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Feed Science Daily: First Beehives In Ancient Near East Discovered (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed
Archaeologists revealed that the first apiary (beehive colony) dating from the Biblical period has been found in excavations in Israel's Beth Shean Valley. This is the earliest apiary to be revealed to date in an archaeological excavation anywhere in the ancient Near East, according to the researcher.
Quake

Submission + - Complete Quakecon '07 Coverage: id Tech 5 Unveiled (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
bigwophh
bigwophh writes: "Top to bottom coverage of Quakecon 2007 has just been posted at HotHardware. The article includes a multitude of images and information from all of Quakecon's events, including id's keynote address in which John Carmack revealed details of the id tech 5 engine, NVIDIA's kick-off event, and all of the vendor displays. They also have pictures of all of the case mod contest winners, the lovely Frag Dolls, and news about a handful of yet to be released titles including Rage, Left 4 Dead, John Woo's Stranglehold, and Quake Wars: Enemy Territory. There's even a bit of information regarding the upcoming movie based on id's Wolfenstein franchise."
Quickies

Submission + - Human origins theory tested by recent findings. (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by annamadrigal
annamadrigal writes: The BBC new is reporting on findings presented in nature which suggest that Homo Errectus and H. Habilis were in fact sister species which co-existed.

This challenges the view that the upright humans evolved from the tool users.
The Internet

Submission + - 365main releases root-cause of data-center outage

Submitted by linuxwrangler
linuxwrangler writes: 365main has issued a root cause report and FAQ about the failure that took out prominent sites like Craigslist. It was not, as initially reported, a drunk employee but rather two failures. The generator failure was caused by a setting in the Detroit Diesel Electronic Controller that wasn't allowing memory to be reset correctly resulting in engine misfires and failed engine-starts. The problem has been duplicated and is reportedly now fixed. 365main has updated controllers on all its Hitec rotary UPS systems and shared its findings with other Hitec users. Meanwhile, the half-second outage in colo-7 was caused when a brief power-surge hit it's primary side causing it to attempt to switch to secondary power. Unfortunately, the secondary side was already powering three other colo-rooms so the transfer was refused and the PDU switched back to primary 490ms later.
Programming

Submission + - Are Industry Standards really this low?

Submitted by
segafreak
segafreak writes: "I'm a Software Engineering Student from the UK about to enter my final year. During this summer I have been on placement at a large software company (which shall remain unnamed), and while my experience hasn't been entirely negative, I'm appalled by some of the practises that seem commonplace — minimal or non-existant documentation, prototype quality code being sold to customers, lack of comments in code, and worst of all large projects coded and maintained by a single programmer! Having spoken to several of my classmates, I've discovered the situation to be similar all across the region. So fellow Slashdotters, my question is this: is our Industry really this bad? Or have my classmates and I just been shockingly unlucky?"
Networking

Submission + - Cisco co-founder pitches optics for the enterprise

Submitted by
netbuzz
netbuzz writes: "Cisco co-founder pitches optics for the enterprise

Len Bosack's company, XKL LLC, has announced an optical transport system called DXM, a 1-rack unit device supporting up to 100Gbps that lets companies with access to dark fiber to build their own point-to-point metro-area optical link.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/080607-bosac k-optics-product.html

Bosack does some numbers crunching in this interview with Network World: "A DS-3 is usually a couple thousand dollars a month, depending on where you are and where it's going. For a fiber ring around a metro area, if you're only stopping in three or four places you get a monthly recurring charge in the $20,000/month range. And there's a one-time cost to get to the fiber rings, and it's usually $20,000 per location. That's when you actually have to dig a ditch to get there. There's the cost of the equipment, which in our case is, for a 100Gbps pizza box, is 1/8 of $1 million, basically. Four of those is $500,000 in equipment. You got yourself 200Gbps of bandwidth out of that ... that gives you 10 cents per megabit per second. Even if it were 10 times more expensive, it's such a change that it's almost astounding that people shouldn't be running to do this because it changes what they do in their business. They stop arguing about a scarcity."

  http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/080607-bosac k-xkl-qa.html"
Privacy

Submission + - Google Toolbar Always Reports Your URLs to Google

Submitted by Anonymous
Anonymous writes: The Google Toolbar in Firefox is sending every URL I visit to Google, even though I'm not logged in to my Google account, even though I have a web history turned off for my account, and even though I have Safe Browsing/Enhanced Protection mode turned off (hidden away in Firefox's Tools > Options > Security > "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is suspected of forgery". I can see the URL transmitted to Google with the Live HTTP Headers Firefox plugin.

This is a Privacy and Security issue. The Google privacy policy clearly states in the first bullet that the Toolbar will not transmit URLs to Google unless I explicitly tell it to.

—
Information we collect

        * The Google Toolbar automatically sends only standard, limited information to Google, which may be retained in Google's server logs. It does not send any information about the web pages you visit ( e.g., the URL), unless you use Toolbar's advanced features or use Safe Browsing in Enhanced Protection mode. You do not need to provide any personal information in order to download and use the Google Toolbar.
—

I have explicitly turned off all of these features, but it still sends URLs.

Here's an example: if I visit a web site like http://wikipedia.org/ , and Live HTTP Headers shows (some info masked):

—
http://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?sourceid=n avclient-ff&features=Rank&client=navclient-auto-ff &googleip=O;64.233.161.99;146&ch=...&q=info:http%3 A%2F%2Fwikipedia.org%2F

GET /search?sourceid=navclient-ff&features=Rank&client =navclient-auto-ff&googleip=O;64.233.161.99;146&ch =...&q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fwikipedia.org%2F HTTP/1.1
Host: toolbarqueries.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070718 Fedora/2.0.0.5- 1.fc7 Firefox/2.0.0.5 pango-text GoogleToolbarFF 3.0.20070525
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,tex t/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q= 0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: __utma=...

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Server: GWS/2.1
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Encoding: gzip
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2007 15:32:25 GMT
—

Clearly, a request was sent to Google with my URL and Google accepted the request, in clear violation of their Privacy Policy. Worse yet, it sends the url in the clear! So if there is any session or security information on the URL, it is there for the world and Google to see.

My Google Toolbar, as much as I used to love it, disappears today.
HP

Submission + - Big Box Technician Lashes Out Against HP (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: A Big Box Technician speaks out against HP, and their warranty services provided by their retail stores.

From the article:
HP2: It looks like the week you put that claim in, we closed a service center, and opened another one. The label you got and used was a label to the wrong service center.
BBT: So the unit has been forwarded to the right service center by now, correct?
HP2: No.

Despite the PC vs Mac ideologies now, many wonder what the best retail PC is. In an effort to provide more information suitable for prospective buyers, this blog has condemned the use of HP products by means of their warranty service and customer service agents. I know next time I'm looking to buy something I'll keep this in mind.
Biotech

Submission + - Drink diet soda, develop metabolic syndrome (newsday.com)

Submitted by
Xemu
Xemu writes: "A study published yesterday in the American Heart Association's online journal Circulation found that people who drink one or more cans of diet soda a day were 48 percent more likely to develop "metabolic syndrome," including excessive abdominal fat, high blood-glucose levels, high blood pressure, high blood triglycerides and low levels of high-density lipoprotein. These conditions are believed to lead to heart disease. Soda makers, in a surprising move, rejects the study."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - GOATSE Picture Shown In YouTube Debate

Submitted by
Penguinshit
Penguinshit writes: "What makes the Internet so great, beyond showing a glimpse of a confusing world to millions of mouth-breathers? The answer, of course, is GOATSE (relax, this isn't THAT link...). One of those lame YouTube questions featured a split-second image of the horrible anus. As of this time, it is unclear as to how many Americans witnessed the outrage, but there are reports of as many as 200,000 phone calls made to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) reporting the obscenity. CNN has yet to make an official statement regarding the matter, but a top spokesman was reportedly overheard denouncing the incident as "despicable."

The story is being reported in several aggregators and blogs."
United States

Submission + - H1B Outsourcing - A Sad Day for America Worker (businessweek.com) 1

Submitted by acole4ns
acole4ns writes: Well, I know many of us have heard rumors about such practices, but the attached BusinessWeek article seems to confirm our worst fears about H1B abuses. This story highlights just how easy it is to bypass a well-qualified US worker and tap into the pool of lower-cost H1B workers. A single quote from the article sums it all up "[O]ur goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker". This is a sad day for the American worker.
Businesses

Submission + - Enterprise Management with Open Source?

Submitted by HalfOfOne
HalfOfOne writes: This is a repeating topic on Slashdot (No, really, I'm saying that with a straight face) but one that can and should probably be revisited every once in awhile.

As part of my job, I get asked every few months/years how close we are to being able to deploy free open source solutions (OS and Software) for a large (4000+ users) manufacturing corporation. My background is origially with Unix, but I've come into a mostly MS shop, so this is going to sound like a strawman for MS, but it's not. I honestly want to see what's out there.

So, my question to AskSlashdot is, how do the free open source alternatives stack up? Give us your personal ancedotes and recommendations:

Some seed for the discussion:

*Desktop imaging, deployment, and management
You can't go to each desk, so how do you automatically and remotely roll out your desktop OS of choice, complete with configs and software? How do you keep it up to date with minimal user interaction? How do you inventory and keep control of what's added and removed from your environment?

*Centralized Directory Management
You don't use MS AD or NDS. What directrory store do you use to centrally manage security and store information for users, groups, and all of the other odds and ends that go into your schema? Can you support a single signon structure? Can you assign security so that only certain people can see or change certain objects? Can you distribute this internationally, does it replicate quickly and is it fault tolerant?

*Communication/collaboration software
Can any free email/scheduling/contact management software integrate with your directory store for email groups, contact lists, and other info?

*Server Monitoring/Management
Can you monitor the hardware health of your servers and have it automatically alert in case of a warning or failure?

*Consistency of Integration
How well does all of it tie together? Can the look and feel be made consistent across software suites and OSes? Can John Doe from marketing/sales figure out intuitively where most things are without calling the helpdesk.
Displays

Submission + - Man sues Gateway because he can't read EULA

Submitted by Scoopy
Scoopy writes: California resident Dennis Sheehan took Gateway to small claims court after he reportedly received a defective computer and little technical support from the PC manufacturer. Gateway responded with their own lawyer and a 2-inch thick stack of legal docs, and claimed that Sheehan violated the EULA, which requires that users give up their right to sue and settle these cases in private arbitration. Sheehan responded that he never read the EULA, which pops up when the user first starts the computer, because the graphics were scrambled — precisely the problem he had complained to tech support in the first place. A judge sided with Sheehan on May 24 and the case will proceed to small claims court.

A lawyer is quoted as saying that Sheehan, a high school dropout who is arguing his own case, is in for a world of hurt: 'This poor guy now faces daunting reality of having to litigate this on appeal against Gateway...By winning, he's lost.'

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