I started with the eTrex (vista hcx) and was really happy with it (same comments as my peers here). I also got my hands on a Dakota 20, which thanks to its touchscreen is much nicer to use (especially for naming waypoints !). I now have a GPSmap62 which is bulkyer, but has a slightly better accuracy than the eTrex and Dakota.

So the eTrex is great and cheap, the Dakota is nicer to use, and the GPSmap is more accurate. If you've got plenty of cash, the Oregon brings you the best of both worlds (but smaller battery life: 16h vs 20/26h).

Try http://trac.openstreetmap.org/ instead of the diary.

Strash: http://odbl.de/ and http://ni.kwsn.net/~toby/OSM/license_count.html will give you stats. http://osm.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/map/ will show you the map rendered according to license.

I do not see how some contributors disagreeing with the license change is going to stop the license change. So if there's no victim, how can there be a bully ? "expessing your discontent" maybe; "bullying" not so much. And I think saying "I disagree" until the cut-off date is perfectly ok (even though I personnaly agree with the license change).

On the other hand, I can easily see how anybody who hasn't paid attention to the license discussions and suddenly sees a "agree or your contributions will be deleted" sign can feel bullied (even if that feeling is based on misinformation). So for those contributors's sake I think your post, by reversing the bullied-bullier roles, is doing more harm than good.

It's a little bit depressing to see yet another complain about the process, leading to a decision to decline the new license. You should keep in mind that

* the decision to change the license (and the text of the license) took plenty of time and open discussion, involving any contributor who cared about the issue.
* once that license-change decision was taken, deleting (with backups of course) any data that is still under the old license is the only course of action that makes sense. It is pointless to have one without the other.
* Complaining about the license change, the license text, or the change process should have been done about a year ago, sorry. Now is the time to decide wether the ODbL is acceptable for your past and/or future contributions.
* If you're going to decline the new license, please pretty-please make that decision based on the text of the new license compared to the text of the old license (which you have agreed to when you initially registered).

And by the way, really... The spirit of the ODbL is pretty much the same as the CC-BY-SA. The change was needed essentially because CC-foobar licenses aren't designed for the type of data the OSM hosts; I see it more as a technical change than an ethical one.

So...
1) don't do that work yet, there may still be many users who will accept the odbl.
2) doing a copy-paste of the data just to "solve" the old-license issue is a no-no.
3) doing a delete,recreate_from_scratch is legal, but you're losing history and credit while it is not always necessary.
4) if you're going the delete+recreate route... you might as well wait until the "license sysadmins" (whatever their name is) do the delete for you, at the proper cut-off date.

As for your initial question... JOSM can give you the selected object's history much faster than the website can.

I think we can never compete (and we should compete, for the sake of openness) against the google brand name : we'll never be as well known. Competing on the openness argument is a tough sell, it's just too insubstancial for some people.

But we can definitely compete on technical merit. We should advertise our strong points, like specialized maps for anything and everything, device support (like non-connected satnavs), and blazing-fast applications like marble. We should work on some low-hanging improvements, like better nominatim-type search, world-accessible page showing a trail with events, easyer-to-use "signpost on the map with my busines's info" api, etc. We should clear the misconception that we're "small and irrelevant" by mentioning the number of active contributors and links to well-known actors like mapquest and bing.

...lots of work and I dont even know how to do half of it myself :/ But I'm confident we'll get there bit by bit, and I'm convinced we must get there, because OSM is inherently better than anything google will ever want to provide.

Also, any fork will have the backup of all deleted CC-BY-SA data available "as long as possible". So the old data will still be available, should anybody feel that it is worth the trouble to create a dual-licensed db.

The license implementation plan is here : osm.wiki/Open_Data_License/Implementation_Plan

You might also be interested in
http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/We_Are_Changing_The_License
osm.wiki/Open_Database_License
http://odbl.de/

All those links can be found easily on the wiki. That may not be visible enough, but then again the plans to change the license are nothing particularly new, and you could expect most contributors to either
1) be interested in licensing question and have noticed that there was some license discussions ongoing (Since you clicked "I decline" instead of just following the trend and ensuring your contributions will be kept, I assume the license is important to you).
2) be totaly oblivious of licence issues, or spend all his OSM time in the editor only so that no news of the license change could have reached him.

The mandatory accept/decline dialog is necessary to reach people in category 2. Whatever your thoughts about the license (and the decision to go ahead and implement the change), I think the actual process of changing the licence is done reasonably well and not too pushy. This mandatory accept/decline dialog is a necessary step and is gradual enough, IMHO.

I think the current data format (3 element types, each taggable) is sound : both simple and powerfull. It lets you describe any kind of real-world object. To me, ThePromenader's "object" element sounds like an unnecessary indirection : why have an extra element for tagging when you can tag the other elements directly ? Also, there are plenty of use-cases for tagging a contained element with one value, and the container element with another value.

While the format is good, I agree that it's too easy to misuse it. But that's something that should be fixed in the editor workflow, not the underlying format. Maybe deciding on the tags before drawing the element instead of the other way around, like ThePromenader suggests, is a step in the good direction. But please don't dump things down to the point of inflexibility. For that matter, it is very good that we have different editors avaible, with different philosophies.

@rovastar
the new device has a better (but bulkyer) antenna, and probably some software tuning. In practice, the difference is quite small but it is noticable : for example this one finds the satellite inside my house near the window, while the older one did not. I had the two devices available one day and tested them side by side, the new one reported a slightly better accuracy, and behaved much better when I took sharp turns in a narrow street with high buildings.

I will not remap anything I did before, the difference is not worth it. I did it just once for a particularly tricky street, but that's a rare case. If I can, I do walk (cycle) near the center of the street :) Or At least I try to remember on which side of the road I was walking.

I really do not want to downplay how great having bing imagery available is. I cannot thank Microsoft enough (for once...) for this authorisation. But bing imagery does need to be taken with a grain of salt, and a good GPS device can tell you exactly what seasoning is needed. If you look at osm.wiki/Tag:'source=' tags sometimes you'll see 'bing' and sometimes 'bing adjusted'. That's an important distinction.

disclaimers:
* I have only ever owned garmin GPSes, but I've seen online comparisons of iphone vs droid vs gpsmap, and the difference is big (bigger than between two garmin devices).
* bing hi-res isn't available in the main area I edit, although I used bing for a few other areas.

Perhaps there's a confusion between 'best practice' and 'technical restriction'. There are quite a few cases where "no overlaping polygon" is good advice to mappers, even if it's just for data consistency purposes.

@Rovastar: The difference in accuracy between a phone and a special-purpose GPS is quite big. I even switched recently from a garmin eTrex to a GPSmap62 (I lost the previous device), and the newer model is slightly better still. Nobody claims that GPS traces are perfect, but they're invaluable even if you've got bing imagery in your area, to provide proper alignment for the later.

It's often hard to know which source is most trustworthy. Checking the "source" tag (if present) of various objetcs in the area might give you a hint. If *every object* in the area is missaligned (compared to bing) by the same amount and direction, that's another hint. If you can, place your gps in an easily-recognized open spot for a long while (even better: at a few hours or days' interval) so that you have a trustworthy gps coordinate that can be matched on an aerial photo.

Once you have a source you trust, just change the offset of the bing layer so that it is aligned correctly. And store that information as a point in the map, or on the wiki (not sure what the best practice is).

I have to admit I never tried potlatch2, but when I started with potlatch1 it was a real pain to use, in good part because of the flash technology. I gave JOSM a try and never looked back. Don't be turned off by the number of tools displayed by default in JOSM, it is actually very easy to use, and quite stable. Give it another try even if just for curiosity's sake, and I promise I'll give potlatch2 and meerkartor a proper try too :)

While purists would say "it's just data - wether it should be provided and if/how it should be used are two entirely deifferent things", I feel uneasy about mapping that kind of data. For one it's a case where "observing is disturbing", and for two it requires a highly skilled mapper (most people would not recognize an animal trail even if they followed it for 1km) that is unlikely to be/stay relevant for long (would *you* commit to making that data exhaustive and to keep it up-to-date ?).

Lastly (but I'm veering a bit off-topic here), I often wonder at people doing "micro-mapping". Unless you're in an area that has already been mapped-to-death and really-really couldn't bother about other places, there's still plenty of important-feature mapping to do nearby, at worst using bing imagery, mapdust, or suchlike.

Hum, ça m'étonne que ce ne soit pas abordé plus clairement dans le wiki ("Deux bâtiments adjacents doivent réutiliser les mêmes nœuds." sans indiquer la technique), mais il est tout à fait possible de créer des zones adjacentes (batiments ou autres) sans superposer de noeud ni de segment :

1) Crée les segments (les murs du batiment) sans te soucier des batiments auquels ils appartienent, et sans les tager.
2) Crée une relation pour chaque batiment, rajoutes-y les segments "anonymes" qui constituent le batiment, et tag la relation comme tu aurais tagé le segment fermé.

Tu verra qu'il est souvent nécessaire de faire des segments plus petits, pour pouvoir mettre juste la partie qui t'interesse dans la relation. C'est un peu plus de boulot, mais on prend vite le coup de main et c'est plus "propre" dans la base de données.

Plutôt qu'un tout-ou-rien, ce serais interessant d'avoir une liste de choix "dernière activité il y a 1semaine/1mois/6mois/1an/inifi".

Tu devrais plutôt parler de ça sur le bugtracker. Cela dit je doute que cette amélioration ai une haute priorité, tu aura plus de chances si tu peux faire la modif toi-même et envoyer un patch.

Mit Osmarender kriegt est das gleiche Symbol wie alle andere Schüle, glaube ich.

Bah pourtant, une boite à lettres au beau milieu du desert sans rien autour, dans la Pampa c'est crédible :)

Je cerne mieux ce que tu veux dire, et c'est vrai que poser des POI au bord d'une route est du temps gaché si la route est décalée de 25m, par exemple. Mais je ne vois pas ce danger dans les exemples que tu a cités : si une rue est mal nomée/classée, ça n'empèche pas d'y ajouter des POI. Si on ajoute une rue sans en préciser le type d'accès, ça reste un pas en avant.

Personellement je trouve que position, nom, classification, et accès sont des infos de base, que je tiens à finaliser avant de passer à autrechose. Mais ce n'est que mon avis. Si quelqu'un veut bosser sur ce que je considère être des fioritures, tant que son travail n'est pas gaché par un prérequi manquant ça me va.