fidzu : computers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Those who remember PC gaming in the days before Steam may have fond memories of the "big box" packaging that made those games stand out as shelf eye candy and sought-after in-home collectibles. Today, PC gaming platform GOG is hoping to reignite some of the nostalgia for those days by adding downloadable 3D models and printable, foldable high-res packaging scans for a handful of PC games on the platform. Thus far, the "Printable Big Box" collection on GOG is limited to just five games: Armikrog, Descent, Hitman: Codename 47, Myst, and Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. Players browsing those games on the GOG store will now see "3D Boxes" listed among the included "Goodies" before purchase. Owners of those games on GOG can download a ZIP file containing a version of the box art as an animated 3D object file (in an easy-to-open GLB format) and a "flat printable template" in PDF, SVG, and Adobe Illustrator formats. Those downloads allow for what GOG calls "a proper papercraft project for anyone who misses shelves full of PC game boxes." The physically focused expansion of the existing GOG Preservation Program comes through a partnership with Benjamin Wimmer's Big Box Collection website, which has grown since 2015 to include over 1,000 3D scans from his private collection of physical PC games. In an interview with GOG, Wimmer said that while he appreciates the artistry of a good old-fashioned big box, he also appreciates their evolution into the "interactive cards" on modern digital storefronts that "provid[e] us art, screenshots, gameplay videos and whatnot and that not shown as a box, [it] is just good UX." "Physical media doesn't survive the way software can -- boxes get lost, crushed, thrown out," GOG writes in today's announcement. "Scanning them, and letting you print your own, is preservation in a different shape: the same mission that keeps these games running on modern PCs, applied to the objects they used to come in."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

09 Sep 2026 3:00pm GMT

Critics say the new agenda could weaken science-based rules and marine protections.

09 Sep 2026 1:58pm GMT

Man with bipolar disorder sued OpenAI after surviving ChatGPT-linked suicide attempt.

09 Sep 2026 11:00am GMT

The U.S. Department of Energy has approved a $1.9 billion loan to NextEra Energy to restart Iowa's shuttered Duane Arnold nuclear plant, which Google has backed as a power source for its growing AI infrastructure. "The sizable loan is the second of its kind, suggesting that the Trump administration views revived nuclear power as a key source of electricity for tech companies seeking to power their AI data centers," notes TechCrunch. From the report: James Danly, Deputy Secretary of Energy, said that the Iowa power plant's restart in 2029 will "drive down electricity costs," though he did not explain how. Just 50 megawatts will be set aside for the local power cooperative, NextEra CEO John Ketchum said during an earnings call (PDF) last year. That capacity would cover 18% of Iowa's demand growth since 2021, the year before ChatGPT was released. Google is reportedly looking to build up to six data centers near the Duane Arnold Energy Center, which hasn't operated since 2020 when an intense rainstorm damaged the power plant. Rather than repair it, NextEra decided to mothball it. At the time, cheap natural gas was flooding the market, making nuclear power economically unappealing. A lot has changed in the last six years, though. After decades of little growth in demand, the sudden rise of AI coupled with broader electrification of the economy meant that utilities and power providers were suddenly scrambling to find new generating sources of electricity. New data centers are expected to nearly triple the sector's electricity demand by 2035.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

09 Sep 2026 11:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: OpenAIsaid on Tuesday that its newest artificial intelligence technology had solved one of the "Millennium Problems," a collection of important unanswered math questions meant to push the world's leading mathematicians to new heights. The announcement is an another clear sign that A.I. is fundamentally changing the upper reaches of mathematics, which have long been viewed as a pinnacle of human achievement. The change has excited some mathematicians, while stirring concern among others. Over the past year, A.I. systems successfully solved a wide range of problems that have bedeviled mathematicians for decades. But these problems were not as complex, nor as closely watched, as the one that OpenAI's technology has solved over the past several days. The Millennium Problems are among the most heavily researched in the field. "This is a spectacular culmination of the arc we have seen over the past twelve months," OpenAI researcher Sebastien Bubeck said of the company's new solution. The company announced that one of its latest models, which has not yet been released to the public, needed just 88 hours to solve what mathematicians call "the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem." This problem involves a series of equations that are often used to predict the weather. The equations describe the movement of water and other fluids. The Navier-Stokes problem, which has no clear practical value, asks whether these equations completely break down in certain situations. OpenAI's proof claims to have defined just such a situation. This would imply, at least theoretically, that the laws of physics themselves would break down under certain conditions: that, for example, water could be made to spontaneously explode. But mathematicians and physicists do not believe that this mathematical breakdown could really lead to such an outcome in the physical world. The Navier-Stokes problem was one of seven "Millennium Problems" selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the year 2000 as a way of tracking the progress of mathematics in the new millennium. The institute, founded by an American businessman named Landon T. Clay, offered a million dollars for the first correct solution to each problem. Before OpenAI's announcement, only one of the problems had been solved. OpenAI says it managed to solve the Navier-Stokes problem by coordinating as many as 10,000 AI agents, an extremely expensive process that may have cost millions of dollars in computing power. For those curious about the findings, the company has released a paper (PDF) and formal Lean proof.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

09 Sep 2026 7:00am GMT

Yesterday we had the final maintenance release for the NetBSD 9.x series, and today we have FreeBSD 14.5 entering the scene. Since this release is occurring late in a legacy stable branch, there are few new features; rather, the focus is primarily on maintenance. As such, changes since 14.4-RELEASE consist mostly of bug fixes, driver updates, and new versions of externally-maintained software. ↫ FreeBSD 14.5 release announcement The adventurous among us are already on the 15.x branch, but those of us running mission-critical systems are most likely still rocking 14.x, and for you, this is a must.

08 Sep 2026 10:16pm GMT

With ever-changing devices, browsers, operating systems, form factors, specifications, personal preferences, tooling, and corporate interests, the web is in a constant state of flux. As a result, so is the HTML we write. For every line of the HTML specification itself that has changed since the language's inception, there are many more bits of HTML that have seen what I'll call 'environmental' changes. Adaptations to differing browsers, extensions, integrations, and systems which we find HTML existing in. This article doesn't cover once-specced but now obsolete bits of HTML but instead looks at all the snippets that have wormed their way into websites as result of, or in combat against, third-party integrations, browser competition, vendor extensions, and platform-specific hacks. The bits of HTML that were included for reasons, and which have been forgotten for present irrelevance. The snippets that live on only in the markup of sites from bygone eras and in the minds of those who fought during the browser wars. ↫ Declan Chidlow I don't do any HTML or website development, and even I clearly recognise quite a few of these. Especially the countless relics of the large technology companies trying to worm their way into the various web standards of decades ago serve as a stark reminder of how many times they tried and failed - which should tell you something about all the times they tried and succeeded.

08 Sep 2026 10:06pm GMT

"It doesn't cost a lot to store text forever."

08 Sep 2026 9:52pm GMT

Speaking of NetBSD, the fifth and final 9x release has been released. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons since the release of NetBSD 9.4 in April 2024. It is fully compatible with NetBSD 9.0. This also marks the end-of-support for all NetBSD-9.x releases and the netbsd-9 branch. All users still on this branch are urgently asked to update to a more recent release like NetBSD 11.0 (with 11.1 upcoming at the end of this month) or NetBSD 10.2 (to be released in a few days). ↫ Martin Husemann at the NetBSD blog The full release notes have more information.

07 Sep 2026 6:06pm GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT