Here we go.
We're live!
It's WAN Show time.
Luke is at PAX in Boston.
Thank you for asking.
James is here.
James is here.
Yay!
New Luke.
Discount Luke.
Discount Luke said everyone.
Sorry we're late, you guys.
I have to confess that it was not entirely my fault.
James was at least partially to blame.
Go on.
Well, James distracted me with his marvelous beard.
I spent 25 minutes just staring at it today, rather than working,
which happens to be exactly the amount of time that I'm late.
Yvonne looks confused and worried.
Well, she shouldn't be confused, but she can be a little worried if she'd like.
She knows by now.
In all seriousness, guys, we have got...
Oh, apparently the left ear is not getting the right amount of attention.
Oh, crap.
I legitimately don't know how to fix that.
Put your headphones in mono.
Yeah, that may actually be the solution because I don't remember which dial does what.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, yep, nope.
I don't actually know how that stuff works.
So there you go.
Apparently left and...
Why do people change these things?
Why would anyone change that?
Once again, we didn't touch it all week.
And once again, it's different.
Gremlins.
I swear there are gremlins living in it.
So what's actually going on is I have been in a mad sprint to get a bunch of stuff done
because I am going to China.
I will be gone all next week, but there will still be videos
because this week, instead of being on time for WAN Show, I was shooting two videos.
One's actually pretty cool.
The other one's garbage.
Yeah, the other one's kind of lame.
Yeah, no, one of them, Intel released an entire lineup called Xeon W
that as far as we could tell is basically their core series high-end desktop processors
with a Xeon sticker over top of Core i9
and some ECC support kind of ticked on in the microcode
or with a non-lasered connection somewhere in the chip or something along those lines.
At least that's what we thought.
And that turned out to be very true.
So that's going to be interesting.
So you can see what you're paying an extra as much as $500, $600 for
depending on what kind of a currency you use.
I'm just mad. That was like a spoiler.
Yeah, I guess it's kind of a spoiler.
But I mean, people who watch the WAN Show, we want to spoil them.
They're nice people. They're good people.
You're the best.
Second one is actually on the Lenovo X1 Carbon.
Really nice machine.
But like everything this year, it is not quite perfect,
which will drive me to madness at some point
because you've got either 1080p with touch
or 1440p with HDR, but no touchy.
Is there any technical reason for that?
Actually, I remember talking to them back at CES
and I managed to get not a marketing person, which is always awesome
when you manage to find the engineering guy
that's kind of like back at the back of the booth
or kind of sipping a coffee.
They don't let me talk to people.
I'm here, but realistically I'm not really supposed to say anything.
So you go find that guy and he'll be like,
yeah, I wanted that too, but there was some issue with this.
I don't remember what the reason was.
It seemed to be a fairly good one.
Anyway, we actually had a great chat.
But you remember a technical reason.
It wasn't just they're trying to hit a particular price point.
There was a business reason.
There was a compelling enough reason
because I remember we had a long chat
where we were discussing sort of the stagnation
of display technology in the PC space.
No one does anything until Apple does it.
Because you think about it, a PC up till the very high end
would be like 1366 by 768.
Remember that horrible sort of HD resolution
that they were pushing for a while?
Freaking awful.
And that was like the norm until Apple came out
and was like, okay, no retina.
Retina is a thing now.
And then everyone raced to retina.
But it all feels kind of like it's driven
by just responsiveness rather than trying to innovate
in a way that's meaningful to the consumer.
So I would look at notebook displays
and I would go, why are we trying to sell 4K?
Why aren't we just running a sensible resolution
like 2560 by 1440 and doing it at a higher refresh rate?
That's what I'd like to see.
I don't mind seeing features like HDR, for example,
but I don't necessarily want to compromise on them.
So yeah, to be clear, we are trying to fix the audio.
But for now, what I would recommend is that you use the...
I'm watching a podcast, but my kids are in the next room
and I need to hear if they're crying technique.
I can't do one headphone.
Really? Why?
I can't do it. I don't know.
It's psychological.
It falls out?
No, no, no, no. It's just the sound of it.
I think I'm focusing on the fact that one of my ears
is getting worn out faster than the other
and I need them to be balanced.
What?
That's insane.
I can see it. It could be insane.
It just bugs me.
So, and okay, let's say that I do subscribe to you.
Oh, wait, it's too loud. Anthony.
Just scream at him.
Yeah, I'm between a rock and a hard place.
No, no, it's fine. I'll message him.
Technology.
Let's see him walking away.
So let's say that I do subscribe to your theory
that listening to headphones is going to wear out my ears.
Wouldn't I want to wear them out less?
Okay. No, it's not the fact that...
So I would use just one for a bit, right?
Here, I'll show you the technique I came up with.
I call it the James is crazy,
but maybe just crazy enough for it to work technique.
I'm going to listen for a little while here.
I'm going to listen for a little while here.
I actually miss very little of my program.
But you're saving on 50% ear erosion.
So, ear erosion.
Okay, here's the thing. It's not...
Hold on just a sec.
I hate you so much.
It's not that they're getting used or worn out
like your brakes on the car. That's fine.
It's that they're getting used unequally.
Okay, all right, all right, all right.
But this was just like the seed
that resulted in me just hating the feeling of it now.
Right.
This is like when I was like 12 or something.
Right.
Oh, man.
Luke, he knew I wouldn't check.
So he went out of his way to message me and tell me,
make sure that you change the title of the land show
because I'm changing it for the thing that I'm doing at PAX.
Oh,
Fridays,
1700.
Can we talk about news while you do that?
What? You want to talk about news?
You want the work that you do on this show
to actually like be for something?
Yeah, sometimes.
No, that's madness.
Yeah, fine.
Okay, what do you want to talk about?
Okay, well, there's a thread on our forum
posted by Aluminum Tech, also known as Aluminium Tech.
And this thread is about the Facebook Messenger app
and how Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook this week,
confirmed that Facebook does indeed scan your messages,
whether they're pictures or text or whatever,
make sure that they conform with community guidelines
before actually sending it to the recipient.
So if you send something that's against their guidelines,
like hate speech or inciting genocide or something like that,
they may not actually deliver that message
to whoever you're talking to,
which definitely has some benefits.
But the thread on our forum kind of erroneously implies
that we're not just talking about Facebook Messenger's normal messaging
when we're talking about this surveillance.
It implies that we're talking about Facebook's secret function,
which is more akin to apps like Signal or Telegram,
and that's actually not the case.
Facebook does have a function.
Facebook Messenger has a function
where you can make your chats encrypted end to end
and the interface turns black and there's a little lock,
and you can even make exploding messages like Snapchat style.
Facebook is not scanning those messages at all,
or maybe they are and we have no evidence of it,
but the news or whatever Zuckerberg confirmed
has nothing to do with the secret messages.
It has to do with the normal messages.
And so we really shouldn't be surprised that they're looking at those.
So tell me then, okay, do you use Facebook Messenger?
Yeah, actually it's one of my primary messaging apps.
Okay, how do you feel about them scanning your messages
with an automated system for community guidelines, standards, adherence?
As opposed to like a human?
Well, I guess I'm asking two questions first.
So do you like or dislike it?
Okay, first of all, I think we should clarify,
I believe that they're scanned with an automated system
and once they're flagged,
it requires a human to then say this message is not getting sent through.
I believe that's how it works.
Sure.
I am fine with my messages being scanned.
Okay, and are you surprised by this?
No.
I should also mention that they do not use the data,
any of the information that they scan,
that information is not used to sell ads,
which is what Gmail used to do prior to last year.
Right.
So I got to tell you, okay, story time.
So the only reason that I use Facebook
is that Facebook does not permit you to manage a Facebook page.
So the first page that I had to manage
and the reason that I had to create a Facebook account
was the one for NCIX PC back when I worked there.
So we were trying to get into this whole newfangled social media thing
and so I needed an account so that the page could invite me to manage it
and make posts on it and stuff.
I have probably posted of my own volition
a grand total of, I don't know,
between five and 10 things on Facebook ever.
I only use Facebook Messenger as sort of a digital phone book
because the good thing about Facebook is that
whether you're happy about it
or whether you kind of just do it because you have to,
pretty much everyone has it.
And yes, thank you whoever's in the Twitch chat
declaring that they do not have Facebook
because they're taking some stand.
Good for you.
We're all jealous. We all want to be in your shoes.
Yeah, but the truth of the matter is that Facebook
is a great way to get in touch with people.
And aside from people changing their names,
yeah, okay.
Like having your first name and middle name as your Facebook name?
No, no, I mean people getting married.
Oh, okay.
So this is kind of embarrassing,
but I was going through my friends on Facebook
and I was like, who are these people?
And the people, shut up,
the people I was confused about were mostly women
from my high school class that are now married.
And I was like, that kind of looks all,
oh, okay, that makes sense.
And then like a kid that I went to elementary school with,
he changed his name from like his stepdad's name,
which was his last name for some reason,
I'm not quite sure how that worked,
to his birth father's name.
So I was like, oh, whatever your name is, Barry now.
That's cool, wouldn't have known that
if I hadn't already had your platform.
B to BA?
No.
That would be tough.
But anyway, so what's good about Facebook
is that it's a digital phone book,
because real phone books aren't a thing anymore.
But the bad thing about it
and the thing that has always made me
both a little bit uncomfortable
and just feel like it's a little bit unnecessary
is that while I am technically a millennial,
I share sort of updates about my life as a job.
I have never done it for leisure, not once.
When I created a Facebook account,
it was because I needed to for work.
When I created a Twitter account,
it was because I had to for work.
And when I created a YouTube account,
it was because I had to for work.
Same with Twitch for that matter.
So I just straight up don't really get it.
And I've never really felt,
it's never been because I feel super comfortable with it
that I've shared a lot of detail about my life.
Some of you have probably noticed
that especially now that the Linus Tech Twitter account
is managed by the entire team,
I post almost nothing really personal on it.
And I only post to my personal account
like once every couple of weeks at most.
And I've had a lot of people ask me like,
why don't you do more videos on your Linus cat tips channel?
Or why don't you vlog?
Or why don't you do this or do that?
And the truth of the matter is like,
I actually, I like not having to talk to anybody.
Like, yeah, no kidding.
Like it's related.
I found that I watched,
started watching our videos a lot less
once I worked here for awhile.
And it's like, not a surprise.
Like, what do you wanna do when you go home?
Do you wanna watch Linus Tech Tips?
Like, no, you just did Linus Tech Tips all day.
I just had to look at him for the last eight hours.
The last thing I wanna do is to see him again
because he's annoying.
Oh, it's not you.
See how I'm only wearing out one here right now?
It's not you.
It's me.
It's weird.
Today, someone made a thread about an item
that they thought would be awesome for us to review.
So I send it to Anthony.
I was like, oh, have you seen this yet?
And he's like, yeah,
Alex just made a video about that today.
Like it's done already.
Like, oh.
So, okay.
So back to messenger.
So for me, honestly, it doesn't affect me much
because even though I do have a Facebook account,
this is actually, okay, you know,
I'm gonna go off on another thing here.
The not, ah.
Use your words.
If I had a dollar for every time we've run a giveaway
or a promotion or something,
and it has required you to tweet something.
For every time someone's been like,
yeah, well, you guys suck because I don't have Twitter.
If I had a dollar for every time I saw that,
I would still be mad because it's phenomenally stupid.
Twitter is free.
Facebook is free.
And the only information they have is what you give them.
Creating a Twitter account
that's sole purpose is to enter giveaways
really doesn't give them a lot on you.
And get this, it's free.
You could create a new one every time.
Hey, but you need to have an email address,
which is free to me.
Also free.
So if you don't want it that bad
to create a free anonymous email
and a free anonymous Twitter account,
people are like, cookies?
Walk in once, post the thing, log back out.
It's pet peeve show, next pet peeve topic.
How about that?
So anyway, so I do have a Facebook account,
but they actually probably know
very, very little about me personally.
Other than that, I'm a tech head
and I post a lot of techie stuff for work.
So I guess I'm trying to say
that I just am not bothered that much.
You know what sucks more about Facebook Messenger
than that feature is them putting ads in your inbox.
You probably haven't even seen this,
but on mobile, you'll open your messages.
It'll be like your partner, your best friend,
your acquaintance, Oculus, blah, blah, blah,
with a picture and everything.
Really?
And then another acquaintance
straight up like right in there.
And I don't know if these are in WhatsApp yet,
but I wouldn't be surprised if that happens soon
since they've been wanting to monetize WhatsApp
for a while and they own it.
I would like to show you something
super, super cool and funny.
I think there's a way to see your page
as though you are like, oh man, it's-
No, not your personal page.
Yeah, view as a page visitor.
No, no, no, the Linus Tech Tips one.
Right.
Oh wow, is it gone?
Oh, that's pretty annoying.
Well, anyway, up until sometime,
hopefully fairly recently,
the Linus Tech Tips page actually had
as like the top post, like somewhere near the top,
please don't send messages to this account.
Nobody checks them.
And right now, see, I don't even know where to find them,
which is super terrible.
See the feed.
Do you know where you find messages?
Maybe you disabled it.
Maybe that's why that warning isn't even there anymore.
I don't know.
We had something horrendous,
like I don't remember how many tens of thousands
of messages that people sent.
And I was just like, I don't know,
I don't know what I can do for you
to help make it more clear
that you shouldn't send messages through here.
And it just said something like, yeah,
you need to go on the,
you need to go on the Twitter page if you want to,
or the Twitter account if you need to send a message.
And wow, I just, I have no,
I should, honestly, I should be screen sharing right now
because you guys would find this pretty funny.
I have no idea how to use Facebook.
How do I Facebook?
Maybe you used to and then as soon as you had a kid,
it just left you.
Now you're old people.
I just never did.
I just actually never cared like at all.
Yeah, I don't know.
But anyway, so the point is I do use messenger,
but it's usually just to be like, oh yeah,
that person that I met at like badminton
at the rec center a couple of weeks ago.
What was their name again?
Oh, right.
Maybe I'll see if I can get in touch with them.
Yeah.
One Facebook messenger feature I like
is that you can make it your default SMS app
on Android anyway.
So you could type in someone's name
and then choose to message them via Facebook
or through like regular texting, which is sweet
because then you only have one app for both purposes.
But it also kind of sucks.
So I eventually switched back to not doing that.
All right.
So why don't we jump into the next thing
that I'm super mad about.
The original article here is from a non tech
and this was posted by aluminum tech on the forum.
Once again.
All right.
So this is really dumb and really frustrating.
And it's not the first time that this has been done
by either AMD or Nvidia.
And so right to be clear,
even though it's Nvidia doing it this time,
AMD has done it in the past.
Neither of them is getting a free pass here.
And this behavior is absolutely 100% unacceptable.
It's right in the headline.
Nvidia quietly rolls out slower,
lower TDP GeForce GT 1030 with DDR4 VRAM.
Now to be clear,
the GT 1030 is not some kind of pillar of gaming cards
or anything like that.
And you wouldn't expect to be running the latest games
at the highest settings at the highest resolutions with them.
But you would expect that if you bought a GT 1030
that what you got out of the box would be similar
to someone else's GT 1030.
And I would make the argument that if you look
a little bit closer at these specs here,
look at this.
Memory that is running at one third of the speed.
Huh.
Oh man, not to mention at lower base and boost clocks
with a completely different memory technology.
So we're talking DDR4 versus GDDR5.
I would make the assumption that that is
not what you would expect.
And that that is going to make some difference
to the gaming experience.
And that if you are buying a dedicated graphics card,
you probably care at least somewhat
about the gaming experience.
Is it true that these systems,
the systems that will be running these low-end cards,
discrete as they may be,
won't actually be able to really reap the benefits
of GDDR5 anyway?
So it's not a huge loss?
Okay.
So you could make the argument that the way that
a review site like us or an OnTek or whoever else
would typically benchmark a card like this
is not necessarily a very real world.
Because what we'll do,
and we've taken a lot of flack for this over the years,
presumably from people who don't understand
why we do it this way,
but what we'll typically do is we'll take
the highest end processor on the market
and we'll throw a GT 1030 on it.
And then we'll report our results with the GT 1030
compared to some other graphics cards,
you know, whatever suite of cards we decide to test.
And the fatal flaw that people feel like
they're pointing out for us is that
no one would install a GT 1030 on a $2,000
7980 XE18 Core Extreme Edition.
But the problem is that if we use anything else,
we lose track of the difference between these graphics cards
because what might happen is the higher-end ones
might end up bottlenecked,
so it doesn't give you a clear idea
of the value per dollar prospect of each card.
You're trying to remove the CPU as a variable altogether.
Yes.
So it's as fast as possible.
Now with that said,
it is possible that in the kind of system
someone might install one of these in,
you might not see as much of a difference,
but I think you would probably see a difference,
especially because GPU memory has an impact
on the GPU's ability to load in textures, for example.
So it might affect the detail level that you can run at.
Now, this might be completely naive and ignorant,
but does the type of memory impact the TDP of the graphics card?
So it depends.
It depends on the clock speed it's running at.
It depends on the...
I think it...
Yeah, it depends how many chips you're running.
It depends on...
Yeah, mainly that.
It depends on the tech that's being used.
Because you could also make an argument
that it's better to have a lower TDP GPU.
If you're looking to get a 1030
in the kind of system that's gonna run it,
you might actually want that lower TDP
more than you want the extra memory.
So that is possible,
but in that case,
what I'd like to see is a separate skew.
I ended up arguing with Sapphire on the phone
about...
How old was I?
Supposed to be about 16 years ago,
but I'm still mad.
I ended up arguing with Sapphire on the phone,
and AMD for that matter,
about a Radeon 9600 that I bought.
So that should give you guys some idea of...
Well, I told you how long ago it was.
Anyway, the point is,
it was a Radeon 9600,
and it came with a 64-bit...
I still remember to this day,
it came with a 64-bit memory bus
instead of a 128-bit bus.
And back then,
that was a big deal.
And compared to a 1030,
a 960 was still sort of a somewhat respectable card.
Like if you wanted to play...
I don't remember if this is sort of era appropriate,
but I think like SIMS would have been the kind of thing
that my sister might've wanted to run on it.
That would have made a significant difference.
And the reason I was mad was that not only
was it not marked clearly anywhere on the box,
what the difference in spec was
between this card and the other one,
the only place anywhere that I could find this information
was on Sapphire's website,
but not their North American one.
It was on their European one.
Wow.
So I had to go all the way out of my own territory online
in order to find out that this card was not the same thing.
And it was like hidden like way down somewhere.
And this was at a time when manufacturers
were often doing like SE editions of cards,
special edition or second edition.
But what the community nicknamed these things
was slow edition because a lot of the time
they were cut down because of yields.
So like they had a bunch of scrap chips
that they had to do something with.
So they'd like cut down the memory bus
or they'd do something else like that.
And that's a point that people are bringing up this time.
What's the difference between this and like 1080 TI?
It just, but the thing is they don't put
these other letters, these qualifiers front and center
on the box in this case.
No.
This is way down the line in the product description.
It's a description of the memory.
It's not upfront right beside the 1030.
Yeah.
They do put D4 in the description,
but it's not a 1030 D4.
It's way, way, way, way down there.
So I find it really frustrating,
but Nvidia seems to be rather than having taken
our feedback and a lot of other members
of the press feedback to heart about the 1063 gig,
which is more than just a 1060 with three gigs of Ram,
or I should say less, it's actually slower as well.
They seem to have taken all the feedback that we gave them
and crumpled it up and thrown it in a fire
because here they are doing it again.
And it's only been a few months.
So what I worry about is that if we don't call them out
on this, it's going to be something
that we're going to continue to see happen.
And that's not what we need.
You don't want to have to walk...
Remember guys, this is the same company
that brought you Greenlight,
that brought you a program that restricted
their partner's abilities to pre-overclock their cards
to differentiate them, supposedly to reduce confusion.
Like that's why they have all these branding initiatives
and stuff like that.
Oh, not to mention GeForce Partner Program.
We want to reduce confusion.
Do you want to reduce confusion
or do you just want the right type of confusion?
Right.
So it's good for their business interests.
So it doesn't matter.
A lot of people won't notice anyway.
I won't know.
So just let it kind of slip by.
This is great.
Sparkleman55 says, rip,
I got the notification a half hour late.
No, no, we were just a half hour late.
Unless you just got it now.
Yeah, the other one's ripped.
So I guess I don't really have a ton more to add.
I mean, this is really frustrating.
You've got a note in here.
Some of the listed documentation
does show two different core names,
GP108300 versus GP108310.
But the whole thing is very confusing.
Oh, this was what I ended up yelling at AMD about
16 years ago.
AMD on their website,
because remember this was not an AMD card technically,
it was a Sapphire card
as if AMD didn't send them the frigging chips.
AMD's own website had no mention whatsoever
of a 64-bit memory bus variant of this card.
So in this case, once again,
Just washing their hands of it.
the official NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 product page
mentions nothing about this change.
So how can you advocate for less consumer confusion
when you're running around enabling your partners
to release products,
even if you technically not your product
or whatever the defense would be,
how can you be running around enabling partners
to create products based on your products
that you don't even list on your website?
Especially going forward when those partners
are part of the GeForce partner program.
Yeah, very, very frustrating.
All right.
Do you also feel passionately about the Spectre business?
I can't imagine that you feel as passionate about it.
What I really feel passionate about
is eating savage jerky.
I know.
In my head I was like, he wouldn't.
He couldn't.
God damn it.
He did.
Savage jerky is a tasty snack that's not bad for you.
It's made with the best ingredients
without nitrates or preservatives.
And their goal was to create a snack that's full of flavor
and not bad for you,
which I think I already said.
I got my talking points mixed up here.
They've got 13 different flavors of jerky.
Some of the fan favorites are the sriracha bacon.
My personal favorite is the maple Buffalo bacon.
I gave it to someone else to try like two weeks ago
and they were like, eh, but whatever.
I like it.
I don't care what they think.
More for you, man.
More for me.
There's probably John.
He's not Canadian.
He doesn't understand maple.
Not that I was going to share it with anybody anyway.
So whatever.
These cracked pepper and sea salt is really good.
The traditional is really good.
Anything moho is really good.
Can you hand me a bag?
You're a vegetarian.
I want to check out the label and stuff.
And why not show off a different flavor?
You can show off whatever flavor you want.
You can have a little box.
So they not only make jerky, they've got hot sauces,
barbecue sauces, a spice rub.
Jacked.
I never get any.
You're not supposed to get any.
Well, this bag's fine.
Take it.
This bag's been open for over a week.
So you don't get to complain when I take your M&M's anymore.
I don't.
Well, you do it all the time.
Okay.
Actually, I don't eat M&M's anymore.
I eat trail mix.
You take that all the time.
Yeah, but you don't get to complain when I pick the M&M's
when I pick your trail mix.
I think he's pretty generous.
He's given me M&M's without me even asking before.
So use offer code LTT to save 10% on savage jerky products.
Next up, we've got honey.
So when you shop online, are you the kind of person who suddenly
turns into a tab hoarder?
Yeah, turns into.
Sure.
Loading dozens and dozens of new tabs.
That middle click really is like the bomb.
What is that?
You middle click to open in a new tab.
You mean like click the mouse wheel?
Yeah.
Doesn't that just make it like the continuous scrolling thing?
No.
What?
Not when you click a link.
Oh, you middle click a link.
Dang.
Yeah, you don't know this?
No, I don't know that.
It's the best.
That's how I end up with like a hundred tabs.
Oh, I really like that.
You know what I use a lot?
Control shift T.
You know what that is?
Reopen closed tab.
Oh, no, I just never closed them.
So anyway, one of the reasons you might end up with a bunch of tabs is searching for promo
codes.
Hopefully at least one that actually works.
And you don't want to close any of them because you might have to go back and try them again
or try them on a different product or whatever the case may be.
Well, Honey gets rid of all that.
Honey is the free browser add-on that over 9 million people are using every day to save
money while they shop online.
In two clicks, you can add Honey to any browser for free, then shop like you normally do.
Honey scans and tests millions of coupons in the background.
Then at checkout, Honey automatically applies the best coupon.
So 9 million, I felt like a sucker.
Time magazine calls Honey basically free money.
What am I doing?
Uh, so there's basically no reason to not add Honey to your browser.
It's free, two clicks to install and will save you money.
Head out over at honey.com slash Linus, and we're going to have that linked in the video
description.
Finally, FreshBooks.
FreshBooks.
FreshBooks is the super simple to use invoicing tool that does a lot more than just help you
create and send professional looking invoices.
It helps you track your time with their time sheet function, manage your expenses, and
keep track of who owes you what, which is important.
It also has a feature that tells you when your client has looked at your invoice for
the first time so that you can put an end to that whole, hey, did you get that invoice
I sent?
Wow, you're really not going to help me out here.
This is what they do.
They stare blankly at you.
Ah, I see.
What invoice, Linus?
I didn't pick up what you're throwing down.
Anyway, the point is you'll know that they saw it.
And if you have questions, you can reach out to their support staff where you will speak
to a real human.
No escalations, no return calls, just answers.
Visit freshbook.com slash when and enter when in the how do you hear about us section
when you sign up for a free trial.
That's freshbooks.com slash when.
I think you just owned the ears of the viewers.
Thank you for that.
I don't have a choice.
All right.
What topic do you want to do next?
Oh, can we do this one?
Okay.
I'm sorry.
But the thing is only part of this is news.
All right, fine.
Let's do the stupid PS5 thing.
No, this is good.
I don't want to talk about this.
No, I'm already screen sharing the original article here from express.co.uk.
PS5, rumors are it might come out this Christmas.
A lot of people think those rumors are dumb.
So this started on a website called, what is it called?
The Situation or?
We're going to have to stop calling you laser games.
Semi accurate.
We're going to have to go with Savage James.
Here, have some savage jerky.
That was savage.
Okay, so I actually, this website has a great name in this context, semiaccurate.com.
Behind a $1,000 per year paywall or $100 a year for students, this website published
an article with allegedly legit information claiming that the PlayStation 5 was going
to come out this holiday season, which is a lot sooner than people would think considering
that the PS4 Pro came out only two years ago and the PS4 itself only came out five years
ago and when traditionally the launch cycles of these things have been about seven years
between the three and four.
So people think that you can, Sony can make a lot more money off the PS4 Pro still.
Like that can become the de facto like normal default PlayStation for people and they can
start to push the price down to like 250 bucks.
They don't need to release the new PlayStation just yet.
The PS4 Pro was two years ago?
Yeah, bro.
See, the older you get, the faster time goes.
What?
Because each year of your life is a smaller proportion of your life.
No, it was a year and a half.
Oh, okay.
Oh, okay.
I should have written the months in.
Oh, okay.
No, no, no.
But by the time this launched at Christmas, it would be two years.
Oh, I see your point.
Okay, okay, okay.
So here's, okay, do you want to go through the rumored specs first?
Sure.
It's going to be AMD again.
The platform, like the architecture is Navi.
It's going to be eight cores.
And I actually have a question about that if we get to it.
Yeah.
It's going to have a strong emphasis on VR support.
That, some discussion there, you know, they have to make certain considerations and decisions
to include that.
And maybe no one cares, but maybe no one cares because there's no good VR yet.
And this is a chicken and egg thing.
They did recently drop the price of the PSVR, but I don't know what, my understanding is
that the PSVR is the best-selling gaming VR headset.
But I also don't know if that's meeting Sony's expectations in terms of how many they have
to sell in order to support it.
It's a, I think at this point it's a rising tide lifts all boats thing with VR.
It's a setup for future profits.
What else do we know about this thing?
We know that the CPU would be rumored to be Zen based, although we could pretty much take
for granted that any future custom SOC that AMD would produce for whether it's Microsoft
or Sony would hopefully be Zen based at this point.
So here's my question.
And again, noob question, maybe.
On the PC, in the realm of PC gaming, prior to Ryzen and Coffee Lake for sure, single-threaded,
all the games and engines and all that APIs are optimized for single-threaded.
Right?
So...
Depends.
Mostly.
So, strongly, strongly depends.
So some of them, basically since we started getting dual cores, which was actually a really
long time ago now, sort of terrible.
At least 10 years more than that.
Yeah.
They were in laptops 10 years ago.
Q6600.
I remember buying our Q6600 engineering sample, which technically you're neither supposed
to buy nor sell, from my old boss at NCIX back in 2007.
So, yes.
Quad core.
And that was like $600, $700 CPU.
So that was like the first non-extreme edition quad core.
But certainly not mainstream yet.
Dennis just walked by with an eggplant.
So, we've got...
How do you...
You heard that.
So, we've had quad cores on the desktop for 10 years, and that chip later dropped in price,
I think probably about eight months to eight to 12 months later, and became far more accessible.
So, ever since then, we have seen an onward march towards supporting more cores.
Now, in the early days, the support was fairly rudimentary.
You would have one core dedicated to mostly the entire game, and then you'd have another
one that handled maybe enemy AI.
Like one thing would be offloaded.
But over time, they got to supporting more and more and more threads natively.
And I believe Crysis 3 supports something like four or six?
Well, the why is it then when Ryzen came out, and it had all these cores, everyone was stoked
on it, and in theory, the performance should beat a lot of these Intel SKUs.
It didn't, and it was because we had to wait for the game developers to optimize their
games and the APIs for multi-core.
Okay, so there were a couple of things that happened.
First of all, a lot of the things that people were excited about with Ryzen and about multi-core
on Ryzen...
Well, actually, I think it's mainly two things.
One is that AMD, depending on how you look at it, and it's complicated, but AMD wasn't
that far behind Intel for gaming from a certain point of view, as Obi-Wan might put it, because
at the resolutions that you would be likely to run games at, so higher resolution with
higher details, you'd be more likely to hit a GPU bottleneck than a CPU one.
So, in that sense, AMD CPUs weren't that far off, unless you did wanna turn down your details
to get higher frame rates because you were a competitive player, or unless you cared
about your power consumption because they did consume a lot more power before Zen, or
if you wanted more up-to-date features on the platform because by the end of it, those
boards were looking pretty dated in terms of their feature set, so there were lots of
other things.
Let me fully actually finish the question.
The final clause of the question is, given that, in the PC side, it's so weird that on
the console side, you've got these multi-core AMD chips ruling the roost on all the consoles.
So, are game developers taking different approaches on console and PC?
Okay, so back to your question, the things people were excited about.
AMD having better single-threaded performance for gaming, and AMD having multi-threaded
performance for other workloads, and also to put pressure on Intel because that's what
Intel did.
They launched quad-core on the desktop back in like 2006, and it was quad-core on the
desktop up until 2001-6.
That was pretty much it, unless you wanted to just bring it from the high-end desktop
platform.
Well, no, there were six-core AMD CPUs in like 2010.
No, but I mean on the Intel side.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
The thing about those six-core AMD processors, though, is that they didn't threaten Intel.
Even with six cores, they weren't competitive with Intel's own quad-cores that they could
turn out, so it wasn't really relevant, and they sucked more power.
They didn't overclock.
There was a bunch of things.
So, people were excited because Zen would bring more competition to the market.
Now, getting back to AMD's previous cores not necessarily being that underpowered for
gaming, well, that's what you're seeing on the game consoles.
So, because the game developers know exactly what hardware they're optimizing for, they
can go, okay, we're going to have exactly this.
Oh, right, the other issue with Zen performance on the desktop in games was actually more
software and firmware related.
There were scheduler issues with Windows, and there were, I mean, any new CPU.
It's kind of like why I put, what was the not, the 6950Xs in the editing machines like
three weeks before the new 18-core flagship came out.
The reason is that any time you have a new CPU launch, whether it's AMD or Intel, and
particularly on this last round, where both AMD and Intel were guilty of pulling up their
launches just to have something out there and them being not quite 100% polished, any
time you have a new CPU, you're going to have some issues.
And that was a big part of what affected gaming performance on the desktop, and sometimes
game developers did have to optimize because even though it's x86, it's not like a new
CPU is just the old CPU, but like with a Trogdor arm sticking to it.
Like it's actually different.
And so if you gave, even if, let's say you gave a professional driver, and I don't know
cars, so you'll have to forgive me, but let's say you gave them a Bugatti and a Lamborghini
of some model, X and Y, and you were like, okay, get the best track time on this track.
It would take them a little while if they switched from this one to that one to learn
the best way to do it, even if this one was more powerful.
They are, they're different machines.
So, coming back to consoles, this has been a very sort of winding topic here.
They know exactly what they're optimizing for, they don't have to make any guesses,
and they are going to run the game in such a way, and they're going to optimize the game
in such a way that you aren't going to run out of CPU resources.
Also, by the end of AMD's non-Zen cores, while the performance wasn't great, their power
efficiency was getting a lot better.
So they take this good power efficiency, and they've got four kind of like good enough
cores, and they've got developers who know that they can split it up exactly in this
way, because it's going to run on four cores, there's not going to be some yahoo out there
running a dual core, because Intel still has dual cores for some reason, and they can split
it up that way to make the best possible use of the quad core.
And then the GPU, well they can push the game's visual effects to the max so that they can
run into a GPU bottleneck rather than a CPU one.
Also, it's a console, it's going to run on a TV, it doesn't have to run higher than 60
FPS anyway.
Cool, I get it now.
There's the long, the very, very long answer, hopefully that wasn't too boring.
Please finish your bacon, you've been...
Oh god.
Talking with your hands way too much to still be holding that bacon, so please.
Now to circle all the way back to the beginning, in your opinion, is the PS5 coming out in
2018?
Even if it's December 31st?
Okay.
Consider that when the PS4, I think, was it Pro came out, which it was either the Pro
or the PS4, it came out in November and we knew about it in February of that year.
If this is going to come out on the holiday, we're two months beyond that now, it probably
would be launching in November if they're trying to make the holiday.
So that's a short media window to get the media hype running, so do you think it's coming
out this year?
So normally I would say absolutely not.
And the reason is that up until now, every PlayStation, whether it was Emotion or whether
it was Cell or whether it was a move to Jaguar, every PlayStation has been architecturally
dramatically different, totally different.
So if you told me in April there's a PlayStation coming in November, I'd tell you to go take
a long walk off a short pier because you're an idiot, because there's no way that in...
What does that work out to?
Seven months?
There's no way that in seven months anyone is going to have launch titles ready, because
they're going to have to completely re-code aspects of these games in order to run on
this new machine.
The developer things are already out there.
That is known.
Okay, so that we know.
But even then, like I'm saying, there's still no way that seven months would be even close.
Like a modern AAA game, remember, you can't launch a console without, unless you're Nintendo,
without at least a couple AAA tier games.
And those take literally years to develop.
And it's not going to be good enough to just take some existing titles and go now at 4K
with better details or whatever else.
If people were really into that, they'd go buy a PC.
However, because a PlayStation 5 would be just PlayStation 4 on steroids with Zen cores,
which is going to make a big difference.
That's going to be like really nice.
And then presumably, and it says Navi based graphics, which would be, again, very nice.
Remember, this is not Vega.
This is a new architecture past Vega.
Because it would be just like that on steroids, new architectures, but much more powerful
ones, but still fundamentally x86 and, oh crap, what does AMD call their thing again?
GCN.
No, not GCN anymore.
Anyway, the point is-
So you're saying it's kind of like PS4 Pro Pro.
Yeah, but way more pro.
Because the PS4 Pro relied on Crossfire, which was a bad approach.
I think actually your theory might have some credence given that one of the other leaked
bullet points here is that the PS5 would be backwards compatible with PS4 Pro titles.
Why not?
Yeah.
It might as well be, right?
Because it's fundamentally pretty similar in terms of the hardware.
And-
So you've got, you go, you go.
This site, semi-accurate, you haven't heard of it apparently, but I've been following
Charlie, I don't remember how to pronounce Demerogen, Demerogen, whatever, Charlie.
I've been following Charlie since about 2002, back when he used to work at the Inquirer,
not the National Inquirer, the Inquirer.
And back then the Inquirer was the bomb for industry leaks.
They do have a track record of being prescient at accurately leaking, specifically console
related leaks in the past.
They've been wrong a couple of times with something.
I can suggest why that might be.
See, okay.
And it makes me a little uncomfortable because I've never really talked to Charlie much.
So I don't want to like talk about him when I don't actually know him that well.
But what I can say is that I do know that I've never seen him at an industry event that
isn't an AMD one.
Okay.
So what I can extrapolate from that particular data point is that if AMD talks to him and
no one else does, and he gets industry information somehow, that maybe he's getting his information
from contacts at AMD.
And if he has a track record of leaking console news, which AMD has their hardware in up until
the switch had their hardware in all three, that would align with my guesses as to where
his sources might be from.
So that to me adds some credibility because over the years, Charlie has taken a lot of
flack for saying a lot of stuff that didn't turn out to be true.
But as a reader of his over the years who, you know, takes rumors with the grain of salt
that-
You pay the thousand dollars a year?
No.
Okay.
Are you a student?
I read before he put up the paywall.
But as someone who's kind of paid attention to his career, he's been right enough that
if you read with the grain of salt that you should take rumors with in the first place,
and he called the site semi-accurate, I mean, what more do you want?
He's offered a lot of insight over the years.
That's what I'll say.
So-
All right.
I'm not saying, yeah, there's going to be a PS5, but I would suggest that this might
be why Sony hasn't had a response to the Xbox One X yet.
And this might've been a good move for them to let Microsoft launch the One X a few months
ago and then say, okay, you know what, we're going to miss out on having the crown for
like a year, but realistically, Microsoft can't run out and release a new Xbox again.
So we're giving up this year now of console, you know, thronedom, but we should have a
year or maybe more than that afterward while Microsoft responds.
Yeah.
They want to wait until the PS4 Pro sales have peaked and are starting to taper off,
but also enough time.
So people through some people who bought a PS4 Pro will also buy a PS5 at launch.
Honestly, not everyone's going to do that.
Another major factor is that they're at AMD's mercy here.
They can't release a faster console until AMD releases a faster piece of hardware.
So that custom SOC design process takes time and you can't start that process until the
individual components of it, so both the CPU and GPU are at least somewhat finalized.
So this, that looks, I mean, that timeline sounds not that, you know what, the more we
talk about this, I'm going with it.
Oh, PS5, this Q4.
It's on, put your balls on the table.
There you go.
Bet something.
Um, so the bet would be either it's coming out holiday season or it's being announced
at E3 next June or I guess this June.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm going to say, I'm going to say it's coming holiday season.
I don't know exactly how they're going to handle the hype leading up to the release,
but you know what?
I'm in.
When are they going to announce it?
They can't wait till E3 at June.
That's could they?
Yeah, they could.
Yeah, that gives them like a few months.
Do they need to announce it at a conference or an event or can they just launch it?
More and more companies.
Excuse me.
I mean, announce it.
Microsoft did this for the Xbox One.
More and more companies are just doing an Apple style, um, like conference.
They're just doing, you know what?
Forget it.
We're not going to announce things at CES or Computex or E3 or whatever.
We'll do our, we'll do our own party.
But they do it.
Apple does it at their own conference every year.
Exactly.
But does Sony have one of those?
Um, I don't know if Sony has done that, but more and more companies are trying to do this.
So yeah, let's find out.
Maybe they, maybe they'll just do their own thing.
I'm seeing CES, E3.
You never know.
Speaking of things you never know, you never know when big brother is watching.
The original article here is from CNET, sorry for the abrupt change in topics, but I really
want to cover this.
And it's like 20 after six already and I really want to talk about this.
I am going to Shenzhen on Monday.
So an AI company that works with Shenzhen police is creating a system that will use
CCTV cameras to identify jaywalkers and send them a fine via a messaging app.
Okay.
So full disclosure here, that's CNET articles from July, 2017 because this is the fact that
peoples are getting in trouble.
Like their faces are being projected onto a giant billboard in real time because these
facial recognition equipped cameras are watching them jaywalk.
That's old news that that's been since last summer.
The new update now is that if that happens to you, you might just get an SMS that's like,
here's your fine bud.
Click through and pay it.
Could be SMS, could be in WeChat, which is, I guess, gets compared to Chinese WhatsApp.
So over 10 months ending in February of this year, these boards that they created displayed
13,930 jaywalker faces.
It's like a public shaming thing or something like this?
Well, apparently jaywalking is a bigger deal in China than it is over here.
I can kind of see that.
There's more people.
They have a different attitude.
Both the pedestrians have a different attitude to the law according to Chinese political
party opinion anyway, and drivers have a different standpoint to pedestrian right of way.
Apparently I saw there's studies where in Germany you might only wait 60 seconds to
cross the road, but in China it might be 90 seconds and that's longer than the people
who need to wait.
Meaning when it's their turn, the drivers might still just not respect their right of
way anyway.
So there's a lot of jaywalking and presumably because of the number of people there, it
causes a lot of traffic and bottlenecks.
So there's a high incentive for the government to try to work this out.
So one of the ways they'll de-incentivize people to jaywalk is by socially shaming them,
putting their face and their family name, by the way, up on a giant billboard that you
can see.
And now I guess they're attaching a monetary incentive or de-incentive on that as well.
I mean, this is just so apparently only about 10% of the population can be identified by
the city or by the system in the city of Shenzhen.
But if you consider that they're already working with third parties like these chat applications
to deliver fines, presumably they could work with third parties like, um, crap.
What's their, uh, what's their Amazon Alibaba?
Like they could work with Alibaba.
Um, well no, AliExpress is, is part is like, yeah, but Alibaba is like to contact manufacturers,
not just buy stuff.
You're right.
Um, so they could work with, um, wait, hold on a second.
Oh, where's he going?
Alibaba group, Chinese multinational.
Yeah, no Alibaba group, not like Alibaba.com necessarily.
Okay.
Um, anyway, so the point is that they could work with companies like that, that have,
or they could work with, um, Chinese phone manufacturers, for example, that I'm not going
to say who or what they're doing now, but have been known in the past to put back doors
on phones and or share information with the Chinese government.
So they could work with these groups to make the facial recognition, just one part of how
they identify you.
So they could monitor where you go, what you buy, uh, who you spend your time with.
And they could use all of these things to augment their facial recognition technology
so that they could actually make a very, very good guess as to who you are, even if they
don't get a perfect look at your face and where you are, they can track you while you're
driving your car.
Exactly.
There are apparently 600 million CCTV cameras in China.
It's like, it's getting to full on surveillance state.
And some of these things are positive.
Like there's, there's benefits from it.
Um, you can go to certain airports in China and be, and not have a boarding pass.
It's all facial recognition.
Your hands are full of your bags.
You just walk by the, the flight, the attendant as you go onto the plane.
Like that's pretty sweet.
Wow.
Maybe you'll get to do that.
If you're in an airport that has that, you should make a video.
There's no way I'll be able to do it.
Cause I won't be.
Yeah.
In fact, the reason why only 10% of the population of Shenzhen gets their faces recognized is
because presumably it's like the database of all the different provinces isn't integrated.
So if you live in Shenzhen, but you're from a different province, then they just don't
have your record available.
So that's why they think that the number of people who will be susceptible to this tech
should go up dramatically once they do get a more broadly based system in the future.
All right.
That's the topic for the day because we are not going to stop harping on this, at least
until you guys get bored of it.
More G-Force partner program news.
Asus to Ares.
Is it just me or does that sound like kind of like a Spanish?
I'm actually trying to figure out if it's supposed to be like Ares.
Well Ares used to be, they had Ares before with an S on the end.
What they called their ROG AMD based cards.
So it was at the very high end.
They had Mars on the Nvidia side.
Maybe that's intentional because they're not allowed to say ROG anymore.
They're still saying Strix.
So maybe people will remember that Ares was ROG and because losing ROG hurts man.
Like people, consumers know what ROG is and they want to buy it, which is still bizarre
to me because I still remember being just like baffled and angered by the original implementation
of that branding.
I was just like, this is so stupid.
What does Republic of Gamers even mean?
Was this like a place where all the gamers live?
You've never been?
It smells weird, but it's pretty dope there.
That's what we need is a new sponsor, like a deodorant product.
People's Republic of Gamers.
The sales pitch writes itself.
It's like too busy gaming to shower.
Just use this spray.
No problem.
At least for a little while.
Eventually you'll have a problem.
So Asus ROG Strix turns into Ares or Ares Strix.
Asus Dual tunes into Ares Dual.
Asus Expedition, which I've never even heard of before, turns into Ares Expedition.
It's way out there.
So not only do we appear to be losing ROG branding, it looks like they aren't even putting
Asus branding on the cards.
That weirds me out a little bit.
Isn't that a maybe?
At what point is somebody going to leak this freaking agreement so that we can have a look
at it?
Because I'll tell you, 99% of the time when some controversial document gets leaked or
whatever, I'll read a bunch of articles, figure out what the consensus is, and go, okay, yeah.
Or I might read a couple of paragraphs of the thing.
If the GeForce Partner Program leaked, I would read the whole thing multiple times.
I want to understand.
I don't just want to see what's in there.
I want to understand what's in there because this sounds like a scary freaking document.
Well, in the original, what's the site that leaked it?
Hard OCP, right?
Yeah.
In the original blog post or article, he wondered if it was actually legal.
I don't know, man.
Me too.
So thanks for watching, guys.
See you again next week.
Same bad time.
Same bad channel.
So much bacon.
Maybe a different co-host.
No, no, no, no, hold on, no, hold on, no, hold on, hold on a minute.
Same bad time.
Variable co-host.
Hold on a minute.
Wait, you're looking at the dates of taxes?
No, no, no, no, we're going to straw pull this.
We're going to straw pull this.
James.
Okay.
Good job.
All right, let's get some options in here.
Yes.
No.
Donkeyballs.
Ooh, I'm going to log in and vote Donkeyballs.
Create this poll here.
Come on, you guys.
You got to let us know.
Do you really want a new co-host next week?
I guess I ignored the possibility that the new co-host being replaced would be me because
I'm traveling next week.
Oh yeah.
Some people have said that Luke James is their favorite combo.
Well.
It was my mom.
She's biased.
Oh, terrible.
Hey, more Donkeyballs than no's.
Come on, Donkeyballs.
Let's get it.
Let's get our act together here.
That's a win.
Let's get some more Donkeyball art.
That's what the poster on your office door is about.
Donkeyballs inside.
Well, I don't need the whole donkey for that.
Wait.
Linus likes Donkeyballs.
James, donkey.
And we'll see you again next week.
Good show.
Most people said good job.
Cool.
51%.
Very narrow most.
That was a good show.
No, it was fun.
Felt smooth.
You know we're still live, right?
That's good.
I felt smooth, buttery, savage jerky smooth.
Smooth like honey.
Freshbox.
Number four.