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Submission + - Student finds 5000-year-old chewing gum (kierikki.fi)

itsthebin writes: "Sarah Pickin, 23, found the lump of birch bark tar — complete with neolithic tooth prints — on a dig in Finland. Ms Pickin's tutor at the University of Derby, Professor Trevor Brown, said birch bark tar contained phenols, which are antiseptic compounds. "It is generally believed that neolithic people found that by chewing this stuff if they had gum infections it helped to treat the condition. It's particularly significant because well-defined tooth imprints were found on the gum which Sarah discovered," he said. Ms Pickin was on a volunteer program at the Kierikki Centre on the west coast of Finland when she made the find. It is not for sale on Ebay yet :-)"
Operating Systems

Submission + - Will pervasive multithreading make a comeback? (google.com)

exigentsky writes: "Having looked at BeOS technology, it is clear that like NeXTSTEP, it was ahead of its time. Most remarkable to me is the incredible responsiveness of the whole OS. On relatively slow hardware, BeOS could run eight movies simultaneously while still being responsive in all of its GUI controls and launching programs almost instantaneously. Today, more than ten years after BeOS's introduction, its legendary responsiveness is still unmatched. There is simply no other OS (major) that has pervasive multithreading from the lowest level up (requiring no programmer tricks). Is it likely, or at least possible that future versions of Windows or OS X could become pervasively multithreaded without creating an entirely new OS?"
Java

Submission + - Dangerous Java flaw threatens virtually everything

Marc Nathoni writes: Google's Security team has discovered vulnerabilities in the Sun Java Runtime Environment that threatens the security of all platforms, browsers and even mobile devices. "This is as bad as it gets," said Chris Gatford, a security expert from penetration testing firm Pure Hacking. "It's a pretty significant weakness, which will have a considerable impact if the exploit codes come to fruition quickly. It could affect a lot of organizations and users," Gatford told ZDNet Australia.
Announcements

Submission + - Linux 2.6.22 Kernel Released (kerneltrap.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the official release of the 2.6.22 kernel, "it's out there now (or at least in the process of mirroring out — if you don't see everything, give it a bit of time)." The previous stable kernel, 2.6.21, was released a little over two months ago on April 25'th. New features in the 2.6.22 kernel include a SLUB allocator which replaced the slab allocator, a new wireless stack, a new firewire stack, and support for the Blackfin architecture. Source level changes can be tracked via the gitweb interface to Linus' kernel tree.
PHP

Submission + - Fix what slows Apache down by optimizing PHP

An anonymous reader writes: As the load on an application increases, the bottlenecks in the underlying infrastructure become more apparent in the form of slow response to user requests. This article discusses many of the server configuration items that can make or break an application's performance and focuses on steps you can take to optimize Apache and PHP.
Operating Systems

Submission + - NYSE moves to Linux

An anonymous reader writes: Even the old mainframe strongholds, the financial markets, are moving away from big iron. The New York Stock Exchange is one of them, as it's leaving the mainframe for AIX and Linux. They're doing it to save money; it seems that transactions are going to cost half as much on Unix and Linux as they did on the mainframe.

Feed How to Get Off a Government Watch List (wired.com)

If you aren't a Senator who can call up the head of Homeland Security, or a high-powered nun whose boss who can ring up Karl Rove, working free from government watch lists will be a tedious and not-very transparent process.


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