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Microsoft Releases 125 Million Building Footprints In the US To the OpenStreetMap Community (mspoweruser.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSPoweruser: Today, Microsoft announced that it is releasing 124 Million building footprints in the United States to the OpenStreetMap community. Bing Maps team used Microsoft's CNTK Unified Toolkit to apply its Deep Neural Networks and the ResNet34 with RefineNet up-sampling layers to detect building footprints from the Bing imagery. OpenStreetMap currently has 30,567,953 building footprints in the U.S., thanks to editor contributions and various city or county wide imports. Using DNNs and Bing Imagery, Microsoft has extracted 124,885,597 footprints in the United States and making it available for download free of charge.
I had to use Windows 10 this week. I'd say MS is a long way from redeemed.
Of course, a company that size is not a monolith.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Dear Sub-Human Filth,
I'm appealing to all of you stupid idiots to vote Democrat in 2018. That is if you have the basic education enough to read a ballot, anyway. I understand the majority of you racist rednecks can't even read this post, though. But those who can, please pass my message on to the rest of your inbred family.
We Democrats are morally, culturally and intellectually superior to you in every way. I will qualify myself by noting that I have a Liberal Arts degree from a college, which you obviously have never been to, if you even know what one is. I also have a black friend. I have been told by several professors that everything you hold dear is terrible. Therefore you, personally, are also terrible.
I don't know you, but I know that you're racist. I also know that you hate gay people and still get scared during lightning storms.
The religion which you hold closely, greatly believe in, and which brings you comfort--you are wrong because I'm smarter than you and I'm telling you so. It is one of the many reasons why you are stupid and I'm better than you.
You see, us Democrats want a system which helps everyone in the world. Our system is designed around love and kindness to everyone. If you don't agree, I hate you.
It's not too late to change. If you knew your history, which of course you don't, you'll remember a time in America when Indians were dragged away from their homes and forced to assimilate into white society. Well, we want to change that kind of behaviour (sorry for my spelling, as I'm not from your country) by making sure you go to college and have a small apartment in a big, busy coastal city, where you belong. That will help you rid yourselves of your backward, incorrect culture and way of thinking. We'll do everything we can to make sure you agree with us and say all the right things and not be brainwashed against thinking the same way we do.
All of you stupid, backward, redneck, racist, homophobic, uneducated yokels need to realize we're trying to build a classless society where we all get to live in harmony with each other, where we're all equal. If you only understood that you wouldn't be so much worse of a person than I am.
So please vote Democrat. Help me help you, you worthless motherfuckers.
M$ is moving toward SaaS. They're doing it with Office and Windows is next I suspect. Win10 was "free" for a while IMHO because they've loaded the start menu with ads that they're making money off of. Think about that for a second - think about how many Windows installs there are in the world. Now think about Microsoft getting money every time they click on their start menu. Every time is an impression. I mean, I'm guessing that's their model anyway (per impression) but I could very well be wrong.
Aside from the above rant, Win10 (again, just MHO) is no better than Win7. It just has an updated UI and different methods of accessing the same things. It's no more stable, the updates are far less vetted and less stable and the user privacy issues for even using it makes me vomit in my mouth (and I don't even use it). I honestly don't see how the matador-esque marketing strategy has lasted this long to keep people buying their stuff. They definitely have momentum on their side.
I'm really sorry. I don't want to sound like I'm ungrateful for all of the GOOD things Microsoft has done, I am. They've done things I can't fathom to progress technology as a whole. They've got a lot of great, dedicated devs and there's a LOT to be said for keeping a company so successful for so long. And I'm really happy that they're joining the FOSS train - it's great to see them stop treating it like a competitor, because eventually it would have eventually starved them of air. Their SaaS model shift proves that they understand this, and it's a smart move. I grew up loving DOS just as much as I now love Linux. I just progressed past Microsoft products and onto Linux around 1993 when Windows '95 started putting all sorts of unnecessary junk in the root of my hard drive.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
It's a trap.