Welcome to the WAN Show, everyone. We've got a fantastic show for you here today.
In fact, I was a little bit surprised, because when we were going through the topics for this week a couple days ago, I was like,
Oh, it's actually...
It's not a ton, really.
Yeah, well, compared to last week, when we had all the things to discuss, that was just, like, crazy as all balls.
But this week is turning out to look actually pretty darn good.
Our special guest today is Elric from Tech of Tomorrow, formerly from Motherboards.org.
Maybe we can poke him a little bit and see if we can get him to...
Actually, you know what? Let's not dig up the past. Let's not dig up the past.
But we've got Elric joining us today for our guest segment, and I'd love to do a preview of the topics we've got today.
So number one, guys, is lock up your daughters and sons and badgers, because Minecraft will turn your kids into gun-slinging, knife-toting, violent, violent people.
I can't believe this got out.
Minecraft.
With GTA 5, like...
I know!
Like, the timing is hilarious.
The timing is fantastic. More on that later, guys.
Cheating in Android benchmarks is definitely a thing, so we are going to discuss the state of the Android ecosystem and what cheating means to consumers and manufacturers, and why it gets done when they get caught every time.
This is the exact same thing we've seen on the PC platform.
We've seen it on the PC. We'll see it again on smart watches. Quote me on that.
That's true.
What else we got?
We've got control delete was a mistake, admitted by Bill Gates. Kind of an interesting little conversation that happened there.
And Steam Machine specs unveiled by xi3 and Valve. And the Valve Steam Machine specs that were unveiled were the prototype ones that are going in.
Kind of all over the place.
And, yeah, all over the place.
Alright, so why don't we kick things off with...
The intro.
Alright, guys, so this week's episode of the WAN Show is brought to you by Hotspot Shield.
You get 20% off elite prices with the offer code Linus.
You can sign up at bit.ly or bit.ly slash hsshare and you will be among the...
Actually, I talked to them today.
You will be among the 430 Linus Tech Tips viewers so far that have already signed up with them, which is pretty cool.
There was one post on the forum from someone that had an issue with customer service.
And within a matter of, I think it was about a day, Hotspot Shield had posted on our forum, fixed it with them,
posted their email address for any other Linus Tech Tips viewers that had any kind of issues with the service.
So, I thought that was pretty cool.
I got an industry affiliate then.
Yeah, we should probably do that.
I was like, I didn't hear about this.
Don't worry, don't worry, we got this.
Anyway, guys, 20% off elite prices, so bit.ly slash hsshare.
So, let's move into our first news item of the week, which is actually a pretty minor item.
It's just more of a funny thing.
Yeah, it's...
So, Bill Gates admits, this was posted on the forum by snowcomet.
Bill Gates admits Control-Alt-Delete was a mistake and blames IBM.
So, first of all, Control-Alt-Delete, as far as key combinations go, I mean, that's kind of like saying Alt-F4 was a mistake,
except that it's not because Control-Alt-Delete in Microsoft's mind should have been one button.
Yeah.
At the time, the functionality was to restart your computer.
It's evolved over time and we still have it today.
And then the other functionality, of course, at the time was to prove that you were a human being sitting in front of a computer.
Now, from a security standpoint...
That's not a very good proof.
Was it ever effective, though?
I can't see a way that it could have been, but maybe someone better than me knows the way that it could have been.
Because from my standpoint, you can just mimic those key presses.
It's not a big deal.
So, Control-Alt-Delete, if they'd had their way, would have been a single button, which would have saved us how many billions of keystrokes over the last few years.
Basically, the original article was from The Verge, so you can go ahead and check it out over there.
But pretty much, he was giving a talk and everyone kind of had a good laugh about it.
The IBM keyboard designer just kind of refused to implement it, which I...
Honestly, in my opinion, I have no real problem with.
Like, it's the least big deal ever.
Yeah, we just thought that was kind of funny, so we're not going to spend too much time on it.
Let's go ahead and move into our next topic.
It's... I don't know, it's just... I think the thing about it that sticks out most to me is how these legacy things just keep carrying forward.
And carrying forward to the point where Control-Alt-Delete has very different functionality today.
And you have to basically be in the BIOS or in a pre-Windows environment for it to even reboot your computer.
But what you can do is you can bring up the task manager, you can lock the computer, and there's...
And some places still use it to authenticate that it is an actual user sitting in front of the PC.
Server login. I still have to Control-Alt-Delete.
Server logins.
One thing I think is interesting, though, is if that didn't happen, if the mistake, quote-unquote, didn't happen,
how many key things... There's so many people I know that can do it without looking.
Without having hands on the keyboard and just go, boom, and just hit it.
And there was that thing before where someone made a fake little keyboard that was just Control-Alt-Delete
and they were like, this is all you need to use Windows.
All that stuff, the cult following that Control-Alt-Delete has, to be completely honest...
Well, if they had one key, if there was like the...
Would it have been the same, though?
If there was like the O-Balls key or something like that, that might have been alright.
Probably, yeah.
But yeah, yeah, we love it.
Let's go ahead and move into our next topic.
This is actually one that hits pretty close to home for me because here in Canada, we have...
Oh, no, I actually was... Okay, let's talk about a couple of different things that are going on with smartphones in the EU.
So this isn't exactly new, but I just want to talk about this because it's something that I personally feel quite strongly about.
And that is that the EU, this was on BBC, plans to end mobile phone roaming charges.
So this would be implemented by 2016 and in 2014, it would be eliminating roaming charges for incoming calls.
And as someone who lives in Canada, we don't have the greatest mobile phone rates.
We also don't have the worst ones.
I mean, I pay about $100 a month for my business plan that includes 5 gigs of data, basically unlimited calling for all intents and purposes.
It includes US calling when I'm at home, which is great because you'd be amazed how many people just don't want to bother with Skype and want to talk on the phone.
And most of the people we work with are in the US.
So I would be paying a fortune in long distance if I didn't have that kind of a plan.
It's really not that bad.
It's $100 a month.
But the thing that kills you, so I was over in Hawaii for about 8 days, $6 a meg is the roaming charge.
I think it's something like 75 cents a text.
And to me, the only excuse for this kind of behavior and these kinds of charges is the back room of a lady club where there's fat dudes with cigars sitting around,
going like, you know, like placing bets on the table for how much they think that people would be willing to pay in roaming charges.
And I mean, even roaming plans where it's like, yeah, $50 gets you, you know, a 100th of what you normally have access to with your regular plan while you're on the go.
There's no reason that it has to be done.
And I really applaud the EU for being progressively thinking when it comes to these infrastructure items that I think unify people.
And I think they make travel and they make the global economy more of a thing where travel can become less expensive in every way, whether it's planes or trains or hyperloops.
Okay, so Elon Musk isn't building the hyperloop, but anyway, I really admire that. I think it's fantastic.
There's interesting stuff too, because you'd automatically think when you go roaming somewhere that you should pre-purchase the roaming plan because it'll save you all the danger.
One of my friends when we went down to PAX pre-purchased the roaming plan. It was $40.
Yeah.
I didn't. Took all the hits and was still totally fine and under $40. It was still really expensive and stupid.
So it's just like, would you like to bend over the couch or would you like to bend over the bed?
It's totally up to you as long as you bend over and take it from your telco.
Now, there are challenges associated with this because you're asking for telcos to cooperate.
In the EU, it's going to require wireless providers to have, I think, yeah, the proposals must be approved by the 28 EU members.
And they also have to have permission to operate and conduct business, so to speak.
In all of those countries, I think there's going to be a lot of consolidation in the market where the large players in the larger markets, whether it's Germany or the UK, are going to have a huge leg up on the smaller providers in the smaller EU countries.
And I think it's going to put a lot of people out of business. And there are problems with all of this, but I think that it has to happen at some point.
And I would love it if even Canada and US got together and cooperated.
I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet.
Well, of course it hasn't happened because whether it's Verizon or Bell or Rogers or AT&T, they all love damn roaming charges.
That's true.
They all love it.
But with everything else that Canada and US does together, I'm actually going to be surprised that's not one of them.
Well, it's one of those things where it takes a government mandate to make telcos cooperate with each other.
Have you seen...
Or they'll cooperate with each other above board.
Right, right.
Have you seen all that stuff lately, the Canadian government attacking wireless companies?
Their web page, whatnot, whatnot.
I didn't bother to put that in the thing because we've talked too much.
We've talked enough about that.
Yeah, they're kind of mad.
Yeah, that's good. That's good.
I'm glad we need more government regulation on the telecommunications guys because it is getting ridiculous.
So speaking of government regulations and sometimes them getting involved in things that they don't fully understand, this one is new.
It was posted by BamBamLali on the forum.
The EU wants every smartphone and tablet to charge by micro-USB.
So the original article was on the verge as posted by our forum member who is helpfully putting in his sources.
And I agree with the idea that every smartphone should use a universal standard.
But what I disagree with is that micro-USB should be it.
So let's get into it, shall we?
Just go.
Okay, I'm gonna start this by saying I've been called out a little bit over the last week or so because I did tweet about this a little bit.
Where people are saying, okay, well Linus's quotes about how fragile micro-USB is are from some company that didn't have it validated by a third party and etc.
Let's set aside the quotes for now.
Guys, hit us on Twitter.
Simple yes, no.
Have you ever had a micro-USB connection fail?
I want that to be the first answer.
And then yes, no.
Have you ever had a full-size USB or a mini-B connection fail?
So your post should read no, no if you've never had anything fail.
Yes, no if you've had this one and not this one.
And yes, yes if you've had both of them fail.
Guys, hit us on Twitter.
We're gonna go through your thoughts.
But my problem is I have personally had micro-USB fail and not...
Okay, I'll let you talk in a minute.
It's validated for a thousand plugs or something like that.
The problem I have is how fragile physically the connector is.
It can be validated for whatever you want.
But in the real world, we don't carefully plug it in and unplug it.
We don't even plug it in quickly straight and unplug it straight.
We run into situations where our phones are dead.
We really need to charge.
We're on the go.
We take a portable battery bank.
We plug it into it.
We jam the whole thing in our pocket.
That is the real world, especially in this day and age of cell phones that don't last for a week on battery like they did when I first got a cell phone.
We have moved so far backwards to the point where when I'm heavily using my HTC One, I might have to charge it a couple times in a day.
I'm talking really heavy use.
I burned through 20% of my battery in about 15 minutes today when I had tethering on and I was using it for navigation and the screen was on.
They go fast.
So micro USB is fragile even if it is reliable or whatever other term you want to use for it lasting a long time.
So with all of that said, I don't have an alternative connector I like better.
I actually, well okay, I don't think mini USB B was that bad.
If you actually objectively look at them and compare them, they are not that different.
The only real difference on a modern cell phone implementation, even on something like the HTC One, would be that you'd get less of a sort of support around it,
which I find that that connector doesn't need as much.
With that said, the internals of the connector are bulkier.
But they could have moved it closer to the center and that could have still worked.
So okay, maybe mini B isn't the answer, but I would rather they develop a more rugged standard as opposed to just making it standardized on this fragile connector.
To play against your question that you're putting on Twitter.
A, standard USB is obviously a lot better and could never be put on a phone and that's ridiculous.
So that doesn't matter.
Phone blocks, my magical phone, could have like an interface module.
That would be awesome if you could be like, no, this is my power connector.
I want to use an AC wall out here.
Bulkiness of the phone be damned.
It's going to be this thick and it's going to run on AC power.
Like standard computer power.
Anyways, and then mini B like no one ever uses.
So your metric there, micro USB is going to have a whole bunch of people that use it.
Every camera.
And a whole bunch of people using it for different devices.
Every camera was mini B.
Mini B is going to have a tiny, much smaller pool of people.
Well it's dead now, but it used to be much more popular than micro.
And it was mainly on cameras.
Yes, which were the portable electronics of the time.
And not nearly as many people had a freaking camera as they have smartphones.
So the metrics do not line up.
So your one side has way more population than your other side and it's not a fair competition.
Okay, fine. And you know what, I'm going to devil's advocate myself a little bit here
because I did run into a situation this very week twice
where I found myself wishing that my pebble, which is awesome by the way,
doesn't have micro USB.
I lost the magnetic connector, which is awesome and I love magnetic chargers.
I lost it twice.
Once, when I wanted to shoot the original unboxing, I had left it at home
and I was like, oh balls, because I could have run around anywhere in the inlay studio here
and grabbed a micro USB cable, chucked it in the box and pretended that was the one it came with
and it would have saved me a lot of time.
But I couldn't because it uses a proprietary cable.
And then again, when Brandon needed to shoot the B-roll for it.
But then in your defense, you're not against the unification of the cable.
No.
You're against micro USB.
If we could have like a magnetic USB standard cable.
Yeah.
So that's not really like, that's not really a point to gain.
Bring it on because there will be teething panes in any transition.
I mean micro USBs, remember when we never used to have enough of those.
Yeah.
There will be teething panes, but if we could have a standard that,
that just falls away when you trip on it, like a magnetic connector, that would be amazing.
Amazing.
All right.
So let's go ahead and see what kind of results we got on that there Twitter blitz.
I don't know how many people have followed the instructions
because a lot of people are just like, oh, they're doing a Twitter blitz.
I'll use this as an opportunity to say something completely unrelated.
Oh.
All right.
So there we go.
People, hey, people are, people are doing it.
So we've got, wow, this browser is being a big giant pile of poo.
It is lagging out so hard.
All right.
So yes, no, no, no.
Wow.
Yeah, I can't, I can't even do this.
So, so far of the people who haven't had like nothing die on them,
we have three for micro and one for mini.
We have another no for both.
We have Twitter being, or not Twitter, but Chrome being a big pile of junk.
All right.
Another one for micro.
Another one for micro.
No for both.
Micro but not mini.
No for both.
Yes to both.
No micro but yes mini.
Yes to micro.
No to mini.
Yes to micro.
No to mini.
So, okay.
Let's say, let's say, yeah, and it's lagging out again.
This is ridiculous.
We're gonna have to switch browsers.
We'll find some time to do that in a moment.
But mostly you guys are saying that micro USB breaks on you more often.
But again, as Luke was saying, yeah,
it's skewed because there's a much larger, much larger install base for micro.
That being said, I've used a lot of both and I've only had micro USB fail on me.
Like I just, I'm just.
For me, the problem isn't the cable so much as the receptacle.
Yeah.
And on something like a phone where we're talking a $600 plus piece of electronics
where it has this one failure point where if you bump it once, it's completely dead
and there's no repairing it.
Yeah.
And like every once in a while you'll find that device that comes with a cable
and that device and that cable like click together and it feels really good.
And you're like, oh, it's gonna be solid forever.
And it is.
And then you go to plug in like a random USB or even the one that comes with your phone
I found sometimes and you plug it in and you can like move the whole phone
like oscillating around where the actual plug is in.
It's like, that's not gonna work for very long.
It's like, oh, come on.
I don't know.
You can see it coming a lot of the time.
And then like you said, putting it in your pocket kills it all the time too.
All right.
So let's do one more major topic before we bring our guest on.
Apparently you didn't even get back to them about having not done the test call.
Do you have them added on?
I thought so.
On voice chat.
Okay.
If you have to go bail for a couple of minutes and I'll handle this topic on my own and make
sure you just kind of get that figured out.
I just replied to the email.
So here we go guys.
Parents.
Actually, you know what?
I'll save that one.
I'll save that one to talk about with you.
All right.
This was a post on the forum a long time ago and kind of a funny story here was slick's
been using the priority inbox in Gmail.
Um, basically since Linus media group was formed and only realized this week that, I
don't know, what would you say about half of the emails you get from me have not been
being flagged as priority at least, at least 25% at, okay, so let's say at least a quarter
of them.
So guys, priority inbox, if you don't already know, I really don't recommend using it.
I found it makes a lot of things escape from you.
Um, so, Oh, okay.
You weren't CC'd I guess.
So that's a bit of a problem.
So basically this article was actually posted on the Linus tech tips forum by Queek back
in June and it was something that I emailed.
I was like, Hey, we should, uh, we should talk about this on the WAN show.
So load line calibration or V droop, um, sort of V droop compensation is something that
many motherboard manufacturers have implemented in order to potentially stabilize overclocks.
However, it's one of those things where the motherboard manufacturers put it on there.
Extreme overclockers do tend to use the setting from time to time, but if you ask most of
the motherboard guys or you ask Intel, they'll say, well, you know what?
It's part of the Intel spec, so we'd really recommend that you leave it on.
And what happens is when your CPU goes under load, the motherboard actually drops the amount
of voltage it's delivering to the CPU.
This does a couple of things.
It reduces heat output and it also improves longevity of the CPU and reduces power consumption.
The flip side of that is if you set a voltage to your CPU with the objective of making it
stable at higher clock speeds, like if you're overclocking, you don't necessarily want your
motherboard dropping the voltage when you're in a load under a heavy load or intensive
situation because, well, I told you I wanted the voltage and I wanted the power and you're
turning it off on me.
So this article was just done by one of our forum members.
It's not the most scientific thing I've ever seen, but basically he took some time and
used a Rampage 4 Extreme and a 3930K to test with a digital multimeter what the actual
settings were, what was actually being delivered to his CPU on that board with different load
line calibration settings.
And I thought it was absolutely fascinating just because there's some pretty interesting
stuff going on.
It has a huge effect on the voltages that your CPUs are going to be running at, whether
it's at idle or whether it's at load, and it is definitely worth a read.
It will be posted in the WAN Show document after the show, but if not, you can always
search on the forum for load-line calibration, why overclockers should care, and you can
check out that article.
Full tip, if you want to search on the forum, just go to Google and do like Linus Tech Tips
and then load-line calibration forum, and it'll probably come up better because our
search sucks.
I know, the search is terrible.
It is.
We're hoping that they fix it in IPS version 4, which is in alpha right now, and we will
not be beta testing.
Yeah, no more beta testing forum software.
You know what, we've got a little bit more time, so Warcraft the movie is coming out
on December 18th.
Okay, there's a couple different ways this can go.
People were stoked so hard on, what was it, Advent Children or whatever they called that
first Final Fantasy movie.
What was it?
That was at least one of them.
I can't remember.
I don't know if that was the first one.
I watched about 30% of it, and I was like, this is the most boring, stupid thing that
I've ever seen.
I kind of expected that.
The CG, okay, the problem is that at that time, I hadn't played a Final Fantasy game
since like Final Fantasy 6, so I was expecting a story that wasn't just like the stupidest
thing ever.
Like, I was expecting it to be more than just a tech demo, and it really wasn't.
I was incredibly disappointed.
I was at a friend's house, and we were watching it together, and I was just like, I'm gonna
go play Sims, and that was the one time I ever sat down and played The Sims because
I was that bored.
Was that, I can't remember the names because I'm derping right now, but was that the Final
Fantasy movie where she has to go find, she's trying to find plant life?
I don't even remember, man.
Like, it was terrible.
I didn't mind the one where she has to go find plant life.
So Warcraft movie could end up being like just a tech demo for CGI and...
But it's Blizzard.
But it's Blizzard.
So it also could end up having like the best story ever and launching an entire series
of movies and a franchise that could be amazing.
I'm a huge fan of the Warcraft lore.
Like I love the Warcraft lore.
And I linked something in this document so you guys can check it out later, which is
a compilation of HD remakes of all of the cinematics, not like cut scenes, but cinematics
from Warcraft 3.
And like, they're epic.
Everything's epic.
Like when Arthas is succeeding you and stabs you in the guy's thing and his crown rolls
down the stairs.
Like that's so ridiculously epic.
And I expect it to be more like fighting and war and epic scenes and stuff like that than
I would expect from the Final Fantasy series.
So if someone could pull this off, would it be Blizzard then?
I think so.
Because we also saw Prince of Persia.
Because Square's whole thing was cinematics and being awesome at cut scenes and making
them epic, even though the games themselves, particularly these days, don't necessarily
have a whole lot of meat to them.
But then they've been moving away from that.
And they've been moving away from that, so okay.
And like, there was Prince of Persia.
But then Prince of Persia, I think, tried to be its own thing too much.
And this, I think they're just gonna embrace it and be like, nope, this is Warcraft.
Well Blizzard's good at that.
I mean, you know what, this was actually when I was, oh man, it was awesome.
When I was just kind of hanging out having drinks with Chris Roberts.
Yeah, that happened.
I don't think I told you that yet.
We haven't talked much about this.
I'm like, I told you in an email, it's probably the most jelly I've ever been.
So anyway, so he was all like, yeah, you know, I think the thing we did wrong on the Wing
Commander movie was that we tried too hard to make it its own thing.
Instead of just making it Wing Commander.
So if Blizzard does this, starring Colin Farrell, which is gonna be awesome, eventually.
I have a feeling it's gonna just be all voice actors though.
December 18th, 2015.
I'll go see it.
Yeah, me too.
I don't think I've seen a movie on launch day since Avatar.
And before that, oh no, I did see Deathly Hallows on launch day.
Deathly Hallows part two.
Return of the King?
No.
No, I think that was me.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that was your last one?
I think so.
Okay.
Well here, why don't we make a pact?
Let's go see this.
We'll get a big group together.
We'll have a Linus Media Group outing and we'll go see the Warcraft movie.
Guys, are you as stoked as us on this?
I gotta get the Twitch chat going on my laptop here because I am, I am, I am just, I'm sorry
guys.
I've abandoned you here.
I just like, yeah, seriously.
Like the amount of time that I've spent playing Warcraft 3 and the amount of time that I've
spent playing WoW should be like criminal.
Are we ready for our special guest?
I'm still waiting for the friend request and then we'll be good to go.
Alright.
So we're just jumping on right now so it shouldn't be too long.
Alright, jumping on right now.
Why don't we go ahead and just go for our one troll news item.
I really don't think this is going to take that long.
Half-Life 3 confirmed.
So they registered a trademark for Half-Life 3 but it's just trademarking the name and
at an almost exact same time they registered the steam symbol in the EU.
So I personally think it's just trying to drive hype towards Valve.
I think it has nothing to do with anything and I think anyone who's reading anything
into this other than they don't want someone else to make the game Half-Life 3 and be put
in a position where they can't really say anything about it, I think that's all that's
going on right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I honestly think it, like, you're definitely right.
I think it might have had something to do with the timing of the other stuff that's
going on because it drove a huge amount of more interaction to go along with their Steam
Box and all this kind of stuff because even in that thread you can scroll down and see
someone that posted a picture of Steam Box with the controller with Half-Life 3 bundle
by it for whatever, like, it drove interaction directly for Steam Box and the other, or Steam
Machine, sorry, and the other stuff that they're releasing.
So the timing may have been interesting but they also just had to freakin' patent the
name because they had to.
Right.
Well, trademark is different from patent to be very clear.
So I actually do get a kick out of the fact that it's a Newman avatar on the guy who posted
it on NeoGaf, so yeah, the ultimate troll avatar right there.
How close are we here?
It still hasn't added me up, haven't gotten an email recently.
Alright, cool.
Hopefully we'll have this going very, very soon.
Add me on Skype, yep, I'll be hopping on Skype in a second, okay, that's good.
So let's move along to, you know what, guys, hit us with a Twitter blitz of maybe some
questions for Elric, I'll take some time and introduce him.
If you aren't already familiar with Elric from Tech of Tomorrow, he's done a wide variety
of different stuff, started up Motherboards.org about one billion years ago without taking
a crack at him for his age.
He's been doing the whole tech media thing for longer than I have known what a CPU is,
so the guy's got a ton of experience.
His new YouTube channel, Tech of Tomorrow, is actually growing faster than Motherboards.org
ever did, and I think it really shows what creators are able to do when they shed the
shackles of corporate involvement or when they aren't forced anymore to focus as much
on the business side of things and are instead allowed to focus on the creation side of things.
I mean, we've seen similar success with Linus Tech Tips growing at a much faster rate than
it used to be back when I had to deal with my full-time job.
So Tech of Tomorrow is his show, he's on Twitter at, oh balls, okay, I can't remember, but
if you search for Tech of Tomorrow Twitter on Google, which is actually how I usually
find people because Twitter does a terrible job of autocomplete.
You know what really, really drives me insane?
This is like kind of an offshoot, but when you go on Twitter and type in, there's the
search box, and I'm like, Linus, and then press down once because it's currently searching
for you, and then press enter, and it comes up with, instead of going to you, it just
does like a search for, if I just did L-I-N-U, it would do a search for Linux.
And it's like, no, actually I want the thing that you were showing a millisecond previously,
which was Linus, it's, oh man, there's some stuff about Twitter that drives me crazy.
I have recently started using Instagram, because Twitter pictures break constantly.
You know what, I've actually found that too, there's better support when you click, especially
on the mobile app, when you click on a Twitter picture link, it just goes nowhere.
It doesn't work, so now if I use Instagram, it actually loads, like I have no interest
in actually using Instagram, I used to use it a long time ago, I didn't even bother making
a new account, I was just like, whatever, it'll work.
And like, I don't want to promote it, I don't want to do anything, I don't care if anyone
follows it, because everything that I ever post on Instagram will always just push to
Twitter.
I have no interest, because it's just, the only reason why I'm using it is so it'll actually
freaking load.
Alright, we've got another little bit of troll news here, this is pretty funny, while we
stall for time some more, so, are we ready to rock?
Okay, so get things going over there, we need our headsets, right?
On Indiegogo, the AI smartwatch is a smartwatch that I watched their, I watched their video
about sort of two minutes in, and I kind of went, yeah, okay, you know what, the real
secret to a successful Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign seems to have less to do with the
idea and the product, and more to do with having a really slick video, and I was looking
at it going, yeah, really guys, I don't know if, I don't know if this is going to work,
so what we got a kick out of, and this was pointed out by one of our community members,
was that it is as featured in, whoa, hold on a second, what's that down there?
What's this right here?
As featured in Linus Tech Tips.
So Luke's looking at this going, what?
I don't remember this.
I don't remember making a video about this.
You know what's funny too, is I watched the video, and it was just, it was music that
we paid for off Melody Loops, but they used the same music that we use in one of our Tech
Quickie videos in their Indiegogo video.
So what it turned out to actually be was a post on the Linus Tech Tips forum that like
one dude who looks like a legit member of the forum, so it's not just them, it's you
better not, who I've seen around, like 2,000 posts saying, oh that's pretty cool, but that
small interface, and then nobody ever replied.
And it's not even a bad post, just no one ended up replying.
The good post just, it wasn't really featured on Linus Tech Tips in the same way that that
Indiegogo page would imply that it was featured on Linus Tech Tips.
So we're getting our call with Elric going.
I've had the pleasure of meeting Elric a couple times.
The first time we met in person was at CES this year, and I remember us saying, hey,
we gotta, you know, get together and like do something.
And then we just never managed to make it happen.
So is he on?
Are we good?
Are we live?
I'm here.
Hey, hey, welcome to the show.
All right.
So I kind of introduced you a little bit, but why don't you tell the audience what you're
about as if any of them don't know who you are already, because I'm pretty sure they
do.
I don't know, man.
I feel like the old man in the tech business.
I've been doing this like since the day it started.
I've been into gaming and computers and electronics ever since I was a little kid.
So like doing this for me, it just seems to be like the natural way of my life.
I really love doing what I'm doing, and I don't really see myself doing anything else.
And it's great to see so many other young people doing it nowadays.
Like I've been doing it back when I was like one or two sites.
Now there's just so many people out there doing their own thing, and it's just awesome.
You know, a lot of people feel like guys like you and me or, you know, the new egg TV guys
or whatever are competitors.
And I'd like you to take a moment and address that in your own words, because I think you
put it pretty well.
Yeah, I mean, there really is no competition between anybody.
I'll admit that like when I first got into it, I used to kind of look around and look
at everybody's numbers and wonder, you know, what I could do to get better and all this.
But then I just kind of just started like doing my own thing, paying attention to what
I was doing and learning really to like more and less buddy up with everybody.
For a long time, it seems like a lot of the PC people all want to be like an island.
They just, you know, they were afraid to share their ideas, afraid to work together.
And I've really noticed that over the years, the Mac guys have never done that.
And so I really myself started adopting more of their kind of an outlook on things, work
with everybody, work together and just be one big happy family instead of being an island
all by yourself trying to do this.
Absolutely.
I agree 100%.
I mean, it still kind of is funny to me when people post on my video that, you know, Elric's
the best tech host or they post on your video that Linus is the best.
And you know what, guys, we really don't see it that way.
We see ourselves as and this is sort of my take on it is that I see every other YouTuber
who is doing tech on YouTube or making videos on YouTube and making a living out of it as
a testament to the solidity of the platform and the legitimacy of what we're doing here.
I think every other tech YouTuber that's approaching sponsors and trying to, you know, get sponsorship
or, you know, get access to the samples that we need in order to bring you guys timely
content is great because it brings attention to YouTube and to video that we otherwise
wouldn't be getting if it was just one dude talking about it to them.
So I think it's fantastic.
Yeah, I just think it's funny because they leave comments like, oh, hey, he did it before
you or so and so did it before you.
And I see those same comments on their channels when I do when they don't realize that we
all are just doing our own thing.
And when it hits, it hits.
Speaking of things that are hitting, this was an article that is on Tech Power Up.
Now, I don't know what your NDA obligations are, but I do have some with respect to the
upcoming Radeon graphics cards.
So I want to keep the discussion pretty much narrowed in from my side on what I've already
seen posted in other places.
But Tech Power Up posted some benchmarks of the Radeon R9 290X, which we already know
this isn't under NDA is going to be their new flagship card based on a new GPU.
And we saw some interesting results here.
So there's rumored specs in here as well, but we see it trading blows with the Titan.
So give me give me your thoughts on Radeon 290X.
Well, for me, I'm just really glad to see AMD getting something that's new for the people
that out there that have been supporting them.
I mean, they've had their cards on the market for a long time.
We did see the 7990 hit the market, but it doesn't seem like it got very favorable results
since the price is like almost next to giving it away now compared to some of the cards
that are coming out.
But I'm really looking forward to it.
And if these guys can actually get the price point down below the Titan, even if it does
not beat the Titan, if it can even come anywhere near the Titan and be hundreds of dollars
less, fans are going to be embracing that and enjoying it and being reviewer myself.
And you know what it's like when you get new tech stuff, then you have shit to really talk
about.
When you're on your 10th card of your launch, you're like, OK, it's the 10th card.
But now this is fresh.
This is exciting.
And I'm looking forward to it.
And I know the AMD fans are looking forward to it as well.
I'm super stoked into bringing the pricing thing.
Newegg had their little.
Yes, there was a little snafu on Newegg.
I don't know if you saw this or not, but go ahead.
So they had a preorder listed and whenever this happens, there's always that dude that
decides to go check out like the code code for the forum or for the forum or Web page
or whatever it is.
There's always that dude that goes and finds whatever that isn't supposed to be there.
So seven hundred dollars plus.
But then they could pull a switcheroo like has happened in the past.
Nvidia did it with GTX 680, where pricing was going to be six ninety nine and launched
a boom.
It was five ninety nine.
So they shocked everyone from AMD to their retailers, to their partners, with a much
more aggressively priced part than we were expecting.
Based on what we've seen from the leaked benchmarks on tech power up, performance looks very close
to the Titan.
However, I would take these results with a ginormous grain of salt.
Yes, not only because it's prerelease, but I mean, come on.
OK, Elric, how many times have you run surround benchmarks only to discover that it is a freaking
nightmare?
Yeah, it's most of the time just getting the set up on.
It's a pain in the butt.
You can get it done.
But those numbers to me are a little bit questionable right out of the gate.
I'm waiting till we really see what goes on with it.
I mean, now now I really do think, though, the card is going to be very, very competitive.
AMD wouldn't have held their cards so close to their sleeve if they didn't have something
that was going to come out to compete.
And these guys are known to be the price competitors.
So if they just play their cards right, AMD can do a serious damage to the market, especially
here around the holiday season.
Oh, play their cards.
Oh, that's right, man.
I love that.
I didn't catch that.
What happened there, guys?
You guys sound like you fell off the planet.
You guys fall over.
No, I was just I was I was laughing.
I love that.
Play your cards right.
Oh, that's fantastic.
So rumored specs has the die size double whammy rumored specs have the die size of
the 290 X at higher than the seventy nine seventy.
Now we saw AMD revised their strategy significantly with the release of the thirty eight seventy
where Nvidia remained committed to the gigantic monolithic GPU that was extremely expensive
to engineer, produced a lot of heat and was extremely expensive to build and put on cards
when AMD said, no, our strategy is going to be multi GPU for the future.
We're going to build smaller GPUs and our flagship part will always be two of them together.
Do you see a larger die than what we saw on Cayman XT, which was the seventy nine seventy
seventy nine fifty series as a departure from that strategy?
And what does this mean?
To be honest with you, Linus, during that, a lot of that last thing, I couldn't hear
most of it.
Would it?
I'm sorry.
I apologize, everybody.
Can you can you say a lot of it?
Because I couldn't hear you guys.
It broke up really bad in the Skype connection.
Oh, shoot.
Sorry about that.
OK.
So do you see AMD's new GPU, which is rumored to be much larger than the seventy nine seventy
GPU in terms of diarrhea?
Do you see that as a as an admission of defeat on their strategy of having two smaller GPUs,
so thirty eight seventy X to forty eight seventy X to two smaller GPUs together make
up their high end strategy?
I think that AMD is trying to stick to what they know best and trying to like get the
technology to be smaller and smaller and smaller always causes some type of problems.
These guys right now really just want to get a cards and cards out there that could seriously
compete with Nvidia, since we guys all know the titans so far just suck the market up.
So I think AMD is just trying to really stick to what they know right now.
I think in launch that we see next year with new stuff, we'll see them go back to that
again.
But I think right now they're just trying to really stick with what they know.
Yep, I agree.
I agree 100 percent now.
I wanted to move on to this as a separate topic, but I guess this segues in really,
really well.
Do you feel like Nvidia has been holding back for the last two years?
Yes, for a fact.
I mean, everybody that I see at Nvidia is constantly on vacation like you guys all know
Del Rizzo.
Every time I see him, he's on vacation with his husband around the world, sending me a
postcard saying, hey, we love the world.
If the company really wanted to be that competitive, I think we'd be see these guys doing a lot
more launching and a lot more talking about their product.
They seem to be right now in cruise control, just kicking back and waiting to see what
AMD's move is now.
Of course.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
We called this out like a while ago.
We've called this out repeatedly because we've known they've been sitting on this chip for
so long, just going, oh, here's another little bit, there's another little bit.
That's all you need.
Don't worry about it.
They're just kind of sitting there.
So for those of you who aren't familiar with the history, GTX Titan or GK110 is the code
name.
It's the same GPU that's in GTX 780.
The rumor was that that was always supposed to be the successor to the GTX 580.
That was supposed to be the GTX 680.
But the rumor, the word on the street is that Nvidia saw how poorly 7970 performed.
And remember, this was AMD's strategy of smaller cores and then putting two of them together
for the high end, which they didn't even manage to do until a year plus into that product
launch.
So when Nvidia saw how poorly it performed, they basically went, well, we don't even have
to release this as a GeForce GPU.
And they took what would have been GTX 660 TI, GTX 660 class of product, the GK104 GPU
and turned that into their high end product and basically sat on GK110, you know, deployed
it in supercomputing applications, Tesla.
And so basically the rumor is that had AMD managed to release something like R9 290X,
you know, a year and a half ago, we would have been different.
We would have seen we wouldn't have seen a thousand dollar GTX Titan.
Yeah, I agree with you 100 percent.
Nvidia has had no reason to come back up and swing and it really wouldn't make much sense
for them either.
If they came out with some card now, that was super, super fast.
They would put their competitor almost completely out of business and that really would make
sense for them either.
They don't really want AMD to go anywhere.
They just want to beat them.
And they're doing that and they don't have to do much.
Like I said before, these guys would not be out on vacation and doing everything if they
wanted to compete.
They'd be in the lab talking to their engineers and talking to all of us about something new.
I don't know about you folks, but I haven't heard about anything crazy new coming out.
And the thing about I mean, the thing that the viewers need to understand, because, you
know, viewers, a lot of the time I feel like don't understand the market dynamics as well
as they would if they were part of the industry.
So the things that viewers need to understand is that it costs a certain amount to make
a card, whether it's to engineer a new chip or put a complicated VRM design on it or a
heat sink.
I mean, the heat sink on GTX 780, GTX Titan costs, I think something in the neighborhood
of 70 to $80.
That's a bomb cost on that heat sink.
It's extremely expensive to produce something like that.
So there is an actual cost to produce graphics cards.
But Linus, it looks good, Ben.
It does look good.
And I love it.
But I mean, everybody likes reference cards from those guys.
For the first time ever, Nvidia made reference cards that people actually wanted more than
other cards.
That's a different change for those guys, for sure, though.
So the perception from consumers that more competition just drives pricing down is actually
wrong.
More competition drives a product out of the market, potentially, if it costs too much
to continue to make it versus how much they can actually sell it for compared to everything
else that's out there.
So if Nvidia turned around and released Maxwell Tomorrow, which is their upcoming architecture
and it was twice as fast as the R9 series, it's not like they could charge $1500 or $2000
for the top end card.
It might be lucrative in terms of the profit margin on the card, but it wouldn't be lucrative
in terms of the volume they could turn.
So it's a balancing act where AMD and Nvidia are constantly playing this game where they
actually carefully, unless they do something crazy like 8800 GT, they actually carefully
slot in a new card so that it performs about like the old ones except a slightly better
value and it makes sense.
We very rarely see the market completely upset these days, so from a business standpoint,
if you can't get as much for your card because people just don't have that much money as
it would be worth compared to everything else that's in the market and what your competitor
can deliver, why do you release something new?
Yeah, for Nvidia there's really no reason at all for them to release any new product
right now.
They can kind of cruise, even if this card comes out and it's really close, they can
still say in the long run, hey, our card's faster, we're going to charge that money and
they can wait another generation to launch their cards.
Plus, from what we've heard, they do have two more cards that are possibly going to
be coming out, so we may see something new from them very soon.
Why don't you give the details on those cards because we haven't talked about them at all.
Let us.
Well, there's supposed to be a single GPU card coming out and another dual GPU card
coming out from Nvidia.
The rumors are flying.
There's nothing concrete that I've actually heard from them directly, but we've seen the
leaks around the world, so we know that something's definitely going to be coming.
All these guys are doing right now is sitting back once again, they're going to wait for
the launch, they're going to see how it affects them, and then they'll make a decision.
If there's nothing that they need to do, they're going to even hold back on releasing any new
cards until probably we may see something right at the holiday season, but if not, it'll
be in Q1 of 2014.
So I actually just linked to your article here.
So guys, this is on techoftomorrow.com, and the article is Nvidia cutting video card prices
in October to compete with AMD with a question mark on it, you know, allegedly, you know,
rumoredly.
Rumor.
Rumor.
That question mark.
Where Elric basically says, well, look, we might see a full-fledged Titan.
Not all of the SMX modules and CUDA cores are enabled on the GTX Titan right now.
We might also see, and this has been rumored by Nvidia themselves, a dual GK110 GPU, which
would be absolutely benchmark crushing.
I mean...
I'd love to see it.
I'd love to see it.
With that said, for all the viewers that are kind of about to ask me and about to hit my
PM inbox, Linus, how do you think it will perform?
The answer is very simple.
Fast.
Fast.
Just like two GK110s in SLI on separate cards.
Pretty much like that.
So there's not a whole lot of special sauce to go on here.
But Nvidia has actually contacted me and said, hey, you know, get ready to have these cards.
So they might be something that they have on paper.
They might even have them, but they're not yet really sharing them with the market and
saying, hey, these cards are for sure coming, because believe me, as soon as they do, you
know we'll know.
Well, Nvidia used to be pure, pure, you know, consumer graphics cards, whereas you look
at some of their initiatives now, something like grid already uses dual GK110 GPUs on
a single PCB.
So Nvidia has become, and you look at Titan, same thing, become more about delivering an
enterprise solution and trickling that technology down to the consumer, which is a reversal
from what we saw from them before.
So I wouldn't be surprised if they are just sitting there waiting for AMD to do something
and they just, you know, get a consumer friendly looking heat sink and redesign the IO to actually
have some ports on it and release something along the lines of that card.
Did you guys hear that all of the two ATX cards that are coming out, they're not any
reference bottles whatsoever.
I'm hearing that every card is supposed to have its own coolant from the company.
So instead of using a card with a sticker on it, I'm hearing that all of the new 2NX
cards will be specifically designed by the company that's making them.
You guys heard that as well?
I hadn't heard that, but I do know that our sample 290X is a non-reference card and I
haven't heard of anyone who has gotten a reference card.
So while AMD did have reference cards at the event in Hawaii, I haven't seen any yet.
So that could very well be true.
With that said, you know, maybe this is a good opportunity to talk about what do you
think of reference cards versus non-reference cards, because this is a question that we
get a ton of.
I think it really matters on like who is making the reference card, because I'm sure the company
will take a reference card and they'll put like...
Sorry to interject.
Sorry to interrupt.
We're getting some breaking up on the call here.
Can we try redialing you here?
Let's try that one more time here.
Sorry guys, our connection looks good.
The stream seems to be running just fine still.
So just to be clear guys, we still have our Razer lower third down here, but the Razer
comms sponsorship is technically over and Elric had Skype on his machine.
So we decided to go that route.
So you're back, right?
But you still got that robot sound.
I wonder what's going on here.
It sounds like you might be being DDoSed actually would be my suspicion.
My comms broke.
That's actually why I didn't use it, but I can try and see if things work.
Yeah, I think you might be being DDoSed.
So do you happen...
Okay, let's see if we can figure out what we can do here.
There we go.
Hold on.
Has the connection dropped completely?
No, I'm here.
Still there.
Okay.
Well, you know what?
Why don't you go ahead and sort of we'll see if we can power through it and give us a...
You know what would be...
How good of a data plan do you have on your phone?
Do you want to give us a call from your phone on a mobile network and see if we can avoid
this?
I suppose.
I'm in my house.
I thought it was a good connection.
They said I'm being DDoSed or something.
Yeah, it's a Skype bug.
There's really not a whole lot that can be done about it, but anyone who knows your Skype
ID is able to DDoS you with impunity.
It was a problem we were running into on the WAN show where our shows were getting shut
down because someone who knew our Skype ID was shutting us down.
In fact, that person's probably trying to DDoS us right now, but don't worry.
We're using a very secret Skype ID that gets used for nothing but this.
I've been hacked.
Basically, yeah.
So you guys want me to try to hang up this and then call you back?
You know what?
It's a little bit better now.
Why don't you give us the reference versus non-reference card bit and let's try it.
Let's try it.
Let's see if you can make it.
All right.
Check it out.
Here's my way.
Now, the past...
Are you guys still there?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
In the past, I thought NVIDIA made some of the worst reference cooler around.
You guys all know everybody called them lawn mowers and everything else.
They were super loud.
In fact, everybody kind of suffered from it.
Do you remember the 7950 GX2?
How could you not?
But like I was saying, man, NVIDIA now makes a reference card that has a really nice cooler
on it and many of the people in my town will come to me and say, hey, how do you get a
hold of that reference design exactly like that?
And that time, it was really cool.
But most of the time, when companies just take and put some piece of plastic on it and
throw a sticker on it, I mean, I suppose that's okay if you're just somebody throwing it in
a computer and not looking at it.
But most of the people, I think, nowadays, they're gaming.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
No.
He's definitely, definitely being DDoSed, so maybe try and bring the connection back.
In the meantime, guys, I would love for you to hit us up on Twitter.
Give us a Twitter blitz of any questions you have for Elric that you'd like him to address
live on the screen.
All right, so let's go ahead and move into one of our other topics while we try and get
Elric back.
I've got someone asking me on Twitter, do you even know what DDoS is?
It's just Skype being garbage.
The reality of it is Skype's service really just isn't actually that bad.
And yeah, it's probably not that.
So do we have you back?
Are you back?
I am here.
I don't know how much you guys got, but I'm here.
All right, you're back.
So we made it to, you don't see much of a value to board partners just taking a reference
design and slapping a sticker on it versus actually designing their own card.
Most of the time, I don't really think that's good because, I mean, unless you're just somebody
who doesn't care about your computer and you just want to throw it in there and play some
games, you want a card that's going to look good, it's going to be cool, going to have
overclock and all that stuff.
And when these guys go out of their way and they make Windforce, Twin Frozer, Asics, when
they make this extra clean and go that extra mile, it just seems to make the card be a
better card and look better.
And for the five or $10 that should pay a difference, I think the people who take the
time to do that are making a better card.
Now, there are some people who have contacted me, like I said, who they really want to get
their hands on the reference cards, just like they look from and get those obviously from
EVG, they have those, but there are still some people that just made a plastic shroud
even for some of these newer cards, and I don't really appreciate that.
I think it's better if you go out of your way and take the time to make a better card.
You're not the reference guy.
Take the time to make a good card.
Yep.
You know what?
I agree with you 100% because there was a time a few years ago when you were looking
at paying a lot of the time for a non-reference card as much as you would pay for the next
better GPU.
So we were getting redesigned cards that are a lower tier of product, and then we were
getting them sold to us at the price of a higher tier of product with performance that
was about the same, but they'd be overclocked already, and yeah, you'd have a little bit
more headroom out of them, but usually you were better off just buying a better GPU in
the first place.
Whereas now, it's like you said, it usually costs like, what, an extra 10 bucks, 15 bucks
to get something like a Direx CU2 or a Windforce or a Twin Frozr card that has better cooling,
and in the case of Direx CU2 in particular, Asus has done a great job of having completely
non-referenced, redesigned cards ready at launch a lot of the time, so I think there's
a very compelling value to be had there.
The only case takes a lot of time, but Asus is taking a lot of time to make a card.
Sorry, we can't make you out again, but you know what, I think we're getting some complaints
here on the stream about just how bad the voice quality is.
You know what, I'm sorry, we might have to let you go, Elric.
Is he still able to hear me?
Probably not.
He can hear us fine.
Yeah.
I hear you guys fine, sorry.
You're breaking up too bad, so you know what, thank you so much for coming on as a guest.
Since they can't really hear you, I guess what I'll have to do is just kind of do your
outro for you.
Hey, I hope you can hear that.
Sorry, man, we've got nothing, you're going to have to...
Let's do it, yeah.
I'll cut it, but do an outro for him.
Yeah, okay, so guys, just so you know, that's Elric, he's got over 200,000 subscribers on
the YouTubes, which is all the more impressive because he had to restart his channel, he
got a lot of support from his viewers, formerly on the YouTube.com slash Motherboards.org
channel, they have flopped over there, they have helped spread the word, and it is now
at the point where Tech of Tomorrow has more subscribers than the Motherboards.org channel
ever had, and he's got faster growth than ever before, and I think it's a really cool
example of how YouTubers can basically come back and with the support of their communities
can really make a go of it in spite of some really challenging stuff that happened quite
a few months ago.
It must have been about 10 months ago now to Elric, yeah, it was because it was right
about the time that we went indie.
So guys, you can follow him at Tech Tomorrow on YouTube, or you can go over to Tech of
Tomorrow.com and check him out.
So parents, Minecraft is apparently a big problem.
So this was a post on Kotaku, which, I mean, oh, come on, okay, so now we've heard it all,
Minecraft blamed in school violence case, it should be noted that the kid took an unloaded
gun to school, and there was no, to give a little bit to the guy who's an idiot, there
was no firing pin in the gun.
The kid should not have been able to get a pistol with ammo, but there at least was
no firing pin.
So there was no firing pin, however, the kid did have a steak knife and a small handled
sledgehammer, so arguably, as far as things that we'd consider to be weapons go, the only
one was a gun, and then as far as things that we'd consider to be functional weapons go,
the sledgehammer and the knife are probably actually the most potent out of everything
that, with that said, threatening with a gun is a very big deal, but the kid never
actually threatened anyone, so he had them at school, which is terrible, and the kid
basically says, well, they use hammers to dig and knives and guns to protect themselves
from zombies.
This was the, not the kid, yeah, this was the, wait, what?
I'm pretty sure that was the dad, was it not?
Yeah, that was the dad.
So, I thought you were saying that that was the radio station, so when the dad was interviewed,
he clearly didn't have a very clear understanding of how Minecraft works, because digging is
normally done with a shovel, and mining is done with a pickaxe.
Or he doesn't understand how digging and mining work, because I don't know anyone who digs
or mines with it.
So, I mean, really what this calls into question is the comprehension of situations.
He's trying, he took his situation, he sat there and went, okay, everything that went
wrong was kind of my fault, now what is applicable that I can throw poo at to make this look
bad instead of me, and just randomly was like, he plays vidja games, everyone blames vidja
games, I'm gonna blame vidja games.
And I mean, I personally, as a parent now, do I think that something like Grand Theft
Auto 5 is something that I want my kid playing?
The answer's no.
I was gonna say, hopefully no.
The answer's no.
And you know what?
I don't even, I'm not even of the mind that, you know, at 16 or 18 necessarily that people
should be influenced by that kind of media.
With that said, there's worse out there that isn't in a video game.
This much is true, and with that said, I'm a pretty firm believer in the whole nurture
versus nature, and I lean more towards the nature side.
Do I believe that playing a violent video game takes an otherwise fuzzy, warm, would-never-hurt-a-fly
person and turns them into a serial killer?
The answer is no.
Do I think that some desensitization goes on?
The answer's yes, and you're basically wrong if you don't think that desensitization is
a thing.
But desensitization also doesn't make you do anything, it just makes you not necessarily
react in crazy ways.
So the one thing that does bother me is I do think that there is probably, potentially,
and I'm putting a lot of stuff in here, I think that if you lean that way in the first
place, you might get a few interesting, cool ideas that you could go ahead and act on that
you might not have otherwise thought of.
But not really from Minecraft.
No, not from Minecraft.
That's ridiculous.
No, like a sword, and my thing was like a sword and a bow and arrow, if you can translate
his whatever the heck that he brought up.
What kid didn't carve their toast into a sword and sword fight with their brother?
100%.
What kid doesn't go to camp and sharpen the end of a stick and poke random things?
You know, sword fights.
Or whatever.
Like, you're a kid.
Yeah.
Like, come on.
Any media, any book you've ever read, ever, has some sort of, there's the mice, whatever
that book was called, but the mice have little swords and shields and stuff, it's a thing.
I think it's like Redwall or whatever that series is.
It's just, come on.
Anyway, this doesn't deserve any more of our attention.
Let's move on to, ah, yeah.
This surprises the crap out of me.
I can't believe they're shipping Titans.
I had no idea that this was the approach Valve was gonna take.
So they're talking about the prototypes that they're gonna send out 300 of to lucky folks
who...
Potentially very lucky.
Potentially very lucky folks who apply to participate in the prototype test of Steam's
Steam Box gaming console that's gonna have the Steam OS on it, and there are, okay, so
the 300 prototype units will ship with the following components.
Some will have Nvidia Titans, some will have GTX 780s, some 760s, and some 660s.
So we're talking mid-range to high-end GPUs.
I was really expecting Steam Box to be more of a value-oriented thing.
Sure though.
What I brought up last week is that Valve, the Steam Box from Valve, if you buy a Steam
Box from Valve, it's gonna be heavily customizable.
So it's gonna be a desktop PC.
And it's gonna come with baller hardware.
That's been the idea.
Then everyone else will have size or value, like price or power consumption or low power
consumption.
That kind of stuff.
Valve is going for the Beast Machine PCs, which is probably not gonna sell as many in
my opinion.
But I mean, Valve has such brand equity that they could say, well look, if you want the
ultimate Steam Box experience, you can get it this way, or you can go work with a third
party or you can build your own or whatever, but we're Valve, so if you want one built
by us, boom.
Boom, exactly.
And something that's been interesting is boutique system builders.
We kind of brag on it every once in a while because it's so hard to effectively be a boutique
system builder.
This might be the only point in time where it makes sense.
Because if you build Steam Machines, you're getting into an audience where they don't
want to build their own computer, potentially, and they want something that's not an HP.
And they want something that's built for that application, so it might make more sense.
The rest of the specs look great as well, Intel 4770s or 4570s, there's gonna be semi-3s.
Storage is gonna be a 1 terabyte slash 8 gig hybrid SSHD, it sounds like Seagate's drive.
In all likelihood, power supply will be an internal 450 watt because Valve actually understands
that you don't need a 1200 watt power supply even to power something like a Titan, although
450 watt is probably borderline for a 4770 and a Titan.
And then finally, 16 gigs of RAM, so they are really going balls to the walls on the
hardware here, which leads us into, unless you had something else to say about Valve's
prototype.
The Titan thing is that they're not gonna be, I don't think any of these, like, I think
what they're expecting is that if you're getting a prototype, that if you, they're saying fully
customizable, right?
So if you want it to overclock like crazy and do heavier things on it, that you could
put in a bigger power supply probably, because it's fully customizable.
Because I think what they're expecting is...
But the prototype has to work out of the box, I mean...
I think it'll work.
Okay.
That'll work.
Alright, so, Xi3 to unveil the piston.
So this is apparently gonna be shipping as soon as, what was it, mid-November?
November, yeah.
Mid-November for folks who pre-ordered them a while ago, and late November, like the end
of November, I think the 29th, for folks who want to order one now.
So they are saying, okay, it's a powerful gaming system, however powerful is very relative.
It is not that powerful compared to what Valve will be shipping as prototypes, because this
is gonna be what I'd consider to be more like a next-gen console in terms of CPU power,
but the GPU power will actually be less.
This is an APU-based machine.
So here you can see what it looks like.
APU-based machine, it'll be powerful for its size.
Yeah, it's tiny.
So it's 4 inches by 4 inches by 4 inches.
Their website has a bunch of different pictures on it, including a dude wearing it as like
a backpack, so you can see that right here, and wearing what looks like a VR device and
a...
Interesting, because of certain things that don't make sense, but kind of epic, if you
can make it work.
It'd be awesome, like...
There's no battery!
Or they haven't...
I looked like crazy, I spent a really long time on this topic, because I was digging
through everything, trying to find if there's a battery, because I'm like, how is this guy
wearing it in the backpack?
Okay, here's my suggestion.
I would suggest that it uses DC in, because it's going to be relatively low power, and
if that were the case, you saw that huge external battery that Edzel bought, right?
A 25,000 milliamp-hour battery.
You could buy a half a dozen of them, daisy chain them, and you could...
If you look in my notes, I was saying something I would love to do is throw this in a backpack
with a huge pile of batteries, and then go into...
And something I thought of, this is...
We always have our crazy off-the-wall theories, so this is one of mine, is you could go into
a paintball arena, or a laser tag arena, and have that space mapped out into the thing,
and then go around with a gun where Oculus ripped and have fake enemies all over the
place.
That would be so cool.
Or even better yet, real enemies.
Real enemies and bots?
You would just have to have some sort of positional tracking on the backpacks, so they could say
where they were.
Oculus, in its current form, where you connect it to a desktop PC, is fascinating, but this...
It's everything else that's gonna be super cool.
This is gonna be just freaking insane.
So the piston can power up to three displays, who cares, because the GPU is just plain not
that powerful.
It's gonna have, I think, eight gigs of RAM in its stock configuration, it's an APU, blah,
blah, blah.
It'll start with 128 gigabyte SSD, but you can upgrade to two 512s.
Yep, so those are just standard M-SATA drives, super small, tons of IOs, so 12 USB 2 ports,
DisplayPort, Mini DisplayPort, all kinds of great stuff, so you can see what they've got
planned there.
Sorry, four of them were USB 3.0 ports.
And so this is, I think, this ties in really well to a topic that I was talking to Chris
Perillo about at the airport when we were in Hawaii.
And I got a lot of flack in the comments under his video, which I basically said, PS4, Xbox
One is the last generation of dedicated gaming consoles.
There's people in dedicated gaming media that have said that.
I don't know if you've heard this.
Okay, so hold on.
The people that were arguing with me seem to have largely not watched the video, because
what they're saying is, mobile will never replace the big screen experience with a controller.
Didn't say that.
I didn't say that.
He's a dedicated console.
At all.
I said a dedicated box for call.
I had one guy say, oh, this guy's an idiot because it might be something integrated into
your TV.
Yeah, I said that in the video.
The couch gaming experience isn't going away.
No.
That would be a stupid thing to say.
That would be ridiculous.
What I said is that if this generation of consoles has a life cycle that's as long as
the last one of about eight years, we will have outgrown it by eight years from now.
There's people speculating 10 years, and in 10 years, if your phone can't plug in to your
TV and power the whole thing, what were we doing for 10 years?
Yes.
You look at how quickly it's moving right now compared to the speed at which larger
devices are moving, we're moving towards smaller cores that are very powerful but also very
power efficient, and that's where all the development's going.
Nobody gives any cares about building a new cell processor, okay?
So no, I'm not saying you're not gonna sit on your couch with a controller and play games.
People will still do that.
That will pretty much always be a thing.
But to imagine that you need a dedicated device that exists just for playing games on your
TV in eight years is ridiculous.
So I really think that platforms, like I suggested in the video that Android or iOS could potentially
take a chunk of this, and people are like, oh, the game devs will continue to develop
for Vita.
Come on.
What?
Nintendo is still gonna exist as a hardware manufacturer in eight years?
Are you kidding me?
Good luck.
I challenge you, Nintendo, because platforms like, open platforms like Android will attract
game developers.
We have seen, who was it?
I could see devices from Nintendo running Android.
Sure.
That's actually, I had a talk with a friend about this not long ago.
But that would be like, that would be a rebranding exercise more than anything else.
Okay, fine, fine, okay, fine, fine, fine.
But to suggest that closed platforms will continue to be a thing I think is ridiculous.
We've seen already, I think it was $15 was the most expensive game on the App Store.
And it's selling.
So no, you don't have to develop for, and we can prove that you don't have to develop
for a closed platform, and all of a sudden, anyone on their phone or TV or shield or whatever
else can consume your game, you're gonna be hitting so much larger of an audience.
What do game devs look for?
They look for where are people willing to spend money, people love buying apps, and
they look for where is a large install base?
Why do you develop for Xbox 360?
Because there's millions of them out there.
Why do you develop for Android versus Windows Phone?
Because there's millions of them out there.
The install base for Android will completely eclipse anything that PS4 or Xbox One combined
could hope to accomplish eight years from now, in fact, probably already.
And we're gonna look at cell phones that you will own in not that long that will be more
powerful than that console that you own.
Yes.
That is going to happen.
The reason I brought up plugging your phone into the TV, that's because your phone will
be better than the console that you also have plugged into the TV.
So there you go guys, yes, it'll hold on, and yes, this generation of consoles will
continue to exist, but, and you know what, okay, maybe we'll see one more, but I don't
think it'll be that successful.
I don't think it'll be that big of a deal.
That's another thing, like Nintendo not making their own device, like they might still be
making their own device.
It might be side by side, like there might be a dedicated Nintendo and an Android one,
or they might just be struggling along, it just won't be on the scale it currently is.
Or we might see some kind of an evolution where games could be platform specific, like
Nintendo could lock down Nintendo games to only run on their Android thing.
I don't see that happening though.
I could see it happening, I don't know why they would.
It'll all come down to game devs though, and I mean, people making the argument in the
comments as well that, oh yeah, I'm gonna replace my GTA 5 gaming experience with Angry
Birds.
Angry Birds isn't the only game that runs on Android, like let's get over that, let's
just move past that.
And we don't have GTA 5 running on Android, but at some point it will be able to.
It will be capable of doing it, and if there's money to be made by doing that, I mean, you'd
be crazy as a game dev to not develop for a platform where people will throw buckets
of money at you.
One of the main reasons why I was interested in Ubuntu Edge, back to throwing way back
to this, was because once you plugged it into a computer, or a monitor, and it detected
that setup was going on, it would completely change.
It would boot into a bunch of desktop OS, instead of a bunch of mobile OS, and I found
that fascinating, because you can plug your phone into a screen that's bigger than it,
and it still sucks.
Because it's a mobile OS and it's all weird and whatever.
But if it boots into a desktop OS, how about you plug your phone into your TV, it boots
into a console OS.
Sure.
And we've seen glimmers of that with Android already, and things like the Asus Transformer.
Yeah.
Where, okay, yeah, mouse keyboard support, sure, yeah, have a more desktop-like experience.
There's no reason, I mean, eight years!
It's a really long time.
It's a really long time.
In eight years, we've seen smartphones come into existence.
Yeah.
To where we are today.
Like, when you just think eight years, it doesn't seem like that long, but actually
go back and look, try and figure out what tech you owned eight years ago.
Yeah.
And then just be like...
It's laughable.
So, okay, let's move into our next topic, because I think I've ranted about that enough.
The Silk Road has been busted open.
So you know what, you're more into this whole stuff than me, so go ahead.
To first explain what it is, it's a website on the quote-unquote, people hate when I say
quote-unquote, quote, darknet, unquote, there we go, called out for that a ton on the livestream,
that uses bitcoins and a weird way of transferring bitcoins to sell drugs or narcotics, so they
would sell...
Or fake IDs.
Or fake IDs.
Anything that you would sell on the black market, quote-unquote, would go on this website.
So the idea of it was that you could only access it through a Tor network, it was a
dot onion website, so it wasn't dot com, they have a weird crazy URL, which is in the doc
for people that are interested, but wouldn't exactly suggest going right now.
And users would connect to it by going behind a proxy, so like hotspot shield or something,
and then Tor up behind that, and then they'd be able to access the website, so it was below
layers of security.
And the idea was that everyone, sellers, buyers, owners, was completely anonymous.
Yeah, and that helps, and these dot onion websites, how all they work and all that kind
of stuff, tons of anonymity, and then even the way that the bitcoins are transferred
in between people helped, because you know, bitcoin transactions are traceable, so the
way that they went around was in this weird loopy way.
It was like scrambled or something.
Yeah, so you could follow it, but it was really confusing, and it was pretty much impossible
to find who it actually ended up with, blah blah blah blah blah, all that kind of stuff.
So what happened was, not the original creator, but the guy that took it over...
So that's Ross Ulpricht.
Or what was his tag?
Dread Pirate Roberts.
There we go, yeah, as a throwback to an old movie.
I love that movie, it's awesome.
Yeah, it's one of your favorites, I think.
Some people will know what we're talking about.
Princess Bride, there.
Yeah, so he has posts on Stack Overflow, which I linked in the document, which you guys can
check out, which is just like Kay, and people knew it was him, and he's talking about securing
onion websites, and it's just like Kay.
And then in PMs to a few users, he put his personal email address, which had his name
on it.
So it's like Kay.
And then the FBI's been on him forever.
He tried to place two hitman contracts through FBI agents, not knowing that they're FBI agents.
He tried to buy a kilogram of coke through FBI agents.
For running this super secret crazy thing that tons of people were on, where's my metrics?
There's 146,000 unique buyer accounts.
Now when saying that, there was almost a million accounts.
It's just 146,000 unique buyer accounts, these people that actually put through transactions.
And there was nine million bitcoins transferred through this thing.
If you break that down, that's, as far as I know, like billions of dollars.
A 1.2 billion today would be the, yeah, so the sales revenue of more than nine and a
half million bitcoins, valued at 1.2 billion.
And people figured out that was like a huge percentage of all bitcoin transactions going
on at all.
Yeah, I think it was something like half.
Yeah.
So we're through this website.
When this got, when this got, when he got busted, bitcoin fell by 29%, immediately.
Which is like, wow.
For people that were trying to keep bitcoin up on the, up and up and like the good kind
of situation, you just lost a lot of people.
And it's one of those things where we, you know, we look at bitcoin and we kind of go,
a great idea, but if you're ever going to be legit, this kind of crap isn't going to
help because, because all people are going to see for it, because they had this whole,
the mentality behind the site was that they thought that all of this should be okay and
should be legal.
And they were trying to make their own way of doing it.
Like it had a philosophy and that's going to be completely ignored now that it's been
busted open and the runner was trying to get people killed because that's what people are
going to focus on.
Yeah.
This whole underlying philosophy just got blown the crap up and it's, it's, it's now
everyone is going to hear about this.
It's huge on the news and all it says is bitcoin is bad.
So that's a real shame.
It is.
It's actually, I mean, I think we should look at this as just from sort of a thousand foot
view.
What a shame.
What a shame for bitcoin.
What a shame for alternative currency in general because you know, even, even other currencies
like light coin are going to suffer as a result of the negative image of bitcoin.
And I mean, it's one of those things where we look at it and we go, well, the whole point
is we want to get away from governments dictating what we can or cannot buy, where we can and
cannot spend our money, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But the problem is that it seems, you know, like if I say this, I think it will be true.
It seems like if people want to avoid having the government snooping in their affairs,
well, this is what they're doing.
Well, okay.
For half of the people using bitcoins, it was true at least.
The drug thing aside, because there's so many laws changing in that field right now, whether
or not you think it's bad or not completely ignoring that.
I think the part where it really stepped over the line was where he's trying to get people
killed.
Well, yeah, of course.
Yeah.
So it just, so, so, so, so that's the perception that will be, that will exist for half of
all the transactions that were occurring using bitcoin and that's, that's all allegedly,
we haven't confirmed that number through investigative journalism that half of the
transactions were, but, but I think part of that too is because of the kind of back loopy
way that they're doing transactions, they bounced around a lot, right?
So that inflated the number like crazy, but still 9 million bitcoins, it wasn't a small
amount.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So one of the, so he actually ended up getting busted due to a random, a random routine package
inspection where he was having some fake documents shipped over the border.
And so there was one of them was a California driver's license with his photograph and birth
date, but a different name.
So they ended up being able to put enough of it together that they were able to bust
him.
Canadians ended up catching him.
And one thing that is kind of go Canada sucky and this is go Canada, but a huge amount of
the transactions and a huge amount of people on the website were Canadian.
So let's go Canada kind of, oh yeah, alrighty then.
We have a fantastic, well, we have a fantastic sponsorship message for you before we start
talking about cheating in Android benchmarks and I almost feel a little bit sort of weird
talking about this right now, but whatever your reasons might be, and there are legitimate
reasons to value your privacy on the internet.
Seriously, with all the NSA crap going on right now, just because you're not buying
drugs online doesn't mean that you shouldn't value your privacy.
VPNs are a great solution and hotspot shield is the proud sponsor of the land show for
this week.
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You can get a trial of the software of course, and try it out before you buy.
And what's the value of a VPN?
You can do things like we just talked about where you can, no, not the buying drugs part.
No, I meant at the beginning where I was like to hide your footsteps and all that kind
of stuff.
And maybe you're not buying drugs.
Maybe you're trying to talk about something that you don't want other people to know about.
And that might not actually be an inherently bad thing.
So you want to trace your steps.
Not everything that's illegal is necessarily bad.
I mean, we've seen this time and time again throughout history where not everything that,
I mean, at times you couldn't talk about being a Christian for fear of execution.
Like talking about things is not necessarily bad.
So VPNs can help protect your privacy.
Underground railroad, it's all like there's tons of stuff.
Being black is not inherently bad.
No.
I think we can all agree on this now, but even a hundred years ago, that wasn't a thing.
So anyway.
So whatever your reasons be, you can hide your footsteps.
You can, there's some things, I think it's just with iOS where it will actually kind
of help save money on your data plan because it does compression on their side.
So another thing you can do with it because all your traffic is being rerouted through
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So thanks again to hotspot shield for sponsoring the WAN show.
And without further ado, boom.
They are almost all dirty by Anand Lal Shimpi and Brian Klug.
So the state of cheating on Android benchmarks.
So I want to preface this by saying cheating on benchmarks is not a new concept, especially
on the, on the PC side.
We had seen this over and over and over again, whether it was 3dMark 2001, 3dMark 2003, every
graphics company was doing everything they could to have the highest score.
Whether it meant, Oh, well, if we just like render that with a little bit less fidelity,
nobody will notice.
And so they were making specific optimizations that they were releasing with driver updates
to 3dMark, a synthetic benchmark, the new driver would drop and it would say 10% improvement
in far cry, 15% improvement in 3dMark.
And you'd just be like, come on, you guys are really investing in this.
But the reality of it was especially then a lot of people were making purchasing decisions
based on synthetics.
Yeah.
I think more than actually.
More than so leading us to, well on the Android side, I would say a lot of people are making
purchasing decisions.
I meant for PCs.
Oh, more than than now.
Yeah.
For PC.
Sure.
Because most people just don't care anymore.
Yeah.
So they tested a bunch of stuff.
The pad phone from ASUS, the HTC one, the one mini, the G2 from LG, the Moto razor.
And the basic conclusion guys is that if you're buying a Nexus device, there is no cheating
going on.
If you're buying a Motorola device, it looks like at least the ones they tested, no guarantees
about the other ones.
There is no cheating going on.
If you were buying a Samsung device, look at that note three, there is more cheating
going on with the note three and the note 10.1 2014 edition than any other device that
was tested.
Nvidia shield is not doing any cheating, but let's, let's get into the technical sort of
what is cheating exactly because this is a bit different.
This isn't driver tweaks where you're actually rendering less of the image or doing whatever
else.
So on the Exynos 5410 Samsung was detecting the presence of certain benchmarks and raising
thermal limits and thus the max GPU frequency in order to gain an edge on those benchmarks
on both the Snapdragon 600 and the 5410 on the Samsung Galaxy S4 platform.
So both of those, both Samsung Galaxy S4 platform Samsung was detecting the presence of certain
benchmarks and automatically driving CPU voltage and frequency to their highest state right
away as opposed to a gradual ramp up and ramp down.
And how these benchmarks work is they'll go through multiple times and then give you an
overall score.
So it's going to change it.
The scale at which it changes it, if you look at it for one run is a little bit, but then
over time it actually increases.
Yeah.
So basically they're not, they're not lying to you about what your hardware is capable
of doing.
They're not just, you know, creating a, you know, they're not putting like a piece of
software on the phone that detects the benchmark, closes it automatically, puts up a static
image that makes it look like it's running it and then just spits out a fake score.
We're not talking something that blatant, but what they're doing is they are manipulating
the numbers to achieve unrealistic levels of performance.
And maybe it's 3% here or 8% there.
It's not like doubling it, just, just fabricating the numbers completely.
But it really feels unnecessary.
And I wish that that this wasn't the case, but it's going to happen.
It'll keep happening.
And you know why it'll keep happening?
Because most people don't care.
You folks watching this show, you probably already were at least vaguely aware of this.
The people who we would be breaking this news to are not watching this show.
And the people who might be shopping for a cell phone probably aren't going to listen
to you when you start talking about what benchmark the HTC One wins and which one the Galaxy
S4 wins because they don't care.
They look at it and they go, well, yeah, this one's really nice and it has a good battery
life.
And what they will read into is the newscaster who quickly goes to some websites, finds benchmarks
and then goes, this is the fastest phone there is, or this phone is faster than this phone
without saying benchmark, without saying any of the big words.
And up till now, my understanding is that Samsung has mostly just denied any optimizations.
So unless they're reading the Verge or AnandTech versus if they're watching Fox News, that
tells you what kind of information they're going to get.
Most sites are just going to keep running benchmarks.
And that's all you can do.
I mean, this is very low-level firmware programming that's going on here to change things like
power states on the fly like this.
So you can't just turn that off and run the benchmark to get more legit benchmarks.
One thing they did was they renamed the executables, not, I guess, the packages, they would rename
the benchmark and then it wouldn't detect it in some situations.
And then it's going to become another arms race where the phone manufacturers will find
some way to detect it.
So there you go.
And if you want to keep your phone up to date, you're going to have to keep installing, you
know, new ROMs and new updates.
And for everyone who's saying, oh, well, I just, you know, I rooted my phone, I installed
it.
Because good for you.
Most people aren't going to do that.
My mom is not going to do that.
His mom is not going to do that.
I didn't even bother on my own phone.
Not because I don't know how to do it, because I just don't care.
We jail broke my mom's phone, but that was just because she needed a few more things.
That's one way of putting it.
It was like a super old phone.
She needed a few more things?
It was additional functionality.
Ah, okay.
We didn't actually pirate any apps or anything, it was just additional functionality.
So Qualcomm claims that Apple's 64-bit CPU is a marketing gimmick, so this was posted
by E. Chando on the forum.
The original article is from news.techworld.com.
And basically they've come out and said, look, I think they're doing it as a marketing gimmick.
There's zero benefit that the consumer gets from that.
The benefit, the main benefit of 64-bit is being able to address more than four gigs
of memory.
And Apple has only equipped the 5S with one gig of RAM, which means that on the 5S there
is no benefit.
But this comes down to what we were talking about before, which was what Apple's doing
in my mind is preparing the ecosystem for the eventual move and paving the road for
a smoother transition.
So I think, I think the 64-bit chip may have been interpreted incorrectly, but I don't
think it was complete hogwash and had no, no, it didn't help consumers at all.
I think that's complete crap because it's preparing the whole ecosystem for later.
So when they will utilize this, which will be probably pretty freaking soon to be completely
honest.
Maybe another year or two kind of thing.
Yeah, it will be ready and it won't be a big deal.
We saw this on the PC side where it was kind of terrible.
And the difference between Apple and Android at that point then will be that Apple will
be able to launch iOS 7.5 or 8 or whatever they want to call it and say backwards compatibility
all the way back to 5S.
Whereas the compatibility of 64-bit Android operating systems and apps will be so broken
and so fragmented that no one will know what's going on unless you're one of that 0.1% that
actually gives two cares about it and follows all this stuff daily.
You'll know, but good for you because most people won't.
And when it comes to selling to the general consumer, you have to do things that appeal
to the general consumer and compatibility is a big one.
So I still say like huge thumbs up to Apple.
64-bit does not inherently improve the performance.
The A7 chip, the A7 chip is fast because the A7 chip is fast.
Not because it's 64-bit, it just happens to be 64-bit compatible.
And I think it's fantastic that moving forward, we're going to have the market move in that direction.
Yeah, I found one of the things that you said actually interesting saying...
Really?
How was that for you?
You have to let me...
Finding one of the things that I said interesting.
No, not you.
Oh, okay.
I generally find things you say interesting.
Oh, thank you.
I was talking about the guy in the thing.
Anyways, he says it will have no real benefit other than engineering chip design and operating
systems.
Well, wow, that sounds like a pretty compelling list of benefits.
What?
Those things are really important.
What are you talking about?
I can't find any of those three things that is not important.
Yeah.
What?
Sorry.
Like that quote was just like, okay, I really like...
Oh, man.
Sorry, dude, but that's brutal.
So let's go ahead and move into our next iPhone piece of news.
So Logitech's iPhone game controller pictured again in a new leak.
This is all rumored.
This isn't by any means release hardware or anything over here, but that looks pretty
darn cool.
It looks good.
And this plays into exactly what you just brought up, which is where Nintendo might
not be a handheld manufacturer, hardware manufacturer.
Why would they need to be?
Because stuff like this is going to start coming out and I think stuff, even though
this is awesome, I think stuff a lot better than this is going to start coming out.
That's the other thing too, is the ridiculous people posting on that video saying, oh, well,
the touchscreen experience isn't very good.
And for you, the touchscreen experience isn't very good.
That's not...
It's not what we're talking about.
Touchscreen experience like always sucks unless you might be Valve and you might be changing
it.
Yeah, you might be made of magic.
Yeah, but that touchscreen experience that Valve is going to have, I don't think...
That's touch pad.
Yeah, that's not going to come to phones for at least a long-ass time.
So you know, you look at the direction things are moving, where it comes to where we've
got accessories that turn our phones into consoles.
We've got dedicated devices like Shield that turn that ecosystem into a console.
Oh, sorry.
Throwback, another thing, Shield didn't cheat either.
Yeah, Shield didn't cheat.
I did mention that.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, Nvidia did not cheat with the Tegra 4.
And I think that really speaks to how much they've grown up in the last five to eight
years where they were as guilty as AMD at times, like real guilty.
And now, no one was really investigating this at the time, but they basically said, look,
Tegra 4 kicks ass and it's going to kick ass without us making any optimizations for particular
applications.
Kudos to you Nvidia, love to see that.
All right, so here's a quick discussion topic and that is the Xeon versus Core series processors.
So there's a lot of confusion about this.
So the Xeon E3, yeah, I know I'm in Canada, I don't care.
The Xeon E3, oh, I hate it when it does that to me.
Stop it.
I know I'm in Canada.
Don't redirect me to the homepage.
I want to actually look at this page.
So what is the difference between a Xeon and a Core series processor?
So there's a couple of different things.
First of all, right now there happens to be a particularly interesting Xeon, which I can't
remember the model number of for the life of me right now.
And of course this, this isn't working because I bet my phone battery just died.
Your phone just died, yeah.
Oh, it's one thing after another today.
So it's the E3 something or other.
It's clocked 100 megahertz slower than the Core series equivalent.
And what's the difference?
So number one is that Xeons aren't officially supported by some boards.
With that said, I've yet to see a compatible, an electrically compatible board that doesn't
support it.
They always work.
They're just not like officially supported, but they always work.
Yeah.
Number two is there's no integrated GPU.
So Intel has fused it off because they, I guess they figure people who want those Xeons
don't need integrated graphics, which I think is crazy because that's one of the reasons
I have against getting one is if I wanted to use it for a server later on, I'd want
it to have integrated graphics.
Okay.
Base clock overclocking only, which is fairly limited compared to being able to overclock
the multiplier.
Even on non-unlocked SKUs, you can overclock the multiplier a fair bit on modern GPUs and
on Haswell, since they don't overclock that high, you might be getting pretty close to
the maximum without even getting an unlocked CPU.
It doesn't need ECC memory, but it can use ECC memory unlike the Core series processors.
So someone was basically just asking me, well, is there any compelling reason why I
should get a Core series processor versus a Xeon if it's like 50 bucks cheaper?
And I was kind of like, let me look into this.
The answer seems to be if you don't need the onboard graphics and you don't want to overclock,
not really.
Yeah.
Make sure your board supports it.
In fact, many boards, even consumer ones do officially support Xeons.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just, just not all, just not everyone officially supports Xeons.
That's all.
Um, but, and like this has actually been pretty crazy on the forums lately.
I don't know if you've noticed that, but people have been going nuts over these two processors
and like, yeah, if you have no plan on overclocking and you have 100% of a plan to always have
a video card with that processor all the time, like you're going to pair them together, um,
then yeah, it's fine.
Uh, personally, I like getting processors that have integrated graphics if I'm going
to get it on a non like crazy enthusiast platform.
So if I'm not going to get 2011, I'm probably going to want the option for integrated graphics
because at some point in time I might take that system and throw it in a server environment.
Who knows?
There's other stuff that uses it.
I mean things like, uh, things like, uh, video encoding, quick sync, um, anything that's
going to take advantage of open CL is going to benefit from the onboard graphics, whether
it's Intel or AMD, although AMD's onboard graphics are quite a bit more powerful.
Yeah.
Um, and I can't find a micro USB charging cable, which means that our, um, our PowerPoint
for build of the week is going to be a bit of a challenge.
So we'll be back in just a moment.
Oh, we can do that.
Uh, wait, where are we?
Right.
Right.
You've got it.
Okay.
Our builds of the week this week are freaking awesome.
So the first one is Arctic water from B negative and there's nothing negative about it.
Holy balls.
So this was built for someone else.
I think it was on the OC3D forums, but like when you're building something for someone
else that is already on a tech forum, like you kind of know it's going to be pretty awesome.
Unbelievable.
I mean, even replacing all of the connectors on the PCI express slots, painting the shroud
on the saber tooth board, painting dat memory, dat hard piped copper tubing.
I mean, Oh, it's, it's orgasmic.
And then once you go to the next photo, you can actually see even the ring on the Corsair
fans, different accent points on the saber tooth motherboard, like what a beautiful machine
attention to freaking detail.
What an absolutely beautiful, wow.
And it's the one system I've ever seen where the stock crossfire breaks, like it's not
completely out of place.
It's pretty awesome.
Next up, this one's been in the works for a long time from PBaines, the custom water
cooled desk, boom.
So cool.
And then one thing that I always worry about with these desks, and actually we talked about
this in one of my private little, not private, but my solo live streams a while ago when
this was in production, which we brought this up and everyone, instead of me playing a game
was just looking at this build, which is ridiculous, but I brought up something that always worries
me about these taller desk builds, which is like, what it means is like the, uh, the,
the tallness of the height here.
Yeah.
So it's like, where do you put your legs and then how do your arms, like if it's tall enough,
your legs or your arms up here and he has a photo of it and he actually kind of slots
in fairly well.
Okay.
And he also brought up that he's going to be putting his keyboard and mouse probably
on the tray anyways.
Right.
Okay.
So that totally makes sense.
That's just a wicked build.
Look at that.
It's amazing.
Sleeving and these, I love that nice straight runs of, of, um, uh, vinyl tubing or a flexible
tubing look outstanding.
It looks so good.
Oh, all them right angles, man.
And he was even super, super, super careful about the color of his coolant too.
It's great.
That's a great picture.
Oh, okay.
Just one more.
It's not like a super crazy picture of the insides, but I just wanted to show how like
he actually does kind of fit now.
It's pretty tight, but he did say that he's kind of a bigger guy.
You can, you can tell looking at him.
So some for someone like me, my legs would be too low and my arms would be up here, but
it seems to kind of, it seems to kind of work for him, which is very, very awesome.
What a great build.
Yeah.
Seriously.
Absolutely.
Super stoked to see it finished.
So guys, I think that's pretty much it for the land show this week.
Thank you so much for tuning in and, uh, again, big thanks to our sponsor hotspot shield for
making this episode possible.
So without further ado, peace out.
We'll see you again next week.
Bye bye.
Oh, that makes sense that that didn't work.
So network target.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Did it just crash?
Oh no, we're here.