fidzu : geek

Paramount Skydance is launching a hostile bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery after it lost out to Netflix in a months-long bidding war for the legacy assets, the company said Monday. CNBC: Paramount will go straight to WBD shareholders with an all-cash, $30-per-share offer. That's the same bid WBD rejected last week, according to people familiar with the bid who asked not to be named because the details were private. The offer is backstopped with equity financing from the Ellison family and the private-equity firm RedBird Capital and $54 billion of debt commitments from Bank of America, Citi and Apollo Global Management. "We're really here to finish what we started," Ellison told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" Monday. "We put the company in play." On Friday, Netflix announced a deal to acquire WBD's studio and streaming assets for $72 billion. David Ellison-run Paramount had been bidding for the entirety of Warner Bros. Discovery, including those assets and the company's TV networks like CNN and TNT Sports.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Dec 2025 2:30pm GMT

Amazon used its annual re:Invent cloud conference in Las Vegas to pitch a vision of the workplace where AI agents serve not as tools but as "co-workers" and "teammates," even as the company proceeds with eliminating roughly 14,000 corporate jobs in its second major workforce reduction in recent years. AWS CEO Matt Garman predicted on stage that autonomous "frontier agents" could represent 80 to 90% of enterprise AI value. Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions, described a future where companies manage "teams" of agents capable of working autonomously for hours or days while humans shift into supervisory roles. Amazon has already deployed agentic systems across tens of thousands of its own engineers to triage outages and propose fixes. The company calls these systems "teammates" rather than tools. CEO Andy Jassy has warned that AI would shrink Amazon's workforce, though a spokesperson attributed the current cuts to "reducing bureaucracy" and "removing layers" rather than AI deployment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Dec 2025 2:00pm GMT

America's Energy Department runs a research lab in Idaho - and this week announced successful results from a ground-breaking experiment. "This is the first time in history that chloride-based molten salt fuel has been produced for a fast reactor," says Bill Phillips, the lab's technical lead for salt synthesis. He calls it "a major milestone for American innovation and a clear signal of our national commitment to advanced nuclear energy." Unlike traditional reactors that use solid fuel rods and water as a coolant, most molten salt reactors rely on liquid fuel - a mixture of salts containing fissile material. This design allows for higher operating temperatures, better fuel efficiency, and enhanced safety. It also opens the door to new applications, including compact nuclear systems for ships and remote installations. "The Molten Chloride Fast Reactor represents a paradigm shift in the nuclear fuel cycle, and the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment (MCRE) will directly inform the commercialization of that reactor," said Jeff Latkowski, senior vice president of TerraPower and program director for the Molten Chloride Fast Reactor. "Working with world-leading organizations such as INL to successfully synthesize this unique new fuel demonstrates how real progress in Gen IV nuclear is being made together." "The implications for the maritime industry are significant," said Don Wood, senior technical advisor for MCRE. "Molten salt reactors could provide ships with highly efficient, low-maintenance nuclear power, reducing emissions and enabling long-range, uninterrupted travel. The technology could spark the rise of a new nuclear sector - one that is mobile, scalable and globally transformative. More details from America's Energy Department: MCRE will require a total of 72 to 75 batches of fuel salt to go critical, making it the largest fuel production effort at INL since the operations of Experimental Breeder Reactor-II more than 30 years ago. The full-scale demonstration of the new fuel salt synthesis line for MCRE was made possible by a breakthrough in 2024. After years of testing, the team found the right recipe to convert 95 percent of uranium metal feedstock into 18 kilograms of uranium chloride fuel salt in only a few hours - a process that previously took more than a week to complete... After delivering the first batch of fuel salt this fall, the team anticipates delivering four additional batches by March of 2026. MCRE is anticipated to run in 2028 for approximately six months at INL in the Laboratory for Operation and Testing (LOTUS) in the United States test bed. "With the first batch of fuel salt successfully created at INL, researchers will now conduct testing to better understand the physics of the process, with a goal of moving the process to a commercial scale over the next decade," says Cowboy State Daily. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Dec 2025 12:34pm GMT

With the current, rapidly deteriorating state of the Windows operating system, you have to take the small wins you can get: Microsoft is now offering the option of removing "AI" actions from Windows 11's context menus. buried deep in the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7344 release notes, there's this nugget: If there are no available or enabled AI Actions, this section will no longer show in the context menu. ↫ Windows Insider Preview release notes If you then go to Settings > Apps > Actions and uncheck all the "AI" actions, the entire submenu in Windows 11's context menus will vanish. While this is great news for those Windows users who don't want to be bothered by all the "AI" nonsense, I wish Microsoft would just give users a proper way to edit the context menu that doesn't involve third party hackery. KDE's Dolphin file manager gives me full control over what does and does not appear in its context menu, and I can't imagine living without this functionality - there's so many file-related operations I never use, and having them clutter up the context menu is annoying and just slows me down. There's more substantial and important changes in this Insider Preview Build too, most notably the rollout of the Update Orchestration Platform, which should make downloading and installing application updates less cumbersome, but since it's a new feature, application won't support it right away. This release also brings the new Windows MIDI Services, and Microsoft hopes this will improve the experience for musicians using MIDI 1.0 or MIDI 2.0 on Windows. There's a slew of smaller changes, too, of course. I'm not exactly sure when these new features will make their way to production installations - who does, honestly, with Microsoft's convoluted release processes - but I hope it's sooner rather than later.

08 Dec 2025 12:08pm GMT

2025 was a very good year for my favorite genre.

08 Dec 2025 12:00pm GMT

When Mac OS X was designed, it switched to the bundle structure inherited from NeXTSTEP. Instead of this multitude of resources, apps consisted of a hierarchy of directories containing files of executable code, and those with what had in Mac OS been supporting resources. Those app bundles came to adopt a standard form, shown below. ↫ Howard Oakley A short, but nonetheless informative overview of the structure of a macOS application. I'm sure most people on OSNews are aware that a macOS application is a bundle, which is effectively a glorified directory containing a variety of files and subdirectories that together make up the application. I haven't used macOS in a while, but I think you can right-click on an application and open it as a folder to dig around inside of it. I'm trying to remember from my days as a Mac OS X user - 15-20 years ago - if there was ever a real need to do so, but I'm sure there were a few hacks you could do by messing around with the files inside of application bundles. These days, perhaps with all the code-signing, phoning-home to Apple, and other security trickery going on, such acts are quite frowned upon. Does making any otherwise harmless changes inside an application bundle set off a ton of alarm bells in macOs these days?

08 Dec 2025 11:52am GMT

The end of an era, perhaps. Applets are officially, completely removed from Java 26, coming in March of 2026. This brings to an official end the era of applets, which began in 1996. However, for years it has been possible to build modern, interactive web pages in Java without needing applets or plugins. TeaVM provides fast, performant, and lightweight tooling to transpile Java to run natively in the browser. And for a full front-end toolkit with templates, routing, components, and more, Flavour lets you build your modern single-page app using 100% Java. ↫ Andrew Oliver As consumers, we don't really encounter Java that much anymore unless we play Minecraft, but that doesn't mean Java no longer has a place in this world. In fact, it still consistently ranks in the top three of most popular programming languages, so any tools to make using Java easier, both for programmers and users, are welcome.

08 Dec 2025 11:43am GMT

Dog behavior is a lot more complicated than any one gene variant.

07 Dec 2025 12:08pm GMT

The port will revolutionize global trade, but it's sparking destructive rainforest routes.

06 Dec 2025 12:30pm GMT

Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people's beds. A little over a week later Microsoft Azure had a [widespread outage][Azure outage] that managed to significantly disrupt train service in the Netherlands, and probably also things that matter. Now last week, Cloudflare takes down large swaths of the internet in a way that causes non-tech people to learn Cloudflare exists. And every single time, people share that one XKCD comic.

24 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

After Gandi was bought up and started taking extortion level prices for their domains I've been looking for an excuse to migrate registrar. Last week I decided to bite the bullet and move to Porkbun as I have another domain renewal coming up. However after setting up an account and paying for the transfer for 4 domains, I realized their DNS services are provided by Cloudflare! I personally do not use Cloudflare, and stay far away from all of their products for various reasons.

18 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

The waydroid package prior to version 1.5.4-2 (including aur/waydroid) creates Python byte-code files (.pyc) at runtime which were untracked by pacman. This issue has been fixed in 1.5.4-3, where byte-compiling these files is now done during the packaging process. As a result, the upgrade may conflict with the unowned files created in previous versions. If you encounter errors like the following during the update:

error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files) waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/__pycache__/__init__.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/actions/__pycache__/__init__.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/actions/__pycache__/app_manager.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem

You can safely overwrite these files by running the following command: pacman -Syu --overwrite /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/\*__pycache__/\*

06 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT