A new version of the foundation sp package is reaching CRAN mirrors, and Windows and OSX binaries should follow within a day or so. There is a significant change in how SpatialGrid objects are created, which we hope will not affect users negatively, and which is giving a two orders of magnitude speedup for reading larger rasters (single band 900 by 3600 down from 12 minutes to 6 seconds on an older 1.5GHz machine). If anyone sees any negative impacts, please contact the authors immediately directly. Roger
Roger Bivand Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43 e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no