fidzu : nerd

VirtualBox 7.2.6 improves reliability on Windows 11, AMD systems, and Linux hosts, with fixes across VMM, GUI, and Guest Additions.

28 Jan 2026 5:03pm GMT

Comments

28 Jan 2026 4:52pm GMT

An analysis of film and music release patterns has found that summer and late fall are the optimal windows for movie premieres, while the music industry has no clear "best" month -- only a worst one, December, which the report's author dubbed "Dump-cember." For films, the calendar splits into distinct strategic zones. Summer months and holidays see elevated box office because audiences have more free time, and studios chase mega-billion-dollar hits during these windows. October and November see a surge of prestige releases as studios cluster their Oscar hopefuls to keep them fresh in voters' minds when awards season begins in January. The Silence of the Lambs, which swept the Academy Awards' Big Four categories in 1992, remains the only Best Picture winner in seven decades to have been released in January -- the industry's infamous "Dump-uary." The music industry operates differently. Most months are interchangeable for album releases, but December is uniquely bad. Artists avoid it because they would compete against Christmas classics from Bing Crosby and Andy Williams, both dead for decades. Albums released in December also receive weaker critical reception as measured by Pitchfork scores, and labels quietly slot their least promising projects into this low-attention window.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

28 Jan 2026 4:45pm GMT

Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. From a report: The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece -- the earliest wooden tools on record. The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence. Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred. The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

28 Jan 2026 4:15pm GMT

Debian-based GParted Live 1.8, a bootable Linux system for disk partitioning, ships with kernel 6.18, upstream GParted 1.8, and system updates from Debian Sid.

28 Jan 2026 3:42pm GMT

Comments

28 Jan 2026 3:39pm GMT

UPS said today it plans to eliminate an additional 30,000 operational jobs this year as the shipping giant continues to wind down its partnership with Amazon -- previously its largest customer -- and push forward a broader turnaround strategy under CEO Carol Tome. CFO Brian Dykes said on an earnings call that the cuts will be accomplished through attrition and a voluntary separation program for full-time drivers. The company also plans to further deploy automation across its network. UPS has identified 24 buildings for closure in the first half of 2026 and expects to reduce operational hours by approximately 25 million as the Amazon relationship unwinds. Last year, UPS eliminated 48,000 jobs -- 34,000 operational and 14,000 management -- and closed 93 buildings. The company expects $3 billion in total savings from the Amazon unwind.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

28 Jan 2026 3:29pm GMT

Comments

28 Jan 2026 2:32pm GMT

Krita 5.2.15, a free and open-source digital painting app, is out with crash fixes, improved tablet handling, and stability improvements for everyday creative work.

28 Jan 2026 11:41am GMT

Anti-vaccine Kennedy may be "enacting a self-fulfilling prophecy," expert says.

27 Jan 2026 11:28pm GMT

TikTok's tech issues abound as censorship fears drive users to delete app.

27 Jan 2026 11:17pm GMT

Abusing Microsoft's reputation may make scam harder to spot.

27 Jan 2026 10:34pm GMT