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You will find torrents at each of these mirrors. The ones on the US mirror are:
AMD64 torrent
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UK Mirror
US Mirror
Italy Mirror

You will find torrents at each of these mirrors. The ones on the US mirror are:
AMD64 torrent
i386 torrent
powerpc torrent

UK Mirror
US Mirror
Italy Mirror

You will find torrents at each of these mirrors. The ones on the US mirror are:
AMD64 torrent
i386 torrent
powerpc torrent

UK Mirror
US Mirror
Italy Mirror

You will find torrents at each of these mirrors. The ones on the US mirror are:
AMD64 torrent
i386 torrent
powerpc torrent

Download mirrors are still doing fine :
Italy
US
UK

From the site: http://ftp.cs.umn.edu/pub/ubuntu-cdimage/releases/ warty/preview/warty-i386.iso.torrent

here and here.

But this is my favorite: What Kills Bird.

Note that none of those sources says 1 billion, but the first two say 250 million in the UK based on a study, so it would not be unreasonable to assume a billion in the US. The final link reports only 100 million killed by cats, according the National Audubon society. The biggest culprit according to them? Glass windows, which kill up to 900 million birds a year.

But that last site is from "Consultants to the Wind Power Industry on birds and other wildlife issues." So they may have reason to slant things one way or another.

I have no idea why I am even reading this article, let alone posting to it.

A couple years back, a professor of mine gave a talk entitled 'Is Microsoft Word Inherently Evil?' in which he outlined why the assumption of peoples' use of MS Word creates problems and what we can do about it. It's probably nothing that most /.'ers don't already know, but he presented this at an instructional technology fair for faculty and staff, so he's helping to make the issues known outside the Computer Science populace.

How the flock would I know?

it was the federal law that required convicted felons be removed from voter registration lists.

Ah, that would be... FALSE. It's up to the states. Felon voting restrictions by state

in your tinfoil hat world. Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris personally programmed this database so that it would only exclude blacks who would vote Democrat.

Nope. People at that level don't get their own hands dirty (granted, Nixon and the tapes was an exception), they have others do the work for them.

Over at my library, we use Sun's SunRays. They make for a OK solution. At first, I was quite excited about it, but the school's IT department implemented them poorly. The biggest detail in this regard is their choice to use CDE for the desktop environment, rather than using fvwm95 or even KDE and GNOME. We used CDE for a couple of years, and then ITSS finally got around to installing KDE and making it the default option for the new incoming students.

Under CDE, the students hated them. And a lot still do, with that reputation becoming entrenched. And with the switch to KDE, the reasons the students hated them changed, although there were still a lot of negative feelings toward them. CDE is ... CDE, and very unfamiliar to your average users of Windows and Mac OS. But there weren't problems with speed. But when they put KDE 2.x on there (not sure if they are running 3 now) people knew how to use it for the most part, but things got incredibly slow. KDE is slow, CDE was pretty fast. On top of that, KDE has had a lot of flaky little features, the most common is not being able to log-out of the session, but there's a lot of parts of KDE that seem to crash randomly. That confuses students and patrons. These people aren't Linux users at home- when the logout button doesn't work in KDE, they don't know enough to log-in to the SunRay next to them and kill the Xsession. But then again, they shouldn't have to.

Considering that, it's not surprising to find that the relatively small number of real PCs are always in use, people checking to see if there's a PC open before resorting to a SunRay.

The price... it really isn't all that good. The models we use, The SunRay 1g, costs $360 now from Sun. Not horrible, but then you also have to consider the very big and expensive SunRay servers in that. When we got them, they cost a whopping $699. This was 4 years ago, but even back then you could get a low-end PC for that. That didn't include the 18" LCD displays either, but that's the same on any computer. Though, back then, the prices on the LCDs were very good- when this was all happening, I remember hearing that some school (in Michigan?) was buying a bunch of SunRays from Sun just to get the huge discount on the LCD displays, which they were using with their "real" PCs. The SunRay's lived in a closet somewhere in their original shipping boxes.

Over at my library, we use Sun's SunRays. They make for a OK solution. At first, I was quite excited about it, but the school's IT department implemented them poorly. The biggest detail in this regard is their choice to use CDE for the desktop environment, rather than using fvwm95 or even KDE and GNOME. We used CDE for a couple of years, and then ITSS finally got around to installing KDE and making it the default option for the new incoming students.

Under CDE, the students hated them. And a lot still do, with that reputation becoming entrenched. And with the switch to KDE, the reasons the students hated them changed, although there were still a lot of negative feelings toward them. CDE is ... CDE, and very unfamiliar to your average users of Windows and Mac OS. But there weren't problems with speed. But when they put KDE 2.x on there (not sure if they are running 3 now) people knew how to use it for the most part, but things got incredibly slow. KDE is slow, CDE was pretty fast. On top of that, KDE has had a lot of flaky little features, the most common is not being able to log-out of the session, but there's a lot of parts of KDE that seem to crash randomly. That confuses students and patrons. These people aren't Linux users at home- when the logout button doesn't work in KDE, they don't know enough to log-in to the SunRay next to them and kill the Xsession. But then again, they shouldn't have to.

Considering that, it's not surprising to find that the relatively small number of real PCs are always in use, people checking to see if there's a PC open before resorting to a SunRay.

The price... it really isn't all that good. The models we use, The SunRay 1g, costs $360 now from Sun. Not horrible, but then you also have to consider the very big and expensive SunRay servers in that. When we got them, they cost a whopping $699. This was 4 years ago, but even back then you could get a low-end PC for that. That didn't include the 18" LCD displays either, but that's the same on any computer. Though, back then, the prices on the LCDs were very good- when this was all happening, I remember hearing that some school (in Michigan?) was buying a bunch of SunRays from Sun just to get the huge discount on the LCD displays, which they were using with their "real" PCs. The SunRay's lived in a closet somewhere in their original shipping boxes.

The University of Minnesota-Duluth Library uses Sun Ray thin clients for many (though not all) of its public workstations. Look at their basic access hours for some evidence. I believe that while the Sun Rays are in the Libraries, they are run by the campus IT folks. I imagine either Library or campus IT staff could give you an idea of how they are used and how well they perform. I'm not sure who you would contact there for information, but I bet their directory might give you an idea.

The University of Minnesota-Duluth Library uses Sun Ray thin clients for many (though not all) of its public workstations. Look at their basic access hours for some evidence. I believe that while the Sun Rays are in the Libraries, they are run by the campus IT folks. I imagine either Library or campus IT staff could give you an idea of how they are used and how well they perform. I'm not sure who you would contact there for information, but I bet their directory might give you an idea.

If anything, cars have MORE of a right to be there since the roads were primarily built because of automobile transportation.

There have been paved roads LONG before cars. Romans had them 2000 years ago. In China they have paved roads where 1% of the traffic is cars.

They also were funded more by automobiles than by bicyles (gas taxes and whatnot).

This is simply not true. For example, this page shows that for Minnesotta roads [emphasis mine]:

Derived from three statewide taxesmotor fuels excise taxes, motor vehicle registration taxes, and starting in 2003, a portion (30 percent) of the motor vehicle sales taxroad aid accounts for nearly a third of the $1.5 billion in total local road spending annually. The remaining two-thirds comes from local government general funds, primarily property taxes and state property tax relief, also known as general-purpose aid.

While a cyclist isn't paying a fuel tax, they are still paying for the roads via other taxes. Additionally, since a bicycle induces virtually no wear on the road-surface, cyclists are paying for more than their share of road maintainence.

Please, share the road.

well first, because everyone is in some major pissing contest over their typing speeds: 105 wpm; after error adjustment (retarded idea): 102 wpm

i remember reading somewhere that the average english speaker only speaks at a rate of 150-170wpm: here

additionally, QWERTY keyboards were designed to slow a typist down...back in the day of typewriters, you couldn't have people typing so fast because the arms of the keys would jam together (i used one when i was in elementary school and i did this ^_^;;;)

that being said, a dude named Dvorak created a new keyboard layout and it was much easier to use...much more efficient...i'm sure most slashdotters have heard of Dvorak layout before...another interesting thing is that recently, i read that a computer program was written to derive the "most efficient" keyboard layout, and it turned out VERY similar to Dvorak...wish i had a link for that article tho

From an urban-planning geek's perspective, it's one of the coolest local sites I know of. But serving 300,000 a month with what I assume to be an intensive GIS application can't be cheap.

UMN Mapserver
+ GRASS GIS
+ FreeGIS tools

The equivalent ArcWeb system ain't cheap. Like several county employees' salaries uncheap.

I tried to look at their GIS site to see what they were using, and got this error:
(Firefox on Debian/G/Linux)

http://www.maricopa.gov/Assessor/Error.aspx?type =b rowser
"This site is best viewed when using Internet Explorer.
Your using: Netscape5"
[not proceeding]

.. I'm guessing they are not using Free software.

Bonus chuckle [non-county residents only]:
Spot the apostrophe disaster in the error message.

Good call

I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)

The University of Minnesota is already starting to do that with their Digital Audio Initiative. Want to learn Pashtun or Punjabi? You can. You can also study Shakespeare, British literature, science fiction, or learn how to write a short story.

More courses can be found here. They're adding courses, but slowly. It's worth bookmarking.

I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)

The University of Minnesota is already starting to do that with their Digital Audio Initiative. Want to learn Pashtun or Punjabi? You can. You can also study Shakespeare, British literature, science fiction, or learn how to write a short story.

More courses can be found here. They're adding courses, but slowly. It's worth bookmarking.

I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)

The University of Minnesota is already starting to do that with their Digital Audio Initiative. Want to learn Pashtun or Punjabi? You can. You can also study Shakespeare, British literature, science fiction, or learn how to write a short story.

More courses can be found here. They're adding courses, but slowly. It's worth bookmarking.

I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)

The University of Minnesota is already starting to do that with their Digital Audio Initiative. Want to learn Pashtun or Punjabi? You can. You can also study Shakespeare, British literature, science fiction, or learn how to write a short story.

More courses can be found here. They're adding courses, but slowly. It's worth bookmarking.

I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)

The University of Minnesota is already starting to do that with their Digital Audio Initiative. Want to learn Pashtun or Punjabi? You can. You can also study Shakespeare, British literature, science fiction, or learn how to write a short story.

More courses can be found here. They're adding courses, but slowly. It's worth bookmarking.

I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)

The University of Minnesota is already starting to do that with their Digital Audio Initiative. Want to learn Pashtun or Punjabi? You can. You can also study Shakespeare, British literature, science fiction, or learn how to write a short story.

More courses can be found here. They're adding courses, but slowly. It's worth bookmarking.

I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)

The University of Minnesota is already starting to do that with their Digital Audio Initiative. Want to learn Pashtun or Punjabi? You can. You can also study Shakespeare, British literature, science fiction, or learn how to write a short story.

More courses can be found here. They're adding courses, but slowly. It's worth bookmarking.

A couple replies-

Dynapad, the project isn't dead. I'm the one who'd know, I'm it's pappy. However, Dynapad the site at swiki.net is often dead. I rather doubt that the US gov is blocking access- swiki.net is just flaky as hell lately. Never used to be bad, but it is now.

As a consequence, I've moved it over to Utaria.net, being hosted by them for free, which is very nice of them. It is at dynapad.utaria.net.

There has not been a release for a very long time, although I've released some newer screenshots, but still old.

What's the deal? It is very hard to find time for anything when you're working 50 hours a week and going to school full-time. Hopefully, that should change this fall semester, when I forgo school for a "real" full-time job, instead of a "shit-paying, second-class employee" or "student" job. Just 40 hours a week is a vacation, hopefully a long one, during which I will make a Dynapad release.

A lot has gone into Dynapad since the last release (2 years ago? jesus). Worth at least two releases of apps and upgrades. But, being a one man project currently ran by a man with not only no time, but a bit of a trade deficit.

I'm always accepting folks to give me a hand, either willing to learn Smalltalk or know it already. I've long wanted another coder or two who'd allow me to design and manage the project, but helped out with coding. One day!

But have you actually tried to use Squeak or any of his other projects? They make neat demos. They demonstrate ideas very nicely. But I haven't found the "real, live, usable".

Yes, very much so. As I've pointed out in this thread and plenty of other times over the years, Squeak is basically my desktop OS. I have written some simple glue that allows me to run Squeak full-screen and easily switch to the only other app I need the regular OS for- a modern web browser, which means Safari or Firefox for me. That is thanks to the ever-so-slick AppleScript plugin that has been in Squeak for a very long time. I started implementing something very similar using Windows Scripting Host for Windows, but never had the time or reason to finish it.

Aside from the browser, I can do most of it in Squeak. Granted, some of it involves running the vt100/xterm client- but it's written in 100% Squeak. My email goes through the Squeak email client, Celeste, or Pine on a school Unix machine. I chat through the Squeak IRC client. I write code in Squeak's browsers. I post to my LiveJournal, keep track of RSS feeds and the weather with my own little widgets, kind of like Konfabulator for OS X, but they're nothing "special"- making them is quite easy with the Morphic GUI toolkit, so it's not as big of a deal as it is on OS X or Windows, where people are used to being forced into working one way with their data and apps.

Another practical aspect of Squeak for me is Dynapad. Dynapad is a PDA operating system/environment written in Squeak by me. I mostly stated the project as a reaction to the death of the Newton OS. The NOS is a lot like Squeak- you've got a nice, dynamic OOP language and the system is written in it. And unlike systems written in a crufy and static language, extending or modifying apps is pretty easy to do.

Some old screenies here. In this case, the little date book apps especially takes advantage of the kinds of technologies that make Squeak what it is. Older ones here, but I've been beyond burn-out busy in the last year. :/

Kay has been out of the visionary stage for a long time. I may be a blip, but I'm not the only one who uses Squeak for more than just cute demos. I don't use most of the new demoable features, most of them not being terribly interesting to me. But that doesn't stop Squeak from being the most productive environment I've ever used.

In addition to me using Squeak like this, myself and others have written apps in Squeak. No, they don't look like a native OS X/Windows/GTK+ app, but where I've used it for apps I've shared with others that wasn't an issue.

And for those who are dying to have a bland and consistent UI (no problem with that!), there is the Squeak binding to wxWidgets- wxSqueak.

Why should Kay have to limit himself to some other environment simply because you prefer it? Sure, Kay or someone else could re-write GTK+ so that it had the kind of power- useful *and* demoable power- that the Morphic toolkit has. Or add this to Quartz. But why? Kay isn't in the business of appeasing those who wouldn't be happy anyway by the work. Kay, like a lot of old and new Smalltalkers, is comfortable in that world. I am one of those people. I only use Windows, OS X and Linux as little as I have to, mostly as a host for Squeak and a usable web browser. The rest I can do within Squeak itself. On my Linux machine, I was even able to dispose of X11, instead using the links/g (with graphics) browser displaying to the framebuffer- and Squeak displaying on another fb console.

I'm not saying that this sort of setup would be for everyone. It's not! But then again, a hardcore emacs user just looks nuts to most people- at least my environment looks and feels very close to any other modern GUI system superficially. I use Squeak because it is the only environment that exists [1]. I can't do this stuff i

Rule #1: To each his own.

Just a guess: Did you go to GaTech or some other school where they use Squeak in a class? A lot of people seem to get bitter after that, especially if they didn't like the prof.

I'm with Abcd on this one. Myself, I prefer Squeak to any other desktop environment. I get absolute power over my GUI environment, but I don't have to exercise any of that power if I don't want to. I can use the standard config and GUI preferences. But I don't. Squeak affords me total control over my environment, in a way that doesn't exist on the other GUIs of Mac OS X, Linux or Windows. The GUIs of Mac OS X, Windows and Linux are all so much more confining and limiting. There are some perks to any given one of em, but nothing that touches Squeak.

Pre-Macintosh windowing system? Methinks you haven't used Squeak in a very long time. Sometime before Morphic was usable, and you were in MVC, which actually was the windowing system that pre-dated and fathered the Mac OS. These days, Squeak's GUI system/toolkit- called Morphic, and Morphic has very few real rivals. Sure, there is Self's Morphic, but that doesn't really count. :P

On Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, people have been getting giddy over tools like Konfabulator. Don't get me wrong, they're fun extensions to the desktop. But I'm pretty non-plussed. I've been doing the same thing in Squeak for a long time now, without needing anything special. If I want to put up a widget showing the temp and cloud cover icon for my zip code, it's pretty trivial... Drag out the appropriate Morphs, write a couple lines of Smalltalk code to grab the sunny/cloudy/raining cloud gif and display it.

And no, people don't have to do that every time they want a little weather monitor. I can save the object and share it with others, so that they can get their weather updates without having to do anything more than click "install" in SqueakMap.

See this for a photo of a more modern Squeak. This is still a little old, though, from around a year ago. I can use any IceWM theme with Squeak. I wish I had a screenshot of the weather widget I used to use, it was purty.

Another great example- check this out. What we have here is a Windows-like taskbar. Nope, that isn't stock Squeak. First, I installed an IceWM theme (easy as pie) and then I wrote up that little taskbar. See, a newbie popped into IRC (irc.freenode.net - #squeak) and said he wished he had a taskbar like Windows has for managing his open and minimized windows in Squeak. Always up for a small challenge to show someone new how great Squeak can be, I wrote that up for him. The whole process- between updating the people on #squeak as I wrote the code, playing around with colors, doing the actual coding *and* putting it up on SqueakMap for easy download and install took 45 minutes. About 20 minutes of that was spent doing the last step- I had never put any code up on SqueakMap before that, so I had some docs to read to find out what to do. But 25- or even 45- minutes to write up a Windows taskbar? You have to admit that's not too shabby. I can't imagine how long it'd take for something similar to be whipped up for, say, WindowMaker.

That's the kind of power Squeak gives me, a feature I use all the time to make my enviornment more useful.

If you need to communicate with someone, Squeak is not the way to go. Send an email using one of the millions of other solutions.

Why not use both? After all, Squeak does come with an email client, though it does SMTP+POP3 out of the box, IMAP (over SSL to, I think?) was added a while back as well. Nothing weird about it- it's just regular email.

And it goes beyond that. Squeak has a number of fun methods of communication, all very easily installable using SqueakMap. SqueakMap is like Debian's apt-get

Rule #1: To each his own.

Just a guess: Did you go to GaTech or some other school where they use Squeak in a class? A lot of people seem to get bitter after that, especially if they didn't like the prof.

I'm with Abcd on this one. Myself, I prefer Squeak to any other desktop environment. I get absolute power over my GUI environment, but I don't have to exercise any of that power if I don't want to. I can use the standard config and GUI preferences. But I don't. Squeak affords me total control over my environment, in a way that doesn't exist on the other GUIs of Mac OS X, Linux or Windows. The GUIs of Mac OS X, Windows and Linux are all so much more confining and limiting. There are some perks to any given one of em, but nothing that touches Squeak.

Pre-Macintosh windowing system? Methinks you haven't used Squeak in a very long time. Sometime before Morphic was usable, and you were in MVC, which actually was the windowing system that pre-dated and fathered the Mac OS. These days, Squeak's GUI system/toolkit- called Morphic, and Morphic has very few real rivals. Sure, there is Self's Morphic, but that doesn't really count. :P

On Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, people have been getting giddy over tools like Konfabulator. Don't get me wrong, they're fun extensions to the desktop. But I'm pretty non-plussed. I've been doing the same thing in Squeak for a long time now, without needing anything special. If I want to put up a widget showing the temp and cloud cover icon for my zip code, it's pretty trivial... Drag out the appropriate Morphs, write a couple lines of Smalltalk code to grab the sunny/cloudy/raining cloud gif and display it.

And no, people don't have to do that every time they want a little weather monitor. I can save the object and share it with others, so that they can get their weather updates without having to do anything more than click "install" in SqueakMap.

See this for a photo of a more modern Squeak. This is still a little old, though, from around a year ago. I can use any IceWM theme with Squeak. I wish I had a screenshot of the weather widget I used to use, it was purty.

Another great example- check this out. What we have here is a Windows-like taskbar. Nope, that isn't stock Squeak. First, I installed an IceWM theme (easy as pie) and then I wrote up that little taskbar. See, a newbie popped into IRC (irc.freenode.net - #squeak) and said he wished he had a taskbar like Windows has for managing his open and minimized windows in Squeak. Always up for a small challenge to show someone new how great Squeak can be, I wrote that up for him. The whole process- between updating the people on #squeak as I wrote the code, playing around with colors, doing the actual coding *and* putting it up on SqueakMap for easy download and install took 45 minutes. About 20 minutes of that was spent doing the last step- I had never put any code up on SqueakMap before that, so I had some docs to read to find out what to do. But 25- or even 45- minutes to write up a Windows taskbar? You have to admit that's not too shabby. I can't imagine how long it'd take for something similar to be whipped up for, say, WindowMaker.

That's the kind of power Squeak gives me, a feature I use all the time to make my enviornment more useful.

If you need to communicate with someone, Squeak is not the way to go. Send an email using one of the millions of other solutions.

Why not use both? After all, Squeak does come with an email client, though it does SMTP+POP3 out of the box, IMAP (over SSL to, I think?) was added a while back as well. Nothing weird about it- it's just regular email.

And it goes beyond that. Squeak has a number of fun methods of communication, all very easily installable using SqueakMap. SqueakMap is like Debian's apt-get

This is a bald-faced "Urban Myth" go back and review the facts of the 2000 election and you'll find the Supreme Court in reality ended up being a non-factor in the outcome of the election.

Mapserver can serve WMS/WFS and can be compiled to support ArcSDE, if you have the SDK available. It is an excellent project with a great support community.

Eventually, some script kiddie will come along and extrapolate from this paper. Containing the resulting outbreak, while not completely impossible will be most difficult

If you really like geometric data types checkout PostGIS - a full, power implementation of spatial data types. Load some points, buffer them, intersect them with lines. Then serve up a web map with MapServer. The power is yours!

• DREN is an R&D network. You won't find anything sensitive here, and it's considered the least secure of the primary DoD networks.
• NIPRnet is where you find the DoD's mail servers, primarily. This is where your mistake is - NIPRnet is considered at maximum SBU "sensitive but unclassified". The network isn't secure in the sense that Secret systems would be. All DoD systems are required to be 'secure', moreso than most or all commercial machines, but no special effort is expended to secure down NIPRnet systems. It's an analogue to the office network in a commercial environment. If you only used the Secret networks, you could never communicate outside of DoD, mostly.
• SIPRnet - You need a Secret clearance to be here. SIPRnet is for sensitive stuff. It isn't directly connected to anything else. This is what you were thinking about when you were talking about 'secure systems'. However, even stuff on the NIPRnet or DREN has to be secure.

Please note I used completely public sources. There is more to know, but not more that I can say.

In direct answer to your question, we get a decent amount of spam, mostly worm related stuff though. Most spammers seem to be afraid to send Viagra ads to .mil addresses. I dunno why. Maybe they're afraid they'll get a Hummer.

dinitrogen tetroxide (N2O4) and heptyl (a UDMH [unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine] compound)

There are quite an assortment of GIS tools available for Linux, too, for those of us mapping wi-fi. Check out Mapserver, GRASS, and PostGIS.

How about:

- panel discussions from the H2K2 conference.

- a college course on SF and Fantasy literature.

- the DV Guys focus on the art and tech of video production. (Terrible bumper music. Just suffer through it)

- The Teaching Company has some fantastic for-pay courses on CD and DVD.

- Lastly, I gotta mention The Infidel Guy. The focus is on atheism, so it's not for everyone, but there are some great interviews in the archives with people such as Massimo Pigliucci, Michael Shermer, Paul Kurtz, and Michio Kaku. Lots of contorversial and thought provoking talk on the subject of religion, philosophy, and science.

Forgive me for being the bearer of bad news, but didn't the Ariane-5 die a horrible death moments after launch...
I was told it was the result of an overlow error. Apprarantly no one bothered to check if the Ariane-4s code hadnled as many points of percision...

As others have mentioned, the TIGER data is free and good. And not rocket science to figure out. However, you can also purchase ESRI shapefiles fairly cheaply, eg on ebay, and use a 3rd party program to view/change.

Where I work we use mapserver (mapscript actually), which I think is fairly smooth. One example of street annotations being directly read from shapefiles is here [beta version]. Right now the street annotation shows up only when zoomed, but is automatic and decent; you can export PDF's to print, and soon it will interactive in terms of adding comments for specific places. All open source.

Also, many many cities and counties have freely available gis data, usually in shapefile format, for download. This is often a touch more accurate than the tiger/esri files, but those are a great start.

Point is: There are lots of freely available sources for national and local street coverage. Most conform or are easily converted to a standard (often esri shapefile oriented) format. The data often comes with no license. There are lots of [open source] programs that do a good job of allowing changes and display of annotation.

Nice ideas with great merit.
You've gotta see the "Historical Atlas of Amsterdam"
Mentioned on the MapServer mailing list
Or directly to the site HERE

The atlas shows eighteen historical maps of Amsterdam from 1544 to 2003, referenced to the present-day national coordinate system. The scans are very detailed; when you zoom in very deeply, especially on the older maps, you can see how wonderful they are as works of cartography. When you pan around a bit, they really give the impression of flying very low over the city. If you are on a fast connection, you should certainly try this with a maximized map window.
-Tyler

There's been a lot of questions about what the government can and cannot copyright. Here's some relevant information:

• The government cannot copyright their own works, but they can hold the copyright of others. Source
• Works by state (and local) governments are not necessarily in the public domain. Source

Another good resource is the Copyright FAQ here, which elaborates on both of those points.

Disclaimer: These resources are for the U.S. YMMV. IANAL.

UMN Mapserver works fairly well to display map files from nationalatlas.gov (water features, county boundaries, state boundaries, a lot else). I have used this to display points on state and county maps. I use data from the Tiger 2002 files to get long/late coordinates from an address in order to plot onto the map. The tiger files aren't 100% useful for mailing addresses, as they don't contain all streets and have no information about R.R. postal addresses. As far as understanding the tiger files goes, there are some help documents which explain what all the files are as well as their data formats.

There's a great open source project that you can use the tiger data with - Mapserver
Lots of tutorials there to, but it's a bit of a learning curve. Try it! I knew nothing about mapping, and in two months I had built a web application that could zoom down to the street level with selectable layers for all sorts of data.

All of the street level labels are there too, which makes it a very good source of free data. I've been using the data for my own project and it was fairly easy to setup.

GIS is a new-ish field, still developping very fast. A lot of tools are fairly mature, but the prices are still high, interoperability is getting good but there aren't many mature commodity components.

The major industry effort towards interop seems to be OpenGIS.

Some open source GIS stuff that looks promising to me are Mapserver and OpenMap.

I found the learning curve too much at this point, and many of the OSS solutions didn't work straight out of the box. Proprietary solutions are so expensive that they made playing around impossible.

What's more, getting data was difficult. Your city should be able to share its digitized maps. Here in Canada, my city was reluctant to share them, as some are copyright to ESRI (imagine your city co-owning its information with a foreign company!!!). What I found out however is that there isn't any copyright if you take the paper maps they publish and digitize it yourself. Time consuming, I know :(

There are a lot of useful hacks that I wanted to do with geographic data, but I shelved those plans for now. Hopefully in a year or so we will have better tools and cheaper data. If you manage to help us get there, thanks in advance :)

At our website the maps we use are based on TIGER 2002, and we're homogenizing TIGER 2003 as I type this. It's not easy to parse TIGER, but there are tools out there to do this for you. We had to integrate some features to fix some of the errors in the TIGER format, and a few other things.

Also, we're starting to publish our data (maps and other) -- just trying to figure it all out, and determine the best way to do this (suggestions are welcome!). Currently, our map engine supports some form of XML output, so we're experimenting with this at this stage.