wowbagger's Journal: "...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury..."

'Tis a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

That, in a nutshell, seems to be the best description of this story about GPS navigation/trip planning software.

This is a subject near to my heart - I enjoy traveling, and good trip planning software makes working out a two-week driving trip a great deal easier. Years ago, when I first started working with Wine, I felt "Surely, within a few months I will be able to run MapNGo under Wine flawlessly." Well, I can run MapNGo 4.0 (about 4 versions old) under Wine, as long as I don't want to update the construction information (doing so requires MapNGo to use out of process COM to talk to an update fetcher program, and Wine doesn't do OOP COM).

"No matter, the way Linux is growing we will see someone release a similar product soon. Maybe Delorme will port over..." As we can see from the /. story, that hasn't happened yet.

"Well, now that this is on the front page of /., we will see enough people contacting Delorme that they may change their minds." Perhaps, but my reasonable request that people write in my journal if they do so has not been heeded.

I am forced to conclude the highest probability explaination for this is that most people's desire to solve this problem ends at bitching on /..

I guess if you cannot get fake karma for it, it isn't worth it for most people.

Well, I've done my part. For years, I've been doing my part - politely emailing Delorme asking for them to consider porting. I've had one response (from a customer service tech) of "COOL! I like that idea" (of which nothing has come), several responses of "This is the first request we've ever had for this, so go away" (demonstrably untrue after my first request), or a big "cat /dev/null" in most cases.

And if this is the level of desire that a (admittedly non-scientific) cross-section of Linux users have for this, then there is no likelyhood of either a native solution nor of a port by a commercial vendor.

It's truly sad, but I suppose not unexpected.

You've got the right idea!

[Interrobang]

Hi there,

Just read a bunch of your journal entries. I posted something in my journal about "dollar voting," and the secret is, I'm convinced, to tell the uncooperative SOBs about whatever it is they're doing that miffs you.

I also like your Evil Thoughts entry. It made me laugh out loud, almost a Coke|nose>keyboard...sparking is badness...

Click my sig link and check out my journal, if you like.