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CachyOS Challenges Ubuntu In New Server Benchmarks  Dataconomy

InputPlumber 0.70 Released With Expanded Hardware Support  Phoronix

Recovered Unix v4 tape quickly yields a usable operating system — nostalgia addicts can now boot up Unix v4 in a browser window  Tom's Hardware

Recovered Unix v4 tape quickly yields a usable operating system — nostalgia addicts can now boot up Unix v4 in a browser window  Tom's Hardware

Meta has agreed to acquire viral AI agent startup Manus, "a Singapore-based AI startup that's become the talk of Silicon Valley since it materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it went instantly viral," reports TechCrunch. "The clip showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI's Deep Research." From the report: By April, just weeks after launch, the early-stage firm Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that assigned Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million. General partner Chetan Puttagunta joined the board. Per Chinese media outlets, some other big-name backers had already invested in Manus at that point, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China) via an earlier $10 million round. Though Bloomberg raised questions when Manus started charging $39 or $199 a month for access to its AI models (the outlet noted the pricing seemed "somewhat aggressive... for a membership service still in a testing phase,") the company recently announced it had since signed up millions of users and crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That's when Meta started negotiating with Manus, according to the WSJ, which says Meta is paying $2 billion -- the same valuation Manus was seeking for its next funding round. For Zuckerberg, who has staked Meta's future on AI, Manus represents something new: an AI product that's actually making money (investors have grown increasingly twitchy about Meta's $60 billion infrastructure spending spree). Meta says it'll keep Manus running independently while weaving its agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, where Meta's own chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.

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D7VK 1.1 adds experimental Direct3D 6 support for classic PC games on Linux  VideoCardz.com

Running Linux on Sony’s PlayStation 2 is Easier Than You Think  TechEBlog -

Three Linux Conflicts That Still Shape the OS You Use Today  gHacks Technology News

Three Linux Conflicts That Still Shape the OS You Use Today  gHacks Technology News

Three Linux Conflicts That Still Shape the OS You Use Today  gHacks Technology News

Three Linux Conflicts That Still Shape the OS You Use Today  gHacks Technology News

Three Linux Conflicts That Still Shape the OS You Use Today  gHacks Technology News

Three Linux Conflicts That Still Shape the OS You Use Today  gHacks Technology News

NTFSPlus Becomes "NTFS" as Driver Moves Closer to Kernel Integration  It's FOSS

The Wall Street Journal reports that Boston's once-booming biotech sector has hit a sharp downturn, leaving newly minted Ph.D.s struggling to find work as venture funding dries up, lab space sits empty, and companies downsize or relocate amid rising costs and policy uncertainty. The Wall Street Journal reports: Boston's biotech sector, long a vital economic engine for one of America's wealthiest metro areas, is sputtering. A double whammy of cutbacks in venture capital and government funding have taken a toll, leading to layoffs and struggles for job seekers. For workers who thought they would easily launch into a well-paying science career, the downturn has been especially harsh. Massachusetts experienced a slight decline in its roughly 65,000 biotech research-and-development jobs in 2024 after years of mostly strong increases, including during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to federal data. The numbers indicate that job losses continued through at least June, while hiring remains sluggish. By the end of September, nearly 28% of greater Boston's laboratory space sat empty, according to the latest estimates from real-estate firm CBRE. "Every stage of the life cycle has been impacted by policy or regulatory uncertainty this year," said Kendalle Burlin O'Connell, chief executive of MassBio, an industry trade group. The impact has hit startups especially hard, she said. A continued downturn poses risks for a region where workers will put up with sky-high real-estate costs if they can land high-paying jobs. Massachusetts faces competition from other states and China, which are eager to peel away talent and investment. "There are states and countries chasing us every single day," Gov. Maura Healey said in an interview. In late October, the Democrat testified before the Massachusetts legislature in support of a $400 million "competitiveness agenda" that she is seeking to spur new investment and supplement research funding lost this year. Lawmakers are reviewing the bill, a House spokesman said.

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Liquid Reply Joins Linux Foundation Backed Agentic AI Foundation  Open Source For You

Playing A Game Of Linux On Your Sony Playstation 2  Hackaday

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming from still other neurons. Now, researchers have used spiking circuitry to build an artificial robotic skin, adopting some of the principles of how signals from our sensory neurons are transmitted and integrated. While the system relies on a few decidedly not-neural features, it has the advantage that we have chips that can run neural networks using spiking signals, which would allow this system to integrate smoothly with some energy-efficient hardware to run AI-based control software. [...] There are four ways that these trains of spikes can convey information: the shape of an individual pulse, through their magnitude, through the length of the spike, and through the frequency of the spikes. Spike frequency is the most commonly used means of conveying information in biological systems, and the researchers use that to convey the pressure experienced by a sensor. The remaining forms of information are used to create something akin to a bar code that helps identify which sensor the reading came from. In addition to registering the pressure, the researchers had each sensor send a "I'm still here" signal at regular time intervals. Failure to receive this would be an indication that something has gone wrong with a sensor. The spiking signals allow the next layer of the system to identify any pressure being experienced by the skin, as well as where it originated. This layer can also do basic evaluation of the sensory input: "Pressure-initiated raw pulses from the pulse generator accumulated in the signal cache center until a predefined pain threshold is surpassed, activating a pain signal." This can allow the equivalent of basic reflex reactions that don't involve higher-level control systems. For example, the researchers set up a robotic arm covered with their artificial skin, and got it to move the arm whenever it experiences pressure that can cause damage. The second layer also combines and filters signals from the skin before sending the information on to the arm's controller, which is the equivalent of the brain in this situation. So, the same system caused a robotic face to change expressions based on how much pressure its arm was sensing. [...] The skin is designed to be assembled from a collection of segments that can snap together using magnetic interlocks. These automatically link up any necessary wiring, and each segment of skin broadcasts a unique identity code. So, if the system identifies damage, it's relatively easy for an operator to pop out the damaged segment and replace it with fresh hardware, and then update any data that links the new segment's ID with its location. The researchers call their development a neuromorphic robotic e-skin, or NRE-skin. "Neuromorphic" as a term is a bit vague, with some people using it to mean a technology that directly follows the principles used by the nervous system. That's definitely not this skin. Instead, it uses "neuromorphic" far more loosely, with the operation of the nervous system acting as an inspiration for the system.The findings have been published in the journal PNAS.

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Amid a global DDR5 shortage and soaring prices, Russian hardware enthusiasts are experimenting with do-it-yourself DDR5 RAM by sourcing empty PCBs and soldering memory chips by hand. Tom's Hardware reports: The idea comes from Russian YouTuber PRO Hi-Tech's Telegram channel, where a local enthusiast known as "Vik-on" already performs VRAM upgrades for GPUs, so this is a relatively safe operation for him. According to Vik-on, empty RAM PCBs can be sourced from China for as little as $6.40 per DIMM. The memory chips themselves, though, that's a different challenge. The so-called spot market for memory doesn't really exist at the moment, since no manufacturer has the production capacity to make more RAM, and even if they did, they'd sell to better-paying AI clients instead. Still, you can find SK Hynix and Samsung chips across Chinese marketplaces if you search for the correct part number, as shown in the attached screenshots. Moreover, the Telegram thread says it would cost roughly 12,000 Russian Rubles ($152) to build a 16 GB stick with "average" specs, which is about the same as a retail 16 GB kit. There's also a ZenTimings snapshot showing CL28 timings, claiming that even relatively high-end DDR5 RAM can be built using this method, but it won't be cost-effective. Therefore, it doesn't make too much sense just yet to get the BGA rework station out and assemble your own DDR5. Things are expected to get worse, though, so maybe these Russians are on to something.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It Took 6+ Years For Linux's "New" Mount API To Be Properly Documented In Man Pages  Phoronix