[R] Which CRAN mirror is the fastest ?

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:49 AM, Martin
Maechler<maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:

> Yes!  And visualize the corresponding  "nearest neigbourhood"
> for each CRAN mirror on a world map
> and make this dynamically refreshing every few minutes
> and put it on a webserver so people can watch the "CRAN world"
> in real time!

 It would be useful if CRAN sites could give their lat-long
explicitly. GeoNames finds 32 "Chapel Hill"s in the USA. All of them
bar two have a population of zero though, so an automatic system could
have a pretty good guess at which one it was (the one in NC with
47,529 people, or the one in TN with 943?).

 Coords could just be added to the CRAN_mirrors.csv file. I might try
and geocode the lot later.

 I suppose it might be possible to have a non-geographic CRAN mirror
though, since a DNS entry could point to one of a global network of
servers....

Barry