Just a quick thanks to all who contributed to our meeting last night - I personally found both topics interesting and useful. The OpenStreetMap presentation was really quite excellent - it was nice to have a highly organized and focused discussion topic like that. Given my daily work with maps and GIS and such, the topic was even more relevant than just as an interesting geek project - I see the real world applications of data like that every day. The comment that if anyone made maps of Barre, nobody else would care, because Barre is a slum (or something to that effect) ... not really true, as it turns out. Barre is a place with a lot of problems, and some of them are related to chemical/pollutant spills/plumes/leaks that not only mean there will be remediation necessary for a given area or property, but for nearby properties as well. My company has -paid- people to get data for Barre just so we can plan remediation efforts. Having up-to-date basemap data such as that provided by OpenStreetMap, for free, is useful just about anywhere! Furthermore, while it would seem that data collected by the government about public areas or public knowledge - say parcel data for a county, or accurate street data for New York city, would be easy to get, it is in fact severely difficult. In New York, Nassau county requires you to bypass reels and reels of red-tape to get parcel data ... for the county, from the county. It is f*cked up. And then the office of Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Coordination in New York, after 9/11, locked down tons of seemingly public and generally useful data, such as their up-to-date roads data, for fear that it could be used by terrorists. My company has been working with New York for the past two years on a project that required us to collect data like this from all over that State, and we ran into many roadblocks accessing this seemingly public and free data. OpenStreetMap would be a very viable answer once the state of NY has been properly cleaned up in the OSM database. On the virtualization side... Virtual Box seems nice, but what does it offer that VMWare does not offer, aside from a lower price? Any particular features? Performance? Does it run on more platforms than Linux, Mac, and Windows? Is there a server version of Virtual Box so I could build a VB machine on my workstation, and then deploy it to my VB server? On the other hand, Xen did appear to be highly interesting ... eschewing the traditional GUI is nice, but I'm curious if Xen has a web GUI like VMWare Server v2? Is it entirely CLI based? I don't have a problem with a CLI, but other people in my IT group would prefer a GUI ... so while it might mean better job security for me to setup the VMs in Xen if there was only a CLI, it wouldn't be all that nice to my buddies who don't have a CLI inclination. Again, thanks to all - it was a good meeting! -Nick --- Nicholas Floersch (pr. Floor-sh) Stone Environmental, Inc.
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