GPX OR NOT GPX?

[Ben T]

Knowing the size of the individual track data, and the number of saved tracks (up around 30m), the cost of storage isn't much — it's just a big database or object store.  But really not that big as these things go — maybe 90TB (30m x 3MB), which is around $2000/mth S3 pricing, plus transfer costs.  But then I'm only thinking about how I would set this up, it's impossible to know from the outside.  Therefore for little me and my routes on RWGPS, maybe 2000 x 3MB would cost them much less than 20p/mth in S3 storage costs.  Unless I've got my decimal point in the wrong place ...

Sounds about right - it's not expensive per user, but a site wouldn't want to have to stomach that $2000 a month cost if they were going to be providing it for free for all users.
Possibly even if they were commercial like RWGPS.

[FifeingEejit]

I see what you're saying Mr Eejit, but shurely RWGPS are also providing access to a load of route data, as well as some tools - aren't they?? 

It's a bit like MS Word coming with access to a cloud of docs that you can't get to without a copy of MS Word. (I think ... )

(hence Ben trying to use music in his analogy - without content (the routes or music), the whole setup is pretty pointless and valueless)

Unlike with the music analogy where without content it is useless, RWGPS could exist if all it did was let you download the GPX file afterwards.
But the storage of the routes and the search facility that finds routes others have created and made available to be searched (you can mark your routes as private) is another part of the tool.

Storage space isn't free either, so the premium RWGPS users are paying for the free users' space usage, and it's not going to be a small amount.

You see, it costs Real Money for all these services to use Google Maps — and it is not pocket change, but serious amounts.  They also have to pay themselves — nobody's mortgage or food bill gets paid from "being nice and giving it away for free".

How does RWGPS pay its staff and bills?  Subscriptions.  But since users are, on the whole, freeloading gits then they need to be shown a stick/carrot to make some of them cough up, hence the feature limitations.  That's why I stump up the cash and pay my annual subscription, even though I don't need the extra features, you're welcome    You're welcome, because without right-minded people like myself paying into the pot, the service will fold — not "might", but "will".

Aye, and google keep putting the price up.
Randomly this morning before I got up I somehow starting thinking of the features on Strava I use compared to what I get from RWGPS.
And I realized I get much more from RWGPS than I do Strava. Better mapping, better tool for routing, much better analysis graphs.
But Strava's gamification with Suffer Scores and segments has me paying them...

Meanwhile it's equally valid to use the commercial software you paid for as part of the cost of a GPS receiver or access to proprietary map products.  Or even use open source software^[1] and maps.


_{[1] Which is presumably written by freeloading git GenXers, who would rather develop and share their own stuff than pay to use somebody else's.  Selfish bastards.}

I've never fully understood Open Sourcers.
I don't understand why a commercial organization would give away it's IP for free.
I don't understand why an employers software developer would go home and spend more of their time in front of a computer writing software.

I do understand why an unemployed software developer would though... but given my experiences of Open Office and the like, that's maybe why they're chronically unemployed.
I do understand that some people like the idea of giving stuff away for free, which is fair enough.

But then I appear to be atypical, what with being a noisy, fidgety, argumentitive nutjob...

Knowing the size of the individual track data, and the number of saved tracks (up around 30m), the cost of storage isn't much — it's just a big database or object store.  But really not that big as these things go — maybe 90TB (30m x 3MB), which is around $2000/mth S3 pricing, plus transfer costs.  But then I'm only thinking about how I would set this up, it's impossible to know from the outside.  Therefore for little me and my routes on RWGPS, maybe 2000 x 3MB would cost them much less than 20p/mth in S3 storage costs.  Unless I've got my decimal point in the wrong place ...

--snip--

I have to say that I have almost zero interest in the content provided by others.  I don't know whether I'm in the majority or minority, but I think RWGPS's route-plotting tools are (currently) the best there are for me and they way I do things.

One of my colleagues crapped himself when he found out how much ATOS charged us per terrabyte per year.
That was 5 grand, he thought it was expensive. because a spinny disc only costs 100 quid...

My only interest in other peoples routes on RWGPS is the ones Orgs have put up, though I have found traces of a few other extinguished Scottish classics too.
Agree, by far the best route tool out there.

[wilkyboy]

Randomly this morning before I got up I somehow starting thinking of the features on Strava I use compared to what I get from RWGPS.
And I realized I get much more from RWGPS than I do Strava. Better mapping, better tool for routing, much better analysis graphs.
But Strava's gamification with Suffer Scores and segments has me paying them...

Exactly my thoughts: for getting at the info I actually want at the end of an audax, RWGPS is my first upload, and I analyse the track.  Then I push it to Strava and do a little write-up to go with it, upload a few photos, and that's the public face of my efforts, in the social-media hot-pot that is Strava.  I stopped paying for Strava for a while, but I recently restarted my paid membership on the basis it was becoming more important to me — and given how slow the site has become, it's possible they need to pay for more engineers ...

[phil d]

I'm interested in the discussion between "publisher pays" and "end-user pays". I'm not a RWGPS user (free or paid), so may be off-beam here.  But it seems to me that the way Wilkyboy uses the service (with a "publisher pays" model) he is able to download the resultant gps files in whatever format he deems appropriate to supply to his audax entrants. He can then supply this file free, by email, as a download from his website, or presumably via a link on the AUK site.

Of course, if a user wants it in a different format he/she can then either modify it themselves (though I would guess that relatively few of us have the skill to do that unless it is simple downsizing), or use a commercial site like RWGPS to modify it for them, at their expense.

I fail to see how this is unreasonable? But then, I'm one of those people happy to pay for advert-free apps.

[FifeingEejit]

If you view such a system as primarily a tool for:
a) Creating routes for you or others to ride
b) Reviewing stats from rides you've done

Then the "publisher pays" model makes sense.

If you view such a system as primarily a tool for:
a) Finding routes to ride
b) commenting on routes you've ridden

Then the "consumer pays" model makes sense, because your are using it to consume the content provided and nothing else.

RWGPS is heavily aimed and weighted at the "publisher" side.
Strava is heavily targeted at the "consumer" side.

The reason I've put publisher and consumer in quotes is because in reality in both models when implemented appropriately the consumer is the payer.
In RWGPS the tools are being consumed for the primary purpose of the site; the publishing of routes for others to find is almost a happy side effect.

[Kim]

I've never fully understood Open Sourcers.

An awful lot of it is people who need a tool to solve some problem, make one, then share it because it might help someone else out.  Often that results in other people contributing to making the tool better, so that makes perfect sense to me.  You haven't lost anything by sharing it.

I don't understand why a commercial organization would give away it's IP for free.

Same principle I think.  If you're in the widget business and develop a new widget-tracking database, you don't necessarily want to be a database vendor.

Or if you *are* a database vendor, you figure you can make more money selling widget database administration services or out-of-the-box widget-management solutions than you can selling your Free software, which functions as a marketing tool.  This certainly seems to work for some companies.

I don't understand why an employers software developer would go home and spend more of their time in front of a computer writing software.

I think it's like a cycle courier going for a bike ride at the weekend:  They get to choose the route, their own timescale and ride their favourite bike that wouldn't last 5 minutes unattended in some loading dock in That London.

I do understand why an unemployed software developer would though... but given my experiences of Open Office and the like, that's maybe why they're chronically unemployed.

I don't think OO is particularly badly written (it's huge, and mostly works).  I think it's meeting a highly dubious set of design objectives.

[Karla]

You also get cases of companies needing to write a tool to perform some necessary function, then deciding that the cheapest way to maintain that tool is to open source it and let their competitors do the work.

[FifeingEejit]

I wasn't thinking of small tools, rather large scale pieces of software like Operating systems, IDEs (Eclipse springs to mind instantly... There's a reason JetBrains make a shed load on IntelliJ...) etc.

[lmm]

For me it's a combination of an aversion to subscriptions (particularly when it's not clear if I'm getting all the things I want) and a feeling that RWGPS are not providing anything in my workflow. I don't want the Google maps, the downsampling, or anything like that. I just want to download the GPX with waypoints that the organiser originally uploaded, something any number of file hosts offer for free.

Would I pay a one time 10 quid for each GPX (whether to RWGPS or the organiser)? Sure. Would I sign up for a subscription if it was the agreed standard for AUK events, and I could be confident that all events would have tracks there? Yes, with gritted teeth. But signing up for an ongoing subscription for the sake of this one event, when the next event might use some other service? It's too much, especially when all I want is the file the organiser originally uploaded.

[Kim]

For me it's a combination of an aversion to subscriptions (particularly when it's not clear if I'm getting all the things I want) and a feeling that RWGPS are not providing anything in my workflow. I don't want the Google maps, the downsampling, or anything like that. I just want to download the GPX with waypoints that the organiser originally uploaded, something any number of file hosts offer for free.

Would I pay a one time 10 quid for each GPX (whether to RWGPS or the organiser)? Sure. Would I sign up for a subscription if it was the agreed standard for AUK events, and I could be confident that all events would have tracks there? Yes, with gritted teeth. But signing up for an ongoing subscription for the sake of this one event, when the next event might use some other service? It's too much, especially when all I want is the file the organiser originally uploaded?

+1

[dogtrousers]

Am I missing something here?  Perhaps I've missed a point above, which may mean that the following is irrelevant.

You can download a GPX file of a route/ride from RWGPS without having an account of any sort (paid or free).  Provided the author has made it public, of course.

What you can't do without certain kinds of account is do fancy-dan processing like downsampling to 500 points on download, and maybe conversion to certain formats.  They're not charging people to download content that others have placed on RWGPS.  They're charging people (or just requiring people to set up a free account) for extra features.  Vanilla GPX download is free.  Chocolate sauce download is extra.

If you want to reprocess the GPX that you've downloaded for free and munge it into your required format yourself, then you are free to do so. 

Edit: I've just experimented a bit.  I logged out of RWGPS and tried some searches and downloads.  You can download GPX and TCX, but you can't reduce the number of points and you can't get TCX turn-by-turn (whatever that is) or FIT notify-before-turn (ditto).  You can download CSV cuesheets, map images (that are a bit crap).  There is actually quite a bit of flexibility available even without an account.

[FifeingEejit]

For me it's a combination of an aversion to subscriptions (particularly when it's not clear if I'm getting all the things I want) and a feeling that RWGPS are not providing anything in my workflow. I don't want the Google maps, the downsampling, or anything like that. I just want to download the GPX with waypoints that the organiser originally uploaded, something any number of file hosts offer for free.

Would I pay a one time 10 quid for each GPX (whether to RWGPS or the organiser)? Sure. Would I sign up for a subscription if it was the agreed standard for AUK events, and I could be confident that all events would have tracks there? Yes, with gritted teeth. But signing up for an ongoing subscription for the sake of this one event, when the next event might use some other service? It's too much, especially when all I want is the file the organiser originally uploaded.

Since RWGPs lets you get the GPX files or direct linking to device for free (without the bells and whistles); your use case has no need for the subscription (unless you want the bells and whistles in the file)

IIRC you need to be a subscriber to export GPX files in Strava
(but then Strava's routing tool is pretty much junk anyway so it doesn't matter much)

Which is a further example of the "publisher" vs "consumer" charging model.

[teethgrinder]

Since RWGPs lets you get the GPX files or direct linking to device for free (without the bells and whistles); your use case has no need for the subscription (unless you want the bells and whistles in the file)

Yes, that's why I put any routes up for sharing. So anyone can look at them or use them for free.
I create routes on Bike Hike, save them to my hard drive and if I want to share it I load it to my RWGPS account.
I also look at other people's routes for ideas etc

[Phil W]

Yes you are missing something.  Unless you have a premium account you cannot upload waypoints in a GPX you already have. Unless you have a premium account, you cannot add waypoints to your routes within RWGPS. You also cannot download (unless you hack the webpage) a GPX containing waypoints unless you have a premium account. So no, you can't download the vanilla GPX without a subscription. You can download just the track but since you are wanting to use it for navigating an Audax having waypoints to mark the controls is kind of useful.  Now if the organiser never marked the controls with waypoints there's nothing lost.   It's a bit like an organiser writing a route sheet and then when you download it , it doesn't say where the controls are, but for an extra £5 they will be included.  So in affect the GPX no longer describes an Audax it just describes a route.

[FifeingEejit]

Aye but you get a bit of paper that describes the Audax that makes the route usable in that context.
I think it's called a Brevet card.

Obviously I can see the advantage of having the waypoints in the GPX,
I've never used that approach. but that's me

[wilkyboy]

Yes you are missing something.  Unless you have a premium account you cannot upload waypoints in a GPX you already have. Unless you have a premium account, you cannot add waypoints to your routes within RWGPS. You also cannot download (unless you hack the webpage) a GPX containing waypoints unless you have a premium account. So no, you can't download the vanilla GPX without a subscription. You can download just the track but since you are wanting to use it for navigating an Audax having waypoints to mark the controls is kind of useful.  Now if the organiser never marked the controls with waypoints there's nothing lost.   It's a bit like an organiser writing a route sheet and then when you download it , it doesn't say where the controls are, but for an extra £5 they will be included.  So in affect the GPX no longer describes an Audax it just describes a route.

Ah, I did not know all that.  Probably because I work with TCX and cue points and do all the GPX conversions from there.  It also seems that they've tightened up on what is and isn't available on the free membership?

[Phil W]

Aye but you get a bit of paper that describes the Audax that makes the route usable in that context.
I think it's called a Brevet card.

Obviously I can see the advantage of having the waypoints in the GPX,
I've never used that approach. but that's me

It's like the advantage of having the controls marked in context in a route sheet.  Sure you could have hand written the distance from the brevet card in the appropriate place in the route sheet. But brevet card distances are sometimes the shortest distance and sometimes the actual route distance. How are you to know which is which, and if shortest how the hell are you meant to translate that to ridden especially if looking for an info control?

If we go down this route (no pun intended) in absurdism you could reduce it to here's you brevet card, off you go; no route sheet or GPX.  Good luck with that when no one found the info clue because they'd all picked different routes and covered different distances when they decided the sign post at 99km was the one.

An event with check points but no recommended or published route between them is called orienteering but this time on road bikes. 

[teethgrinder]

Yes you are missing something.  Unless you have a premium account you cannot upload waypoints in a GPX you already have. Unless you have a premium account, you cannot add waypoints to your routes within RWGPS. You also cannot download (unless you hack the webpage) a GPX containing waypoints unless you have a premium account. So no, you can't download the vanilla GPX without a subscription. You can download just the track but since you are wanting to use it for navigating an Audax having waypoints to mark the controls is kind of useful.  Now if the organiser never marked the controls with waypoints there's nothing lost.   It's a bit like an organiser writing a route sheet and then when you download it , it doesn't say where the controls are, but for an extra £5 they will be included.  So in affect the GPX no longer describes an Audax it just describes a route.

Yes, I didn't know that. I don't use waypoints on my routes. I have wondered why nobody seems to use waypoints for controls on Audax events...
They're either a route to get somewhere, a ride to a cafe, so pretty obvious when you get there, or a long ride, including DIY Audax where I don't see any point in waypoints because not everyone will want the same thing as a control.
I only upload as GPX tracks or FIT files. If I can't get the type of file I want, I use a file conversion website to get the type of file I want from a GPX track.

[dogtrousers]

Yes you are missing something.  Unless you have a premium account you cannot upload waypoints in a GPX you already have. Unless you have a premium account, you cannot add waypoints to your routes within RWGPS. You also cannot download (unless you hack the webpage) a GPX containing waypoints unless you have a premium account. So no, you can't download the vanilla GPX without a subscription. You can download just the track but since you are wanting to use it for navigating an Audax having waypoints to mark the controls is kind of useful.  Now if the organiser never marked the controls with waypoints there's nothing lost.   It's a bit like an organiser writing a route sheet and then when you download it , it doesn't say where the controls are, but for an extra £5 they will be included.  So in affect the GPX no longer describes an Audax it just describes a route.

I see what you mean.  I never use waypoints when cycling except very occasionally, and when I do I always add them in manually and set a proximity alarm so I didn't pick up on that.  My mistake.
All I ever use GPX for is navigating a route.  I can see they would be useful for marking controls.  And if, in another world, I were specifying a standard for organisers to comply with I'd probably make them mandatory, or at least recommended.  So it is an issue.

[Exit Stage Left]

I've used the Brevet card and a map for navigation before the days of GPS and mobile phones, when I've left the route sheet at a control. Route sheets got a bit bogged down in detail when bike computers became widespread.

There should be an assumption that routes can be followed with the information provided in hard copy form, without any additional technology, although a watch is handy.

[Nutbeem]

I have had pleasure plotting the BCM 2019 route (6 months ago and revised as the routesheets have been e-mailed out) in RwGPS to help those who prefer not to construct such themselves: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/20922029?beta=false  A fair few have looked  at it and I assume the majority of riders have exported a tcx or gpx (for free). I hope I have been accurate and, at the weekend, will be on the lookout for riders pausing at the embedded minor aberrations eg start of the Barmouth bridge track.

I particularly enjoyed the little off road jaunt through the woods at 320Km & in the middle of the night

Seriously though I used your track; split to out & back, slightly edited to use the two main road options on the return legs and Track Points filtered down for my Etrex. It got me to Menai & to Chepstow with no problems - Thank You.

Off road aberation wasn't actually I problem, zooming out the Etrex screen showed me what had happened & I just stayed on the road.

[Phil W]

I've used the Brevet card and a map for navigation before the days of GPS and mobile phones

I'm sure that back in the 1970s audaxes primarily used main roads with simpler navigation.  Maybe this basic form of Audax could be marketed as the XXX version and you could be the Vin Diesel?

If it comes down to a series of check points and find your own way using a map then I think it just becomes a version of ultra racing and the Audax format dies a little.

[FifeingEejit]

Aye but you get a bit of paper that describes the Audax that makes the route usable in that context.
I think it's called a Brevet card.

Obviously I can see the advantage of having the waypoints in the GPX,
I've never used that approach. but that's me

It's like the advantage of having the controls marked in context in a route sheet.  Sure you could have hand written the distance from the brevet card in the appropriate place in the route sheet. But brevet card distances are sometimes the shortest distance and sometimes the actual route distance. How are you to know which is which, and if shortest how the hell are you meant to translate that to ridden especially if looking for an info control?

If we go down this route (no pun intended) in absurdism you could reduce it to here's you brevet card, off you go; no route sheet or GPX.  Good luck with that when no one found the info clue because they'd all picked different routes and covered different distances when they decided the sign post at 99km was the one.

An event with check points but no recommended or published route between them is called orienteering but this time on road bikes.

That one's already been done in this thread with the context of "if you can use GPS software you can work out your own route" and "well if that's the case I ca work a map so..."
Provided the locations are clear enough, yes you could do that, and as you say it's not Audax.

I don't think I've ever found the distance recorded to match the distance on a route sheet at an info control either and unless the info control is at a junction or other feature worthy of mentioning on a route sheet there's always the possibility that you're going to miss one if it's entirely dependent on what ever distance recording method you use (if you indeed use one at all) matching the info.

What does get confusing is when you get an info something like "what's the name of the house at the junction" or "what's the distance to blah at the junction"
There's two junctions within a reasonable margin of error and both fit the bill for the question but due to the priorities on the road only one of them is in the routesheet.

This happened on Moffat Toffee earlier this year, two junctions 500m apart, both fit the bill for the question distance wise although everyone had a different distance on their devices.
Junction 1: https://goo.gl/maps/KzgYhBdWnxnVV3ZXA
Junction 2: https://goo.gl/maps/gtzhZqvw37ooCUUeA

The obvious solution there for Routesheets is to list every junction not just ones you leave the priority route on though that will make route sheets much larger, but without waypoints is a problem on GPS.

[Ben T]

I'm interested in the discussion between "publisher pays" and "end-user pays". I'm not a RWGPS user (free or paid), so may be off-beam here.  But it seems to me that the way Wilkyboy uses the service (with a "publisher pays" model) he is able to download the resultant gps files in whatever format he deems appropriate to supply to his audax entrants. He can then supply this file free, by email, as a download from his website, or presumably via a link on the AUK site.

Either of those methods... just not a link to RWGPS, unless he wants his entrants to also have to pay again to RWGPS for his waypoints.

When I talked about RWGPS being a "subscriber pays" model, what I meant was that RWGPS doesn't give you the option of paying as a publisher in order that your subscribers (entrants) don't have to. Whether he also pays a premium as a publisher is by the by.

I've used the term "publisher pays" to mean publisher pays so subscribers don't have to - something that I have previously thought might be quite useful to audax organisers. And probably is to some. But something which RWGPS doesn't allow.

In light of what Phil W points out about having to have premium RWGPS to even upload* waypoints as well, I think it's slightly confusing to talk about RWGPS being either a "publisher pays" or "subscriber pays" model because in reality it is an "everyone pays" model.

* (I was under the illusion that they let you do this for free as it was beneficial to them as content provision that would encourage more paying subscribers but it seems not)

[Phil W]

That one's already been done in this thread with the context of "if you can use GPS software you can work out your own route" and "well if that's the case I ca work a map so..."

Thats a bit like saying you can read a book why not write one? Well you could but most likely it'll be shit and take the average person a very long time. Being a consumer of content doesn't necessarily make you good at creating that content.  It does of course make us all expert critics of content created by others.

I don't enter events then expect to also have to create the route and mark controls. If I want to do that I'll just do a DIY or even just a ride and do that at my convenience.