fidzu : computers

Dell's CES 2026 product briefing, PC Gamer writes, stood out from the relentless AI-focused presentations that have dominated tech events for years, as the company explicitly chose to downplay its AI messaging when announcing a refreshed XPS laptop lineup, new ultraslim and entry-level Alienware laptops, Area-51 desktop refreshes and several monitors. "One thing you'll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first," Dell head of product Kevin Terwilliger said during the presentation. "A bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC." The shift stems from Dell's observation that consumers simply aren't making purchasing decisions based on AI capabilities. "We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device -- in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it -- but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger said. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

07 Jan 2026 4:00pm GMT

Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage service has drawn renewed criticism for a particularly frustrating behavior pattern that can leave users without access to their local files after the service automatically activates during Windows updates. Author Jason Pargin recently outlined the problem: Windows updates can enable OneDrive backup without any plain-language warning or opt-out option, and the service then quietly begins uploading the contents of a user's computer to Microsoft's servers. The trouble begins when users attempt to disable OneDrive Backup. According to Pargin, turning off the feature can result in local files being deleted, leaving behind only a desktop icon labeled "Where are my files?" Users can redownload their files from Microsoft's servers, but attempting to then delete Microsoft's copies triggers another deletion of the local files. The only workaround requires users to hunt down YouTube tutorials that walk through the steps, as the relevant options are buried in menus and none clearly describe their function in plain English. Pargin compared the experience to a ransomware attack.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

07 Jan 2026 3:20pm GMT

The AI pioneer talks about stepping down from Meta, limits of large language models.

07 Jan 2026 3:06pm GMT

Sure, there were many great moments, but in the end, they didn't add up to a satisfying whole.

07 Jan 2026 2:46pm GMT

Polymarket is disputing that the mission to capture Nicolas Maduro constituted an invasion and said it will only settle a prediction contract if the US military takes control of Venezuelan territory. From a report: The decision by the prediction market has angered gamblers and added to the controversy surrounding a successful wager on the timing of Maduro's capture that netted more than $400,000 in winnings for a mystery trader. The dispute over the definition of "invade" highlights just one of the controversies faced by the mostly unregulated industry. Polymarket -- which only recently gained regulatory approval to operate legally in the US -- says on its website that it will resolve the "Will the US invade Venezuela by ... ?" contract if the US "commences a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Venezuela" by one of three dates. "The resolution source for this market will be a consensus of credible sources," it adds. Prediction platforms such as Polymarket do not typically make directional wagers in their own markets. Rather, they act as an intermediary matching long and short positions and adjudicating the outcome of events, collecting a fee in the process.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

07 Jan 2026 2:40pm GMT

A lot could happen in space next year, but let's get real about what actually will.

07 Jan 2026 12:00pm GMT

About half a year ago, I wrote an article about persistent rumours I'd heard from Android ROM projects that Google was intending to discontinue the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). AOSP has been gutted by Google over the years, with the company moving more and more parts of the operating system into closed-source, non-AOSP components, like Google Play Services. While you can technically still run bare AOSP if you're really hardcore, it's simply unusable for 99% of smartphone users out there. Google quickly responded to these widespread rumours, stating that "AOSP is not going away", and a lot of people, clearly having learned nothing from human history, took this at face value and believed Google word-for-word. Since corporations can't be trusted and lying is their favourite activity, I drew a different conclusion at the time: This seems like a solid denial from Google, but it leaves a lot of room for Google to make a wide variety of changes to Android's development and open source status without actually killing off AOSP entirely. Since Android is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, Google is free to make "Pixel Android" - its own Android variant - closed source, leaving AOSP up until that point available under the Apache 2.0 license. This is reminiscent of what Oracle did with Solaris. Of course, any modifications to the Linux kernel upon which Android is built will remain open source, since the Linux kernel is licensed under the GPLv2. If Google were indeed intending to do this, what could happen is that Google takes Android closed source from here on out, spinning off whatever remains of AOSP up until that point into a separate company or project, as potentially ordered during the antitrust case against Google in the United States. This would leave Google free to continue developing its own "Pixel Android" entirely as proprietary software - save for the Linux kernel - while leaving AOSP in the state it's in right now outside of Google. This technically means "AOSP is not going away", as Chau claims. ↫ Thom Holwerda at OSNews Ever since the claim that "AOSP is not going away", Google has taken numerous steps to further tighten the grip it has on Android, much to the detriment of both the Android Open Source Project and the various ROM makers that depend on it. Device-specific source code for Pixel devices is no longer being released, Google dabbled with developer certification even for developers outside of Google Play, and Google significantly scaled back the release of security patches to AOSP. And now it's early 2026, and Google is about to take the next step in the slow killing of the Android Open Source Project. On the main page of the Android Open Source Project, there's now a new message: Effective in 2026, to align with our trunk stable development model and ensure platform stability for the ecosystem, we will publish source code to AOSP in Q2 and Q4. For building and contributing to AOSP, we recommend utilizing android-latest-release instead of aosp-main. The android-latest-release manifest branch will always reference the most recent release pushed to AOSP. This means that instead of four AOSP code releases every year, Google is now scaling back to just two every year. The gutting and eventual killing of AOSP has now reached the point where the open source nature of AOSP is effectively meaningless, and we're yet a few more big steps closer to what I outlined above: eventually, Google will distance itself from AOSP entirely, focusing all of its efforts on Pixel Android alone - without any code contributions to AOSP at all. If you still think "AOSP is not going away", you're delusional. OASP is already on life support, and with this latest move Google is firmly gripping the plug.

06 Jan 2026 10:39pm GMT

Since we moved to a new year, we also moved to a new month, and that means a new monthly report from Redox, the general purpose operating system written in Rust. The report obviously touches on the news we covered a few weeks ago that Redox now has the first tidbits of a modesetting driver for Intel hardware, but in addition to that, the project has also taken the first steps towards basic read-only APIs from Linux DRM, in order to use Linux graphics drivers. ARM64 now has dynamic linking support, POSIX compliance has been improved, and countless other improvements. Of course, there's also the usual massive list of bug fixes and minor changes to the kernel, relibc, drivers, and so on. I genuinely wish the Redox project another successful year. The team seems to have its head screwed on right, and is making considerable progress basically every month. I don't know what the end goal is, but the way things are looking right now, I wouldn't be surprised to see it come preinstalled on system76 laptops somewhere over the coming five years.

06 Jan 2026 9:16pm GMT

Happy New Year 2026! Once again, a lot has happened in Gentoo over the past months. New developers, more binary packages, GnuPG alternatives support, Gentoo for WSL, improved Rust bootstrap, better NGINX packaging, … As always here we're going to revisit all the exciting news from our favourite Linux distribution. ↫ Gentoo's 2025 retrospective We don't talk about Gentoo very often, and I consider that a good thing. Gentoo is just Gentoo, doing its thing, seemingly unaffected by the shifting sands of any community or world events. Gentoo will always just be Gentoo, and we're all better for it. The past year brought a ton of improvements to both Gentoo as a distribution and as a wider project and community. Because of Github's insistence to shove "AI" into everything, the project is currently moving to Codeberg instead, EAPI 9 has been approved and finalised, there are now weekly Gentoo images for WSL, the project welcomed several new developers, they've got a second build server, and so much more. Sadly, the project did have to drop the hppa and sparc architectures down a peg due to a lack of hardware, which hurts my soul a tiny bit but is entirely understandable, of course. Gentoo is doing great, and I doubt it'll ever not be doing great. Gentoo is just Gentoo.

06 Jan 2026 8:45pm GMT

2025 was a crazy simulation. A lot of glitches, plot twists and fun stuff™.

31 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

Same as last year, this is a summary of what I've been up to throughout the year. See also the recap/retrospection published by my friends (antiz, jvoisin, orhun).

• Uploaded 467 packages to Arch Linux
  • Most of them being reproducible, meaning I provably didn't abuse my position of compiling the binaries
  • 35 of them are signal-desktop
  • 29 of them are metasploit
• Made 53 uploads to Debian
  • All of them being related to my work in the debian-rust team, that I've been a part of since 2018
  • …

31 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

With the update to driver version 590, the NVIDIA driver no longer supports Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs or older. We will replace the nvidia package with nvidia-open, nvidia-dkms with nvidia-open-dkms, and nvidia-lts with nvidia-lts-open. Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment. Intervention required for Pascal/older users: Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support:

• Uninstall the official nvidia, nvidia-lts, or nvidia-dkms packages.
• Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR

Users with Turing (20xx and GTX 1650 series) and newer GPUs will automatically transition to the open kernel modules on upgrade and require no manual intervention.

20 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT