fidzu : computers

Looking back at Dash Rendar, 3DFX cards, and a pivotal moment for Star Wars.

12 Mar 2026 11:15am GMT

This satellite streaming technology transforms off-road racing for fans and teams.

12 Mar 2026 11:00am GMT

A Pew Research Center survey found that only 53% of U.S. adults went to a movie theater in the past year, while 7% said they've never seen a movie in a theater at all. "The findings reflected a domestic box office still fighting to regain its footing since the COVID-19 pandemic, when ticket sales collapsed 81% in 2020 due to theater closures," reports Variety. From the report: In 2025, moviegoers in the U.S. and Canada bought 769.2 million tickets, less than half of the all-time peak of roughly 1.6 billion tickets sold in 2002, according to data from Nash Information Services. However, an August 2025 study field by NRG/National Research Group showed that 77% of Americans ages 12-74 went to see at least one movie in a theater in the previous 12 months. Box office revenue peaked at an inflation-adjusted $16.4 billion in 2002, and annual ticket revenue held relatively steady through the 2000s and 2010s before falling to under $3 billion in 2020 when theaters closed for months. Last year, U.S. theaters sold just over $9 billion worth of tickets, per media analytics firm Comscore. The number represents a recovery, but nowhere near a full one, as ticket sales have been lagging around 20% below pre-pandemic levels.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Mar 2026 11:00am GMT

GFiber (a.k.a. Google Fiber) and Astound Broadband announced that they plan to merge into a deal backed by infrastructure investor Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners. The resulting company will be majority owned by Stonepeak, with Alphabet becoming a "significant minority shareholder." Light Reading reports: Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners teamed with Patriot Media to acquire Astound in November 2020 for $8.1 billion. Stonepeak is Astound's largest investor. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026. The combined business will be led by the existing GFiber executive team. GFiber is currently led by CEO Dinni Jain. Jain, a former Time Warner Cable and Insight Communications exec, took the helm of what was then called Google Fiber in 2018. "This agreement advances GFiber's mission of redefining internet connectivity and represents a major step toward its goal of operational and financial independence," the companies said. "GFiber will have the external capital and strategic focus needed to accelerate its next phase of growth, expanding its customer-first approach and pioneering fiber technology across the country." GFiber's combination with Astound represents "a strategic opportunity to scale our customer-focused approach to connect more households to a truly different type of internet service," Jain said in a statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Mar 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In a paper, published last month in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers offered a novel take on falling felines. Their evidence suggests new insights into the so-called falling cat problem, particularly that cats have a very flexible segment of their spines that allows them to correct their orientation midair. [...] People have been curious about falling cats perhaps as long as the animals have been living with humans, but the method to their acrobatic abilities remains enigmatic. Part of the difficulty is that the anatomy of the cat has not been studied in detail, explains Yasuo Higurashi, a physiologist at Yamaguchi University in Japan and lead author of the study. [...] Modern research has split the falling cat problem into two competing models. The first, "legs in, legs out," suggests that cats correct their falling trajectory by first extending their hind limbs before retracting them, using a sequential twist of their upper and then lower trunk to gain the proper posture while in free fall. The second model, "tuck and turn," suggests that cats turn their upper and lower bodies in simultaneous juxtaposed movements. [...] The researchers found that the feline spine was extremely flexible in the upper thoracic vertebrae, but stiffer and heavier in the lower lumbar vertebrae. The discovery matches video evidence showing the cats first turn their front legs, and then their lower legs. The results suggest the cat quickly spins its flexible upper torso to face the ground, allowing it to see so that it can correctly twist the rest of its body to match. "The thoracic spine of the cat can rotate like our neck," Dr. Higurashi said. Experiments on the spine show the upper vertebrae can twist an astounding 360 degrees, he says, which helps cats make these correcting movements with ease. The results are consistent with the "legs in, legs out" model, but definitively determining which model is correct will take more work, Dr. Higurashi says. The results also yielded another discovery: Cats, like many animals, appear to have a right-side bias. One of the dropped cats corrected itself by turning to the right eight out of eight times, while the other turned right six out of eight times.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Mar 2026 3:30am GMT

Google is more focused on desktop gaming than ever before.

11 Mar 2026 11:00pm GMT

Red Hat developer Marcin Juszkiewicz is working on the RISC-V port of Fedora Linux, and after a few months of working on it, published a blog post about just how incredibly slow RISC-V seems to be. This is a real problem, as in Fedora, build results are only released once all architectures have completed their builds. There is no point of going for inclusion with slow builders as this will make package maintainers complain. You see, in Fedora build results are released into repositories only when all architectures finish. And we had maintainers complaining about lack of speed of AArch64 builders in the past. Some developers may start excluding RISC-V architecture from their packages to not have to wait. And any future builders need to be rackable and manageable like any other boring server (put in a rack, connect cables, install, do not touch any more). Because no one will go into a data centre to manually reboot an SBC-based builder. Without systems fulfilling both requirements, we can not even plan for the RISC-V 64-bit architecture to became one of official, primary architectures in Fedora Linux. ↫ Marcin Juszkiewicz RISC-V really seems to have hit some sort of ceiling over the past few years, with performance improvements stalling and no real performance-oriented chips and boards becoming available. Everybody seems to want RISC-V to succeed and become an architecture that can stand its own against x86 and Arm, but the way things are going, that just doesn't seem likely any time soon. There's always some magical unicorn chip or board just around the corner, but when you actually turn that corner, it's just another slow SBC only marginally faster than the previous one. Fedora is not the first distribution struggling with bringing RISC-V online. Chimera Linux faced a similar issue about a year ago, but managed to eventually get by because someone from the Adélie Linux team granted remote access to an unused Milk-V Pioneer, which proved enough for Chimera for now. My hope is still that eventually we're going to see performant, capable RISC-V machines, because I would absolutely jump for joy if I could have a proper RISC-V workstation.

11 Mar 2026 10:17pm GMT

Now let's go live to Amazon for the latest updates about this developing story. Amazon's ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a "deep dive" into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant said there had been a "trend of incidents" in recent months, characterized by a "high blast radius" and "Gen-AI assisted changes" among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. Under "contributing factors" the note included "novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established." ↫ Rafe Rosner-Uddin at Ars Technica Oh boy.

11 Mar 2026 6:43pm GMT

Back in 2023, John Earnest created a fun drawing application called WigglyPaint. The thing that makes WigglyPaint unique is that it automatically applies what artists call the line boil effect to anything you draw, making it seem as if everything is wiggling (hence the name). Even if you're not aware of the line boil effect, you've surely encountered it several times in your life. The tool may seem simple at first glance, but as Earnest details, he's put quite a lot of thought into the little tool. WigglyPaint was well-received, but mostly remained a curiosity - that is, until artists in Asia picked up on it, and the popularity of WigglyPaint positively exploded from a few hundred into the millions. The problem, though, is that basically nobody is actually using WigglyPaint: they're all using slopcoded copycats. The sites are slop; slapdash imitations pieced together with the help of so-called "Large Language Models" (LLMs). The closer you look at them, the stranger they appear, full of vague, repetitive claims, outright false information, and plenty of unattributed (stolen) art. This is what LLMs are best at: quickly fabricating plausible simulacra of real objects to mislead the unwary. It is no surprise that the same people who have total contempt for authorship find LLMs useful; every LLM and generative model today is constructed by consuming almost unimaginably massive quantities of human creative work- writing, drawings, code, music- and then regurgitating them piecemeal without attribution, just different enough to hide where it came from (usually). LLMs are sharp tools in the hands of plagiarists, con-men, spammers, and everyone who believes that creative expression is worthless. People who extract from the world instead of contributing to it. It is humiliating and infuriating to see my work stolen by slop enthusiasts, and worse, used to mislead artists into paying scammers for something that ought to be free. ↫ John Earnest There's a huge amount of slopcoded WrigglyPaint ripoffs out there, and it goes far beyond websites, too. People are putting slopcoded ripoffs in basic webviews, and uploading them en masse to the Play Store and App Store. None of these slopcoded ripoffs actually build upon WrigglyPaint with new ideas or approaches, there's no creativity or innovation; it's just trash barfed up by glorified autocomplete built upon mass plagiarism and theft, "made" by bottom feeders who despise creativity, art, and originality. You know how when you go to IKEA or whatever other similar store to buy picture frames, they have these stock photos of random people in them? I wonder if "AI" enthusiasts understand you're supposed to replace those with pictures that actually have meaning to you.

10 Mar 2026 10:56pm GMT

On Friday, July 18th, 2025, the Arch Linux team was notified that three AUR packages had been uploaded that contained malware. A few maintainers including myself took care of deleting these packages, removing all traces of the malicious code, and protecting against future malicious uploads.

30 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

While starting this post I realized I have been maintaining personal infrastructure for over a decade! Most of the things I've self-hosted is been for personal uses. Email server, a blog, an IRC server, image hosting, RSS reader and so on. All of these things has all been a bit all over the place and never properly streamlined. Some has been in containers, some has just been flat files with a nginx service in front and some has been a random installed Debian package from somewhere I just forgot.

19 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT