Phoronix Premium Cyber Week “Black Friday” Deal To Help Enable Linux Hardware Reviews
The end of 2025 is quickly approaching and while there are the various end of year holidays, you can still expect to find new and original content on Phoronix each and every single day of the year just as it’s been for more than a decade of the now 21-year-old Phoronix.com. The last day without any new content on Phoronix was all the way back in May of 2012. That’s due to my passion for Linux hardware and open-source, paired in … ⌘ Read more
Glibc Math Code Sees 4x Improvement On AMD Zen By Changing FMA Implementation
Merged this week to the GNU C Library “glibc” code is dropping the ldbl-96 FMA implementation from this library as in doing so they found a 4x improvement to throughput and latency on AMD Zen 3 hardware… ⌘ Read more
Amazon Kicks Off Black Friday Sale With Major Discounts on Apple Accessories, TVs, and More
Black Friday deals have begun, and Amazon is one of the best places you can find steep discounts on numerous products this week. We’ve already collected all of the best Apple-related deals you’ll find at Amazon (and other retailers) in our [Apple Black Friday Deals](https://www.macrumors.com … ⌘ Read more
Did Bitcoin Play a Role in Thursday’s Stock Sell-Off?
A week ago Bitcoin was at $93,714. Saturday it dropped to $85,300.
Late Thursday, market researcher Ed Yardeni blamed some of Thursday’s stock market sell-off on “the ongoing plunge in bitcoin’s price,” reports Fortune:
“There has been a strong correlation between it and the price of TQQQ, an ETF that seeks to achieve daily investment results that correspond to three … ⌘ Read more
RISC-V Testing Lapse Resulted In Wrong MIPS RISC-V Vendor ID Landing In Linux 6.18
An interesting anecdote from this week’s batch of RISC-V fixes for the Linux 6.18 kernel exposed that the MIPS RISC-V/JEDEC vendor ID was wrong for code merged at the start of the kernel cycle. The testing hadn’t caught it either as the QEMU emulation also ended up inadvertently using the wrong vendor ID too… ⌘ Read more
780,000 Windows Users Downloaded Linux Distro Zorin OS in the Last 5 Weeks
In October Zorin OS claimed it had 100,000 downloads in a little over two days in the days following Microsoft’s end of support for Windows 10.
And one month later, Zorin OS developers now claim that 780,000 people downloaded it from a Windows computer in the space of a month, according to the tech news site XDA Developers.
… ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.6 Will Provide A Much Better Experience For High Refresh Rate Displays
More features continue piling on for the KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop, including an important performance fix this week for those running displays with a higher than 60Hz refresh rate… ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.6 Will Provide A Much Better Experience For High Refresh Rate Displays
More features continue piling on for the KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop, including an important performance fix this week for those running displays with a higher than 60Hz refresh rate… ⌘ Read more
Top Stories: Tim Cook’s 2026 Exit?, Mac Pro on Hold, and More
2025 is rapidly drawing to a close, but this week still saw some interesting news in the world of Apple, led by a report claiming that Tim Cook’s retirement as Apple CEO might not be too far away.
This week also saw word that the future of the Mac Pro appears to be in question, while Apple continues to work on the upcoming iOS 26.2 update and related relea … ⌘ Read more
Nautilus File Manager In GNOME 50 Will Load Thumbnails Much Faster
Just last week GNOME’s Nautilus file manager “GNOME Files” made headlines for finally supporting Ctrl+INsert and Shift+Insert while this week there is more activity worth pointing out. Nautilus in GNOME 50 will be loading thumbnail images much faster than in prior versions… ⌘ Read more
Intel Continues Working On Dynamic PAMT To Reduce Memory Overhead For TDX
One of the improvements that Intel software engineers have been working on for the Linux kernel around their Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) functionality for confidential computing VMs is reducing the memory use. That work is under the Dynamic PAMT umbrella and this week brought the latest iteration of patches to help lower RAM use when engaging TDX for confidential VMs… ⌘ Read more
Google Mocks iPhone in Musical ‘Wicked’ Ad Claiming Pixel Firsts
Google this week shared a new ad in its ongoing anti-Apple “BestPhonesForever” series, this time leaning into the launch of the new Wicked: For Good movie that’s out in theaters.
The spot features an iPhone fawning over a Pixel smartphone before breaking into the Wicked: For Good song. Google suggests that it was first to multiple features that the iPhone then copied, like screening phone calls an … ⌘ Read more
This floof has been sleeping in my garage for the past week or so. ⌘ Read more
As Windows Turns 40, Microsoft Faces an AI Backlash
Microsoft’s push to transform Windows into an “agentic OS” that allows AI agents to control PCs is drawing user backlash similar to the Windows 8 controversy, as the company marks the operating system’s 40th anniversary this week, writes Tom Warren, a reporter at The Verge who has been covering Microsoft for nearly two decades. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri announced the ag … ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.18 Sees Late Improvements For Xbox Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, & Alienware Laptops
We’re closing in on the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release likely in little more than one week (30 November barring any delays) and today’s batch of x86 platform driver updates is bringing some new hardware support as well as some notable consumer device fixes/improvements… ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Exec Asks: Why Aren’t More People Impressed With AI?
An anonymous reader shares a report: A Microsoft executive is questioning why more people aren’t impressed with AI, a week after the company touted the evolution of Windows into an “agentic OS,” which immediately triggered backlash.
“Jeez there so many cynics! It cracks me up when I hear people call AI underwhelming,” tweeted Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO for M … ⌘ Read more
New Antibiotic Could Be a Breakthrough in Treatment for Killer TB, Trial Suggests
A new treatment for tuberculosis could boost cure rates and shorten the time needed to treat the disease by months, trial results suggest. The Guardian: Globally, an estimated 10.7 million people fell ill with TB last year and 1.23 million died from it. In its annual report on tuberculosis, launched last week, … ⌘ Read more
AMD Threadripper 7980X Performance On Linux Two Years After Release
This week marks two years since the debut of the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors. Given the occasion, I decided to revisit the Linux performance of the Threadripper 7980X compared to original benchmarks from November 2023 to see how the latest Linux software stack performs for these Zen 4 HEDT processors. ⌘ Read more
GCC 16 Compiler Now Ready For AVX10.2 & APX With Intel Nova Lake
Intel’s ISA documentation was updated last week to confirm Nova Lake processors will support AVX10.2 and APX extensions after they were not officially acknowledged in prior versions of the spec and the initial open-source compiler enablement with -march=novalake also left them without those prominent ISA capabilities. Following that documentation update, a few days ago LLVM Clang updated their Nova Lake compiler support for the new ISA capabilit … ⌘ Read more
Get Nomad’s Apple Watch Bands for Up to 30% Off in Black Friday Sale
Nomad kicked off its official Black Friday event this week with sitewide savings on its best gear, plus a deal of the day that will change every day in the lead-up to November 28. Today’s deal of the day is 30 percent off the Sport Band Glow 2.0 for Apple Watch Ultra.
. This new extension for Shader Execution Reordering “SER” is showing to deliver some nice performance potential for Vulkan ray-tracing performance… ⌘ Read more
‘Talking To Windows’ Copilot AI Makes a Computer Feel Incompetent’
Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant in Windows 11 fails to replicate the capabilities shown in the company’s TV advertisements. The Verge tested Copilot Vision over a week using the same prompts featured in ads airing during NFL games. When asked to identify a HyperX QuadCast 2S microphone visible in a YouTube video – a task successfully completed i … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft is Adding an ‘Experimental Agentic Features’ Toggle To Windows 11
Microsoft has rolled out a new preview build for Windows 11 Insiders in the Dev and Beta Channel this week that introduces a new toggle called ‘experimental agentic features’ that can be enabled or disabled in the Windows Settings app. From a report: According to Microsoft, this new toggle is designed to “allow agents to use ne … ⌘ Read more
Valar Atomics Says It’s the First Nuclear Startup To Achieve Criticality
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Startup Valar Atomics said on Monday that it achieved criticality – an essential nuclear milestone – with the help of one of the country’s top nuclear laboratories. The El Segundo, California-based startup, which last week announced it had secured a $130 million funding round wi … ⌘ Read more
Apple Releases Second iOS 26.2 and iPadOS 26.2 Public Betas
Apple today provided public beta testers with the second releases of upcoming iOS 26.2, iPadOS 26.2, tvOS 26.2, and watchOS 26.2 updates for testing purposes. The second public betas come two weeks after Apple seeded the first betas, and a day after Apple provided developers with the third iOS 26.2 beta.
After signing up for beta testing on Apple’s bet … ⌘ Read more
An AI Podcasting Machine Is Churning Out 3,000 Episodes a Week
fjo3 shares a report from TheWrap: There are already at least 175,000 AI-generated podcast episodes on platforms like Spotify and Apple. That’s thanks to Inception Point AI, a startup with just eight employees cranking out 3,000 episodes a week covering everything from localized weather reports and pollen trackers to a detailed account of Charlie Kirk’s as … ⌘ Read more
3rd Beta of iOS 26.2, macOS Tahoe 26.2, and iPadOS 26.2 Available for Testing
Apple has issued the third beta versions of iOS 26.2, iPadOS 26.2, macOS Tahoe 26.2, to those engaging in the beta testing programs for Apple system software. With a new beta build coming every week, it’s fairly likely we will see a final version released in December before yearend. A handful of tweaks, changes, and … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/11/17/3rd-beta-of-ios-26-2 … ⌘ Read more
Updated LLVM/Clang Compiler Enables AVX 10.2 & APX For Intel Nova Lake
Last month when the LLVM/Clang 22 compiler merged support for Intel Nova Lake with the “-march=novalake” target there was no mentions of AVX10 or Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) support. But last week Intel published a new programming reference manual where they confirmed AVX 10.2 and APX for Nova Lake. Now that it’s official, Intel compiler engineers are updating the LLVM/Clang (and GCC) compiler support to reflect these ISA addition … ⌘ Read more
Florida Bill Would Require Cursive Instruction in Elementary Schools
An anonymous reader shares a report: Elementary-school students would have to learn how to write in cursive, under a bill set to be vetted by a House committee next week. Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, filed a similar proposal (SB 444) on Monday. The House Student Academic Success Subcommittee is set to review the measure (HB 127) on Nov. … ⌘ Read more
Chinese Astronauts Return From Their Space Station After Delay Blamed on Space Debris Damage
“Three Chinese astronauts returned from their nation’s space station Friday,” reports the Associated Press, “after more than a week’s delay because the return capsule they had planned to use was damaged, likely from being hit by space debris.”
The team left their Shenzhou-20 spacecraft i … ⌘ Read more
Rust in Android: More Memory Safety, Fewer Revisions, Fewer Rollbacks, Shorter Reviews
Android’s security team published a blog post this week about their experience using Rust. Its title? “Move fast and fix things.”
Last year, we wrote about why a memory safety strategy that focuses on vulnerability prevention in new code quickly yields durable and compounding gains. This year we look … ⌘ Read more
PureAudio Lotus DAC5 & Other PureAudio Hardware Supported For Linux 6.18
As part of this week’s sound subsystem fixes ahead of today’s Linux 6.18-rc6 kernel release is adding some quirks for supporting the PureAudio Lotus DAC5 and other PureAudio audio hardware… ⌘ Read more
Sony Killed This Game in 2024. Three Developers Reverse-Engineered It Back to Life
An anonymous reader shared this post from the gaming news site Aftermath:
Concord, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Firewalk Studios’ Overwatch-like shooter, was live for just two weeks before it was pulled offline. Though Concord certainly had some dedicated players, it didn’t have many — which is why it … ⌘ Read more
AMD Releases Additional Zen 5 CPU Microcode For RDSEED Issue
Stemming from AMD’s recently acknowledged Zen 5 issue with the RDSEED instruction and AMD releasing Zen 5 CPU microcode updates to address it, this week brought some additional microcode updates… ⌘ Read more
Plasma 6.6 Will Avoid Running Out Of RAM When Something Crashes In A Loop
KDE Plasma 6.6 continues seeing a lot of development activity while the Plasma 6.5 series is calming down after its first few point releases. Plasma 6.6 landed many more features and improvements this week… ⌘ Read more
Top Stories: Apple Silicon Turns 5, iPhone Pocket, and More
It’s hard to believe we’re halfway through November already, as 2025 rapidly draws to a close with no firm signs of several smaller hardware updates we’ve been hoping to see before the end of the year, although we did get one surprising new iPhone accessory this week.
This week also saw the fifth anniversary of the very successful Apple silicon effort on t … ⌘ Read more
YouTube TV and Disney Reach Deal Ending Two-Week Blackout of ESPN, ABC
YouTube TV and Disney have ended their two-week carriage standoff, restoring ESPN, ABC, and other Disney networks under a new multiyear deal. Variety reports: Under the new agreement, ESPN’s full lineup of sports – including content from ESPN Unlimited – will be made available on YouTube TV to base-plan subscribers at no addi … ⌘ Read more
The Age photos of the week, November 15, 2025
The week in photos from our award-winning staff photographers and regular contributing photographers at The Age ⌘ Read more
ollama 0.12.11 Brings Vulkan Acceleration
ollama 0.12.11 released this week as the newest feature update to this easy-to-run method of deploying OpenAI GPT-OSS, DeepSeek-R1, Gemma 3, and other large language models. Exciting with ollama 0.12.11 is that it’s now supporting the Vulkan API… ⌘ Read more
Krafton Launches Voluntary Resignation Program Weeks After Declaring ‘AI-First Company’ Future
An anonymous reader shares a report: In October, PUBG and Subnautica 2 publisher Krafton announced that it would be undergoing a “complete reorganization” to become an “AI-first” company, planning to invest over 130 billion won ($88 million) in agentic AI infrastructure and deployment beginning … ⌘ Read more
‘Big Short’ Investor Michael Burry To Close Hedge Fund as He Warns on Valuations
Michael Burry, the investor made famous for his bet against the US housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, is closing his hedge fund [non-paywalled source] as he warned that market valuations had become unhinged from fundamentals. From a report: Scion Asset Management this week terminated its registration wit … ⌘ Read more
Verizon To Cut About 15,000 Jobs
Verizon is planning to cut roughly 15,000 jobs, looking to reduce costs as it contends with increased competition for wireless service and home internet, according to WSJ, which cites people familiar with the matter. From the report: The cuts, the largest ever for the carrier, are set to take place in the next week, the people said. The majority of the reduction is expected to be made through layoffs. Verizon … ⌘ Read more
The Incredible Evolution Of AMD EPYC HPC Performance Shown In The Azure Cloud
Last week the Microsoft Azure HBv5 instances reached general availability as powered by the custom EPYC 9V64H CPUs with HBM3 memory. These very interesting EPYC processors for memory bandwidth intensive workloads were announced last year while have finally reached GA with jaw-dropping results for software able to take advantage of the 6.7 TB/s memory bandwidth thanks to the HBM memory. The Azure HBv5 benchmarks last week showed how th … ⌘ Read more
Linux Looks To Remove SHA1 Support For Signing Kernel Modules
Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week are seeking to remove SHA1 support for signing of kernel modules. This is part of the larger effort in the industry for moving away from SHA1 given its vulnerabilities to hash collisions and superior hashing algorithms being available… ⌘ Read more
Apple Begins Selling Some Third-Party Accessories in ‘Dark Cherry’ Color
Apple has teamed up with a handful of accessory makers to offer charging stands, cables, a power bank, a laptop sleeve, and more in a Dark Cherry color.
The range of Dark Cherry accessories were added to Apple’s online store this week in the U.S. and many other countries, with delivery and in-store pickup available.
Participating brand … ⌘ Read more
Private hospital fails in bid to block new medical centre
Work is expected to start in January on a new medical centre across the road from Queensland’s largest private hospital, which lost its Supreme Court appeal this week to stop it being built. ⌘ Read more
AI-Generated Song Tops Country Music Chart
Slashdot readers Tablizer and fjo3 share news that an AI-generated country song has topped the U.S. sales chart for the first time this week. ABC News reports: The new country tune, “Walk my Walk” by Breaking Rust, recently hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, reaching over 3 million streams on Spotify in less than a month. That success has garnered mixed rea … ⌘ Read more
Found this kitten a week ago, frolicking in my backyard. She’s very talkative and loves belly rubs🥰 ⌘ Read more
YouTube TV Blackout Is Costing Disney an Estimated $4.3 Million Per Day In Lost Revenue
Disney is losing an estimated $4.3 million per day (about $30 million per week) from the ongoing YouTube TV blackout of ESPN, ABC, and other networks amid a contract dispute over carriage fees. Of course, YouTube is also feeling financial pressure from users who have already canceled or intend to cancel … ⌘ Read more
One week at home after being found on the side of the road ⌘ Read more