Reuters reports: Incoming British prime minister Andy Burnham will scrap the government's troubled plans for a digital ID scheme when he enters office on Monday, a spokesperson for the new Labour Party leader said. Resources devoted to the scheme, deemed a "fiasco" by a cross-party committee of lawmakers, will be redirected to Burnham's priorities, the spokesperson said... "All the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it's most needed, such as helping with the cost of living," Burnham's spokesperson said. In November, the Office for Budget Responsibility watchdog estimated the cost of the digital ID scheme at around £1.8 billion ($2.4 billion) between financial years 2026/27 and 2028/29.

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The performance of the Nouveau kernel driver with the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver continues to improve each feature release in its quest toward better competing with NVIDIA's official Linux graphics driver with its proprietary Vulkan driver...

"Approximately half of Gen Z and millennials who have purchased a CD do not own a CD player," according to midyear sales statistics from entertainment data company Luminate. It's driven in part by "collection building", according to their report [PDF]: The CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible. This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist as it is listening to the music on the product itself "Among artists who had a direct impact on the resurgence of CDs, K-Pop icons BTS' 10th studio album, ARIRANG, was a big seller," Vice points out in their report on the new data. "However, Luminate also found that, beyond K-Pop's overall influence, CD sales still increased 6.7% year over year, even if the whole genre was removed from the equation, jumping 16% to 16.3 million units." That's more than the growth of vinyl sales (2.4%) — but physical media in general seems to be making a comeback: Through the first half of the year, total physical album sales on vinyl, CDs, and cassettes reached 38.2 million units in the United States. This equates to a 7.8% increase.... [I]t seems that younger music fans have been driving a lot of the retro revival. The report shows that in 2026, 60% of Gen Z listeners said they most often listen to music from the 1990s and older. This is a massive increase from the 18 percent marker in 2021. The new report also revealed that the way music fans are buying physical media has shifted. Indie record stores have been the largest generator of physical album sales for some time, and they continue to be. However, big-box stores like Target and Walmart took significant strides in the first half of 2026. Collectively, their music sales made up about 30% of the market. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

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Le 18 mars 2026, il y a donc exactement 4 mois maintenant, nous vous partagions sur H&Co un score Geekbench 6 qui semblait appartenir à un prototype issu d'AMD d'un futur processeurs Zen 6 mobile à 10 cœurs, alias Medusa Point. Le score en lui-même n'était pas très élevé : 2 300 en Single-Core e...

"One of the most interesting BSD variants of the 2010s, NextBSD, has come back to life under new management," reports The Register: Aside from the homepage, there's a GitHub repository — but beware, this is separate from the old one, whose repo is still there although the most recent changes were seven years ago. The new project also has a project history giving credit where it's due. The main man behind the revival is Joe Maloney, known on GitHub as pkgdemon. In case his name rings a bell, we've mentioned him before: he put together the Gershwin desktop in GhostBSD. Soon after we covered Gershwin on GhostBSD, he asked the maintainers if he could take over the NextBSD project. He did have a relatively minor role in the original — you can see his list of commits. The original NextBSD project was started by FreeBSD co-founder Jordan Hubbard in 2015 — its Wikipedia article has some of the history. The plan was to port some of the components of Apple's Darwin OS to FreeBSD... [T]he NextBSD plan is to take the FreeBSD kernel, the most capable of the FOSS BSD kernels, but replace FreeBSD's traditional and server-focused userland with the relevant parts of the publicly available Apple code. The rebooted NextBSD-redux is not based on a fork of the decade-old code. FreeBSD has moved on substantially in that time, and so have macOS and Darwin. This is a new project by a new developer, but it picks up the same overall plan, aims to assemble the same puzzle pieces, and shares the same intended goal. In places, it does draw on a little of the same code, though. The NextBSD-redux README describes what's working so far, with a lot more detail in the porting notes. Although there's no graphical desktop yet, that's underway as well.... For us, perhaps the key aspect of NextBSD — both the original version and NextBSD-redux — is that it isn't an effort to build something completely new from scratch. It's an effort to cherry-pick and combine elements of existing separate FOSS projects, and assemble them into a useful whole. The Team section of the homepage lists two core developers: Maloney and Anthropic's Claude Code. "From my perspective, AI is a force multiplier here," Maloney told The Register. "It is my team of developers, but I am steering the entire thing."

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La fin des arêtes franches chez NZXT.... [Tout lire]

In a sign of our times, CNBC's Jim Cramer "said Wednesday that it's time for companies to prove artificial intelligence is paying off," reports CNBC: "I need cold hard return facts," the "Mad Money" host said. "Or, I, too, will grow more skeptical than I am now...." While Cramer said he remains optimistic about the long-term opportunity, he argued the market needs more evidence that those investments are translating into measurable financial returns for customers. Cramer said one of his biggest concerns this earnings season is that companies adopting AI have largely failed to point to meaningful revenue gains or cost savings from the technology. "We're still early in the earnings season but already we are not hearing anything material about the use of AI," he said... While AI infrastructure companies continue to benefit from the spending boom, Cramer said the same cannot yet be said for many of the businesses buying the technology... Cramer said only a handful of companies, most notably fintech firm Block and web-security provider Cloudflare, have clearly attributed recent layoffs to AI adoption. Block did so in February, while Cloudflare's job cuts were disclosed in May. Plus, critics argue some companies may also cite AI as a buzzy excuse for cuts, leading to the creation of the term "AI washing." Ultimately, Cramer said that if more businesses do not begin reporting tangible returns, the AI skeptics will grow louder, with ramifications for the tech industry's big spenders.

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21 litres ventilés de conviction Il y a six ans à présent, le H1 était issu d'une idée plutôt sympathique : proposer un kit incluant boitier, AIO et alimentation au format mITX. Hélas, il a surtout marqué les esprits par des soucis de fiabilité et conclu un rappel peu glorieux, puis une V2 mise sur le marché... [Tout lire]

Tous ensemble : un, deux, trois... "AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D" ! À n'en pas douter, le dernier-né des rouges a rythmé ce qui ne devait être qu'une paisible journée d'été à la (précédemment) fraîche. Pour autant, le CPU ne fait pas (toute) l'actualité, puisqu'une machine de guerre portative, de la RAM et q...

Retour aux fondamentaux pour la chaine YouTube TrashBench, qui nous fait une modification digne de celles que de nombreux passionnés de hardware de longue date on sans doute déjà tentées au moins une fois dans leur vie : affubler leur carte graphique d'un maximum de ventilateurs possibles, pour tent...

Launched in 2006, NASA's New Horizons probe flew by the planet Pluto in 2015. But this week it "awakened from its longest sleep ever," reports CNN. It's now 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth... NASA's New Horizons spacecraft went into a planned hibernation mode on August 7, 2025, and woke up on June 23 using commands stored on its main computer. The mission's flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed that New Horizons is in great shape and ready to transmit a stream of science data gathered during hibernation from its location in the region of icy objects known as the Kuiper Belt. Pluto is the largest of thousands of frozen, rocky bodies called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, that exist in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system — remnants from its formation 4.5 billion years ago... The spacecraft is capturing data about the rotation rates, orientations and shapes... The measurements provide insights into how planets are born from dust and pebbles, said Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "There seems to be more paired, snowman-shaped bodies, like Arrokoth, out there than anyone expected," Brandt wrote in an email. "Are such binaries the most common planetesimal and is this how larger planets have been built in our own and other stellar systems? These are very deep questions that New Horizons can help answer." The spacecraft also measures the distribution of gas in the outer heliosphere, the expansive, protective bubble formed by a steady stream of particles that release from the sun called the solar wind. Meanwhile, an instrument called the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation is measuring galactic cosmic rays, extremely fast particles created when stars explode. The particles pose one of the more severe threats for human activities in space, Brandt said, but the boundary of the heliosphere acts as a shield to protect our solar system from 70% of them. New Horizons' data could help scientists learn more about how this puzzling shielding works, he said. Another instrument, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, has collected data that has thrown New Horizon's team a curveball, Brandt said. The team expected dust abundance to be high within the Kuiper Belt due to the significant presence of small objects. But New Horizons has traveled beyond the known boundary of the Kuiper Belt — and it's still in a dusty environment.

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Thursday the union that helped organize thousands of workers across numerous Microsoft-owned video game studios filed unfair labor complaints against Microsoft over the layoffs of 1,600 employees. The gaming news site Aftermath says the complaints allege unlawful action: "Xbox management is required to bargain with the union over the decision of layoffs prior to implementing them during the status quo period, and we are pursuing every available avenue to protect our members," a Communications Workers of America spokesperson said in a statement to Aftermath... Speaking to Game Developer, CWA Canada president Carmel Smyth elaborated on the unions' misgivings... "Basically the employer cannot arbitrarily change working conditions while it is engaged in negotiating with the union. We will continue to file legal challenges if necessary, and do all we can to defend the rights of Bethesda Game Studios workers...." "I'm very proud of the hard work the bargaining committees and CWA staff have put in to evaluate the legality of how the layoffs were conducted," a current id Software employee and union member told Aftermath. "It's important, even for the world's largest and most profitable companies, that there are consequences for violating federal labor law. If we hadn't explored this avenue to hold Microsoft accountable, it would be a sign to all other game executives that they can break the law and get away with it." Legal action is just one part of unions' larger effort to hold Microsoft accountable for its decision to lay off thousands of workers. This week, CWA also hosted a series of "Save Our Devs" demonstrations outside the offices of affected studios like Zenimax, id Software, Bethesda, and Obsidian.

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Disney+ BiG Bouygues Telecom : les clients ayant un pack box et forfait mobile profitent d’une remise permanente de 5€/mois sur Disney+ Standard. Ainsi l’abonnement revient à 5,99€/mois au lieu de 10,99€/mois, sans engagement supplémentaire. Voici le détail de cette offre et des trois autres formules disponibles. L’offre BiG Les 4 formules Comment souscrire FAQ […]

L'article Disney+ BiG Bouygues Telecom : 5,99€/mois au lieu de 10,99€ a été publié en premier sur Bbox-Mag

Last year just 0.6% of new vehicles made for U.S. customers were stick shifts, reports the Washington Post, citing preliminary government data. "That's a precipitous drop from the 34.6 percent of vehicles with manual transmissions produced in 1980." [T]he stick shift's popularity hit multiple new lows in recent years, with no signs of a turnaround, thanks to new technologies and a rapidly changing marketplace. Buyers and automakers increasingly have turned to the sophisticated automatic drivetrains that now smoothly swap gears in fractions of a second and with better fuel efficiency. The average new vehicle today comes with seven gears, thanks to computers, twice as many as in 1980 and more gears than any ordinary driver would want to shift through using a manual gearbox. At the same time, sporty cars — the kind that buyers might demand a stick shift to drive — have fallen out of favor, replaced by interest in hulking SUVs, which are almost always automatics. The stick shift's demise has been hastened, too, by the rise of electric vehicles and increasingly autonomous vehicles. Neither have any need for a manual transmission... Europe has seen a less dramatic decline in stick shifts, with manual transmissions dropping from 91 percent of car registrations in 2001 to 29 percent in 2024 among Europe's largest auto markets, according to industry analyst JATO Dynamics... Subaru made its name with manual cars. But the Japanese automaker stopped offering a manual Crosstrek with the 2023 model year, having already dropped that transmission from its Legacy, Outback and Forester models. Other automakers have followed the same path. Volkswagen announced that it plans this year to ditch its last U.S. stick-shift model, the Jetta GLI. Even Toyota, Honda, and BMW have all reduced the number of cars for the U.S. market with a manual transmission, the article points out — leaving stick shift-loving Americans with a total of about 24 new-vehicle models to choose from. The articles adds that only 60% of Americans know how to drive a manual transmission (according to a survey from auto parts retailer AmericanMuscle): 83% for baby boomers but 39% for Gen Z. "Respondents were about evenly split on whether knowing how to drive a manual is an important life skill." But Ford CEO Jim Farley said earlier this year he has no plans to make the Mustang automatic-only. "Out of our cold, dead hands will we not have a manual Mustang." Farley said.

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Le baromètre fibre Bouygues Telecom publié par Ariase en juillet 2026 place l’opérateur en 2e position des quatre marques historiques. En ajoutant B&YOU Pure Fibre à la comparaison, l’offre du groupe rejoint ainsi le trio de tête, au niveau de Free. Voici le classement complet. Le classement B&YOU Pure Fibre Bouygues Telecom Méthodologie Baromètre fibre […]

L'article Baromètre fibre Bouygues Telecom : le classement de juillet 2026 a été publié en premier sur Bbox-Mag

En matière d'offre "au sens large", il ne s'agit peut-être pas de la meilleure sur une GeForce RTX 5070 récemment, car nous avions eu une MSI avec deux cadeaux à 569 € fin mai 2026 qui était vraiment très sympathique. Par contre, en matière de prix "pur", cela faisait longtemps que nous n'avions plu...

Le baromètre mobile Bouygues Telecom publié par Ariase en juillet 2026 place l’opérateur en tête des quatre marques historiques. Mieux encore, en ajoutant B&YOU à la comparaison, le groupe Bouygues Telecom ressort en tête. Il devance ainsi RED by SFR et Sosh. Voici le classement complet. Le classement B&YOU dans la course Bouygues Telecom Méthodologie […]

L'article Baromètre mobile Bouygues Telecom : le classement de juillet 2026 a été publié en premier sur Bbox-Mag

This week's batch of AMDGPU Display Core "DC" updates arrived heavy with 70 new patches for improving that open-source display support for Radeon graphics on the Linux desktop...

At GNOME's annual GUADEC conference happening this week in Spain, an update was shared on the current state of GNOME OS...

Nate Graham and John Veness are out with the latest issue of This Week in Plasma to highlight all of the interesting developments taking place in the KDE Plasma desktop space...