Irish competitor Diarmuid Early, dubbed the "Lebron James of Excel spreadsheets," has won the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championship in Las Vegas, dethroning three-time champion Andrew Ngai. The BBC reports: The esport showpiece in December attracted competitors worldwide as 256 spreadsheet heads battled it out across knockout rounds to join the final 24 in Vegas. [...] A three-time champion in the financial Excel tournaments, this win was Diarmuid's first in the overall competition. He held the triple-world champion Andrew Ngai to second place, and won the $5,000 prize and title belt. [...] Excel esports transforms a common office tool into a dynamic sport. More than 20 years old, the competitive scene has evolved from being finance based to now involving more general problem solving. Although it might help, Diarmuid said "it doesn't require accounting or finance knowledge." He described an example where Excel is used in solving a maze, scoring poker hands, or even sorting Kings and Queens into the battles in which they fought. Generally there is a 30 minute challenge, with each challenge broken up into levels. The questions increase gradually in difficulty, with each correct answer gaining a player points. Whoever gets the most points wins, and in a tie, it is whoever got there first. "It's just, can you think on your feet and do things quickly in Excel?" he said. "If you solve the earlier levels in a neat way, that'll let you hit the ground running faster on the later ones."

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A federal judge blocked Texas' app store age-verification law, ruling it likely violates the First Amendment by forcing platforms to gate speech and collect data in an overly broad way. The law was set to go into effect on January 1, 2026. The Verge reports: In an order granting a preliminary injunction on the Texas App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420), Judge Robert Pitman wrote that the statute "is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book." Pitman has not yet ruled on the merits of the case, but his decision to grant the preliminary injunction means he believes its defenders are unlikely to prevail in court. Pitman found that the highest level of scrutiny must be applied to evaluate the law under the First Amendment, which means the state must prove the law is "the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling state interest." The judge found this is not the case and that it wouldn't even survive intermediate scrutiny, because Texas has so far failed to prove that its goals are connected to its methods. Since Texas already has a law requiring age verification for porn sites, Pitman said that "only in the vast minority of applications would SB 2420 have a constitutional application to unprotected speech not addressed by other laws." Though Pitman acknowledged the importance of safeguarding kids online, he added, "the means to achieve that end must be consistent with the First Amendment. However compelling the policy concerns, and however widespread the agreement that the issue must be addressed, the Court remains bound by the rule of law." "The Texas App Store Accountability Act is the first among a series of similar state laws to face a legal challenge, making the ruling especially significant, as Congress considers a version of the statute," notes The Verge. "The laws, versions of which also passed in Utah and Louisiana, aim to impose age verification standards at the app store level, making companies like Apple and Google responsible for transmitting signals about users' ages to app developers to block users from age-inappropriate experiences." "The state can still appeal the ruling with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has a history of reversing blocks on internet regulations."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: CBS cannot contain the online spread of a "60 Minutes" segment that its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, tried to block from airing. The episode, "Inside CECOT," featured testimonies from US deportees who were tortured or suffered physical or sexual abuse at a notorious Salvadoran prison, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. "Welcome to hell," one former inmate was told upon arriving, the segment reported, while also highlighting a clip of Donald Trump praising CECOT and its leadership for "great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don't play games." Weiss controversially pulled the segment on Monday, claiming it could not air in the US because it lacked critical voices, as no Trump officials were interviewed. She claimed that the segment "did not advance the ball" and merely echoed others' reporting, NBC News reported. Her plan was to air the segment when it was "ready," insisting that holding stories "for whatever reason" happens "every day in every newsroom." But Weiss apparently did not realize that the "Inside CECOT" would still stream in Canada, giving the public a chance to view the segment as reporters had intended. Critics accusing CBS of censoring the story quickly shared the segment online Monday after discovering that it was available on the Global TV app. Using a VPN to connect to the app with a Canadian IP address was all it took to override Weiss' block in the US, as 404 Media reported the segment was uploaded to "to a variety of file sharing sites and services, including iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent," including on the recently revived file-sharing service LimeWire. It's currently also available to stream on the Internet Archive, where one reviewer largely summed up the public's response so far, writing, "cannot believe this was pulled, not a dang thing wrong with this segment except it shows truth." "Yo what," joked Reddit user Howzitgoin, highlighting only the word "LimeWire." Another user responded, "man, who knew my nostalgia prof pic would become relevant again, WTF." "Bringing back LimeWire to illegally rip copies of reporting suppressed by the government is definitely some cyberpunk shit," a Bluesky user wrote. "We need a champion against the darkness," a Reddit commenter echoed. "I side with LimeWire."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: It's been more than eight years since Amazon bought Whole Foods, but the two companies still haven't aligned their setup for the Microsoft software their employees use. That disconnect was flagged in an 8-week Deloitte review of Whole Foods' use of Microsoft 365 apps earlier this year, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider. Deloitte found that Whole Foods relies on "fragmented" Microsoft toolsets, has loose security and data-retention practices, and employs a complex user-management setup -- all of which contribute to inefficiencies and lower productivity when working with Amazon employees. The consulting firm recommended a 24-month integration plan that would first move Whole Foods' corporate employees onto Amazon's backend system, followed by its frontline workers. The phased approach would ensure a "smooth transition for users and minimal disruption to business processes," while generating cost savings, the document said. The review, completed in May, highlights Amazon's ongoing challenges in integrating Whole Foods. Since acquiring the chain in 2017, the company has struggled to scale the business and integrate operations, resulting in frequent reorganizations and shifting strategic priorities.

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In the late 1980s, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary sat on the New York Times best-seller list for 155 consecutive weeks and eventually sold 57 million copies, a figure believed to be second only to the Bible in the United States -- but those days are thoroughly gone. Stefan Fatsis's new book "Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary" chronicles what Louis Menand describes in The New Yorker as "a losing struggle" for legacy dictionaries to survive in the internet age. The profession has been decimated: an estimated 200 full-time lexicographers worked in the US 25 years ago, and Fatsis believes that number is "probably closer to thirty" today. "By the time I finished this book," Fatsis writes, "it wasn't clear how long flesh-bone-and-blood lexicographers would be needed to chronicle the march of the English language." Merriam-Webster is now owned by Encycloaedia Britannica, another print-era giant that stopped publishing physical volumes in 2012. The company's free website draws about a billion page views annually, but the content has shifted dramatically -- word games, trending slang and ads dominate rather than lexicographic depth. The scale of the challenge facing dictionaries is staggering. One study of digitized library books found the English lexicon grew from about 600,000 words in 1950 to over a million by 2000, and concluded that 52% of English words in printed books are "lexical dark matter" that appears in no standard reference work.

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European public institutions are quietly migrating away from American cloud providers and office software, driven less by policy ambitions in Brussels than by the mundane legal reality that GDPR-mandated risk assessments keep flagging the US CLOUD Act as an unacceptable threat to citizen data. Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism moved 1,200 employees to the open-source platform Nextcloud in four months. Germany's Schleswig-Holstein has already transitioned 24,000 of its 30,000 civil servants to LibreOffice, Nextcloud and Thunderbird. The International Criminal Court in The Hague announced in November 2025 that it would replace Microsoft office software after chief prosecutor Karim Khan was temporarily locked out of his Outlook account. Competition economist Cristina Caffarra estimates that 90% of Europe's digital infrastructure is now controlled by non-European companies. Forrester predicts no European enterprise will fully abandon US hyperscalers in 2026, but these targeted migrations for sensitive government applications are already underway.

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If Linux 6.19 switching from the Radeon legacy to AMDGPU kernel drivers for the GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs for those ~13 year old GPUs isn't nostalgic enough for you, here's something a bit more nostalgic this holiday season: fresh open-source driver commits to the Radeon R300g driver for supporting those 23 year old ATI R300 GPUs up through the 20 year old R500 class graphics processors...

NVIDIA a publié, il y a quelques jours ses pilotes GeForce Game Ready 591.59. David vous avait fait une présentation de ces derniers pilotes GeForce Game Ready, avec les choses à en attendre. Toutefois, il persiste des bugs (introduits avec ?) qu'il a fallu éradiquer, et le hotfix était un bon moyen...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung is breaking new ground with its 2026 lineup of gaming monitors, with the Odyssey 3D G90XH becoming the first to feature a 6K display with "glasses-free 3D." The new monitor comes with a 32-inch IPS panel, offering real-time eye-tracking that "adjusts depth and perspective" based on your position, along with a speedy 165Hz refresh rate that you can boost to 330Hz with a Dual Mode feature that switches to 3K. [...] A 6K 3D display isn't the only notable upgrade coming to Samsung's lineup; the company is launching the Odyssey G6 G60H, which it says is the "world's first" 1,040Hz gaming monitor. The 27-inch monitor only supports this ultra-fast refresh rate in HD, while its native 1440p resolution still offers speeds up to a very fast 600Hz. It's also compatible with AMD FreeSync Premium and NVIDIA G-Sync.

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With the upcoming LibreOffice 26.2 open-source office suite release, they are getting rid of the "Community Edition" branding for the standard version of this widely-used cross-platform office suite...

The great return-to-office battle has effectively concluded and a clear pecking order has emerged, according to Sander van 't Noordende, the CEO of Randstad, a staffing giant that places around half a million workers in jobs every week. Remote work is becoming a status symbol reserved for star performers and those possessing rare skills. "You have to be very special to be able to demand a 100% remote job," van 't Noordende told Fortune. "That's increasingly the story. You have to have very special technology skills or some expertise." The equilibrium appears to be settling at a hybrid model of three to four days in office for most workers. Van 't Noordende noted that apart from some banks in major cities, the five-day office week isn't returning as the norm despite hardline mandates from companies like Amazon and JPMorgan. Korn Ferry predicted this "hybrid hierarchy" at the start of 2025, forecasting that flexibility would become a perk reserved for top talent. At some companies, high performers are already being offered flexible schedules as a bonus while mid-range employees don't get the privilege, the Wall Street Journal reported.

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Australia is on track for a significant expansion of desalination capacity -- converting seawater to freshwater -- to meet the needs of a swelling population at a time of declining average rainfall. From a report: The world's driest inhabited continent is projected to build or expand 11 desalination plants worth more than A$23 billion ($15 billion) over the next 10 years, according to a research report by Dominic McNally at Oxford Economics. "Our population growth forecasts imply an additional 190GL/year in household water demand across major cities by 2035, while the booming data center industry also threatens to rapidly expand urban water use," he said. "This growing demand coincides with falling average rainfall in major population centers, increasing the vulnerability of existing infrastructure." Water construction activity slowed after 2010 as a severe drought receded. However, recent dry periods have reignited interest in water security and coincide with a new boom in water infrastructure investment, including desalination, McNally said.

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Asus has been showcasing its new 5K 27-inch ROG Strix 27 Pro gaming monitor running at 5,120 x 2,880 resolution and up to 180Hz, but even Nvidia's flagship RTX 5090 struggles to deliver smooth frame rates at this demanding pixel count. In testing conducted by Asus, the RTX 5090D -- a Chinese-exclusive variant with weaker AI performance -- achieved just 51 frames per second in a Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark at ultra ray traced settings. The test system ran an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D processor, had DLSS set to balanced, and kept frame generation disabled. The same configuration running at 4K managed 77 fps, around 50% higher. The underlying math is simple: 5K resolution requires rendering 78% more pixels than 4K. That 218 PPI pixel density delivers impressive sharpness up close, but Asus chose an IPS panel over OLED technology to reach it, trading away deeper black levels and faster response times. Asus appears to be positioning the monitor as a dual-mode display -- 5K for productivity and video, 1440p at up to 330Hz for gaming. Early Chinese listings have it priced at the equivalent of $800, roughly what you'd pay for a larger 4K OLED panel.

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Very talented open-source developer Fabrice Bellard who already is well known for his work on QEMU, the Tiny C Compiler, and FFmpeg, has another accomplishment: Micro QuickJS. The Micro QuickJS JavaScript engine can compile and run JavaScript programs with as little as 10 kB of RAM...

Ahead of Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to debut next month at CES in Las Vegas, the Linux driver support for the next-gen "50xx" NPU of Panther Lake is now complete. The last piece of the driver support puzzle is now in place with the NPU firmware binaries having been upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository...

Le jeu Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night est offert par le store d'Epic Games, vous avez jusqu'à demain 17 heures, pour effectuer l'ajout ici.Les Igavania sont de retour ! Vous incarnez Miriam, une orpheline marquée par la malédiction d'un alchimiste qui cristallise lentement son corps. Pour se sauver, et sauver l'humanité, elle doit se frayer un chemin à travers le château pour vaincre l'invocateur, Gebel. […]

Lire la suite

C’est une sempiternelle interrogation : combien de RAM pour son PC de jeu ? La dernière fois que nous nous l’étions posée, par l’intermédiaire de TechSpot, remontait à 2018. La conclusion était simple : pour les jeux récents, 8 Go étaient devenus caduques ; 16 Go représentaient le juste milieu ; 32 Go restaient excessifs... [Tout lire]

Speaking of Italy's competition authority , it has fined Ryanair $301 million for abusing its dominant market position to limit sales of tickets by online travel agents. The Guardian: The authority said Europe's largest airline had "implemented an abusive strategy to hinder travel agencies" via an "elaborate strategy" of technical obstacles for agents and passengers to make it difficult for online travel agents to sell Ryanair tickets and instead force sales through its own website. The fine related to Ryanair's conduct between April 2023 and at least until April 2025, the authority said on Tuesday. It said Ryanair had prevented online travel agents from selling tickets on its flights in combination with other airlines and services, weakening competition. Ryanair said it would immediately appeal against the "legally flawed" ruling.

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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night est un jeu de rôle gothique d’horreur et d’action à défilement horizontal qui se déroule dans l’Angleterre du 18ᵉ siècle. Une force paranormale a fait surgir un château infesté de démons, révélant avec lui des éclats de cristal imprégnés d’une puissance magique considérable.

Dispo gratuitement sur EPIC

PEGI 12 – Audio en Anglais et Texte en Français – Windows

Retrouvez tous mes bons flans sur Mistermatos.com

Bon Flan : Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night gratuit 🍮 © MiniMachines.net. 2025

Elles n’avaient pas tout à fait disparu mais les voilà de retour en force, ce que j’appelle les configurations minables sont de nouveau bien en vue.

Les configurations minables ce sont ces minimachines qui apparaissent ici et là avec un prix défiant toute concurrence et qui viennent progressivement remplacer les MiniPC que nous croisions jusqu’à la rentrée de septembre. Les algorithmes des plateformes de vente adorent nous cataloguer. A grands coups de cookies, elles dressent un profil de nos goûts et déterminent notre pouvoir d’achat. Aussi, quand nous recherchons un produit dans une certaine tranche de prix, elles s’efforcent de nous en proposer d’autres, encore et encore.

Mais que se passe t-il quand l’offre change, par exemple suite à une augmentation de prix importante ? Un internaute qui a été sur une plateforme de eCommerce en septembre pour chercher un MiniPC à 150€ et qui retourne aujourd’hui sur la même plateforme aura une drôle de surprise. Dans les suggestions mises en avant par le site, il découvrira toujours toute une série de MiniPC de 120 à 150€. Simplement, elle aura considérablement évolué, dans le mauvais sens.

Les configurations minables, toute une galaxie de vieux clous

Dans l’offre massivement mise en avant aujourd’hui, des engins que plus personne ne regardait il y a seulement quelques semaines. Des machines sous Celeron, de vieux Athlons et autres configurations équipées de 8 Go de mémoire vive et 128 à 256 Go de stockage. Certains livrés avec un système d’exploitation. D’autres sans.

Dans le lot, on note particulièrement le retour de l’AMD 3020E qui est, avec le 3015E, la puce la plus bas de gamme possible de l’offre AMD compatible avec Windows 11. Le 3020E est sorti en 2020 et propose des performances vraiment ultra-basique. Comptez sur deux cœurs Zen 1 sans multithreads. Une fréquence de 1.2 GHz et un circuit graphique Radeon Vega 3. Cette puce est moitié moins rapide qu’un Intel N150 avec énormément de fonctions en moins pour une consommation équivalente.

Intégrée dans des MiniPC avec 8 Go de DDR4 (souvent en monocanal) et un stockage de 128 ou 256 Go, elle se vend pour 120-130€ en ce moment. Soit le tarif des MiniPC Intel N150 16/512 Go en aout. Ce machines poussées en avant par des plateformes comme AliExpress, deviennent pour un non initié le nouveau « bon plan » du moment. Si l’engin sera sans doute fonctionnel, son niveau de performance le classera comme un engin très entrée de gamme. Cette puce était déjà pénible à exploiter sous Windows à sa sortie en 2020, elle sera horrible à utiliser en 2025 et bientôt 2026.

Même chose pour ce MiniPC sous Intel Pentium J3710 de… 2016 ! Lui n’est pas compatible avec Windows 11 mais livré avec en outrepassant les solutions de sécurité de Microsoft. Les performances de ce type de puce sont abyssales. C’est clairement un processeur qui n’a de sens aujourd’hui que pour une exploitation monotache avec un usage industriel sous Linux. 

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Ce type de configuration peut se décliner dans différents scénarios et avec de multiples variations. Toutes se basent cependant sur la même logique. Une puce ancienne remontée du fond de vieux stocks comme des Penitums et Celeron ou ces fameux AMD 3015E et 3020E, qui reprennent du service en ajoutant un peu de mémoire vive et un stockage basique. Pour baisser le prix de l’ensemble, des composants de seconde zone sont embarqués à bord.

Le tout est emballé dans des boitiers à la connectique limitée. En général deux paires d’USB Type-A, deux sorties vidéo dans le meilleur des monde, un Ethernet Gigabit et un Jack. Le module sans fil est souvent confié à une solution Wi-Fi5 et Bluetooth 4.2.

Je ne dis pas que ces configurations minables n’ont aucun intérêt, j’utilise toujours un MiniPC fanless équipé d’un Celeron avec 8 Go de mémoire vive DDR4 comme petit serveur perso. Mais à moins d’avoir une idée réellement précise et identifiée des usages que l’on veut en faire, ce type d’engin ne sera pas assez performant pour utiliser confortablement un système d’exploitation moderne.

Ne vous faites donc pas berner par ces MiniPC entrée de gamme. Cela n’est pas une solution viable pour un usage courant.

MiniPC : le retour en force des configurations minables © MiniMachines.net. 2025