fidzu : computers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The contiguous United States sizzled to its hottest month ever last month, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. July averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit (24.94 degrees Celsius) across the Lower 48 states, eclipsing the Dust Bowl's July 1936 by an eighth of a degree. Records go back to 1895. [...] Although it was unusually cool in Alaska, hotter-than-normal conditions blanketed the Lower 48, with the most excessive heat in the Mountain West, Southwest, Northern Plains and Southeast. The heat was so widespread that every one of the Lower 48 states was at least 1 degree Fahrenheit (nearly 0.6 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average, said Russ Vose, chief of monitoring at NOAA's National Center for Environmental Information. [...] The biggest driver of the record heat was nighttime lows that smashed the old mark for hottest minimums by 0.7 degrees, NOAA said. Hotter nights are a classic sign of human-caused climate change, according to scientists and several studies in peer-reviewed literature. NOAA's calculation is based on averaging 24 hours of temperature, not just highs or lows. "If you're talking heat waves, that nighttime low is incredibly important for determining total heat stress," [said meteorologist Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections]. "So if it doesn't cool off at night, your body doesn't have time to readjust to all the heat." As nighttime temperatures increase, more people die and lose sleep, studies show. The years 2021 and 1936 tie for America's hottest summer, which is June through August. Through July, 2026 is a shade cooler than 2021, which was powered by record heat in June. Because of climate change, Masters said, "this may be one of the coolest years we're gonna experience for the rest of our lives." What's needed, Masters said, is "to stop burning so many fossil fuels. We also need to be spending money to adapt to the new climate that we've put in place."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Aug 2026 3:30am GMT

FBI Atlanta confirms it's looking into the incident, no arrests made.

12 Aug 2026 12:08am GMT

Cloudflare data suggests desktop Linux usage in North America has climbed to 6.4%, up from 4.1% a year earlier, with one post-holiday workday briefly spiking to 22%. ZDNet reports: [B]elieve it or not, on Monday, July 6, when people were back after the July 4 holiday, Linux usage jumped to a high of 22%. The users of these systems are not AI agents or bots, but real people. I set Cloudflare to count humans rather than bots. If you include people and bots, Linux has a 9.7% market share. That proportion is similar to StatCounter's score. By Cloudflare's count, bots alone come to 19%. These numbers tell us that workers are leading the way to the Linux desktop. [...] However, past performance doesn't explain present trends. So, why are we now seeing such a bump in Linux desktop growth? Experts believe this trend is largely AI developers and Linux users running AI Agents. For example, as David Linthicum, former managing director and chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting and AI and cloud influencer, recently observed, while "Windows 11 can technically run local AI workloads, but as you begin using multiple tools, managing different projects, and installing various dependencies, the friction starts to build," it's a different story for Linux users. Linthicum continued: "Linux delivered what I can only describe as a true 'AI desktop' experience. Setup was straightforward, mainstream AI instructions matched what you'd actually see in your environment, and GPU-accelerated apps simply worked -- consistently. I spent far less time troubleshooting and far more time actually executing on projects." As for agents, Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin summed up their role succinctly: "Linux is the OS of choice for AI agents." Desktop Linux is also gaining momentum as frustration with Windows 11 and the end of Windows 10 support push users to alternatives, particularly on older PCs that can't officially upgrade. At the same time, Linux has become much easier to use, install software on, and game with, lowering many of the traditional barriers to switching.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 Aug 2026 11:00pm GMT

The slow but steady march to the grave for the Android Open Source Project continues. Every few months Google hammers another big nail in the coffin of Android as an open source effort, and I've documented them all here on OSNews (nail, nail, nail, nail, nail), coming to the conclusion long ago that for all intents and purposes, Android is no longer an open source operating system. The latest move, however, is just petty. According to GrapheneOS on , Google has apparently replaced public, instant code downloads for Pixel phone drivers with a manual request form. Instead of publishing code directly to open developer platforms where anyone can grab it, Google now requires developers to fill out a Google Form and wait for someone to send them a Google Drive link. What used to take a couple of hours is now taking weeks. ↫ Hillary Keverenge at Android Authority I'm perhaps misremembering, but I vaguely recall discussions decades ago about what, exactly, it meant to "make source code available", as open source licenses state in a variety of words. Would mailing a paper print-out by classic post satisfy such requirements? Could you write the source code on a brick and throw it through the user's window? Could you hire a church choir to sing it? These are all silly examples, but before everyone had internet access, this was a relevant question. The widespread availability of the internet and software like git solved these issues, which makes it all the more petty that Google now requires an actual application process, waiting times, and Google Drive dumps just to get access to the source code for Pixel drivers. Google is clearly trying to kill whatever's left of the Android Open Source Project's rotting corpse, only barely technically complying with any license requirements only because they're obligated to. The Android team at Google must be a hoot at parties.

11 Aug 2026 10:45pm GMT

It took just hours for the leading pharma group to reject the recommendations.

11 Aug 2026 10:31pm GMT

The GNOME Shell user interface has mostly seen minor refinements and quality of life updates in recent cycles, but on the design side we've explored a lot of longer-term things we'd like to do. Some of these we have relatively complete plans for, others are more vague ideas that need more research and prototyping. As always, getting things like these implemented depends on developer capacity and interest (and sometimes funding). While each of these ideas may require additional discussion, prototyping, and testing, we (the design team) have collected them all together here to share our longer-term vision and to give each idea more visibility. ↫ Tobias Bernard on the GNOME blog There's quite a few good ideas in there, with most of them already being available in the form of various extensions. I'm not entirely sure if I'm a huge fan of copying Android and iOS by moving notifications into the quick settings dropdown thing, but it's not like having them in the clock/calendar dropdown thing is any better. I only use notifications as they arrive and never look at the place where they end up - that's a mobile thing for me - so I don't think I'll really care either way. Things like editable quick settings, transparent top bar on certain backgrounds, the improved window drag and drop in the Exposé view, the alt+tab experiments, and some of the others do seem quite interesting though, and anything that reduces the number of GNOME extensions I need to install and keep updated gets a big thumbs up from me. If you wish to work on any of these suggestions, working on GNOME Shell has gotten a lot easier recently. In the past, GNOME Shell was significantly harder to contribute to and test than apps since you needed to use tools like jhbuild. This has changed in the past year: You can now easily build and test your branch in a nested session from Builder using Mutter Devkit. If you use GNOME OS, you can even build a sysext to install your branch on your host system. This allows daily driving experimental branches easily, which is super helpful for evaluating changes to everyday workflows. ↫ Tobias Bernard on the GNOME blog That's quite neat.

11 Aug 2026 10:18pm GMT

Ian Clarke (aka ancient Slashdot reader Sanity), designer of the peer-to-peer communication platform Freenet, is back with an update on the project's progress following the launch of its P2P network in March. He writes: Earlier this year, Slashdot covered the launch of the completely redesigned Freenet. I recently gave a talk about what we've been building since then. Unlike traditional web applications, apps on Freenet have no central server or database; instead application state is distributed across the network. These now include decentralized group chat, publishing, search, and fully decentralized Git hosting. The talk also gets into some of Freenet's internals, including how we use machine learning for network routing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 Aug 2026 10:00pm GMT

This follows many drone incursions into Romania and a failed attack in Germany.

11 Aug 2026 9:20pm GMT

This was bound to happen. According to a new report from Taiwanese publication United Daily News (UDC,) Microsoft is raising the cost of Windows license fees for hardware makers by a much higher amount than normal. According to the report, certain OEMs are seeing licensing price hikes of between 7% and 10%. ↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central Like every other tech company diving head-first into "AI", Microsoft is losing money on its gamble head-over-fist, with no profitability in sight. Since admitting betting the company on "AI" was a mistake is out of the question, Microsoft has to extract the money from somewhere else to make up for it. The cost of Windows licenses for OEMs is an obvious lever to pull, as OEMs really have nowhere else to turn to (yes, desktop Linux is making gains, but not in any meaningful numbers), so they'll take hit and pass the cost on to consumers. The end result will be that prices for laptops will increase even more than they already have thanks to the "AI"-induced RAM and component crisis, creating a double-whammy of price increases caused by "AI", either directly or indirectly. It's just another category of products we can add to the cost of living crisis that's causing untold harm and damage to hardworking people all over the world. The price of incompetence is rarely paid for by the incompetent.

11 Aug 2026 12:34pm 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