Mogwai

Microsoft says recent Windows 11 updates have made the operating system up to 20% more responsive by improving memory management and reducing background resource use. "A big part of that work is making smarter use of memory and system resources," says Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows experiences at Microsoft. "We've improved memory management and efficiency across Windows to help keep more of your PC's resources focused on what you're actively doing." The Verge reports: The improvements to memory management now make a "meaningful difference" on PCs with just 8GB of RAM. "Windows can now keep up to 2GB more of your active data in memory instead of moving it to slower storage," says Virk. "For example, on PCs with 8GB of memory or less, Widgets load only when you open them, making more than 200 MB of memory available for your apps and other work."

Microsoft has also made Windows Update less disruptive, cleaned up the Widgets section, and finally allowed the taskbar to be repositioned to the sides or top of a display. Windows Hello sign-in has also been sped up, and Bluetooth pairing is more reliable, "including an AirPods pairing experience that's up to 15 seconds faster."

The next big step is a new Windows Search experience that's a lot faster and more capable. [...] It's currently available for Windows Insiders, and Microsoft says it will "roll out more broadly later this year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

braart has added a photo to the pool:

My patio

BRUSSEL (ANP) - Voorzitter van de EU-leiders António Costa komt binnen een paar weken met een nieuw onderhandelingsvoorstel voor de EU-meerjarenbegroting 2028-2034, zo is donderdag besloten tijdens de EU-top. Dat laat een hoge EU-bron weten.

Belangrijkste discussiepunten zijn de omvang van de nationale afdrachten aan de EU-begroting en nieuwe EU-belastingen zoals op tabak. Ook de flexibiliteit in de begroting om te kunnen inspelen op crises is een onderwerp waarover nog lang geen overeenstemming is, zegt de bron.

Inzet is nog steeds om voor het einde van dit jaar tot een akkoord te komen. Eind november komt er een extra EU-top waar alleen de meerjarenbegroting op de agenda staat.

Nieuwe EU-belastingen

EU-leiders hebben donderdag lang, vier uur, over de meerjarenbegroting gesproken. Het is onduidelijk of de 27 EU-regeringsleiders iets nader tot elkaar zijn gekomen. Een geplande persconferentie hierover werd aanvankelijk verplaatst en daarna geschrapt. Vanwege een diner van de leiders zou er geen tijd meer voor zijn.

In het nieuwe voorstel zouden onder meer ideeën voor nieuwe EU-belastingen zoals voorgesteld door het Europees Parlement worden meegenomen, aldus de bron. Het parlement stelde onder meer belastingen voor op crypto en online gokken en was verbolgen dat dat niet was meegenomen in het voorstel van het Ierse voorzitterschap afgelopen weekend.

Hoe Costa tegemoet gaat komen aan de tweestrijd tussen de EU-landen over de hoogte van het budget is nog onduidelijk. Er zijn zeker zes landen, waaronder Nederland, die het Ierse voorstel van 1,62 biljoen euro te hoog vinden. Een groep van zeventien landen vindt juist dat er te veel geschrapt wordt in het meerjarenbudget.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De wereldwijde verkoopgolf van AI-gerelateerde aandelen lijkt weer ten einde te komen. Op Wall Street herstelde het vertrouwen van beleggers donderdag na opmerkingen van topman Jensen Huang van chipconcern Nvidia. Hij wees zorgen over financieringsproblemen bij CoreWeave van de hand. Daarbij zei hij niet te denken dat het datacenterbedrijf gered hoeft te worden door Nvidia.

CoreWeave stond in het middelpunt van de recente onrust in de techsector. De belangrijke klant van de AI-chips van Nvidia kelderde woensdag 15,5 procent door zorgen over de hoge schuldenlast van het bedrijf. Dit leidde tot bredere twijfel of de enorme investeringen in kunstmatige intelligentie de hoge waarderingen van veel techbedrijven nog wel rechtvaardigen.

Donderdag ging de beurswaarde van CoreWeave eerst verder omlaag. Na de opmerkingen van Huang sloot CoreWeave echter bijna 6 procent in de plus. Techbeurs Nasdaq ging uiteindelijk 0,1 procent hoger de handel uit op 26.713,03 punten. Nvidia zelf verloor nog wel een kleine 2 procent.

OzGFK has added a photo to the pool:

February 2026.
Hakuba, Japan.
Fomapan 100, bulk rolled.
Ricoh 35 ZF.
Home dev and scan.

In echoes of Valerie, the dachshund on the loose for 529 day in Australia, 34 days ago Luna, a Jack Russell Terrier, slipped out the door of her family's rental cabin at Yellowstone. Yesterday, her family and rescuers raced the approaching winter snows to successfully capture Luna with the use of a Missy Trap

Five people seriously hurt after incident involving vehicle carrying HGV drivers in Calais, say French authorities

Nineteen people have been injured after a minibus was involved in an accident at the loading platform of the Eurotunnel near Calais, French authorities have said.

Five people were severely injured though no one’s life appeared to be in danger, the local prefect said in a statement.

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Rising from bluebell woodlands and framed by rolling hills, this cluster of pink and brown brick towers in Croydon is a bittersweet winner of the prestigious RIBA Stirling prize

If Andy Burnham is looking for inspiration for his great “council housebuilding comeback”, he would do well to visit Croydon. There, nestled into a steeply sloping site, sheltered by a canopy of mature trees, stands a cluster of crystalline pink and brown brick towers, where generous flats look on to a landscape of allotments, playgrounds and to the rolling hills of south London beyond. Designed by Mary Duggan Architects, with Ruff Architects, it is a model of council-led housebuilding – so much so that it has also been named this year’s best building in the UK, confounding the bookies’ outsider odds.

Only once before has the RIBA Stirling prize ever been awarded to a council housing project, when Goldsmith Street in Norwich scooped the gong in 2019, for its rows of low-energy brick terraces, designed by Mikhail Riches Architects and Cathy Hawley. This year’s winner, Lion Green Road in Coulsdon, is an entirely different animal, and it puts a welcome spotlight back on housing design at a time when the government plans to pump £39bn into the sector. It is also a bittersweet vindication of Croydon council’s erstwhile housebuilding company, Brick by Brick, a bold and sadly brief experiment by the previous Labour administration, which was halted in 2020 when the council went bankrupt, seeing numerous projects cancelled.

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A small but active community of retro computing enthusiasts is working to keep Palm OS alive, and a developer who recently became aware of their existence has just handed them a treasure trove of code he had no idea was still useful. Swedish developer Aaron Ardiri published around a gigabyte of Palm OS development resources on GitHub on Thursday in a bid to preserve them for community consumption. Prior to their upload, Ardiri told The Register that the files were languishing in his own personal backups for more than 25 years, preserved only for his own records as part of his past as a developer of Palm OS applications. “Everything in the archive was accumulated during my years as an active Palm OS developer,” Ardiri explained in an email. “It includes SDKs, technical documentation, conference presentations, development utilities, examples, and some limited system source code that was originally made available to developers to help them understand the operating system's UI and internal components.” One gigabyte of such info might not seem like a lot today, but back in the halcyon era of the PalmPilot, that was a whole heap of valuable data. Ardiri had previously published source code from his own Palm OS apps on GitHub for those who were interested in it, but he had assumed it was just for public record and that no one would really want to muck about with old Palm OS apps. “A developer recently submitted a pull request to my original Lemmings source repository, adding HiRes+ display support for the Palm Tungsten T3,” Ardiri explained. “I had no idea people were still actively developing and improving this software more than two decades later.” That sent him down a rabbit hole. He soon realized there were Palm OS enthusiasts on Reddit, Discord, and other online communities all looking for resources to keep their vintage hardware alive and their retro software viable. “It made me realize that the old development resources sitting on my backup drives might actually be useful to people today,” he said. And now here we are, with a nice, fat GitHub repo full of resources Palm OS users can make use of. It’s worth noting that just because Ardiri has published this stuff on GitHub, that doesn’t mean it’s open source and ripe for the picking. He’s taken steps to avoid stepping on any copyright toes by leaving out things like Palm OS ROM images, firmware, simulators, and commercial apps that he felt he ought not to distribute as he didn’t have explicit permission. Ardiri sees this as a historical preservation effort, not an attempt to circumvent IP laws. “A lot of early mobile development knowledge has disappeared with old websites, developer forums, and documentation archives. Some of it survives only in personal collections like mine,” Ardiri told us. He said that he’s thrilled to have been introduced to the world of Palm enthusiasts, and recently passed off more than 50 old Palm OS devices to Russian dev and Palm OS preservationist Dmitry Grinberg. “This has been an unexpected rediscovery of a period of my career that I thought was largely behind me,” Ardiri told us. “It's clear that Palm OS has a much more active community than I realized … the repository is my contribution to those efforts, providing a historical record of what development looked like when Palm OS was a thriving commercial platform.” It makes you wonder what other digital gold is sitting in backups just waiting to be discovered. Take this as a sign to take a look through your old drives – you never know what you might find that someone has long been looking for. ®