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02 May 2026 12:39pm GMT

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02 May 2026 12:16pm GMT

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02 May 2026 12:13pm GMT

Acoustic fire suppression goes commercial.

02 May 2026 11:30am GMT

GameStop is reportedly preparing a potential offer for eBay, an unusually ambitious move given that eBay's roughly $46 billion market value is nearly four times GameStop's. Reuters reports: GameStop is preparing an offer for eBay as CEO Ryan Cohen pursues plans to boost the struggling videogame retailer's market value more than tenfold, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Shares of eBay, which has a market capitalization of about $46 billion, soared about 14% in extended trading. GameStop gained 4%. The company has a market value of nearly $12 billion. GameStop has been quietly building a stake in eBay's shares ahead of a potential offer, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. If eBay is not receptive, Cohen could decide to take the offer directly to the e-commerce company's shareholders, the Journal said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 May 2026 11:00am GMT

KDE Plasma 6.7 prepares Background Apps portal support, sharper KWin zoom upscaling, and several System Tray and Discover refinements.

02 May 2026 9:45am GMT

NASA engineers have tested a next-generation lithium-plasma electric propulsion system that reached 120 kilowatts, a new U.S. record and about 25 times the power of the electric thrusters on NASA's Psyche spacecraft. "Designing and building these thrusters over the last couple of years has been a long lead-up to this first test," said James Polk, who is a senior research scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's a huge moment for us because we not only showed the thruster works, but we also hit the power levels we were targeting. And we know we have a good testbed to begin addressing the challenges to scaling up." Universe Today reports: While 120 kilowatts is a new record, NASA estimates it a future human mission to Mars will require 2 to 4 megawatts of power consisting of several thrusters and requiring more than 23,000 hours (958 days/2.6 years) of operation. To accomplish this, the thrusters would have to withstand more than 2,800 degrees Celsius (5,000 degrees Fahrenheit), which the thrusters achieved during testing. The reason for the extended operation is due to the estimated time of an entire human mission to Mars, which is estimated to be approximately 2.6 years. This is because the launch window to Mars only opens once every two years due to the orbital behaviors of both planets. While no mission has ever returned from the Red Planet, this same launch window works from Mars to Earth, too. When launched within this window, robotic spacecraft have traditionally taken approximately 6-7 months to reach Mars. However, a human mission would require a much larger spacecraft to accommodate the astronauts, food, fuel, water, and other mission-essential items. For the approximate 2.6-year mission, this would entail approximately 6-9 months traveling to Mars, followed by approximately 18 months on the surface of Mars until the next launch window opens, then another approximate 6-9 months back to Earth. However, having much less fuel due to the electric propulsion system could potentially alter this timeframe.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 May 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon's cloud customers will need to wait several more months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain -- meaning that full recovery from the cloud disruption could take nearly half a year in all. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard posted an April 30 update describing how its UAE and Bahrain cloud regions "suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East" and are unable to support customer applications. The update also said that "relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations" in a process that "is expected to take several months." That wording suggests Amazon will continue to avoid billing AWS customers in the affected regions -- ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 -- after it initially waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 at an estimated cost of $150 million. AWS also "strongly" recommended that customers migrate resources to other cloud regions and rely on remote backups to restore any "inaccessible resources." Some customers, such as the Dubai-based super app Careem-which offers ride-hailing, household services, and food and grocery delivery -- were able to get back online quickly after doing an overnight migration to other data center servers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 May 2026 3:30am GMT

Overtuning can cause models to "prioritize user satisfaction over truthfulness."

01 May 2026 10:23pm GMT

Op-ed: Valve has made a dent in Windows' gaming share, but can it keep going?

01 May 2026 10:00pm GMT

Wine 11.8 updates Mono to version 11.1, improves MSXML and VBScript support, and fixes 22 bugs across games and Windows apps.

01 May 2026 9:12pm GMT

Canonical confirms Ubuntu web infrastructure is facing a sustained cross-border DDoS attack, causing service disruption.

01 May 2026 8:57pm GMT