Enchanted Shadow
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Posts posted by Enchanted Shadow
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2. Just because someone does it differently does not mean that it is wrong.
But it may put an inordinate load on the server, which may be a detriment to other cachers. Sure, just you doing it doesn't, but multiply by 100000 or so, and the problem escalates.
When it comes to web sites, that is not the users' problem. That is the hoster's problem. You're not going to see Google issuing a statement asking if people wouldn't mind not searching quite as much.
3. People have every right to cache in a manner different than you ("you" meaning generically, not you specifically).
Not if the way you want to cache messes up the way I cache you don't. I'm not saying you can't maintain a large offline database, I'm just saying that the proposed way of changing the system might/would have negative effects on my way and many other peoples way of using pocket queries.
And what if I said that the way you cache messes up the way I cache because you keep getting FTFs, and I don't? Does that mean that I have the right to say that you can't cache in the manner of your choosing? Absolutely not.
So, I'm sorry, but even under circumstances where one person's chosen method of caching might affect you, that does not *necessarily* mean that they still don't have the right to cache in the manner of their choosing.
Sounds like you *might* have a need beyond just 'I want a big offline database', which is what most of these arguments boil down to. But I was wondering, how much warning do you typically have? An hour? That is more than enough time to generate a fresh pocket query of an area of interest.
No, I don't necessarily have any warning at all. So that is not an option for me.
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While in theory it sounds good, I don't think it would be a very good idea. As has been stated previously, the load on servers would be increased quite a bit, as most users would just put in 2500 as number of caches to retrieve and leave it at that.
You still haven't made it clear why it takes you hours to resplice up all of the data. The only query that should need changing is the most recent one, and the creation of the new one.
How are you spliting up the queries? We may be paying members, but not all paying members would agree that the extra server load is worth the extra convenience for the few (I for one don't think its worth it).
As I said earlier, I have it currently split up by Difficulty/Terrain combinations. I acknowledged the possibility that changing to a date-based system might help alleviate the work, but I have to try it before I know for certain.
Here is a stupid aside... Why do you need so many caches, up to date all the time? Are you likely to be traveling 100 miles, to actually need all those caches? Or is it just a 'I like to have a big database' thing. If you don't regularly travel within that 100 mile radius, why do you need all the most up to date cache information all the time?
I'm planning a trip to a fairly cache dense area in the next couple of weeks, what I did was download all the caches I could with one pocket query around my hotel. That got me a fair ol' distance out from the hotel, far more caches than I stand the remotest chance of picking up during my trip.
<sigh> Please don't take this the wrong way, and please don't take my response as overly defensive, but I seem to get in this argument every time I discuss my PQ useage.
Let me try to summarize the final set of items that every argument ends up distilling down to:
1. Not everyone Geocaches in the same way, and not everyone uses PQs in the same way.
2. Just because someone does it differently does not mean that it is wrong.
3. People have every right to cache in a manner different than you ("you" meaning generically, not you specifically).
Now, that being said, I'll give you *some* of the specifics that apply to me:
1. I travel a lot, and I don't always know where I'm going ahead of time.
2. I have easily and spontaneously traveled 200 miles away on *WHIM*.
3. I often do not have internet access when I travel.
In light of those items, I need a fairly comprehensive database available to me on my own system/laptop/gps. And given how often caches can change, or be archived, or be muggled, as well as how often one particular finder's log will make the difference between finding a cache or not, I make it standard procedure for my database to always be up to date.
I hope that helps you to understand why I do what I do, and I hope this thread doesn't become another nightmare of users screaming "but *I* don't need that many caches downloaded, so there's no possible reason that anyone *else* would!"
Again, please don't take this personally, it's just not a new experience for me.
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Sounds like you are not dividing up by placed date...if you were (as TotemLake mentioned) only the PQ for the most recent hides could ever max out.
Hmm. That may work as a temporary measure, I have to try it out. Right now, my multi-PQ sets are divided up by Difficulty and Terrain combinations. It's possible that doing it by date may at least reduce the extreme headache I have now.
That being said, I think it would still be easier to manage three PQs as opposed to fifteen.
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Agree with the sentiment, but most people will simply type in 2500 as their max caches... much more server load. 500 is ample a maximum for each PQ, and those who are REALLY bothered will get 2500 anyway..not just everyone.
That may be true. However, that doesn't change the fact that as a business, Groundspeak needs to cater to the needs of its customers. Now, I could see your argument holding sway if we were talking about one of the services being offered to non-paying users. But this particular service is only supplied to *paying* customers.
And I am not the only paying customer who uses multiple-PQ sets. Personally, I think it's horrific, what I have to go through in order to create and maintain large multi-PQ sets. I was not exaggerating before when I said that every time I have to redo a set because one of the component PQs max'd out, it takes me *hours*.
As a paying customer, I don't think I should have to do that. And rather than dragging out the regular argument that PQ limits should be removed or increased significantly, I thought I would try for a compromise, and ask for a restructuring of the *current* limits.
While you might be correct that it *may* lead to *some* additional load, I think that it's more than fair given what some users have to go through to dance around the current limitations.
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I do it by date and the only fear that I have after that is the PQ will shrink rather than grow. The only PQ that ends up growing then, is the current hides PQ until it reaches 500, then I start a new PQ to be the current caches query.
Either way you look at it, you will always have a PQ that's going to grow and soon enough 2500 won't be enough.
Oh, absolutely, which is why I am completely in favor of increasing the limits in general.
However, in order to get a 100 mile radius around a dense area, I currently need 15 PQs to make it work. And two of those just max'd out, which means it's going to take 17 after I've spent three hours re-sorting everything out.
It would be much simpler if I could consolidate fifteen PQs into three, don't you think?
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It has been requested numerous times by various users that the PQ limits be increased. While I wholeheartedly agree with these users that it would **really** be nice if the PQ limits were increased, this message is not about that.
What I would like is to consolidate the limits, in the interest of eliminating the nightmare that some users have to go through.
Short Summary:
1. Currently, users are limited to a maximum of 5 PQs per day and 500 results per PQ.
2. I would request that the 500 results per PQ limit be eliminated, and be replaced simply with 2500 results per day.
The reason for this is that for users who are trying to (for example) get a radius search in a dense area, it's an absolute NIGHTMARE to manage how to pull this off with the current limits (and let's not even get into what it takes to re-work everything if ONE of those PQs grows above 500). If you simply changed the limits to a max of 2500 results per day, than that would greatly simplify things for the more complicated multiple-PQ setups.
If you're concerned about the performance issues of additional PQs per day, regardless of the number of results, than simply change the limits to 2500 results per day **AND** no more than 5 PQs per day.
Jeremy, unless and until you increase the PQ limits in general (which I would still LOVE to see happen), would this at least be an acceptable compromise to make life easier for people using multiple-PQ sets?
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I can confirm this on my 60Cx. 4 color schemes are affected:
1. Aquamarine
2. Opal
3. Peridot
4. Ruby
All other schemes work okay.
Strange! On my 76CSx, Pearl definitely causes the bug (I don't remember which others, as well). Hopefully, they'll fix this in their next release.
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As any one who as one of these great units used a 512 MB or a 1 GB Micro SD Card and any problems etc...?
I'm using a 76CSx with a SanDisk 1 GB card (with Garmin T/S's blessing). I experienced problems while the card was formatted for FAT-16. However, once the card was formatted as FAT-32, everything worked perfectly.
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I get the impression from this thread that people have been able to use card readers to download maps to the card. In my case, when I insert the card into my computer's built-in reader Mapsource will see the card for the purposes of uploading from the card, but not for downloading. The card comes formatted FAT; would it work if I reformatted to FAT32? It's not a big deal, as I doubt if I will be changing mapsets very often, and I downloaded a set to my 1GB card in the 60CSx last night (1 3/4 hours). I'm mainly curious for future reference. I haven't played around with saving tracks on the card yet, but I left about 200MB free on it, so I may be trying this in the near future.
FAT-16 or FAT-32 doesn't matter insofar as your computer's ability to read and write from the card. You need to narrow down whether the problem is with the card, the reader, your OS/Software set, or with mapsource.
Outside of mapsource, can you read and write to the card? If so, than you rule out most things in one fell swoop. And as far as Mapsource is concerned, are you running the latest version (6.10.2)? If not, you might want to uninstall and reinstall, as there have been changes insofar as MapSource's handling of flash cards.
Now, all that being said, I have seen - and enlightened Garmin's T/S - that certain bugs show up with a 1 GB card formatted as FAT-16, where the bugs dissappear after the card is formatted to FAT-32.
So, especially for the larger cards (although I would do it for all sizes), FAT-32 is a must.
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Any time I put a card in the reader XP will display a little green arrow icon in my activity tray and it wants me to click on it before removing the card. I figure it's there for a good reason and not just decoration so I oblige by using it. One time I forgot and yanked out a USB card reader. That act shut down my laptop faster than the hydro company can do it. I don't forget anymore.
Olar
It's not there for decoration, it's there as a precaution; also because Windows can't always tell the difference between hardware that's safe to just unplug, and hardware that you need to shut down first.
Windows XP does not require that you use the "Remove Hardware" icon for flash memory. If problems occur, that can be due to a corrupt windows installation, or due to third-party software that's interfering (i.e. anything that would cause your system to cache writes).
But just look at the user's guide for the memory card and/or reader in question - you'll see it says exactly what I did.
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Just so you guys know, there's yet another Custom POI related bug for the 76CSx (and thus, probably for some of the other color X-Series units as well) spotted in the 2.62 beta firmware.
On *some* of the Color Schemes, including the default "Diamond" (which is why many people might not have spotted this), this bug does not appear.
However, for most of the Color Schemes (Pearl, for example), if you have Custom POIs loaded, and you go to the "Find/Custom POIs" page, the initial page that comes up indicates "None Found" even though there are Custom POIs loaded onto the unit.
If the Custom POIs were loaded in more than one file, you can hit "Menu/Select Database", select one of the databases, and *then* you'll see a list for that subset. However, you can never bring up the list for All Databases.
If any of you have color X-series units running 2.62 beta, can you confirm whether you see this bug as well?
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One thing that might be overlooked by some people - is that USB storage devices need to be "STOPPED" before disconnecting the device from the system! Perhaps abruptly disconnecting the reader from the system without stopping the device first may be causing some corrution of data...
I have never done this with windows xp. I thought it was a windows 2000 and below thing.
It's an XP thing too.
Incorrect. This is NOT necessary for XP. The only caution is to not unplug the card while it's in the middle of data transfer.
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I'm trying to create Custom POI files, and I need a way to automate the conversion of street addresses to lat/lon coordinates.
Can anyone suggest a method/application whereby I can import a text file of street addresses and process them so that I end up with a text file of lat/lon coordinates?
I tried doing this by importing the addresses into MapPoint, and then exporting them into Excel - but when I do that, MapPoint doesn't export the lat/lon coordinates, so that's useless.
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When I spoke with Garmin a couple of weeks ago, here is what I was told:
1. A new **hardware** revision of the 60/x series was out (or coming out) in order to address the lithium overvoltage issue. To me, this means that the problem cannot be solved (or *truly* be solved) via a firmware update.
2. The 76/x series does not have this problem with lithiums.
I hope that helps.
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I had called that into Garmin back when I got my 60Cx, that I could not search Custom POI by Name, and I had posted about that back in feb.
Did that issue ever get successfully addressed? Or is it still a problem?
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2,, waypoints v POI
POI advantage ... you can have lots as in multi 1000s......
POI disadvantage .. Geocaching mode does not work
Waypoints : in a 76CSX limit of 1000 .. in a lot of other garmins 500
Pros .. Geocaching mode works
Well, I never use Geocaching mode, so I couldn't care less about that. However, are there problems displaying the Custom POIs on the map (for example, I would want to display the Custom POIs, but not the built-in POIs)? Or are there problems searching for Custom POIs by name? ( I seem to recall a post somewhere about someone having that problem...)
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The surest way to mess up a SiFT III GPS like the 60 and 76 x-series GPS units, is to somehow get into TEST mode.
Your warning is well appreciated (not meant sarcastically). However, it also does not answer my question as to how to get into Test Mode.
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I could use some knowledgeable wisdom in regards to the Garmin 76CSx...
Basically, I have two questions:
1. I cannot enter Test Mode via the usual method (holding down Enter while powering up). While that works on the 76CS, it does *not* work on the 76CSx (unless there's something wrong with my unit). Does anyone know how to get into Test Mode on these new x-series units?
2. Can someone who genuinely knows tell me what the pros and cons are of sending caches to this GPS as Waypoints vs POIs? I know that if I send them as POIs, I am not subject to the 1000 waypoint limitation, and I also have larger fields for name and description. But I'm sure there's more to it than that, for both good and bad. Anyone know for certain what the complete deal is?
Thanks!!!
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Flame away at me for saying it, but......
Once again, I notice that all the so-called power users that claim its such a hardship not being able to open 10 cache pages at once, only average a handful of finds a month, or less.
All the people that don't seem to have a problem getting thottled have find counts in the thousands.
Why is it that the people who can find 50-100 caches in one day (over 200 for at least one person in this thread) don't have an issue with throttling, and yet the people who find 25 caches a year NEED to read 20 caches pages a second?
Boy, some people really don't have the ability to wrap their heads around the fact that just because someone does something differently than you, doesn't make it wrong.
Let me give you an example - just a single example - of how this might work out, since you don't seem to understand the general concept.
Possible Example: Not everyone has the free time on their hands to spend 8 hours a day caching. Some people can only manage to do it once every few weeks. For those people, it is possible that - given how few caches they can actually make time for - they want to maximize the QUALITY of those few caches they hit, and so they try to narrow the list down significantly, in order to weed away the ones that are likely to be dissappointing to them (such as doing 20 lamppost magnetic micros in a single afternoon). As such, they need a large pool to choose from, and they need to carefully do their research in paring down the list - as opposed to people who have the time to find 1000 micros per month, and don't need or care to discriminate at all.
If you can't simply accept that different people might do things differently, than does this example help you to understand ONE possible way how the phenomemon you describe *might* have come about?
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You are bass ackwards on that. I agree a knife is a tool. Knives make great cache swag. The problem isn't the parents like you may think. The problem is certain people who live in paranoia about being sued, or held responsible if someone should happen to find a pocket knife in a cache in on their lands. Those people who do hold some power over our activity have created a defacto ban on knives. We live in a world where those people make rules.
However, we, as a people, influence each other. People didn't just go from a Saturday when boys having pocket knives were the norm and wake up on a Sunday when they figured that now was the time for that to be morally wrong.
If you were to cater to confining people to activities where no one was at risk of being sued, than the entire human species might as well commit suicide right now, because there are no such activities.
That being the case, the only reasonable response is to live life according to what you believe is right and just - and deal with the lawsuits when and if they come up, instead of being so afraid of them that you ban anything and everything from everyone.
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Caches are publicly assessable. As such the contents should be suitable for children even if it's under the window of the local adult store since kids can and do walk by them.
The only way to truly have a kids cache is to put one where children are strictly prohibited. I've seen kids in bars, heck my grandma used to bring me...so there truly are not that many spots that don't see kids.
You make my point for me. *Most* things in life are accessible to kids (kids can buy knives, and browse through porn mags right in many stores, as an example). That does not mean that we should holler and rave about making life PG rated, because that's not going to happen. We should be raising our kids to live in the world that *exists* in a safe and responsible manner.
It's not that dissimilar from all the people ranting and raving about how they and their children are psychologically scarred for life because Janet Jackson't breast appeared for a fraction of a second on television. Please. If it takes that little to scar your children for life, than there's a serious problem about how you're raising your kids. The problem is NOT a natural part of anatomy that was responsible for feeding them through the first six months of their lives in the first place.
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Get real. Do you really think they are got to tell the robot authors exactly how to write their programs to avoid the throttling?
Get real yourself. The idea isn't to prevent robots, because there IS no way to prevent robots. If you're going to do anything, than the idea is to throttle bandwidth so that it's not eaten up completely by robots, leaving nothing left for human users.
But ultimately, you do have to cater to the human users. And right now, some of those human users WHO ARE PAYING FOR THIS DAMNED SERVICE are the ones being throttled. I don't think it's unreasonable to lay out the exact tarpitting thresholds on the table, so that we can look at them in detail, instead of speaking about them generically. In addition, it **might** provide a way for those of us having problems to find a way to use the site the way we want to, without triggering this trap.
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The problem is, on the server side of things, it's impossible to tell the difference between a browser grabbing 10 pages simultaneously, and a robot grabbing 10 pages simultaneously. Thus, they both get throttled. I'm sorry, but I remember the days of endless timeouts and the site being almost completely unusable to everyone. Then this throttling was implemented and suddenly the site was a pleasure to use again. So I completely support the corrent throttling mechanism.
I'm loading 10 pages, but waiting 2 seconds between each, and I'm *still* having problems. I think it's easy to tell the difference between 1 page every 2 seconds and a request for 10 pages that all arrive within the span of 1 second.
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I'm still having this problem, even waiting a second or two between loading pages. To me this is completely unacceptable.
Can someone on the management side of things lay out what the exact parameters of the tarpitting are, so that we can discuss this in more detail, instead of in general terms?
A Plead For Pq Limit Consolidation
in Website
Posted
Of course you're absolutely correct, because as everyone knows, the customer has no rights, no voice, and their needs are never to be considered. Obviously, when customers have concerns, they are to be ignored - everyone knows this. Never let customers tell you that you are not providing the services and goods that they want or need, after all, who do they think they are "bit**ing" about things you aren't doing right? It's not like they're the ones paying your salary, right? Hmm... moving on...
You should always follow the examples of companies who knew how to treat their customers as poorly as those "bit**ing" little buggers deserve, like The Wiz! Remember them? Yeah, they knew how to do it right. It didn't matter how poorly they treated their customers, because they knew there were always ten more behind them! Hey, what happened to them? Oh, yeah, they went under because other chains sprouted up that actually provided *good* customer service, and all their prior poorly treated customers flocked to them. Can you believe that? It must have been some sort of freak accident.
So just keep stepping on everyone who tries to say that they have needs different than yours. After all, your opinion is the only one that matters, right?