JohnSmith: If the same routes are traveled many times the built up data may well end up being useful.

johny_: I do seem to recall a tracking company using OSM for some of their work. They were probably german but I can't remember any more details.

Your data would be most welcome. Any additions made would be appreciated. This is exactly what OSM is for.

HannesHH: The etrex should be held _horizontal_. This is because it has a patch antenna, which has strong gain directed upwards around the edges. In this orientation, the high gain angles are pointed just above the horizon, which is the best for GPS reception. The same should go for any GPS that has a patch antenna (most bluetooth GPSs for instance).

liftarn: I think 0.8m accuracy is unrealistic for GPS. Your receiver's estimate is often very optimistic.

Pencils!

Pencils win every time.

Any improvements to the changeset browsing are good.

There is also currently no easy obvious way of monitoring new users who don't post diary entries. These users can spam from their user pages without being noticed. There is also no easy way of flagging such a user as spam.

spam

What about mercurial?

spam

I only add urban footways and cycleways when they actually go somewhere useful, like a footway cut-through between roads which could potentially save a pedestrian user hundreds of meters on their journey.

If you map the sidewalk next to a road, the routing will just not work. It won't know that you can cross the road at any point. As a result it will send you on some strange detour to a node that happens to be connected across a road just to get to the other side. And if the footway isn't well connected, you may find some segments totally unroutable.

And it almost always looks a mess in the rendering.

So I would say no.

Oh.

You should probably read osm.wiki/Wikipedia#Importing_geodata_from_Wikipedia

I am convinced that in the long term, allowing Google to hijack OSM's community (and data) would be a serious detriment to future 'life saving' relief operations.

If it weren't for OSM's existence I can bet you anything Google would not be offering any way of getting vector data from it. In fact I seriously doubt MapMaker would exist at all.

It would be naive of anyone to believe that both sides haven't been using the Haiti work as a means to publicize their platform. At least OSM is using it to further their project, whereas Google is using it to recruit serfs. I'm also not sure about the notion of aiming for publicity is an unsavoury trait. Publicity is not an end in itself. Personally, what puts a smile on my face is having people make use of my work. The more people know about it, the more it gets used.

I don't see how a PD fork would prevent parallel work. Google would not supply us with data in return. We would not be able to incorporate their improvements. We would continue mapping in OSM. It would just be a one way gift to Google.

I also think that at this stage, the merging of the two datasets would be more work than either community could achieve.

I personally have no interest in feeding Google's proprietary data store.

Most phones with inbuilt GPSs perform rather poorly because they have tiny GPS antennas.

As it's not primarily a GPS device, the engineers can't really justify the space a good GPS antenna would take up.

Great work!

I know what you mean with 'ugh', but it's actually really satisfying when you can pinpoint any house number in your neighborhood.

Skippern: I more often see it written rtl.

This is really great.

One of those things that had never even crossed my mind.

This is presumably why google want to trick people into doing their work for them with mapmaker.

Welcome! Congratulations!

We all look forward to seeing more of your contributions.