fidzu : computers

The Academy has struck a multi-year deal to move the Oscars to YouTube starting in 2029, ending decades on ABC and making the ceremony free to stream worldwide with YouTube holding exclusive global rights. Variety reports: The Oscars, including red carpet coverage, behind-the-scenes content and Governors Ball, will be available live and for free on YouTube to viewers around the world, as well as to YouTube TV subscribers in the United States. Architects of the agreement said they hope the move to YouTube will help make the Oscars more accessible to "the Academy's growing global audience through features such as closed captioning and audio tracks available in multiple languages." [...] The Academy had been seeking a new broadcast licensing agreement for the better part of 2025. Over the summer, several expected and unconventional buyers, including NBCUniversal and Netflix, had come into the mix as potential suitors. Insiders believe that YouTube shelled out over nine figures for the Oscars, besting the high eight-figure offers from Disney/ABC and NBCUniversal. Under the most recent contract, Disney was paying around $100 million annually for the Oscars -- but given the ratings declines for the kudocast, Disney/ABC were reportedly looking to spend less on license fees. [...] It's not a secret that the Academy and Disney/ABC would occasionally have disagreements over the best path for the Oscars, including the show's length, which awards to present and who should host. Now, on a streamer with no time limits, the Oscars can be any length, and the Academy likely has carte blanche to do whatever it wants with the telecast. "They can do whatever they want," says one insider. "You can have a six-hour Oscars hosted by MrBeast."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Dec 2025 12:10am GMT

Meta has paused its third-party Horizon OS headset program, effectively canceling planned VR headsets from Asus and Lenovo as it refocuses on "building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market." Road to VR reports: A little over a year and a half ago, Meta made an "industry-altering announcement," as I called the move in my reporting: the company was rebranding the Quest operating system to 'Horizon OS' and announced it was working with select partners to launch third-party VR headsets powered by the operating system. Meta specifically named Asus and Lenovo as the first partners it was working with to build new Horizon OS headsets. Asus was said to be building an "all-new performance gaming headset," while Lenovo was purportedly working on "mixed reality devices for productivity, learning, and entertainment." But as we've now learned, neither headset is likely to see the light of day. Meta say it has frozen the third-party Horizon OS headset program. "We have paused the program to focus on building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market," a Meta spokesperson told Road to VR. "We're committed to this for the long term and will revisit opportunities for 3rd-party device partnerships as the category evolves."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Dec 2025 11:30pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Netflix on Wednesday said it will add a soccer simulation title to its gaming portfolio, as the streaming giant looks to leverage the FIFA World Cup 2026 tournament to deepen its video game push. The soccer title will be developed and published by Delphi Interactive, which is also helping create a premium James Bond game called "007 First Light," and in association with the sport's governing body, FIFA. Netflix said the game will launch in time for the world's most-watched sporting event, scheduled to start June next year in the U.S.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Dec 2025 10:50pm GMT

New method uses no freezing technology or refrigeration equipment-just water and a vacuum.

17 Dec 2025 10:46pm GMT

New GPT Image 1.5 allows more detailed conversational image editing, for better or worse.

17 Dec 2025 10:22pm GMT

Mark Weiser has written a really interesting article about just how desirable new computing environments, like VR, "AI" agents, and so on, really are. On the topic of "AI" agents, he writes: Take intelligent agents. The idea, as near as I can tell, is that the ideal computer should be like a human being, only more obedient. Anything so insidiously appealing should immediately give pause. Why should a computer be anything like a human being? Are airplanes like birds, typewriters like pens, alphabets like mouths, cars like horses? Are human interactions so free of trouble, misunderstandings, and ambiguity that they represent a desirable computer interface goal? Further, it takes a lot of time and attention to build and maintain a smoothly running team of people, even a pair of people. A computer that I must talk to, give commands to, or have a relationship with (much less be intimate with), is a computer that is too much the center of attention. ↫ Mark Weiser That's one hell of a laser-focused takedown of "AI" tools in modern computing. When it comes to voice input, he argues that it's too intrusive, too attention-grabbing, and a good tool is supposed to be the exact opposite of that. Voice input, especially when there's other people around, puts the interface at the center of everyone's attention, and that's not what you should want. With regards to virtual reality, he notes that it replaces your entire perception with nothing but interface, all around you, making it as much the center of attention as it could be. What's most fascinating about this article and its focus on "AI" agents, virtual reality, and more, is that it was published in January 1994. All the same questions, worries, and problems in computing we deal with today, were just as much topics of debate over thirty years ago. It's remarkable how you could copy and paste many of the paragraphs written by Weiser in 1994 into the modern day, and they'd be just applicable now as they were then. I bet many of you had no idea the quoted paragraph was over thirty years old. Mark Weiser was a visionary computer scientist, and had a long career at Xerox PARC, eventually landing him the role of Chief Technology Officer at PARC in 1996. He coined the term "ubiquitous computing" in 1988, the idea that computers are everywhere, in the form of wearables, handhelds, and larger displays - very prescient for 1988. He argued that computers should be unobtrusive, get out of your way, help you get things done that aren't managing and shepherding the computer itself, and most of all, that computers should make users feel calm. Sadly, he passed away in 1999, at the age of 46, clearly way too early for someone with such astonishing forward-looking insight into computing. Looking at what computers have become today, and what kinds of interfaces the major technology companies are trying to shove down our throats, we clearly strayed far from Weiser's vision. Modern computers and interfaces are the exact opposite of unobtrusive and calming, and often hinder the things you're trying to get done more than they should. I wonder what Weiser would think about computing in 2025.

17 Dec 2025 9:36pm GMT

Cops may be fined for jailing a man over his Facebook posts.

17 Dec 2025 8:56pm GMT

In recent years, things have not been going well for Mozilla. Firefox's market share is a rounding error, and financially, the company is effectively entirely dependent on free money from Google for making it the default search engine in Firefox. Mozilla's tried to stem the bleeding with deeply unpopular efforts like focusing on online advertising and cramming more and more "AI" into Firefox, but so far, nothing has worked, and more and more of the remaining small group of Firefox users are moving to modded versions of Firefox without the "AI" nonsense and other anti-features. The task of turning the tide is now up to Mozilla's new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, who took up the role starting today. In his first message to the public in his new role as CEO of Mozilla, he lays out his vision for the future of the company. What are his plans for Mozilla's most important product, the Firefox web browser? Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions. ↫ Anthony Enzor-DeMeo So far, the "AI" additions to Firefox have not exactly been met with thunderous applause - to put it mildly - and I don't see how increasing these efforts is going to magically turn that sentiment around. I'd hazard a guess that Firefox users, in particular, are probably quite averse to "AI" and what it stands for, further strengthening the feeling that the people leading Mozilla seem a little bit out of touch with their own users. Add to this the obvious fact that "AI" is a bubble waiting to pop, and I'm left wondering how investing in "AI" now is going to do anything but make Mozilla waste even more money. I don't want Firefox to fail, as it is currently the only browser that isn't Chrome, Chrome in a trench coat, or Safari, but it seems Mozilla is trying to do everything to chase away what few users Firefox had left. In the short term, we can at least use modified versions of Firefox that have the "AI" nonsense and other anti-features removed, but for the long term, we're going to need something else if Mozilla keeps going down the same path it's been going in recent years. The only viable long-term alternative is Servo, but that's still a long way off from being a usable day-to-day browser. The browser landscape ain't looking so hot, and this new Mozilla CEO is not making me feel any better.

16 Dec 2025 11:15pm GMT

Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It's neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don't think about it often. I applied it to qsort, which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator interfaces, to create allocation functions at run-time bound to a particular allocation region. I've learned a lot since I last wrote about this subject, and a recent article had me thinking about it again, and how I could do better than before. In this article I will enhance Win32 window procedure callbacks with a fifth argument, allowing us to more directly pass extra context. I'm using w64devkit on x64, but the everything here should work out-of-the-box with any x64 toolchain that speaks GNU assembly. ↫ Chris Wellons Sometimes, people get upset when I mention something is out of my wheelhouse, so just for those people, here's an article well outside of my wheelhouse. I choose honesty over faking confidence.

16 Dec 2025 3:27pm GMT

The following packages may require manual intervention due to the upgrade from 9.0 to 10.0:

• aspnet-runtime
• aspnet-targeting-pack
• dotnet-runtime
• dotnet-sdk
• dotnet-source-built-artifacts
• dotnet-targeting-pack

pacman may display the following error failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies) for the affected packages. If you are affected by this and require the 9.0 packages, the following commands will update e.g. aspnet-runtime to aspnet-runtime-9.0: pacman -Syu aspnet-runtime-9.0 pacman -Rs aspnet-runtime

11 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people's beds. A little over a week later Microsoft Azure had a [widespread outage][Azure outage] that managed to significantly disrupt train service in the Netherlands, and probably also things that matter. Now last week, Cloudflare takes down large swaths of the internet in a way that causes non-tech people to learn Cloudflare exists. And every single time, people share that one XKCD comic.

24 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

After Gandi was bought up and started taking extortion level prices for their domains I've been looking for an excuse to migrate registrar. Last week I decided to bite the bullet and move to Porkbun as I have another domain renewal coming up. However after setting up an account and paying for the transfer for 4 domains, I realized their DNS services are provided by Cloudflare! I personally do not use Cloudflare, and stay far away from all of their products for various reasons.

18 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT