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OpenStreetMap Adds Easier Reporting of Map Problems
An anonymous reader writes "OpenStreetMap recently topped one million registered users. Now they are trying to make the barrier to entry for contributing to the project even lower. A new 'notes' feature, announced on the project's blog, allows anonymous users to submit bug reports which will alert mappers in the area to incorrect or incomplete map information. The feature also allows for commenting on notes, potentially enabling two-way communication between a mapper and a bug reporter if more information is needed."
APK's hosts file is almost 2 million lines (!). That means everytime you do a name lookup, it has to parse and compare 2 million records before it performs a DNS lookup. Of course, APK stores his "top 20 sites -- slashdot, goatse, meatspin, etc -- at the top his hosts file. Fun times when their IP Address changes!
But lets say you follow the link on a slashdot post to a new domain. DNS lookup takes .05 -.10 seconds. Scanning a 2-million line randomly generated hosts file (48 megs in size!) took .5 - 3.5 seconds. And after failing to find the name, it still has to perform real DNS lookup.
If you're using something memory intensive like firefox or using a low-memory device (like many android phones) you probably don't have 48 megs of free ram sitting around to cache your hosts file in the vfs layer so lookups will hist the disk every time and be on the slower side.
And are there really 2 million adware and malware sites out there? How many of those domains were abandoned and shut down long ago? Shady operators often buy up a name, use it for a couple of days, then cancel the purchase. Do you really want your DNS resolution to be 10-100 times slower because asdfs3w5fsdf.com served ads for 3 days back in 2003?
But I'm sure APK will "disprove" the above facts by using bold and CAPITALIZED words.