This is a clip from The Animal Box Office of a wild chameleon in Madagascar changing its vibrant color through all the hues of the rainbow over the course of three minutes. It goes from orange to pink to green to yellow to blue to grey and finally back to orange. Those are all the colors of the rainbow, right? “It’s ROYGBIV.” No, I’m pretty sure it’s OPGYBG.

Roblox has adapted its payment system to allow for regional pricing. This means that the software will automatically adjust the cost of an in-game item to match the local economy of the buyer. The company says this will make it easier for active community members to “better adapt to local market conditions and maximize earnings.”

Prior to this move, users in a country like Vietnam would pay the exact same price as folks here in the US. This effectively priced out users who live in countries with weaker economic conditions. Regional pricing should make international users more active in the Roblox marketplace.

Roblox

Creators have to opt-in for the service. The software will not only automatically determine optimal local prices for items, but will update costs periodically as the global economy shifts. Companies like Nintendo already do this, as anyone who has opened up an eShop account in a different region can attest to.

For the uninitiated, Roblox creators earn something called Robux by selling in-game items that grant perks and abilities. Regional pricing doesn’t yet cover avatar items, but will later in the year.

This follows the platform’s recently-launched price optimization feature, which helps creators set the best price for anything they are selling. Roblox says the feature has increased earnings by around four percent for eligible creators, typically because the price was lowered but more units were sold.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-roblox-economy-is-going-global-as-users-can-now-set-regional-pricing-160047440.html?src=rss

Major scholarly databases have removed dozens of academic journals after researchers discovered they had been purchased by questionable companies and transformed into predatory publications. A January 2025 study identified 36 legitimate journals acquired by recently formed firms with no publishing experience, who then dramatically increased publication fees and output while lowering quality standards.

According to information scientist Alberto Martin-Martin from the University of Granada, publishers are being offered up to hundreds of thousands of euros per journal title. Once acquired, journals typically introduce or raise article-processing charges while churning out papers often outside the publication’s original scope. Scopus has delisted all 36 identified journals, and Web of Science removed 11 of 17 affected titles from its index. “As there has been significant change (different ownership), there is no guarantee that review quality is at the same level as the original journals,” an Elsevier spokesperson told Nature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom’s Hardware: While most people enjoy PCs that are powered by SSDs, mechanical hard drives are still king in the datacenter. When these drives reach the end of their useful lives, they are usually shredded, and the key materials they’re made of — including several rare earth elements (REE) — end up as e-waste. At the same time, countries are mining these same materials and emitting a lot of greenhouse gases in the process. And China, a major source of REE, recently announced export restrictions on seven of them, potentially limiting the U.S. tech industry’s access to materials such as dysprosium, which is necessary for magnetic storage, motors, and generators.

[On Thursday], Western Digital announced that it has created a large-scale hard disk drive recycling program in concert with Microsoft and recycling-industry partners CMR (Critical Materials Recycling) and PedalPoint Recycling. The new process reclaims Rare Earth Oxides (REO) containing dysprosium, neodymium, and praseodymium from hard drives, along with aluminum, steel, gold, palladium, and copper. The REO reclamation takes place completely within the U.S. and those materials go back into the U.S. market.

Dubbed the Advanced Recycling and Rare Earth Material Capture Program, WD’s initiative has already saved 47,000 pounds worth of hard drives, SSDs, and caddies from landfills or less-effective recycling programs. WD was able to achieve a more than 90% reclaim rate for REE and an 80% rate for all of the shredded material. The drives came from Microsoft’s U.S. data centers where they were first shredded and then sent to PedalPoint for sorting and processing. Magnets and steel were then sent to CMR, which uses its acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) technology to extract the rare earth elements.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has delayed some commitments around new data center leases, Wells Fargo analysts said Monday, the latest sign that economic concerns may be affecting tech companies’ spending plans. From a report: A week ago, a Microsoft executive said the software company was slowing down or temporarily holding off on advancing early build-outs. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are the leading providers of cloud infrastructure, and both have ramped up their capital expenditures in recent quarters to meet the demands of the generative artificial intelligence boom.

“Over the weekend, we heard from several industry sources that AWS has paused a portion of its leasing discussions on the colocation side (particularly international ones),” Wells Fargo analysts wrote in a note. They added that “the positioning is similar to what we’ve heard recently from MSFT,” in that both companies are reeling in some new projects but not canceling signed deals.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Fyre Festival saga is getting an unexpected new chapter. Shawn Rech, who co-founded the TruBlu streaming network for crime and investigative content, is planning to leverage the Fyre Festival name for a new music streaming platform. He’s acquired select intellectual property trademarks for the famously failed music event whose co-founder Billy McFarland went to jail for fraud. However, Rech will not play a role in Fyre Festival’s hypothetical live events. According to him, he’s just trying to capitalize on the name’s familiarity for his own project.

“It has nothing to do with music,” Rech told Deadline in a surprisingly candid statement. “I needed a big name that people would remember, even if it’s attached to infamy, so that’s why I bought these [trademarks] to start the streaming network.”

Deadline reports that the Fyre Music Streaming will have a subscription video-on-demand platform and free ad-supported television channels. Rech claims it will launch at Thanksgiving. “We’re building something authentic and lasting,” he said.

It takes an impressive amount of hubris to use the name of a comically ridiculous music festival fraud and expect people to give you money for it. But considering Rech did manage to get TruBlu off the ground, maybe his music platform will actually exist. If the fact that the second Fyre Festival has already been indefinitely postponed is any sign of what’s to come, though, it will be a hilarious exercise in schadenfreude.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/fyre-festival-is-becoming-a-music-streaming-service-that-might-not-be-a-scam-this-time-221058381.html?src=rss