[nylug-talk] OT - city wide GPS question???

[Ajai Khattri]

On Tue, 2 Jan 2007, R. Drew Davis wrote:

> My SONY TJ37

Refresh my memory: didn't Sony stop production of the Clie (when I first 
came to NYC, I worked for a PDA seller...).

> has a PDF viewer in it, but when I downloaded a PDF file of
> the NYC subway map from the web to my memory stick, it wouldn't open in
> the PDA.   There were no messages, but I figured it was something to do
> with memory limitations that kept it from opening even a peephole view
> of the big map.

I sometimes come across this problem too. I can open a PDF of the NYC 
subway map on my 770 but not a PDF of the London subway map - go figure.

An expensive alternative is to find a really really small PC like the OQO 
(oqo.com) which has more memory and beefier processor.

> I have seen that there are iPOD downloads of the map - in the form of a
> zillion little tiles.   I don't have an iPOD so I don't know how usable
> that version of the map is.

I suppose you could easily dump a GIF on a mobile device (though, zooming 
in on a GIF image means you lose detail (compared to a vector format like 
PDF which will rescale everything and still look crisp).

> I took a look at MetrO last night.   Pretty spiffy, but it knows
> connectivity, not schedules, and it doesn't know at all about the NYC
> bus routes.   I asked it how to get from Penn Station to the
> Metropolitan Museum and instead of sending me to the M4 bus at 32nd St.
> that drops you off at 83rd and Madison, it sent me via subway, with 2
> changes of train, to 86th and Lexington, a bit more of a walk from the
> museum entrance on 5th Ave.   I was impressed that it knew the Long
> Island Railroad stations, but again, without it knowing the schedule,
> it's advice for getting to Westbury from Penn Station is strictly to
> take the train to Westbury.   There are twice as many trains to
> Hicksville, and often the right choice, if you are in a hurry, depending
> on the time of day is to take the train to Hicksville, the next station
> along the line, after Westbury, and then double-back on the bus from
> Hicksville station back into Westbury.   I guess I was setting my hopes
> too high for what MetrO would "know" for me.

Yep - the current state of the art in AI would still probably be less able 
than a human brain (assuming that kind of processing is available on 
phones/mobile devices ;-)


-- 
Aj. (ajai at bitblit.net)