We had a couple of complications before the show,
but you guys aren't gonna concern yourselves with that,
so let's get a rousing chorus of,
ah, they're late, in the Twitch chat,
and we can all get it out of our system.
Linus late, or late Linus, or whatever,
I don't remember, they say something.
They're probably saying it right now.
They're probably saying it right now,
so it would be helpful if we actually looked at that.
You're kinda cut off.
If I kinda scooched over a little bit, would that help?
I didn't really scooch,
I just wanna sit closer to him.
So let's go ahead and have a look
at what our topics are for the day.
It's actually a surprisingly jam-packed show,
so it's unfortunate that we weren't able
to get started on time.
We had to replace the batteries and the microphone.
I realized right before the show,
normally we leave everything all set up
so that we can get things going pretty quickly,
and then I was like, oh yeah,
our last WEN show was in Vegas.
We took our streaming gear to Vegas.
It's not set up.
So we had to get everything all set back up again,
but other than that,
we are pretty much ready to rock here.
So some sort of top topics today.
Microsoft and Google are scrapping
over patch fixing policies
and sort of airing dirty laundry in public
about each other's bug reports.
The new Nintendo 3DS to not include
a power adapter in North America.
Are you beautiful?
I am.
You might be able to eat for free
at a certain restaurant,
and GTA 5 has been delayed.
Eat what exactly?
General food, super normal things.
I'm trying to make a beautiful face.
It's not going very well.
Okay, go ahead.
I'm done.
Oh. That was it.
GTA 5 delayed?
That's all you're gonna say about it?
Yeah. Right.
Because we're gonna save it for later on
in the show. There you go.
New intro.
Duh, duh, duh.
That's not the music for our intro.
It's duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh,
duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh,
Ramstein. Welcome to the Wed Show.
Ramstein intro.
Metal edition.
And our sponsors today are Squarespace.
Make an awesome website with Squarespace.
Doesn't have to be square.
It could be widescreen.
And lynda.com.
You don't have to read a book, but you could.
But that's not really what lynda.com is about.
All right, so it's gonna be a good show today, guys.
Yup.
We're gonna kick off with something
that's actually not new at all.
This article is from like...
Fairly old now.
Two or three weeks ago.
And we even, okay, like I know it says it's old,
but we never discuss it.
We did.
Oh, I didn't.
Both were like, psh, whatever.
Oh, all right.
I just agreed that it was stupid and moved on.
At any rate, boom, here's the BBC article.
I'll go ahead and screen share with you guys,
but Wow Maker says that video games
should be in the Olympics.
And there are some arguments on either side of this,
or really that, okay, video games.
See, I went and I used one of those words
that mainstream media uses to make it seem less legitimate.
What did you say?
I called them video games.
Oh.
I should have called them eSports, excuse me.
Very different.
What?
I'm being a little bit facetious.
Okay, okay.
Just a touch, just a touch, okay.
So there are a couple good points
that the Wow Creator brings up.
I'm just gonna go ahead and switch back to my laptop here
so I can look at what they were,
because I don't memorize all these things.
So number one is that they're well-positioned
to be a spectator sport,
given that you can fill tens of thousands
of spectator coliseum for a live event
in some parts of the world.
And I mean, the North American viewers out there
might kind of go, whoa, yeah,
but just because you can kind of do it there
doesn't mean that it should be a big deal.
I mean, the reality of it is North America
is not the center of the universe,
and I don't know if this is still true,
and it was either 2008 or 2012.
My facts are a little bit hazy here,
but I believe it was the badminton
men's singles gold medal match
that was the most-watched sporting event
of that entire Summer Games Olympics,
and it's basically nonexistent in North America.
Yeah, I thought you were gonna say, like, ever,
and I'm like, I'm pretty sure
that was something to do with soccer, but yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
No, just because no one watches it here
doesn't necessarily, or-
And people watch it here,
and people go to live gaming events here.
It's pretty rare.
I know they did one at the Staples Center.
Yeah.
But that's kind of it, is like,
yeah, there was that one they did at the Staples Center.
That doesn't make it an Olympic.
It happens, but not on the same scale at all.
It's same, I guess, similar with tennis.
People watch it, but not on the same scale.
So, and then the other argument
is I think the way you look at esports
is as a very competitive skillset,
and you're looking at these professional gamers
with reflexes that are lightning quick,
and quick decision-making,
upwards of 300 actions per minute,
although the whole actions per minute metric
is one of those ones that I think we've pretty much
stopped acknowledging at this point, I hope.
And so, the comment is video games
would first need to win a cultural battle
over physical sports.
So, with all of that said, the IOC,
the International Olympic Committee,
has already kind of laid down the law
as far as new events goes.
They're only gonna have a fixed number of events,
so that means that if you wanna add something,
you have to remove something else.
And as questionable as some of the things in the Olympics,
I actually don't follow summer Olympics
as closely as I do winter Olympics,
but I mean, come on, figure skating and ice dancing?
Like, really?
And someone's gonna give me crap over this.
In fact, I hope my new contact at Sony
isn't watching right now, because, yeah, she's,
actually, no, she's a figure skating judge,
not an ice dance judge, and my understanding is
figure skaters, for the most part,
look at ice dance as kind of, why are you even here?
Figure skating, in its own regard,
is pretty freakin' intense.
I don't know much about ice dance.
Ice dance is kind of like figure skating,
but more dancing.
No, figure skating has partners, too.
Like, that's exactly where it's just like,
why do we need both of them?
Okay, yeah.
We should probably just.
But figure skating is quite physically challenging.
So, okay, I guess whether or not they win this battle
is going to come down to whether they can find
something less worthy to knock out,
and whether or not it's possible to win the battle of,
should what is effectively,
yes, there's a physical component, but,
yeah, you can't really even say.
Well, no, like, a point at the bottom of this,
where it's a mind sport, is a really good point.
Because chess, chess supporters have wanted
chess to be in the Olympics for a long time,
and I think if you were to look at the Olympics
as sort of, you know, it's a traditional thing,
it's all about the legacy of whatever it is,
and esports being very new,
probably don't necessarily fall under that.
Chess would.
I mean, chess has a long history,
and if we're not gonna include that,
then should we include esports first?
If we included stuff like chess,
I think it would make more sense.
Because we have added newer sports
to the tradition of the Olympics.
But of course, there's the business aspect as well,
going back to the, if you're gonna do esports,
you should probably do chess argument,
because compared to esports,
chess doesn't draw nearly the same kind of a crowd.
No, I meant the other way around.
If they were doing chess already,
it would make more sense for them to do,
because that would be including the mind game stuff.
Should we close the door?
Yeah, I'll close the door,
because those guys are loud.
Do you wanna move into our next topic?
Sure.
I don't think there was really much to say on that.
It's just the mind sport thing that comes down to it,
in my opinion.
They don't do the mind sport stuff.
I mean, with that said,
okay, something like throwing a javelin.
Okay, this is not a mind sport.
But some- Okay, I thought
you were gonna be like, that's a mind sport.
I was like, dude.
No, something like hockey, on the other hand, though,
there is a huge mental component.
So yes, it's physically, there's-
There's a mental component to every sport.
Javelin throwing?
There's a mental component to it.
Okay, there's a mental, okay,
I shouldn't have said mental, I should have said mind.
Because the connotation is slightly different.
You don't use your mind to throw a javelin,
but there's like a mental resilience
under pressure component to any competition,
whether it's a physical one or anything else.
You still use your mind to throw a javelin.
Okay, you used your mind to throw a javelin.
We're not talking frickin' telekinesis here.
We're talking about you use your mind to tell the arm
that it should probably go ahead and do this.
No, I know, but also if you're in outdoor stadiums,
you have to judge other things, like it's,
anyways, there's no point in arguing this.
But there's, you have to use your brain in every sport.
But it's like, anyways, whatever.
Google, oh, should we just go
into the Google versus Microsoft thing?
Yeah, sure, why not?
Oh, God, okay.
So there's essentially two stories to this.
So I'm gonna start with the first story.
Google, what the, okay,
so I'm gonna mess up my notes here a little bit.
Did you copy the link already?
I'm doing this, okay.
No, I did not, okay, sorry.
I will do that from now on if I make sure I'm logged in.
Google released details on a security vulnerability
in Windows 8.1 48 hours before Microsoft
was ready to release a patch for it.
Microsoft claims, and I believe Google
is not refuting this at all,
that they were in contact with Google,
and were like, guys, we're releasing a patch
for this in two days.
Patch Tuesday.
Please don't do this.
And then Google was like, nope, releasing it.
Google's whole idea for this,
and Microsoft is calling for them to be more flexible
and work with them in the future
when it has to do with the vulnerabilities
of millions and millions of users.
Google's rebuttal is that they have
a standard 90-day policy when it comes
to releasing data about vulnerabilities,
and the policy and the reason this exists
and all that kind of stuff is to pressure companies
into fixing vulnerabilities more quickly.
Now, when it was already fixed
and it was coming out in two days,
maybe that shouldn't apply,
but that is their policy, so that's what they're doing.
Story two is that,
so there's that fight already going on.
Story two is that while Google is slamming
on other companies to fix vulnerabilities,
they have their own problems.
Google has received reports for vulnerability
in WebView, which is a web renderer for Android,
and it affects Jellybean users.
The article that we have linked here to Neo Win
is claiming that Jellybean is 60% of users.
It's actually more about 46% of users.
Of Android users.
Of Android users.
Be clear.
It's 60 if you include the things before Jellybean,
but I wasn't entirely certain
if this vulnerability affected things
that were before Jellybean as well.
So it's 46 or 60.
I'm not entirely sure, but it's a lot.
Either way, it's hundreds of millions.
Yes, it's a massive percentage of people,
and Google is refusing to fix it
and will not work on it at all
because they will not work on anything at all
that is pre-4.4 Kit Kat.
Google is stating that if someone wants a fix for this,
they can submit the patch in the report
and then Google will check it out,
and if it's legitimate, they'll send it to OEMs
and see what the OEMs deserve.
And then the other option is they're saying
the OEMs are more than welcome to patch it themselves.
Which, I mean, if anyone here has ever bought,
like, I'm gonna pick on Samsung
because they're the biggest one
in the Android space. Any hardware manufacturer
that makes software?
Yeah, any handset manufacturer
that makes their own skin on top of Android
and basically supports it until the next flagship
is out. Oh, what's that?
Hold on, new one's out?
Oh, bye, see ya.
So pretty much that's it.
You get to buy a new device,
or you get to, and I mean,
I'm so sick of people saying,
oh, well, you should just root
and run a different ROM.
Nobody does that.
Like, someone does it.
Yes, you do. That's fine.
But when you're looking at that 46 to 60%
possible metric of people,
an extremely small percentage of that.
The people who are still running Jelly Bean
probably don't do that
because they probably wouldn't still be running Jelly Bean.
And when you consider that there are new devices
being sold today that have Jelly Bean.
Now, running Jelly Bean.
Like, this is a huge problem.
And like, not a small amount of them.
There's a fair amount of devices being sold now
that have Jelly Bean on them.
And I understand Google's issue here
where they have such diversity in the hardware
that Android can be running on
that they can't individually support every device.
And ultimately, it does fall on the handset makers
to support the devices that they sell.
But the cold hard truth is the handset makers
or device makers aren't doing it.
And if Google doesn't support these older devices,
at least with something like a widespread
fundamental flaw like this,
if they opt not to support it,
it ultimately reflects poorly on the Android experience
and gives more ammunition to people like me.
You know, it's amazing how many people
called me an Apple fanboy or like iPhone fanboy
in my Nexus 6 review.
You know, okay, I haven't even watched it.
I've heard of it and I'm going to watch it.
I just, this last two weeks has been a blur.
But can I finish that thought first?
Sure, yeah.
It gives more ammunition to people like me
who praise Apple for supporting their older devices
much, much better than handset makers on the Android side.
I still use my iPhone 4 almost every day.
As an MP3 player and a video streamer,
just if I'm in the bath or something
and I don't want to risk dropping my actual phone,
I'll grab it and I'll throw it there
and it still runs everything I need it to do.
My wife's Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant.
That was the equivalent flagship Android phone.
Okay, aside from the micro USB connector obviously dying
because every single micro USB connector with, you know.
I think the one on my Moto X is already going.
Because they will all die eventually.
It's a terrible, terrible connector.
Aside from that dying on it,
that thing was freaking useless by the end of its life
and that is a pattern that continues
and comes right from Google on the Android side
when Apple does not do that.
But that said, I'm not an Apple fanboy.
In fact, my daily driver right now is an Android phone.
Whoa, look at that.
Well, you can't really tell because that's a Twitter app,
but okay, sorry, what were you gonna say?
I'm conflicted now because you've probably known
for a while now I haven't been super stoked
with my Moto X because it only lasts for half a day,
but this is my problem consistently with phones
is there's no real great solution.
I don't want to go to iOS because I don't like iOS,
but things that I do on the phone a lot.
Twitter, Instagram, social media stuff, email,
all of that would work totally fine on iOS.
Actually, Instagram would work considerably better
and I would know the camera's good.
Now, I could just do more research
and find an Android phone that has a good camera,
but iPhone cameras are very good
and it would be totally fine
and my Instagram would work better.
A lot of app support on iOS is better,
which is frustrating because I'm an Android guy
and I want to stick with Android.
Now, I'm interested in a Turbo,
but they don't even really sell them in Canada.
They don't sell them at all in Canada.
Yeah. Yeah.
Like, you can try and import them,
you can do all this other crap,
but it's super frustrating.
Like, God, this sucks.
There's no good solution on the Android side,
in my opinion, at all.
At least for me in Canada.
I'm honestly not really.
Well, it was cheap.
Battery was crap.
Yeah.
That's a huge problem.
Right.
Like, God, phones just suck.
The iPhone's battery is crap too.
I know.
That's what I'm saying, there's no good solutions.
Standby is excellent,
but the actual in-use battery life is terrible.
Like, at CES, I was using the iPhone 6
because Phantom Glass doesn't have a cover
for the Droid Turbo, so I wasn't able to use it.
But yeah, so I was using the iPhone 6 every day.
I was down to single-digit battery at the end of the day,
and one day it just died while I was out and about.
I had to charge it.
I'm kind of sitting here going,
I can't even get through a day with this phone.
This is ridiculous.
Whereas the Droid Turbo is awesome,
like every single day, no matter what I do to it.
And like, people in Twitch chat are referring phones
that are not good.
One plus one.
Not good.
Actually, the OnePlus One is supposedly okay.
I haven't used it yet.
The experience is not great.
I've used one of my friends.
It's not awesome.
And there's like stuff you have to go and fix yourself
because it's just broken.
It's way too big for me.
That's so stupid.
Yeah, or they're too big, or like other crap.
It's just, ugh.
I do not like phones because I think they're garbage.
You should get the, oh crap,
the Cinco phone.
You know the Cinco phone, right?
Yeah, isn't this?
Yeah.
Okay, we have to play this.
We have to play this.
This is an Adult Swim thing.
Who knows?
I might get a copyright strike or whatever.
I don't care.
Okay.
Watch it be like,
cannot be played in your region.
Oh no, you're good.
Hold on, hold on.
The new Cinco phone from Cinco Mobile.
Great thing about the Cinco phone,
it has one button and one oh.
Let's say I want to call my mom.
Press it on, open both the antennas
for better reception.
And the number, 555-5-3-5-0.
Simply press no times for zero.
Have you seen this?
No.
Nine,
two,
and then,
and the best feature of the Cinco phone,
you cannot receive calls with it.
You can only make calls.
You'll never be bothered again at work.
Your leisure time out in the golf course or at the beach.
So, is that your phone?
Like, is that the point we're at right now?
That doesn't solve any of my problems at all.
No, it really doesn't.
They didn't even talk about battery life.
Speaking of not solving problems,
Nintendo to halt console and software distribution
in Brazil.
So this article is from digitalspy.co.uk.
I'm gonna go ahead and post that in the chat here.
And what a bummer for Brazilians.
Yeah, really.
Like, just, I don't blame Nintendo for this at all.
Yeah, and like, it's not like they're like,
oh, we're never gonna be distributing in Brazil.
They're just talking about how they're having issues
with it right now.
I'm assuming they're gonna try and fix those issues
and then come back, but.
So basically, they and their Brazilian distributor,
who is apparently still handling distribution
for that area, just not in Brazil specifically,
have both said, yeah, we still have a relationship
and we're committed to reevaluating things
as time goes on.
But basically, due to the,
and apparently there are other issues as well
that they're not really getting into,
but they're saying the distribution model
in the country is unsustainable.
And most of this is thanks to the extremely high
import tariffs on anything that's manufactured
outside of Brazil.
Now, this is something that the Brazilian government
did a number of years back to I guess incentivize,
incentivize companies to make
their own manufacturing facilities within Brazil.
Because if you make something in Brazil,
whether it's a car or a PlayStation 4,
if you make something within the country,
it's not subject to those tariffs.
And I can understand why they might wanna do this
from a job creation perspective.
Did you link this?
I'm sorry?
Did you link this? Yeah.
And also to encourage foreign investment into,
high technology manufacturing facilities within Brazil.
But the reality of it is Brazil is just Brazil
and setting up new manufacturing in,
if every country started doing this
and you had to set up manufacturing in every single country,
not only would it drive up the cost of that product
within that country, it would drive it up everywhere
because it creates all this overhead for these companies.
So, I mean, to put this in perspective,
like people might be going,
well, you know, there's import tax in the UK
and in Canada and everywhere.
But to put it in perspective, the $400 PlayStation 4,
this is from the digitalspy.ca article,
was priced at $1,800 after import fees
when it arrived in Brazil.
And that's converted.
That's not in Brazilian dollars or anything like that.
That's just, that's a straight currency conversion.
I mean, it's not like Brazil is Dubai,
where you might expect the average resident
to be able to afford to pay four plus times more
than anyone else in the world.
And obviously I'm generalizing.
I know not everyone in Dubai is loaded.
But the point is, it's not like Brazil
is an extraordinarily wealthy country
where everyone is gonna be walking around with two grand
to drop on a game console
and then over $100 per game.
I mean, that's ridiculous.
So basically, yeah, they're gonna reevaluate
and I hope-
It really sucks for people in Brazil.
It really does because now how are they gonna get them?
The only other option is gonna be-
I'm like, okay, how does it work if you bought something
on like amazon.com and got it shipped to you?
Yeah, same thing.
The import tariffs will still-
You get hit by import tariffs, okay.
Yeah, absolutely.
Rough.
All right, so this is from hexus.net.
I'm just gonna go ahead and-
I got it, I got it, I got it.
You got it?
Yeah, SSDs?
Yeah.
This is from hexus.net and a report
on the state of flash memory and disk storage
has predicted that using SSDs will become more economical
than hard drives for most purposes from 2016 onward.
The prediction applies to almost all storage,
but seems like the highest capacities
will remain the forte of spinning disks
for a little bit longer.
Wikibon followed up its 2009 report
with another recently focusing on evolution
of all flash array architectures.
Blippity bloopity bloopity bloop.
So this one right here shows four year cost per terabyte
for capacity disks and NAND flash.
So they figure in 2016, so between 2015
and the beginning of 2016, we're gonna go from flash costing
you know, let's see, a scale of this here.
So whatever, 40% more all the way down
to only about, wow, less than half.
Massive drop.
Yeah.
So for one thing, I haven't really seen
this exact ratio at this time.
So they're assuming that'll happen in 2015.
So good luck.
And two, talking to a couple SSD makers at CES,
they kind of went, 2016, are you high?
We're a long way away.
And you look at the difficulty that even Intel has had
moving to 14 nanometer, although we haven't seen
any indication that 10 nanometer is gonna slip.
But, yeah, it would be great.
Like at the same time, I just had the problem
where my SSD completely died.
And while, all right, SSD failure rates
are actually really good.
The problem is not really recoverable.
So I'm still gonna wanna have most of my mass storage
on hard disk anyways.
That's actually a very good point.
Not something that I thought about
when it comes to mass storage.
Being able to buy like a terabyte SSD for my boot drive,
sweet, and have it be like totally affordable,
like that's awesome.
I totally wanna be able to do that.
You're still not gonna archive on it.
I'm still not gonna archive on it.
Right.
Not at all.
There's no way.
My NAS will be running hard disks.
And unless something super major changes,
but I seriously doubt it because that way,
if there is a huge failure, I can just be like,
okay, well, I can probably scrub data off this.
That's a good point
because I hate running hard drives on anything portable.
Yeah.
I thought iPods were insane
when they had hard drives in them.
Are you just hitting the bottle?
Are you asking for this to die?
Like I was one of those freaks that bought an RCA Lyra.
Because...
I bought a Zen Creative, some other stuff
because it wasn't a hard drive.
Yeah, I don't remember what it was.
I paid way too much for my Lyra.
But, and it only had, I think,
I think I had one and my girlfriend at the time had one.
One of us had a 64 meg and the other one had a 32 meg.
So we're talking like 10 to 20 MP3 music files
on this thing.
I miss those things.
But I was like, okay, but, but, but,
and so that was like compared to people with iPods, right?
But there was a justification behind this.
So number one is it wasn't a hard drive based.
So flash storage, yay, throw it around and all that's good.
And number two is that at the time,
I was using a Sony Discman anyway.
So when you're burning yourself a mix CD,
that's only going to be about, you know, 16 to 22 songs.
Cause you didn't have MP3 CDs at the time
where you could just burn the files to it.
So you were only going to have about 20 songs
on a disc anyway.
So I was like, okay,
well this thing is the equivalent of whatever mix CD
that I would be burning for myself.
And yeah, it's a couple hundred bucks or whatever,
but at least it's, at least it's pretty rugged.
I used to, I used to love the days of like,
all right, I have woken up, time to change what songs
are in my MP3 player.
Cause I can only hold one album worth at a time.
That was always entertaining.
But yeah, I don't see myself changing
archival storage mediums for a very long time.
On the subject of archival storage mediums,
this is really interesting.
Maybe I just haven't been paying to,
we haven't been saying who's been posting articles
in the forum, we're bad people.
It was iHani for the esports thing, Good Bytes.
Shout out to you for the Google not patching
the security whole thing.
Op code for something.
X tanks layer X for an intended to halt console.
And ah, oh no, okay, that was it.
Okay, so this one's by Ah Ming.
New service allows you to rent your hard disk space.
Have you posted the article already?
Okay, awesome, I'm gonna go ahead and pull up
the myce.com article here, but it's called storage
and it's spelled wrong because that's the hipster
web 2.0 thing to do.
Yeah, like the razor siren.
Like what are you guys doing?
It's like you're celebrities and you're naming
your children or something.
So storage S-T-O-R-J dot I-O is where you can go
to learn about this and it sounds really cool
on the surface.
Last year they raised about $215,000 in bitcoins.
Apparently, according to this article, that's using
today's bitcoin valuation.
So at the time, if they converted them promptly,
then that was actually a lot more money.
But the way it's gonna work is it's a peer-to-peer
network that allows you to allocate storage
on your computer, so on your hard drive or SSD,
whatever the case may be, and go, okay, yeah,
I've got 300 gigs of storage I'm not using.
And then it actually gives you that much storage space
elsewhere on the network to use as cloud-based storage.
Yeah.
Very, very cool.
And then, sorry, go ahead.
There's other ways you can utilize this too.
I believe you can request more but then you have
to pay for it.
Yes.
And then other people can kind of rent out their space.
Yes.
So that's pretty cool.
One quick thing to note about the rent out your space
is you get paid in, I don't remember exactly
what it's called, but it's like storage I-O coin.
Storage coin X.
Yeah.
A digital, a digital valuata, valuta?
I haven't seen this word before.
I'm gonna call it currency.
Which can be exchanged for real money.
Yeah, so you don't actually get paid to like
your PayPal in dollars.
You get paid in this thing.
So you can figure that out, convert it or whatever.
But I mean, think about it.
Like if you planned to use this service in the long term,
you could go ahead and invest in a large rate array
or something like that.
You could rent out until you fill it.
And then you could start using your storage,
like your built up storage currency
to rent from other people until you can save up some money
in order to buy a new rate array or whatever else.
Like I can see this being a really, really cool way
to get the most out of your personal storage.
Things to remember is that current cloud-based storage
is not that expensive to be completely honest.
And this is supposed to be,
nope, this is supposed to be a lot cheaper.
So you're probably not,
and then after their cuts and stuff,
you're probably not gonna get a ton
for renting out your space.
But if you weren't using it anyways,
then that's still cool.
And you might actually be able to theoretically
make more money off of renting your hard drive space,
use a lot less power compared to running Bitcoin miners.
Right.
Which would be kind of funny.
And I mean, one way to look at it too is you're,
it's more like storage shifting almost at a certain point.
Because you could kind of go,
yeah, I don't need all this space I have
on my desktop computer,
which I hardly ever touch anymore
because I'm always running around with my notebook
or my smartphone or whatever else.
But you're converting that to cloud storage
that you can use with your smartphone.
Pretty cool.
And so the way it works is it actually breaks up blocks.
And those are either 32 meg or eight meg,
if I recall correctly.
Yeah, eight meg or 32 meg blocks.
And then it actually distributes everything
all over the place.
So aside from encrypting them,
you shouldn't act like one person's hard drive,
aside from having an encrypted version of your data,
shouldn't even have the entire piece of data in many cases.
So it's in theory secure, I'm not endorsing its security.
Let's be really clear about that.
This is something I hadn't heard of up till now.
And there is definitely a gray zone here.
So each block of data has a unique hash.
It should be possible to add illegal content
to a so-called gray list.
And then it should be possible for users
to allow or disallow gray list content
to be stored on their hard drive.
Because this creates a huge, a huge liability concern.
Like what if I get raided because my hard drive
has a bunch of child porn on it?
Like let's go worst case scenario.
It's got a bunch of child porn on it
that I didn't even know was there and was encrypted.
So I didn't even have any way of discovering
that it was there.
And so, probably.
And then the other way around.
And then the other way around.
What if you use this maliciously to try
and take blame off of yourself
for doing something like that?
So yeah, and it'll use your bandwidth, of course,
because the way it works is it's kind of a,
it's a mesh based network.
So in order to keep speeds high,
you're actually pulling from multiple sources
and in this much the same way.
Like just like torrenting.
You would be, you would have multiple seeds,
including yourself, uploading files
to other people at the same time.
So very cool idea.
I might consider giving it a try.
It would be, it's a very interesting thing.
I'd be interested in giving it a try too.
I'm definitely not gonna check off that gray content thing.
I definitely not.
Even though it might not even help
because I don't know how they're flagging gray content.
But I'm sure it's not very effective.
Yeah.
I'm sure it's not gonna capture stuff like child porn.
I'm sure if it captured anything, it would be stuff like.
Used, read the file name.
It's not very effective.
Called JPEG one.
Didn't work.
But yeah, I'm sure it's more for like movies.
More Nintendo.
Oh, does this file match Iron Man four?
Okay, well, you can't have it.
More Nintendo BS.
Nintendo is no longer including in the new DS XL,
or excuse me, 3DS XL.
This time it's their fault.
Like really guys?
This time it's like super their fault.
This was posted by Rohith Kumar SP.
I'm gonna go ahead and pull this up on my computer here.
But the new Nintendo 3DS XL
does not come with an AC adapter.
Nintendo says there's a good reason for that.
And that's that rather than to raise the cost
of the 3DS XL by charging consumers
for a component they may already own,
we are giving them the option to only buy it
if they need an AC adapter.
And that is an interesting argument.
And you could probably make that argument
for something like a smartphone that uses micro USB
instead of a proprietary connector
that they haven't even been using for that long.
I mean, if you're a DS Lite owner, that's not gonna work.
So Nintendo, and apparently it's an $8 adder.
Although Luke was saying that when he saw them in the store,
they were significantly more than that.
Yeah, well, it's an $8 from Nintendo.
If you buy it from a brick and mortar or something,
it could be more expensive.
I mean, can you imagine giving that
to someone for Christmas?
There's stories in the news article
about people that bought it for Christmas
for their kid with a game.
The kid opened both of them and was like, oh crap,
because this is already a thing in certain Asian markets.
I think Europe and Japan for sure.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's already a thing in places
and people are already upset about it.
People are going, well, you don't do this in the States,
so their decision was to also do it in the States?
That's not how you solve that problem.
Oh my goodness.
You just stopped doing it everywhere.
Because, okay, I've owned iterations of DS where-
You've got a 2DS now, right?
Yeah, where if I bought this new one, it would be fine.
But if I bought the new one,
I would give my 2DS to someone with the charger.
And not everyone is branded
and just buys half a dozen charging cables
for everything they own.
And another simple solution here would be for Nintendo
to stop using a proprietary connector on.
It's just a five volt power source.
There is absolutely no reason on earth.
I thought it was Mini-B.
It looks like Mini-B.
When I had, what was it?
My DS Lite, so admittedly a different connector,
I thought it was Mini-B.
So I lost my charger for a while
and then just went and found a Mini-B cable
and was like, why doesn't it work?
What's wrong?
What is this?
So there's new MacBook Air rumors.
And there's conflicting reports.
I was hearing for a while that they were gonna do away
with the MagDot connector, their magnetic charging cable.
I was hearing, so this is the most recent version.
So it's rumored that it will be so thin
that it will not have room for a 3.5 millimeter audio jack,
which is absolutely ridiculous.
I cannot imagine Apple being, I shouldn't say that.
I truly hope Apple wouldn't be that stupid.
So stupid as to remove the three and a half inch connector.
Maybe the justification is, you know,
we're gonna have an awesome new Bluetooth Beats headphone
or something like that, but that is ridiculous.
So there's other stuff.
It will apparently have a retina screen, duh.
It's 12 inch, it's gonna be super thin.
It's allegedly gonna have a fanless design.
So, so far it actually sounds very similar
to the ZenBook UX305 that we checked out at CES,
which is also extraordinarily thin,
has a 3,200 by 1,800 pixel display,
is fanless, which is cool,
and features a Broadwell M processor,
which is what allows it to be fanless
and still deliver decent performance.
So the new MacBook Air will apparently
have a USB 3.1 interface rather than Thunderbolt,
which is fascinating to me,
because Apple's been the only one
that really has glommed onto the Thunderbolt standard,
and many Mac people are already invested
into the Thunderbolt ecosystem.
Now, bear in mind, USB 3.1 at 10 gigabit per second
and with up to 100 watts of power output
is a very capable, capable connector.
But...
It's still a little weird.
It's still pretty bizarre to me,
because Thunder... The footprint
of a USB 3.1 A plug is actually quite large.
They might've been able to get
two Thunderbolt plugs in that area.
Yeah, and this picture shows,
shows... Well, it looks like
a Thunderbolt plug. shows an A connector
and also shows what appears to be a Thunderbolt connector,
but this might be an older one or something,
like I'm not sure. That's true.
The rumors are kind of all over the place right now,
but one challenge right off the bat,
although USB 3.1 should address this
with display over USB being much easier,
is that people are not necessarily gonna be set up,
but then again, as I was gonna say,
set up with all the cables and everything they need,
but then Apple's never been ashamed
of charging you $60 for a cable with your MacBook anyway,
so who knows what they're gonna do,
but I know for sure that I wanna check out the UX305,
that Zen book from ASUS,
because that one looks outstanding.
Broadwell, while not exciting on the desktop,
looks like it's gonna be- Super cool on laptop.
Really cool on laptop, really cool on notebook.
Did you see the 12.5-inch ASUS,
like super thin, is it,
transformer book Qi T300 tablet?
No, I was checking out all the Lenovo stuff.
They have a lot of really cool yogas,
which are super crazy thin yogas
that are basically as thin as tablets when you fold them.
A yoga could win me over.
I'm really disappointed that Dell
kind of abandoned the ferris wheel design
for their convertibles,
because I mean, the new XPS 13,
we do have a review unit coming,
and I am gonna check it out.
It does look pretty awesome,
but I really, really wish it was a two-in-one,
because even though I used the tablet functionality of this,
only very rarely.
It's still nice.
It's nice to have,
and the hinge mechanism has been robust enough
that it hasn't been a problem for me at all,
and I don't mind the extra thickness in order to have that,
so I would've liked to still have that opportunity.
The other thing I'm really disappointed about,
and I'm already planning to rip into Dell about
for a good minute of the review,
is that the top-end SKU has only eight gigs of RAM.
Yeah.
Really?
It's like they want me to only get a year out of my XPS 13.
Eight gigs of RAM is like,
when I'm like, yeah, buy this kit so you can upgrade later.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
AMD employee confirms new GPU with HBM.
So HBM, or high bandwidth memory,
is a stacked RAM technology co-developed by AMD and SK Hynix,
similar to a hybrid memory cube,
which is something that Micron was working on,
and that Nvidia was backing,
and had planned to release a GPU with this year,
but since Nvidia bet wrong,
it looks like they're gonna be stuck with GDDR5
until 2016, when they are going to be
apparently jumping on the HBM bandwagon as well.
So why do we need HBM?
Well, there's a couple of good reasons.
Dramatically better bandwidth,
we're talking on the order of four and a half times,
right from the start, and higher bandwidth is good,
not only because it allows the GPU
to transfer data extremely quickly
from its video memory and to its video memory,
but also because it simplifies the design of the chips
and the PCBs, lowering the cost of the graphics card
for the end user, in theory, probably not.
Probably they'll just take more margin on it,
but you know how it is.
In the very long term, it will drive costs down,
because if you don't have to have
these massive 384-bit, 512-bit designs,
that's a lot of pins on the bottom of the GPU,
that's a lot of memory modules, and that's a lot of traces,
then it does lower the cost significantly.
So there's that.
Oh, the rumored R9 380X will include it.
That is supposed to be a 20-nanometer GPU
and due sometime in the next few months here.
The R9 390X is also rumored
and is rumored to come with water cooling from the factory,
just like the, wow, I'm drawing a blank, R9 295X2.
And I think that's pretty much it.
It should be noted that our source for this is WCCF Tech,
so I'm saying that at the end,
so everyone wouldn't just tune out immediately.
And most of this stuff looks pretty credible
and does align with stuff that we've heard already.
And the fact that the source for some of this info,
at least, was the LinkedIn pages of AMD employees,
one of which seems to have been made at least not public,
because I couldn't see it at this point,
looks like it could be pretty credible.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's not like it's been,
it's not like HBM has been a secret.
Hynix has been sampling it since late last year.
So it's been available.
I'm pretty excited to see what that brings.
Nvidia may end up in a position
where for the first time in a while,
they have maybe a performance competitive part,
but perhaps not a cost competitive part,
and they might have to give up some of those juicy margins
they've been making for the last couple of years.
Because Titan X,
which is what the internet is kind of calling it now,
the fully enabled Maxwell
that should power Tesla, Quadro,
and then very high-end Titan grade GPUs on the desktop,
is still out there.
We don't know too much about it,
other than it'll apparently have around 3,000 CUDA cores.
But it's gonna be a really large die,
and therefore very expensive to produce,
since Nvidia had planned to skip 20 nanometer,
and instead go straight to 16 nanometer,
except that that's been delayed by TSMC due to difficulties,
and Samsung as well, for that matter.
Intel's the only one
with working one X-class nanometer manufacturing right now,
and I don't think Intel's gonna run around
making GPUs for Nvidia anytime soon.
Although maybe.
That would be a really interesting collab.
I seriously don't think it would happen.
Totally not happening.
Intel always reserves their best for themselves,
and apparently Apple.
So that was rumored a couple weeks ago, I think.
But hmm.
Could be an interesting year.
AMD might be able to fight back.
I mean, FreeSync is a big one,
because I've been blowing that G-Sync trumpet
for a long time,
not because I love Nvidia so huggy-muggy much,
and I think they're just the cuddliest,
most wonderfulest people ever,
but because it's a legitimately
much better gaming experience,
and if FreeSync delivers on what it promises,
and we're gonna have FreeSync monitors
coming into our office here soon,
then.
That'll be a cool showdown.
I mean, what else is there?
Nvidia still has GeForce Experience,
which I personally don't use,
because I have no problem
configuring my in-game settings.
Their 3D is much better,
but stereo 3D is basically dead in the water at this point.
And then multi-monitor.
And then multi-monitor,
I'd say AMD is gonna have the edge there, yeah.
So FreeSync could be a huge win for them,
especially if monitor availability
is as good as they're saying,
with I think it was 11 monitors now,
and then up to 20 by the end of the year.
Wow, that's solid.
And talking to Asus,
they were, it's funny, talking to them at CES,
they actually weren't sure if their monitor
that they know works with FreeSync
was even gonna work with it,
because communication was kind of bleh all over the place.
But now, it's come out that even though that monitor
is not FreeSync certified,
there is no mandatory certification process
or anything like that.
So if Asus wants to have a FreeSync compatible monitor
that's not certified, that's fine,
and it'll work just fine.
Interesting.
Very cool.
As long as the scaler technology
and the firmware on the monitor both support the tech.
Right, yeah, yeah.
Cool, hey?
That's interesting.
All right.
I wonder what the certification process is,
because I still see buyer confidence being a little iffy
if it's not actually certified.
I think so too.
And AMD, I believe, said that there's,
okay, I can't remember what they said
about the fee structure,
so basically don't quote me on this.
But it was something along the lines of
they're not charging for a badge on the box
the way that Nvidia has in the past
with certain technologies,
or the way that someone like MLG will charge BenQ
to have the MLG certified gaming monitor or whatever else.
But I believe there would be a cost associated
with the certification process
just because those things do cost money,
because they would likely be done by a third party,
not by AMD at all.
Which is better.
Which is life.
Yeah.
Okay, oh, should we do our sponsors for the day?
That's probably not a bad idea.
I love it when this works out like this.
I'm wearing my Squarespace shirt today.
It's so comfy.
And it's American Apparel,
and the printing on it is excellent.
It still looks like the day I got it.
I love this shirt.
I know, I'm jealous.
Squarespace.com, they make great shirts.
Well, it's an American Apparel shirt.
Yeah.
They put their logos on great shirts.
They put their logos on great shirts.
And they put your logos on great websites.
Squarespace.com is the-
You put your logos on great websites.
Yes, but they help you.
They provide the platform that lets you put your logo
on a great looking website.
Squarespace makes it easy to design and build
and host a gorgeous website that works great on a computer,
works great on a tablet, works great on a smartphone,
and scales appropriately and just generally puts
your best image forward when people visit your site,
whether it's for a store or a blog or just a, you know,
hey, this site is about me and here's a picture of my cat.
Squarespace has got you taken care of.
And they even offer a lot of other services as well.
So little things like the fact
that they have their logo creator
means that you can save your brand new company a couple bucks
because that kind of stuff isn't cheap if you outsource it
by giving you something that might not be
the most unique thing in the world,
but it's at least a functional logo right off the bat.
They also allow you to have affordable images that are,
ah, shoot, who was the Getty Images?
Was the image service that they worked with
so that you can have beautiful images on your website
instead of whatever it is that you created in MS Paint,
which by the way, we'll be doing some MS Paint artwork
on the after party for the custom forum badges
that we owe some people from the tip starter campaign.
And basically it's, yeah, what else is there
that's really left to say?
Right, if you buy a whole year at a time,
then they throw in a basic cost domain
and they'll cover that for the first year.
And it's got everything from simple tools
to ones that even guys with some web development experience
can really sink their teeth into
to customize their viewers' experience.
And yeah, basically they're good guys.
They've been sponsoring us a long time.
And if you're looking to build a website,
I can't think of anything that makes a,
I can't think of anything
that makes more sense than Squarespace.
I was going to kind of qualify that statement.
I was gonna say, you can't think of anything
that makes a lot more sense than Squarespace,
but I legitimately, I can't think of anything
that makes more sense than Squarespace.
So visit squarespace.com slash Linus
for a free trial and 10% off.
All right, let's go on to our next sponsor today.
Funny story before we move on.
I have a friend that made a website in WordPress
and I'm probably going to be getting them
a Squarespace account for them
so that I can read their website on Squarespace
because I'm highly frustrated with WordPress.
Are they getting your help with it?
Like, is that the problem?
Ha.
Yeah.
That's why I've actually, it's kind of a-
You've been avoiding saying that
throughout the time you've been talking
about your friend's website.
I was like, why does he keep bringing up
his friend's website?
Yes, it's like the same thing
where if I'm building someone's computer,
sometimes I'll make them get a better case.
Right.
So I'm just like, I don't want to deal with this thing.
Anyways.
But if you don't want to ask Luke to help you
with the coding for your website,
boom, segue, there's lynda.com.
lynda.com allows you to learn online,
whether it's coding, digital photography,
video editing, actually like business,
all kinds of cool stuff,
even if it's for a personal hobby
or whether it's for developing new career options
for yourself, lynda.com is a great way to learn online.
They have new content added every week
from industry experts and you can do it completely
at your own pace.
I mean, oh, come on, ultimately, what do they care?
It's a monthly subscription,
very affordably priced by the way, monthly subscription.
So ultimately, they're not gonna put a bunch of pressure
on you if deadline this and required exam that.
No, they want you to learn at your own pace
and just enjoy all the high quality content that they have
in order to better yourself in whatever way it happens to be
we get tons of positive feedback
about lynda.com from our viewers.
So lynda.com, you guys are awesome.
Viewers, you guys are awesome for learning
and all that good stuff
and I think that's pretty much all there is to say.
If you're not sure if lynda.com is right for you
or if you just wanna get some idea,
well, you know, how high quality is the content?
Sure.
Then go ahead and visit lynda.com slash wancho
for a free 10 day trial
and you can try it out with no obligation.
Hooray.
Hooray.
My Google Docs is freaking out right now.
Anyways, what do you wanna do next?
I don't know, what should we do?
Oh, let's do grand theft auto five for PC delayed.
This was posted by werto165 on the forum.
I'll go ahead and post the link, it's okay.
I got this, got this.
So basically the internet's freaking out
and people are, bros be mad and their butts hurt
and all this kind of stuff.
So it's been delayed several times.
So there's that.
Delayed again to the 24th of March
and what I have to say about all of this is,
A, screw you Rockstar for not at least trying
to get the PC version out in a somewhat timely manner
like right near the PS4 and Xbox One versions
at the very least.
And two, screw you guys who are complaining
about them delaying it because they've come right out
and said it needs a few more weeks of testing
and polish to make it as good as it can be.
Yes, please shut up.
Just shut your mouth.
God.
They've said we're getting it.
They're not just going console exclusive on it
which is something we could legitimately be mad about it.
And they've said the reason we don't have it yet
is because they want to port it properly.
I mean, again, screw you Rockstar
for opening up your pre-orders.
And all of you guys, please don't pre-order it
because we shouldn't be giving them money
until they deliver it to us.
But we also shouldn't be upset
that they haven't delivered it to us yet
if it's not ready yet.
I'd rather have a finished game.
And you know what?
I've even seen people posting on Reddit
and even in our forum, I thought I saw one of these.
It was like, I'd rather have it have a few bugs
and be playing it now.
You would be saying the exact opposite thing
if this was Assassin's Creed Unity or Watch Dogs.
Mind you, Watch Dogs was full on a thing.
We have Far Cry come out.
We have Watch Dogs come out.
Ubisoft, hooray, whoa.
We have H1 Zen 1.
We have all these other.
Changing my shirt.
Various problems.
We're gonna get such a huge viewer count.
But yeah, like all these launches
that just go terribly.
If I cover the nipples with the powered by Linus Tech Tips,
I should be okay.
I'm gonna claim that Twitch told me that,
but they definitely didn't.
I feel like you're gonna screw up at some point.
Oh, no, no.
Oh yeah.
You made it, okay.
I'm a nipple management expert.
We have all these terrible,
what, all these terrible launches
that people freak out about justifiably,
and then we have someone go like,
okay, we don't wanna be in that boat.
Let's fix this before we launch it.
And people freak out.
What are you doing?
God.
We have to be united and decide what we want.
What we want is games that work at the beginning
when we first install them without 20 gigs of patches
or whatever else.
And then like, oh, man.
What was it?
Unity that came out with like,
you should probably have a 680.
Was that Unity?
Sounds good to you?
I don't remember.
Some game, I don't know, I don't care already,
but some game came out, probably Unity,
that needed way too high-performance stuff,
and everyone freaked out,
because they couldn't run it.
And then GTA comes out, and they're like,
oh, I expected it to look better
and have higher requirements.
I'm like, God damn it, PC community.
Anyways, sorry.
All right.
We can probably move on now.
Yeah, I guess that's all there is
to really say about that, isn't there?
More gaming news.
This is from PlayStationing.com.
Sony is making $50 million a month from PlayStation Plus.
Isn't that incredible?
Do you wanna post this?
It's okay, I can do it.
I got it, I got it.
You sure?
I got it, I got it, I got it.
No, I got it.
I did it first.
Boom.
You lost.
Disappointed.
So let's go ahead and fire this up.
No freaking wonder.
Microsoft got all over that Xbox Live gold nonsense
and turning multiplayer into a paid service.
Because if you're gonna try and tell me
that you're spending $50 million a month
to make the online gaming experience.
Would you pay five bucks a month for Steam?
Does it include content?
No.
No, of course not.
Well, it includes free games, TF2, stuff like that.
No, I don't wanna play TF2.
Yeah, absolutely not.
So you wouldn't use the Steam service
if it cost five bucks a month?
No, I think I'm already paying for the Steam service
by buying my games through them.
So they're already taking a cut.
No, we have to assume you don't have a Steam account yet.
This is not this realm of reality.
So your options are buying things on the Steam service
or buying them directly.
Like buying them at a store.
Or there's like a download link from the company.
So if they forced me,
if I wasn't allowed to play online,
unless I paid $5 a month for Steam.
No, that's not even, that's an interesting discussion,
but that's not the one I'm trying to send out.
Oh, okay.
So would I pay $5 a month just for what Steam is today?
Essentially.
Steam in-home streaming.
The Steam in-home streaming.
Free games.
Steam music, some free games,
the unification of chat, Steam overlay,
the download service, which is a lot better than most.
All of that kind of stuff.
Would you pay $5 a month for that?
I feel like straw-pulling this.
Wow, straw-pull it, straw-pull it.
Wow, that's tough.
If my other choice was to not have it,
because a lot of the-
Because, okay, you'd still be able
to play multiplayer and stuff.
But you'd have to deal with all of it.
But a lot of the argument that I make for boycotting
something like PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live Gold,
where I just kind of went, look guys,
if we all refused to pay for it,
it would go away like that.
A lot of the argument that I make for that
is based on the fact that we have it for free on the PC,
so you have other options that you could take advantage of.
If you were taking away my option
of not having any platform where I don't have to pay
an additional fee for the overlay,
like even something like Steam Big Picture,
you could look at as a value add
for people who want to use Steam
to even just manage their library of games.
So if I had no choice, and the only other option
was Windows Explorer, C clone slash program file
slash code master slash grid slash,
if that's it, would I pay $5 a month?
It's not a lot of money, I probably would.
I would probably sign up for it once out of frustration,
and then I'd forget about it,
and I'd just kind of do it forever.
That's kind of how it was,
and I think if Steam wasn't there,
a lot of those services that you have
that kind of bring them all together wouldn't exist.
Now to be completely honest, if Steam wasn't there,
I bet you the Windows games folder kind of idea
probably would have actually stuck around,
and that was fantastic,
and that really should still be a thing.
But yeah, I don't know.
It's just an interesting idea that popped into my head.
Can you hang out with me this thing?
This drop pool thing?
Yeah, this drop pool.
Sure.
So I can go ahead and post the results like, oh crap.
Do you want the results?
I didn't realize I was still screen sharing.
Yeah, I want the results link.
Okay.
It doesn't really matter,
I can navigate to the results link on my own.
Doop de doop.
Thank you.
So far it's looking like about 43% of people are saying no,
31% of people are saying Austin's nipple,
and 26% of people are saying yes.
All right, here we go.
I'll get those results visually for you guys there.
There we go.
So yeah, a lot of no, a lot of,
I refuse to say anything relevant about this.
And then actually the fact that 26% of you are saying yes
is a strong indicator to me
that if Valve did decide to charge for the service,
they might actually generate a lot of subscriptions.
I mean, we're probably not a long way off.
I suspect they'll never make it mandatory,
but an optional subscription that gives you extra features,
a la, you know, gold or plus.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't think multiplayer will ever be
one of those additional features for something like Steam.
But if it gave you additional-
Well, that's why I took the multiplayer element
out of the whole discussion.
But if it gave you additional community interaction features
or some other benefits, I mean, people pay for hats.
Like, what if all it did,
what if all it did was drop you a care package
from time to time with a hat in it
that's exclusive to people who are Steam Plus members?
I bet you they'd get way more.
Oh my God.
And that's something that, oh my God,
and that's something that Steam would totally do.
Oh man, if you got like random in-game items in Valve games-
I hope Gabe's not watching right now.
It's like, hey, we could have this rolled out like tomorrow.
Oh my goodness.
And the thing is, okay, not harping on the people
that said no too much,
but I myself kind of sit in the no camp right now
because I could see myself using other systems
to manage my games.
Although, however annoying that would be,
myself and a lot of people in the no camp,
that might change if you didn't have limited
of like five minutes to think about this answer.
If you were then sitting on your computer months from now
and you couldn't remember what freaking game you owned
or where the key was that you could download it
off the website because they have bad account management
and you're dealing with all these other crap things
and you could just be like, well,
could just get Steam, inject all my games there
and then be fine.
I don't know.
I see more of those nos changing.
I see myself maybe being a little bit more flexible.
I don't know.
It's interesting.
All right, what's our next topic here?
None of that is a thing at all.
It's just kind of a thought experiment.
Yeah, this is just us making things up.
Yep, okay, so yes, very fortunately.
We can jump to a few things actually.
Oh, there's the Marriott abandoning their quest
to block personal Wi-Fi hotspots.
This is from inc.com.
I'm gonna go ahead and fire this up.
You wanna post it in the chat?
Yep.
So this was ridiculous.
Basically, they got slammed with,
I think it was a $600,000 fine
when it was discovered that they were
intentionally blocking their users' personal Wi-Fi hotspots
like on their phones from functioning in the rooms
and then they apologized and then they turned around
and tried to get permission from the FCC
to implement that technology in places like conference rooms.
Are you freaking for real?
And they claimed this was to prevent
people from showing up in Marriott hotels
creating unauthorized hotspots with the intention
of stealing data and information
from the patrons of the hotel.
And I kinda go, okay, that is a scenario
that probably happened like once
and there are other ways to get around something like that
and I think it was fairly obvious
like on the surface of this
that this was all about trying to get people
to pay additional for Wi-Fi in the hotel
especially business customers
who are coming in for conferences
and the FCC received 39 comment letters,
this is from the inc.com article,
received 39 comment letters on the issue
of which 38 were negative
and one was either neutral or off-topic.
Google and Microsoft were among those
registering their opposition.
So at least they're on the same side
about something right now.
Yeah, really.
And I'm glad it's that.
Not really getting along everywhere
but they're such big companies
that I guess parts of them can get along with other parts.
Sigh.
All right.
We've got the Tesla thing.
Let's do the Obama thing.
Sure.
Yeah, so this was originally posted
in the forum by Lightning.
I got it.
And you got it?
Okay, Obama calls for an end to 19 state laws
that harm community broadband.
This is awesome because Obama calling for,
calling for the internet to be reclassified as a utility
marked a bit of a turning point,
maybe not in the FCC chairman Tom Wheeler's thoughts
about whether or not it would be Title II.
Like maybe he was already leaning that way
but it definitely brought about a change in his actions
and what he was saying publicly about it.
And it looks like Obama's gonna kinda go,
keep moving forward with this whole,
yeah, if we wanna be a developed nation, let's face it.
We've already got sewage,
we've already got electricity mostly
other than that it can be extremely expensive.
We've already got water, again, mostly.
Actually really interesting conversation with Taran
about how things work with the Colorado River
and allocating the water.
Yeah, he was saying that the way,
like any downstream states get an allocation in gallons.
So if the flow is less,
Colorado is actually the first one
to not get any water from the Colorado River.
Anyway, I thought that was interesting.
So anyway, they've got most stuff mostly figured out
and yet they're lagging behind on broadband
because of either cost or legislative challenges that exist
that prevent any startup
from becoming an internet service provider
and kinda going, you know what?
Hey, those margins, that profitability,
that's not good enough for AT&T.
Yeah, I'll take it.
I'll take it.
I mean, it stifles competition.
That's the principle that this entire country,
and I mean, by this, I mean the USA, I don't live there.
But that entire country was built on
was competition and capitalism.
And if you just legislate the crap
out of anyone being able to compete,
then you end up in a situation
where it's this monopolistic nonsense
and it's not quite a monopoly.
So this was a really interesting chunk of the article.
Yes, here we go.
At speed, so with the old broadband classification
of I believe it was three down, one up,
four down, four down, one up,
75% of consumers have a choice
between two or more fixed providers
and 15% can select among three or more,
which I would even still say is abominable.
Yeah, it's terrible.
However, in the market for internet service
that can deliver 25 megabit downstream,
I mean, we're talking the speed at which
you could pretty much do anything on the internet,
Netflix, HD YouTube, stuff like that.
Three out of four Americans had no choice between providers.
I mean, when was this ever acceptable?
I mean, I hate to be critical
when they're finally speaking up and doing the right things,
but why did this take so long?
And when's Canada gonna follow suit like we always do?
It'll take us a couple of years and then we'll get there.
And I've seen a lot of people wearing their cynicism hats
and especially on our forum
where a lot of our community is international
and sort of going, well, this is only
because the election's coming up.
I mean, okay, maybe there's some pressure
from the Democratic Party to improve Obama's popularity.
So whoever their new candidate coming in
will have a better chance of winning the upcoming election.
But guys, Obama cannot be reelected.
This is his second term.
You can only serve two four-year terms in the United States.
So it's not like Obama personally wants to be the president
for another four years and is therefore trying
to win a popularity contest by making,
especially a lot of this focuses
on community broadband initiatives.
So smaller community ISPs or even municipalities themselves
enabling them to utilize their existing infrastructure.
So whether it's power or sewage or whatever else
to run lines and create their own broadband providers.
Don't remember where I was going with that.
The sentence kind of ends here.
It's not hugely beneficial for himself necessarily.
Yeah.
Because you were talking about elections coming up.
And it's not a popularity contest.
I mean, it's a fact that access to high-speed internet
breeds creativity and gives people more options
to better themselves.
I mean, let's go back to one of our sponsors
for a minute here, lynda.com.
What, are you gonna use lynda.com video tutorials
on dial-up?
No, that's ridiculous.
I mean, what if you have, okay,
what if your lynda.com membership
is really reasonably priced,
but your internet connection has such a small cap
that by the time you watch the instructional videos,
you're actually paying a ton more just to educate yourself
and potentially improve your prospects
in terms of your career path.
I mean, it's absurd.
Inexpensive broadband has become something we need,
not something that should be a privilege for the wealthy.
So just, there, that's it, kudos.
Yeah, very happy about that whole situation.
The FCC is already examining these state laws
and considering whether it can invalidate them
by using its authority to promote competition
in telecommunications already.
So, good, all the progress, let's make it happen.
Jumping to a, not necessarily happier note,
but a funnier note, we can do the beautiful thing.
Yeah, oh my goodness, this is ridiculous.
We just wanna have some entertainment.
I mean, speaking of things that should be illegal,
let's, oh, dang it.
All right, here we go, okay, I'll post it.
Our original source for this was CNET,
but their article is down,
so the Telegraph article is still live.
This is a restaurant.
There's actually a different CNET article now,
but don't worry about it.
I was trying to, I should have fixed the link.
I was trying to figure it out earlier.
Okay, so there's a restaurant that promises
free meal for good looking.
Now, they've been forced to take down that sign.
The local government forced them to take down the sign.
Yeah, like showed up with a wrecking crew.
It's like, we are taking down that sign,
because that's embarrassing.
But they have vowed to continue the promotion regardless.
How this works is there's a scanner,
and there's a panel of surgeons,
which are plastic surgeons,
which are in cahoots with the restaurant
for a sponsorship.
Paying a sponsorship.
Oh, sorry, I'm in the dashboard now.
I always forget about that.
For essentially advertisement,
so you can go there, get told you're not good looking,
and then be referred to those people
to become better looking.
Oh, ridiculous.
And so apparently, it's not flat out
like you're good looking, you get a free meal,
you're not good looking, you get a full price meal.
It's like there's a sliding scale.
So you could be pretty good looking,
and you could get like 30% off or something,
like I'm making up the exact numbers.
But really, like that's just gross.
And I'm not just saying this,
because I don't think I'd be getting a discount.
I just think that is absolutely disgusting.
One thing I noticed is that OP, Mr. Amp12345,
states in his second paragraph,
as someone who has had things given to me
or gotten discounts because of the clerk thought
I was good looking, I was unsure how I felt about this.
So my new idea is that we,
as a Linus Tech Tips community,
need to find Amp12345,
take him, bring him to the restaurant,
and then just all eat there until they're bankrupt.
So we're gonna force feed Amp.
No, no, no, no.
He can get all the food, and we can just eat it.
Oh, I see.
I think they probably would catch on tonight.
It's a very smart idea, though.
You did very well.
Thank you.
You did very well.
I'm very proud of you.
I just wanna utilize Amp's obviously tried and true,
amazingly good looks.
This was posted by Tedster,
and since we're on the topic
of just completely stupid things right now, this Kickstarter
by Paul Boyle is...
30 euros.
He probably did it himself.
Well, he has seven backers.
Seven backers totaling 30 euros.
That doesn't even divide evenly.
So he made seven Kickstarter accounts
and then got bored and went and ate a burger.
So, I mean, you can see that this is clearly
not intended to be serious,
but the plan is to reconstruct the player Michael's house
from the game Grand Theft Auto V to scale,
and the rewards are ridiculous.
I mean, for, okay, so for four...
For $5,000, you can stay there for three nights.
For four euros, you get pictures and a video of it.
For 400 euros, you get a personalized title
with image and info of your choice added
to the bottom of Michael's swimming pool.
For 900 euros, you get to visit the house
and have a tour around it at your leisure.
And for 5,000 euros, you get to visit
and stay in it for three nights.
I just thought it was kind of funny.
He figures he needs the FAQ.
This is pretty good.
Who will the house belong to?
Will the donators get a share in the final build?
Are you giving it to charity?
No shares, I'm afraid.
Given the small chance that it's funded,
the final build will be sold and donated
to the choice of charity voted by the backers.
Which, I mean, the last time anyone believed
that a Kickstarter for charity
was actually going to a charity was,
I don't know, 2013.
Yeah, not that long ago.
Yeah, this Kickstarter hasn't been around that long.
No, but yeah, in internet years, it's been quite a while.
Yep.
I don't know, is there anything else interesting?
There's the not super amazingly interesting Tesla news,
but I can talk about it regardless.
Sure, yeah, let's talk about the three.
So there's honestly not a ton to say.
This article exploded.
Posted by Victoria's Secret, by the way.
Yep, this article exploded.
I can get this into the chat.
And it's kind of an interesting conversation,
but people were like, oh my god, the Tesla 3 is so amazing.
There's not actually that much information here
about the Tesla 3.
This is the Model X delayed again.
That's the Model X, yeah.
So.
And once again, we shouldn't be complaining
about the delay, even though it kind of sucks
because they're saying that they're just trying
to do it right anyway.
They sold out the first manufacturing year
of this thing anyways, so whatever.
Anyways, the feds give about $7,500 for electric cars,
apparently, this is in the States, I don't really know.
So when Chevy came out and was talking about their Bolt,
which is supposed to be a Tesla competitor,
they were toting it as a $30,000 price tag vehicle.
This is a response.
Elon Musk in an interview was like,
well, ours is, what is it?
35.
35,000, so using their logic, it's actually 27,500.
Right.
That was the whole actual point of this article.
Now this thing exploded.
This got everywhere, like automotive subreddit,
it was like massive at front page, all this kind of stuff.
It's, all he's talking about is that he didn't include
incentives in the price of $35,000.
That's all it really was.
As we already knew, you're gonna be able to customize it,
add options, a lot of things that are actually
on the Model S, if you like something very specifically,
it's on the Model S, you might be able to include it
on your three, but that will obviously increase the cost,
so it could be more expensive in the end.
So your version of the Model 3 might end up being
the same cost as a Bolt.
Who knows, because you can configure them.
Yeah, one cool quote that came from it though,
which is interesting, is that Musk said,
the Model 3, in brackets, will be way different
from any other car on the road,
but in a way that's really useful
and doesn't just make it a weird mobile.
Weird mobile.
So I don't know what that means, but yeah.
I love Tesla news, this exploded,
but it wasn't actually, yeah, I don't know.
All right, so this is interesting to me
because I'm Canadian.
Sony is shutting all of their Canadian stores.
I've got the article here.
When was the last time you went to a Sony store?
Wow, I posted it already.
I mean, I totally get it
because I don't think Sony stores
really have any reason to exist,
especially when a lot of the time
they were just a place where you couldn't shop
for any other brand of product
and the pricing wasn't better, often worse
because it wouldn't have the same promotions
because it's really awkward.
For most manufacturers,
Apple doesn't seem to give a rat's ass,
but most manufacturers to have their own branded store
that competes head to head against their customers.
So they have to prove to their customers,
whether it's a Best Buy or whoever else,
that they're not trying to undercut them
and steal customers from them.
And at the same time, they have to sustain their employees
and the retail spaces.
The one Sony store I've ever been to,
the one time I went to it, was just terrible anyways.
They had a really bad selection of Sony products.
Yeah, so anyway, so Sony store closing stores.
Oh, apparently, MEX and Jacob are closing a whack of stores.
But for me, the big one right now is actually Target.
So Target opened up the Canadian territory
in 2012, I wanna say.
I thought it was 13.
I could be wrong.
Was it 13?
Has it really been that short?
I think it's been two years.
I could be wrong though, let me...
Well, it's only barely 2015 right now.
Anyway, the point is Target actually purchased,
at least here in BC, all of the Zellers locations
when Zellers went bankrupt and disappeared.
So they had a total of 133 big box stores
and they will be exiting...
Okay, apparently they launched in Canada in March, 2013.
So they didn't even last two years.
And they will be shutting all of the stores,
putting 17,000 employees out of work
and taking a $5.4 billion loss in that period of time.
There's a lot of problems.
One of the huge one was distribution.
They came in and got 133 stores going,
but didn't have a proper distribution chain for them.
So you'd have a lot of issues where you'd go to Target
and there's just nothing on the shelves.
So how are you supposed to buy it?
How are they supposed to make any money?
So they just were hemorrhaging money,
didn't have distribution going,
went in way too fast and way too hard, totally screwed up.
And then their solution was to just close everything
and bail.
So in under two years, they got 133 stores going,
filled them with 17,600 employees,
fired all those employees,
closed all of those stores and took off.
So Target said exit in Canada
would allow it to focus resources on the US market.
I really, I mean, it just, I don't know.
So misguided.
I don't know.
And I've read one article that suggested that,
you know, the lack of staples
that Canadian consumers are used to
going down to Target US and buying
and bringing back up here,
things that just don't exist in Canada.
I can't remember what the example of it was,
but it wasn't this article.
It was one that suggested that, you know,
the lack of some chocolate something or other
might've been the reason for Target's failure.
Cause maybe people walked in
thinking they were gonna buy cool stuff
that they're used to buying at Target
and they weren't able to.
But honestly, I don't think that has anything to do with it.
I think it was just too much, too fast.
I mean, we were talking to Berkel about this
before the show started and he's like,
yeah, they opened one in, what did he say?
Vernon?
They opened one in Vernon.
It's like, there's not even that many people in Vernon.
I mean, did they even check?
And they already have a Walmart.
They like barely need a Walmart
and they already have one.
And I think, I think Vernon has a Costco too.
So it's like, you're gonna go up against Costco and Walmart,
which have been there for years already.
And you're gonna just hope that what?
People magically sprout from the earth
and come shop in your store?
Like try to build a sustainable business model first.
And obviously I'm not an expert.
I've never run a big box store,
but it just seems like there's a lot of mistakes
in the past that we could have learned from.
And this is actually just the target shutting down
reminded me of this.
My housing development that I live in
was built about 30 years ago.
And we still have from the previous owners,
the brochure that like was like the sales brochure
for people shopping for houses in that neighborhood.
And it's really cool.
It's like an accessible place to live.
Easily accessible from virtually any direction.
The property is bounded by a bunch of places.
The first project of its kind in this area, blah, blah, blah
provides quick access to the interior of British Columbia
and to the rest of the lower mainland.
On the other hand,
it's only two or three minutes away from...
Okay, so there's a shopping center.
Home to Woodwards, Eaton's,
Woolco, Marks and Spencer,
and over 200 other fine stores.
Have you heard of any of them?
No, no.
A few minutes further, you'll find Simpson Sears.
So, okay, Sears.
Okay.
Simpson Sears and the Bay.
Okay, the Bay.
And that Bay and those Sears,
neither of them exists anymore.
Oh my goodness.
That is so hilarious.
Canada has proven to be an interesting market
because of how we're laid out.
And one of the huge, important,
super crazy obvious things about opening
a very large amount of stores,
especially in somewhere super huge like Canada,
is freaking distribution.
What are you thinking?
Like, yes, we're maybe not the most educated people
on opening a massive amount of stores,
but like do any amount of research at all.
Look at how Best Buy came into Canada,
which was actually a very effective takeover.
They bought Future Shop,
which was kind of our version of Best Buy,
and then just took over all their warehouses.
They bought Future Shop for their warehouses.
That was the reason,
because they're like, oh, distribution will be a problem.
Let's solve that problem.
God, that's so dumb.
Like there could have been so many problems,
but their whole thing like,
well, it was hard to make money
when we couldn't keep things on the shelves
because not necessarily that too many people
were buying them,
but we couldn't put things on the shelves
because we didn't have them.
That's so bad.
We're getting a bunch of people talking about how
apparently a couple of those are big over in Europe.
And like that, but that's exactly it.
Like it's been tried and failed so many times
that you would think they would have done
at least a couple sort of case studies
and tried to make sure that they were gonna have a chance
of success in Canada.
Or even open like five stores.
And just slowly figure it out.
So you could lose, let's see,
let's do the rough napkin math.
So that's about 1 50th as many stores as they open.
So it'd be 1 50th as much loss.
So like, okay, so a loss in the order of what?
Tens or hundreds of millions as opposed to billions.
Which is still a lot.
Which is still a lot, but less.
But and for a company of that size,
more growing pain size instead of,
oh my God, complete failure size.
There was a whole thing this week
where apparently Microsoft appeared to be not allowing
YouTubers to put the title of a game
in the name of their YouTube video,
but they've clarified.
It's apparently not that big of a deal.
You are apparently supposed to add a disclaimer
in your description saying something along the lines of
that the game was made by Microsoft
and the video is not endorsed by them.
There's official text for it.
This was posted by COBS360 on the forum.
And you're not allowed to mislead people
into thinking it's a Microsoft video,
but I think that was just people freaking out
over a wording issue.
I'm glad Microsoft got it rectified.
Pretty quick to be honest.
The main concern was that you couldn't call
something like Red versus Blue the Halo show
or something along those lines.
Like using the trademark incorrectly,
you had to come up with your own name
if you were gonna do something that was more along the lines
of a show and less along the lines of strict gameplay
or multiplayer footage.
But you could do like a Halo gameplay and it would be fine.
Yeah, as long as you have your disclaimer.
Yep.
LG had a nitrogen leak in their factory.
This was the original articles from independent.co.uk.
Let's go ahead and pull that up.
Very, very unfortunate.
Two were killed.
Four have taken ill since the incident.
Basically, not a whole lot is known.
One of them died on the scene.
One of them died on the way to the hospital.
I mean, that's something that we often don't consider
about these electronic doodads that we enjoy so much
is there's a lot of harmful and dangerous stuff
that goes on in order to manufacture them.
The NZXC DoCo, this was posted by BrownNinja on the forum,
original article here is from TechPowerUp,
promises 50 to 80 milliseconds of latency
and promises basically your computer experience
on, well, anywhere you want, on your TV.
Luke has a review unit and I know he's planning
to work on it, maybe once you've got
the motherboard roundup done.
I've gotta do motherboard roundup
and maybe one other thing
and then I'll probably be on DoCo.
Yeah, looks cool.
The only disadvantage right now,
so it's got USB ports and it uses USB over IP
in order to make it so if you plug in a keyboard,
it's basically like having that keyboard
plugged into the computer you're using.
I've been able to use it to a certain degree.
Have you used it already?
Not my own unit, but I was able to use it
while it was still under NGA at CES
and the USB over IP is actually pretty freaking good.
Cool.
I was able to use a keyboard and mouse
and I was able to use a flash drive
and I was able to use a,
they plugged in the Microsoft wireless dongle
and then had me using a wireless controller,
which I was actually more worried about
than just plugging in a controller directly
but it worked totally fine.
That's awesome.
Pretty cool.
It's only 1080p 30 FPS
but I'm hoping that we'll see a DoCo Extreme
or DoCo Plus or something along those lines.
One thing I can leak a little bit
because it's not under NDA anymore
is that the processing power and stuff in that unit
is not exactly amazing.
Right.
And if there is a lot of interest shown,
they could release a higher end version.
Right.
Which could do more FPS or whatever.
So, yeah.
Tell them that you want one.
Okay.
Well, I think that's pretty much it for the show today, guys.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
We are planning to...