Okay, WAN Showtime again.
So I've got a terrific story for you guys if you're not tired of my excuses for why
this show is always late.
25 minutes.
My favorite thing ever is that like every time you're gone we're always 5 minutes early.
Well I was fixing a problem that maybe had you been more on the ball and proactive we
wouldn't have had.
You're the one that insisted on having the computer streaming that had a zap strap around
the heatsink so that it could keep running.
That zap strap is incredibly reliable technology.
Plastic never fails.
Plastic holds together.
Plastic never fails?
Unless UV.
Then plastic fails very quickly.
So guys basically what happened is last week we had Paul and Kyle, formerly of Newegg TV
on and we were dropping frames like mad.
It was no good.
It was terrible during the stream.
So I realized about half an hour before today's stream was supposed to start that we had a
guest skyping in this week and we hadn't actually swapped out the CPU.
We had done nothing to make the computer actually work and not drop frames all over the freaking
place.
So I actually did a motherboard CPU RAM swap, reinstalled all the capture cards, reconfigured
XSplit because all the capture settings are messed up because they're all in different
slots.
They've got different IDs now because when you have multiple capture cards, it'll arbitrarily
– well, this is number one and this is two and this is three.
So if that changes, XSplit doesn't remember anything.
We had to redo the color.
We've actually – this room has someone's chair in it and desk now because we've added
another body here at Linus Media Group.
So we had to move the entire thing.
It's a miracle we're live at all.
But of course, what I really meant to say is I'm sorry.
And thank you for tuning in and we're going to get on with the show now.
So we've got a lot of great topics today.
Windows – excuse me, 10, 10, Windows 10, there's a technical preview.
You can go ahead and download it.
We'll talk a little bit about what's new in Windows 10 or more specifically what is
old and not the new thing that we hated anymore.
Also Tesla is pretty sure that when they show you the D, they are – you are going to want
it.
I do.
I want the D. From what I can see so far, just like the
head peeking out, I want the D. Wow.
That's the picture they've launched.
Okay.
Why don't you just go ahead and talk about other topics?
Scott Wasson will be live with us very soon.
So we'll have him on the show.
From the tech report?
Yeah, man.
Samsung will be – Reporting on the tech.
14 nanometer chips for AMD, which Scott Wasson will probably talk about.
Yeah, I would think so.
In fact, I think – On the tech report.
That's going to be a great topic for us to pick his brain about.
Yep.
Project ARA will have hotswap modules with a Google Play-like store where you'll be
able to buy all their stuff super easily and you'll even be able to probably swap out
their battery without fully turning off your phone.
Think of Project ARA kind of like a multi-bit screwdriver.
You see, I could have kept using the screwdriver while I swapped component – well, okay,
not quite.
No.
Okay, Project ARA, better than a screwdriver.
Better than a multi-bit screwdriver, except when you need a screwdriver.
Let's roll the stupid intro.
All right, so we had no audio for the first part of this and I'm supposed to be introducing
our sponsors for today, so – No intro audio at all.
No intro audio.
Oh, what?
No, I had it.
Apparently, they didn't.
Oh.
I could hear them.
That's weird.
Oh, well.
Well, at any rate, Dollar Shave Club, save time, shave money with Dollar Shave Club.
You get high-quality razors delivered directly to your door and later on in the show, I'll
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you can get 10% off with offer code Linus.
So big thanks to Dollar Shave Club and Squarespace for sponsoring today's show.
Look at this.
Look how fast I can move them around.
Oh, my God.
I can dance all day.
I can dance all day.
Look at my sponsors.
Sponsors.
Anyway, let's go back to – So apparently, they did have audio and people
were just being trolls.
Twitch chat.
Horrible.
All right.
So, guys, we're not going to waste too much time because we told Scott he was going to
be joining us at around 5 o'clock, and it is now 5 o'clock.
That was supposed to be half an hour into the show, but the show just started.
So, Scott, you're live.
Welcome to the show.
Want to do a quick introduction to who exactly this Scott guy is and why he's on their
screens?
So, am I giving the introduction or are you giving the introduction?
I will introduce you.
Okay.
So, Scott is basically like a gray hair of the industry.
You know?
Yeah.
Many gray hair.
I would have called him a gray beard, but I don't think he can grow a beard any more
than I can, so.
It's not good.
Yeah.
So, guys, Scott is one of the most respected tech reviewers, tech writers in the industry.
He's been doing it a long time, like a really long time.
Sorry, Scott.
I'll stop with the old stuff.
But he's been doing it a long time.
He's extremely experienced, and basically, if you wanted to get on, you know, a video
call with someone and kind of, you know, hey, can you talk technical to me?
That kind of thing.
You would want Scott on your Skype, so we're going to hit some pretty hard tech topics,
and you guys can find him over at thetechreport.com.
They have lots of great articles about, I think, Furbies.
See, right when you said it, fur, I thought you were going with, like, fur me, and I was
like, that's a little old, so I thought you were going in with the old jokes again.
I was like, that's not that old, though.
Yeah.
It's like, I don't know.
Nope.
Furby.
3DFX SLI coverage.
I got a Q4 review if you want to read it.
There you go.
There you go.
So Geforce 4, to give you some idea, so back in the Geforce 4 days, I was still looking
at, like, the local computer paper and trying to figure out what an AGP was, and you were
reviewing graphics cards.
So Scott, why don't we kick things off with actually something that we didn't really put
in your guest section as far as I know.
Have you heard the rumor?
Have you heard the news?
Sort of news.
We're not sure.
Rumor right now about AMD potentially partnering with Samsung to produce 14 nanometer chips.
Yes.
Yeah, and, you know, we wrote a story about this, and we asked AMD to comment, and I don't
think they got back to us.
So I'm not sure it's confirmed, but it makes sense for a couple reasons.
You know, AMD gets a lot of chips made at its own former fabs by a company called, run
now by a company called GlobalFoundries, and GloFo, as I like to call them, and they don't
like that, but they've had some trouble getting to the next process node, shrinking their
chips down, and they are a part of a common platform alliance, they share technology with
IBM and Samsung, and so these guys kind of work together to make things go, and an unusual
thing happened earlier this year, GloFo licensed Samsung's 14 nanometer process from them,
and we think that probably, I think probably AMD was kind of behind that.
They didn't like GloFo's progress toward getting to that node, and Samsung had made it or gotten
close, and so there was a sort of a technology transfer, but now it sounds like maybe Samsung's
going to just make chips directly for AMD.
So here's kind of an interesting thing.
This would be the first time in, even as long as you've been covering tech, that someone
might potentially be at the same level as Intel for an extended period of time.
I mean, Intel's, they're not that close to, or wait, excuse me, so they're on 14 now,
but they're not that close to 10, are they?
Like we just heard about them announcing a 10 nanometer fab that they're building in.
Like $6 billion project.
Yeah, in Israel, but that means that AMD, Apple, Samsung could all be on the same process
node as Intel for a little while here.
Well it's, yeah, the hard part about that is that the other guys are still talking about
14, and Intel has been shipping 14 in volume for a couple months, and so that, talking
about it and getting there are different things.
I think Samsung has done some test chips and things like that, I'm not completely up on
the status of that, but my sense is they're not yet shipping 14 nanometers stuff in volume,
at least not the types of chips that we're talking about them building for AMD.
So yeah, it would be nice to think that everybody could catch up with Intel, but I don't know,
it hasn't happened for a long time, and everybody's roadmap always says they're going to, and
then they never do it.
When was the last time you might remember this?
Wow, I don't know, like somewhere around 90 nanometers maybe?
Right, so that was back in what, Prescott days?
Yeah, I mean you remember the Intel Pentium 4 stuff wasn't great, and their 90 nanometer
process was somewhat leaky, so it consumed a lot of power.
They had a chip architecture problem too, but they had a lot of problems at the same
time and manufacturing was one of them.
AMD had some goodness going on with copper interconnects and silicon on insulator and
things like that, and so there was a time there when it wasn't entirely clear like it
has been for the past four or five years that Intel was in the lead compared to everybody
else.
Right, so speaking of the kinds of chips that AMD would want someone like Samsung to build
at 14 nanometer, there's rumors afoot of a new FX replacement, finally a legitimate high
performance chip from AMD to replace the aging FX lineup.
So is that what we're looking at here, and if so, any idea when?
What do you think?
Well I think the rumors are about APUs or SOCs, and if you look at the timeframe involved,
it's got to be 2015, right?
So if it's 2015, I'm not sure if that's soon enough for AMD to have a new core out, but
we know they have one in development.
The ARM version of it is called the K12, and x86 is I think called Zen, and that's a new
big core that my sense is that AMD is going to try to build something that will compete
with the Haswells and Skylakes and whatever Intel has out by the time it ships a product.
I think we may be looking at 2016 for that core, but I expect that when that core is
ready, it will go into APUs and SOCs, and so if Samsung's making them, then you could
have, assuming that Samsung does a good job at 14 nanometers, you could have a nice convergence
of Samsung's process tech with the new CPU architecture from AMD.
So tell me something.
I mean, we've seen, so just a brief explanation for the viewers of how the cost structure
of a CPU actually works.
It's all about how much, how many dies you're going to get out of a wafer.
So wafers are pretty much an industry standard size, and if you build a CPU that maybe you
put mountain loads of cash on and you put a ton of cores in it and you make one that's
really big, ultimately you have to buy a lot of these wafers in order to end up with X
number of dies out of that wafer, out of which some of them will be good and some of them
will be corrupted and won't be usable.
Some of them will be partially usable, so maybe they'll have less cash or they'll be
clocked lower or whatever else the case may be.
So the way that processor manufacturers optimize for cost is they try to shrink all aspects
of the chip so that they can fit more chips onto a wafer.
So AMD, by being a process node or even two behind Intel, is at a huge disadvantage because
they get far fewer chips out of these wafers, so their costs are inherently much higher.
If they reached process node parity and AMD was willing to take the kinds of margins that
they've been taking on their CPUs for quite some time, Scott, do you think they could
build a CPU, let's say not an APU, let's say an FX CPU, because we've seen Intel spending
so much of their die space on graphics.
If AMD built a CPU at the same process node as Intel and crammed that much more logic
into it, could we see a legitimate leap forward in CPU performance the likes of which we haven't
seen in four or five years?
That would be nice.
It would be nice if there were more value delivered by AMD, right?
I think the reality is that if you look at the way that chip manufacturing works, none
of what you said is wrong, but if you look at Intel's margins on their financial reports,
it's like 62% or some crazy number.
AMD's cost structure doesn't have to be as awesome as Intel's for them to be very
profitable.
They can be a node or two behind and they can have a relatively larger chip that they're
manufacturing, but if it costs them $60 to make a chip and they sell it for $200 and
it costs Intel $40 to make the same chip they sell for $200, it's still not bad business
to be in.
That goes up too, right?
With Octoruns and things like that, it can be thousands of dollars.
I remember one time I was talking with, quizzing a guy with AMD about this, about, oh, but
you're behind on process node and those are really big chips.
One time they were taking two Octoruns and putting them in the same socket on one substrate.
I said, that's really costly, isn't it?
He said, yes, maybe, but every one of those Octoruns that we sell for $1200 is good business
for AMD.
I think the key for AMD is to be able to offer a product that is a credible alternative to
Intel that has attractive performance and power consumption.
They don't have to win to be winning people's business and making money.
But they need to...
But AMD hasn't been doing exactly amazing.
And I think that's the hope with the new core.
Go ahead.
AMD hasn't been doing exactly amazing with those profit margins there.
Not even that long ago, they were doing seriously not great.
And then with the new console launch, things have been turning up a little bit.
So I do agree with you, that is probably true, but it couldn't help getting onto a lower
node and having more...
You mean it couldn't hurt?
It couldn't hurt.
There we go.
Couldn't possibly help them.
Right.
It's always good if you can get to a new process node.
And one thing that AMD kind of had to take a hit when they made their last transition,
because they went from a 32 nanometer process node designed for CPUs on the last generation
to when they brought out Kaveri, they went to a 28 nanometer process node that's really
more tuned for low power, high density GPU type applications.
And as a result, they got less clock speed on the CPU portion of their APU than they
had in the prior generation.
And really what you want is you want a process tech that will give you all the benefits that
you can get out of better process tech, including faster switching speeds so you can get to
higher clocks.
And I think with Samsung going to 14 nanometers and going to FinFETs or Intel calls them tri-gate
transistors, that there's a good possibility that there could be a nice increase in switching
speed at higher power levels, which could translate into performance as well.
But honestly, I think architecture is their biggest need right now.
I don't think it's process tech.
Process tech is always something you have to be on top of, but there are multiple options
different foundries they can go to, and they're exercising that by going to Samsung.
But what they need is a good architecture to go along with it.
Well, I hope we see that.
I would love to see someone build a balls to the wall CPU again.
The 5960X isn't enough for you.
Okay.
The 5960X is pretty cool.
Okay.
Yes.
The 5960X is pretty cool.
I'd like to see two of them fighting it out, though, right?
Yes.
I'd like to see it not $1,000.
There.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
You'd like to see that on the consumer platform and have something even more badass on the
enthusiast platform as well.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, like Intel did, it's the ED RAM external cache, L4 cache on some chips that it sells,
and it's faster for graphics that way, but you can't buy that in a desktop chip that
is socketed.
That's the type of thing that... It's not a huge performance win on the desktop, but
it's really cool, and Intel doesn't bring it to the desktop because they don't have
any competition there.
Right.
That's the type of thing that gets pulled into the desktop because it's cool technology,
and if they're fighting it out with a strong competitor.
Yeah.
I mean, I love Intel and Nvidia as much as anyone, but I think that we've seen enough
times throughout history, even as long as I've been paying attention to this stuff,
they're pretty content to sit and wait for AMD to make a move before they drop price
or before they release something more competitive or whatever the case may be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, like Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge has well... For like a year after they were released,
they kept the exact same price, and it used to be like every three months you got a price
cut.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was cool.
That's what they talk about, you know?
Yeah.
It's a lot more exciting when there's two competitors instead of one.
Pricing has been a little bit nuts since Maxwell dropped.
Yeah.
I've seen 780 TIs, like $100 or $200 below 980s just because so many people are glomming
on 980s, stuff like that.
Speaking of people glomming on to 980s, I had a chat with someone at an undisclosed retailer,
and they let me know that the GTX 970 Strix, the Asus card, you reviewed that one, right
Scott?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they have 300 back orders on that one SKU.
Wow.
Yeah.
They were telling me they've never seen anything like this since 8800 GT.
Wow.
I believe it.
I mean, it makes sense.
We haven't had this type of combination of there's a lot more performance at a really
nice price for a long time.
Yeah.
You know what's funny is again, undisclosed, not going to say who it was, but I talked
to someone at Nvidia prior to the launch when I was having the prices given to me so I could
make my video very last minute, that whole thing, but that's neither here nor there.
So they told me the prices and I kind of went, wow, well, GTX 970 is the disruptive one.
And he's kind of like, what do you mean?
The 980 is going to have the performance crown.
And I kind of went, well, yeah, but the 970 is only cut down by what, 20%?
And it's going to overclock like a bat out of hell.
And it's like almost $200 cheaper.
What a fantastic card.
And he kind of goes, oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I guess you mean disruptive in that way.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
They focus on the performance crown at these companies a lot.
And that's not always what people want to buy.
You know, they want value.
Because you can get certain cars that are better than 980, but 980 is at a really good
price for what it is.
So people are buying it.
And then 970 is at an even better price for what it is.
So more people are buying that.
It's pretty interesting.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Everyone's way too polite.
I know.
Okay, I'm just going to talk over everyone from now on.
Okay.
So 980 and 970, you had uncovered a little while ago, we thought that the only real difference
between 980 and 970 was how many SMs that they had.
But you had found a bit of a disparity in their performance that you couldn't really
explain up till now.
So can you maybe talk about what people should choose for 4K gaming?
Because I've gotten a lot of questions about this in the comments on our 980 performance
overview, in PMs on the forum, in threads I've seen posted on the forum.
Is 970 okay for 4K?
You know, that's a tough question because is 980 okay for 4K?
I was even going to say, is it okay for 4K is kind of an interesting question right now,
Jen.
I mean, I kind of think you want to.
For running everything like the high end games that we use for testing at high quality settings,
one of anything that's out there right now isn't entirely adequate.
You can play some games and you can tweak things to where a 970 or 980 will run in 4K.
But it's not always a great experience.
So it's weird because there is this this architectural difference that we didn't understand before
between the 970 and the 980 in that the 980 has both of them have the same number of ROPs
which determines pixel throughput.
And that's really important for 4K because you've got a lot of pixels.
But it turns out that when you cut the number of SMs like they do on the 970, you actually
lower the pixel throughput of the card effectively because the SMs help determine the pixel throughput
in a way that we didn't understand until after our 980 review when a fellow reviewer Damien
at hardware.fr sent me a little note and said, hey, see that benchmark you result you got
where it was a lot lower fill rate on the 970?
Yeah, here's the explanation.
I did a little post about it, but it's totally his work.
He figured out by asking very specific questions of Nvidia why there was actually less capacity
for pixel throughput on the 970.
That said, I've been playing around with overclocking 980s and 970s a little bit.
And you can get back a lot of what you lose by taking your SMs away by turning up clock
speeds.
And what else I got right over here is a 4K monitor from Acer that is G-Sync capable.
And I'm finding out that even though in a lot of cases frame rates seem a little bit
marginal on a 970 or a 980 with a single card, that when you have G-Sync and you're in those
situations where it's like 40 some FPS, sometimes that's good enough when the monitor is updating
right when a frame was ready.
So I'll tell you this.
I actually did my Acer 4K G-Sync video really differently from how I've typically looked
at either monitors or video cards from a performance perspective before.
I did it no numbers because we lack the high speed camera equipment that we would need
to properly quantify G-Sync in a way that would be meaningful to viewers.
And FCAT's not working for it and basically the thing about G-Sync is it's more of a feel
than a number right now in terms of the equipment that we have to test it on our side anyway.
So the way I did it was instead of having FRAPS on and tuning my game settings so that
it was running at solid FPS and I knew that, I sat down and I cranked the detail on my
games without any FPS counter and then I reduced it until it felt like I was playing at 60
FPS smooth.
Then I all tabbed out, fired up FRAPS and had a look at my frame rates and I discovered
the exact same thing that you did.
I was getting dips down to 42, 43 and that felt butter smooth to me.
Yeah, and G-Sync is great for that.
So I don't know, that's kind of a tough decision in terms of pricing because those 4K G-Sync
monitors are not cheap, right?
Yeah, well there's one model.
So speaking of two competitors being better for excitement and pricing, ASUS is the only
show in town.
I think ASUS is supposed to have a 4K G-Sync monitor out before the end of the year though.
Okay, so sometime in the next three months, so we'll see.
But even not 4K G-Sync monitors can be extremely expensive still.
We do need to see a little bit more market flooding until it's going to be conceivable
for a lot of different people.
Okay, so Scott, sorry go ahead.
The G-Sync is awesome technology but it's not a good deal right now.
So speaking of not a good deal right now, it's kind of, there's so much confusion right
now about AMD's Project FreeSync.
Maybe you can clarify this because honestly I've even found myself getting a little bit
lost in the misinformation about it.
So there's a lot of people saying, okay, it's built into DisplayPort now, we're just going
to see it built into the next generation scalers and we're going to have support for FreeSync
across the board.
Then there's other information out there, some of which is coming from AMD themselves
saying, well actually hold on a second, it's only a small subset of our graphics cards
that are actually going to support the tech and it's not necessarily just going to be
part of DisplayPort and NVIDIA is coming out saying, yeah, we're not going to support it,
it's not just part of DisplayPort, what the hell is FreeSync?
Well FreeSync is AMD's project to create a variable refresh monitor and there's a VASIS
spec called Adaptive Sync, Adaptive Dash Sync I think, that is something that AMD kind of
shepherded through as an extension to DisplayPort in order to enable Project FreeSync.
I don't think it's a mandatory part of the spec but it's an extension.
It may be mandatory eventually but that doesn't mean that a monitor needs to have all of the
capabilities to support variable refresh.
AMD is working with monitor makers and with the scaler manufacturers to enable a variable
refresh capable set of hardware, set of displays, multiple products from different companies
and what we really haven't seen yet is a functioning prototype or anything like that.
So if you remember, G-Sync was demoed in September 2013, I think we talked at that event and
then NVIDIA said, oh, it'll be out in March and then summer and fall and it didn't come
out until really the end of summer or fall.
And I had plans with NVIDIA to potentially do like a wine tasting style event in Q1 where
they wanted monitors to be available and we were gonna have members of our community come
and do like a blind taste test type thing.
That was gonna be cool.
And that was gonna be like a super cool idea and then, it just didn't really work.
Nothing ever happened because there was nothing.
So I think the first step or probably the next step I hope is that we get to see a working
prototype but AMD is saying that those are on the way and then they're saying early next
year for the first products and these are product schedules, that's the best case I
think when you hear that but it could happen.
And the other question is how much cost will it add to a monitor to support this feature
and do it correctly?
And the path that NVIDIA has taken, they developed their own scaler completely from
scratch as far as I can tell instead of working with the scaler manufacturer, AMD is much
more collaborative here.
So presumably, those scaler guys already have built all the things that you find in a normal
monitors scaler and they only have to add variable refresh capability and presumably
they might be able to do things reasonably well, reasonably quickly without too much
trouble.
The other thing is NVIDIA's hardware is built off of what's called the FPGA, Field Programmable
Gate Array, which is an expensive chip that you can program to do almost anything.
And that's usually what you use in development but then you make the custom chip or an ASIC
that actually does this function and it's much lower cost.
And I think that probably the products that come to market from the scaler manufacturers
are I don't know for sure but I'd expect them to be ASICs and if they're not in the first
generation eventually they should be because I think what everybody wants is for the cost
premium to go down.
And that needs to happen because of more competition, it needs to happen because they use cheaper
hardware and it needs to happen because there are more suppliers.
50 bucks is in my mind for a 24 inch monitor what the adder needs to be in order for me
to really tell people guys it officially doesn't make sense to buy a monitor without some kind
of adaptive refresh rate.
And I think people aren't going to mind waiting for FreeSync to come in because it's not 50
bucks right now so it is a very hard decision to make and a lot of people are going to keep
monitors for a very long time so making monitor decisions sometimes isn't that oh sweet a
new graphics card came out let me upgrade it's more of a okay it's been six years seven
years maybe I should reset all my monitors.
Yeah and you know I think what you want to see is for AMD to succeed and for their stuff
to get out there in the market and then at some point for this to become ubiquitous and
what I mean by that is Nvidia has to cave and say okay we're going to support it if
you buy this monitor you can you can do it but adaptive refresh with the Radeon on the
GeForce but I don't think Nvidia has any interest in making that easy for AMD so they're going
to wait and take advantage of the fact that they're first because they they built G-Sync
and they did it first and they invested and they're going to wait and see and the other
thing that I'm not really clear on is if you look at that G-Sync module that the Nvidia
built it has a bunch of RAM on it as well as an FPGA yeah it has a and I think it's
a like a look-aside buffer and they need it every once in a while when they don't get
another frame from the GPU in time they've got to refresh the display because it's time
so they have to store a frame in the buffer and I don't know whether AMD will be able
to come up with an approach where that memory is not required but the same functionality
is available right it might be because they did they did show variable refresh on a laptop
display which is a little bit of a different type of setup at CES in the little demo they
showed me but whether or not they can pull that off is going to determine the cost too
and I'm still waiting to hear details.
So do you think Nvidia went with such an expensive solution just because they were in a hurry?
Yeah definitely and in fact if I would talk to Tom Peterson who's the engineer at Nvidia
who sort of spearheaded G-Sync and he said something interesting to me between the time
in March or so when they were supposed to launch G-Sync and the time in the summer when
it was really imminent I spoke with him and he said you know we really had some problems
we had to work out which is why we had the delay and thank goodness it was an FPGA because
they had to change the way that it worked fundamentally and if it had been a custom
chip they would have had to build another spin on the chip.
Right I think it also like of course they wanted to hurry but I think it also comes
into Nvidia seems to like doing things by themselves in a fairly locked down ecosystem
and AMD is that whole let's all come together and help everyone and we'll do it as one big
unit and those are two extremely different styles and I fully understand the style that
Nvidia went with because it's their style it makes sense.
Yeah they do tend to do that don't they?
Well you know they also tend to make money every quarter you know it's hard to I want
openness I prefer openness and I like sometimes like AMD's approach of we're a hardware maker
and we're not a software maker and we're going to be open but they are not invested they
didn't come up with G-Sync they didn't they're just sort of doing the me too thing with FreeSync.
Nvidia give them credit they invested in this and they want to get money back and I understand
that I'm sympathetic to that even though I think ultimately I hope everybody in the industry
wants the final destination for this to be that you can plug any monitor into any graphics
card and get variable refresh.
That is exactly what we want I mean actually I should clarify something last week on the
show speaking of Nvidia being closed I did a super pissed off rant for about five minutes
about how the shield controller only works on GeForce PCs right now did you know about
this Scott?
Yeah you know I saw that they're fixing it I got an email at the end of the show last
week yo dog sorry I was I was driving I couldn't reply we're fixing it it's coming it'll work
on any PC please stop talking about this please stop talking about this but you know you gotta
call them out on stuff like that because you don't want the standard to become that we're
all just kind of in our different silos and GeForce is its own thing and Radeon is its
own thing.
Can you imagine a controller that only worked on PCs with a certain brand of graphics cards
I mean we'd we'd be we'd be never mind consoles going away and converging with PCs PCs would
be converging into consoles at that point.
New Intel compatible keyboards oh no oh no that would be bad that's terrifying yeah but
you know if it happened to one thing it would leak into all the things.
I know it's horrible all right with the Samsung plant sorry the same well not Samsung plant
but Samsung was starting AMD development I guess we did we kind of talked about that
already why don't we just hey Scott which of our topics under the guest topics are you
are you most down to talk about do you remember do you even look I am I am easy whatever you
guys want to talk about if you want to talk more graphics if you want to talk any of the
other stuff out there then I'm happy to do it.
I want to talk about that 17,000 Mac botnet that got discovered oh wait that's impossible
Macs don't get viruses no no no surely Steve Jobs said they don't get viruses this isn't
a virus they're just all trying to be friends right Macs are more it's a more friendly operating
system this is the new social network it's joining a botnet you're being social with
other computers and try to help everyone to one goal just might not necessarily be your
goal or really anyone who's not sort of the one dude who set it up don't worry about it
it's cool it's not a virus so okay do you want to just those windows want to do a quick
rundown of what the heck happened here so this was a post from gizmodo.com I'm just
going to check this up on my screen while Luke gives us a rundown and then we'll we'll
move into the back door is called mac.backdoor.iworm because it has to be stealthy and use backdoor
in the name awesome essentially they have gained access to Macs and they use reddit
to connect them all together so basically when the Mac calls out it goes on to reddit
and finds a post which links it to a server on under a minecraft subreddit which is hilarious
and then they all link together through that so this guy's used a worm to grab all these
botnet computers and have them link all together through reddit's minecraft community okay
so maybe you can explain what's the problem with a botnet what exactly is a botnet and
what does it mean you can use botnets for a lot of different things a lot of the laws
around like you can't sue someone for their computer necessarily doing something happens
because of botnets so you can use a botnet to essentially a lot of a lot of people refer
them to them as zombies as well you can utilize all these computers to do things for you it's
like having a gigantic external cluster so you can use these to like DDoS a target or
just do do other things like essentially look like users so if you want to get a whole bunch
of hits on something that's a less aggressive way to use a botnet do we actually have 4400
viewers who knows maybe we have one who owns a lot of iMacs and Scott no he's not viewing
he's just looking through our video conferencing software right so he wouldn't even count yeah
sorry Scott you don't count as a viewer you can use them for large variants of things
but a lot of times it's just DDoS DDoS that kind of stuff bringing down websites being
a jerk in this case though I wonder if he's actually using it to look like users on Minecraft
servers I haven't read into it into that much but it would be pretty funny actually because
if you can make your Minecraft server look popular and then get people to come to it
and then actually do real microtransactions then you might make some money so Scott is
Apple imploding there's a lot of bad PR a lot yeah you know it is weird like the the
Ben Gate stuff that just was one of those tech stories that you could see it taking
on a life of its own like yeah the iPhone 6 it happened it was a big deal and then there
wasn't another story and so that one kind of came out on the weekend and it was like
the news to hit the news cycle perfectly everyone wanted more iPhone news and I don't know did
you watch the bin videos because I got up that morning and I went and I watched one
of those and I watched this guy's thumb just strain against this phone to bend it and I
thought that I'm not worried about that at all it's way too much force for me to ever
care you know I'm not gonna do that accidentally well you need to gain about a hundred pounds
then come on go to the gym those pecs or something but but I but it didn't matter because that
story filled a void right and it was like it was everybody who's like a Samsung fan
like loved it it didn't matter that it was true it just was there right but honestly
I don't think that that story happens and gets that big if it isn't for the fact that
everybody in the media who is reporting on that making it a big deal knows that when
they report on Apple there's a lot of response yeah right then and positive a lot of people
will chime in no matter what right yeah Apple's in trouble when people don't care about what
they do and they're a long way from that place right now yeah fair enough I mean there's
been other bad news too so there was the report that came out that Apple reportedly punished
a German magazine for doing an iPhone 6 bend test saying they would no longer be invited
to any of their events and they were basically cut off I mean how do you how do you feel
as an objective journalist in the IT industry about that kind of behavior from a manufacturer
because that well I want the D which we'll talk about later but um so I don't necessarily
care about like a like a paper style screen or not but I do want the round shape of a
watch and that being said pebble prices are dropping so they're reducing their price on
the standard pebble which is not what Linus has anymore you have the pebble steel I believe
that's right they're reducing the price on the standard pebble to around 90 USD this
is only in the states as far as I know to 90 USD and they're bringing the prices down
on their steel to 199 USD it's a pretty big difference do you think it's worth it from
the standard to the steel you know what I I it depends on it depends on what you want
out of your watch if you just want the functionality the functionality of them is literally exactly
the same they actually have the same hardware in them I mean they didn't even bother to
upgrade the battery on the steel which in my mind is is a little bit frustrating yeah
but I don't see any reason why they couldn't have made the steel you know a nine day battery
or something like that give me some kind of extra functionality the steel is all about
the look so if you wear your watch as a purely functional piece because you would like to
know what time it is and read text messages and all those other cool pebble apps get a
regular pebble right and then the handbooks if your watch is part of Amazon extension
hopefully they sell on Amazon if your watch is part of the look of you that you're trying
to achieve if it's a fashion statement then maybe the steel in my opinion the steel is
a great value I mean you can easily spend $200 on a watch and five ten fifteen times
that watch on a watch are insane that doesn't have that functionality there I think that's
what the steel is is it's a great marriage of functionality and a least a little bit
of style meters underwater if sorry what some of those super high-end watches are like oh
yeah but it'll work two thousand meters underwater and I'm like wow cool for when I'm in a submarine
next what for when I'm completely underwater and dead and out of oxygen awesome so Swift
Tech launches their 240x h240x I believe this was fairly stealthy I saw a bunch of the comments
on the forum thread about this posted by whirlwind oh I should jump up so the new patch from
oh 360 was posted on the forum by Ren the pebble price drops was posted on the forum
by Raph banan there's two A's there I don't know how to properly do that other than he
wins the literally entire world yeah win the world the whole thing everything that you
can possibly win it's one by him anyways I believe it was fairly stealthy because a whole
bunch of posters on the forum we're talking about how they were actually looking to buy
a 240x and then just randomly saw on Swift X website that there was a sorry they were
looking to buy a 220x and then they saw on the website that there was a 240x there's
I don't think there's any like massive changes other than the fact that is a dual 140 millimeter
copper radiator other than that I believe it's the same type of idea so they have a
full pump a full radiator reservoir attached to the radiator and then a full standard water
block so I think this is essentially as close as you can get to standard water cooling with
an AIO style unit out of anything would you agree with that probably yeah pretty much
I think it's cool how they hide the pump up behind the flow rate monitor in the top which
makes it look extremely compact but then still uses full-size components which is awesome
something that I appreciate a lot I don't see a lot of AIO is failing but it's still
nice to know that I have this full-size pump which I could honestly swap out if I really
needed to I like I like AIOs that are after the concept of being more like an actual liquid
cooling setup I think that's I think that's a great direction for them to go Swift X done
an okay job of making their AIOs drop in I think that their last generation one actually
did a better job of this of making it drop in because it did have the pump integrated
with the CPU block so you could mount the radiator in different places much more easily
whereas these ones really have to go on the top of your case but the newer ones so the
h220x and the h240x the fact that they are mounted in the top of the case but they're
much more expandable and much more reliable from what Swift X saying about them is also
great too so I mean maybe there's room for Swift X to have both options a less powerful
central CPU block based pump unit where you have more radiator flexibility and then these
H these X series ones to take care of people who are okay having it in the top only the
top and that is it that is gonna be very applicable in a couple days yeah I won't be doing that
accent when we're not so much probably not a terrible idea yeah so for those of you who
don't know this already Luke and I are doing a German road trip excursion yeah we're gonna
be touring the Sennheiser factory which is gonna be pretty cool to be sweet we're gonna
meet like the dude who designs like the headphones that's awesome which is gonna be cool actually
so stoked but more stoked for Cherry MX so we're going to see Cherry Corps manufacturing
facility as well so next week is gonna be all about the German engineering and the German
manufacturing so both for keyboard switches and for headphones both Luke and I I guess
if you were gonna pick like you know half a dozen companies that we think are pretty
cool and we tend to really like what they do I think Cherry would be on the list and
Sennheiser would be on the list as well yeah so we're pretty pretty stoked to check that
out definitely stoked on that oh no you go that was posted no that was not posted by
yet right worldly speaking of things that are we should probably check out Windows 10
not Windows 9 it's funny because we made that joke Windows 9 Windows Windows no and we were
right yep actually that is kind of true and the reason they did it was because they wanted
to separate the next Windows from Windows 8.1 as much as possible basically they didn't
want people to feel like it was an iterative improvement on Windows 8 which honestly I
don't think Windows 9 would have sounded like if they called it Windows 8.2 that probably
would have sounded like an iteration super drunk to be completely honest that's all I
really have to say about that I mean super dumb it's funny because they made the joke
about we're gonna call it Windows 1 yeah yeah yeah and they weren't even self-aware enough
as far as I can tell to realize that just because they didn't call it one doesn't mean
that what they did was any less stupid it's still not how you count Vista 7 8 10 come
on they can't even hold it together for three releases in a row actually yes they can 95
98 2000 there you go okay so they can't even hold it together for four releases in a row
yeah oh wait well hold on a second Demi came first but it's oh but Emi is Milena still
referencing a year oh come on come on now no I know I agree with you but they like sort
of tried at least they didn't just completely skip a number they weren't like 2014 but it's
2000 but we're gonna release 2014 because it sounds much better one of my favorite quotes
was I don't remember exactly what he said but essentially it was along the lines of
once you once you fire up Windows 10 and you see how awesome it is you won't question why
we jumped a number it's like actually that has nothing to do with anything ever at any
point in time that makes no sense at all because even if it was a massive change like XP to
Vista it wasn't like you didn't go like XP to XP 3 because what that would make any sense
anyways I've seen quite a few people that have tried it so far and it seems kind of
generally broken to be completely honest the GY is apparently far from complete there's
a lot of problems it seems very unpolished there's a tons of missing innovations all
that kind of stuff and their biggest feature that they're toting is the return of the start
menu which is fantastic but but also a little frustrating because when they first showed
off this hybrid start menu start screen thing it was being pitched as a feature that we
were gonna see in the next update to Windows 8.1 yes and move hold on we're not doing that
okay hold on a second hold off for a couple months now we're gonna throw you guys this
Windows 10 preview which isn't gonna come out until late 2015 yeah we're months away
we're almost a year away from Windows 10 actually being something you can install on your system
and run as a production OS production OS yeah okay because you can get the technical preview
right now but it is right now totally broken balls and it has some cool stuff like now
instead of just being able to snap windows to the side side by side reading you can snap
to corners so you can actually have four things on screen something folks with large monitors
are going to be pretty impressed with and then another really cool thing about it is
you can actually have virtual desktops it's funny because I've seen virtual desktops working
as far back as third-party UI modifiers for Windows XP I was good yeah I was gonna say
like as far back as super far back and yesterday because they could work now yes they're not
new so so it's not a new idea but basically a virtual desktop would be different different
different desktops depending on what you want to do so you can have a different set of applications
open and have them spread out a different way depending on what kind of thing you want
to do so for example you could have like steam and you play and origin and you said Warner
Brothers maybe that Warner Brothers one that they're working on anyway you could have one
virtual desktop that has all those pop-ups so all your game libraries are right there
in front of you you could have another one that has you know Chrome up here and then
you know word over here and something else so like a video over here so you can sit and
watch streams while you research and do homework for example and then you are supposed to it's
a little glitchy right now especially for multi-monitor users you're supposed to be
able to switch between them that's pretty friggin cool yes it is but it's also been
a previous feature of Windows kind of been a feature of Linux for an extremely long time
yes and is able to be done by third-party applications already one thing that I know
that's definitely gonna come up with a whole bunch of search results I just hope they at
least divide it in a very good way and they don't put web search results at the top or
it's extremely configurable either one I'll be happy about one thing that we were talking
about was we were questioning whether or not those tiles were gonna be extremely configurable
because I talked about how it could be pretty cool if you wanted to put like certain websites
that you go to a lot and then a whole bunch of games and stuff right but I didn't want
it to like just be an auto population or something like that it is a configurable space right
and one thing that could be really interesting actually is if they made it so that those
switching desktops were able to have their own unique start menus mm-hmm so maybe you
could have a production production desktop we have like Excel word all that junk and
like work websites in the nice kind of like I'm gonna say Metro that's not the right word
modern UI style tiles on the right hand side and then you switch to like your gaming one
it's like gaming websites linus tech tips calm steam all that crap yeah I'd love that
that would be pretty cool I don't know if that's a thing but that would be cool yeah
we'll have to look into it I mean honestly I've been gearing up for the trip to Germany
making sure that we're gonna have some videos while we're gone we've actually got some great
videos queued up we're gonna be taking a look at the 5820 K so that's Intel's lower cost
six core on lg8 2011 versus the 5930 K and because the main difference between these
chips is like a 6% difference in clock speed and that's it except that the 5820 K has quite
a few fewer it's actually got 12 fewer PCI Express lanes so multi GPU support is limited
in terms of how much bandwidth that can deliver to each card so we take a really close look
at how that affects performance then we've got another really great one where we're going
to be looking at SLI scaling with GTX 980 from one GPU to two to three to four at 4k
how it scales and how the gameplay experience is affected by adding more graphics cards
so I'm pretty I'm pretty stoked on those will be pretty cool videos and then I even have
my ultimate keycap replacement guide yes I've been working on a lot lately I think that's
scheduled for next Tuesday night it's an ultimate guide so remember guys our ultimate guides
are the best videos we can make so our build guides things like that graphics card water
block installation guide although that's a bit of an older ultimate guide we're better
now but Luke's is looking like it's shaping up to be pretty darn cool the only thing I'm
worried about is well it's being edited I will not be in the country yes and it's very
long so I don't know I hope that works out quite well but we're not entirely sure and
then one of the most exciting things of my week because anytime any news comes from Mr.
Elon Musk at all ever I get super excited there's more information about the Tesla model
D so all he released was a picture of like a garage door that was partially open and
you could just kind of see like the headlights and a little bit of the front of the car but
people are not entirely sure what it is it could be that cheap well cheap quote-unquote
car that Tesla has been talking about for a little while or that might not be the reveal
it could be something else completely different because they've already been talking with
a little bit people are unsure I personally think it's probably gonna be the cheap one
yeah that they've been talking about especially because the front of the car looked like a
car and not a different type of thing like an SUV yeah I saw some speculation oh maybe
they'll unveil a truck but it looked too low it didn't look like a truck yeah it looked
like a car so it's probably the cheaper version of a Tesla that they've been talking about
for a little while and they've also said that there's other information coming soon which
is probably talking about right by the way that was posted on the forum by Heisenblurgh
Heisenblurgh thank you Heisenblurgh and then this next topic which is Elon Musk saying
that Tesla's will be able to self-drive 90% of the time was posted on the forum by Sherman
Tanker that's incredible that is okay sorry he hasn't said the date yet that's the incredible
part uh what is it by 2015 2015 coming earlier oh wait no Model X is coming early 2015 so
yeah sometime next year which is pretty insane and I love how smug he is about everything
and then he just manages to do it that's my favorite part about Elon Musk we're a Silicon
Valley company so if you know we're not leading the way then you know all is not right in
the universe basically yeah because I mean it's not like other car manufacturers aren't
talking about self-driving or excuse me as Musk calls it autopilot yeah which I personally
think is way cooler oh yeah like 100 self-driving car or car with autopilot badass yeah I want
a car with autopilot it's not like other guys aren't talking about it GM's promised a hands-free
mode for some 2017 models and most are speculating 2020 as a reasonable year for the release
of self-driving cars I want autopilot cars Musk claims it's months away from retail for
his 90% autopilot and some of the things that he's talking about that would be in the 10%
are stuff like difficult to manage like terrain right and like debris on the road it's not
like they can't they can't just kind of cruise around right now it's it's the bad situations
that you want your car to be able to handle can't necessarily and you know the funny thing
about it is these things that self-driving or autopiloted cars have to overcome now are
mostly to do with other drivers being hazardous so they have to overcome this just to gain
enough acceptance to eventually make it to a future where it doesn't matter because every
other car on the road will behave in a predictable manner yeah but then there is other things
and bizarre and that is bizarre and you are completely correct but there is other reasons
why they might have to be careful too if if a house falls over and there's debris in the
road or if there's if there's some sort of rock fall adverse weather effects that are
somehow unpredictable in some way yeah all these kinds of things yes it gets knocked
over but those are much less frequent than some drunk dude crashing into a wall and making
debris go all over the road so that is more what they have to take care of I know Elon
Musk I I tweeted him a hilarious thing about wanting the D and I think half of the entire
internet did as well and he replied the next day saying like oh the internet's hilarious
that wasn't my intention I don't believe you at all yeah no no no because okay he wanted
to release cars in the order of S E and X because he thought that would be funny and
then announcing like asking people if they want to know more about the D yeah so much
innuendo there's no way that's not an intentional so intentional oh my goodness I love it and
that's hilarious and it's cool to see someone running one of these massive very important
companies being able to like have a joke about these have a sense of humor about this stuff
I mean why does product naming have to be so stuffy yeah you know have some fun with
it I mean I'm sure that at least a handful of you have noticed that our secondary channel
is called tech quickie and that our primary format is called fast as possible come on
now more people you know the number of people who have pointed that out to me as if I didn't
know by the way your channel is very like innuendo not sure if you do yeah I find jokes
on the WAN show sometimes I thought perhaps you didn't notice that did you know that fast
as possible is an acronym for something else you know how long it came us to it took us
to come up with that name yeah eventually we found one that fit was like wow that's
awesome yeah with that yeah even tech quickie even tech quickie we we we couldn't even find
a channel name that was available that we were happy with we actually bought tech quickie
for a gtx 670 and a three terabyte hard drive I shipped it to some guy in Singapore and
he transferred the channel to me that's hilarious yeah it actually had a bunch of videos on
it so he transferred the channel to me I knew them all we started over nice he wasn't gonna
do the deal with me until he um until he saw our primary channel and he was like oh yeah
you guys are like you guys are pretty cool you guys do cool stuff you need this more
than I do oh but I would definitely like some hardware I was like okay man sure dude you
got this that's kind of cool I didn't actually know that sorry I knew we acquired it through
some way and I know we traded Harvard but I didn't know like the whole yeah no he didn't
even want to do it because it was actually tied to an email address that he used so he
was like yeah I'm not using the YouTube channel but I'd really rather keep this and I kind
of went dude please we've got big plans we've got stuff we want to do this is important
yeah anyway yeah okay okay every once in a while he like he checks back and goes like
oh cool I don't know maybe have you heard from him at all or no not at all that's interesting
yeah funny hey anyways I guess we can move on to like real yeah I want to thank Scott
for coming on the show yeah great guest lots of great information I know that some of it
might have been a little bit sort of higher level than some of the stuff that we normally
talk about but guys Scott knows a ton and everything he said there was really great
information he's one of the most trustworthy voices in the entire tech industry okay he's
a true journalist he cares so much about the truth and the real information so you guys
should definitely check out the tech report definitely pay attention to what Scott's doing
especially if you were captivated by his presence here on our show he does have a podcast so
you guys should check that out as well normally I would like for him to be able to outro himself
but unfortunately our Skype connection was lost and we can't bring him back on so there
you go guys big thanks to Scott for coming on the show today and we thought that was
great yep that was actually absolutely fantastic was the PCI Express 4.0 conversation no mainstream
no it wasn't on the mainstream yeah it was actually like my favorite part I know I wanted
to knowledge bombs in the middle of no I know I wanted to bring him back I wanted to come
back to that while we were actually live on the show so Scott was talking about PCI Express
4.0 which is basically we've reached the limit of what can be achieved by connecting graphics
cards to other things and in the system via copper and PCI Express 4.0 is going to be
probably server only technology at least for quite some time because of how expensive it's
going to be to implement with like repeaters signal repeaters built into a motherboard
just to get the signal far enough yeah because they have to make it so ridiculously tight
because to get bandwidth that fast over copper it has to be pretty short really really cool
so he was talking about how they're gonna have to get into other technologies outside
of copper and apparently they're already working on this and it's kind of maybe we're kind
of working yeah oh man that was actually really interesting conversation that was my yeah
my favorite part about him having him on the show was that and that's not in the main show
unfortunate yeah don't worry we'll we'll we'll have him back at some point Nexus 6 specs
have been leaked so the original article here is from Android police and this was posted
on the forum by top war gamer thank you top war gamer for posting that let's go ahead
and pop this up on the screen this is the Motorola Nexus 6 a 5.9 inch quad HD display
with a 3200 milliamp hour plus battery dual front-facing speakers and more and I hate
it why it's a phablet oh yeah okay it's almost six inches yeah I mean I understand that no
I don't understand this well how big is it I know it's not like I okay I understand having
a phablet in your product lineup yeah I get that but Google's Nexus line is the one phone
that pardon the pun is supposed to be one size fits all and a phablet does not fit all
equity period oh no there's lots of different sizes of DS that are needed yeah so the the
Note 4 is kind of a huge phone and this is 0.2 larger because the Note 4 is 5.7 inches
this is 5.9 so this is extremely frustrating to me because I already find a five inch phone
to be pretty much the limit for okay and I always used to play devil's advocate and say
that I liked bigger phones like I have bigger hands or whatever but I actually really like
this phone you've been using the Moto X Gen 1 X and whenever I use bigger phones now I'm
like you know what I can reach the other corner I don't want to have to reach for the other
corner it's easier when I can just click on it and I know some people are gonna like destroy
me for that but like it doesn't it doesn't matter I use my phone more for like production
style stuff so I'm like like emails that's content utility stuff yeah I'm not watching
videos on it really I'll listen to music doesn't matter having a huge screen for music because
it just sits in my pocket so like I listen to music I read emails I read documents I
type things up I reply to emails text messages phone calls that kind of stuff so I don't
actually necessarily care about a huge screen anymore I used to because I used to game on
my phone a little bit right but I'm so over gaming on my phone yeah and like especially
with Smash Bros which is awesome I can actually talk about it now because it released this
morning oh yeah you've been playing it for how long like two weeks so good the only unfortunate
part was now that I actually had to go get my own copy because they get the review copy
back it's all saved on the card oh so I lost all my progress go Nintendo but the stop weird
noise the Hyrule Warriors one it saves locally to your Wii U oh so I had to get another copy
of that but then I still have my save nice so I went further in that game and Smash is
more about just fighting so it's not that big of a deal but yeah tons of fun and I would
way rather play that than something on my phone right so I just hold my 2ds with me
and then everyone knows what a shield lover I am yeah so then you have the shield and
like if I didn't have a 2ds I would go with the shield I would not get with a phone with
shield at 200 bucks that's a no-brainer for me yeah for a proper controller yeah I don't
know I mean I'm not really into phone gaming so I don't see the point I don't know I was
happy when I first saw this before I saw the size because I was looking at stuff like oh
okay so they brought forward-facing speakers that's cool they fix the battery problem that's
cool and they have a lot of the other features that that the other Moto X would have yeah
which is that's also cool yeah it's very similar to the new Moto X so it's got the same aluminum
frame around the outside looks very similar other than being larger but ring flash a lot
of the a lot of the innovations here aren't really that meaningful to me especially things
like a quad HD display I reviewed the g3 there's a lot more to a display than resolution so
much more there's a whole world of contrast and color reproduction out there that has
nothing to do with how many pixels you can cram into a space and that's one thing I brought
up in my note for video from CTIA was that they had an extremely high resolution display
on the note for but they didn't sacrifice what it looked like right so the the color
still looks really good which was not a thing on the g3 well that and because Samsung's
gonna be using AMOLED they're not gonna lose contrast the way that the way that a typical
LCD will like the the HTC one m8 is an LCD screen but it's got great contrast which makes
it easier to use outside than the g3 in spite of all the pixels because it's contrast ratio
so the difference between the darkest darks and the whitest whites is not as high whereas
AMOLED is able to turn the pixels right off when they're not being used so you'll typically
have excellent contrast so that's why something like that is gonna work a little bit better
and while you might not necessarily care about the high resolution on a note for because
you're probably not gonna be able to know the difference if you get something like a
gear VR you'll be able to tell the difference when it's right there in front of your face
I'm kind of curious to try gear VR it's surprisingly good but there is also drawbacks have we talked
about on the show before yeah we have yeah okay so I'm not gonna dive into it much but
I think it's gonna be retail available and not way too long so we might be able to try
one out if we get a note for it's one phone compatible right now right they're hoping
to open it up at some point but as of right now it's one phone compatible right all right
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site also sponsoring the show today dollarshaveclub.com why do we like dollarshaveclub well because
shaving is good he doesn't necessarily shave his face but man that doesn't mean he doesn't
use razors I do yeah there you go yeah I definitely there's lots of things you can need to shave
with dollarshaveclub and our new I didn't even get that right away and our new sort
of innovative thing the Dollar Shave Club never told us to say is even though they market
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and you look at the kinds of podcasts that they're sponsoring they they look to be going
after men is there any reason why ladies might not want a high quality razor delivered straight
to their door once a month so they actually had a viewer chime in after that stream when
we brought up the lady thing yeah bring up that his girlfriend prefers his Dollar Shave
Club razors and now uses them as well so we weren't even that far off base looking for
a gift idea for the lady and looking for a way to not so subtly hint that she might need
to do some trimming dollarshaveclub.com slash Linus head over there and give the gift of
getting yourself slapped in the face but then potentially it turning into something worthwhile
later on down the road yes wow wow yeah I went there all right so this is really cool
news most project our modules will be hot swappable thanks to modified Android L this
was posted on techno Buffalo we should have John back his baby must be quite a bit older
now yeah John John Rettinger from techno Buffalo he was one of the best guests we've ever had
we gotta we gotta bring him back maybe when maybe when Nexus 6 drops or something like
that you bring him on to talk about it I haven't checked with him so obviously no promises
but he did say he'd come on the show again at some point but the coolest thing about
this besides being able to swap you know cameras let's say for example you can swap the battery
while it's running it's like what what are they Tesla okay you can't do it while it's
running but you can do it very quickly on a test yes faster than you can fill up your
car with gas but how cool is that okay so project our I've gone from being extremely
skeptical to being extremely hopeful to being extremely not interested because I was sure
it was gonna be very very low-end stuff to being pretty interested again all of a sudden
it's got it's got a little bit of onboard it's got a little bit of onboard power so
you will actually be able to potentially mid call swap battery packs for true continuous
use and like I've had people that I work with in the past carry around multiple batteries
with them with their phone they never actually plugged it this way this was one specific
guy that I worked with he would always have two spare batteries with him at all points
in time and the battery in his phone and he would never plug in his phone to charge those
getting low he'd turn it off swap the battery out turn it back on and keep going this like
that hey and he would just always charge his batteries so this phone will be perfect for
him I know he won't get it because he works for a very specific company but this phone
would have been perfect for him and I do know people that would like doing that as well
because like when when there's there's that what is it commercial yeah there's a commercial
going on right now where the guy his boss calls him and he's on a golf course and his
boss is yelling at him for something and the phone only has four percent battery left and
it just dies during the call and he's like now I don't have a job anymore we had one
of these yeah I'm sure that's gonna be the ad for it no no there is an ad right now oh
where the guy loses his job while he's on a golf course because his phone dies no I
just mean I'm sure that's gonna be the ad for project our I'm sure that's gonna be like
exactly what they're going for I think it's probably gonna be it's gonna be more about
the Google Play type store that they currently envision for parts where you'll be able to
shop lenses or shop processors or whatever else and just quickly and easily order new
swappable parts for your project our phone I think it's incredibly cool and I'm now getting
pretty excited that would be cool because one thing I'm worried about is taking my Moto
X with me to Germany sorry um and not being not your mom is it no no oh okay bye thank
you bye um is my pictures gonna suck right freaking cameras terrible right like it's
it's not good it's specifically not good right and like I don't have it here you can borrow
mine what are you gonna be using this I don't know if you look at the lens you might know
why I was gonna lend it to you oh yeah that's not good yeah I cracked the lens on my one
MA I contacted HTC support so maybe I'll maybe I'll tweet my results but I'm contacting them
just as a regular guy through the regular support channels and I'm gonna see how they
treat me so far I'm warning though I had I had one lady tell me that for sure it was
gonna be covered and then she wanted me to check with my carrier to see if they would
deal with the RMA for me first before calling them back and they'd escalate me and I kind
of went well I didn't get the phone through my carrier so probably not my carrier wasn't
interested so I called back and the second lady said we can't guarantee that it's gonna
be covered and you're gonna have to pay to send the phone and I'm okay with paying to
send the phone to their RMA Center that's pretty standard in the tech industry but if
they don't cover this cracked lens I'm gonna be pretty not impressed because the only way
that that lens could be cracked is if there's something bloody well wrong with it because
the rest of it all around it absolutely perfect immaculate and this lens is fine it's a bit
of a known issue that that main camera lens cover is is not that great there are things
you can do if you use a very mild abrasive like toothpaste you can get the coating off
of it that has been causing it to appear kind of scratchy and then it's fine and but but
with it cracked obviously that ain't gonna help me much so let's see I it's kind of fun
being a normal customer every once in a while for me and just seeing how people treat me
but yeah I was even thinking about possibly maybe getting that camera that Austin will
never stop talking about really anyone but I'm not going to because I don't want to spend
that much money how much is it 800 bucks oh wow yeah you don't seem like the kind of person
who I don't think you've spent $800 on anything since I met you other than your car no definitely
not yeah so I don't know what's new computer hardware he just steals it people ask me if
I get stuff from work and I'm like no I take stuff from work anyways yeah oh well all right
Facebook is doing an about face on their real name policy so the this was posted my by mega
zero on the forum and the original source is the Wall Street Journal okay so let's go
ahead and pop that on there there we go hopefully that'll load at some point which like okay
I find this slightly hilarious because while I feel bad for the people that had their names
forcibly revealed I may or may not and people that I know may or may not have Facebook accounts
under their gamer tags that have existed for a very long time that have never been changed
which last names with like first and last names that are definitely not real right but
like not even real names well the issue here was that it seemed to be a person or group
of people targeting drag queens and drag kings and reporting them okay so Facebook because
the tools are mostly automated just kind of went through and and forced all these people
to submit library cards or gym memberships or whatever else to to validate their names
and of course they couldn't because they go by let's say for example a stage name yeah
that is not their real name legally and and so basically it was a targeted attack on these
people forcing them to reveal their legal names and that is why Facebook is kind of
going well hold on a second that's not really what we meant to do here and they're reevaluating
the policy saying well hold on a second what we were really trying to achieve is to have
people use a name that they use in real life not necessarily that we wanted everyone to
force forcibly reveal their legal name because honestly they want they want a name that they
can target advertisements at yes that's what they want yeah that's all they care about
yes they don't care about getting your real like government-issued name but they want
the name that you're using online so they can target ads of you that's right so they're
not really trying to be oppressive in that way they just want it just happened yeah because
automated tools yeah reasons why people are scared about automated driving speaking of
automated and Facebook and scary uh Facebook's developing giant unmanned planes that are
designed to fly for months at a time this was posted by f nod on the forum thank you
for that and the original article here is from the BBC so they're planning to have the
home fly above the weather which i believe is yeah 60 000 to 90 000 feet which is huge
it's supposed to be about six or seven Priuses in length i love how they're using this as
a unit of measurement six or seven Priuses in length which i believe is about two linuses
so we're looking at about 12 to 14 linuses and then and then like about or about two
school buses yeah there you go and uh where is it about the weight of four tires of a
Prius so weighs basically nothing wow that's incredible i think that's why like they're
supposed to be solar powered for one which is insane that's that's incredible that's
that is kind of incredible so i'm assuming if they're solar powered they're gonna have
to be some type of uh propeller base because you're gonna have to move something instead
of having a jet so that's interesting not entirely sure how they're going to do that
i don't think there's a ton of information about that yet but it could be interesting
they're planning on getting wi-fi to a whole bunch of different places in the world with
the intent of totally not just advertising to even more people but getting more people
online to help with uh just spread of information so you can get people out of poverty and help
with child mortality and stuff like that yeah all all the stuff a lot of the stuff that's
going to be achieved thanks to this initiative is going to be extremely positive oh yeah
definitely not i was just kind of poking fun but i mean i think you know if we look at
why facebook invests in anything are they ultimately after themselves and their own
interests of course their company they're going to do that publicly traded company low
no less they have to justify everything they do to shareholders so so wait till the shareholders
meeting and then you'll figure out why they're actually doing it yeah exactly but it will
be overwhelmingly positive for a lot of people unless the internet access is only to facebook
but i doubt that'll be a thing all right day 028 posted this on the forum and kano has
evidently shipped their built learn to code computer kits to the first batch of backers
we actually got one yeah so we did back it and um i'm actually gonna have luke probably
do the review on this when he gets back but do you want to tell people a little bit about
the kano either way before i get people into it i'm gonna have you as part of the video
video because part of the idea is that it's supposed to take uh hacking around with code
and learning uh computational thinking child's play not that's that's just kind of so i'm
a child no it's supposed to make it easier and it's supposed to make it easier to understand
and just having instead of just having it be raw code all over the place yeah there'll
be examples and it'll build you up you'll learn as you as you play with it and i want
you to try it as someone who hasn't programmed just to see how the how the like barrier of
entry is so we'll get both perspectives yeah because the barrier of entry to coding can
be brutal for a lot of people and then once you start rolling it's a lot easier but the
barrier of entry sucks and a big part of this project is to lower or lessen that barrier
of entry so it should be pretty interesting but it's essentially a little raspberry pi
single board linux based computer that has some of their software on it which helps teach
you how to code it's not the most super complicated thing but it is a very cheap way to get into
programming and it can essentially build you up a whole computer you just have to add like
a screen stuff yep they're gonna get into modular components at some point in the future
here screens battery sensors lights robotics and all kinds of stuff like that so the future
looks pretty bright for these guys they actually just brought in uh the former ceo of match.com
as their chief operating officer yeah i think right now it comes with a keyboard right keyboard
a little touchpad on it i think so all you need to do is hook it up to a screen so if
you walk around with this thing you could have the the power brick and the little keyboard
and the mini raspberry pi unit you just have to hook it up to a screen you're good to go
anywhere which is actually pretty cool all right so i think we've got uh probably a couple
more a couple more topics here and then we might just have to wrap things up sure what
do you think is next ea finally fixed battlefield 4 and apparently they're releasing some stuff
to sims like pools which probably should have been there in the in the beginning but they're
not charging people for it which a lot of people were expecting so you're getting uh
swimming pools ghosts and star wars themed content along with some new careers paths
and all that should be free cool which i don't necessarily care about but we did hammer them
for that so we should have that positive so we should we should be nice when they do good
things we should all right ea we'll be nice but ubisoft we're still mad at you yeah you
didn't make shadows of mordor i'm really excited to play it but i've seen some complaints about
the combat still being kind of simplistic but i want to i want to really play it for
myself before i before i judge it here uh there's a good post on the forum comparing
it to the batman series um especially the combat saying it's just not as deep and it's
very frustrating to play without uh telegraph attack indicators yeah because the the telegraphs
are not as clear and it ends up a lot of the time just being a cluster hump of of bad dudes
around you and it's kind of hard to manage and then playing with telegraphs on pretty
easy so yeah that makes sense i i you played the batman batman series a lot more thoroughly
than i did so you'll probably have more input on that side yeah i barely touched the batman
series so i won't really even know um i know when i play i'm gonna try and play with a
little telegraph things but i'm probably gonna get murdered but i don't necessarily mind
dying in games right as long as it's possible for me to keep progressing yeah i'm okay as
long as it's fair yeah yeah make it fair i mean not like warcraft 2 where you would play
a 1v1 against a computer on an eight player map and then if you watch the replay or just
turn off fog of war with a cheat you could watch their first soldier or grunt walk straight
to your base it's like come on at least search like at least try to search at least pretend
to like hardcode it in so they look in one place that you're not before so so you always
knew you had to build one guard tower before anything else so that you could deal with
that stupid first and second attack kind of brutal yeah so i don't know i'll probably
try it the hard way just because it sounds kind of fun and the combat does seem pretty
simplistic so far and removing that will make the combat not simplistic at all so i don't
know we'll see all right well i think that's pretty much it for the show here today guys
um thank you for watching again big thanks to scott for being our guest big thanks to
squarespace for being our sponsor and dollar shave club for being our other sponsor and
uh we'll see you guys again next week um don't worry we know what's causing the connectivity
problems and we will get that resolved before the show next week so stay tuned for that
thanks for watching and uh if you missed any of the show today the whole thing uninterrupted
will be up in the archive on youtube oh whoops
oh there's a lot of people asking about the 1 million subscriber giveaway that's already
been announced and the winners are linked under last week's land show that's that's
done i've actually got the uh the the gaming notebook sitting at ncix ready to ship out
to the winners so yeah good stuff all right see you guys