This week’s hodgepodge of our top recent tips includes pointers about what the best armor in The First Berserker might be for your build, the best weapons for beginners in Monster Hunter Wilds, the best skills to snag in South of Midnight, and more.
The periodic table, also known as the periodic table of the elements, is a rows and columns arrangement of the chemical elements.
Apple Vision Pro 2 will be cheaper and lighter, not just a chip upgrade, and the company is working on a Mac-tethered headset too, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports.
Gurman has a relatively strong track record of reliably reporting on Apple’s product plans years in advance, and successfully described many details of Apple Vision Pro’s hardware and software long before it was officially revealed.
In the latest edition of his weekly newsletter, Gurman claims that Apple is “readying” two new headsets, a Vision Pro successor and an entirely new Mac-tethered headset.
Back in September, supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed that mass production of a refreshed Apple Vision Pro with an M5 chipset was expected to begin in the second half of 2025.
The M5 chip hasn’t yet been announced, but Apple claims M4 has a 50% more powerful CPU and 4 times more powerful GPU than M2, suggesting the M5 Vision Pro could deliver a phenomenal performance increase.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
Kuo said he didn’t expect the hardware design or price to change “much”. Now, Gurman writes that while Apple had previously considered doing a basic chip refresh, it’s now “looking to go further”.
According to Gurman, the new Vision Pro will be both cheaper and lighter, addressing the two primary concerns of the current headset.
Gurman doesn’t say exactly how much lighter the headset should be, nor does he give an estimated price.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
He also doesn’t make any claims about when the headset should ship, though earlier in the week a lone Chinese report claimed that mass production has already begun.
Back in January, Gurman reported that Apple had canceled transparent AR display glasses that would have required a connection to your Mac (or originally, Apple had hoped, your iPhone), which he said were set to launch in 2027.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
In his new newsletter, Gurman stands by this reporting and says that Apple now plans to deliver the same concept, a head-worn device you plug into your Mac, but with an opaque VR-style display system, similar to Vision Pro.
While Gurman doesn’t go into details, it sounds like this new headset would be a single-purpose device, potentially cheaper and significantly lighter than the standalone Vision Pro.
Gurman’s new report also says that Apple CEO Tim Cook is “hell-bent” on releasing “industry-leading” AR glasses before Meta.
Gurman cites a source as saying “Tim cares about nothing else” and claiming that AR glasses are “the only thing he’s really spending his time on from a product development standpoint.”
UploadVRDavid Heaney
Still, Gurman notes that it will take “many years” for AR glasses to be ready. Back in 2023 he reported that Apple had postponed “indefinitely” plans for standalone AR glasses, due to the engineering challenges in bringing them out of the realm of science fiction into reality, though the company continued to work on microLED displays for AR.
Gurman has previously suggested that Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype, and the overwhelmingly positive reception to them from the tech industry, sparked a competitive spirit within Apple, and motivated the company to reevaluate what might be possible this decade.
UploadVRAlex Coulombe
If Gurman’s new reporting is accurate, it sounds like Tim Cook will stop at nothing to ensure that Apple, not Meta, will deliver the new “iPhone moment” that the introduction of appealing true AR glasses could be.
Warner Bros. is rolling out holographic displays and Snapchat filters in malls nationwide to promote the upcoming Minecraft movie.
The post Minecraft characters come to life as interactive mall holograms appeared first on MIXED Reality News.
Last year work on KDE’s Amarok music player was resurrected after a six year development hiatus. With the return to Amarok development it was ported to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 5. At the end of last year Amarok 3.2 released with initial Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6 support while retaining Qt5/KF5 support. Now out today is the Amarok 3.3 beta to drop that prior-generation support…
Lorena Wiebes powered to a 3rd place at this year’s Paris-Roubaix Femmes aboard a Specialized S-Works Tarmax SL8 custom-painted to honour her European road championships win.
Wiebes ran a 1x setup, with a 50t chainring paired to a 10-32 cassette. A Wolf Tooth Gnarwolf chainguide helped keep things in check on the devastatingly rattly cobbles of northern France.
Sprint shifters in the form of SRAM’s AXS Wireless Blips are hiding under the white bar tape. These gave her another hand position to shift the 12 gears available.
The tyres have been changed from the team’s usual Specialized Turbo Cottons – one of the oldest things still being used in pro road racing – to the Specialized S-Works Mondo in a 32mm size.
These tubeless endurance tyres are designed to provide more puncture protection without sacrificing too much rolling resistance – key to staying at the sharp end of this race.
They’re fitted to the Roval Rapide CLX II wheelset with gloss white decals, which work nicely with the look of the bike.
Wiebes has forgone the SL8’s one-piece cockpit instead of a traditional two-piece setup, which also looks to be wrapped with thicker – possibly double-wrapped – bar tape with a generous amount of tape across the tops.
While the Linux 6.15 merge window ended just one week ago and there is a month and a half until it will debut as stable, a notable feature has already been queued into a “next” branch for the follow-on Linux 6.16 cycle. For those making use of modern Intel Xeon processors with virtualization, the Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) support for KVM virtualization looks like it will finally be mainlined…
One month after GIMP 3.0 was finally released for this popular image editor ported to GTK3 and many other changes, Pinta 3.0 has now been released. Pinta as a reminder is the open-source image editing program inspired by Paint.NET. With the Pinta 3.0 release the image editor has been ported to GTK4 and libadwaita…
It’s been a while since having any exciting feature development to talk about with DragonFlyBSD but merged this past week was dm_target_crypt_ng, a next-generation implementation of their DM-crypt code for disk encryption…
The Ace Virtual Shooting Sig Experience combines virtual reality with realistic weapon replicas for resource-saving shooting training with Meta Quest.
The post This VR gun system for Meta Quest brings pro-level training to your home appeared first on MIXED Reality News.
Originally posted back in 2022 were Linux kernel patches for Qualcomm USB audio offloading for Qualcomm SoCs with an audio DSP that can take responsibility for issuing transfers to the USB host controller to free up system resources. After going through 38 rounds of code review the past 2+ years, it looks like Linux 6.16 will finally mainline this Qualcomm USB audio offloading support…
We were recently given early access to an in-progress build of Aces of Thunder, the upcoming flight simulation game by Gaijin Entertainment, the developers of the ever-popular War Thunder. Although we were unable to test out the game’s multiplayer, we had the opportunity to check out the current state of the game, and how it’s shaping up on a high-end PC VR setup.
Right from the get-go, there’s a lot that Gaijin has managed correctly – but we must stress that this is an in-development version of the game. For one, there were no in-game graphical options for us to tweak; I can’t tell you whether the game defaulted to the maximum graphical preset, the lowest, or something in between. What I can say is that on the same 5090 setup I tested Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 on, I managed a locked 90FPS at Godlike Virtual Desktop resolution settings (150% resolution scale to my Quest 3 headset).
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Gameplay footage captured by UploadVR
This might have introduced some problems, however; Aces of Thunder will eventually have hand-tracking controls, but even using my Touch Plus controllers, I was unable to access any of the menus once I was in a mission. The only way I was able to start a new mission was to restart the game, or deliberately finish the current one – whether that be by failing it, or completing it.
This could just be a controller mapping issue with Virtual Desktop; we can’t say for sure. I tried to use the same flight stick I use in Flight Sim, though for whatever reason I couldn’t get it working with the current build. That’s fine – part of the charm of VR flight simulation is being able to simulate the analog experience of piloting an aircraft itself, and that mostly works with the current keybindings on VR controllers.
I will note, however, that I would recommend instantly turning off the throttle being tied to the left controller’s analog stick. The rudder is also tied to the same analog stick, so it can be straightforward to adjust your thrust while attempting to use the rudders. You can control the thruster manually in the cockpit, and having an additional option for it – while I appreciate the thought behind it – causes more problems than it solves in my opinion.
Beyond that, the controls feel like exactly what I’d expect from a more vintage, WW2 flight simulation game. I’m a big fan of how when the game can tell you’re focusing in on a specific dial in the cockpit, it’ll give an annotation for its current value so it’s easier to read. That’s not something I feel like I might need on my own setup, yet I can anticipate it being useful for players on headsets running a lower resolution, and without any supersampling added to the picture.
While PvP inevitably feels like the main attraction for the game, we did have access to several single-player missions – which is where I have to level with you all. I love a leisurely flight sim, but I am absolutely terrible at actual combat. Not to mention, the more vintage aircraft represented in Aces of Thunder are a touch more challenging to handle compared to my preferred, more modern fare. I’m sure, given enough time, these missions would be a ton of fun – they’re certainly great practice before unleashing yourself upon the online masses. Still, they’re not exactly a tutorial, which I certainly hope the final game might include for those of us not already versed in Gaijin’s brand of flight sim.
Which is to say, Aces of Thunder leaves a very strong first impression – yet at the same time, quite a few questions remain about how things will feel when the game finally releases later this year. How will it perform on more modest setups, and how will graphics scale in fidelity? In what manner will the controls evolve; we know the team is working on hand tracking options, but how will that work out in the end? How about the PlayStation VR2 release? For now, we’re told it’s aiming to maintain a stable 90fps on PS5.
We’ll be sure to report the answers to these questions in full as we get closer to launch, slated for later this year on Steam and PS VR2. Until then, you can watch our recent Aces of Thunder livestream to learn more.
“A modern free society has an obligation to offer electronic tax filing that respects user freedom,” says a Free Software Foundation blog post, “and the United States is not excluded from this responsibility.”
“Governments, and/or the companies that they partner with, are responsible for providing free as in freedom software for necessary operations, and tax filing is no exception.”
For many years now, a large portion of [U.S.] taxpayers have filed their taxes electronically through proprietary programs like TurboTax. Millions of taxpayers are led to believe that they have no other option than to use nonfree software or Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS), giving up their freedom as well as their most private financial information to a third-party company, in order to file their taxes…
While the options for taxpayers have improved slightly with the IRS’s implementation of the IRS Direct File program [in 25 states], this program unfortunately does require users to hand over their freedom when filing taxes…. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to use a program that violates their individual freedoms to file legally required taxes. While Direct File is a step in the right direction as the program isn’t in the hands of a third-party entity, it is still nonfree software. Because Direct File is a US government-operated program, and ongoing in the process of being deployed to twenty-five states, it’s not too late to call on the IRS to make Direct File free software.
In the meantime, if you need to file US taxes and are yet to file, we suggest filing your taxes in a way that respects your user freedom as much as possible, such as through mailing tax forms. Like with other government interactions that snatch away user freedom, choose the path that most respects your freedom.
Free-as-in-freedom software would decrease the chance of user lock-in, the FSF points out. But they list several other advantages, including:
Repairability: With free software, there is no uncertain wait period or reliance on a proprietary provider to make any needed bug or security fixes.
Transparency: Unless you can check what a program really does (or ask someone in the free software community to check for you), there is no way to know that the program isn’t doing things you don’t consent to it doing.
Cybersecurity: While free software isn’t inherently more secure than nonfree software, it does have a tendency to be more secure because many developers can continuously improve the program and search for errors that can be exploited. With proprietary programs like TurboTax, taxpayers and the U.S. government are dependent on TurboTax to protect the sensitive financial and personal information of millions with few (if any) outside checks and balances…
Taxpayer dollars spent should actually benefit the taxpayers: Taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund third-party programs that seek to control users and force them to use their programs through lobbying….
“We don’t have to accept this unjust reality: we can work for a better future, together,” the blog post concludes (offering a “sample message” U.S. taxpayers could send to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel).
“Take action today and help make electronic tax filing free as in freedom for everyone.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here’s an update from the Wall Street Journal about a “widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure.”
China was behind it, “Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting… according to people familiar with the matter…”
The Chinese delegation linked years of intrusions into computer networks at U.S. ports, water utilities, airports and other targets, to increasing U.S. policy support for Taiwan, the people, who declined to be named, said… U.S. officials went public last year with unusually dire warnings about the uncovered Volt Typhoon effort. They publicly attributed it to Beijing trying to get a foothold in U.S. computer networks so its army could quickly detonate damaging cyberattacks during a future conflict. [American officials at the meeting perceived the remarks as “intended to scare the U.S. from involving itself if a conflict erupts in the Taiwan Strait.”]
The Chinese official’s remarks at the December meeting were indirect and somewhat ambiguous, but most of the American delegation in the room interpreted it as a tacit admission and a warning to the U.S. about Taiwan, a former U.S. official familiar with the meeting said… In a statement, the State Department didn’t comment on the meeting but said the U.S. had made clear to Beijing it will “take actions in response to Chinese malicious cyber activity,” describing the hacking as “some of the gravest and most persistent threats to U.S. national security….”
A Chinese official would likely only acknowledge the intrusions even in a private setting if instructed to do so by the top levels of Xi’s government, said Dakota Cary, a China expert at the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne. The tacit admission is significant, he said, because it may reflect a view in Beijing that the likeliest military conflict with the U.S. would be over Taiwan and that a more direct signal about the stakes of involvement needed to be sent to the Trump administration. “China wants U.S. officials to know that, yes, they do have this capability, and they are willing to use it,” Cary said.
The article notes that top U.S. officials have said America’s Defense Department “will pursue more offensive cyber strikes against China.”
But it adds that the administration “also plans to dismiss hundreds of cybersecurity workers in sweeping job cuts and last week fired the director of the National Security Agency and his deputy, fanning concerns from some intelligence officials and lawmakers that the government would be weakened in defending against the attacks.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Trump administration has excluded smartphones and other consumer electronics from its steep “reciprocal” tariffs in a significant boost for Big Tech as the White House battles to calm global markets after launching a multifront trade war.
According to a notice posted late on Friday night by Customs and Border Patrol, smartphones, along with routers, chipmaking equipment, wireless earphones and certain computers and laptops, would be exempt from reciprocal tariffs, which include the 125 percent levies Donald Trump has imposed on Chinese imports.
The carve-out is a big win for companies such as Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft, and follows a week of intense turbulence in US markets after Trump unleashed a trade war on “liberation day” on April 2. The announcement rattled global investors and triggered a stock market rout.
Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger brings news that in June “a rare screening of the original 1977 Star Wars movie — complete with Han shooting first — will be shown at a theater in London…”
Petapixel reports:
Subsequent alterations made to the film are well-documented: Han Solo being shot at by the bounty hunter Greedo first, rather than the original in which anti-hero Han killed Greedo without being shot at. Then there is the addition of a CGI Jabba the Hutt who was only mentioned by name in the 1977 release. Fans have also complained about the color grading painted on re-releases.
But for those attending the British Film Institute (BFI)’s Film on Film festival in London, they are in for a treat. Star Wars will play not once but twice on the opening night on June 12… BFI says the print is “unfaded” and “ready to transport us to a long time ago, and a galaxy far, far away, back to the moment in 1977 when George Lucas’s vision cast a spell on cinema audiences.”
Lucas has little sympathy for those who want to see his first version of the film, telling the Associated Press in 2004, “I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be.”
The film festival promises “a glorious dye-transfer” of Star Wars — and will also show “a pristine 35mm print of the original US pilot episode of Twin Peaks, screening for the first time ever in the UK” — followed by a Q&A with the 1990 show’s original star Kyle MacLachlan.
On display to coincide with the opening night screening there is also a rare opportunity to view material from the original continuity script for Star Wars, which includes rare on-set Polaroids, annotations and deleted scenes. The script is from the collection of Ann Skinner, script editor on the original film, and is now cared for by the BFI National Archive.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Slashdot reader king*jojo shared this article from The Register:
A 23-year-old side-channel attack for spying on people’s web browsing histories will get shut down in the forthcoming Chrome 136, released last Thursday to the Chrome beta channel. At least that’s the hope.
The privacy attack, referred to as browser history sniffing, involves reading the color values of web links on a page to see if the linked pages have been visited previously… Web publishers and third parties capable of running scripts, have used this technique to present links on a web page to a visitor and then check how the visitor’s browser set the color for those links on the rendered web page… The attack was mitigated about 15 years ago, though not effectively. Other ways to check link color information beyond the getComputedStyle method were developed… Chrome 136, due to see stable channel release on April 23, 2025, “is the first major browser to render these attacks obsolete,” explained Kyra Seevers, Google software engineer in a blog post.
This is something of a turnabout for the Chrome team, which twice marked Chromium bug reports for the issue as “won’t fix.” David Baron, presently a Google software engineer who worked for Mozilla at the time, filed a Firefox bug report about the issue back on May 28, 2002… On March 9, 2010, Baron published a blog post outlining the issue and proposing some mitigations…
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A virtual reality program in Spanish prisons is forcing domestic violence offenders to experience their crimes from the victim’s perspective.
The post Virtual Reality puts domestic abusers in their victims’ shoes appeared first on MIXED Reality News.
“Researchers say that a person’s intelligence plays a bigger role in their computer proficiency than previously believed,” writes SciTechDaily, “so much so that practice alone may not be enough to ensure ease of use.”
A new study has found that general cognitive abilities, such as perception, reasoning, and memory, are more important than previously believed in determining a person’s ability to perform everyday tasks on a computer… “It is clear that differences between individuals cannot be eliminated simply by means of training,” says Antti Oulasvirta [a professor at Finland’s Aalto University who conducted extensive human-computer interaction research with his team and the University of Helsinki Department of Psychology]. “In the future, user interfaces need to be streamlined for simpler use. This age-old goal has been forgotten at some point, and awkwardly designed interfaces have become a driver for the digital divide.
“We cannot promote a deeper and more equal use of computers in society unless we solve this basic problem,” Oulasvirta says…
This is the first-ever study to measure users’ actual ability to perform daily tasks on a PC, as previous studies have relied on participants self-assessing their abilities via questionnaires… “The study revealed that, in particular, working memory, attention, and executive functions stand out as the key abilities. When using a computer, you must determine the order in which things are done and keep in mind what has already been done. A purely mathematical or logical ability does not help in the same way,” says university lecturer Viljami Salmela [from the University of Helsinki].
“Our results suggest that contemporary user interfaces are getting so complex that their design is starting to affect inclusivity,” their paper concludes, saying that it ultimately raises a question. “How can we design user interfaces to decrease the role of cognitive abilities.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Celebrating Git’s 20th anniversary, GitHub hosted a Q&A with Linus Torvalds, writes Its FOSS News.
Among the other revelations: He says his college-age daughter sent a texting saying he’s better known at her CS lab for Git than for Linux, “because they actually use Git for everything there.” Which he describes as “ridiculous” because he maintained it for just four months before handing it off to Junio Hamano who’s been heading up development for more than 19 years now. “When it did what I needed,” Torvalds says, “I lost interest.”
Linus then goes on to share how Git was never a big thing for him, but a means to an end that prevented the Linux kernel from descending into chaos over the absence of a version control system. You see, before Git, Linux used BitKeeper for version control, but its proprietary licensing didn’t sit too well with other Linux contributors, and Linus Torvalds had to look for alternatives. As it turned out, existing tools like CVS and Subversion were too slow for the job at hand, prompting him to build a new tool from scratch, with the coding part just taking 10 days for an early self-hostable version of Git.
In its initial days, there were some teething issues, where users would complain about Git to Linus, even finding it too difficult to use, but things got calmer as the tool developed further.
Torvalds thinks some early adopters had trouble because they were coming from a background that was more like CVS. “The Git mindset, I came at it from a file system person’s standpoint, where I had this disdain and almost hatred of most source control management projects, so I was not at all interested in maintaining the status quo.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.