Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: A new study suggests that nearly a decade of housing shortages and rising rents in the U.S. may be reversing course... From 2010 to 2016, America added nearly a million renter households a year. But the census showed a decline in that growth rate in 2016, and some early 2017 data shows an actual decline in renters so far in 2017. Recent census data also shows a rise in vacancy rates.

According to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, that's because foreclosure numbers have declined and young homebuyers are re-entering the market. Home ownership in the U.S. took a big hit from the foreclosure crisis and Great Recession of 2007-2012, while the rental market struggled to meet the new demand. Other insights in the report mostly follow from that shifting reality. Rents are increasing more slowly. Fewer renter households are "cost-burdened," or paying more than 30% of their income in rent, than they were two years ago.
The report also predicts that many high-income households may continue renting rather than buying a home. But it'd be interesting to hear how that compares to Slashdot readers around the world. Are you renting or buying -- and if renting, do you feel that your rent is too high?

Nerval's Lobster writes Millennial tech workers are entering the U.S. workforce at a comparable disadvantage to other tech workers throughout the industrialized world, according to study earlier this year from Educational Testing Services (PDF). How do U.S. millennials compare to their international peers, at least according to ETS? Those in the 90th percentile (i.e., the top-scoring) actually scored lower than top-scoring millennials in 15 of the 22 studied countries; low-scoring U.S. millennials ranked last (along with Italy and England/Northern Ireland). While some experts have blamed the nation's education system for the ultimate lack of STEM jobs, other studies have suggested that the problem isn't in the classroom; a 2014 report from the U.S. Census Bureau suggested that many of the people who earned STEM degrees didn't actually go into careers requiring them. In any case, the U.S. is clearly wrestling with an issue; how can it introduce more (qualified) STEM people into the market?

An anonymous reader writes In a Sacramento Bee op-ed, (in)famous computer security researcher Ed Felten responds to the State of the Union cybersecurity proposal. He doesn't mince words: "The odds of clearing Congress: low. The odds of materially improving security: even lower. "What he suggests as an alternative, though, is a surprise. "California," he writes, "could blaze a trail for effective cybersecurity policy." He calls for the state government to protect critical infrastructure and sensitive data, relying on outside auditors and experts. It's an interesting idea. Even if it doesn't go anywhere, at least it's some fresh thinking in this area of backward policy. From Felten's essay: Critical infrastructure increasingly relies on industrial automation systems. And those systems are often vulnerable – they keep a default password, for instance, or are accessible from the public Internet. These are not subtle or sophisticated errors. Fixing them requires basic due diligence, not rocket science. Requiring the state’s critical infrastructure providers to undergo regular security audits would be straightforward and inexpensive – especially relative to the enormous risks. Areas of sensitive data are also low-hanging cyber fruit. In health care, education and finance, California already imposes security and privacy requirements that go beyond federal law. Those legal mandates, though, are mostly enforced through after-the-fact penalties. Much like critical infrastructure, sectors that rely upon sensitive data would benefit from periodic outside auditing. Of any state government's, California's policies also have the chance to help (or harm) the most people: nearly 39 million people, according to a 2014 U.S. Census estimate.

Hugh Pickens writes writes "In spring of 1940, the Census Bureau sent out more than 120,000 fact-gatherers, known as 'enumerators,' to survey the nation's 33 million homes and 7 million farms. Now as the 72 years of confidentiality expires, the National Archives website buckled under the load as the 1940 census records were released and 1.9 million users hit the archives servers in the first four hours the data went public and at one point, the Archives said, its computers were receiving 100,000 requests per second. Data miners will have the opportunity to pick and chip through more than 3.8 million digital images of census schedules, maps and other sociological minutiae. What will we learn from this mother lode? The pivotal year 1940 'marked the beginnings of a shift from a depressed peacetime to a prosperous wartime,' says David E. Kyvig, author of Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1939. The vast data dump, Kyvig says, will allow historians 'to look closely at particular communities and how people within them were doing in terms of employment, income and material comforts.' The 1940 census was the first Census that looked deeper into the details of much of American life. 'As we see how the country evolved over the subsequent 20 years, where we have aggregate census data ... we ought to be able to see more clearly how government spending bettered everyday life, confirmed Keynesian economic theory and revealed that, before the war, the New Deal did too little, rather than too much, to stimulate the U.S. economy."" Get all 18TB of it while it's hot.

eldavojohn writes "Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions is an addition to six or so other books in the 'Beautiful' series that O'Reilly has put out. It is not a comprehensive guide on data but instead a glimpse into success stories about twenty different projects that succeeded in displaying data — oftentimes in areas where others have failed. While this provides, for the most part, disjointed stories, it is a very readable book compared to most technical books. Beautiful Data proves to be quite the cover-to-cover page turner for anyone involved in building interfaces for data or the statistician at a loss for the best way to intuitively and effectively relay knowledge when given voluminous amounts of raw data. That said, it took me almost two months to make it through this book, as each chapter revealed a data repository or tool I had no idea existed. I felt like a child with an attention deficit disorder trying my hand at nearly everything. While the book isn't designed to relay complete theory on data (like Tufte), it is a great series of short success stories revolving around the entire real world practice of consuming, aggregating, realizing and making beautiful data." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review. Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions author Edited by Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher pages 384 publisher O'Reilly Media, Inc. rating 9/10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-0-596-15711-1 summary A collection of twenty essays and chronicles from the implementers of successful projects revolving around real world data processing and display. Since the individual articles in this book are essentially a series of what to do and what not to do, this review is more like a list of notes that were my personal rewards from each chapter. Given my background, these notes will be very specified to my interests and responsibilities for web development whereas a statistician, academic or researcher might pull a completely different set from the book. The book also has a nice colorized insert that allows the reader to get a better sense of the interfaces discussed throughout the book. One potential problem with these "case studies" is that they will most certainly become dated — and in our world that happens quite quickly. It's very easy for me to think that specific information about colocation facility usage by social networking sites (Chapter Four) will always be useful and relevant. The sad fact of the matter is that because of the unforeseen nature of hardware advancements and language evolution, many of these stories could become irrelevant blasts from the past in one or two decades. I think the audience that stands to benefit this most from this book are low level managers and people in charge of large amounts of data that they don't know what to do with. The reason for this is that while there are a few chapters that deal with low level implementation details it mostly consists of overviews of popular and successful mentalities surrounding data. One other type of audience that might be a target for this book would be young college students with interests in math, statistics or computer science. Had I picked this book up as a freshman in college, no doubt the number of projects I worked late into the night on would have multiplied as would my understanding of how the real world works.

Chapter One deals with two projects done by grad students: Personal Environmental Impact Report (PEIR) and your.flowingdata (YFD). This chapter starts out slow describing how the system harnesses personal GPS devices — a common trend in phone development these days. After clearing the basics, the chapter reveals a lot about the iterative developments the author took to select and include a map interface to effectively and quickly display several routes that a user has driven with intuitive visual queues to indicate which was the most environmentally expensive. Trying to stick with the green means good and red means bad proved difficult and they employed an inverted map of mostly shades of gray to avoid clashing colors with the natural colors on a regular map. The final part of PEIR discussed a Facebook application that simply paired you up against friends also using PEIR. This gave the user a relative value basis of otherwise incomprehensible numbers surrounding their environmental impact. YFD focuses more on an interface for accumulating Twitter data from a user to help them track sleeping and weight loss.

The second chapter deals entirely with constructing a very simple survey that has a variable length depending on what answer you give to an earlier question. While this seems to be a very simple task, the chapter does a great job of explaining how you can make it better and why doing this makes it better. A great quote from this chapter is "The key method for collecting data from people online is, of course, through the use of the dreaded form. There is no artifact potentially more valuable to a business, or more boring and tedious to a participant." The chapter points out that for every action you require the user to make, the user may decide the survey is not worth their time. Yes, clicking "Next" on a multi-page form only gives the user another chance to decide this isn't worth it. Furthermore, many pages might cause the user to be unsure of the real length of the survey. So they decided against this and instead made the survey branch from one page so that page would continually get a little larger depending on how you answered the questions. Knowing the targets for the surveys were older made a copy large font mandatory as 72% of Americans report vision impairment by the time they are age 45. This chapter dealt more with collecting the data, respecting the source of data and building trust with the participants than displaying the data they provided.

Chapter Three deals with the recently disabled Phoenix that landed on Mars and how precisely the image collection was done. While it might seem like the wrong place to do it, there was actually pre-processing and compression done on board the lander before transmission to Earth. This article tackles interesting issues that are long thought to be an extinct animal in computer science where resources are constrained and radiation bombarding keeps the CPU modestly lower than your average desktop. Do you process the image in place in memory or make a copy so that the original image can be retained during processing? These are familiar issues to embedded developers but stuff I haven't touched since college. While the author details the situation on all fronts down to the cameras being used, it's largely a blast from the past as far as resource aware computing is concerned. Then again, I doubt any of my code will ever be flight certified by NASA.

Chapter Four has a very interesting analysis and description of Yahoo!'s PNUTS system for serving up data in complex environments like tackling issues with latency across the world when dealing with social networking. The chapter does a decent job of explaining how issues are resolved when replicated servers across the United States become out of sync and the resolution strategy. The chapter ends on an even more interesting note explaining why Yahoo! deviated from Google's BigTable, Amazon's Dynamo, Microsoft's Azure and other existing implementations. This tale of well thought out design is a stark contrast to Chapter Five which centers on a Facebook 'data scientist' that — instead of explaining the solution as a well planned finalized implementation — tells the trial and error approach of a very small team of developers treading into waters unknown with data sets of Sisyphean proportions. It was tempting for me to read this chapter and chastise the author for not foreseeing what numbers could come with making it big in social networking. But the chapter has a lot of value in a "lessons learned" realm. It may even prepare some of you who are writing web applications with a potentially explosive or viral user base. While it's popular to hate Facebook and in turn transfer that hate to the developers, no one can argue against them being one of the most successful social networking sites and any information of their (sometimes flawed) operations certainly proves to be interesting.

Chapter Six was completely unengaging for me. The chapter covers geographing. More specifically the efforts to take pictures of Britain and Ireland and map/display them geographically. The images would aim to cover a large area than users could tag them with what they see (tree, road, hill, etc). Unfortunately it never really registered with me why someone would want to do this and what the end goal was that they were aiming for. Instead they managed to produce some pretty heinous and very difficult to digest heat maps or "spatial tree maps." By embedding coloration and lines into the treemaps the authors hoped to convey intuitive information to the reader. Instead my eyes often glazed over and sometimes I flat out disagreed with their affirmation that this is how to display data beautifully. You're welcome to try to convince me that geographing has some sort of merit other than producing pretty mosaics of large image sets but it took a lot of effort for me to continue reading at points in this chapter.

Chapter Seven sets the book back on track in "Data Finds Data" where the writers cover very important concepts and problems surrounding federated search and instead offer up directories with some semantic metadata or relationship data that makes keyword searching possible over billions of documents. For anyone dealing with large volumes of data, this chapter is a great start to understanding the options you have to processing your data when you first get it (and only once) versus searching for that data just in time and paying for it in delay. While the former incurs much more disk space cost, Google has proven that paradigm shift definitely has merit.

Chapter Eight is about social data APIs and pushes gnip heavily as the de facto social endpoint aggregator for programmers. The chapter mentions WebHooks as an up and coming HTTP Post event transmission project but doesn't offer much more than a wake up call for programmers. The traditional polling has dominated web APIs and has lead to fragile points of failure. This chapter is a much needed call for sanity in the insane world of HTTP transactional polling. Unfortunately, the community seems to be so in love with the simplicity of polling that they use it for everything, even when a slightly more complicated eventing model would save them a large percentage of transactions.

Chapter Nine is a tutorial on harvesting data from the deep web. What they mean by this is that — given proper permission — one can exploit forms on websites to access database data and then index that instead of merely being relegated to static HTML pages. In my opinion, this is a fragile and often frowned upon approach to data collection but as this chapter (and many others) illustrates, sometimes data is locked up due to lack of resources to expose it. This means that if a repository of information is meant to be available to you through a simple submission form, you can tease that information out of "the deep web" and into your system with the tricks mentioned in this chapter.

Chapter Ten is the story of Radiohead's open sourced "data" music video of "House of Cards" and the collection process from the kinds of devices used to the methodology of collecting that data to the attitude they used when treating the data. This chapter is a sort of key for understanding what data you have with Radiohead's offerings and I heavily recommend it for anyone interested in taking a stab at this video. The most interesting things I found in this was their method for collection and, more importantly, their decision to actually degrade the data and opted not to texture when displaying Thom Yorke's face — citing artistic choice. This chapter gave me one very amazing display tool that I am embarrassed to admit I had no knowledge of prior to this book: processing.

Chapter Eleven is the story of a few people that chose to do something about serious crime problems in Oakland. The city was compiling reports of crimes weekly but they weren't opening up the data. You could do a search and get a very minimal display on a map of crimes that had happened. This caused Oakland Crimespotting to arise. At first they were forced to graphically scrape and estimate crime locations so their own system could offer it back to the user in more intuitive and useful ways to the citizens so the citizens could take action. At first they were forced to work around problems but in the end the city government came to its senses and began offering them the data in a far more open format. From browsing the site now, you can get an idea of the tale this chapter tells. The evolution of that end product is chronicled in this chapter.

Chapter Twelve center's on sense.us, a potentially powerful product that aims to empower users to analyze and create notations on graphs that might relay correlations between factors inside US Census data. The only disappointment with this chapter is that sense.us isn't live for us to use. The tool shows powerful abilities in collaboration in analysis of census data but also is a double edged sword. There's nothing that stops this tool from being used for political and monetary ideals instead of purely academic revelations. They used tools like Colorbrewer and prefuse to dynamically generate graphs and charts that were pleasing to the eye. Then they used 'geometric annotation' (a vector graphic approach to recording user's doodling and annotations) in order to facilitate collaboration. The notes the researchers took on the collaboration between their pilot users is probably more intriguing than their actual approach to display good graphics. Each user seemed to take a natural progression from annotation producer to annotation crawler and then bounce between them as other user annotations gave them ideas for more annotations to create. While not exactly ideal collaboration, it's interesting to hear what users do in the wild when left to their own.

Chapter Thirteen "What Data Doesn't Do" is a very short chapter with a set of ten or so rules that are intended to remind you that data doesn't predict, more data isn't always better or easier, probabilities do not explain, data doesn't stand alone, etc. This chapter felt sort of like a pause and remember way point through the book. Just when you've gone through these great stories of success, the book, reels you back into reality with this chapter. In other chapters you'll be reminded to avoid pitfalls like the narrative fallacy but this book just reminds you quite literally what data doesn't do automatically for you. It's an indicator that you need to shore up these things that data doesn't magically do when you present data.

Chapter Fourteen is Peter Norvig's "Natural Language Corpus Data" and does not disappoint. Once the reader is empowered with the code and the data in this chapter, it almost seems like one could solve several problems using ngrams, Bayes' theorem and natural language analysis. As you read this chapter, Norvig lays out how to tackle several problems with ease: decoding encryption levels up to WWII, spelling correction, machine translation and even spam detection. In just 23 pages, Norvig conveys a tiny bit of the power of a corpus of documents coupled with the willingness to be a little dirty (total probabilities summing to more than one, dropping ngrams below a threshold, etc). It's clear why he's employed at Google.

Chapter Fifteen takes a drastic turn into one of Earth's oldest data stores: DNA. As the chapter so coyly notes, programmers can view DNA as a simple string: char(3*10^6) human_genome; The chapter gives you a brief glimpse of DNA analysis but focuses more on the data storage involved in facilities that are currently working to harvest data from many subjects. As of the writing of this chapter, one facility was generating 75 terabits per week in raw data. Most interesting to me from this chapter was ensemble.org, a site to find DNA data, genome data and also collaborate with other researchers on annotating and commenting on certain parts and regions of DNA.

Similar to the previous chapter, Chapter Sixteen focuses briefly on chemistry and describes how data was collected "to predict teh solubility of a wide range of chemicals in non-aqueous solvents such as ethanol, methanol, etc." Having a very minimal chemistry background, it's never really revealed what purpose this data collection has but nonetheless the chapter explains a lot of challenges in this environment that are similar to other chapters. The interesting aspect of this chapter is that the team used open notebook science to collect this data and therefore faced the challenge of cleaning crowd-sourced data. A constantly recurring problem in these chapters is how one represents data and chemistry apparently has many standards — some more open than others. This book makes a very good argument for open standards and selecting open standards when one witnesses the screen scraping, licensing issues and costs researchers face when unifying data even for something as old as the representations of chemicals.

Chapter Seventeen is the case study of FaceStat, a statistically more ambitious Hot-or-Not effort from researchers. The site would allow anyone to upload a photo of a person and then allow users to rate them and tag them. After collecting this data, the researchers used the ubiquitous R statistical language to do some feature extraction on the data. Of course, the chapter first deals with cleaning the data and catching bad user input. While this chapter sounds like vanilla run-of-the-mill feature extraction, it also includes some interesting display examples as well as the very interesting yet controversial stereotype analysis. From taboo topics like attractiveness vs age line fitting to the sexism of tags to using k-means in order to establish stereotype clusters in the data. While other chapters sought offense through possible privacy concerns, this chapter reveals more about the callow stereotypes that internet inflict upon each other.

Chapter Eighteen looks at the San Fransisco Bay Area housing market from a very interesting selection of recent years. What differentiates this chapter from so many of the others (we collect, clean and process the data) is that it needed to break the data down by neighborhood to find the really interesting features of the data. The neighborhoods could then be grouped into six different groups with their increase in house prices to their decline in house prices. Only one group had one neighborhood that showed no decline (Mountain View). Unfortunately for this chapter and the next one, by the time the reader arrives they appear to be straight forward replications of ideas from other chapters. Chapter Nineteen is brief chapter on statistics inside politics. Aside from revealing five or six interesting correlations in voting revealed through data, this chapter merely relays what we already know: politicians implement statistics to a sometimes harmful degree (gerrymandering).

The last chapter is, appropriately, about the many sources of data exposed on the internet and the problems everyone faces in matching entities from one data source to another. The idea of using a URI to describe a movie hasn't really seemed to catch on. And if that wasn't enough, even words like "location" used to describe a column could mean drastically different things between houses and genomes. The chapter lists out a number of sources where data is available to download and tinker with (most already listed in the book) and proceeds to analyze an algorithmic (collective reconciliation) way for a system to differentiate between two movies with the same name. Naturally the author of this chapter worked on freebase which was recently (and predictably) acquired by Google. Although a short chapter, it speaks to problems that all online data communities face and what prohibits mashups from automagically happening between two disparate data sources holding data that is actually related.

With the exception of chapter six, every chapter offered me something that I won't forget. More importantly, most chapters offered a data source or data processing tool that expanded my toolbox of things to use when programming. The only reason this book misses a perfect 10/10 from me is chapter six and a couple of the later chapters feeling like weaker ideas from earlier chapters rehashed into a different domain. A worthwhile book if you work with data — whether you be a consumer or producer.

You can purchase Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

suso writes ""The estimated population of the world will pass 6,666,666,666 today. No doubt an interesting number for people everywhere (not referring to any religion connotations). 5,555,555,555 was passed about 14 years ago. You may not realize that only 80 years ago, the population of the Earth was only around 2 billion. This shows how the population of the world has increased at an alarming rate in recent times, although the growth rate is almost half what it was at its peak in 1963, when it was 2.2%. Unrelated but also an interesting coincidence, the estimated number of available IPv4 addresses is getting very close to 666,666,666. It should cross over today as well.""

ChrisK87 writes "The United States' population will hit 300 million on Tuesday morning, just 39 years after it reached 200 million, the US Census Bureau estimates. A 'population clock' will record the milestone at 0746 (1146 GMT) — a timing based on calculations that factor birth and death rates and migration." From the article: "But it is not possible to say if the 300-millionth American was a new-born or crossed one of the US borders. Correspondents say that there is not expected to be the same hullabaloo as when the figure of 100 million was reached in 1915, or the double century in 1967 when President Johnson gave a speech and newborn Robert Ken Woo Jr was hailed the 200-millionth American by Life magazine. Today, the population figure is mired in the divisive politics of immigration — a hot-button issue ahead of the 7 November mid-term elections, they say." The story has lots of interesting stats and graphs, for those of us so inclined.

Read on for some of the most interesting comments and exchanges on a handful of yesterday's Slashdot posts (on the age of the Universe, virtual desktops in OS X, trick photography on the Reuters wire, and AOL's latest privacy gaffe) in today's Backslash summary.

About yesterday's story about a recalculation of the Hubble constant that indicates the Universe is much older than the current conventional wisdom that it's about 14 billion years old, reader Toby Haynes (tjwhaynes) writes

I love it when I see reports like this. Stating that the age of the universe is 15.8 billion years old gives the impression that this is accurate to around 1 percent or better. The error bars on this sort of figure are probably closer to +/- 2 billion years or more, implying that the 99% percentile answer is something in the range 12-20 billion years. Most of the "measurements" over the last 20 years fit into that range. There is a tendency for the more recent publications to fall into the 14-16 billion year mark and that may simply be a reflection that that is the "accepted" answer.

I actually used to work on a team measuring the Hubble Constant using Radio Telescope data ten years ago — actually the same group who came up with 42 km s-1 Mpc-1 value which caused all the Douglas Adams H2G2 references (that was shortly before I joined). There was a lot of controversy over the value of the Constant back then and it is still a hot topic. Back then, the Hubble Constant was thought to have values anywhere from 30 km s-1 Mpc-1 up to 120 km s-1 Mpc-1 . The smaller the value of the Hubble Constant, the older the Universe is. Having a smaller value was desirable because it meant that the Universe was old enough to account for the oldest objects observed (about 16 billion years old). Think about that.

One of the points that struck me then was that the value of the Hubble Constant measured tended to be higher when measured using "more local" techniques and tended to be lower as techniques using more distant measurements were used. The Radio Telescope information gave us measurements based on object around or beyond a redshift of 1 (or, to put it another way, these clusters of galaxies observed were about half the age of the universe when the light left them).

Anyway, we'll be seeing more measurements of the Hubble Constant for many more years. Just remember the error bars!

Reader habig disagrees, writing

No, the startling thing about recent cosmological work is that we do know this number to ~percent. The flagship for this new "precision cosmology" are the WMAP [nasa.gov] results [nasa.gov]. The number is weighing in at 13.7+/-0.2 billion years. Take a look at the tables of cosmological parameters in this paper and the carefully calculated error bars.

This particular press release's sweeping claims do overreach, as nicely summarized by Michael Richmond in a post above. M33 isn't at a cosmological distance, the observations being done by this project help to understand the lower rungs of the distance ladder, from which you can figure out distances to far-off galaxies and try to calculate numbers to independently compare to the microwave background fits. These results are one of many such distance calibrations, and have to be factored in statistically with the others. On the whole, several other means of figuring out cosmological parameters (such as the Age of the Universe) agree with the WMAP results within errors. You only get TFA's 15% increase if that is the only measurement you use to calibrate distances, throwing out all the rest.

To that, Haynes replies

Chewing through that paper (interesting one by the way) shows that those error bars are based on analysis of the data after processing. Therefore, those error bars on the age of the universe are assuming that the removal of foreground sources and fluctuations due to the Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect have been done absolutely correctly. No attempt (that I can see) has been made to model the errors arising from that procedure. That alone suggests that there are systematic effects which are not accounted for in those results.

I'm extremely skeptical of a lot of error bars on a lot of data. Confusion is a huge topic in radio astronomy (and I don't mean the chaotic, running-around, headless-chicken type of confusion) and I see paper after paper that really doesn't understand it, deal with it or present any full explanation of how errors in confusion analysis would propagate into the answers.

Of the several announcements from Apple's World Wide Developers Conference yesterday, the most controversial seemed to be the introduction of "Spaces," an implementation of virtual desktops for Mac OS X's next version, Leopard.

Reader bandrzej welcomed the introduction of virtual desktops, but pointed a finger at Apple for taking so long to introduce them:

About time with the virtual windows! Took them long enough...all other major *nix based window managers have them. Makes their "photocopying" comment at WWDC seem double edged, eh?

mblase has a mitigation defense for Apple's tardiness, writing

In all fairness, Leopard's Spaces implementation looks like a quantum improvement on other virtual desktop managers I've used. (Granted, it's been awhile since I tried any since I was never very satisfied.) None of the other VDMs I recall were quite "Mac-like" enough — by that, I don't mean flashy and animated, but easy to use and understand.

They borrowed some design ideas from Expose, it looks like; you can view all four of your desktops at once; you can drag-and-drop windows from one to the other; and they all use the same Dock instead of using different Docks for each desktop, which is the one thing I always wanted.

Reader CatOne mostly agrees and adds some details:

I've played with Spaces briefly; it's nice.

You can configure as many virtual desktops if you want — the default is 4 (2x2) but you can add rows or columns as you see fit. I went to 16 (4x4) and that was fine... I don't know whether 36 or heck 81 would be manageable. I'm sure it would be RAM heavy ;-)

The ability to bind applications to individual "spaces" is nice, as is the ability to dynamically drag windows between them. Clicking on an application icon automatically moves you to the appropriate space; this should mean much less (where is that damn window, it's buried!) that I still experience, even on my 30" Cinema Display. I thought this would be enough space for that to not happen anymore; all I have now is *huge* browser and mail windows.

Is it a quantum leap in virtual desktop managers? No. But switching between them is quick, efficient, and easy (you can use control-space # to go to it, or control-arrow key)... so it really just gives you a desktop space many times your actual space... that's what it feels like. None of the cube effects a la You! desktops, which is slow and mostly eye-candy-esque.

On the disclosure by America Online that the company had inadvertently released more than a half million customer search records stripped of names but not otherwise sanitized (and thereby possibly exposing individuals to snooping), reader ivan256 wants to know

Why were you ever under the delusion that aggregate data about your searches would be kept private? You don't even have an implied right to privacy when you send un-encrypted data across the internet. Not only are people stupid if they're upset about this, they're stupid if they're surprised.

Calling this is a consumer rights issue is a joke. There are no rights involved here other than ones that people made up after the fact because they were irrationally upset.

To that question, reader schwaang writes

Maybe because AOL's privacy policy says so? First because it defines Member Information to include:

"information about the searches you perform through the AOL Service and how you use the results of those searches;"

And then it says:

"AOL will only share your AOL Member information with third parties to provide products and services you have requested, or when we have your consent"

"Keep reading," says ivan256:

Get down to the part about AOL Search, which has additional privacy terms. It is implied that they have your consent unless you opt out of the data collection.

While some commenters scoffed at privacy concerns in aggregated, semi-anonymized data, reader geekotourist says it's time to revisit "personally identifying information."

When AOL apologized today, the spokesperson said'"Although there was no personally-identifiable data linked to these accounts, we're absolutely not defending this."

Back in January, related to the story on how the DoJ demands and gets ISP data, AOL had said that "We did not comply with the request made in the subpoena," spokesman Andrew Weinstein said. "Instead, we gave the Department of Justice a list of aggregate anonymous search terms that did not include results or any personally identifiable information."

AOL- you need to rethink that phrase personally identifiable, because it doesn't seem to mean what you think it means. You're hiding behind one technical definition of PII, without concern about whether or not the results actually have PII. If you're releasing results with personally identifying information, then you cannot say you're not releasing PII. I'd written in January "I question this assumption by Yahoo, AOL, etc. that search terms, by themselves, have no privacy considerations because they've been separated from personal info. What if the search itself contains personal information? Are the search companies deleting the timestamps and randomizing the order of the search terms themselves? Because otherwise I could see personal info showing up." Obviously, half a year later, they still think that replacing a name with a number takes away the PII. They need to have a talk with, say, the Census Department, about why the department will withhold data about groups of businesses in a region. Grouped data can easily become PII data if you can tease out characteristics. AOL didn't even group the data!

As always, relevant quotes from the best.essay.evar on why privacy is a fundamental human right: "If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm..."

Yesterday's post about news agency Reuters' admission that it ran a digitally manipulated photo depicting the effects of Israeli bombing in Lebanon drew more than 500 comments. Joining many others in pointing out the obvious manipulation of the photograph, reader plover wants to know "Is Reuters complicit?"

The photo was so obviously manipulated as to be laughable. Anyone who's ever used the Clone Brush tool would immediately recognize it as having been manipulated, and anyone who's completely unfamiliar with digital photography would still question the regularity of the blobs of smoke.

Sure, this photographer is at fault, and you can make assumptions about his political motives for Photoshopping this image. But what's worse is how did Reuters let such a piece of crap into the system? The guys on SomethingAwful [somethingawful.com] or Worth 1000 [worth1000.com] all do a much better job, and that's just for the glory of the contest. They're not trying to pass their stuff off as "news." Even the guys at Fark [fark.com] aren't this bad (not even Heamer :-) No, this Photoshop was of "The Daily Show" quality — comically bad.

The only conclusion I can come up with is that Reuters isn't actually looking at the images that come in the door. Even if someone at Reuters had the same political agenda as the photographer, he should have had the good sense to deny that picture because the Photoshopping was so obvious. Actually, neither conclusion is good news for Reuters at all.

Piling on one last insult, Megane writes

It was done so badly that I could tell it was clone tooled by looking at the thumbnail of the picture.

Many thanks to the readers (especially those quoted above) whose comments informed each of these discussions.

I've spent seven years working as a writer and editor for Slashdot's parent company. During this time I've been to at least a dozen mainstream journalists' and editors' conferences where the most-asked question was, "How do we adapt to the Internet?" You'd think, with all the smart people working for newspapers, that by now most of them would have figured out how to use the Internet effectively enough that it would produce a significant percentage of their profits. But they haven't. In this essay I will tell you why they've failed to adapt, and what they must do if they want to survive in a world where the Internet dominates the news business. I'm going to use the Bradenton Herald as an example, not because it's a bad newspaper but because I live in the middle of its circulation area. The Herald is a typical Knight Ridder small-city newspaper in every way except one: it serves Manatee County, an area with a fast-growing population where most new residents are old enough that they grew up reading newspapers every day. Despite these favorable factors, the Herald's circulation has declined by 3.5% in the last year. Of course, newspaper circulation declines are now normal rather than exceptional. Other newspapers have done far worse, with the San Francisco Chronicle recording a 16.4% drop in the last six months alone.

Readership vs. Circulation

Much of the Chron's circulation decrease was because it stopped giving away free papers. The Boston Globe also stopped a giveaway program and suffered a circulation decline as a result, although only about half as big a loss as the Chron's, but the Globe's marketing people have said that only half of the loss came from stopping the giveaways, and blamed the rest of it on the usual suspects, notably TV and the Internet.

These figures only measure paper newspaper circulation. They don't include Web readership, which generally seems to be trending (slowly) upwards on newspaper Web sites. Circulation figures can also be misleading because they only measure the total number of newspapers distributed, not the kind of people who read them. And readership quality can often be more important, in a business sense, than quantity. This is especially true for those newspapers (namely, just about all of them) that rely on advertising for the bulk of their income.

By definition, anyone who reads a newspaper online at home can afford a computer and an Internet connection, which means they aren't at the very bottom of the economic pile. Online readers are also likely to be more open to new experiences, products, and services than those who don't feel they need to use the Internet -- which by some estimates may be as many as half of all households within the Herald's circulation area, which has a higher percentage of retirees than all but a few other U.S. counties.

Journalism professor Douglas Fisher and media executive Alan Mutter have both talked about intentional circulation losses on their blogs. In his post, Fisher says, "The industry evolves to the point of small, expensive print publications and most of the 'mass' news on the Web somehow. Then, as we evolve toward paid content online will come issues such as whether a certain amount of 'base' information should be free for every person -- sort of like a public utility of information (perhaps presented as a social utility necessary in a functioning democratic society)."

Meanwhile, when newspapers talk about readership vs. circulation, they're typically trying to estimate how many people read each copy of their print product (pdf download) rather than come up with a total picture of their publication's readership, including its online presence. This is a mistake. Instead of treating their Web sites like unwelcome stepchildren, newspapers should turn them into their primary method of news delivery -- and teach their reporters, editors, and ad sales people how to work effectively with this new -- to them -- medium.

Slashdot Lessons

1. No matter how much I or any other reporter or editor may know about a subject, some of the readers know more. What's more, if you give those readers an easy way to contribute their knowledge to a story, they will.

Imagine a newspaper with a space for comments below each story on its Web site. This Slashdot story has comments directly attached to it, not tucked away from public view the way the Bradenton Herald's site hides reader comments on Bulletin Boards that aren't directly connected to any of the paper's articles or editorials. To make matters worse, the Herald's Bulletin Boards require a separate login to post. Even if you're a logged-in reader you must put in your username and password again to use them.

As a result of these posting barriers, you hardly see any reader comments on the Herald's site, and what few there are seem to come from a small group that posts over and over. Even the Herald's single (hard to find) blog, maintained by token hip-dude entertainment reporter Wade Tatangelo, draws so few daily comments that you could count them on the fingers of one hand -- and usually have four or five fingers left over.

By contrast, the Washington Post's Web site has two blogs, Achenblog and The Debate, prominently displayed on the Opinions page that almost always draw 100+ comments per post.

A truly Web-hip newspaper would not only allow but encourage reader comments on all of its stories, not just on a blog or two. With thousands of readers as fact-checkers, mistakes would rarely go uncorrected for long, and if there was any perceived bias in a controversial article, reader comments would make sure the other side got heard. Even better, a reader who witnessed an event the paper covered would be able to add his or her account of it to the reporter's, which would give other readers a richer and deeper view of it.

2. Not all readers know what they're talking about.

While some readers know more about any given topic than a professional journalist writing about it, most don't. Some, indeed, post anything about anything, including misleading or false information. This is why Slashdot has a moderation system, and why all newspaper Web sites need to have moderation systems in place before they allow reader posts attached directly to stories. Slashdot's, which is built into the code that runs the whole site, is probably too complicated for most newspapers, but everyone (including newspaper publishers) is free to download, use, and modify it. For those who don't want to use the code behind Slashdot, there are many other free (and proprietary) content management programs available that have similar -- and often simpler and less geeky -- moderation features built into them.

3. No matter what you do, some readers will post malicious and/or obscene comments

Slashdot removes posts only in response to Cease and Desist orders or legitimate copyright infringement complaints. We find that malicious or obscene posts are usually moderated into oblivion almost immediately, because our readers -- hundreds of whom have moderation power at any given moment -- have a sharp eye for stupid stuff.

A mainstream newspaper might choose to remove blatantly disgusting posts, which would take some staff time. There would also -- inevitably -- be second-guessing and complaints, including whines from readers who believed their posts were removed because they didn't follow the [fill in political party here] line, not because they used offensive language.

Moderation never makes everyone happy. Someone will always feel the rules are too loose, while someone else will believe they're too tight. And moderates -- I mean moderators -- will always get flak from ____-wingers who think they're biased. But these problems shouldn't stop grown-up newspaper people from soliciting and publishing readers' posts. They should already be accustomed to bias accusations.

4. What if readers post comments that advertisers don't like?

This is a problem, and one to which some newspapers are extremely sensitive --not just over readers' comments but sometimes over their own reporters' stories. A 1999 Washington Monthly article had some examples of how newspapers sometimes cater to advertisers instead of their readers. Allowing readers to comment on stories, and allowing them to post anything they want (other than obscenities, blatant hate speech, and personal attacks) increases readers' faith in the newspaper, which makes it a more effective advertising medium in the long run because some of that trust will rub off on advertisers that support it.

The Business Side of a Newspaper Web Site

Slashdot, like almost all other Web, broadcast, and print media outlets, depends on ad revenue for most of its income. For the first few years of its existence as a commercial entity, major advertisers were afraid to buy ads on Slashdot or other free-wheeling, community-driven sites. They worried that every time they touted a product, all the customers they'd ever irritated would post bad things about them. It's impossible to run a company of any scale without having at least a few dissatisfied customers, no matter how good your products and services are, so this was not an unjustified fear.

Luckily for Slashdot (and our parent company), many companies have learned that they are going to get criticized online whether they like it or not, so at the very worst, running ads on pages where they get slammed gives them a chance to tell their side of the story.

Keyword-based ad placement helps them do this. Imagine making software that's often knocked for its security vulnerabilities, while competing software is available that costs little or nothing and doesn't share your product's problems. You'd want to run a Get the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) campaign on every Web page where the competing product was being discussed so that you could tell people who are (obviously) interested in the competing product how awful it is, and why they should buy yours instead.

On a local newspaper Web site, a developer intent on replacing pristine wilderness along a scenic river with ugly condominium towers in the face of opposition from local citizens' groups could run a keyword-targeted campaign explaining why their buildings would be better than a swampy, mosquito-ridden riverfront. They could stress the fact that they would reduce the population of turtles, spiders, alligators, shore birds, frogs, and other annoying wildlife, and that runoff from their chemically-fertilized landscaping would help keep local fish populations down by contributing to red tide, thereby reducing the number of smelly fishermen infesting the area.

Other, more sensible, businesses would use the same tactic -- keyword ad placement -- to sponsor discussions in a positive way. An obvious example here in Florida would be resort property owners linking ads to tourism-related stories and the discussions attached to them. With geotargeting becoming common on the Web, ads aimed at visitors could be visible to all of a Florida newspaper's online readers, while ads for a local business would only be shown to local residents -- unless the local advertiser was canny enough to realize that Florida has many thousands of seasonal residents, and that reaching these snowbirds through the local newspaper's Web site before they come South is a great way to get a leg up on competitors.

Some other ways to exploit the Web that newspapers don't seem to do well:

• Print-them-yourself coupons. This is lots cheaper than putting coupons in a print newspaper. Many newspapers boast that today's paper contains $___ worth of coupon savings. Why don't more papers make this boast about their online editions? TV stations could do this on their sites, too. This would be an entirely new source of revenue for them, since there is no way to put a coupon in a TV spot.
• Online ad circulars, similar to the paper ones that pack print newspapers on Sundays and holidays. The print ones are expensive to produce and deliver, especially in color. Online circulars would be far less costly.
• Selling sponsorships for community calendars and other "public interest" sections that should be on every newspaper's Web site -- but often aren't or are produced in too scattered a manner to be useful for readers. C'mon, newspaper (and local TV) people! A well-organized, database-driven events calendar is easy to produce. If you don't have one (and sponsors for it), you should.
• Sponsored, "free to individuals and small businesses," local classifieds. craigslist and eBay are busily taking the classified ad market away from newspapers, with Google getting ready to help them with this effort. The Poynter Institute's Steve Outing suggests that the best way to beat back this threat is to "Turn newspaper classifieds into an active and interactive community, instead of just static, dull listings. A cold-hearted newspaper classifieds database could well be smothered by Google classifieds. A local-focused interactive community may be less vulnerable."

The Local-Focused Interactive Community

I believe the future of not only classified ads but of local news gathering and distribution is the "local-focused interactive community." According to this article, craigslist founder Craig Newmark agrees with me. So do plenty of other Web entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who are busily building and financing "community" sites.

Local newspapers should have dominated all of this interactivity from the beginning. They had the name recognition and -- through their print editions -- the promotional muscle to make their Web sites into unassailable community hubs. But they didn't, and now they're reduced to playing catch-up.

If the Sarasota Herald-Tribune had followed through on its plans to incorporate reader-written blogs into its site, Suncoastblog.com probably wouldn't exist. This group blog is an admittedly lame effort, barely begun, put together by several people in this area (including me) who thought it would be nice to have a local site that might eventually cover events and places that don't make their way into the local papers. We know the Herald-Tribune, whose circulation area overlaps the Bradenton Herald's, had thought about hosting reader blogs at one point, because they asked readers to submit blog ideas several months ago. I submitted one and never heard back.

I also submitted a local computer business column concept to the Herald. I came up with it because the Herald has a Sunday business page it calls "Digital Manatee," on which I have never seen anything other than out-of-town wire service material even though there is more than enough local computer and Internet business activity to fill a weekly column, and enough local computer and computer service vendors to surround that column with profitable advertising.

The Herald's editor didn't respond to my proposal. I've written three computer-oriented books, and thousands of articles that have run online and in print all over the world, but I am apparently not worth even a polite turndown from my local paper's editor. No problem. A week later I was having lunch with a couple of local entrepreneur buddies. I told them what had happened. They suggested an online computer business magazine instead of a Herald column, and offered to finance it on the spot, out of their pockets.

I don't have time to start a new publication. But I am in a position to help someone else start one, and to write a story or two for it now and then. Financing's in place. So is a domain name. So at some point the Herald and Herald-Tribune may have (yet) another niche publication competing with them. It won't be a big competitor, but its ad revenue will come from lucrative business-to-business accounts you'd think a local newspaper would be eager to lock up with a weekly (or more frequent) column for local computer-using business people.

This doesn't mean the Herald has a bad editor or that another small paper would have reacted differently. I use this anecdote only to point out that it is now easier to start an online publication than for even a highly-qualified outsider to get his or her work into a local paper. Is it any wonder that local blogs and other online niche publications are springing up like mad? And as a corollary, is it any wonder that newspaper circulation and influence continues to decline?

Newspapers need to open up more to the communities around them. They need to stop confining their interaction with readers to advisory board meetings and questionnaires, and allow readers' stories, opinions, and thoughts to become an integral part of the newspaper itself. They should not allow readers to alter the newspaper's own words, as the Los Angeles Times did back in June with their laughable wikitorial experiment. Moderated comments are a much better way to give readers a voice. So are journals that allow (logged-in) readers the same level of freedom they'd have with their own blogs, but also give them the cachet of being published on a "major brand" Web site.

'Local' is the Key Word

The Herald, Herald-Tribune, and many other (if not most) local newspapers seem to think that they are still their readers' primary source of national and international news, just as they were 20 years ago. So that's what fills their front pages most of the time, with local and regional news stuck in a "B" or "C" section.

Welcome to the Internet age, local newspaper (and TV) people. I can and do get my national and international news from the New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, Al Jazeera, Fox News, CNN, and other online media that cover faraway events better and faster than you ever will. I turn to you for local news. You tell me more about last week's home invasion robbery on 11th Street East than they ever will.

It's time for local newspapers to become truly local; to feature local news on the front pages of both their Web sites and print editions, with only a few out-of-the-area stories up front, augmented by an above-the-fold story list that tells readers where to find national and international news on their inside pages.

Add readers' stories and comments to the mix and you suddenly have a local online community, not just a newspaper. This will not take work away from professional reporters, photographers, and editors, who will still be the foundation of local news-gathering. In fact, increased interaction with local community members will probably give them more work than ever, because they will find themselves inundated with news tips and story suggestions they never would have found on their own. Some of these story ideas will be dreck and some will be invaluable. It will be up to the newspaper's editors to find the (rare) nuggets in the huge pile of dross they will need to sort through every day, and up to the newspaper's reporters to follow up on them.

One important thing a community-oriented, Web-based newspaper must do is credit readers for their story leads unless they specifically request anonymity. Another good idea is to pay readers who submit news stories that are written well enough that they can run with only routine editing and fact-checking. Those readers are, in effect, doing a reporter's work, and they should get some sort of compensation for it. Some may even turn into stringers capable of covering government meetings and other events when staff reporters aren't available, and a few of those stringers eventually ought to become staff members. After all, if a newspaper is going to be about, by, and for its local community, shouldn't that community be its primary recruiting ground?

Newspapers Will Not Die

Some newspapers (and newspaper chains) will probably not survive the shift from news-as-monologue to news-as-dialog. Most will, although those that wait too long to adjust will have much of their audience, influence, and ad revenue taken away by more agile competitors.

The smartest newspapers will follow my survival recipe or come up with their own way to become an integral part of their community instead of a building full of people who have been sprinkled with Secret Journalism Powder that makes them better and smarter than their readers. These newspapers will not only survive, but prosper. They may even become the prime outlets for bloggers in their communities, which will increase their readership and ad revenue. Extreme ____-wing bloggers won't want their words associated with the hated Mainstream Media, but most others will be happy to have a widely-read, influential outlet for their work.

Eventually, I expect print newspapers to become "snapshots" of their Web editions taken at 1 a.m. or another arbitrary time, poured into page templates and massaged a little by layout people, then sent to the printing presses, a pattern that has potential for significant production cost reductions if handled adroitly. From that point on, their paper editions will be distributed the same way newspapers are now.

Senior citizens and others who can't afford (or don't want) computers are and will continue to be a viable market. So will commuters who use public transportation. Then there are those -- a substantial part of the population -- who simply prefer reading words and looking at pictures on paper to seeing them on a screen. They will still want physical newspapers, even if they are not as up-to-date or as complete as what they'd get on the Web.

However it is delivered, text will not go away anytime soon. For a fast reader, it is the most efficient way to take in large quantities of information. Most people speak at a rate of between 130 and 200 words per minute. Most college students, according to a Virginia Tech student guide, can read non-technical material at 250 to 300 words per minute, and can increase that reading speed significantly with a little thought and practice. Listening to a city council meeting at 150 words per minute takes much longer than reading a meeting transcript at two, three, four or ten times that speed. Now have a skilled reporter -- whether a staff member, paid contributor or volunteer -- write an intelligent summary of that meeting, and even an average reader can learn what happened there in a few minutes instead of slogging through a two hour audio or video recording.

The Web version of that summary can be posted without waiting for the printing presses and delivery trucks to roll, and can have audio or video snippets embedded in it, but there is no reason not to make the text portion of it available on paper for those who prefer it in that form, unless the paper's editors decide so few people are interested in a city council meeting that it doesn't deserve a spot in the print version -- and tracking page readership on the Web version of the paper before the paper edition goes to press should give those editors a good idea of what they should and shouldn't put on paper.

Printed newspapers will have a significant following for many years to come. They may or may not become "expensive," as Professor Fisher predicts, but they will likely become smaller than they are now, and subscription sales efforts will probably be targeted more closely at groups unlikely to have Internet connections, especially senior citizens.

On the Web side, it's likely that newspapers will end up keeping most of their content free, with specialty sections (and posting privileges) reserved for logged-in users. Whether they'll be able to charge for some or all of their Web content is questionable. I paid $50 for a year's subscription to the NYT's Times Select program, and I don't think it's a good enough value that I'll renew my subscription when it runs out. I would be more likely to pay if I lived in New York and that subscription, in addition to what it gives me now, offered access to additional features like complete transcripts of government meetings. Indeed, I would happily pay at least $30 per year to the Bradenton Herald for a well-organized Web edition that gave me what I now get in the paper edition, plus government meeting transcripts and other useful subscriber-only features.

But if I paid for an online subscription to the Herald, I'd probably drop my subscription to the paper edition. I'd still be the same person, with the same interests, earning power and spending habits. The only thing that would change about me, from the newspaper's perspective, would be my news delivery preference.

The challenge for local newspapers that beef up their Web editions at the expense of their paper versions won't be to keep (or add) readers, but to teach advertisers that the Web, not paper, is the best way to reach their most lucrative potential customers.

This may not be easy, but it will be a lot easier than explaining to advertisers why they should keep spending money in a newspaper that has fewer readers, and less influence, every year.

Anonymous Coward writes "IBM has released a Linux based technology enabling spatiotemporal modeling of infectious agents across the United States, providing scientists and public health officials with a powerful tool for understanding, and potentially preventing, the spread of infectious diseases. The new STEM technology provides Geographic Information System (GIS) data for every county in the United States supplied by TIGER files."

Chilltowner asks: "I'm trying to get local (US) maps together for a community project. I want to able to modify and annotate the maps and provide them free to the public, creating a derivative open work. They also need to be accurate down to the street level and no more than 10 years out of date. I've been searching around for maps available in the public domain or under open licenses, like the Creative Commons licenses allowing derivative works. I've looked at the National Atlas, but the maps, though interesting, aren't detailed enough with street information. The topographical and aerial image maps available through that site are from Terraserver, which are copyrighted to Microsoft. Plus, I really just need simple vector road maps, not USGS rasters. I tried looking at the Census Bureau's TIGER line data, but I can't make heads or tails of it. Are there maps available through other agencies (national or international)? Are there Free/Open-Source Software projects that are making use of public data to build street-level maps for free (as in speech) use?"

waytoomuchcoffee writes "Over 200 million U.S. residents now have access to the internet at home, or 3/4 of the U.S. population. This is quite a jump, as only 51% of U.S. homes had access to the internet in August of 2000. Interestingly, among age/gender groups, internet access is highest among females 35-54."

RonMcMahon writes "According to a CNN Money article, Forrester Research is predicting that there will be 235,396 fewer Computer Programmers and Software Engineers employed in 2015 than there are today in America. This is a 25% reduction in the number of positions from today's depressed numbers. This sucks. I know that many companies are moving work off-shore, but wow, that's half the population of Wyoming!"

securitas writes "eWEEK has two related articles on the growth of open source software. The first article is about the growth of desktop Linux, featuring Lotus and the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) founder Mitch Kapor, who says (among other things) that call centers will be where the next wave of growth for desktop Linux happens and that 10 percent of global desktops will be Linux in a few years. He bases his statements on a report by Eazel and GNOME Foundation co-founder Bart Decrem entitled 'Desktop Linux Technology and Market Overview' (PDF) mentioned last week. The second story is about open source software growth in the government sector where government agencies like the U.S. Census Bureau have embraced OS software for projects like the State and County QuickFacts site. Based on Perl, Apache, MySQL and Linux, the site gets 200,000 page views a day."

willo asks: "I recently built an on board computer for my Grand Cherokee. The initial uses for it include music, gps navigation, on board diagnostics and a baby cam so I can see how my kid is in that rear facing seat. After lots of research and testing, I'm really disappointed with the mapping software out there for Linux. Gpsdrive provides the basic functionality I need, but the street names are built into the image and are difficult to read at a glance while driving. Not to mention that it has to download the maps it needs ahead of time. Xastir can handle almost any map out there, but it reads through every map for each redraw! It also seems to lack the ability to zoom intelligently based on location. Note that it's not really designed to be a navigation aid, but rather a ham radio APRS tool. (I am a ham). Delorme Street Atlas USA does what I really want, but it's been a pain to make run properly under wine. Is anyone else out there working on a decent navigation application?"

"To be really usable navigation software should do the following:

• handle maps efficiently and draw them quickly
• have intelligently organized map sets for countries/states. (You can't download a friggin map in the middle of Montana!)
• include serial gps/gpsd support. (just about everyone has this)

I've found a few references to mapping projects that seem to just be vaporware.

Map Sources do exist for this! Bruce Perens made TIGER/line data availible. NAVTECH is the map source for pretty much all the vehicle navigation systems out there, and high resolution maps are availible from the Geographical Information Survey."

Bruce Perens writes: "In an effort to seed the development of Open Source(TM) auto-navigation software, mapping web sites, and other geographical applications, I have purchased the TIGER/Line 1997 data set, and will be reissuing it on CD under the GPL. This is a complete U.S. map database, with GPS coordinates, street names, etc. I am offering one 6-CD set to each of Debian, GNOME, and KDE, and will consider other worthy non-profit groups with a history of finishing what they start. They will be able to use this data to develop navigation applications, etc., under the GPL or LGPL" The FAQ specifies this does not include topological data, but Bruce is looking into other sources of that.

Bruce Perens writes: "In an effort to seed the development of Open Source(TM) auto-navigation software, mapping web sites, and other geographical applications, I have purchased the TIGER/Line 1997 data set, and will be reissuing it on CD under the GPL. This is a complete U.S. map database, with GPS coordinates, street names, etc. I am offering one 6-CD set to each of Debian, GNOME, and KDE, and will consider other worthy non-profit groups with a history of finishing what they start. They will be able to use this data to develop navigation applications, etc., under the GPL or LGPL" The FAQ specifies this does not include topological data, but Bruce is looking into other sources of that.