[Az-Geocaching] In awe.....of......Brian.........

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 22:54:36 -0700 (MST)

Wow.

All I can say is...Brian, you continue to amaze me. I barely
understand much of what you talk about half the time, (that is a
compliment!) but I love to try. I am SO glad I got to meet you at the
Prescott Event!!

Having said that, I will say no more as I don't know a thimble-full's
worth of stuff about this topic, therefore I feel I have no credible
opinion one way or the other.

It's a game and it's a free country (at least for now).

HAVE FUN. IF IT CEASES TO BE FUN, DO SOMETHING ELSE THAT IS FUN. (and
in general, Stop whining?!)

There, I said that! :-)

Trisha "Lightning"

On Wed, 4 Aug 2004 23:34:05 -0600, "Brian Casteel" wrote:

> 
> 7/3/2000 Geocaching.com registered.  4/1/2002 GeoToad begins
> development.
> Which parallel universe contains the missing 2 years of development? 
> This
> can be verified by clicking on the >>See Older News Items at the
> bottom of
> the front page.  It isn't until 4/26/2003 that a public release was
> completed.
> 
> Now, reading a little more recent, we have a snippet from this little
> gem:
> 
> <snippet>
> International searches broken
> 16aug2003 12:31
> Jonat Brander gave me another bug report today: Searching for
> geocaches in
> other countries does not work. It seems geocaching.com is in the
> process of
> making regional searches work inside countries outside of North
> America. Of
> course, they've implemented this in a way to give <keywords here>page
> scrapers like GeoToad<keywords here> a hard time.   </snippet>
> 
> So they admit to the nature of the software, part of what gc.com has
a
> problem with.  Granted, just in reading about updates, it sounds like
> killer
> software, but the issues need to be addressed.  What was the problem
> universities and ISPs had early-on when p2p programs like Napster and
> Limewire came out?  Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth.  Costs
skyrocketed
> because it was being consumed at an astronomical rate.  In this case,
> it's
> potentially thousands of users pointing their IP address at the
> geocaching.com domain exclusively, not some loosely affiliated
> bandwidth/resource sharing p2p service.  What I see Groundspeak doing
> is
> asking that the developers cease-and-desist, nothing more...yet.  We
> don't
> know what (if anything) is going on behind the scenes, nor is it our
> business unless tptb choose to make it so.  You can't say that you
know
> anything about what is going on within the realm of negotiation
unless
> you're somehow directly involved in development/distribution of
GeoToad
> software, or unless you work for Groundspeak, which I don't see being
> the
> case, especially since you live nowhere near the corporate
> headquarters and
> the only 'employees' who aren't are volunteer approvers.
> 
> Ok, you aren't getting any profit from posting your caches on gc.com.
> Neither am I, yet I continue to do so, because it's the one way to
help
> further an activity that has provided me many hours of entertainment
> for
> very little expense (not including supplementals, like gas, GPS, oil
> pans,
> etc...) and taken me to places I never would have known about
> otherwise.
> Dave Ulmer created Geocaching through a newsgroup for nothing.  The
> first
> ever finder of a Geocache did so for...<drumroll>nothing, except
> entertainment.
> 
> As I said before, if you're going to take an extremist approach and
> pull all
> your caches in protest, go for it.  Navicache is right over
> there --->http://www.navicache.com/, but GeoToad would do you
> absolutely no
> good then, so the argument becomes moot.
> 
> Now, Geocaching.com is only going to take from us, just what we give
> them.
> Coordinates, various input values which return difficulty, map
> information,
> clues, etc.  If we feel so inclined, money for TBs, premium
membership,
> t-shirts, stickers, whatever.  All of this money goes to keep
> Geocaching.com
> running, expand services and keep a bunch of people behind the scenes
> fed
> with ramen noodles.  Where do you really think all this would be if
it
> weren't for someone who put their neck on the line and developed a
> successful business model for the benefit of everyone who chooses to
> participate?
> 
> I don't always agree with decisions made with regard to Geocaching,
> but my
> options are limited and IMO, inadequate.  For the money, you can't
ask
> for a
> better service.  It surprises me to this day that Jeremy/Bryan and
crew
> continue to tolerate the thankless bitching by the masses because it
> isn't
> their perfect version of life.  Neither is my operating system (XP
> Pro), but
> you don't see me tossing molitov cocktails at Redmond, WA just to
give
> them
> a piece of my mind.
> 
> Brian
> 
> Team A.I.
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Kevin Schuman" <Lpublic@cox.net>
> To: <listserv@azgeocaching.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2004 9:08 PM
> Subject: Re: [Az-Geocaching] Notification of Cache Removal
> 
> 
> > Geotoad has been a project with 4 years of work behind it. It's
> hardly a
> new thing, if
> > geocaching.com had wanted to discuss the issue they had ample time
> to do
> so. I'm
> > not saying they should be allowed to take all of gc.com's bandwidth
> that
> they want,
> > i'm saying negotiation for the preservation of a good product would
> be a
> good idea.
> > Perhaps gc.com could come to an agreement and made geotoad
available
> to
> paying
> > users. Instead they simply said "NO".
> >
> > As for "Protecting a business", frankly i'm not getting any profit
> from
> posting my
> > caches on geocaching.com, if we want to take the purely capitalist
> model
> i'm working
> > for GC.com for nothing. Since it's my effort to plant and list a
> cache I
> would hope that
> > at least my opinion means something, but apparently it doesn't
> anymore,
> GC.com is
> > going to take our data and do with it as they please.
> >
> > I haven't made a definate choice to take this action, i'm just
> putting out
> a warning
> > ahead of time so you can hit those caches while they are still
there.
> >
> > -- 
> > Lasivian
> > Website - http://members.cox.net/lasivian/
> > E-mail - http://members.cox.net/lasivian/email.html
> > ICQ# 3619356
> > -- 
> >
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> 
> 
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