Last night out of the blue, we received an email from AMD, sharing some of the specifications for the forthcoming Ryzen Threadripper CPUs to be announced today. Up until this point, we knew a few things - Threadripper would consist of two Zeppelin dies featuring AMD's latest Zen core and microarchitecture, and would essentially double up on the HEDT Ryzen launch. Double dies means double pretty much everything: Threadripper would support up to 16 cores, up to 32 MB of L3 cache, quad-channel memory support, and would require a new socket/motherboard platform called X399, sporting a massive socket with 4094-pins (and also marking an LGA socket for AMD). By virtue of being sixteen cores, AMD is seemingly carving a new consumer category above HEDT/High-End Desktop, which we’ve coined the 'Super High-End Desktop', or SHED for short.

From version to version, I always love to play around with the kernel. And it has always been a great lack in guides and documentation on how to build Mac OSX's kernel, XNU. For those of you that already have tried compiling XNU for Mac OSX 10.12 (Sierra), you probably noticed that earlier build guides like ssen's blog - Building xnu for OS X 10.11 El Capitan don't work anymore. However, many thanks to ssen to put in time to write a guide.

The problem is that Apple introduced something named Circular dependency with the libdispatch library and the kernel headers. So the order of the build process just got really important.

FCC chairman Ajit Pai is fond of saying that "the internet was not broken in 2015" when he argues for repeal of our nation's net neutrality rules. This is particularly funny to me, because in 2014 I literally wrote an article called "The internet is fucked".

Why was it fucked? Because the free and open internet was in danger of becoming tightly controlled by giant telecom corporations that were already doing things like blocking apps and services from phones and excusing their own services from data caps. Because the lack of competition in the internet access market let these companies act like predatory monopolies. And because our government lacked the will or clarity to just say what everyone already knows: internet access is a utility.

Most of these things are still true, even after the Obama-era FCC under Chairman Tom Wheeler reclassified internet access as a Title II telecommunications service and imposed strict net neutrality rules on wired and wireless internet providers. And most of these things will get even worse when Pai pushes through his plan to rescind Title II and those rules, despite widespread public outcry.

From a hardware perspective, the PiDP is just a frontpanel for a Raspberry PI. In the hardware section below, the technical details of the front panel are explained. In fact, the front panel could just as easily be driven by any microcontroller, it only lights the leds and scans the switch positions.

From a software perspective, the PiDP is just a Raspberry Pi, running Raspbian, which automatically logs in to the SimH emulator. SimH is modified to drive the front panel - meaning it has instructions added to reflect the state of the PDP-8 CPU registers through the leds, and responds to the switch settings.

The Multics CPU simulator created by Harry Reed and Charles Anthony is available for public download. A complete QuickStart installation package is available that provides software, compilers, system source, install scripts, and several initial projects (SysDaemon, SysAdmin, Daemon, etc.) and users.

Google operates a little-known program to harness the brain power of university researchers to help sway opinion and public policy, cultivating financial relationships with professors at campuses from Harvard University to the University of California, Berkeley.

Over the past decade, Google has helped finance hundreds of research papers to defend against regulatory challenges of its market dominance, paying $5,000 to $400,000 for the work, The Wall Street Journal found.

This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and that was less than half used. It has a fast SSD that was mostly idle. And yet, as I moved the mouse around it kept hitching - sometimes locking up for seconds at a time.

So I did what I always do - I grabbed an ETW trace and analyzed it. The result was the discovery of a serious process-destruction performance bug in Windows 10.

Valve's Alden Kroll was at Indigo 2017 to talk about Steam and the changes they're working on. The talk covered the business side of Steam as well as some specific features available for game makers. The company wanted to meet developers face to face, answer questions, and hear feedback and suggestions as well.

"The fundamental reasons that Valve cares about SteamOS haven't gone away, and we continue our work to expand it," Valve said in a statement to PC Gamer. I had asked if SteamOS was still a priority, how many people were working on it, and if Windows 10 changed Valve's approach. "The launch of Steam Machines taught us a lot about what Steam customers value in hardware. Right now we're continuing to work on SteamOS as a product, with over 96 updates and 3,525 games released. We have many incentives for those making SteamOS titles and we see a bright future for SteamOS, especially in VR."

The comment about VR is interesting, as the new tech is clearly Valve's present focus. If SteamOS can provide a better VR experience than Windows, and VR technology proves itself more popular in the future, perhaps the OS has a shot of resurging with a new round of 'SteamVR Machines'. But the success of SteamVR isn't a sure thing, either.

Since launching the Virtual Console in 2006, Nintendo has officially re-released dozens of Super NES games for play on modern consoles. As that emulated library has grown, though, many have noted an important gap: Nintendo hasn't re-released any SNES games that made use of the 3D-focused Super FX chip (or the improved Super FX2 follow-up).

That streak of Super FX disrespect will finally end in September when Yoshi's Island and Star Fox will show up on the Super NES Classic Edition. They'll be joined by the previously unreleased, Super FX2-powered Star Fox 2, which was completed in the mid-'90s but cancelled to avoid the shadow of more powerful 3D games on the likes of PlayStation and Nintendo 64.

While it's nice to see the Super FX getting some official attention, the question remains: what took so long? Why has Nintendo ignored the Super FX corner of its history all these years?

The people who make enhanced editions of old role-playing games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment want to do the same thing for Icewind Dale II. There's just one problem: nobody knows where to find the code.

Fedora Workstation comes with two package managers by default: DNF and PackageKit. DNF has all the latest features and the best support, but PackageKit is put front and center in GNOME Software, KDE Plasma Discover, and as of Fedora 26 also in Cockpit’s new Software Update panel.

You may be better off sticking with the DNF package manager in the command line; even though PackageKit is the choice of all the graphical package managers. Here is some of the advantages DNF still gives you over PackageKit based applications.