fidzu : geek

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: VMware customers face multiple obstacles as they rethink their virtualization strategy to reduce dependence on VMware. Today, Rimini Street published its "2026 IT Virtualization Survey -- What's Next for VMware Users." The survey examined 300 organizations worldwide that use VMware. Notably, Rimini sells third-party support for VMware and other software, including Oracle and SAP. That means there's an incentive for Rimini to portray VMware users as experiencing obstacles. However, the survey was also conducted by a third-party research company, Unisphere Research, and the results align with other recent reports about VMware customers. For example, 90 percent of participants in Rimini's survey said they're exploring VMware alternatives due to VMware's higher licensing costs, while 54 percent pointed to Broadcom killing support for perpetual license holders. Since Broadcom took over VMware, customers have said that their VMware costs increased by as much as 1,000 percent, with many more pointing to more modest price hikes of around 100 to 300 percent. In Rimini's survey, 73 percent of participants pointed to cost savings as a top priority in their virtualization roadmap decisions. In today's announcement, Rimini pointed to "significant barriers to progress" for organizations exploring virtualization options, with the most cited barriers being operational complexity (named by 40 percent of respondents), multi-vendor management challenges (38 percent), securing the increased attack surface (37 percent), and team skills requirements (37 percent). "These findings suggest that while organizations are actively pursuing change, they are also looking for ways to reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption," Rimini's announcement said. [...] Rimini reported that 60 percent of the organizations it surveyed are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy, which is indicative of "growing interest in more flexible, mixed environments that support both operational and financial goals." "In addition, 47 percent are favoring a hybrid IT virtualization environment consisting of hypervisors and containers for 'best of both worlds' workload placement," the announcement said. Rimini noted that 48 percent of respondents aren't planning to move any of their assets to VMware's hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

06 Oct 2026 6:00pm GMT

Amazon hasn't made an Echo with a 3.5mm port in six years.

06 Oct 2026 5:03pm GMT

Mistral has unveiled Mistral Large 4, or "le Chonk," a 1-trillion-parameter model that it says is the strongest open-weight AI model developed outside China by a wide margin. The model is entering preview for developers, cybersecurity teams and governments before a broader release later this month. CNBC reports: ML4 was trained on 4,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs over two months that were deployed in Mistral's own data centers in Europe. When its core parameters are released, ML4 will rank among the top open-weight models globally on aggregate benchmark performance, Mistral said in a statement. The company added that ML4 was the strongest open-weight model developed outside China by a "substantial margin." The new model still lags behind the frontier in areas such as coding. "The model capabilities will further improve as we scale up our training capacity, following our Series D fundraise," said Guillaume Lample, co-founder and chief scientist of Mistral. "Further, the cyber defense capabilities will enable enterprises and governments to defend themselves against threat actors that are jailbreaking closed models to perform cyber attacks," he added. Further reading: Mistral CEO Says US AI Safety Debate Masks Competitors' 'Negligence'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

06 Oct 2026 5:00pm GMT

Francis Halzen of University of Wisconsin-Madison led development of IceCube Neutrino Observatory.

06 Oct 2026 4:53pm GMT

Googlebooks require Android 17, but Samsung's Android 17 phones won't work yet.

06 Oct 2026 4:15pm GMT

Independent researchers say they've identified a large "fleet" of AI agents apparently running on Tencent infrastructure and making parallel queries against Alibaba's Amap mapping service. TechCrunch reports: Researchers, however, resisted the term "swarm," noting that there seems to be little coordination between their different queries. "'Agent fleet,' not 'swarm:'" one researcher wrote in the preliminary report, "many parallel agents on the same kind of task, with no sign of communication between them." The agents were discovered by monitoring traffic to the domain-scanning service urlquery, a technique that previously revealed long-running activity by OpenAI agents. AI agents often use urlquery to load websites that they cannot access directly, leaving a record of their activities that can be valuable to researchers. In this case, the record showed queries to Alibaba's Amap service, seeking directions to different entrances of various public places, including a park, a zoo, and a hospital. The research is ongoing and so few details are available, but the behavior shows how persistent AI agent activity has become on the internet. In the wake of the Hugging Face incident, many researchers are actively monitoring for rogue agent activity on the internet. Much of that activity has been easy to find because agents tend to use the same techniques and make little effort to conceal themselves.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

06 Oct 2026 4:00pm GMT

Speaking of Windows and performance, how about that RAM crisis? Microsoft is feeling the squeeze too, and is apparently doing work up and down the Windows stack to improve its memory consumption. Microsoft's Windows chief Pavan Davuluri has admitted that the rising cost of memory is pushing the company to make Windows 11 use less RAM. Microsoft is working on the Windows memory manager, memory compression, WinUI 3 and WebView2, and has made "memory optimization for 8GB and above" an official priority for the rest of 2026. ↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest This might be the only positive consequence of the RAM crisis.

05 Oct 2026 9:44pm GMT

To this day, Windows retains full support for the old MS-DOS 8.3 filename limitation, and it does this by creating 8.3 aliases for files with longer names. Apparently, this has a measurable effect on performance, so naturally, people are going to turn it off to make their Windows installations perform better. According to the user, this resulted in noticeably smoother scrolling in Tile view. They subsequently repeated the process on several folders they regularly use and reported that searching through files became much faster. The user also claimed that external hard drives became faster and that browsing an Android directory over USB or FTP behaved more like a regular Windows folder, including when copying large numbers of music files. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin You can disable this legacy feature in Windows per volume or globally, but Microsoft is warning users not to do so. Even in 2026, applications and registry entries may depend on 8.3 filenames being available, so removing them can lead to unexpected outcomes. It's just one of those things you wouldn't expect to still be around or have a measurable impact in the days of fast SSDs, but there's enough credibly evidence out there to suggest that yes, it actually does negatively affect performance. If you're doing a lot of file operations in Windows, it might be worthwhile to do some testing of your own to see if you can speed things up. Or, you know, you can just not use a house of cards disguised as a serious operating system.

05 Oct 2026 9:41pm GMT

Apple's macOS has a Full Disk Access permission, designed to allow backup applications full access to, well, the disk, so they can perform their job properly. Apple posted a notice on its website that it's going to further restrict this permission, because some applications were abusing this permission to gain access to users' messages, emails, and so on, which it obviously isn't intended for. What kind of applications, you may ask? Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action. Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy. ↫ Announcement from Apple This was prompted by a story a few weeks ago, where Facebook's Muse "AI" tool was apparently reading people's private messages and other data, and even sent messages on users' behalf, without informing its users. It's incredibly naive to think Facebook software in 2026 would not do creepy things, so I'm honestly not at all surprised. It makes sense in Apple's worldview to further restrict permissions in response, but I'm sure more experienced macOS users are not going to like this.

05 Oct 2026 9:29pm 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