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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"
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.
No matter where it comes from.
Thanks to Microsoft for this contribution. Hope to see some more out of the USoA (where I am from).
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PS: Now, if you guys could also Fix Win10, would be even better.
I use MacOS, but still have to go back to Win10 from time to time, and get an awful experience each and every time.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!