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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Il aura fallu quatre ans, trois mois et 23 jours depuis son lancement, le 5 octobre 2021. « Windows a franchi une étape importante : le milliard d’utilisateurs de Windows 11, soit une hausse de plus de 45 % sur un an », a annoncé Satya Nadella, CEO de Microsoft, mercredi 28 janvier lors de la présentation des résultats financiers de l’éditeur.

Le mouvement a logiquement été accéléré par la fin du support de Windows 10, programmée au 14 octobre dernier. Cette bascule, annoncée de longue date, permet à Windows 11 d’afficher un taux d’adoption plus rapide que celui de son prédécesseur. La disponibilité générale de Windows 10 remonte en effet au 29 juillet 2015, et ce cap symbolique du milliard d’utilisateurs avait été annoncé le 16 mars 2020 (soit quatre ans, sept mois et 18 jours plus tard).

« Ce trimestre, nous avons également enregistré des gains de parts de marché sur Windows, Edge et Bing, ainsi qu’une croissance à deux chiffres du nombre de membres sur LinkedIn et une augmentation de 30 % des publicités vidéo payantes », a également déclaré Satya Nadella.

Si Windows 11 gagne des parts de marché, la concurrence n’est pas en reste, ce qui laisse supposer que le système profite principalement de l’abandon progressif de Windows 10.

D’un point de vue financier, Microsoft fait état, pour le deuxième trimestre de son exercice fiscal 2026, clos au 31 décembre dernier, d’un chiffre d’affaires en hausse de 1 % sur un an pour la division Windows OEM and Devices. Cette dernière intègre à la fois les ventes de licences Windows au travers des canaux OEM, les machines de la gamme Surface et les accessoires PC.

Microsoft ne précise pas le chiffre d’affaires attribué spécifiquement à son système d’exploitation (d’ailleurs ouvertement présenté par Nadella l’an dernier comme un produit d’appel vers le reste des offres de l’éditeur, notamment sur le cloud), mais Amy Hood, directrice financière, a quelque peu détaillé la tendance mercredi :

« Windows OEM a enregistré une croissance de 5 % grâce à une excellente exécution et à l’effet favorable continu de la fin du support de Windows 10. Les résultats ont dépassé les attentes, les niveaux de stocks restant élevés en raison d’une augmentation des achats avant la hausse des prix de la mémoire. »

Elle anticipe néanmoins un ralentissement des ventes en trimestre glissant. « Les revenus liés aux appareils et aux OEM Windows devraient connaître une baisse modérée. Les taux de croissance seront affectés par la normalisation des avantages liés à la fin du support de Windows 10 et par la diminution des niveaux élevés des stocks au cours du trimestre. Par conséquent, les revenus liés aux OEM Windows devraient baisser d’environ 10 % ».

• Windows 11 : la chienlit de 2025

Il aura fallu quatre ans, trois mois et 23 jours depuis son lancement, le 5 octobre 2021. « Windows a franchi une étape importante : le milliard d’utilisateurs de Windows 11, soit une hausse de plus de 45 % sur un an », a annoncé Satya Nadella, CEO de Microsoft, mercredi 28 janvier lors de la présentation des résultats financiers de l’éditeur.

Le mouvement a logiquement été accéléré par la fin du support de Windows 10, programmée au 14 octobre dernier. Cette bascule, annoncée de longue date, permet à Windows 11 d’afficher un taux d’adoption plus rapide que celui de son prédécesseur. La disponibilité générale de Windows 10 remonte en effet au 29 juillet 2015, et ce cap symbolique du milliard d’utilisateurs avait été annoncé le 16 mars 2020 (soit quatre ans, sept mois et 18 jours plus tard).

« Ce trimestre, nous avons également enregistré des gains de parts de marché sur Windows, Edge et Bing, ainsi qu’une croissance à deux chiffres du nombre de membres sur LinkedIn et une augmentation de 30 % des publicités vidéo payantes », a également déclaré Satya Nadella.

Si Windows 11 gagne des parts de marché, la concurrence n’est pas en reste, ce qui laisse supposer que le système profite principalement de l’abandon progressif de Windows 10.

D’un point de vue financier, Microsoft fait état, pour le deuxième trimestre de son exercice fiscal 2026, clos au 31 décembre dernier, d’un chiffre d’affaires en hausse de 1 % sur un an pour la division Windows OEM and Devices. Cette dernière intègre à la fois les ventes de licences Windows au travers des canaux OEM, les machines de la gamme Surface et les accessoires PC.

Microsoft ne précise pas le chiffre d’affaires attribué spécifiquement à son système d’exploitation (d’ailleurs ouvertement présenté par Nadella l’an dernier comme un produit d’appel vers le reste des offres de l’éditeur, notamment sur le cloud), mais Amy Hood, directrice financière, a quelque peu détaillé la tendance mercredi :

« Windows OEM a enregistré une croissance de 5 % grâce à une excellente exécution et à l’effet favorable continu de la fin du support de Windows 10. Les résultats ont dépassé les attentes, les niveaux de stocks restant élevés en raison d’une augmentation des achats avant la hausse des prix de la mémoire. »

Elle anticipe néanmoins un ralentissement des ventes en trimestre glissant. « Les revenus liés aux appareils et aux OEM Windows devraient connaître une baisse modérée. Les taux de croissance seront affectés par la normalisation des avantages liés à la fin du support de Windows 10 et par la diminution des niveaux élevés des stocks au cours du trimestre. Par conséquent, les revenus liés aux OEM Windows devraient baisser d’environ 10 % ».

• Windows 11 : la chienlit de 2025

Frameview, c'est ce logiciel fait par NVIDIA qui permet d'enregistrer des tas de métriques durant une séance de jeu ou un benchmark. Frameview offre ni plus ni moins une interface graphique et une simplification à PresentMon 2.2 sur lequel il repose. Beaucoup de paramètres sont relevés durant une se...

Hier, AMD amor�ait le lancement de son nouveau processeur X3D avec le Ryzen 7 9850X3D. Un processeur en 8c16c � 120 W de TDP qui s'avance � 499 USD, soit � peine plus que l'actuel Ryzen 7 9800X3D, mais pour quels gains et r�sultats ? En plus de notre test disponible ici, voici une petite s�lection d'articles de confr�res pour se faire un avis plus complet. […]

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Le jeu Monster Hunter Wilds profite d'une nouvelle mise � jour, la 1.040.03.01, de fortes optimisations sont au programme, ainsi que des correctifs. Espace requis environ 2 Go (environ 31 Go au total avec le pack de textures haute d�finition) Note : en raison des r�visions apport�es au pack de textures haute r�solution, un nouveau t�l�chargement d'environ 31 Go sera n�cessaire, ce qui repr�sente une r�duction globale d'environ 45 Go par rapport � la version pr�c�dente. Version pilote graphique Veuillez installer les versions de pilotes suivantes pour b�n�ficier de l'exp�rience la plus stable possible. - NVIDIA GeForce : 581.57 ou plus r�cent - AMD Radeon : 25.9.1 ou 25.9.2 Remarque : certains probl�mes ont �t� identifi�s au niveau des pilotes AMD Radeon versions 25.10.2 et plus r�cents. Remarque : ces informations sont susceptibles de changer � tout moment selon certains param�tres tels que la disponibilit� de l'assistance assur�e par NVIDIA et AMD. […]

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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.

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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.

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Sun Microsystems began developing gettext in the early 1990s and the GNU Project began GNU gettext development in 1995 for this widely-used internationalization and localization system commonly for multi-lingual integration. While GNU gettext is commonly used by countless open-source projects and adapted for many different programming languages, only an hour ago was GNU gettext 1.0 finally released...

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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French lawmakers have voted to ban social media access for children under 15 and prohibit mobile phones in high schools, positioning France as the second country after Australia to impose sweeping age-based digital restrictions. The Guardian reports: The lower national assembly adopted the text by a vote of 130 to 21 in a lengthy overnight session from Monday to Tuesday. It will now go to the Senate, France's upper house, ahead of becoming law. Macron hailed the vote as a "major step" to protect French children and teenagers in a post on X. The legislation, which also provides for a ban on mobile phones in high schools, would make France the second country to take such a step following Australia's ban for under-16s in December. [...] "The emotions of our children and teenagers are not for sale or to be manipulated, either by American platforms or Chinese algorithms," Macron said in a video broadcast on Saturday. Authorities want the measures to be enforced from the start of the 2026 school year for new accounts. Former prime minister Gabriel Attal, who leads Macron's Renaissance party in the lower house, said he hoped the Senate would pass the bill by mid-February so that the ban could come into force on September 1. He added that "social media platforms will then have until December 31 to deactivate existing accounts" that do not comply with the age limit. [...] The draft bill excludes online encyclopedias and educational platforms. An effective age verification system would have to come into force for the ban to become reality. Work on such a system is under way at the European level.

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Le jeu Along the Edge est offert sur la plateforme d�mat�rialis�e de Valve, Steam, l'ajout se passe ici, vous avez jusqu'� 19 heures pour l'effectuer, il s'agit d'un jeu narratif, au style crayonn� plein de charme.Suite � la perte d'un b�b�, une rupture amoureuse et un h�ritage surprise, Daphn� d�cide de tout plaquer pour refaire sa vie � la campagne. Elle y d�couvre qu'elle est la derni�re descendante d'une lign�e de sorci�res. Embrassera-t-elle la tradition familiale ? […]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Investors are souring on the bonds of software companies that service industries ranging from automotive to finance as fast-paced artificial intelligence innovations threaten to upend their business models. [...] Bond prices tumbled as advances in artificial intelligence rack up. Google announced plans to launch an AI assistant to browse for internet surfers Wednesday while a customer support startup, Decagon AI Inc., raised a new round of funding. Such developments are further stoking the angst about AI displacing enterprise software companies, driving a selloff in the sector's stocks and bonds across the globe. [...] Some say the AI fears weighing on software companies are overdone. "While point-solution software faces disruption risk, large company platforms with complex workflows and proprietary data are better positioned to benefit from AI-driven automation," wrote Union Bancaire Prive in its investment outlook for 2026 released this week. But a recent report by EY-Parthenon flagged that in the UK last year, software and computer services firms issued the highest number of warnings on earnings among listed firms. "Software multiples have compressed amid uncertainty around whether incumbents can defend pricing power and sustain growth in an AI-first work-flow environment," wrote Bruce Richards, chief executive officer and chairman of Marathon Asset Management, in a LinkedIn post last week.

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Apple is forcing Patreon to move all remaining creators onto Apple's in-app purchase subscription system by November 2026 "or else Patreon would risk removal from the App Store," reports TechCrunch. "Apple made this decision because Patreon was managing the billing for some percentage of creators' subscriptions, and the tech giant saw that as skirting its App Store commission structure." The tech giant initially told Patreon that it must do so by November 2025, but the deadline was pushed back. From the report: "We strongly disagree with this decision," its blog post states. "Creators need consistency and clarity in order to build healthy, long-term businesses. Instead, creators using legacy billing will now have to endure the whiplash of another policy reversal -- the third such change from Apple in the past 18 months. Over the years, we have proposed multiple tools and features to Apple that we could've built to allow creators using legacy billing to transition on their own timelines, with more support added in. Unfortunately, Apple has continually declined them," it says. Creators can read more about the transition plan on Patreon's website. It has also built several tools to support these changes, including a benefit eligibility tool to see who has paid or is scheduled to pay, tier repricing tools, and gifting and discount tools to offer payment flexibility. An option for annual-only memberships will be introduced before November 2026 as well. The commission on in-app purchases and subscriptions is 30% on Apple's system, but "drops to 15% for a subscription that has been ongoing for more than a year," notes MacRumors. Patreon lets creators either raise prices only in its iOS app to cover Apple's fee or keep prices the same by absorbing the cost, while iPhone and iPad users can avoid the App Store commission entirely by paying through Patreon's website instead.

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Google is rolling out an "auto browse" AI agent in Chrome that can navigate websites, fill out forms, compare prices, and handle tedious online tasks on a user's behalf. Bloomberg reports: The feature, called auto browse, will allow users to ask an assistant powered by Gemini to complete tasks such as shopping for them without leaving Chrome, said Charmaine D'Silva, a director of product. Chrome users will be able to plan a family trip by asking Gemini to open different airline and hotel websites to compare prices, for instance, D'Silva explained. "Our testers have used it for all sorts of things: scheduling appointments, filling out tedious online forms, collecting their tax documents, getting quotes for plumbers and electricians, checking if their bills are paid, filing expense reports, managing their subscriptions, and speeding up renewing their driving licenses -- a ton of time saved," said Parisa Tabriz, vice president of Chrome, in a blog post. [...] Chrome's auto browse will be available to US AI pro and AI Ultra subscribers and will use Google Password Manager to sign into websites on a user's behalf. As part of the launch, Google is also bringing its image generation tool, Nano Banana, directly into Chrome. The company said that safeguards have been placed to ensure the agentic AI will not be able to make final calls, such as placing an order, without the user's permission. "We're using AI as well as on-device models to protect people from what's really an ever-evolving landscape, whether it's AI-generated scams or just increasingly sophisticated attackers," Tabiz said during the call.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: The interim head of the country's cyber defense agency uploaded sensitive contracting documents into a public version of ChatGPT last summer, triggering multiple automated security warnings that are meant to stop the theft or unintentional disclosure of government material from federal networks, according to four Department of Homeland Security officials with knowledge of the incident. The apparent misstep from Madhu Gottumukkala was especially noteworthy because the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had requested special permission from CISA's Office of the Chief Information Officer to use the popular AI tool soon after arriving at the agency this May, three of the officials said. The app was blocked for other DHS employees at the time. None of the files Gottumukkala plugged into ChatGPT were classified, according to the four officials, each of whom was granted anonymity for fear of retribution. But the material included CISA contracting documents (PDF) marked "for official use only," a government designation for information that is considered sensitive and not for public release. Cybersecurity sensors at CISA flagged the uploads this past August, said the four officials. One official specified there were multiple such warnings in the first week of August alone. Senior officials at DHS subsequently led an internal review to assess if there had been any harm to government security from the exposures, according to two of the four officials. It is not clear what the review concluded.

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Amazon is discontinuing its Amazon One palm recognition ID system for stores later this year, the company informed users. From a report: The company will discontinue Amazon One services at retail businesses on June 3, 2026, according to a support page for the service and email messages to customers. "In response to limited customer adoption, we're discontinuing Amazon One, our authentication service for facility access and payment," an Amazon spokesperson said. "All customer data associated with Amazon One will be securely deleted after the service ends." The move coincides with a sweeping pullback from Amazon's physical retail experiments. Amazon announced Tuesday that it's closing all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh locations, a total of 72 stores nationwide, concentrating its efforts instead on its Whole Foods Market locations and grocery delivery from Amazon.com. Amazon One launched in 2020 as a way to help speed up in-store entry and payments, identifying customers who opted-in and eliminating the need for them to present a credit card to pay. It often worked in conjunction with the company's Just Walk Out technology, which uses cameras and sensors to let customers avoid using a checkout line.

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Wasmer 7.0 is out today for this WebAssembly "WASM" run-time for enabling lightweight containers that can run "anywhere" from the desktop to cloud and the edge. The security-minded and extensible WASM runtime provided by Wasmer has already proven to be quite robust while with Wasmer 7.0 has become even more featureful...

The upcoming release of GNOME 50 to be found in the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 will feature improved discrete GPU detection within the GNOME Shell. This effort has been two years coming and finally merged this week...

The housing shortages plaguing Western cities today stem partly from the abandonment of a 19th century urban governance model that enabled cities like Berlin, New York and Chicago to expand rapidly while keeping real house prices flat and homes increasingly affordable. A new analysis by Works in Progress argues that Victorian-era urban management wasn't laissez-faire but rather a system carefully designed to align private profit with public benefit. Infrastructure monopolies -- whether privately franchised, operated as concessions or municipally owned -- funded themselves entirely through user fees rather than public subsidies, and were structured so that building more capacity was the path to greater returns. Landowners enjoyed a fundamental right to build when profitable, and height limits applied uniformly across entire cities rather than varying by neighborhood, meaning dense development remained legal everywhere. The system began collapsing after 1914, however. Inflation proved fatal to self-funding transport because governments found it politically impossible to raise controlled prices year after year. By the 1960s, trams had vanished from Britain, France and the U.S. Meanwhile, differential zoning gradually banned densification in established neighborhoods, and rent controls decimated private homebuilding in many countries. In Britain, average house prices fell from twelve times earnings in 1850 to four times by 1914. They have since climbed back to nine times earnings. The article argues roughly 80% of postwar price increases trace directly to restrictions on building.

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