Slashdot Mirror

neilest writes "Organic chemistry textbooks will need to be revised to recognize a chemical species that chemists have discovered at Northwestern University. The species -- pentamethylcyclopentadienyl cation -- was thought not to exist for long because theory said it was unstable. The full story can be found at this suntimes article"

According to this story running at Info World, the license from FrontPage 2002 contains a clause that says 'You may not use the Software in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services ...' An unfortunate clause that will prevent me from my long term plan of migrating Slashdot to Frontpage (cough). There's lots of other nastiness in this article too. Can anyone find that specific clause? Can anyone find the EULA itself? Update: 09/20 18:10 GMT by T : According to reader bteutsch "FWIW, the clause appears only in the EULA agreement for use of the FrontPage Logo, not with the product or server extensions license."

Satai writes: "FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE has been delayed a full year, until November of 2002. The reasons included a lack of support for SMPng - including a developer fall-off ratio of 15 to 1 - a desire to finish the PowerPC/Sparc64/IA64 architectures, and a general desire to robustly test the additions. The economic downturn even makes an appearance in the announcement."

Marty writes: "Coming soon to a CD near you, Safeaudio, the Bride of Macrovision. Those wonderful people at Macrovision, who brought us such wonderful technological innovations as, well, macrovision copy protection on VHS tapes, is now taking a stab at the CD market with a new scheme called Safeaudio. The press release about the beta test can be seen here, which I found initially on Stereophile. It's designed to prevent copying of audio CDs to a CD-R (no technical details are given). Might as well get rid of that whole pesky fair use provision of copyright law, right? After all, according to Macrovision, "We believe that SAFEAUDIO provides an opportunity for the music industry to regain the billions of dollars lost to unauthorized casual copying." Better we all buy multiple copies of the same CD so we can keep one in the car, one at work, one at home so the music corporations can regain their rightful billions that we've stolen by making personal copies or compilation CDs for our own use."

Marty writes "It appears the U.S. government is setting an excellent precident when it comes to genetic testing and insurance claims. According to the Chicago Tribune, The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad for "requiring genetic testing of employees who file claims for certain work-related hand injuries" on the basis of civil rights violations. The article states that the tests looked for chromosome 17 deletion, which some studies claim makes a person more susceptible to CTS (more info about the genetic link is available at hnpp.org). Contrast this to recent policies in the UK."

Marty writes: "Most of us are still waiting for HDTV to arrive. There have been some alternatives available to people who don't live in an area with a HDTV-broadcasting station, like DirecTV. However, it looks like DirecTV has chosen to go the content-control route with the MPAA. Their set top boxes now contain the CGMS, or Copy Generation Management System. Part of the scheme allows for the remote disablement of the HDTV (480p, 720p, and 1080i) analog outputs on the set-top box, allowing the user to only view the low-grade 480i picture, even though the programming is broadcast in HD. So, now that you've spent $2000+ on your HDTV, $1000 on your DirecTV HDTV box, and your DirecTV subscription, someone else decides whether or not you can actually take advantage of that investment. You can read the full details here at E-Town."

Lars Bergstrom writes "Well, SGI's finally given up on their Visual Workstation product line -- check here for the details. " As many people have noted, the technology was pretty sweet, but people won't pay the huge premiums for that. At least the flat panels are great.

lawrence writes "The BBC is carrying this story about five post-grad students at the University of Hertfordshire who are planning on creating a glow-in-the-dark christmas tree. They would do this by adding the genes that cause glowing in fireflies and jellyfish, making the pine-needles glow all the time. They expect the cost of the trees to be about £200 ($330) Future possibilities involve coral genes that would make it multicolored. " I think my favorite part about this story is the comment about Americans being a likely market. *grin*

dooling asks: "How would one go about building a Linux cluster from the ground up? I read a lot about Linux clusters on /. and have been able to find some information on configuring the cluster, but have found little on how to assemble the hardware, i.e., what is necessary, how they should be connected, etc. So does anyone have reliable information on hardware assembly and configuration? Also, (if you've never done this before) is it worth building your own, or is it better to just buy one prebuilt and preconfigured? If you want specifics: 20-40 machines, Linux (probably RedHat 6.x), disk or diskless?, do not need video cards (but should we have them?), switch or hub (best way to hook them up). We will be doing pretty straightforward scientific computing (floating point number crunching). "