Hi,
Philip Gillißen wrote:
You're definitely drawing a black picture of TaH. It's really
disappointing to read all these points
I often defend TaH when people talk bad about it. There was a time then
TaH was cutting-edge, where it would deliver new renderings in as little
as 15 minutes whereas the Mapnik server would take 15 days or more. TaH
really raised the bar back then, and without TaH we might still be
stuck in a setting where you'd have to wait for days or weeks to see
your mapping.
So TaH definitely has a place of honour in the history of OSM and nobody
can take that away. But I don't think that it still is very useful today.
All this consideration lead me to one question: Is TaH dead?
It looks like the "at Home" addition is lost and does not create any
advantage.
A new infrastructure for "TaH v2" would be necessary. Is it too radical?
I think you're approaching this from the wrong side. The question
shouldn't be: "We have all these cool kids with 20 cores each eager to
contribute to something, what could they do for us?" - The question
should be: What's a cool thing we could do for OSM which actually
requires so much computing power that it cannot be easily done by a
central rendering instance like tile.osm.org or bing or MapQuest?
It is possible that there are avenues of cartography not yet explored,
for which something like the TaH infrastructure would really be useful.
I'm thinking along the lines of
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TopOSM
- a beautiful map with a very complex rendering process (described on
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TopOSM/Details), so complex indeed
that it cannot currently be rendered "live". However, such maps require
data in addition to what is on OSM, most importantly elevation data.
Elevation data is bulky and probably unsuitable for downloading on the
fly; it could be that certain clients would have elevation data for
certain areas, and then pick up only rendering requests for their
particular area.
But that's just my two cents. TaH does have some advantages over the
centralised rendering, mostly that it has a very permissive styling
which often brings ridicule from others but it is closer to the spirit
of OSM than a centralistic approach. But technologically it really is a
big waste of CPU cycles, and thus it should not be used as a prime
example for distributed computing.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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