheap." you might be thinking, but storage gets expensive as you increase the demands of the storage. All of this storage needs to be available immediately, so it can't be stored on near time storage devices, which might make it less expensive. And it must be stored in such a way that makes it redundant in case of hardware failure, so either using disk, or system level data replication.
And now that you've stored the data, you need to serve it to users. Pushing out a small amount of data to a user isn't a problem. 2 cents a gigabyte seems cheap. But if you need to serve a whole country worth of data, with tens or hundreds of thousands of users, you now hit bandwidth issues- bandwith caps, and overage costs. Getting a larger pipe to the user costs more money, and deals that seemed reasonable start to become very expensive very quickly.
You'd quickly start talking about needing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to store the data, and then hundreds of thousands (or more) to serve it out.
Commercial organizations are not going to be inclined to put money towards something when they don't have to, and the burden on users would be incredibly high.
Is it still wrong?
It can take a while for the geocoder to pick up on issues.
Also, if you put a note on your area and link to it, I can take a look.
Addresses are particularly tricky for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you with, but could make your head spin.
You're right that there is a need to make addresses easier to work with, but in 99% of cases, you can just draw the building and tag it with the address and all should be good.
When you say "the result doesn't change"- can you elaborate exactly what you mean?
Addresses are quite difficult to get right (no one gets them right, not even the guys with billions of dollars to spend).
You can get a lot of help with these kinds of issues on the mailing lists, help.osm.org, the IRC channel, or the web forums. And depending on where you are, you may even have a local group of mappers to help you. So you have a community to help you through any editing issues you might encounter.
If you look at OpenStreetMap's maps of North Korea in comparison to Google, you see that the OSM maps are of much higher quality, as well as being Free (unlike Google MapMaker):
http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=mapnik&mt1=googlemap&lon=125.7375&lat=39.03865&zoom=12
Someone should show this video to these elderly folks
> you are doing an AWESOME job.
I don't speak for the project. I'm just a contributor, just like if I were a Wikipedia contributor.
> May be you could suggest the "free-as-in-beer users" of OSM to to add a sponsor link to their search engine.
I don't know what a sponsor link to a search engine is, but the license dictates usage, and everyone is in full compliance with the license.
> For instance, I find fairly difficult to edit maps in open street map, but if there was a good interface to allow the user to report back to OSM that an information is wrong with a descriptive text might help mappers that know how to edit the maps to correct them.
This question has multiple answers, so let me try my best to address them:
1) If you're interested in learning more about OSM, I highly recommend joining the newbies list. It's very low traffic and very high quality.
2) Personally, I think most mapping in OSM isn't that hard (sometimes it is but not usually). Maybe if you explained what you found hard, we could work on that?
3) The suggestion for textual feedback back to OSM is already in the works for the new website, which will hopefully be up later this year. I think that's the bridge between mappers and non-mapping contributors you're asking about.
> it just doesn't contain the terms that (apparently) the developer would like
No.... It's a term that the article of this slashdot blurb doesn't like. We in the project (including me, the person who is being paraphrased) have no issue with anyone making money off the project.
> without any acknowledgement or payment to the origin of the product is just immoral,
Acknowledgement is attribution, and attribution is part of the license. And the license is being followed.
As for payment... there is no obligation for that. Would it be nice? Sure. But it's not required.
> Who is making that accusation?
Probably the same guy whose voting my comment down clarifying things I was quoted on in the original article.
I want to make a few clarifications to the article.
1. This was, as Roblimo points out, a Facebook chat. This wasn't an interview and I didn't know it was going to be the subject of an article. I was having a conversation with a friend, but when friends are reporters... well mea culpa.
2. Bing is not doing evil here. They are in full compliance with the license as far as I know. And they have expressed interest in offering the project help in the future. I stated a fact, which is that nothing concrete has some out yet, but that's not quite the same "they don't give back.". It's my hope that they will do something for the project, but they're not required to.
3. Lots of companies use OpenStreetMap to make money. There's nothing wrong with that. And many of the same individuals who make money off OSM are its biggest supporters in terms of spreading the word, in terms of helping support the OpenStreetMap Foundation, and by going out and mapping their neighborhoods. There's no separation in my mind between these people and other contributors.
4. The license is essentially attribution-sharealike. It's like the GPL. If there's modification of our data, they're required to make it available to others under the same terms as they received it. That's the license, and that's what everyone is following.
I want to make sure this confusion is cleared up, and if there are any other impressions that are wrong based on this article, I want to apologize for them.
- Serge
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.
