fidzu : computers

James Cameron's Avatar is no longer the highest-grossing movie in box office history. That honor now goes to the Disney/Marvel Studios film Avengers: Endgame. Variety explains: "Avatar" spent a decade as the biggest release ever until "Avengers: Endgame" overtook the record in 2019 during its initial run on the big screen. "Endgame" dropped to No. 2 on all-time charts in 2021 when "Avatar" returned to theaters in advance of 2021's "Avatar: The Way of Water." Five years later, and Earth's Mightiest Heroes have triumphed over the Na'vi again. Disney is popping Champagne no matter which big-screen behemoth claims the No. 1 spot. "Avatar" was released by 20th Century Fox, which Disney now owns after the companies merged in 2019... [Last week's] re-release of "Endgame" has generated more than $126 million worldwide. Together the 38 Marvel Studios movies "have generated more than $35 billion worldwide," notes an announcement on Disney's web site, "making the Marvel Cinematic Universe the most successful film franchise in history." Their announcement adds that Disney "is responsible for seven of the 10 highest-grossing films of all time." That list also includes James Cameron's Titantic and his first two Avatar movies, but also this summer's Spider-Man: Brand New Dayand the earlier film Spider-Man: No Way Home, plus Marvel's 2018 film Avengers: Infinity War. Also among the top-10-of-all-time are Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) at #7 and last year's Zootopia 2. Meanwhile Coyote vs. Acme was released for rent or purchase on streaming platforms Tuesday, and became the No. 1 most-watched movie in the Apple TV store for America and Canada, according to CBR. (Citing a report from FlixPatrol ) "On Rotten Tomatoes, Coyote vs. Acme has a near-perfect 96% Certified Fresh Tomatometer score based on critics' reviews, and a similar 94% Verified Hot Popcornmeter score based on audience reviews... Frank Scheck from The Hollywood Reporter called it "one of the best live-action/animation films ever." Preorders have just opened for its DVD and 4K disks, and Coyote vs. Acme is also coming to Blu-ray writes IGN, "along with some hilarious outtakes that he described as 'not PG-rated.'" Celebrating the film's $100 million box office take last week, the movie's distributors posted a very Coyote-like koan on social media. "It's only over when you stop trying."

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04 Oct 2026 7:37pm GMT

"Physicists smashed gold nuclei together at nearly the speed of light and found an unexpected pattern in the particles..." writes Live Science. "If confirmed, that pattern could help reveal how the hot soup of quarks and gluons that filled the universe in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang cooled and condensed into the protons and neutrons that make up ordinary matter today." In every collision, particles are flung out sideways; how hard they are flung, on average, varies slightly from one collision to the next. Physicists expected the size of these variations to change smoothly as they adjusted the collision energy. Instead, the variations dipped, shrinking and then growing again. This dip could be a sign of a long-sought "critical point," a special set of conditions at which nuclear matter changes the way it transforms from one form to another. The signal, detected by the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, is strong enough that it is very unlikely to be a statistical accident. However, the researchers cautioned that the dip is a tantalizing hint, not proof of the long-sought transition. They published their findings Sept. 22 in the journal Physical Review Letters... The team analyzed roughly 1 billion collisions, measuring how hard charged particles were flung sideways out of the fireball, according to the article. The dip "does point to a set of conditions where the behavior of nuclear matter changes, and it gives theorists a new, precise measurement to test their calculations against," study co-author Rutik Manikandhan, told Live Science.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

04 Oct 2026 6:15pm GMT

Car thefts in San Francisco are down almost 59% for the first eight months of 2026 compared with the same months in 2022, according to analysis of police department statistics by NPR's Planet Money - and car break-ins are down more than 82%. "San Francisco's law enforcement leaders tell us that greater use of surveillance technology - including a controversial, AI-powered license plate camera system made by Flock Safety - has been crucial to this drop in car crime." How much credit does Flock actually deserve...? [In July of 2022, San Francisco District Attorney] Jenkins began taking a more aggressive approach to prosecuting people accused of crimes. Meanwhile, the SFPD beefed up its tactics to fight car thefts and break-ins. In 2023, for example, the police increased patrols in tourist areas known for car break-ins and used "bait cars" to catch and build cases against organized car burglars. But, Jenkins says, "one of the most important factors" behind the drop in crime came when the city introduced new crime-fighting technology. In March 2024, San Francisco voters approved Proposition E, which, among other provisions, made it easier for SFPD to use drones and high-tech surveillance cameras. That same month, the SFPD began installing Flock cameras in strategic locations... In a statement to Planet Money, a spokesperson for the SFPD said, "ALPR has been instrumental in driving down crime in San Francisco. These tools enable our officers to identify crime vehicles with precision, and ALPR is assisting in reducing crimes that were previously very challenging to solve, like auto burglaries." Jenkins described how Flock cameras and drones can work together to catch suspected criminals. In one case the SFPD publicized, the department says Flock cameras spotted a moving vehicle linked to an auto burglary the previous day and alerted officers. Officers deployed a drone, which flew in from above and then began recording suspects in real time as they smashed windows and stole luggage out of a parked SUV. The police then moved in and arrested them. They can do all this, Jenkins says, "without putting innocent people in danger with dangerous police chases." Meanwhile, the surveillance system creates an evidence trail that [Jenkins'] office can use to prosecute suspected criminals... Jenkins also believes high-tech surveillance helps deter crime, although that's harder to prove... The most ambitious study of Flock's system so far is a recent one by University of South Carolina crime researchers Ian Adams and Scott Mourtgos. They analyzed data from 216 law enforcement agencies that introduced Flock cameras, comparing crime trends with places that had not adopted Flock. They found that deploying Flock cameras was associated with an 11% drop in car thefts in the first year. This is only one study, and it has yet to be peer-reviewed. It's also not a randomized controlled trial, the gold standard for finding the actual causal effect of something. Other factors, beyond Flock, could still help explain the decline. That study attempted to control for variables, the article points out - like how San Francisco's decline coincided with a broader drop in crime across American cities as America emerged from the pandemic... But the article also notes another worry shared by "countless citizens" and political leaders. Are these systems handing too much power to law enforcement to "invade our privacy, trace our whereabouts, and stomp on our civil liberties."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

04 Oct 2026 4:34pm GMT

Wunmi Mosaku (Sinners, Loki) narrates NatGeo's new documentary Africa: Earth's Wild Home

04 Oct 2026 3:34pm GMT

The IEA and climate negotiators want to set a target for shifting the economy to run on electricity.

04 Oct 2026 11:05am GMT

"...we were making history."

03 Oct 2026 7:45pm GMT

I like squirrels. Apparently, there's a SquirrelOS. It's a small hobby OS learning project from five years ago, developed by Immanuel Daviel A. Garcia. A simple DOS like OS made in Assembly and C with a ported version of Stephen Brennan's Shell. ↫ SquirrelOS GitHub page Why do I like squirrels? I don't know man, they're just cute.

02 Oct 2026 9:19pm GMT

Google launched its Googlebooks platform a week ago, and a lot of people were wondering what this meant for Chrome OS and Chromebooks. Since Googlebooks and its Android-based Googlebook OS lack the management frameworks markets like schools require, Chromebooks will continue to be available for now, until such time Googlebooks catch up in that regard. However, in a support document, Google states that update support for all Chromebook devices will end in 2034: ChromeOS devices will continue to receive regular updates and security patches through mid-2034. For qualifying devices purchased today whose 10-year support lifecycle extends beyond 2034, Google is committed to supporting your transition to Googlebook OS, with many devices offering direct migration paths. ↫ Google support document Google promised 10 years of updates for all Chromebooks, and it's now breaking that promise for anyone buying a Chromebook between now and whenever the last Chromebook rolls off the production line. Sadly, we live in a world where corporations are free to make and break whatever promises they want virtually free of consequences, and as society we're so used to it that anti-consumer behaviour like this barely elicits a shrug. Google does state that "many newer commercial Chromebook models will be capable of upgrading to Googlebook OS", but that, too, is just another promise - and a vague, one at that - so who knows how many devices will actually be capable of upgrading out in the real world. On top of that, we have no idea if Googlebooks will just be yet another in a long line of quickly abandoned Google tablet/laptop projects, further adding to the uncertainty. Stuff like this should not be legal.

30 Sep 2026 10:09pm GMT

In June 2008 Apple announced Mac OS X Snow Leopard, proudly boasting that it would have "no new features". Instead of piling on new things, Snow Leopard aimed to build on the success of its predecessor, Leopard, opting to focus on under-the-hood performance and stability improvements throughout the system. 18 years later, Apple is taking a similar approach with macOS 27. Golden Gate aims to fix the missteps of last year's Tahoe, promising an expansive set of improvements and "a more responsive and delightful experience". Does it hold up? Here are just some of the bugs I've encountered in my daily use over the past couple of weeks. ↫ Chester at SquareOrbits I'm getting some real Windows 11 vibes from this long list of bugs and issues, further underlining my perception that Apple completely lost the plot when it comes to Mac OS X (in the past) and MacOS (today). These are not the kind of things you'd find in the heydays of Mac OS X, back when I was a devout user, and makes me glad I abandoned ship long, long ago (around the time of the Intel transition). I don't see stuff like this in GNOME or KDE, and while not nearly as bad as Windows 11, the cracks are obvious. I am by no means an expert at how Apple is run and how it organises itself, but as a layperson I do wonder if the company is simply trying to do too much - too many different platforms, too many different crucial components it all develops internally, too many different markets to please. Things are going to fall through the cracks when you try to keep this many plates spinning.

30 Sep 2026 9:55pm 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