Essentially OSM works on the principle of "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". There are cases of vandalism in OSM, but they don't last very long; the community usually picks them up rapidly and reverts them.
We have one advantage over Wikipedia in that it's easier for us to determine what's right. On Wikipedia, if one contributor says "John Doe's contribution to scholarship was important" and another says "no it wasn't", you get an edit war. On OSM, if one mapper says "this road is called Market Street" and another says "this road is called Market Road", we just go and look at the street sign. The rule is "what's on the ground". (The one place where this breaks down is disputed territorial borders, such as Northern Cyprus and Kashmir, but there are procedures in place for that.)
I'm always bemused why Apple doesn't bake closer iPhone/iPad integration into the Finder itself - the "root UI" of OS X, if you will. Shouldn't syncing between your Mac and your iPhone be a core service these days?
And no, it doesn't solve the Windows problem - except if you're Apple. "See, if you have a PC you have to use this external app. But if you switch to a Mac, look how easy syncing is..."
But then I'm an old grouch who thinks that Apple's once fabled UI consistency has been slowly getting messier from System 7.5 onwards.
First, ask on the OpenStreetMap mailing lists. There's lots of us who've done this kind of stuff before, and we'd be really pleased to help. I collected, scanned and rectified the Ordnance Survey's New Popular Edition - a complete set of England and Wales maps from the '50s, now out of copyright. It's all available in OpenStreetMap as a background layer and loads of people use it for adding rural roads, rivers, placenamese etc. Others are scanning other old Ordnance Survey series right now. Seriously, we love this kind of stuff. (#osm on OFTC can help too.)
Secondly, GDAL is definitely your friend. It's the most amazing set of command-line tools for rectifying and reprojecting data. gdalwarp and gdal_translate are probably the two you'll use most.
But there's not a lot point exporting the data if you don't have the rights to use it.
That's what the top-ranked Data Liberation suggestion is talking about - great that we can get the data out; but now allow us to use it elsewhere without fear of being sued for breach of copyrighted.
Try maps.cloudmade.com - there are numerous others. The point of OpenStreetMap is to make the data free so anyone can build a routing site, custom map or whatever - and not so much, in itself, to be an all-singing all-dancing alternative to Google Maps.
It also uses street data from OpenStreetMap. And, you know, this being Slashdot and all, you'd have thought the "open" stuff might be mildly interesting... maybe a bit more so than "New Site Uses The Same Maps API Seven Million Sites Have Used Before". Still, meh.
The author of TFA is renowned as one of the least clueful Apple apologists there is, even amongst plain ordinary OS X fanbois. He's also a regular sock-puppeteer, although not a very convincing one.
John C Welch rightly reams him out over this latest burst of idiocy. Worth reading for the headline ("Douchebags fondly eviscerated") and such prize comments as "You'd have to be smoking hobo crack (as in 'ass' not 'rock') to say that without snickering".
I run our town website. 1,000 registered users but very, very little spam - over seven years I think I can count the amount of spam from China and Russia on the fingers of one hand.
Two reasons. One: a completely bespoke system, hand-crafted from finest dodgy Perl and inefficient SQL. Put simply, if you're not running phpBB or something well-known like that, they're simply less likely to find you. These guys search for phrases like "powered by punBB" to find targets.
Two: postings in the news, events and ad sections require approval before they go live. Postings in the forum don't - but you can only get access to the forum by clicking through a JavaScript "I agree not to be a dick" page, which sets a cookie (yeah, I know, accessibility yadda yadda). So, again, they're less likely to find it because it doesn't show up on Google. (Oh yeah, not having frickin' Googlebot hammer the server is a plus, too.)
I realise this isn't an option for everyone, but the OP sounds reasonably tech-savvy so should be able to do similar.
is the place that I find most rewarding for Hard Algorithm Questions.
Regular Google is cluttered up with SEO crap and dear old experts-exchange. Clicking on the Groups 'tab' gets past all that to a load of really useful stuff that isn't indexed by regular Google.
Of course, you have to wade through the Usenet kooks, but hey, at least that's more fun than paywall sites.
The summary is way off-beam. The Heritage Lottery Fund is nowhere near stepping in.
I quote: '"We are in serious discussions with the Heritage Lottery Fund. This is prime Lottery territory," said Greenish. "We haven't put in an application yet, but the rules have changed a bit which is helpful."'
Here's how HLF works. You put the application in. This is serious, serious hard work. It's not just "fill in a form and post it to PO Box Lottery". Expect to have a full-time team working on it for three months at least: and even then, really deserving projects have done exactly that and found themselves rejected.
Ok, so your application is good (and, just as important, there aren't any better ones at the time - HLF only has a finite pot of money, and in fact it's getting smaller, as the UK Government takes from it to fund the Olympics). You then get a "Stage One Pass".
This doesn't mean you have the money. This means they'll give you a small grant to help you with the cost of preparing the real application. At this point, they want to know everything: your projected finances, how it's going to benefit public access to an important bit of heritage, how you'll make it sustainable to avoid coming back for another hand-out in three years' time, the works. Remember that the Lottery funds were seriously burned in their early days by the fiasco of the Millennium Dome. They don't give it out lightly.
If you're really good, you might get through this and get the Stage Two Pass. This means you've got the money. (Where, incidentally, "the money" is probably much less than you wanted in the first place, because there's so much competition that the HLF advisors have warned you your only chance is if you lodge a lower bid.)
Oh... one more thing. HLF doesn't generally fund the entirety of a project. They give "match funding". In other words, "we'll pay 50% of the costs if you can find 50% from someone else".
So, with that in mind, allow me to rephrase the summary. "Britain's Lottery Fund has changed some rules to potentially allow these guys to apply for a grant which entitles them to prepare a proper application for a grant which might, if they're very lucky, pay for half the cost of a reduced-cost version of your total project." Sorry, not quite as catchy.
Amstrad produced a very similar machine around the same time, called the NC100. It too had BBC Basic, but added a really very competent text editor/word-processor - Protext, as used on the Amstrad CPC - and superb battery life. I kept using one well into the late 90s until the screen cracked.
Looking at the Dana Wireless machine cited earlier, it's all right... but a deal bigger than a Z88 or NC100. I barely want function keys on my desktop machine, let alone on a lightweight throwing laptop.
Wow - a CPC question on/. The best years of my life were spent hacking on a CPC - I worked as freelance technical editor for Amstrad Action magazine (on which the mighty Future Publishing was founded), coded a DTP system, a load of demos, a route-planner (you know, "I want to get from London to Edinburgh, what's the quickest way?"), and so on.
I used to get a handful of letters to AA's technical Qs+As column ("Techy Forum") every month asking "how do I transfer my files to a PC?". Lots of posters have mentioned the easiest ways to do it, which would probably be the ways I'd have recommended at the time: data transfer bureaux, hooking up a drive to a PC and copying across, etc. etc.
Here's a more involved solution, which is the best long-term one for the serious CPC hacker, and is how I do it. I'm not seriously recommending you do this.
Get a CPC with second drive interface (i.e. anything except an unexpanded 464), and connect a 3.5in drive - any standard Shugart 3.5in drive - to it. Theoretically you need a separate power supply for the 3.5in drive, but you can actually hotwire this to the monitor power supply.
Then use WriteDSK on the CPC to transfer CPC discs into.DSK images on a DOS-formatted 720k disc. (The CPC's FDC can't cope with 1.44Mb discs.) Getting WriteDSK onto your CPC in the first place is left as an exercise for the reader.:)
Put that in a USB floppy drive, copy across to your Mac and run in WinAPE under Parallels - far and away the best CPC emulator there is.
For general CPC information, have a look at CPCwiki. It's a goldmine in itself, but best of all is the scan archive of Amstrad Action, Amstrad Computer User etc. etc.
Or you can use Ming, which is what I do all my Flash development work with - mostly the Flash editor for OpenStreetMap. Ming is actually the underlying library for Salasaga, and if you're at all familiar with scripting languages, you may well prefer direct access to the library rather than working via a GUI.
It's an even older version of Actionscript - AS1 vs mtasc's AS2 or commercial Flash's AS3 - but AS1 and AS2 have the same functionality, and personally (much to the exasperation of my co-devs;) ) I prefer the old-fashioned AS1 grammar. Unlike mtasc, which is just an Actionscript compiler, Ming also provides language wrappers (Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby...) for Flash drawing primitives. Ming works fine on Linux, OS X (which I use), even Windows. There are plenty of examples available, and the devs are really helpful.
Flash is one of many tools available for building Rich Internet Applications. AJAX-type technologies are another, Java a third. In some areas, such as vector drawing and image manipulation, Flash is the best choice: in some areas, it isn't. Hey, isn't it great that the web isn't just controlled by one company?
I'm the main developer of the online map editor for OpenStreetMap. It's written in Flash (a fairly old version, actually - ActionScript 1 compiled with the open-source Ming library). Flash hits just the right spot. Its penetration is very high. It's easy to develop for, because the implementation is almost entirely the same on the three main platforms - a big deal for a volunteer project with limited developers and users ever demanding more and more features. (There is one bug in the Linux player that doesn't show up on OS X or Windows. Other than that, the differences are entirely in Microsoft's brain-dead embed method for WinIE.) It's fast - yes, even on the fairly sluggish OS X player: the Java applet we had in the project's early days was much slower on Apple's JVM. And the results are visually appealing.
To sneerily dismiss Flash with a superior "does not belong on Proper Websites Like The Sort I Make" is like damning HTML because some people use the blink tag.
Upload your trace, click "edit" next to it, and it'll open in Potlatch (the Flash-based editor - disclaimer, I wrote it:) ). Wait for it to appear then click the "Track" button to convert it to vectors that you can tag up, split and otherwise edit. It even runs a simplification algorithm (Douglas-Peucker) over the track so that you don't upload too many intermediate points.
"the one thing you need in a map is accurate data you can rely on"
Fair point, but I wonder if you realise how many mistakes there are in commercial maps. OpenStreetMap is already more useful, right now, for (say) navigating along many of the Sustrans cycle routes in Britain than any printed map is. I have it loaded onto my handheld Garmin GPS and it's saved me from getting lost several times.
OpenStreetMap has also shown that, where there's a critical mass of mappers, it gets updates faster than the commercial maps. There's a lot of UK housing estates that you'll find on OSM but not on Google Maps.
But more usefully, we'll soon be adding a layer out-of-copyright maps that you can trace from. A lot of rural roads are still in the same place they were 50 years ago (the term of UK Crown Copyright)... so you should see the rural coverage come on in leaps and bounds.
Every single technology-aware teacher in Britain is at the BETT show at the moment - the trade fair for the educational IT industry. And the Eee PC is the star of the show. Rebadged it may be under various resellers' names, but it's the same old Linux-based Eee PC, complete with OpenOffice and - more significantly - 802.11g and Firefox, ready to access any number of educational webapps. Of course, it doesn't hurt that in a time of reduced Government spending, the Eee is also ridiculously cheap.
So along comes Becta and says "actually, you should look at free alternatives to Windows/Office". When they said that three years ago, everyone went "uh-huh" and carried on buying what they'd always bought. This time, there's an alternative. This is the first serious challenge to Microsoft in UK schools since the demise of the Acorn Archimedes.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. It's a work-in-progress; if you know the local paths, go in and add them to the map!
But it's worth noting that partial coverage of rural footpaths is a lot more than TomTom ever has. ;)
Essentially OSM works on the principle of "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". There are cases of vandalism in OSM, but they don't last very long; the community usually picks them up rapidly and reverts them.
We have one advantage over Wikipedia in that it's easier for us to determine what's right. On Wikipedia, if one contributor says "John Doe's contribution to scholarship was important" and another says "no it wasn't", you get an edit war. On OSM, if one mapper says "this road is called Market Street" and another says "this road is called Market Road", we just go and look at the street sign. The rule is "what's on the ground". (The one place where this breaks down is disputed territorial borders, such as Northern Cyprus and Kashmir, but there are procedures in place for that.)
I'm always bemused why Apple doesn't bake closer iPhone/iPad integration into the Finder itself - the "root UI" of OS X, if you will. Shouldn't syncing between your Mac and your iPhone be a core service these days? And no, it doesn't solve the Windows problem - except if you're Apple. "See, if you have a PC you have to use this external app. But if you switch to a Mac, look how easy syncing is..." But then I'm an old grouch who thinks that Apple's once fabled UI consistency has been slowly getting messier from System 7.5 onwards.
...with Cowboy Neal as the final option.
First, ask on the OpenStreetMap mailing lists. There's lots of us who've done this kind of stuff before, and we'd be really pleased to help. I collected, scanned and rectified the Ordnance Survey's New Popular Edition - a complete set of England and Wales maps from the '50s, now out of copyright. It's all available in OpenStreetMap as a background layer and loads of people use it for adding rural roads, rivers, placenamese etc. Others are scanning other old Ordnance Survey series right now. Seriously, we love this kind of stuff. (#osm on OFTC can help too.)
Secondly, GDAL is definitely your friend. It's the most amazing set of command-line tools for rectifying and reprojecting data. gdalwarp and gdal_translate are probably the two you'll use most.
But there's not a lot point exporting the data if you don't have the rights to use it.
That's what the top-ranked Data Liberation suggestion is talking about - great that we can get the data out; but now allow us to use it elsewhere without fear of being sued for breach of copyrighted.
Try maps.cloudmade.com - there are numerous others. The point of OpenStreetMap is to make the data free so anyone can build a routing site, custom map or whatever - and not so much, in itself, to be an all-singing all-dancing alternative to Google Maps.
It also uses street data from OpenStreetMap. And, you know, this being Slashdot and all, you'd have thought the "open" stuff might be mildly interesting... maybe a bit more so than "New Site Uses The Same Maps API Seven Million Sites Have Used Before". Still, meh.
John C Welch rightly reams him out over this latest burst of idiocy. Worth reading for the headline ("Douchebags fondly eviscerated") and such prize comments as "You'd have to be smoking hobo crack (as in 'ass' not 'rock') to say that without snickering".
I run our town website. 1,000 registered users but very, very little spam - over seven years I think I can count the amount of spam from China and Russia on the fingers of one hand.
Two reasons. One: a completely bespoke system, hand-crafted from finest dodgy Perl and inefficient SQL. Put simply, if you're not running phpBB or something well-known like that, they're simply less likely to find you. These guys search for phrases like "powered by punBB" to find targets.
Two: postings in the news, events and ad sections require approval before they go live. Postings in the forum don't - but you can only get access to the forum by clicking through a JavaScript "I agree not to be a dick" page, which sets a cookie (yeah, I know, accessibility yadda yadda). So, again, they're less likely to find it because it doesn't show up on Google. (Oh yeah, not having frickin' Googlebot hammer the server is a plus, too.)
I realise this isn't an option for everyone, but the OP sounds reasonably tech-savvy so should be able to do similar.
Regular Google is cluttered up with SEO crap and dear old experts-exchange. Clicking on the Groups 'tab' gets past all that to a load of really useful stuff that isn't indexed by regular Google.
Of course, you have to wade through the Usenet kooks, but hey, at least that's more fun than paywall sites.
The summary is way off-beam. The Heritage Lottery Fund is nowhere near stepping in.
I quote: '"We are in serious discussions with the Heritage Lottery Fund. This is prime Lottery territory," said Greenish. "We haven't put in an application yet, but the rules have changed a bit which is helpful."'
Here's how HLF works. You put the application in. This is serious, serious hard work. It's not just "fill in a form and post it to PO Box Lottery". Expect to have a full-time team working on it for three months at least: and even then, really deserving projects have done exactly that and found themselves rejected.
Ok, so your application is good (and, just as important, there aren't any better ones at the time - HLF only has a finite pot of money, and in fact it's getting smaller, as the UK Government takes from it to fund the Olympics). You then get a "Stage One Pass".
This doesn't mean you have the money. This means they'll give you a small grant to help you with the cost of preparing the real application. At this point, they want to know everything: your projected finances, how it's going to benefit public access to an important bit of heritage, how you'll make it sustainable to avoid coming back for another hand-out in three years' time, the works. Remember that the Lottery funds were seriously burned in their early days by the fiasco of the Millennium Dome. They don't give it out lightly.
If you're really good, you might get through this and get the Stage Two Pass. This means you've got the money. (Where, incidentally, "the money" is probably much less than you wanted in the first place, because there's so much competition that the HLF advisors have warned you your only chance is if you lodge a lower bid.)
Oh... one more thing. HLF doesn't generally fund the entirety of a project. They give "match funding". In other words, "we'll pay 50% of the costs if you can find 50% from someone else".
So, with that in mind, allow me to rephrase the summary. "Britain's Lottery Fund has changed some rules to potentially allow these guys to apply for a grant which entitles them to prepare a proper application for a grant which might, if they're very lucky, pay for half the cost of a reduced-cost version of your total project." Sorry, not quite as catchy.
Beautiful machines.
Amstrad produced a very similar machine around the same time, called the NC100. It too had BBC Basic, but added a really very competent text editor/word-processor - Protext, as used on the Amstrad CPC - and superb battery life. I kept using one well into the late 90s until the screen cracked.
Looking at the Dana Wireless machine cited earlier, it's all right... but a deal bigger than a Z88 or NC100. I barely want function keys on my desktop machine, let alone on a lightweight throwing laptop.
CPC BASIC source isn't ASCII unless you explicitly save it as such (SAVE "FILENAME.BAS",A). Usually it's tokenised.
Tsk, these kids with 2Gb memory... when I were a lad with a 64k Amstrad, every byte counted (contd. page 94)
Wow - a CPC question on /. The best years of my life were spent hacking on a CPC - I worked as freelance technical editor for Amstrad Action magazine (on which the mighty Future Publishing was founded), coded a DTP system, a load of demos, a route-planner (you know, "I want to get from London to Edinburgh, what's the quickest way?"), and so on.
I used to get a handful of letters to AA's technical Qs+As column ("Techy Forum") every month asking "how do I transfer my files to a PC?". Lots of posters have mentioned the easiest ways to do it, which would probably be the ways I'd have recommended at the time: data transfer bureaux, hooking up a drive to a PC and copying across, etc. etc.
Here's a more involved solution, which is the best long-term one for the serious CPC hacker, and is how I do it. I'm not seriously recommending you do this.
Get a CPC with second drive interface (i.e. anything except an unexpanded 464), and connect a 3.5in drive - any standard Shugart 3.5in drive - to it. Theoretically you need a separate power supply for the 3.5in drive, but you can actually hotwire this to the monitor power supply.
Then use WriteDSK on the CPC to transfer CPC discs into .DSK images on a DOS-formatted 720k disc. (The CPC's FDC can't cope with 1.44Mb discs.) Getting WriteDSK onto your CPC in the first place is left as an exercise for the reader. :)
Put that in a USB floppy drive, copy across to your Mac and run in WinAPE under Parallels - far and away the best CPC emulator there is.
For general CPC information, have a look at CPCwiki. It's a goldmine in itself, but best of all is the scan archive of Amstrad Action, Amstrad Computer User etc. etc.
Here is a TCP/IP stack for the CPC. I did very briefly start work on a web browser for it - no, really - but never got very far...
Or you can use Ming, which is what I do all my Flash development work with - mostly the Flash editor for OpenStreetMap. Ming is actually the underlying library for Salasaga, and if you're at all familiar with scripting languages, you may well prefer direct access to the library rather than working via a GUI.
;) ) I prefer the old-fashioned AS1 grammar. Unlike mtasc, which is just an Actionscript compiler, Ming also provides language wrappers (Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby...) for Flash drawing primitives. Ming works fine on Linux, OS X (which I use), even Windows. There are plenty of examples available, and the devs are really helpful.
It's an even older version of Actionscript - AS1 vs mtasc's AS2 or commercial Flash's AS3 - but AS1 and AS2 have the same functionality, and personally (much to the exasperation of my co-devs
Utter rubbish.
Flash is one of many tools available for building Rich Internet Applications. AJAX-type technologies are another, Java a third. In some areas, such as vector drawing and image manipulation, Flash is the best choice: in some areas, it isn't. Hey, isn't it great that the web isn't just controlled by one company?
I'm the main developer of the online map editor for OpenStreetMap. It's written in Flash (a fairly old version, actually - ActionScript 1 compiled with the open-source Ming library). Flash hits just the right spot. Its penetration is very high. It's easy to develop for, because the implementation is almost entirely the same on the three main platforms - a big deal for a volunteer project with limited developers and users ever demanding more and more features. (There is one bug in the Linux player that doesn't show up on OS X or Windows. Other than that, the differences are entirely in Microsoft's brain-dead embed method for WinIE.) It's fast - yes, even on the fairly sluggish OS X player: the Java applet we had in the project's early days was much slower on Apple's JVM. And the results are visually appealing.
To sneerily dismiss Flash with a superior "does not belong on Proper Websites Like The Sort I Make" is like damning HTML because some people use the blink tag.
"Playing graphics games costs CPU and GPU processing power"
Official Microsoft advice: please refrain from playing graphics games on Vista. You may still, however, play text adventures. Honk if you love Zork.
Windows Vista: Designed For Infocom.
Sure, you can import traces directly to the map.
:) ). Wait for it to appear then click the "Track" button to convert it to vectors that you can tag up, split and otherwise edit. It even runs a simplification algorithm (Douglas-Peucker) over the track so that you don't upload too many intermediate points.
Upload your trace, click "edit" next to it, and it'll open in Potlatch (the Flash-based editor - disclaimer, I wrote it
"the one thing you need in a map is accurate data you can rely on"
Fair point, but I wonder if you realise how many mistakes there are in commercial maps. OpenStreetMap is already more useful, right now, for (say) navigating along many of the Sustrans cycle routes in Britain than any printed map is. I have it loaded onto my handheld Garmin GPS and it's saved me from getting lost several times.
OpenStreetMap has also shown that, where there's a critical mass of mappers, it gets updates faster than the commercial maps. There's a lot of UK housing estates that you'll find on OSM but not on Google Maps.
But more usefully, we'll soon be adding a layer out-of-copyright maps that you can trace from. A lot of rural roads are still in the same place they were 50 years ago (the term of UK Crown Copyright)... so you should see the rural coverage come on in leaps and bounds.
Late-breaking news: contracts (think Google Maps' Ts & Cs) can restrict you where statute law doesn't.
* Give us an option to completely eliminate the sidebar without having to go back to "spacial" windows.
Give us an option to go back to spatial windows.The interesting thing is the timing.
Every single technology-aware teacher in Britain is at the BETT show at the moment - the trade fair for the educational IT industry. And the Eee PC is the star of the show. Rebadged it may be under various resellers' names, but it's the same old Linux-based Eee PC, complete with OpenOffice and - more significantly - 802.11g and Firefox, ready to access any number of educational webapps. Of course, it doesn't hurt that in a time of reduced Government spending, the Eee is also ridiculously cheap.
So along comes Becta and says "actually, you should look at free alternatives to Windows/Office". When they said that three years ago, everyone went "uh-huh" and carried on buying what they'd always bought. This time, there's an alternative. This is the first serious challenge to Microsoft in UK schools since the demise of the Acorn Archimedes.