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Heroic Games Launcher v2.16 released with improved Steam Deck / Linux game compatibility  GamingOnLinux

Heroic Games Launcher v2.16 released with improved Steam Deck / Linux game compatibility  GamingOnLinux

Heroic Games Launcher v2.16 released with improved Steam Deck / Linux game compatibility  GamingOnLinux

How confident are we about the safety of commercial space tourism? Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: It's one thing for Microsoft to boast that they dare to use Outlook instead of Gmail. But it took a whole other level of commitment for Jeff Bezos to join his brother Mark aboard Blue Origin's first passenger-carrying mission in July 2021. So, while Bezos is unhesitant about sending himself and other celebrities and loved ones into space aboard Blue Origin, how confident are you about the current state of space travel safety? If offered a free ride into space from Bezos's Blue Origin, or one of the other options like Virgin Galactic, Axiom Space, or Boeing's Starliner, would you accept or decline it? Share your own thoughts and answers in the comments. Would you accept a free ride into space?

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Buying a Mini PC for Linux? Keep These 5 Factors in Mind  How-To Geek

Steam sees a big rise in Simplified Chinese for February 2025 bringing Linux down below 2%  GamingOnLinux

Steam sees a big rise in Simplified Chinese for February 2025 bringing Linux down below 2%  GamingOnLinux

Steam sees a big rise in Simplified Chinese for February 2025 bringing Linux down below 2%  GamingOnLinux

Steam sees a big rise in Simplified Chinese for February 2025 bringing Linux down below 2%  GamingOnLinux

Steam sees a big rise in Simplified Chinese for February 2025 bringing Linux down below 2%  GamingOnLinux

Steam sees a big rise in Simplified Chinese for February 2025 bringing Linux down below 2%  GamingOnLinux

Steam sees a big rise in Simplified Chinese for February 2025 bringing Linux down below 2%  GamingOnLinux

Steam sees a big rise in Simplified Chinese for February 2025 bringing Linux down below 2%  GamingOnLinux

Can a new 3D-printing technique shorten 3D printing times to just seconds? A team of researchers in Europe has modified Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing, which can "create entire objects in one shot by shining light patterns into liquid resin," according to the 3D Printing Industry blog. (The liquid resin then solidifies when the light intensity is high enough...) While this approach can fabricate support-free, micro-scale parts within tens of seconds, it is "highly inefficient." This is because under 1% of the encoded light reaches the resin vial. Conventional TVAM can also lead to unwanted distortions and poor resolution due to light blurring and projection artifacts. To address these limitations, the researchers developed HoloVAM, a new technique that uses a 3D hologram instead of conventional volumetric light projections. This approach reportedly boosts light efficiency by 20 times, resulting in faster and more accurate 3D printing. According to their paper, published in Nature Communications, HoloVAM successfully fabricated several millimeter-scale objects in under 60 seconds with fine details as small as 31 micrometers... They believe this new approach offers value for medical bioprinting applications, thanks to HoloVAM's use of "self-healing beams." These can generate and retain their shape when passing through materials, which is particularly valuable when 3D printing with cell-laden bio-resins and hydrogels. Thanks to Slashdot reader BizarreVR for sharing the news.

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Petawatt lasers have already allowed scientists to "manipulate materials in new ways, emulate the conditions inside planets, and even split atoms," reports Science magazine. "Now, accelerator physicists have matched that feat, producing petawatt pulses of electrons that could also have spectacular applications..." Described in a paper published Thursday in Physical Review Letters, the electron pulses last one-quadrillionth of a second but carry 100 kiloamps of current. "It's a supercool experiment," says Sergei Nagaitsev, an accelerator physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who was not involved in the work. Richard D'Arcy, a plasma accelerator physicist at the University of Oxford, adds, "It's not just an experimental demonstration of something interesting, it's a steppingstone on the way to megaamp beams." If achievable, those even more powerful beams might begin to perform extraordinary feats such as ripping particles out of empty space, he says... [A]mped-up lasers would open the way to, for example, probing chemical processes as they happen, says Sergei Nagaitsev [an accelerator physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who was not involved in the experiment]. "These are the easy pickings." An ultraintense electron pulse could also be used to generate plasmas like those seen in astrophysics, such as the jets of matter and radiation that shoot out of certain stellar explosions at near-light-speed. Researchers need only fire the electron beam into the right target. "This is a fantastic relativistic drill," Ferrario says. "The interaction of this with matter could be very interesting." Superintense electron bunches might someday even probe the nature of empty space. They produce a hugely intense electric field, so if one of them were to collide with an ultraintense laser pulse, which also contains a huge electric field, it would expose space to an incredibly strong electrical polarization, D'Arcy notes. If that field is strong enough, it should begin to rip particle-antiparticle pairs out of the vacuum, a phenomenon predicted by quantum physics but never observed. "You can access areas of particle physics that are inaccessible elsewhere," Darcy says. Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.

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Have Your Linux Terminal Read to You With the espeak Command  How-To Geek

Which Linux Terminal Game Should I Play?  How-To Geek

Steam Survey For February 2025 Shows A Big Drop To Linux Use  Phoronix

A malicious PyPi package effectively turned its users' systems "into an illicit network for facilitating bulk music downloads," writes The Hacker News. Though the package has been removed from PyPI, researchers at security platform Socket.dev say it enabled "coordinated, unauthorized music downloads from Deezer — a popular streaming service founded in France in 2007." Although automslc, which has been downloaded over 100,000 times, purports to offer music automation and metadata retrieval, it covertly bypasses Deezer's access restrictions... The package is designed to log into Deezer, harvest track metadata, request full-length streaming URLs, and download complete audio files in clear violation of Deezer's API terms... [I]t orchestrates a distributed piracy operation by leveraging both user-supplied and hardcoded Deezer credentials to create sessions with Deezer's API. This approach enables full access to track metadata and the decryption tokens required to generate full-length track URLs. Additionally, the package routinely communicates with a remote server... to update download statuses and submit metadata, thereby centralizing control and allowing the threat actor to monitor and coordinate the distributed downloading operation. In doing so, automslc exposes critical track details — including Deezer IDs, International Standard Recording Codes, track titles, and internal tokens like MD5_ORIGIN (a hash used in generating decryption URLs) — which, when collected en masse, can be used to reassemble full track URLs and facilitate unauthorized downloads... Even if a user pays for access to the service, the content is licensed, not owned. The automslc package circumvents licensing restrictions by enabling downloads and potential redistribution, which is outside the bounds of fair use... "The malicious package was initially published in 2019, and its popularity (over 100,000 downloads) indicates wide distribution..."

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Rich Warren | Dipping a toe into the Linux community  Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette