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“Consolidation is in full swing and I’m excited to see who will still be there at the end of the year,” said one managing director, on condition of anonymity.

Installers face significant challenges, including employee utilization, short waiting times for commissioning, and declining demand due to higher interest rates, inflation, and high electricity prices.

He also said that large online providers could exploit current market conditions, affecting even reputable solar installers.

“Price competition in the balcony module segment makes a normal PV system seem too expensive,” said another executive.

Another long-standing installer compared the current market to 2012, criticizing the media’s focus on low prices from third-rate Chinese manufacturers.

“I’m pessimistic about the second half of the year,” he said, noting the need for future support and policies to ensure sector stability.

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As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we weren’t able to uncover fully.

The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”

If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.

In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”

The small number of staff across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its immense business as basically the de facto PC gaming platform.

While we haven’t seen any leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data, the figures give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff — which, given the massive popularity of Steam, is probably still just a fraction of the money the company is pulling in.

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The #7955 bug report is over the S-Hoai Windows client displaying an application exception when clicking the “File” or “Projects” menu.

S-Hoai is a Windows application used in Germany by architects and building engineers/contractors for managing estimates and billing according to German laws.

This S-Hoai “Honorarordnung für Architekten und Ingenieure” software on at least older versions has been borked running under Wine with little activity in the bug report over the years.

But now in Wine Staging 9.11 is an OLEDB32 patch where mode can have multiple values as a string.

That will hopefully take care of the issue for S-Hoai and any other similar Windows software.

Separately, Wine Staging 9.11 carries an ODBCCP32 patch to correct the look-up of DSN before writing to registry.

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The iPhone’s next major software update will roll out later this year, featuring plenty of AI infusion—Apple Intelligence—plus other quality-of-life improvements across the platform.

At WWDC 2024, Apple announced that iOS 18 would finally let you place app icons wherever you want on the Home screen, freeing them from the stringent rail it was on before.

The iOS 18 developer beta shows that the color accents pick up based on your wallpaper and system theme.

Still, even though Apple quietly announced RCS support this week during its developer conference, Google doesn’t get its victory lap.

On the plus side, messages between iPhones and their green bubbles will be able to share features like high-resolution photos and Tapback animations later this year.

In Android 7, the Quick Settings in the notification shade added editable tiles, which were eventually opened up to third-party app developers.

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Playtron have teased their PlaytronOS, taking aim at the gaming space to compete with SteamOS with a Linux-powered system.

Many others are involved who have developer experience from the likes of Google, Amazon, Red Hat, Meta, Samsung, SEGA and more.

They say it aims to be “compatible with every game store” and to expect “many 3rd party integrations to come”.

And they say to expect “Playtron on Laptops & PCs, TVs, XR and in Car in the coming years”, so they’re certainly aiming high with it.

Their current plan is to launch PlaytronOS for Steam Deck and other handheld gaming PCs “later this year” and that “Playtron 1st hand held PCs coming soon” — so we can expect to see some future handhelds launch with PlaytronOS.

While exciting, they have a huge uphill battle here and will no doubt have to do a lot of convincing when it comes to hardware vendors to actually use it.

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Tourists are to be banned from parts of Japan’s famous geisha district in Kyoto following complaints of “overtourism”.

“Kyoto is not a theme park,” said the local council amid discontent about over-zealous visitors with cameras hoping to snap a glimpse of the famous geishas.

Geishas are professional entertainers who are trained in various traditional arts including dance and music and are an iconic part of Japanese culture.

Visitors crowd the narrow, quaint streets of the area called Gion in Japan’s ancient capital city, often following tour guides who show people around and lecture for long hours, according to local district official Isokazu Ota.

The district’s public streets will remain open to tourists, so the area and the rest of Kyoto will still be teeming with visitors, both from Japan and around the world.

Complaints about “overtourism” began years ago, but cooled somewhat when the COVID-19 pandemic brought numbers of visitors down.

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All of that language was offered up while Avast was collecting users’ browser information from 2014 to 2020, then selling it to more than 100 other companies through a since-shuttered entity known as Jumpshot, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

While we disagree with the FTC’s allegations and characterization of the facts, we are pleased to resolve this matter and look forward to continuing to serve our millions of customers around the world," the statement reads.

The FTC’s complaint (PDF) notes that after Avast acquired then-antivirus competitor Jumpshot in early 2014, it rebranded the company as an analytics seller.

For example, a sample of just 100 entries out of trillions retained by Respondents showed visits by consumers to the following pages: an academic paper on a study of symptoms of breast cancer; Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential candidacy announcement; a CLE course on tax exemptions; government jobs in Fort Meade, Maryland with a salary greater than $100,000; a link (then broken) to the mid-point of a FAFSA (financial aid) application; directions on Google Maps from one location to another; a Spanish-language children’s YouTube video; a link to a French dating website, including a unique member ID; and cosplay erotica.

In a blog post accompanying its announcement, FTC Senior Attorney Lesley Fair writes that, in addition to the dual nature of Avast’s privacy products and Jumpshot’s extensive tracking, the FTC is increasingly viewing browsing data as “highly sensitive information that demands the utmost care.”

“Data about the websites a person visits isn’t just another corporate asset open to unfettered commercial exploitation,” Fair writes.

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Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page.

The blog post says the ad platform is hitting “general availability” today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users.

This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done.

Users should see a pop-up when they start up Chrome soon, informing them that an “ad privacy” feature has been rolled out to them and enabled.

That’s actually what started this whole process: Apple dealt a giant blow to Google’s core revenue stream when it blocked third-party cookies in Safari in 2020.

Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads."

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The companies believe their research, published on their websites, documents for the first time how hackers with ties to foreign governments are using generative artificial intelligence in their attacks.

to generate exotic attacks, as some in the tech industry feared, the hackers have used it in mundane ways, like drafting emails, translating documents and debugging computer code, the companies said.

They shared threat information to document how five hacking groups with ties to China, Russia, North Korea and Iran used OpenAI’s technology.

Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, tech experts, the press and government officials have worried that adversaries might weaponize the more powerful tools, looking for new and creative ways to exploit vulnerabilities.

He said that OpenAI limited where customers could sign up for accounts, but that sophisticated culprits could evade detection through various techniques, like masking their location.

The emails included “one pretending to come from an international development agency and another attempting to lure prominent feminists to an attacker-built website on feminism,” the company said.

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“I’m so scared, please come,” were some of the last words six-year-old Hind Rajab said in a telephone call to rescuers after her family’s car came under fire in Gaza City.Trapped in the vehicle and surrounded by her dead relatives, for three hours she pleaded with the Red Crescent to save her.But the aid agency lost contact with the ambulance dispatched to her aid on 29 January and its crew and Hind remained missing.

Now Hind’s family has said that she was found dead inside the car in the Tel al-Hawa area of Gaza City on Saturday morning.

Hind’s mother, Wissam Hamada, added: “I will question before God on Judgment Day those who heard my daughter’s cries for help and did not save her.”The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said that it had located its bombed-out ambulance just metres away, and that its two paramedics, Yusuf Al-Zeino and Ahmed Al-Madhoun, had also been killed.

Gaza City has been devastated by fighting between Israel and Hamas since the war broke out four months ago and Hind’s family had reportedly been hoping to seek shelter elsewhere.

The tragedy unfolded on 29 January, when Hind and her uncle, aunt and cousins attempted to flee approaching Israeli forces and their car came under fire.

“The occupation deliberately targeted the Red Crescent crew despite prior coordination to allow the ambulance to arrive at the site to rescue Hind,” it said in a statement.

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Apple and Google have long been criticized for selling devices that are deemed harder to repair than others.

Worse, PIRG believes that the two companies are failing to make laptops easier to take apart and fix.

The “Failing the Fix (2024)” report released this week [PDF] is largely based on the repairability index scores required of laptops and some other electronics sold in France.

For laptops, that criteria includes providing updates and the ability to reset software and firmware.

PIRG also docked companies for participating in trade groups that fight against right-to-repair legislation and if OEMs failed to “easily provide full information on how they calculated their products."

PIRG’s report doesn’t factor in software support timelines, but even if it did, Chromebooks’ repairability score wouldn’t increase notably since the move only brought them to “industry norms,” Lucas Gutterman, Designed to Last campaign director for the US PIRG Education Fund, told me.

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Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez described the move as “blackmail” on Tuesday, warning that Caracas would stop cooperating in repatriation flights for Venezuelan migrants from the US if Washington’s “economic aggression” intensifies.

In October, the Biden administration lifted general economic sanctions targeting Venezuela’s mining and oil industries, in support of an agreement struck in Barbados between Maduro and the opposition to hold free and fair elections in 2024.

Earlier on Monday, White House’s spokesperson John Kirby had said Maduro had until April to return to the negotiating table and commit to what was agreed last year, including holding free elections where all candidates are allowed to run, or sanctions could be reimposed.

It also has the potential to impact the US domestic gas market because several US companies, including Chevron, operate in Venezuela and Venezuelan crude is regularly exported to refineries in the US Gulf Coast, data from the US Energy Information Administration show.

In an interview with CNN’s Isa Soares on Tuesday, Machado warned millions more Venezuelans could flee the country if Maduro doesn’t comply with commitments to hold free elections.

Machado also commented on Rodríguez’s warning that Venezuela could stop cooperating on repatriation flights, saying, “You can imagine that it breaks my heart to see our people being used in such a hard and unlawful way.

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The 2.2 release includes some big changes like a new modified fsync kernel with enhanced hardware support, HDR and more.

You also get Nintendo HID support, a Webapp Manager, Pods as a default feature which is great for managing distrobox/containers, improvements to Steam Deck support, patches to Gamescope pulled in from ChimeraOS and tons of tweaks to both the GNOME and KDE desktop environments available.

Despite this project also being image-based, you are able to install any Fedora package straight from the command line.

These packages will persist across updates (So go ahead and install that obscure VPN software you spent an hour trying to get working in SteamOS).

Additionally, Bazzite is updated multiple times a week with packages from upstream Fedora, giving you the best possible performance and latest features - all on a stable base.

Bazzite ships with the latest Linux kernel and SELinux enabled by default with full support for secure boot (Run ujust enroll-secure-boot-key and enter the password ublue-os if prompted to enroll our key) and disk encryption, making this a sensible solution for general computing.

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A mother whose child died aged six from a brain inflammation caused by measles hopes sharing her story will encourage parents to “vaccinate more”.

It comes as the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) warned of measles outbreaks in parts of London.

Her son, Samuel, developed a rare form of brain inflammation after catching measles, and died in 2019.

“I honestly think that if people knew that this was a possibility they would vaccinate more,” Ms Larkman-Jones, 45, of Brixton, south London, told the PA Media news agency.

Prof Dame Jenny Harries, UKHSA chief executive, warned that measles is spreading among unvaccinated communities, and added that a “national call to action” is needed across the country.

In February 2019 Samuel was transferred to St Thomas’ Hospital where a lumbar puncture and an MRI test found he had the neurological disorder subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE).

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Democratic nations like the United States rarely politicize their economic statistics — although ask me again if Donald Trump returns to office — but authoritarian regimes often do.

President Xi Jinping is starting to look like a poor economic manager, whose propensity for arbitrary interventions — which is something autocrats tend to do — has stifled private initiative.

Well, international economists are fond of citing Dornbusch’s Law: “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” What happened in China’s case was that the government was able to mask the problem of inadequate consumer spending for a number of years by promoting a gigantic real estate bubble.

To outside observers, what China must do seems straightforward: end financial repression and allow more of the economy’s income to flow through to households, and strengthen the social safety net so that consumers don’t feel the need to hoard cash.

And when it comes to strengthening the safety net, the leader of this supposedly communist regime sounds a bit like the governor of Mississippi, denouncing “welfarism” that creates “lazy people.”

Will it try to prop up its economy with an export surge that will run headlong into Western efforts to promote green technologies?

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A new class of antibiotics for drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria which was discovered using more transparent deep learning models.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is proving to be a game-changer when it comes to medicine with the technology now helping scientists to unlock the first new antibiotics in 60 years.

“Our work provides a framework that is time-efficient, resource-efficient, and mechanistically insightful, from a chemical-structure standpoint, in ways that we haven’t had to date”.

These models consist of very large numbers of calculations that mimic neural connections, and no one really knows what’s going on underneath the hood," said Felix Wong, a postdoc at MIT and Harvard and one of the study’s lead authors.

By integrating these toxicity predictions with the previously determined antimicrobial activity, the researchers pinpointed compounds capable of effectively combating microbes with minimal harm to the human body.

The models identified compounds from five different classes, categorised based on specific chemical substructures within the molecules, that exhibited predicted activity against MRSA.

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Ukrainian men between the ages of 25 and 60 living abroad will be asked to report for military service, Defence Minister Rustem Umerov has said.

Kyiv has also seen setbacks in provisions of aid, with US Republicans blocking a $61bn (€55bn; £48bn) military package and Hungary stopping an EU financial deal worth €50bn ($55bn; £43bn).

In an interview for the media outlets Die Welt, Bild and Politico, Mr Umerov described the recruitment drive as “not a punishment” but “an honour”.

The defence minister said that it was important to be fair, informing mobilised men how they would be trained and equipped, when and where they would serve and when they would be discharged.

Mr Zelensky suggested in his end-of-year news conference on Tuesday that there were currently 500,000 Ukrainian troops at the front.

Currently conscripts and volunteers are obliged to serve until the end of the war, and are only allowed 10 days’ leave a year.

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