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It's a feature-length film "rendered on a free and open-source software platform called Blender," reports Reuters. And it just won the Oscar for best animated feature film, beating movies from major studios like Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks. In January Blender.org called Flow "the manifestation of Blender's mission, where a small, independent team with a limited budget is able to create a story that moves audiences worldwide, and achieve recognition with over 60 awards, including a Golden Globe for Best Animation and two Oscar nominations." The entire project cost just $3.7 million, reports NPR — though writer/director Gints Zilbalodis tells Blender.org that it took about five and a half years. "I think a certain level of naivety is necessary when starting a project," Zilbalodis tells Blender. "If I had known how difficult it would be, I might never have started. But because I didn't fully grasp the challenges ahead, I just dove in and figured things out along the way..." Zilbalodis: [A]fter making a few shorts, I realized that I'm not good at drawing, and I switched to 3D because I could model things, and move the camera... After finishing my first feature Away, I decided to switch to Blender [from Maya] in 2019, mainly because of EEVEE... It took a while to learn some of the stuff, but it was actually pretty straightforward. Many of the animators in Flow took less than a week to switch to Blender... I've never worked in a big studio, so I don't really know exactly how they operate. But I think that if you're working on a smaller indie-scale project, you shouldn't try to copy what big studios do. Instead, you should develop a workflow that best suits you and your smaller team. You can get a glimpse of their animation style in Flow's official trailer. NPR says that ultimately Flow's images "possess a kinetic elegance. They have the alluring immersiveness of a video game..."

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What's Linux's marketshare on Steam? The Steam Survey numbers tell this story: 11/24: 2.03% 12/24: 2.29% 01/25: 2.06% 02:25: 1.45% "The February numbers show a staggering 0.61% drop to Linux use..." reports Phoronix. But they attribute this to an sampling error: According to the survey, it shows 50% of Steam users using the Simplified Chinese language pack [a 20% increase from the month before]. In prior months where there has been drops to Linux use, it's been correlated to wild swings in the Chinese use on Steam. This looks to be another such month. Of the Linux specific data, SteamOS continues to prove most popular for that Valve distribution powering the Steam Deck [at 34.67%, with Arch Linux coming in second at 9.7%]. AMD CPUs power around 70% of the Linux gaming systems thanks to the Steam Deck APU and AMD Ryzen being quite popular with Linux enthusiasts.

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What's Linux's marketshare on Steam? The Steam Survey numbers tell this story: 11/24: 2.03% 12/24: 2.29% 01/25: 2.06% 02:25: 1.45% "The February numbers show a staggering 0.61% drop to Linux use..." reports Phoronix. But they attribute this to an sampling error: According to the survey, it shows 50% of Steam users using the Simplified Chinese language pack [a 20% increase from the month before]. In prior months where there has been drops to Linux use, it's been correlated to wild swings in the Chinese use on Steam. This looks to be another such month. Of the Linux specific data, SteamOS continues to prove most popular for that Valve distribution powering the Steam Deck [at 34.67%, with Arch Linux coming in second at 9.7%]. AMD CPUs power around 70% of the Linux gaming systems thanks to the Steam Deck APU and AMD Ryzen being quite popular with Linux enthusiasts.

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Lenovo demonstrated "a laptop with a foldable screen and one that can get extra battery life from solar power," reports CNBC, emphasizing that "These laptops are just concepts, meaning they are not commercially available." But "Lenovo, the world's biggest PC maker, has a history of showing off imaginative concepts with some becoming reality, so it's worth keeping an eye on what the Chinese technology giant is up to..." The latest concepts were unveiled at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona... When fully unfolded, the screen is an 18-inch display [on the Lenovo ThinkBook 'flip' concept]... The screen can then be folded in half horizontally to create two screens — one on the front and one on the back. The entire display can be folded down flat so the laptop turns into a tablet-like device. Lenovo also showed off a Yoga Solar PC concept, reports Gizmodo, calling it "relatively thin and light" despite a solar panel in its lid with "a supposed 24% solar conversion rate": Lenovo claims they achieved this by maneuvering the gridlines you usually find on a solar panel behind the solar cells, offering more real estate for energy absorption... Lenovo's software showed the power accumulation at around 7 V when facing away from the sunlight and 12 V when facing toward it. It could get more when getting direct sunlight. Despite the presence of the solar panel, the laptop still weighs a little more than 2.6 pounds, which isn't out of the realm of what to expect from most modern laptops. We should note that the panel isn't generating the required power to run the PC continuously. Lenovo claimed that 20 minutes of direct sunlight will transform into about one hour of video playback battery life. Depending on the CPU and battery, that could be 1/20 of the laptop's battery life. CNBC had slightly different statistics for the laptop's battery life. "Lenovo said that the solar panels can absorb even ambient light in a person's surroundings to give a user an extra hour of laptop use at the end of an eight-hour work day..."

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Despite a January announcement that America would explore the idea of a national digital asset stockpile, the exact cryptocurrecies weren't specified. Today on social media the president posted that it would include bitcoin, ether, XRP, Solana's SOL token and Cardano's ADA, reports CNBC — prompting a Sunday rally in cryptocurrencies trading. XRP surged 33% after the announcement while the token tied to Solana jumped 22%. Cardano's coin soared more than 60%. Bitcoin rose 10% to $94,425.29, after dipping to a three-month low under $80,000 on Friday. Ether, which has suffered some of the biggest losses in crypto year-to-date, gained 12%... This is the first time Trump has specified his support for a crypto "reserve" versus a "stockpile." While the former assumes actively buying crypto in regular installments, a stockpile would simply not sell any of the crypto currently held by the U.S. government. "The total cryptocurrency market has risen about 10%," reports Reuters, "or more than $300 billion, in the hours since Trump's announcement, according to CoinGecko, a cryptocurrency data and analysis company." "A U.S. Crypto Reserve will elevate this critical industry..." the president posted, promising to "make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World," reports The Hill: His announcement comes just after the White House announced it would be welcoming cryptocurrency industry professionals on March 7 in a first-of-its-kind summit... It's unclear what exactly Trump's crypto reserve would look like, and while he previously dismissed crypto as a scam, he's embraced the industry throughout his most recent campaign.

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Earth's core "burns with an estimated forty-four trillion watts of power," the New Yorker reminds us — enough to "satisfy the entire world's energy needs" with a power source that's carbon-free, ubiquitous — and unlimited. (Besides running 24 hours a day, one of geothermal energy's key advantages is "it can be used for both electricity and heating, which collectively account for around 38% of global climate emissions...") And one drilling expert tells them there's been an "exponential spin-up of activity in geothermal" energy projects over the last two years. (Ironically it was the fracking boom also brought an "explosion of new drilling practices — such as horizontal drilling and magnetic sensing — that inspired a geothermal resurgence.") In 2005 one research team calculated that just 2% of the heat just four miles underground in America "could meet the entire country's energy needs — two thousand times over," according to the article. So their new article checks in on the progress of geothermal energy projects around the world, including a Utah company using a diamond-bit drill to dig nearly a mile into the earth to install a 150-ton steel tube surrounded by special heat-resistant cement — all to create "a massive straw" for transporting hot water (and steam). The biggest problem is drilling miles through hot rock, safely. If scientists can do that, however, next-generation geothermal power could supply clean energy for eons... At 6:15 P.M. on May 3rd, cement had started flowing into the hole. Four hours later, part of the cement folded in on itself. The next morning, the cement supply ran out; the men had miscalculated how much they needed. This brought the three-hundred-million-dollar operation to a maddening halt... The cement truck from Bakersfield arrived around 8:30 P.M. By ten-thirty, the men were pouring cement again, gluing the enormous metal straw in place. Next, the team scanned the borehole with gamma rays...

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"Thousands of buildings across the United States are staying cool with the help of cutting-edge batteries made from one of the world's simplest materials," reports the Washington Post — ice. When electricity is cheap, the batteries freeze water. When energy costs go up, building managers turn off their pricey chillers and use the ice to keep things cool. A typical building uses about a fifth of its electricity for cooling, according to the International Energy Agency. By shifting their energy use to cheaper times of day, the biggest buildings can save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on their power bills. They can also avoid using electricity from the dirtiest fossil fuel plants. In places where the weather is hot and energy prices swing widely throughout the day — for instance, Texas, Southern California and most of the American Southwest — buildings could cut their power bills and carbon emissions by as much as a third, experts say... When every building is blasting its air conditioner at the same moment on a hot day, power companies often fire up backup generators, known as peaker plants, which are generally extra pricey and polluting. If utilities avoid using peaker plants, they'll pollute less and save money. Last year, the Energy Department struck a tentative $306 million loan deal with the ice-battery-maker Nostromo Energy to install its systems in 193 California buildings to make energy cheaper and cleaner while lowering the state's blackout risk. "The batteries themselves are huge..." the article acknowledges, citing one in New York City that uses 100 parking spot-sized tanks "which collectively make 3 million margaritas' worth of ice each night... But that's starting to change." (And they believe new smaller designs "could bring the batteries into smaller buildings and even houses.") Wherever they can squeeze into the market, ice batteries could be a cheaper and longer-lasting option than the lithium-ion batteries that power phones, cars and some buildings because their main ingredient is water, experts say. The pricey chemicals in a lithium-ion cell might degrade after 10 years, but water never wears out. And according to the article, one company has already installed ice batteries in over 4,000 buildings...

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Here's Why There Are So Many Linux Distros  Review Geek

Here's Why There Are So Many Linux Distros  How-To Geek

A "decision science partner" at a seed-stage venture fund (who is also a cognitive-behavioral decision science author and professional poker player) explored what happens when GPT-4 Turbo converses with conspiracy theorists: Researchers have struggled for decades to develop techniques to weaken the grip of conspiracy theories and cult ideology on adherents. This is why a new paper in the journal Science by Thomas Costello of MIT's Sloan School of Management, Gordon Pennycook of Cornell University and David Rand, also of Sloan, is so exciting... In a pair of studies involving more than 2,000 participants, the researchers found a 20 percent reduction in belief in conspiracy theories after participants interacted with a powerful, flexible, personalized GPT-4 Turbo conversation partner. The researchers trained the AI to try to persuade the participants to reduce their belief in conspiracies by refuting the specific evidence the participants provided to support their favored conspiracy theory. The reduction in belief held across a range of topics... Even more encouraging, participants demonstrated increased intentions to ignore or unfollow social media accounts promoting the conspiracies, and significantly increased willingness to ignore or argue against other believers in the conspiracy. And the results appear to be durable, holding up in evaluations 10 days and two months later... Why was AI able to persuade people to change their minds? The authors posit that it "simply takes the right evidence," tailored to the individual, to effect belief change, noting: "From a theoretical perspective, this paints a surprisingly optimistic picture of human reasoning: Conspiratorial rabbit holes may indeed have an exit. Psychological needs and motivations do not inherently blind conspiracists to evidence...." It is hard to walk away from who you are, whether you are a QAnon believer, a flat-Earther, a truther of any kind or just a stock analyst who has taken a position that makes you stand out from the crowd. And that's why the AI approach might work so well. The participants were not interacting with a human, which, I suspect, didn't trigger identity in the same way, allowing the participants to be more open-minded. Identity is such a huge part of these conspiracy theories in terms of distinctiveness, putting distance between you and other people. When you're interacting with AI, you're not arguing with a human being whom you might be standing in opposition to, which could cause you to be less open-minded. Answering questions from Slashdot readers in 2005, Wil Wheaton described playing poker against the cognitive-behavioral decision science author who wrote this article...

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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

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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Keeping your FreeBSD server or workstation updated is crucial for security and stability. However, after applying updates, especially kernel updates, you might wonder, "Do I need to reboot my system?" Let's simplify this process and provide a straightforward method for determining whether a reboot is necessary using the CLI, shell script, and ansible playbook. Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post How to tell if FreeBSD needs a Reboot using kernel version check appeared first on nixCraft. 2025-02-23T22:07:23Z 2025-02-23T22:07:23Z Vivek Gite

Rsync is a opensource command-line tool in Linux, macOS, *BSD and Unix-like systems that synchronizes files and directories. It is a popular tool for sending or receiving files, making backups, or setting up mirrors. It minimizes data copied by transferring only the changed parts of files, making it faster and more bandwidth-efficient than traditional copying methods provided by tools like sftp or ftp-ssl. Rsync versions 3.3.0 and below has been found with SIX serious vulnerabilities. Attackers could exploit these to leak your data, corrupt your files, or even take over your system. There is a heap-based buffer overflow with a CVSS score of 9.8 that needs to be addressed on both the client and server sides of rsync package. Apart from that info leak via uninitialized stack contents defeats ASLR protection and rsync server can make client write files outside of destination directory using symbolic links. Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post Critical Rsync Vulnerability Requires Immediate Patching on Linux and Unix systems appeared first on nixCraft. 2025-01-15T18:04:24Z 2025-01-15T18:04:24Z Vivek Gite

Multiplexing will boost your SSH connectivity or speed by reusing existing TCP connections to a remote host. This is useful when you frequently connect to the same server using SSH protocol for remote login, server management, using IT automation tools over SSH or even running hourly backups. However, sometimes your SSH command (client) will not respond or get hung up on the session when using multiplexing. Typically, this happens when your public IP changes (IPv4 to IPv6 changes when using DNS names), VPN issues, or firewall cuts connections. Hence, knowing SSH client control commands can save you time and boost your productivity when such gotchas occur. Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post How to control the SSH multiplexing with the control commands appeared first on nixCraft. 2025-01-15T08:29:10Z 2025-01-15T08:29:10Z Vivek Gite

After years of development and testing, the ZFS raidz expansion is finally here and has been released as part of version 2.3.0. ZFS is a popular file system for Linux and FreeBSD. RAIDz is like RAID 5, which you find with hardware or Linux software raid devices. It protects your data by spreading it across multiple hard disks along with parity information. A raidz device can have single, double, or triple parity to sustain one, two, or three hard disk failures, respectively, without losing any data. Hence, expanding or adding a new HDD is a very handy feature for sysadmins in today's data-sensitive apps. Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post ZFS Raidz Expansion Finally, Here in version 2.3.0 appeared first on nixCraft. 2025-01-14T09:19:20Z 2025-01-14T09:19:20Z Vivek Gite