Today in Techrights

• [Meme] Monopoly Tony
• It Took Campinos Three or More Years to Undo Illegal Battistelli Actions on Boards of Appeal and Strike Regulations (Only After Losing at ILO-AT!), But He Does Not Mention That
• IRC Proceedings: Saturday, May 21, 2022
• Links 22/05/2022: Free Software Developments in Bratislava
• Gemini is the Direction the Paginated Internet Should Have Taken (Not Bloated Web With JavaScript and DRM)

today's leftovers

• Dirk Eddelbuettel: #37: Introducing r2u with 2 x 19k binaries for Ubuntu 22.04 and 20.04

  One month ago I started work on a new side project which is now up and running, and deserving on an introductory blog post: r2u. It was announced in two earlier tweets (first, second) which contained the two (wicked) demos below also found at the documentation site. So what is this about? It brings full and complete CRAN installability to Ubuntu LTS, both the ‘focal’ release 20.04 and the recent ‘jammy’ release 22.04. It is unique in resolving all R and CRAN packages with the system package manager. So whenever you install something it is guaranteed to run as its dependencies are resolved and co-installed as needed. Equally important, no shared library will be updated or removed by the system as the possible dependency of the R package is known and declared. No other package management system for R does that as only apt on Debian or Ubuntu can — and this project integrates all CRAN packages (plus 200+ BioConductor packages). It will work with any Ubuntu installation on laptop, desktop, server, cloud, container, or in WSL2 (but is limited to Intel/AMD chips, sorry Raspberry Pi or M1 laptop). It covers all of CRAN (or nearly 19k packages), all the BioConductor packages depended-upon (currently over 200), and only excludes less than a handful of CRAN packages that cannot be built.

• Three insights you might have missed from the Red Hat Summit event

  TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, covered the Red Hat Summit event through exclusive interviews with company executives and partners. (* Disclosure below.)

  Here are three additional insights you might have missed: [...]

• Remembering Gary Kildall on what would have been his 80th birthday

  On May 19th, 1942, the late (and great) Gary Kildall was born. Making today, what would have been, his 80th birthday.

• Timur Kristóf: Task shader driver implementation on AMD HW

  Previously, I gave you an introduction to mesh/task shaders and wrote up some details about how mesh shaders are implemented in the driver. But I left out the important details of how task shaders (aka. amplification shaders) work in the driver. In this post, I aim to give you some details about how task shaders work under the hood. Like before, this is based on my experience implementing task shaders in RADV and all details are already public information.

• Appwrite Opened A 50k Fund For Open Source Devs - Invidious

  Appwrite has become a successful open source software company and they've decided to give a little something back, they've decided to open up a 50k open source software fund that any open source devs can apply for.

• InfluxDB 2 migration

  InfluxDB is the MIT licensed time series database of my monitoring stack of choice, the so-called TICK stack, consisting of Telegraf (data collection agent), InfluxDB (time series database), Chronograf (charts and dashboard interface) and Kapacitor (data processing engine).

Open Hardware/Modding and Linux Devices

• Amiga 1000 Restoration: Recap, Cleaning and Testing

  Looks like my next adventure will be cleanup and repair of the keyboard.

• iFixit will sell nearly every part of the Steam Deck — including the entire motherboard

  The era of fixing your own gadgets has nearly arrived, and Valve’s Steam Deck handheld gaming PC may be setting the best example yet — not only does it offer a repair-friendly design, but it now looks like almost every part will be sold separately at iFixit.

• Apple shipped me a 79-pound iPhone repair kit to fix a 1.1-ounce battery

  The thing you should understand about Apple’s home repair process is that it’s a far cry from traditional DIY if you opt for the kit — which I did, once I saw the repair manual only contains instructions for Apple’s own tools. (You can just buy a battery if you want.)

  I expected Apple would send me a small box of screwdrivers, spudgers, and pliers; I own a mini iPhone, after all. Instead, I found two giant Pelican cases — 79 pounds of tools — on my front porch. I couldn’t believe just how big and heavy they were considering Apple’s paying to ship them both ways.

• We need to talk about Thread

  Thread launched back in 2014 as a wireless networking protocol designed for a world of millions or billions of connected devices. The idea behind the radio was that connected devices such as sensors, thermostats, doorbells, etc. needed mesh capabilities, the ability to conserve power, and a direct connection to the internet.

  While the code underneath has changed, the basic design of the technology and its requirements haven’t changed much. It has since become the low-power data transfer option for the Matter smart home interoperability standard, which means Thread will soon play a huge part in smart home and building infrastructure.

  But it does have a few problems the industry needs to address.

• Aeon ATX Server board is equipped with eight SATA III ports, two GbE ports and six R-DIMM slots

  The ARES-WHI0 is an ATX server board built around the Intel Xeon Ice Lake-SP processor. Besides its large storage capacity, the ARES-WHI0 features plenty of PCIe slots to support up to four VGA cards for AI acceleration and enhanced graphics experience. Another useful feature of the Intel C621A chipset is the support for Intel’s Deep Learning Boost which is supposed to improve AI acceleration and Edge Server performance. RAM is supplied by six R-DIMM slots (2666MHz) and the eight SATA III (6.0 Gbps) ports that support RAID.