Hans F. Nordhaug wrote: > Me: I have just installed the ti...@home client on my server - nice to be > able to contribute some CPU cycles to the OpenStreetMap project. > > Shaun McDonald: um do you know that one machine can deal with the > rendering of the whole world wilst t...@h needs lots of machines and > bandwidth?
Well, that is their view and they are certainly entitled to it. Others see it differently. tiles.openstreetmap.org will cut your IP if you suck too many tiles and there was some discussion in the past as to enforce stricter limits. That is no criticizm of the foundation, they probably have to do that in order to keep their bandwidth under control and of course there is also a commercial startup that would like to sell these services. ti...@home on the other hand has so far never ever cut of a single IP for downloading too many tiles. Also see Freeriks response: ti...@home has provided close-to-realtime map updates since hwow many years? At least March 2007. It's only a rather short time ago that mapnik started showing hourly (and minutely now?) updates. The "wasteful" way to t...@h has also spawned quite some infrastructure development around the main API. There would have been no Read-only mirrors of the OSM data without t...@h. There are also some differences in style creation. Mapnik is centrally driven, while t...@h is much more open to community "enhancements" (sometimes an advantage and sometimes not). So, given the historical reason, I wouldn't say that it's a worthless piece. Yes, it is more effort than a single mapnik instance, but it runs, it is independent from the foundation and any commercial interests and the styles are very much user-driven. Will it hurt if we turn off t...@h at some time in the future? Probably not that much, but it already has had its benefits. spaetz
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ Tilesathome mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tilesathome
