fidzu : geek

Denmark's Ministry of Digitization reportedly abandoned a pilot to replace Microsoft Office with the open-source Collabora suite less than six months after it began. Tom's Hardware reports: According to Danish publication Computerworld, the pilot project was launched in 2025 and involved 38 employees, all of whom would start using the British open-source Collabora office suite instead of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The experiment was initiated by the then Digitization Minister Caroline Stage, who wanted to reduce the country's dependence on American technology. Denmark isn't alone in moving away from U.S. software, with France and the Netherlands both taking steps to replace Microsoft Windows. However, it seemed that the experiment fizzled out less than six months after it started. It had reportedly ended by the time the Danish government called for an early election in February 2026, with some employees complaining about issues with style, paragraph formatting, blank pages, and challenges with tracking changes. But even though it's been months since the experiment reportedly ended, Prof. Mikkel Flyberbom of the Copenhagen Business School complains that the project hasn't been properly evaluated. "It's a good idea to test alternatives in a pilot project," the professor said in an email. "However, I wish that the ministry would take the opportunity to learn from the pilot project and share those experiences with other parts of the public sector."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

27 Oct 2026 11:00am GMT

Susanne Rust of the Los Angeles Times reports (paywalled) that industry executives knew for decades that microplastics were infiltrating the human body. Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the report: Scientists today say we're just beginning to understand the harm that the tiny bits of plastic we drink, eat and breathe are doing to the human body. Internal memos among company scientists and executives obtained by The Times reveal that for at least half a century, the plastics industry has been aware of and concerned about the potential for microplastic contamination in the human body. But recently discovered chemical company documents dating back several decades show that industry scientists have long been aware of -- and concerned about -- the way microplastic particles migrate beyond the gut in animals and humans, depositing in important organs. And the potential for that knowledge to affect the plastic food packaging industry. Their concern goes back to 1974 and a scientific meeting at a New York City hotel, where a German gastroenterologist presented a scientific paper that showed for the first time that ingested particles like microplastics could infiltrate the rest of the body. His presentation was largely overlooked by the government scientists in attendance but became a point of worried discussion among company scientists. Tracey Woodruff, professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University, who reviewed the documents, said they indicate scientists and executives at major chemical companies have known and remained silent even as microplastics accumulated in tissues. She likened it to other industries that knew about pollutants -- greenhouse gases, asbestos and tobacco -- but did not take action to make them safer. A spokesperson with the chemical industry's largest trade group took issue with that characterization. "Scientific debate over what the evidence shows is not silence. It is how sound science and effective policy advance," said Craig Davis, senior director of plastics chemistry at the American Chemistry Council. "Our industry is committed to advancing microplastics science by supporting independent research and policies that would do so."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

27 Oct 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The U.S. designated helium as a critical material on Friday because it's indispensable for making semiconductors that are essential to energy generation, and the global supply is at risk of disruption, according to the Energy Department. The designation by the Energy Department means that more federal financing will be available for helium producers and that the government will monitor it more closely. Helium is primarily produced as a byproduct of natural gas processing. The United States is the world's largest producer of natural gas and of helium. Qatar and Russia are the other top helium producers. [...] Helium makes balloons rise, but that's not why the DOE is interested in it. Helium plays an important role in wind, solar and nuclear energy production, space exploration, medical imaging and research. Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson said helium's unique properties make it irreplaceable, such as the fact that it's non-combustible and has the lowest boiling point of any gas. The nation needs an ample supply for semiconductors, quantum and super computing, and superconducting magnets, added Robertson, who oversees the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation. [...] Despite environmental concerns with recovering helium from natural gas, there are also opportunities, said Greeshma Gadikota, director of the Lenfast Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University. "If we burn the natural gas, there are a lot of CO2 emissions associated with that," Gadikota said. "But if you just extract the helium and use it, the uses of it don't contribute necessarily to greenhouse gas emissions. "So from a climate standpoint, if we are going to continue down the line of extracting natural gas and recovering helium," she added, "I would prefer to see natural gas being used in a form where we directly produce hydrogen and we produce solid carbon." Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel, and solid carbon can provide permanent carbon sequestration and can be used widely in industrial applications, including rubber and pigments.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

27 Oct 2026 3:30am GMT

What's the oldest Windows GUI application you can still run on Windows 11 today, without any modifications? For now, the best answer Boris Popik can come up with is an innocuous application from build 347 of Windows NT 3.1, an early prerelease: CDPLAYER.EXE. You can't go any older than that, because earlier prerelease builds had not yet finalised its PE format and calling convention. Neat find. Popik also mentions a few other contenders, but I won't spoil those here.

27 Oct 2026 12:14am GMT

Another month has crumbled to dust under the oppressive boots of time, so it's time for another month of Redox improvements. This past month, Redox' build system gained support for Clang, SDL2 saw performance improvements, and WebKitGTK3's HTML layout rendering was fixed. Users of Intel Tiger Lake processors can now enjoy external display hot-plugging, and overall system performance has been improved in a variety of ways. And as always, there's the long lists of kernel, relibc, and driver improvements and fixes as well. Redox keeps making big strides every month, and it's definitely one of the few alternative operating systems that actually feels like it might, one day, be an actual contender for general purpose use.

27 Oct 2026 12:06am GMT

Thew day ends in a Y, so Microsoft is launching a new way to build Windows applications. Get excited, Windows application developers! If you caught our session at Microsoft Build 2026 or you've been watching the repo, you've seen this one taking shape in public for a while now, and a lot has changed since Build. Here's the longer tour: Microsoft.UI.Reactor, an experimental C# framework that brings the MVU (Model-View-Update) pattern to WinUI desktop apps. No XAML files, no code-behind, no ViewModels. Two things before the fun part. Reactor is experimental: no support policy, no API guarantees, published this early on purpose because we'd rather hear we got the design wrong now than once people have shipped on it. And it is not a replacement for XAML or MVVM, which we'll come back to. ↫ Alexandre Zollinger Chohfi at Microsoft's Dev Blogs At multiple points in the linked blog post, Microsoft underlines that no, Reactor is not going to replace XAML. I'm sure Windows developers who learned Win32, Silverlight, WinRT XAML, WPF, UWP, WinUI 2 and 3, and all the others, over the past two decades will feel deeply comforted by Microsoft's insistence that Reactor will not replace XAML. Microsoft repeats: this won't replace XAML. They swear.

26 Oct 2026 11:57pm GMT

Employees in the US, Canada, India, and the UK may receive offers to leave MS today.

26 Oct 2026 10:36pm GMT

Case study gives a whole new meaning to "bedroom eyes."

26 Oct 2026 8:27pm GMT

Lindsey Fitzharris chats with Ars about her new book, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes.

26 Oct 2026 8:15pm 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