Alright, welcome to the WAN Show guys, it's Friday, I'm broadcasting live from the studio here in lovely Langley, British Columbia, and quite frankly, I'd rather be at home playing games on the HTC Vive, I will definitely be spending some time on the show today talking about that,
I will definitely acknowledge my unfortunately downgraded but still somewhat sexy co-host here, and I will definitely tell you all of the topics that we are going to be covering on the show today, after the intro.
Hold on, I got this. There may even be music today, we'll see if I fixed it.
Hey, look at that car, that car by WAN Show.
Also, woah, some of you guys were asking where Luke is.
Luke is in a place, doing a thing, the place is called PAX East, and whoever did up the PAX thing here doesn't realise that PAX is Penny Arcade Expo, not a word that starts with a P and has two small letters after, that's okay.
PAX East 2016, so huge thanks to Logitech G and Discord for powering our PAX East 2016 content.
Yes my friends, for the first time ever, Linus Media Group actually had two away teams at the same time.
So Taron and Brandon were down at NAB in Las Vegas, and before they returned, Luke, Berkel and Dennis actually left to go cover PAX East, so we're going to have an entire week of show coverage for you guys.
And in the meantime, I've been back here in the studio with David and Ed and, well I guess that's about it, and we've been working on some really cool stuff, so we've got the review of the iPhone SE coming up.
We've got a power bank, like battery bank showdown coming up, we've got, this is a video nobody asked for but I was kind of interested in, and so I decided to make.
But I've got a video upcoming on IPMI, which is a remote management interface that exists on some motherboards that allows you to log in from anywhere,
and like power on the server, power down the server, change bio settings even, all kinds of cool stuff like that.
So I've been working on some videos, and they've been working on some videos, and it's all good stuff.
And okay, right, so I will answer those questions that I said I was going to answer.
This is my new co-host, her name is Keiku, or something, I'm making that up, I know she's an actual character from an actual show, I don't know what it is.
Got people talking about Wake On Land, yes, yes, I go through Wake On Land in the video, I actually have some other cool solutions that I guarantee you've never heard of as well.
Yes, I know, Yoko, apparently it's Yoko, I don't know, I'm sorry, for me it's just a pillow, I was on Amazon, and I was just browsing toys, not those kinds of toys.
I was browsing toys, and I was just trying to find stuff for Channel Super Fun, so this was around the time leading up to the big move into the new studio.
And so I was just like, what the hell is this? It's a waifu pillow, you gotta be kidding me.
So I ordered it, having no idea what I was going to do, like I was thinking initially, I would try and do some kind of a prank, where I called people down to help me with something, and then I'd have a hidden camera, and then I'd be like, making out with it or something, and I'd get reaction shots from people.
But we ended up coming up with the Channel Super Fun, where we did the cuddle challenge, I think that ended up being a lot better anyway.
I don't know how well that video is doing, you know, honestly, I feel like Channel Super Fun just should do so much better, but like, nothing ever really catches on for us on that channel, like it doesn't go viral or whatever else.
I've got people telling me to get another human, the office is like, empty. I mean, do you really want me to pull Nick Light in here? Huh? Come on, it'd be like the worst thing ever.
So I promised to discuss, okay, before I get into that, I will go through some of the top topics for today.
Intel to cut 12,000 jobs as PC demand wanes.
Ouch.
Researchers accidentally discover technology that could lead to batteries that can be charged many more times than current ones.
Nerd Sports has launched on Vessel, so this is something that we've had a lot of people asking about, seeking clarification on, so Nerd Sports is a new series that we developed.
It was funded by Vessel.com, so if you guys are familiar with Vessel, it's the early access platform that our videos go up on, generally speaking, one week before YouTube.
But this is different. Nerd Sports is exclusive to Vessel and it's a series that we developed. We've done five episodes, or filmed five episodes so far, three of which are actually done, one of which is released, where basically the Linus Media Group team, we call ourselves the Keyboard Warriors, takes on actual sports teams.
So the first sports that we did were, actually we filmed it like ages ago at this point.
Projects like this take so long, so volleyball, dodgeball, lacrosse, ice hockey, and curling.
So the first episode is volleyball, it's awesome, we actually take on the Trinity Western Spartans, who are the top college women's volleyball team in the country as of last year, and it is actually pretty hilarious.
I don't think I'm technically supposed to do this, because there is a trailer and stuff, but I will play just a little bit of it.
So where are videos? Here we go. I'm just going to grab a couple chunks out of it here.
It loads. Of course everyone is probably hitting it all at the same time now. Thanks guys! That's weird, see that's working.
Well, we'll be back. So Nerd Sports is available now, it's going to be released weekly for the next four weeks over on Vessel.com.
What else do we have? Ah yes, a mosquito killing billboard. Pretty freaking cool.
So now, with all that aside, I have to take some time to talk about the HTC Vive.
And I know you guys are thinking, alright, Luke's not here on the show, I don't have to listen to anyone talk about VR for the next hour and a half.
But, you were wrong, everything about that was wrong, I'm definitely going to be talking about VR.
So, the HTC Vive arrived yesterday afternoon, at which time I promptly, completely abandoned everything else that I had planned for that evening.
I got home, I was like, hi kids, bye kids, and locked myself upstairs.
They were allowed in afterwards, but only if they agreed to help me set up the Vive.
I locked myself upstairs to set up the Vive.
It takes, it's the most agonizing hour ever, because I kind of thought it would come with floor stands or something for the lighthouse units.
It does not, they just expect you to wall mount it.
So I was like, Vaughn, are we painting this room soon? Because we had actually discussed it.
And she's like, yeah I think so, we had said we were going to.
I'm like, okay, I'm putting a bunch of holes in the wall. So I'm just in there, just like drilling random holes in the wall, mounting the lighthouse.
It takes about an hour to set up, and you're just like, I just want to play VR games, I just want to play VR games.
So then, at that time, I kind of realized, again, that I had derped and that I should have done this at the beginning.
But I realized, oh, I don't have any VR games downloaded, so I had to go buy some VR games right away.
And then I had to go ahead and wait for those to download while I finished the set up.
And then I spent about two hours straight, for the first time playing a single player experience in, I don't even know,
like I can't even begin to imagine how long it's been since I've done that in a single player game.
Like, I'll drop in, and I was playing Team Fortress 2 with Luke, actually, the other night.
He was streaming on his Twitch channel and stuff.
But just playing single player games, it's been a long time.
But I was playing Space Pirate Trainer. It is freaking cool.
You've got a shield and a blaster, and you can switch out your shield and your blaster.
It is unbelievably fun.
I had a lot of people say, yeah, enjoy your headache after 30 minutes.
You know what, two hours almost uninterrupted.
My wife was playing for a little bit.
Two hours almost uninterrupted, and I was feeling good.
Like I was 100% fine at the end of that.
It was freaking awesome.
I can't wait to go home and play with it more.
There are still issues, like the set up process is not perfect.
I ran into a couple of issues while I was setting it up.
Number one was I ended up with the bug where you can end up standing like 6 to 10 feet below the floor
for the entire introductory video segment.
And I was just like, okay, well, this is really frustrating.
Is everything supposed to be up there?
Am I supposed to be down here because there's a weird golf cart next to me?
But what I was actually standing in was a little room that's supposed to lift the golf cart up,
like it's supposed to seem like the golf cart emerges from there, but I was just stuck down there
and I didn't come up when the golf cart went up either.
So it was just sort of confusing.
And then the other issue I had was my motion controllers, my handheld motion controllers,
just weren't picking up until I uninstalled and reinstalled the software.
There were some issues with the set up, but once it's going, man, it's fun.
Like the resolution does bother me.
Like you take off the goggles and you see the preview window on the screen, you're just like,
oh man, what if it looked like that?
But not to the point where the gameplay isn't immersive and the gameplay isn't ludicrously enjoyable.
So it was, I tell you guys, it was an absolute blast.
I had a lot of fun with it last night.
I will, I suppose I will get on with the show now.
Let's jump into our first topic here.
So the original article is from a non-tech.com and Intel is slashing, oh, right.
This was posted originally on the forum by, oh, no one.
So Intel is slashing a huge number of jobs over the rest of 2016 and even leading into 2017.
About 11% of the total workforce, 12,000 people.
CEO Brian Krasanich says, Intel has been known as a PC company.
It's time to make this transition and push the company all the way over to supplying chips
for things like smartphones, cloud computing, sensors, and other devices,
getting heavily into internet of things and mobile products.
I mean, he's not saying that CPUs, as you know them, are going away.
They're just diversifying their portfolio and focusing their R&D very clearly
on those other possible revenue streams.
To be clear, also 60% of the revenue does still come from PC CPUs,
but most of the layoffs are expected to occur inside the PC business
to allow them to focus on these other categories.
I really hope that they know something that AMD doesn't know
about the possibility for improving CPU performance over the next few years here
because we really have seen them de-emphasize the CPU.
Long before there were mass layoffs associated with it like this,
where they're kind of going, okay, yeah, more power efficiency,
we're putting more GPU on it, we are not really doing a whole lot
in terms of the overall horsepower of it,
keeping the computing experience of the desktop user relatively stagnant
while the mobile users are getting real tangible benefits out of each coming generation.
The better connectivity, I would say, even, benefits notebook users more than desktop users
because desktop users can throw an add-in card in their system, say, for example,
whereas laptop users, these battery life improvements, these connectivity improvements,
things like Thunderbolt 3 make a huge difference.
I mean, you can only have so many ports on something like a laptop,
something like Apple's MacBook, you can only have one port, yay,
whereas on a desktop, you don't really need a single port that has such high speeds
and can handle LAN and sound and USB and HDMI and DisplayPort
all out of this one connection because you could just plug all those things in.
It's not really that big of a deal.
Where was I going with this? Right, so we've seen this de-emphasis coming,
but it's frustrating because when you look at Intel's CPUs on the mainstream side,
like on the LGA115x side of things, there is room, like actual physical,
there is physical room for them to, even if they can't increase clock speeds dramatically,
and even if they can't increase IPC, that's the performance per clock dramatically,
they could be putting more cores on them if they opted to give us a pure CPU rather than an APU,
something with CPU and graphics built into it at the same time.
They just don't. They reserve that for the high-end platform, the enthusiast and the server platform,
and that's pretty much all she wrote on that.
Now, this is really weird, and I am going to have to find out what it is regarding
by having Nick find out what it's regarding.
Sorry, just one moment. Can you take this for me, please? Thank you.
And I'm going to move into my next topic here.
Well, actually, well, hold on. I guess I should give a little bit more clarification.
So this is the largest set of layoffs in 10 years, since 2006, when they let 10,500 people go.
Profit margins in Q1 were lower than expected with a net income of $2 billion on a revenue of $13.7 billion.
Yeah, I don't know. I hope for their sake they know something AMD doesn't know,
because if they're planning to let a lot of people go on the desktop CPU side,
if AMD really does see a resurgence with Zen, get some more revenue coming in,
potentially allowing them to pick up some of that talent,
there could be a big opportunity for us to have competition again due to Intel,
not accidentally, but making a conscious decision
to take their foot off the pedal on the desktop CPU side of things.
All good?
Yeah, just because of the...
Okay, okay, okay, cool.
All right, so let's move into Intel announcing...
Oh, no, we already got that.
Oh, let's move into this one. This one's fun.
So original article here was off of PC Perspective.
And basically, it's amazing how this happens,
but researchers accidentally discovered nanowire-based technology
that could lead to batteries that can be charged hundreds of thousands of times.
So you guys are probably familiar with the way that almost as though by planning,
phones become obsolete thanks to their batteries
just going through the maximum number of charge and discharge cycles until they die.
Like, those lithium-ion batteries are inherently not stable
over many charge and discharge cycles.
Well, here we go.
Accidental discovery nanowires, which are several thousand times thinner than a human hair,
extremely conductive and have a large surface area
to support storage and transfer of electrons.
Latai's team, so this is Maya Latai,
fixed the issue where these tiny wires are fragile
and don't hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging.
They fixed this by coding a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell
and then placing it in a gel that's like plexiglass to improve its reliability.
Again, totally by accident.
So Maya was apparently playing around and she coated the whole thing with a very thin gel layer
and started to cycle it and discovered that by using this gel,
she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity or any power output.
So this was tested more than 200,000 times over a three-month span
and they are reporting the findings now.
I would love to see this technology in my new smartphone
and I share, I believe it was written by Ryan Shroud over at PCper,
but it could have been one of their other writers,
but I share their concern about this technology ultimately being patented
and ending up in a warehouse somewhere, never to be seen again
because it is a good thing for phone manufacturers, bottom line wise,
for the phone to effectively not be usable anywhere from three to six years
after it was originally manufactured.
Would they want the battery to last forever? I don't know.
Okay, so moving along to our next topic,
AMD is set to receive $293 million in fresh cash from a deal with the Chinese government.
This, of course, raises any number of questions.
I mean, this comes on the heels of the Chinese.
Okay, it's kind of complicated because the Chinese government
and then companies in China are intertwined in a way that you wouldn't necessarily expect
if you come from like a more Western or more capitalist society.
I mean, yeah, the Chinese claim that capitalism is alive and well,
but the reality of it is that state funds make a lot of the businesses that run in China possible.
So in here, the original article is actually from Guru 3D.
I'm just going to go ahead and pull that up.
So in the Guru 3D article, they say the Chinese government has attempted to make CPUs
and develop their own CPU architecture many times before.
They want their own hardware and software for government-funded institutions,
but they have not yet succeeded, and it looks like AMD is going to be the beneficiary.
AMD has made it clear in their marketing strategy that they're ready to customize modular CPU
and SOC or system-on-chip designs by the client specs,
so similar to what they would have done with Sony and Microsoft for the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One.
So the deal was mentioned in their last quarterly results,
and basically the deal would involve AMD licensing its x86 processor technology
and the IP related to designing an SOC like memory controllers, input, output, and caching,
but possibly not their GPU technology.
The architecture has not been confirmed, but Forbes is claiming that it must be Zen
as their previous server CPUs hadn't had much, if any, success.
It's been a while since Opteron has been much of a big deal.
This is very, very interesting.
You could see it as AMD getting in bed with China.
You could also see it as China eventually giving in and using American technology
in order to catch up to what the Americans were able to do with respect to supercomputing.
I don't even know if this is going to be used in a supercomputing context, to be very clear,
because all we really know is that the deal would involve licensing x86 processor technology
and IP related to building x86 architecture chips and SOCs.
I've got people saying AMD is American since when.
Okay, so a significant amount of their company is owned by overseas investment.
That is true, but they are American in the sense that their headquarters is in America, I guess.
Yeah, I guess.
This is interesting.
I don't have a source link for this or anything like that, but AMD will not be seeding their upcoming dual Hawaii card.
I forget what they're even calling it.
I think it's like Radeon Duo Pro or Pro Duo, there we go.
So the Radeon Pro Duo will not be seeded to conventional gaming press.
I'll go ahead and show you guys on the announcement for their supercomputing performance to VR.
So what I was pretty much told is that this product, and I can't say anything about it for a couple of reasons.
Number one, if I want to get a deck about it prior to the embargo so I can prepare any content that I have,
that I will be able to release without an actual card, I do have to agree to the NDA.
And number two, because I haven't received any of the deck materials yet,
so all I know is going off of rumors.
So it's supposed to be dual Hawaii chips.
It sounds like it's going to be dual 4 gig.
It'll be, okay, this is off of AMD's site.
So anticipated selling price of $1,500 US.
And basically the reasoning that was given to me was, well, it's not really, sorry, did I say dual Hawaii?
Sorry, dual Fiji, so it's effectively two R9, like R9 Fury slash Fury X kind of class GPUs.
That's what we can glean from the details we have so far.
Sorry, I can't believe I said dual Hawaii.
I'm running around trying to get our internet back up and running over here.
Sorry, I'm struggling a little bit because I'm not sure how much of what they told me is stuff that is on this page I'm looking at
and how much of it is stuff that's going to be in the deck that's going to be NDA'd.
So this is good.
It offers a complete solution aimed at all aspects of the VR developer lifestyle.
Developing content more rapidly for killer VR experiences while at work
and playing the latest DirectX 12 experiences at maximum fidelity while off work.
So it's no secret that dual GPU support on recent generation games has not been what it was even before.
And by the way guys, we are live. Something about time zones, not time zones.
It is 5.37 and we are live.
So even a year or two years or even three years ago, dual GPU support wasn't perfect.
A lot of the time it required patches from NVIDIA or AMD or previously ATI in order to function.
But it's actually gotten worse and worse and worse as time has gone on.
In fact, some games over the last little while, even games that have been the ones where there's like the NVIDIA logo
or the AMD logo that pops up at the beginning with game works technology or whatever else
that just flat out the developers going, yep, yep, SLI, Crossfire, forget it, forget it.
It just doesn't matter. It's too small of a portion of customers.
So for that reason, the Pro Duo was not realistically going to get very good reviews from the gaming press
because it frankly just doesn't make a ton of sense as a gaming card.
It's only got four gigs of effective video memory because it's four gigs per GPU.
That doesn't add up to eight gigs. That means four gigs.
It's two presumably fairly power hungry chips that perform okay, but not well enough to charge $1,500 for two of them.
And like we've run into this before, but typically the dual GPU solution has been closer to the $1,000 range
and not so close to the $1,500 range where you can't just kind of go, okay, like here, this is a fun experiment.
Let's just fire up Newegg, shop AMD Radeon Fury X. No, newegg.com is fine.
Oh, I don't, wow, wow, the world's most boring sale, monitors and printers.
Unless you're shopping for a monitor or a printer, in which case, what just happened to my search result?
Oh, Newegg. Anyway, oh, okay, so about $629.
So you're paying this huge premium to have a card that does save you on PCI,
apparently 295X2 launched at $1,500. Yeah, that's a good point, but how many units did 295X2 sell?
Like this is a dinosaur. The Radeon Pro Duo in a gaming sense is a dinosaur
because you can get two Fury Xs for 1,300 bucks after taxes kind of thing.
So unless you desperately need those two slots, what are you even doing?
And if you desperately need those two slots, why don't you just water cool a couple of Fury Xs?
I mean, that actually pays for your water blocks right there.
So yeah, it's going to be power hungry. It's going to be super expensive.
So basically they're kind of going, okay, yeah, it's for developers.
And I don't really, I guess what I don't really get at this point,
I understand why they're not ceding it to reviewers because it wouldn't have gotten a positive review from us.
It wouldn't have gotten a positive review from probably anyone.
They'd say, you know, it's always that sugar coated conclusion, right?
This is the ultimate graphics card for AMD enthusiasts who want the highest performance single AMD card.
So you go like this sliver of this slice of the available market of people who are interested in graphics cards.
And that is pretty much all that is left for someone who, for gaming purposes, might be interested in a Radeon Pro Duo.
I'll be interested to see what they can come up with in terms of value adds for the Pro Duo
that would make it make sense for developers.
But I just have a hard time imagining what would make it better for developers than just picking up a couple of Furies or a couple of Fury Xs.
Alpha 17x in the chat. This is a really good point. I'm a developer.
I use what the end user would be using so I know what the crap I'm something Twitch chat moves too fast.
I mean, that is a really, really great point.
And depending on what kind of development you're doing, like if you're working on digital assets, you might be interested in something like a Fire Pro or something like a Quadro card.
But in those cases, you'd want a lot more than four gigs of VRAM per GPU.
So I still don't understand why they're even releasing this card. That's the question.
I understand why they don't want people to review it.
I don't understand why they even kept it in development after all this time because it's no secret that VR and DirectX 12 is where we're headed.
And dual GPU? Something of a dinosaur at this point. I mean, Nvidia didn't even bother.
Do you think Nvidia couldn't have built a dual 980 card? Come on.
They totally could have done it. Do you think they couldn't have built a dual 980 card with eight gigs of RAM per GPU?
Like, that. They managed to build an MXM. They managed to put a 980 in a laptop.
The power efficiency was there. The thermal output was there.
They were just like, eh, why bother? I mean, Titan Z was such a flop.
I mean, the price that presumably it had to be in order to build it because they had lots of time to drop the price on it and just go,
yeah, we'll just take less margin on it and sell some more units. Like, the price it must have cost to make it just made it untenable.
So, yeah. I mean, to me, this is kind of like the final swan song for dual GPUs on one card outside of, you know,
professional scientific high-performance computing-based cards that you might expect to find in a huge server farm somewhere.
So, hopefully Polaris is the answer and we can all look forward to that.
Hey, Brandon, can you help me with something for a minute? Very, very quickly by running.
Thank you. Can you find out what this is and direct it to the appropriate place?
It may be something quite important. All right.
So, this is a cool piece of technology. The original poster here is Ah Ming and the original article here is from The Verge.
This is a cool way to use technology.
This is a mosquito killer billboard that is targeting mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus in Brazil.
Now, if you have been watching the development of Zika in the news, you're probably aware that it is a huge concern,
not necessarily for perfectly healthy people, but especially if you're pregnant.
Zika could be a major problem because it can cause, I believe it's either macro or micro.
I'm going to go with microcephaly, which is a condition where your brain, depending on whether it's macro or micro,
I think it's micro, where your head is super small, which causes all kinds of developmental problems.
So, Zika has been a problem in warmer climate areas, jungle areas, because it's spread by mosquitoes.
It actually transmitted sexually as well, but it has been a huge problem in Brazil.
So, this technology is apparently using this carbon dioxide and lactic acid solution to mimic human breathing and sweat,
and then zapping the bugs, killing them.
So, it can actually lure insects within a radius of up to two and a half kilometers.
This is something I've always wondered about. Like, how do mosquitoes find us?
So, there you go. Apparently, it's by smell.
Now, to be clear, always wondered about doesn't mean it was a burning desire, because I could have just googled it.
It's just something that kind of like, oh, dang it, how do they find me?
So, it can lure insects within a radius of two and a half kilometers and kill them.
But, there are some concerns that have been raised.
So, two of these billboards have been installed in Rio de Janeiro,
and they're using technical specifications that are actually published for free online.
Chris Jackson, a pest control expert at the University of Southampton,
told the BBC that the billboard could inadvertently cause more people to be bitten, depending on where it is placed.
And just give me one second. Brandon, who did you give that phone to?
Okay, can you bring him back here? Thank you.
So, I've actually got a pretty cool graphic for how it works here.
I'm just going to go ahead and pull this up on the screen.
So, a device spreads in the air in a solution containing the lactic acid and CO2.
Okay, so it spreads in the air this solution.
The combination of the two substances attracts mosquitoes at this, claims a distance of up to four kilometers.
Fluorescent lights enhance this attraction, facilitating the approximation, I think they mean approach of the mosquito.
And then, as the Aedes flies, on average, four feet above the ground,
the catch mechanism was designed to be there, it draws the mosquito into the panel,
and after being stuck, the mosquito dies dehydrated.
So, it doesn't zap them in the sense that it, like those awesome paddle bug zapper things,
but it does kill them eventually, which I guess is all we can really ask.
Hey Brandon, where is he? Okay, did you tell him to move quickly?
I can't hold on, I'm streaming from that phone, I'm dropping frames, he needs to get over here right away.
Thank you, sorry.
Alright, so this was originally posted by Yami Yuki Senpei,
and this is pretty much the worst news ever.
Le Eco, who formerly went by the name of Le TV, revealed their Le 2 range of smartphones,
none of which have a 3.5mm jack.
So instead, the phone supports USB Type-C digital headphones through the charging port.
They also launched a USB-C earphone skew and a USB-C headphone skew to accompany it.
So let's have a look at the original article over on Android Authority,
which I would love to click on, but Google Talks is being such a derp right now,
and making it hard for me to click stuff. There we go.
So after all the rumors about Apple launching a phone with no headphone jack,
it turns out that an Android phone maker is going to be the first one.
I really, I get a kick out of, especially, what are they, why?
Why, what is the point?
Like I get that they're kind of going, oh yeah, well you know, we're going to build this ecosystem
of like earphones and headphones that work with it, but it's like such a hassle.
Like what if, I don't know, say for example you were sitting down to stream the WAN show
and you wanted to quickly plug your headphones that you normally use with your phone
into your streaming computer so you can check audio levels.
Oh right, oh bummer, it's USB Type-C, I guess it's just not going to work with anything.
And it's one thing if you were to release like some kind of a killer pair of headphones
that rounds out the ecosystem and makes it make a ton of sense,
but that's not, yeah, that's not going to help if you're just some random Android maker
and your headphones and earphones, to be clear I haven't heard them,
but are probably terrible, like probably just awful.
Let's go ahead and see if we can find any pictures of the device.
That would be super cool. I'm going to see if Pocketnow has pictures up on their site.
But yeah, I mean there's really not much else to say.
It's not a product that I would be especially interested in one way or the other,
and unfortunately the Pocketnow article is not loading for me at the moment, but yeah.
Speaking of products that I'm not particularly interested in,
this was originally posted by lots of unexplainable lag on the forum,
and the original article here is from MacRemers.com,
but Apple has updated not the MacBook Air,
not the product we were actually hoping that they would update,
one that has enough thinness, but maybe not quite as much thinness,
but good battery life, but maybe not as good battery life,
but actually has ports on it. No.
No, they didn't give the MacBook Air a retina display,
so it really does look like the MacBook Air is a forgone conclusion at this point.
I think it's a done deal. It's gone.
They have updated the 12-inch MacBook.
So now it has Skylake CPU options, a longer battery life, and a rose gold option.
So 6th generation Skylake dual-core Core M processors up to 1.3 GHz,
HD Graphics 515 delivering 25% faster performance
for all the games that you will presumably be playing on your MacBook,
faster PCI Express-based storage. Okay, I can't complain about that.
An additional hour of battery life, faster 1866 MHz memory.
Oh, wow. Oh, it's available in rose gold.
In addition to the existing gold, silver, and space gray colors,
unfortunately, Apple in its infinite wisdom did not feel it was necessary to add any ports to it.
So while I wasn't going to buy one anyway, I find that frustrating
just because for the sake of the people buying this product,
it would be considerate of Apple to care about them enough to give them some ports to use.
You know, man? I feel bad for the Apple people buying this.
Yeah. All right. Uh-oh. More car scandals.
The OP here is Num Lock 21.
I'm going to see if refreshing Google Docs helps here. This is driving me crazy.
It's doing that weird thing where there's, like, the line you're trying to click on,
and you put your mouse there, and it clicks, like, an inch higher or something like that.
Let's see if, yeah, there we go. Reloading the page helps.
So Euronews.com has the original article about Mitsubishi Motors faking their fuel economy tests.
They actually got rated. Like, go figure. Rated.
So their shares plunged on Thursday following an admission that they faked fuel economy data on cars sold in Japan.
They ended up losing $3.2 billion in market value over a mere three days.
They apologized on Wednesday, saying they will make a sincere effort to make amends to car owners.
And the transport minister of Japan wants Mitsubishi to look at the possibility of buying back the cars.
That could be even more costly than what Volkswagen went through.
Wow. Mitsubishi will also have to pay subsidies granted to consumers if data shows its cars do not meet the necessary fuel economy standards.
I mean, I don't know. I don't know what the takeaway here is.
Part of the takeaway is these companies are bad, and they did really bad things,
and I don't know if that makes some bad people. Sometimes good people do bad things, but faking fuel economy ratings is pretty bad.
I mean, you're lying to your customers. You're lying to your government.
You are polluting the environment more than you said you were.
These targets exist for a reason. We're trying to reduce our ecological impact.
But with that said, it also raises questions about whether introducing laws governing how much CO2 or governing the emissions that cars can output,
whether that's actually the solution or if you have to do something else.
I mean, I've argued for a long time that here in Vancouver, public transit is basically unusable.
If you have a job, public transit is pretty difficult to use. Vancouver is such a suburban sprawl.
It just spreads in all directions rather than building up like many other cities have.
And our infrastructure is just awful outside of the urban core to the point where something that is a half an hour drive could easily take two, two and a half hours on a bus.
And if you value your time at all, like you could even just work another job in the four hours of commuting that you save per day in order to have a car and not just sit around on the bus.
So rather than just kind of tell companies, hey, you have to have lower emissions, you know, maybe making changes that make it easier for people to use mass transit would be a better solution.
But of course, that's very easy for me to sit here and say, I mean, I don't actually have to run the country, thank goodness.
All right. More bad news posted by Phoenix Arising on the forum.
And the original article here is from the CNN Money.
Microsoft's profits fall by 25%, not an insignificant amount, sort of a lousy quarter, but not all of this is necessarily entirely their fault.
So Q1 2015, $5 billion profit.
Q1 2016, $3.8 billion.
But part of the reason that it fell 25% was due to a higher than expected tax rate and a strong US dollar.
Okay, sales are down from 21.7 to 20.5 billion.
Sales for consumer versions grew 15%, enterprise version declined 11% for Windows.
Although this, I don't know, could have something to do with that we got a consumer version of Windows that was not accompanied by a server version.
I mean, server 2016 is nowhere to be found yet.
If anything, it's probably kind of happy that, you know, enterprise sales only declined a little bit.
Like I personally would be trying to put off a server purchase until server 2016 shows up if I had any say in the matter at this point.
Office 365 consumer base reached 12.4 million in Q1 2015 and grew to 22.2 million in 2016.
I will say I contributed to that. I love Office 365.
Azure is up. Xbox is up. So basically, yeah, OS is not growing the way they would like and they were taxed higher than they thought.
I'm glad they're at least paying taxes. So, you know, good guy Microsoft, I guess.
Yeah, anyway.
What else we got?
This is interesting. So original post here is from Engadget.
The Canadian province of Quebec contemplates mandating home EV charging stations, expects a decision by the start of this summer.
I don't really understand what they're hoping to accomplish by that.
I mean, I can see how investing in infrastructure throughout the province like public infrastructure could help the adoption of an EV.
Because in my mind, like as someone considering purchasing an electric vehicle, I would love to buy an electric vehicle.
It's just not really in my price range right now.
But as someone considering it, after I've spent the $25,000 to $30,000 on an EV, you know, hundreds more or even, you know, low thousands more for the charging station is not the end of the world.
I mean, you think about it like a phone. Like if you walk in, you buy a $500 phone, are you that concerned about the $30 charger at the same time?
Like I consider it part of the purchase, part of the decision that someone buying that vehicle would have to make.
So this really, and my decision as far as what the government can do to help would have more to do with mandating businesses or installing these charging stations in public places than to do with whether or not I have to buy a charging station to put in my garage.
So this again smacks of the government thinking that just introducing a regulation is going to somehow address some kind of a problem and change consumer behavior at no cost to themselves.
Because basically they're just making builders stomach it and they're making consumers who don't necessarily want one and aren't ready for one and could have easily waited another five years when they were ready for a new car and bought one then when it's cheaper.
And they're making them foot the bill instead of just investing in the infrastructure themselves.
Speaking of investing, you know who invested in our trip to PAX East?
Yes my friends, our friends from, oh, that's uh, oh, my lower third is gone. Hopefully I can find my lower third. Come on, lower third.
Let's see what path it's supposed to be in. Of course, of course mousing over it didn't help. And of course I do understand why that's not working and there is basically nothing I can do about it right now.
So our sponsors were Logitech G and Discord. So Logitech G you're probably familiar with. You can check out their new G900 wireless gaming mouse over at Amazon.com.
I will link that in the Twitch chat. This is the one that Luke went all the way to Switzerland to check out and basically see how it is that Logitech validated it to run as effortlessly and as stably as a wired mouse even though it doesn't have a wire.
Pretty freaking cool little piece of technology. They're also showing off what they're calling the Great Wall of Logitech Gs using their G810 keyboards.
So they created original 8-bit content to show on the wall through the use of their keyboards LEDs. You can actually find a short clip. Here I'll try and fire this up for you guys here.
Yep, there you go. So this is on Nvidia's Twitter. Pretty freaking cool. It's hard to even tell that that's not a proper display from here.
Look at it! They're all keyboards! That is awesome. Which like pretty much everything in my life right now reminds me of the HTC Vive. There's a really cool mini-game from Valve that has you use the controller as a ship kind of like an old arcade style upscrolling spaceship shooter game.
Except the controller is the ship so you can move around in 3D space and fire at bad guys. It's freaking, freaking sick.
So if you're watching this on YouTube, there should be a full video by the way linked in the video description so you can check that out.
Also sponsoring our trip to the show, and this is a brand new sponsor, is Discord. It's the all-in-one voice and text chat for gamers. It's free, secure and works on both desktop and your phone.
They are promising to never make you pay to use it. They plan to monetize in the future with optional cosmetics like themes, sticker packs and sound packs.
So similar to like what someone like a SwiftKey was doing where they actually switched from a paid model to a free model.
They are encrypting server-to-client communications to keep your IP address safe. That sounds pretty cool.
And they have built-in DDoS protection with automatic server failover. They promise minimal CPU usage and it's optimized so your game's performance doesn't tank when you use it.
They claim it takes 10 seconds to set up and doesn't require drivers or any weird setup config.
So if you guys want to try it out, I've got a link over here that I'm going to post in the Twitch chat or if you're watching this on YouTube, then you can go ahead and check that out at the link in the video description.
But it looks pretty freaking good. I know that Nick and Colton actually did their conference call with Discord about this deal on Discord.
So, yeah, I mean, what else would you use?
It's like, you know, hey, do you want to, I don't know, use the telephone? It'd be like, what, telephones? Ancient technology?
What else we got here? Other sponsor, lynda.com. If you somehow are not familiar with lynda.com by this point, then I will tell you about it.
lynda.com is used by millions of people around the world. They have more than 3,000 courses available and they are taught by experts in the topics of things like web development, photography, visual design, video editing, business, productivity application use.
Pretty much whatever you could want, you know, Excel, WordPress, Photoshop, whatever you could want to kickstart your hobby or your career.
They have new courses that are added every week and they've got a lot of new tools that they've added since we have been, since we've been doing these pods for them actually.
Now that I think about it, things like being able to download the videos and view them on the bus when you don't necessarily want to eat up your data connection on iOS and Android.
The ability to skim along a transcript of the course and then just click to a point on the script and then have the video pick up at that spot.
The ability to create playlists so you can learn alongside your friends and follow a curriculum together.
And they're offering a 10-day free trial which gives you access to every course on lynda.com for 10 days all you can eat with plans starting after that at only 25 bucks a month. So check it out.
Alright, what else we got here? We've actually got a fair number of, a fair number of topics. Microsoft has finally ended production of the Xbox 360. So there you have it.
Originally posted on Kotaku. If you wanted to buy an Xbox 360, before today was the time.
Well, there will probably still be some on shelves, but 10 and a half years, 10 and a half years ago, the Xbox 360 launched and we are finally, finally rid of it.
Microsoft's Phil Spencer wrote a few paragraphs about its success saying,
Xbox 360 means a lot to everyone in Microsoft and while we've had an amazing run, the realities of manufacturing a product over a decade old are starting to creep up on us, which is why we've made the decision to stop manufacturing new Xbox 360 consoles.
We will continue to sell existing inventory with availability varying by country. Xbox Live will remain active, as will the Xbox 360's various stores and online services.
And the Xbox One is actually adding support for backwards, is adding backwards compatibility support for some 360 games.
So there you have it. There you have it. The Xbox 360 is finally no more. I'm actually probably going to pick up a handful of Xbox 360 controllers before like, getting peripherals for dying console madness happens.
I want to get a couple that are in good condition because it's still my favorite controller. I really don't like the shape of the dual shock and I really do prefer it to the Xbox One controller.
So there you go.
Let's see what else we got.
Oh, this is interesting. Original article here is from AnonTech.com. WD is introducing WD Gold hard drives. They have added yet another color. It's available in capacities from four to six to eight terabytes and effectively pretty much replaces the SE lineup.
Oh, that's funny. I derped. And pretty much replaces their existing SE lineup, which was kind of like a high capacity enterprise, but not as expensive as RE, not quite as high performance as RE.
So basically the color branding is almost complete. I'm surprised they called it gold. I would have thought they would save gold for RE, but maybe they're going to call that platinum or something. I don't know. It's tuned similarly to WD Red drives, rated for 24-7 use and workloads of up to 550 terabytes a year with a five year warranty.
Cool. This is just kind of funny. This is originally, the original post here is over on cbc.ca. Rust players outraged after half of them given female avatars in some kind of attempt to appease SJWs, I suppose.
Now this wouldn't be that big of an issue if they hadn't been changed without the players even being notified and permanently.
So your player just, boom, they've been put under a feature that randomly makes your character a man or a woman. They actually randomize features for your permanent character, like skin color, limb length, and even penis size. So developers Gary Newman and Taylor Reynolds expected this backlash and addressed it on their community dev log.
We understand this is a sore subject for a lot of people. We understand that you may now be a gender that you don't identify with in real life. We understand this causes you distress and makes you not want to play the game anymore.
Technically nothing has changed since half the population was already living with those feelings. The only difference is that whether you feel like this is now decided by your Steam ID instead of your real life gender.
This is really just the first pass of an ongoing rework of the player model. I'll continue to add variations over the coming weeks, which means you're probably not stuck with your new face forever.
We've got a decent synced workflow between the assets I make in ZBrush and the assets you'll see in game now, so it opens up a lot of scope to easily add or change features without a great deal of technical faffing in between.
What?
So we heard that lots of people don't identify with gender X or Y or some combination of the two, and that makes them unhappy.
So we thought, as a game developer, we'd take our customers and we would have them experience that on some scale.
Because... we... something... um... okay.
We've got more details about the PlayStation 4K, which we don't know if it's the confirmed name.
I don't know if we talked about some of this stuff last week. I believe we actually did, but we've got a handy-dandy little chart this time, so I can go ahead and fire that up for you guys.
So... eight Jaguar cores, eight more Jaguar cores... well, no, exactly the same number of eight Jaguar cores. In fact, same architecture, but higher clock speed. Okay, GCN. Better GCN. Okay.
Higher clocked. More compute units. Memory looks like it's got a bandwidth increase, but is actually still the same eight gigs. So... there you go.
Yep. This is cool. So this was originally posted by Strider721 on the forum. The original article here is from The Verge.
Counter-Strike hacked to run on Android phones. This is cool.
Now, to be clear, this is not CSGO. This is Counter-Strike 1.6. But how cool is that, right? Look at this. Love it.
Oh, man. So let's get some details here. So this is the work of programmer... oops, sorry, hold on. Gotta close that.
Alabeck Omarov, who's experienced in making old PC games run on Android. He's created touchscreen controls for the game.
So to get it to work on your Android device, you download the SASH, XASH, it's X-A-S-H, 3D software.
Have the games on your Steam account to copy the files across, and the port does apparently support peripherals, which is pretty cool.
Because with an on-the-go cable, I have actually tested this, with an OTG cable and a phone that supports OTG, and just a normal USB hub,
you can plug in pretty much whatever you could possibly want. Powered USB hub, otherwise you are definitely going to have issues running large, 104-key RGB backlit keyboards.
So I think that pretty much does it for the WAN Show. Thank you to all of you who went ahead and stuck with me through the technical difficulties on the show today.
Really do appreciate it. I will see you guys next week, same bat time, same bat channel.
Actually, will I see you guys next week? I may be travelling next week.
We have a lot of, like, a lot of the team is travelling a lot. No, I, wait, what?
Brandon's, like, gone forever. Yeah, Linus and Ed are in San Francisco until, yes, next Friday, so I'll see if I'm remoting in or I'll see if I'm not, but if I don't, Luke will be hosting the show, because he'll be back by then.
This is the problem with, like, you tell people, take your vacation, and then no one does it, and then you tell people, look, you're not going to be able to take it in Q4, because it's busy, and then everyone just takes off.
Mind you, most of this is work stuff. Actually, only Brandon's taking vacation, because he's not a team player.
You heard me.
Alright, see you guys.