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Fast food restaurant Wendy's drew an image of their redheaded mascot in the style of GTA, posting it on social media with the message "Our ride-or-dies are gonna love what we have in the works," and the date 11/19/26. That's how widespread the hype has become for Thursday's release of Grand Theft Auto VI. The BBC reports that fictional brands from the game are now actually appearing on billboards across Miami, the city that inspired the game's "Vice City" setting. And GamingBible.com reports Rockstar Games has announced Grand Theft Auto VI: The Festival, "a real-life music festival to be held in Miami, Florida... on November 21, 2026. Featuring two stages, the festival will be headlined by some incredible artists that, to state the obvious, feature on the game's soundtrack...." YouTube said pre-launch videos about the game have already racked up a whopping 40 billion views (with 900 billion views for videos about all GTA games). And now YouTube is partnering with Rockstar Games to offer several special features on launch day: Fans can drop themselves directly into Vice City using the GTAVI: Visit Vice City Shorts Effect. The feature includes multiple iconic backgrounds, making it easy for creators and fans to build their own launch-week videos... Listeners can find the official GTAVI soundtrack (featuring Morgan Wallen's "Last Thing You Need") and the complete GTA series anthology playlist directly on the YouTube Music homepage throughout launch week... Starting November 19 at 12 AM ET, fans worldwide can tune in to youtube.com/youtube for a 24 hour stream packed with live gameplay, creator podcasts, and original content featuring top creators... [On launch day] fans can jump straight into the global broadcast by clicking the custom GTAVI-themed YouTube logo (Yoodle) on the YouTube homepage At one one study suggests nearly one in a five U.S. workers plan to skip work on Thursday, writes the New York Post: Roughly 18% of workers plan to take Thursday off to park themselves on the couch and wreak havoc across the revamped Vice City, according to data from BambooHR, which analyzed information from 3.4 million US-based employees... Half of the joystick jockeys planning to take off will simply call in sick instead of requesting time off, BambooHR reported. The hordes of workers playing hooky could cost the US economy $1 billion in lost productivity, International Business News reported. Forbes reports the game has $1.18 billion in pre-orders from 12 million buyers, according to market research firm Sensor Tower, puting it ahead of Grand Theft Auto V, which had 7 million pre-orders. The BBC points out that "Already, both PlayStation and Xbox, the two platforms the game is initially releasing on, have said the game has become the most pre-ordered title in their digital stores' history. This may be partly down to its huge size (212GB), meaning many are pre-ordering to "pre-load" the game, ready to play it immediately at launch rather than waiting to download it. But that's a problem for other games, reports GamingBible.com: With most current-gen consoles having somewhere between 512 GB and 1 TB of free storage before expansion upgrades, it means if you're a gamer with lots of games installed, you're going to have to make some sacrifices and delete any older games you're not currently playing. As reported by Push Square, it seems that Electronic Arts is also getting the message, as it allegedly is showing messages inside games asking players not to uninstall in anticipation of the GTA VI launch. GamingBible.com notes one final concern for hardcore gamers. "Rockstar Games recently confirmed the game targets 30fps, even on high-end consoles like the PlayStation Pro. While it probably won't affect the game's total sales, many gamers are appalled."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

15 Nov 2026 6:34pm GMT

"Huawei believes its new Luterra S2 is more than just a home backup battery," reports Electrek: This high-tech Huawei home battery pack hopes to hold back Tesla's latest Powerwall with silicon carbide technology, AI-powered energy management baked in, and enough modular storage to keep even large homes bright and warm when the rest of the block goes dark... The Chinese tech firm is calling it an "all-in-one residential energy system" that combines a hybrid inverter, modular battery storage, and AI-powered energy management in a single, simple, and stackable package that's available in single-phase versions that put out between 3 and 10 kW and three-phase versions that can push up to 20 kW. The Luterra S2 is the first system of its kind to use Huawei's proprietary full-silicon carbide (SiC) architecture, which promises improved efficiency, power density, and ease of use. It's so easy, in fact, that Huawei claims it can be installed and commissioned in just minutes. Huawei's basic Luterra S2 configuration starts with "just" 5 kWh of battery energy storage and 3 kW of output. That's enough to keep essential household appliances, lighting, and electronics running during a power outage, but you'll want to keep going if you're preparing for more than a day or two without power. If that sounds like you, Luterra's got you covered. The modular system can be expanded with modular 7 kWh LFP battery packs and can keep scaling up to a massive 336 kWh of total storage across interconnected systems, with inverter output peaking at an impressive 60 kW using three 20 kW units in parallel. Keeping all that power cool and quiet is a Huawei-developed passive cooling system that does without external fans, keeping operating noise levels below a claimed 29 dB (about the same as my Mac mini).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

15 Nov 2026 5:34pm GMT

Environmental activist Bill Gates has "quietly accumulated a $29 billion stake in America's No. 2 landfill operator, Republic Services," reports ProPublica, in a new 5,000-word investigation. But inspectors from America's Environmental Protection Agency "have repeatedly found methane - a highly potent greenhouse gas - escaping from Republic landfills at levels above federal limits. Republic has lobbied against regulations that could make the waste industry cleaner, including by keeping organic garbage out of landfills in the first place." While Gates has invested at least $2 billion in green companies, he's "put more than double that amount into a very dirty, old-school industry," their article argues. And Gates has increased his stake in Republic "to 38% of the company, a position worth $29 billion." While fossil fuels get most of the attention, scientists increasingly see landfills as a crucial climate issue. They're responsible for as much as a fifth of the country's emissions of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, studies show. Republic alone generates as much climate pollution as 3 million gasoline-burning cars each year, according to its own reports.... [Gates] has failed to make Republic live up to his own climate principles, a ProPublica investigation has found. Federal inspectors have repeatedly found methane escaping from Republic landfills at levels above federal limits. The company has refrained from adopting the ambitious emissions-reduction goal embraced by its main competitor... "It seems very likely that Bill Gates has the power to influence Republic's behavior to make it more climate-friendly, even if that costs the company profits," said Ann Lipton, a legal scholar who studies corporate governance at the University of Colorado, Boulder... Gates didn't respond to repeated requests to discuss his landfill investments, and ProPublica couldn't find any public comments he's made about them. But the bet has proven wildly lucrative. Since November 1999, when he emerged as the owner of 5% of Republic's shares - "It's 'Garbage In' for Gates," the New York Post headline read - the company's stock price has soared thirtyfold. And Gates has personally received $2.6 billion in dividends, a ProPublica analysis of securities filings shows... A rare clue to why Gates made his foray into landfills can be found in an interview he gave to Fortune [in 1999]... To fund his plan to give away virtually his entire fortune, he said he'd given his personal money manager, Michael Larson, a simple remit: Sell Microsoft shares, buy safe, boring assets... After that initial investment, Larson progressively increased Gates' stake in Republic over the years that followed. [On behalf of the Gates Foundation] Larson would also acquire a small chunk of Republic's main competitor, Waste Management. Methane emissions weren't a major focus of climate activism until years later The gas can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide in the near term, and it's responsible for one-third of the global warming we experience today, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. But it also breaks down much more quickly, turning into CO2 and water vapor in about a decade - which means that cutting methane emissions now would reduce that warming within our lifetimes. This is especially urgent, scientists say, as the climate approaches tipping points that could doom rainforests, coral reefs and ice sheets.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

15 Nov 2026 4:34pm GMT

MenuetOS, the operating system written in x86-64 assembly, has seen a few new releases since we last looked at it, delivering some welcome improvements. Secure network connections are now faster, there's a TrueType font demo, and, of course, the usual bugfixes and smaller improvements. The game Wizord EXL100 has been ported, and a few drivers have been improved as well. You can get the latest releases from the downloads page.

13 Nov 2026 11:00pm GMT

The ReactOS project organised two hackfests this year, and the work done during those in-person sessions, combined with the ongoing regular progress, has led to some pretty significant breakthroughs and progress. More NT6+ syscalls have been added, ReactOS supports floppy disks now, NTFS support has been vastly improved, and much more. There's also a new USB3/4 stack, which is now merged and offers basic support for these versions of USB. One of the biggest additions is a new kernel shim engine which gives ReactOS the ability to work around buggy drivers and implement quirks, moreso than even Windows itself can. For instance, thanks to this new shim, XP-era NVIDIA drivers can run on NT6 ReactOS. The ongoing efforts to implement SMP are yielding results too: ReactOS can now run with SMP for days on end while doing tasks in the background, which is quite promising. The team is showing off Steam and the game Among Us running on ReactOS, which is definitely impressive.

13 Nov 2026 12:38am GMT

MATE is probably the last X11-only holdout among the major desktop environments, but that's about to change if Kerem Söke has anything to say about it. Polo is a port of Marco's behavior and window management policies to Wayland, built on libweston and written in Vala and C. It's a window manager, compositor, and session authority for the MATE Wayland desktop. It takes over, step by step, what Marco, mate-session-manager and the compositor-facing parts of mate-settings-daemon do on X11. ↫ Polo's GitHub page Söke is looking for testers with this very first Polo 1.0.0 release - cute name, too - which is available on its GitHub page.

13 Nov 2026 12:16am GMT

This is a story of how we got from something like this: Failed to deserialize BUILDINFO file: Parser failed with the following error: unknown ^ invalid makepkg build environment option expected `buildflags`, `ccache`, `check`, `color`, `distcc`, `sign`, `makeflags` To this: When the ALPM project started, the goal was fairly simple: Better tooling to interact with the low-level plumbing of Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM). This meant binaries to read/write individual file types, better error messages, extensive specifications and of course exports to common dataformats like JSON. The thing is, although some of us already had experience with low-level dataframe parsing, …

08 Oct 2026 12:00am 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

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT