Slashdot Mirror

codesmythe writes "The Fates, through SGI nee Rackable, have granted a new beginning to Silicon Valley's once darling Silicon Graphics. Despite old mistakes and economic misfortunes, Silicon Graphics' engineering contributions are legendary: their systems (oh, the systems!), and software such as the well known OpenGL and the little known Performance Co-Pilot. PCP is an enterprise-class open source system monitoring, measurement, and visualization infrastructure — overlooked in last fall's monitoring tool discussion. Since its proprietary beginning in 1993, PCP has been re-released as open source and ported to all major operating systems. Readers of Slashdot's recent Beginning Python Visualization book review will be pleased to hear there are Python interfaces to PCP data sources. Here is an example of using Python and Blender to visualize PCP data (registration may be required). The PCP dev community is well and active, and includes several of the original team members."

Stefan vd Linden writes, "An international team of scientists has discovered a substance to heal bleeding wounds within seconds. They're using a solution of protein molecules that self-organizes into a biodegradable gel. Until now they've only tested it on animals, but the tests were highly successful. From the article: 'Some surgeons are already excited about the material. "I see great potential in the eye field, the gastro-intestinal field, and in neurosurgery," says Dimitri Azar, head of ophthalmology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, US. "In the eye, even a drop of blood will blur your vision for a long time," Azar adds. "A material that would stop the bleeding could lead to a paradigm shift in how we practice surgery in the eye."'"

Laurens Simonis writes "Yesterday, the Dutch ISP Planet Internet introduced a games subscription service. For a small monthly fee, about $10, you get unlimited access to a growing list of (sort-of) current games which you can legally download from them. Currently, you can pick from 20 titles including Tomb Raider Chronicles, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare and Commandos 2. New ones are added monthly. To my knowledge, this is the first time an ISP offers this kind of service. Personally, I'm all for the idea. Could this be the future? Half-Life developer Valve Software seems to think so." This looks really cool, but I'm curious as to how well it will catch on. It feels about 5 years too early to me, but here's hoping it performs well.

Laurens Simonis writes "Yesterday, the Dutch ISP Planet Internet introduced a games subscription service. For a small monthly fee, about $10, you get unlimited access to a growing list of (sort-of) current games which you can legally download from them. Currently, you can pick from 20 titles including Tomb Raider Chronicles, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare and Commandos 2. New ones are added monthly. To my knowledge, this is the first time an ISP offers this kind of service. Personally, I'm all for the idea. Could this be the future? Half-Life developer Valve Software seems to think so." This looks really cool, but I'm curious as to how well it will catch on. It feels about 5 years too early to me, but here's hoping it performs well.

Laurens Simonis writes "Yesterday, the Dutch ISP Planet Internet introduced a games subscription service. For a small monthly fee, about $10, you get unlimited access to a growing list of (sort-of) current games which you can legally download from them. Currently, you can pick from 20 titles including Tomb Raider Chronicles, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare and Commandos 2. New ones are added monthly. To my knowledge, this is the first time an ISP offers this kind of service. Personally, I'm all for the idea. Could this be the future? Half-Life developer Valve Software seems to think so." This looks really cool, but I'm curious as to how well it will catch on. It feels about 5 years too early to me, but here's hoping it performs well.

Lars writes "A 26-year old man from Hengelo has admitted to deliberately setting fire to the Network Operations Centre of University of Twente, last Wednesday. The fire gutted two wings of the building and devastated one of the fastest networks in Europe. The arsonist is an employee of the University, which must come as quite a shock to those involved. The University released a short statement to the press. It mentions that the total damage caused is roughly 40-50 million euros (about the same in dollars) and that the guy was caught last Friday, when he tried to set fire to one of the faculty buildings."

JanJoost writes "Around 08.00 CET today the University of Twente Network Operations Center, which amongst other things hosts a SURFnet PoP as well as security.debian.org and non-us.debian.org, caught fire. The UT, which hosted the HAL in august last year is completely unreachable and is not likely to come back up any time soon. The fire department has given up every hope on protecting the server area and is now trying to protect the surrounding buildings. More information can be found at the Telegraaf, Planet Internet and Twentsche Courant. Pictures can be found here and here. It's a shame to see a great infrastructure go down in flames like this."

JanJoost writes "Around 08.00 CET today the University of Twente Network Operations Center, which amongst other things hosts a SURFnet PoP as well as security.debian.org and non-us.debian.org, caught fire. The UT, which hosted the HAL in august last year is completely unreachable and is not likely to come back up any time soon. The fire department has given up every hope on protecting the server area and is now trying to protect the surrounding buildings. More information can be found at the Telegraaf, Planet Internet and Twentsche Courant. Pictures can be found here and here. It's a shame to see a great infrastructure go down in flames like this."

musicmaster writes "A couple of organisations that worry about too much copyright protection have organised an essay contest about intellectual property. This contest is meant as an alternative to a similar WIPO contest. The contest can be found at Wipout Among the participating organisations are Center for the public domain, the Register, the EFF and the GNU foundation."

mirko writes: "Here's a link to some weird projects that consist of recycling old servers. You have the SGI Fridge, but also the VAXbar, the SGI Espresso Machine, the VaxTap2000Pro and the SGI HiFi-Miniset. Now that you recycled the case, you can get inspiration from this project in order to recycle their inside components..." We've linked to some of these before, but a couple of them are new (to me, anyway).

Starting the show off with some cool do-it-yourselfer sorta projects: Diederik Meijer submitted the The Silicon Graphics Refrigerator Project (or: How To Turn a $175.000 High-End SGI Challenge DM Server into a Fridge). Next up, mdaughtrey built a Mechanical Hit Counter jrbx1 sent us a link to an in-dash Atari 2600. Even coolor is that the dash its in is attached to a 1978 volkswagon ;) rednax sent us a review of a kit for adding neon to your PC. If you're not skilled enough to hack how it works, at least you can pretend you're cool and hack how it looks! I Nothing is more dangerous then glewtion's link to a story about a sculpture in england that that worries people since the heat it generates cook fry a bird mid-air. Oh, and I lied: even more dangerous then art is amasci's link to making pet ball-lightning. In your microwave, duh. If you've got some spare time, MxTxL submitted something that we've been seeing more of, email games. This one is battlemail, which apparently is glorified addictive paper rock scissors. f you were an Anime character, here's some helpful hints to keep in mind. Hieronymus Coward sent us a bit about The Drew Carrey Show featuring a 2 minute segment based on the sims. I wonder if they will use the vibromatic bed, actually the next expansion comes out soon (today?) so I probably am gonna have to resurrect my neighborhood sometime soon. Thirsty? Dipfan sent in a story about Coke wanting to put soda fountain style coke in every house right next to the water dispenser. Got Carbonated Milk? Finally for a little random product plugging, Rustin H. Wright found a place selling penguin crossing signs. Finally, anotherone noted that you can use Google in full swedish bork bork chef glory.