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Job listing suggests GOG Galaxy may soon introduce first-party support for Linux  KitGuru

Job listing suggests GOG Galaxy may soon introduce first-party support for Linux  KitGuru

I used to avoid the Linux terminal. Here’s the path that fixed it  How-To Geek

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Gatik, a Silicon Valley startup developing self-driving delivery trucks, says its commercial operations are about to scale up dramatically, from fewer than a dozen driverless units running in multiple U.S. states now to hundreds of box trucks by the end of the year. CEO Gautam Narang said it's also booked contracts with retailers worth at least $600 million for its automated fleet. "We have 10 fully driverless, revenue-generating trucks on public roads. Very soon, in the coming weeks, we expect that increase to 60 trucks," he told Forbes. "We expect to end the year with hundreds of driverless trucks -- revenue-generating -- deployed across multiple markets in the U.S." Though the Mountain View, California-based company hasn't raised as much funding as rivals, including Aurora, Kodiak and Canada's Waabi, Gatik said it's actually scaling up faster than any other robot truck developer. Unlike those companies, it focuses on smaller freight delivery vehicles, rather than full-size semis, supplied by truckmaker Isuzu that operate mainly between warehouses and supermarkets and other large stores. The company's focus has been on so-called middle-mile trucking, which, like long-haul routes, has a severe shortage of human drivers, according to Narang. Currently, its trucks are on the road in Texas, Arkansas, Arizona, Nebraska and Ontario, Canada. The company has been generating revenue since shortly after its founding in 2017, hauling loads for customers like Walmart in trucks with human safety drivers at the wheel. Beginning late last year, it began shifting to fully driverless units and is getting more trucks from Isuzu built specifically to incorporate its tech, Narang said. "The hardware that we are using, this is our latest generation, has been designed to enable driver-out across thousands of trucks."

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The Succession Question: Linux Kernel Community Confronts Life After Linus Torvalds  WebProNews

A great week for Linux gaming as GOG plans support, and Bazzite has "a brighter future" with new collab  PC Guide

A great week for Linux gaming as GOG plans support, and Bazzite has "a brighter future" with new collab  PC Guide

Valve Developer Improves Aging AMD APUs On Linux With VRR, DP/HDMI Audio, HDR & Atomic  Phoronix

Linux Kernel Quietly Formalizes What Happens If Linus Torvalds Steps Away  Linuxiac

joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer: The FBI has seized the notorious RAMP cybercrime forum, a platform used to advertise a wide range of malware and hacking services, and one of the few remaining forums that openly allowed the promotion of ransomware operations. Both the forum's Tor site and its clearnet domain, ramp4u[.]io, now display a seizure notice stating, "The Federal Bureau of Investigation has seized RAMP." While there has been no official announcement by law enforcement regarding this seizure, the domain name servers have now been switched to those used by the FBI when seizing domains. If so, law enforcement now has access to a significant amount of data tied to the forum's users, including email addresses, IP addresses, private messages, and other potentially incriminating information. In a forum post to the XSS hacking forum, one of the alleged former RAMP operators known as "Stallman" confirmed the seizure.

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Open Gaming Collective Forms to Enhance Linux Gaming  TechPowerUp

Open Gaming Collective Forms to Enhance Linux Gaming  TechPowerUp

Handmade by human hands using machines  Digg

Apple TV+ has landed the screen rights to Cosmere, the sprawling literary universe created by Brandon Sanderson. "The first titles being eyed for adaptation are the Mistborn series, for features, and The Stormlight Archive series, for television," reports the Hollywood Reporter. From the report: The deal is rare one, coming after a competitive situation which saw Sanderson meet with most of the studio heads in town. It gives the author rarefied control over the screen translations, according to sources. Sanderson will be the architect of the universe; will write, produce and consult; and will have approvals. That's a level of involvement that not even J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin enjoys. Sanderson's literary success and fan following helped pave the way for such a deal. One of the most prolific and beloved fantasy authors working today, he has sold over 50 million copies of his books worldwide, collectively across his series. [...] While the Cosmere books are set in various worlds and eras, the underlying premise concerns a being named Adolnasium who is killed by a group of conspirators. The being's power is broken into 16 shards, which are then spread out throughout many worlds by the conspirators, spreading many kinds of magic across the universe.

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Fixed for 2026. I initially wrote this calculator in 2007. Hey, at least you know it wasn’t AI! Some of you may be wondering how well your specific portfolio performed last year (or over any specific period of time). Let’s say you started the year with $10,000 and put in another $5,000 through 10 different deposits spaced throughout the year, and ended up with $16,000. What was your rate of return? Your main goal is simply to separate the effect of new deposits (or withdrawals) and your actual return from investments.

Figuring out your exact personal rate of return requires you to know the exact dates of all your deposits and withdrawals, along with a financial calculator or spreadsheet program with an IRR function (example here). However, for a quick and simple estimate of your returns, try this calculator instead:

Initial Balance: $ Total Deposits: $ Total Withdrawals: $ Final Balance: $ Time period:   year(s) Your estimated annualized rate of return:   %

Instructions

1. Get your initial balance. This is probably from your brokerage statements. Try January of last year.
2. Tally up any deposits or withdrawals. For example, let’s say you know you put $3,000 in your Roth IRA and also 5% of your $40,000 salary into a 401(k). That would be $3,000 + $2,000 = $5,000. That’s it, you don’t need to worry about looking up the specific dates and amounts.
3. Get your final balance. Your December statement is probably available already.
4. Find the time elapsed (in years) between your initial and final balances.
5. Hit Calculate. An estimate of your annualized return is instantly given.

How Accurate Is This Estimate?
The calculator assumes that the inflows and outflows are spread evenly around the middle of the year. I originally saw this method in the book The Four Pillars of Investing (review). However, unless the deposits and withdrawals are very large as compared to the initial balance, the estimates are actually pretty good.

For example, let’s say that you start with $100,000 on 1/1/2025, and end up with $120,000 on 1/1/2026. If you had net deposits of $10,000 during the year, the calculator above would estimate your return at 9.52%. If the $10,000 was actually deposited all at once on one of these specific days, you would get the following exact returns:

Deposit Date Exact Return 1/1/2025 (very first day) 9.1% 6/04/2025 (middle of the year) 9.5% 1/1/2026 (very last day) 10% Estimate 9.5%

 

Also check out the rest of my Tools and Calculators.

Nobara Linux: Gaming distribution with focus, not marketing  igor´sLAB

Scientific American's Elizabeth Anne Brown recently "polled the great art houses of Europe" about whether they'd had any recent experiences with mold in their collections. Despite the stigma that keeps many institutions silent, she found that extremophile "xerophilic" molds are quietly spreading through museums and archives, thriving in low-humidity, tightly sealed storage and damaging everything from textiles and wood to manuscripts and stone. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the article: Mold is a perennial scourge in museums that can disfigure and destroy art and artifacts. [...] Consequently, mold is spoken of in whispers in the museum world. Curators fear that even rumors of an infestation can hurt their institution's funding and blacklist them from traveling exhibitions. When an infestation does occur, it's generally kept secret. The contract conservation teams that museums hire to remediate invasive mold often must vow confidentiality before they're even allowed to see the damage. But a handful of researchers, from in-house conservators to university mycologists, are beginning to compare notes about the fungal infestations they've tackled in museum storage depots, monastery archives, crypts and cathedrals. A disquieting revelation has emerged from these discussions: there's a class of molds that flourish in low humidity, long believed to be a sanctuary from decay. By trying so hard to protect artifacts, we've accidentally created the "perfect conditions for [these molds] to grow," says Flavia Pinzari, a mycologist at the Council of National Research of Italy. "All the rules for conservation never considered these species." These molds -- called xerophiles -- can survive in dry, hostile environments such as volcano calderas and scorching deserts, and to the chagrin of curators across the world, they seem to have developed a taste for cultural heritage. They devour the organic material that abounds in museums -- from fabric canvases and wood furniture to tapestries. They can also eke out a living on marble statues and stained-glass windows by eating micronutrients in the dust that accumulates on their surfaces. And global warming seems to be helping them spread. Most frustrating for curators, these xerophilic molds are undetectable by conventional means. But now, armed with new methods, several research teams are solving art history cold cases and explaining mysterious new infestations... The xerophiles' body count is rising: bruiselike stains on Leonardo da Vinci's most famous self-portrait, housed in Turin. Brown blotches on the walls of King Tut's burial chamber in Luxor. Pockmarks on the face of a saint in an 11th-century fresco in Kyiv. It's not enough to find and identify the mold. Investigators are racing to determine the limits of xerophilic life and figure out which pieces of our cultural heritage are at the highest risk of infestation before the ravenous microbes set in.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Reuters: Fully electric car sales in December overtook petrol for the first time in the European Union, even as policymakers proposed to loosen emissions regulations, data showed on Tuesday. U.S. battery-electric brand Tesla continued to lose market share to competitors including China's BYD and Europe's best-selling group Volkswagen, data from the European auto lobby ACEA showed. Car sales throughout Europe sustained a sixth straight month of year-on-year growth, with overall registrations, a proxy for sales, hitting their highest volumes in five years in Europe in 2025, though they remained well below pre-pandemic levels. [...] December registrations of battery electric, plug-in hybrid and hybrid electric cars were up 51%, 36.7% and 5.8%, respectively, to account collectively for 67% of the bloc's registrations, up from 57.8% in December 2024.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bazzite reveals the Open Gaming Collective to make gaming on Linux even better  XDA

The Linux kernel community has formalized a continuity plan for the day Linus Torvalds eventually steps aside, defining how the process would work to replace him as the top-level maintainer. ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports: The new "plan for a plan," drafted by longtime kernel contributor Dan Williams, was discussed at the latest Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit in Tokyo, where he introduced it as "an uplifting subject tied to our eventual march toward death." Torvalds added, in our conversation, that "part of the reason it came up this time around was that my previous contract with Linux Foundation ended Q3 last year, and people on the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board had been aware of that. Of course, they were also aware that we'd renewed the contract, but it meant that it had been discussed." The plan stops short of naming a single heir. Instead, it creates an explicit process for selecting one or more maintainers to take over the top-level Linux repository in a worst-case or orderly-transition scenario, including convening a conclave to weigh options and maximize long-term project health. One maintainer in Tokyo jokingly suggested that the group, like the conclave that selects a new pope, be locked in a room and that a puff of white smoke be sent out when a decision was reached. The document frames this as a way to protect against the classic "bus factor" problem. That is, what happens to a project if its leader is hit by a bus? Torvalds' central role today means the project currently assumes a bus-factor of one, where a single person's exit could, in theory, destabilize merges and final releases. In practice, as Torvalds and other top maintainers have discussed, the job of top penguin would almost certainly currently go to Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable-branch Linux kernel maintainer. Responding to the suggestion that the backup replacement would be Greg KH, Torvalds said: "But the thing is, Greg hasn't always been Greg. Before Greg, there was Andrew Morton and Alan Cox. After Greg, there will be Shannon and Steve. The real issue is you have to have a person or a group of people that the development community can trust, and part of trust is fundamentally about having been around for long enough that people know how you work, but long enough does not mean to be 30 years."

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