Month: July 2017

Enlarge / Martin Shkreli leaves a federal court in New York. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

In 2009, at an apartment cocktail party in New York’s East Village, Steven Richardson met one Martin Shkreli; soon after, Richardson invested $400,000 in Shkreli’s buzzing MSMB hedge funds. Though federal prosecutors allege that Shkreli went on to defraud investors of those funds, including Richardson, the two became close. Richardson, now 63 and a seasoned former American Express executive, described himself as Shkreli’s “personal mentor.”

In his testimony in a federal court in Brooklyn Wednesday, things certainly got personal—from troublesome Twitter use to sexually charged e-mails and Shkreli’s oral hygiene.

Shkreli, now 34 and notorious for a drug price hike, stands on trial for eight counts of securities and wire fraud. Federal prosecutors allege that Shkreli hid millions in losses at MSMB from bum trades, which he covered up by plundering the pharmaceutical company he founded in 2011, Retrophin. Richardson would become chairman of the board of directors at the pharmaceutical company.

It's been nearly a year-and-a-half since Nintendo first said it was "looking into" virtual reality, though we have yet to see any concrete signs of that "look" outside of a vague patent application. Thus, it came down to Nintendo partner Namco Bandai to give the world its first official taste of what a popular Nintendo franchise would look like on a modern virtual reality headset (no, the Virtual Boy does not count).

Apparently, it will look a lot like Mario Kart Arcade GP VR, a title being teased for Japanese arcades in a newly released 30-second trailer now making the rounds. The slickly produced, first-person trailer shows players puttering somewhat slowly down familiar looking track settings (Peach's Castle grounds, Bowser's airship, a Thwomp-filled fortress) while throwing turtle shells and banana peels and even bonking opposing players with a hammer.

Though the trailer is making a big splash today, the game's existence was first revealed a month ago as part of a preview event for Namco's upcoming VR arcade games (an event we seem to have missed amid the bustle of E3). A report from The Japan Times explains and shows a bit more about how the game works, with users sitting in a small kart that bumps and shakes as they drive with an HTC Vive strapped to their heads. Vive trackers strapped to the back of the wrists track players' hands (via rubber gloves) and allow them to grab virtual items out of the air and throw them at opponents with real-world motions. IGN Japan has even more footage of people playing the game (note the commentary is all in Japanese).

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen die. Threadripper has two of these in a multi-chip module. Epyc has four of them. (credit: AMD)

AMD today announced the pricing and (approximate) availability for Threadripper, its high-end desktop platform that was first unveiled in May.

The top-end part will be the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X: a 16 core, 32 thread chip with a base clock of 3.4GHz and a boost clock of 4.0GHz for $999. Below that will be the 1920X: 12 cores, 24 threads, at 3.5/4.0GHz, for $799.

Both chips will use a 4094-pin socket called TR4 and the X399 chipset, offering 64 lanes of PCIe 3.0 connectivity and four channels of DDR4 memory. Both have a notional power envelope of 180W. Internally, the chip is essentially a doubled up version of the existing Ryzens: AMD's basic building block is a unit of eight cores with 16 threads (split internally into two core complexes of four cores each). Threadripper has two of these chips in each package; the Epyc server processor has four.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SweetBabeeJay)

Broadband providers made it clear this week: they wholeheartedly support net neutrality... but they want to overturn those pesky net neutrality rules and replace them with something that isn't so strict.

In fact, the way to truly protect net neutrality is to keep the Internet free of regulations, Internet provider CenturyLink wrote. "Keep the Internet Open and Free—Without Regulation" was the title of CenturyLink's blog post Wednesday.

"Reversing the FCC’s 2015 Internet regulation order will do several positive things: Increase customer choice, spur innovation and investment, [and] create lasting consumer and competitive protections," CenturyLink wrote.