oct 25th, 2007
yes, i simply the in-car guidance systems and the soothing voice that never tells you, "you dummy, what do you mean you missed that turn? an infant could have done it!" but instead quietly says, "recalculating route".
now if only these were available in india! i believe some new phones are rolling out with gps maps of bangalore and so forth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/opinion/26brooks.html?th&emc=th
4 comments:
absolutely. especially while driving in the dark.
Dont forget no of potholes, today- one-way-tomorrow-two-way-day-after-no-way streets and addresses that go on and on which have to be fed into the system.
only if there is a regular update happening about the city traffic can gps succeed, but it will still need a lot of manual help, and dont forget there is no dearth of people all around you to tell you direction and you cal always ask as you are mostly stationary or crawling at a sanil's pace- in US you dont have such facilities which makes gps indispensible
GPS based driving directions in India presents a unique problem due to 1. the ever changing street names and 2. the disproportionately high number of roads named after dead members of the nehru/ghandy family.
#2 can be really irritating if you're writing software to calculate driving directions. Imagine
"Turn left on I. Ghandy road,
Turn right on S. Ghandy st,
Arrive at R. Ghandy airport
or M. Ghandy stadium " etc......
Also, geocoding (matching latitude/longitiude coordinates with addresses) is complicated by the addressing conventions in India,ex:"1-3-4-456/1/4/A". To confound matters further, these conventions vary by city and state.
Yes Karyakarta, I agree, our streets are not reliable, we never know about the traffic jams, we dont know when the municipality will dig up a street to lay a pipe or when an idiotic political party will erect a tambu and block the road, or when a fight starts between 2 and the street is blocked, but the cake goes to the Ghandy streets ha ha... yes, we have disproportionately large number of streets in either of the ghandy's names including the original MG.
Off topic, I was going through the web and came across the website of 'Mizo association of Hyderabad', while going through the the website, I saw the 'objectives', among some fine things like helping out fellow Mizos, To act as a platform for Mizos etc etc, was 'To promote christian values and To encourage a christian way of life'.
I mean, will you ever find such a thing in other state association, say a tamil, telugu, Bengali or Punjabi association about promoting a particular religion's ideals instead of state's cultural and other factors?
While this may be meaningless and also nothing which matters, but I thought I'd share my thoughts.
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