Yeah, I'm a bit late to comment, but haven't found any mention in the threads. There are existing adblockers for iOS that work fine, and they work not just for browsing, but for other apps as well, pretty useful!
Not true, not "just websites" were impacted. I work for a non-US national meteorological center. Those recent hacks meant for us that important satellite data that was usually provided by the NOAA suddenly stopped being accessible, having real impacts on weather forecasting quality. It took a few days to find alternatives. We learned and are in the process of making certain that such a situation does not happen once again. In other words, for some major 'foreign' weather forecasting operations, the impacts were real and important, not overblown as you state.
Unrelated, Slashdot's commenting system sucks in mobile devices... We can't quote or even see the original comments while replying... And the comment box doesn't resize while replying, we can't even review our own replies! Lots of room for improvement...
Most important: NewsBlur is open source. I'm glad I paid the 24$, but if anything goes wrong with their business model, I don't lose anything, I can run it myself: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
"The "sweet spot" for Drupal is larger sites rather than smaller ones. "I think when people think big websites, they usually think Drupal, and when they think small blogs or limited small websites in complexity then they think WordPress," Buytaert said.
"At Acquia we never compete with WordPress. We don't see them ever. I'm sure the smaller Drupal shops run into them, but in the enterprise we never run into WordPress."
"I think with small sites I'm not willing to give up on them but I think we just need to say we're more about big sites and less about small sites, but then the small sites are still very useful to get people into the community," Buytaert said."
I would have liked to know that before... I moved from Slashcode to Drupal years ago on the advice of a few. While I can appreciate how Drupal is flexible and powerful, now I understand that what I really needed, as a non-expert and for my small website, was just WordPress. But too late, won't do another painful migration anytime soon...
What annoys me most with Drupal: no straightforward way to update major versions (e.g. from 6.x to 7.x), especially since a lot of user-contributed modules doesn't exist in the new version or require a lot of work to do so. The admin interface is pretty bad. The user community is much much smaller than WordPress (thinking of mature/maintained user-contributed modules here). Etc.
Anyone found out how to battle monsters? Is this just part of the joke or is there a way to actually do it?:-)
The official Google Lat Long blog: "Get detailed directions to avoid dangerous paths, and battle your way through a world of powerful monsters and mystic treasures."
From the article: "To enable all that, Google introduced a new standard in 2011 called GTFS-realtime. It builds on GTFS, but is a different animal, since it includes new feed types for trip updates, service alerts, and vehicle positions, as well as provisions for constantly refreshing this data throughout the day."
So the article does state that it's also for vehicle positions. I haven't checked if the article is right or not though.
The only thing I'd add to your entry, is asking our fellow canadians to tell their friends, family, everyone in fact, to send such an email by spreading the word on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, or any other means you have. Hey, we're in a connected world now, let's show them that we're able to use those connections for a meaning!
Siri doesn't do translations, it's more of an advanced voice recognition tool. Am I wrong? This would mean that at the moment, Apple's Siri and Google Translation would have two different strengths; Siri: usable natural language voice recognition (at least that's how they sell it) and Google Tranlation, well, multi-language translations.
Two truly open initiatives offering back the crowdsourced data to everyone (it doesn't seem to be the case with OpenSignalMaps): OpenCellID.org and openBmap.org.
I invite friends, and my friends know my name. I don't see the problem at all.
Actually, when I tried Game Center some time ago, the fact that I did not know who was "Weird Username Here" who accepted my invitation was kind of awkward. As much as usernames are cool, I also want to know which username is associated to which friend.
Okay, that's a bit off-topic, but not that much when we discuss virtual globes and the likes. Here's a dismissed submission last week that I think worthy of sharing: "It's a dream come true. After MapQuest and Yahoo actively supporting the Wikipedia-like map initiative OpenStreetMap.org. Microsoft announced that they hired OpenStreetMap's founder Steve Coast for their Bing Maps team. But there's more, they committed providing orthorectified aerial imagery and more to the project. From the official announcement: "Continuously innovating and improving our map data is a top priority and a massive undertaking at Bing. That's why we're excited to announce a new initiative to work with the OpenStreetMap project, a community of more than 320,000 people who have built high quality maps for every country on earth. Microsoft is providing access to our Bing Aerial Imagery for use in the OpenStreetMap project, and we have hired industry veteran Steve Coast to lead this effort. [...] As a first step in this engagement, we plan to enable access to Bing's global orthorectified aerial imagery, as a backdrop of OSM editors. Also, Microsoft is working on new tools to better enable contributions to OSM." Microsoft already added the OpenStreetMap layer to Bing Maps last August."
Clearly, this means to me that open data has won that round and that Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ are in deeper trouble today than a few months ago.
Now to go back to Google, at the moment, but it could change anytime, they're going on a different road away from OpenStreetMap with their Google Map Maker.
There are plenty of commercial uses of OSM already, and some are making quite enough money out of it. One that I personally use is offmaps.com, but that's obviously barely the tip of the iceberg.
But the question is whether OSM can make money out of it or not. Considering CloudMade are paying 40 employees, I guess they *do* can make money out of it, by "providing APIs for web sites, applications, and devices to use the rendered map data." (source is Wikipedia, probably the CloudMade website would provide more details.)
OSM is an example of success: open geospatial data and business profit.
I agree. In addition to OpenStreetMap and Geonames, a few other ones poped up in the geospatial community. OpenAddresses.org - with already 11+ addresses stored while it was launched less than a month ago, OpenAerialMap.org - which "rebooted" late last year, and OpenTopography.org too. There's other similar projects out there - the point being: there are several good starting points.
The summary and the freeciv.net main page (I'm sure it's somewhere else but that's my point) doesn't mention this: it's based on freeciv.org.
(also strange; the freeciv.org site only mention freeciv.net in their 'community news', not 'project news', so it really seems "distinct projects", they're not officially promoting the other option, yet?)
Updating a Drupal site within the same major revision (ie, 6.x) is extremely easy, thanks to the auto-update features you mention.
Wrong - the auto-update feature is new to 7.x, so actual sites running 6.x (or earlier) doesn't benefit from it. Also, the new feature will only install and update modules and themes, not 'core', so I'm guessing updating core from 7.0 to 7.1 is probably going to require about as many manipulation steps as you need to go from 6.14 to 6.15. I don't have a lot of experience, but I would not say it's "extremely easy": the stable 6.x version requires you to do a lot of file and configuration manipulation just to go from 6.14 to 6.15 (if you follow all the recommended steps, which I did for my test site recently). It's not hard, it's just not automated.
You are right that the most difficult upgrade path is for major revisions, e.g. 5.x to 6.x, but I personally have no experience with this (yet!).
I find strange that the article talks about the upgrade path, but doesn't mention that Drupal 7 includes a modules and themes auto-update feature: "Update Manager: Building on Drupal 6's Update module, which keeps site administrators informed when new module and theme releases are available, the new Update Manager module can also install and upgrade modules and themes."
Quantum GIS might be intereting to you: qgis.org and so may gvSIG. If you need raw power, look at GRASS GIS (the interface isn't up to par if you ask me and you can access many GRASS features directly from QGIS). (if you need a spatial database, there's nothing better than PostGIS)
The OSGeo.org (the open source geospatial foundation) is a great resource in that regards. Depending on your needs (geospatial is vast, see my sig), you may "need" ArcGIS from ESRI - it's commercial, it's expensive and it crashes regularly, but it does things no other GIS can easily do.
First, a quick reaction to your post. Radarsat-1 and 2 data, in regards to DEMs, is far from being comparable. The SRTM mission was dual-antenna interferometry, with Radarsat (or Envisat), you must use two images at different times. DEMs from Radarsat can be good and better than SRTM, but it's pretty expensive and there are alternatives (in Canada: CDED1 data is free and in many cases much more reliable than Radarsat data).
If you ever want to use SRTM-DEM data, check the CSI-CGIAR version 4 version. It's the best out there, it's a *major* improvement over the original and previous versions. If you're in hydrography, look at HydroSHEDS SRTM-DEM data.
This year, the advent of the ASTER-GDEM (global DEM) diminished the interest of SRTM-DEM. ASTER-GDEM is still "research-grade", but offers higher spatial resolution, and most important, cover much more land than SRTM (northerm Canada and URSS).
On top of my mind, don't forget SRTM-DEM is available at a higher spatial resolution over the USA than elsewhere (1 arc-second vs 3). The 1-arc-second for the whole world is suppose to become available some time in the future, but that has not happened yet. Also, the X-band (the actual SRTM-DEM comes from the C-band data IIRC) is in the hands of the Germans, but to my knowledge, no public DEMs has come out of it yet (even after all those years). Still relying on my memory (I can be mistaken, see next paragraph), the TerraSAR-X in orbit should be able to give us an even better near global DEM than what's available at the moment.
Sorry for the lack of links. I'm still in my holiday break and you can simply google your way in. Or search SRTM on the site in my sig! have fun -
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm a bit late to comment, but haven't found any mention in the threads. There are existing adblockers for iOS that work fine, and they work not just for browsing, but for other apps as well, pretty useful!
Not true, not "just websites" were impacted. I work for a non-US national meteorological center. Those recent hacks meant for us that important satellite data that was usually provided by the NOAA suddenly stopped being accessible, having real impacts on weather forecasting quality. It took a few days to find alternatives. We learned and are in the process of making certain that such a situation does not happen once again. In other words, for some major 'foreign' weather forecasting operations, the impacts were real and important, not overblown as you state.
Unrelated, Slashdot's commenting system sucks in mobile devices... We can't quote or even see the original comments while replying... And the comment box doesn't resize while replying, we can't even review our own replies! Lots of room for improvement...
Most important: NewsBlur is open source. I'm glad I paid the 24$, but if anything goes wrong with their business model, I don't lose anything, I can run it myself: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
+1 .. NewsBlur works greatly for me too. And it's open source so at least I'm not worried about perenity.
What Dries say in this article:
"The "sweet spot" for Drupal is larger sites rather than smaller ones. "I think when people think big websites, they usually think Drupal, and when they think small blogs or limited small websites in complexity then they think WordPress," Buytaert said.
"At Acquia we never compete with WordPress. We don't see them ever. I'm sure the smaller Drupal shops run into them, but in the enterprise we never run into WordPress."
"I think with small sites I'm not willing to give up on them but I think we just need to say we're more about big sites and less about small sites, but then the small sites are still very useful to get people into the community," Buytaert said."
I would have liked to know that before... I moved from Slashcode to Drupal years ago on the advice of a few. While I can appreciate how Drupal is flexible and powerful, now I understand that what I really needed, as a non-expert and for my small website, was just WordPress. But too late, won't do another painful migration anytime soon...
What annoys me most with Drupal: no straightforward way to update major versions (e.g. from 6.x to 7.x), especially since a lot of user-contributed modules doesn't exist in the new version or require a lot of work to do so. The admin interface is pretty bad. The user community is much much smaller than WordPress (thinking of mature/maintained user-contributed modules here). Etc.
Actually, such imagery should go to OpenAerialMap.org, not OpenStreetMap (which is for vector data).
Also, this story has not mentioned yet (afaict) the official announcement: http://google-latlong.blogspot.ca/2012/04/balloon-and-kite-imagery-in-google.html
Anyone found out how to battle monsters? Is this just part of the joke or is there a way to actually do it? :-)
The official Google Lat Long blog: "Get detailed directions to avoid dangerous paths, and battle your way through a world of powerful monsters and mystic treasures."
Thanks! I've been looking for this for a while! See http://slashgeo.org/2011/06/07/Whats-best-iOS-App-contributing-OpenStreetMap
From the article: "To enable all that, Google introduced a new standard in 2011 called GTFS-realtime. It builds on GTFS, but is a different animal, since it includes new feed types for trip updates, service alerts, and vehicle positions, as well as provisions for constantly refreshing this data throughout the day."
So the article does state that it's also for vehicle positions. I haven't checked if the article is right or not though.
The only thing I'd add to your entry, is asking our fellow canadians to tell their friends, family, everyone in fact, to send such an email by spreading the word on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, or any other means you have. Hey, we're in a connected world now, let's show them that we're able to use those connections for a meaning!
Siri doesn't do translations, it's more of an advanced voice recognition tool. Am I wrong? This would mean that at the moment, Apple's Siri and Google Translation would have two different strengths; Siri: usable natural language voice recognition (at least that's how they sell it) and Google Tranlation, well, multi-language translations.
Two truly open initiatives offering back the crowdsourced data to everyone (it doesn't seem to be the case with OpenSignalMaps): OpenCellID.org and openBmap.org.
Am I the first one to point to the full list of price changes?
UK: £0.59 -> £0.69
Australia: AU$1.19 -> AU$0.99
Japan: 115 -> 85 Yen
Mexico: $10 -> $12
Switzerland: 1.10Fr -> 1.00Fr
Norway: 6.00Kr -> 7.00Kr
And also interesting (at least for some) is Apple will allow business to sell custom apps to other businesses in volume directly.
I tend to believe it is easier for Apple to change their license and allow GPL software in the app store than having VLC move away from the GPL.
Despite the licenses compatibility challenges, you can tell Apple you want the 'VLC Media Player' app back in the app store. Color me utopic, but that's trying to be part of the solution.
I invite friends, and my friends know my name. I don't see the problem at all.
Actually, when I tried Game Center some time ago, the fact that I did not know who was "Weird Username Here" who accepted my invitation was kind of awkward. As much as usernames are cool, I also want to know which username is associated to which friend.
This change sounds like a improvement to me.
Okay, that's a bit off-topic, but not that much when we discuss virtual globes and the likes. Here's a dismissed submission last week that I think worthy of sharing: "It's a dream come true. After MapQuest and Yahoo actively supporting the Wikipedia-like map initiative OpenStreetMap.org. Microsoft announced that they hired OpenStreetMap's founder Steve Coast for their Bing Maps team. But there's more, they committed providing orthorectified aerial imagery and more to the project. From the official announcement: "Continuously innovating and improving our map data is a top priority and a massive undertaking at Bing. That's why we're excited to announce a new initiative to work with the OpenStreetMap project, a community of more than 320,000 people who have built high quality maps for every country on earth. Microsoft is providing access to our Bing Aerial Imagery for use in the OpenStreetMap project, and we have hired industry veteran Steve Coast to lead this effort. [...] As a first step in this engagement, we plan to enable access to Bing's global orthorectified aerial imagery, as a backdrop of OSM editors. Also, Microsoft is working on new tools to better enable contributions to OSM." Microsoft already added the OpenStreetMap layer to Bing Maps last August."
Clearly, this means to me that open data has won that round and that Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ are in deeper trouble today than a few months ago.
Now to go back to Google, at the moment, but it could change anytime, they're going on a different road away from OpenStreetMap with their Google Map Maker.
There are plenty of commercial uses of OSM already, and some are making quite enough money out of it. One that I personally use is offmaps.com, but that's obviously barely the tip of the iceberg.
But the question is whether OSM can make money out of it or not. Considering CloudMade are paying 40 employees, I guess they *do* can make money out of it, by "providing APIs for web sites, applications, and devices to use the rendered map data." (source is Wikipedia, probably the CloudMade website would provide more details.)
OSM is an example of success: open geospatial data and business profit.
I agree. In addition to OpenStreetMap and Geonames, a few other ones poped up in the geospatial community. OpenAddresses.org - with already 11+ addresses stored while it was launched less than a month ago, OpenAerialMap.org - which "rebooted" late last year, and OpenTopography.org too. There's other similar projects out there - the point being: there are several good starting points.
Also interesting is this OpenStreetMap VS Google MapMaker wrap-up - licensing terms being, once again, an information sharing showstopper.
NASA World Wind is the most popular afaik, but there are others, including OSSIMplanet, pTolemy3D, Virtual Ocean and quite a few other ones depending on your requirements.
The summary and the freeciv.net main page (I'm sure it's somewhere else but that's my point) doesn't mention this: it's based on freeciv.org.
(also strange; the freeciv.org site only mention freeciv.net in their 'community news', not 'project news', so it really seems "distinct projects", they're not officially promoting the other option, yet?)
Updating a Drupal site within the same major revision (ie, 6.x) is extremely easy, thanks to the auto-update features you mention.
Wrong - the auto-update feature is new to 7.x, so actual sites running 6.x (or earlier) doesn't benefit from it. Also, the new feature will only install and update modules and themes, not 'core', so I'm guessing updating core from 7.0 to 7.1 is probably going to require about as many manipulation steps as you need to go from 6.14 to 6.15. I don't have a lot of experience, but I would not say it's "extremely easy": the stable 6.x version requires you to do a lot of file and configuration manipulation just to go from 6.14 to 6.15 (if you follow all the recommended steps, which I did for my test site recently). It's not hard, it's just not automated.
You are right that the most difficult upgrade path is for major revisions, e.g. 5.x to 6.x, but I personally have no experience with this (yet!).
I find strange that the article talks about the upgrade path, but doesn't mention that Drupal 7 includes a modules and themes auto-update feature: "Update Manager: Building on Drupal 6's Update module, which keeps site administrators informed when new module and theme releases are available, the new Update Manager module can also install and upgrade modules and themes."
There's also an interesting link not included to TFS named Top Ten Changes That Make Drupal 7 the Best Version.
I have an interest in Drupal, since I'll be moving Slashgeo.org from Slashcode to Drupal in the coming weeks (here's why).
Quantum GIS might be intereting to you: qgis.org and so may gvSIG. If you need raw power, look at GRASS GIS (the interface isn't up to par if you ask me and you can access many GRASS features directly from QGIS). (if you need a spatial database, there's nothing better than PostGIS)
The OSGeo.org (the open source geospatial foundation) is a great resource in that regards. Depending on your needs (geospatial is vast, see my sig), you may "need" ArcGIS from ESRI - it's commercial, it's expensive and it crashes regularly, but it does things no other GIS can easily do.
First, a quick reaction to your post. Radarsat-1 and 2 data, in regards to DEMs, is far from being comparable. The SRTM mission was dual-antenna interferometry, with Radarsat (or Envisat), you must use two images at different times. DEMs from Radarsat can be good and better than SRTM, but it's pretty expensive and there are alternatives (in Canada: CDED1 data is free and in many cases much more reliable than Radarsat data).
If you ever want to use SRTM-DEM data, check the CSI-CGIAR version 4 version. It's the best out there, it's a *major* improvement over the original and previous versions. If you're in hydrography, look at HydroSHEDS SRTM-DEM data.
This year, the advent of the ASTER-GDEM (global DEM) diminished the interest of SRTM-DEM. ASTER-GDEM is still "research-grade", but offers higher spatial resolution, and most important, cover much more land than SRTM (northerm Canada and URSS).
On top of my mind, don't forget SRTM-DEM is available at a higher spatial resolution over the USA than elsewhere (1 arc-second vs 3). The 1-arc-second for the whole world is suppose to become available some time in the future, but that has not happened yet. Also, the X-band (the actual SRTM-DEM comes from the C-band data IIRC) is in the hands of the Germans, but to my knowledge, no public DEMs has come out of it yet (even after all those years). Still relying on my memory (I can be mistaken, see next paragraph), the TerraSAR-X in orbit should be able to give us an even better near global DEM than what's available at the moment.
Sorry for the lack of links. I'm still in my holiday break and you can simply google your way in. Or search SRTM on the site in my sig! have fun -