by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/08/13 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/08/13/10049695.aspx
Happy Friday the 13th, everybody!
To help people get to the Unicode Technical Committee meeting, a link to a map was provided.
The map they chose was showing off the satellite imagery.
And since the meeting was at Microsoft this time, they decided to use Bing maps.
The map was something like the following:
Now this map only had three real flaws in it:
Now the second and third problems were due to the fact that the image is many years old. Like before the buildings were torn down that I mentioned in Alive and well, but more grown up.
The first point, I have no explanation for -- someone took the time to add labels that were wrong.
Now that is just freaking weird.
Maybe they should prioritize getting updated images of the Microsoft campus? :-)
But before we get to making too much of Bing's problems here, we should take a look at Google Maps (which was not linked to):
Now I added the building names in red for comparison purposes, but the other labels come from Google Maps.
The satellite imagery is more up to date, which is nice.
Though the street layout is not in sync -- you can see examples of streets that appear to go right through buildings and through the soccer fields.
Of course if you get directions the map layout is used and thus the directions will be wrong.
Though if you are "lucky" you might be directed to drive right into the meeting.
Literally!
The place where we have been meeting is indeed right under one of these inaccurate streets.
It seems like both Google Maps and Bing Maps ought to get their act together here.
Raymond Chen - MSFT on 13 Aug 2010 8:25 AM:
Or perhaps say "The location is not yet in most mapping systems; here are the real directions." For bonus points, give a fake address that the mapping systems get correct which takes you to roughly the correct location.