All right, guys, sorry, we're a couple minutes late.
Very unusual for us.
I don't know, it's once in a lifetime opportunity
that we would actually be late.
Yeah, actually we're six minutes late,
which is pretty good.
They should all be congratulating us at this point.
And no technical, okay, no,
we did have some technical difficulties.
We had more than one.
Yeah, okay, so our video capture card,
I put the wrong one on
and there were no drivers for that one.
And then...
The computer was just like every couple of seconds, like...
Yeah, our stream computer was being super not cool.
It's like, bro, bro, you've been not cool, bro.
I don't wanna run right now, so I'm just gonna...
I would just walk and trip sometimes.
Being not good, not good, not cool.
And then I thought there was no audio,
but it turns out I stepped on the cord.
So those headphones just weren't plugged in.
Yes.
Fortunately, that one was relatively easy to diagnose,
just like diagnosing how much fun we're gonna have
in the next half an hour.
Let me just listen to your...
Oh, his heart's racing.
Fun, fun, fun, fun, terrible.
All right, so we got a bunch of great topics today.
Digital distribution reigns supreme in the PC market.
So in other words, nothing has changed ever.
Also, Valve is the most desirable employer
in the gaming industry.
Because nothing has changed ever.
Various DDR4 pricing news will be coming later on,
and the Star Wars Unaltered trilogy
could possibly be coming to Blu-ray.
Yay!
Perfect.
Oh.
Did you guys realize that we've never missed a LAN show
since we started broadcasting?
Do you have any idea what kind of dedication that takes,
or at least what kind of copious amounts
of sponsorship money it takes?
Linda.com is proud to sponsor the WAN show this week.
Well, Linda.com is a fantastic way to learn a new skill.
Wanna learn something new?
Visit Linda.com slash WAN show.
And that will be great.
You will get a free trial for nothing.
That's what free means.
I think it even lasts like seven days or something.
Yeah, seven day free trial, bam.
Also, whoa.
Whoa.
What's that?
Oh my God.
Next week on Linus Tech Tips,
PAX Prime coverage,
brought to you by HyperX memory and other products.
They actually make lots of stuff like USB drives
and like even, they even have a headset.
They even have a headset.
They do have a headset.
Have we not missed a WAN show?
I'm pretty sure we've missed a WAN show.
I don't think so.
What about when we were in Taiwan?
Individual ones of us have missed WAN shows.
Taiwan?
Oh, was that WAN show or was that live stream?
Oh, WAN show.
Since we started WAN show.
Yeah, it's been over a year.
We haven't missed a WAN show.
One of us has managed to drag ourselves in here,
come hell or high water or vacation.
Statutory holidays.
Or babies.
Or babies.
I mean-
Most statutory holidays, we both come in.
Yeah, as long as we don't have a baby together,
there's no reason that we'd ever have to miss one.
Just have like a hospital stream.
People are asking for an ice bucket.
I think an ice bucket may be in the future
of at least one of the people
sitting on this couch right now.
I think I just got elected or whatever.
Did you just get challenged?
By Timmy.
By Timmy?
I think so.
Very nice.
He sent me a YouTube link and was like,
hashtag slick.
Hashtag slick.
That's how it's gonna be.
All right, so speaking of how it's gonna be,
how it's always been and how it forever will be,
I think that was the first thing I said,
but if you don't think about it too hard,
it won't make your brain hurt.
Valve is the number one most desirable employer
in the gaming industry.
They surveyed 2,200 companies,
and people even ranked working for Valve
above having their own company.
Oh man, that's kind of insane.
To be clear, having your own company
ain't all it's cracked up to be.
But having your own company
always gets rated extremely highly.
Does it?
Usually, yeah.
In almost all industries, it gets rated pretty highly.
This is something I didn't know.
So this was a survey with 2,200 game devs.
This was posted on the forum by lots of unexplainable.
I think you're looking for the word inexplicable.
Unexplainable.
I think technically that is grammatically correct.
I think so.
Okay, well.
Lots of unexplainable lag.
Anyway, thank you for posting it on the forum,
however much your username has confused me.
Sorry, Karyan.
Yeah, I think in a wide set of industries,
having your own company is rated very highly,
but then you also have to remember
that this is coming from people
that haven't run their own company.
Right.
Yeah, right.
So that's a thing.
So as someone who has run their own company,
there are benefits.
However, it's not like I have a hard time
selling people on coming to work for me
because I think that they understand
that it's not all just benefits.
Both my parents have ran their own companies.
I did for a very small period of time,
and I know you're running one right now,
and it's not easy.
There are good things about it.
There are definitely good things about it.
I set my own hours,
but that's also one of the worst things about it.
Because to be very successful,
you kind of need to set a very large amount of hours.
I think there's this weird assumption
that as a CEO, you could just be like,
well, I'm gonna take 876 days of vacation
like George Bush did in his term.
But I think what it actually turns into
is you end up working usually double hours
for like almost every week.
Yeah, and I mean, the thing too though
is if you have a fantastic team
that's able to support you,
like I was able to take a week off
where I was pretty much completely unplugged
for the birth of my new baby girl.
If you have that, then that's great.
But most self-employed people work really long
and really hard in order to get to that point.
So I mean, I was lucky to be able to do it for a week.
For me to take a two-week vacation,
it's probably gonna be a little while longer.
I'm gonna have to add some more staff.
And so it's one of those things
where you can have a very small business.
Like I've crunched the numbers.
I've been honest with you guys about this.
I've crunched the numbers.
What kind of money could I make as a YouTuber
with my kind of following,
just like me and a chess tripod
pumping out videos that are completely unedited?
You know what?
I could pay myself a lot more, like multiples more.
But that's not really the point
because if you're trying to build a sustainable business,
you have to invest and you have to spend a lot of money
on people who can support the business
and actually help to grow it if you get really good people.
So that's the thing that every business owner
has to struggle with.
You look at any industry.
So let's look at the gaming industry.
Like an indie dev has to decide,
do I work crazy stupid hours
to make the game myself from scratch
or do I pay crazy money to build this team
that then I'm banking on being able to pay back
and then you have all that stress
and then you're not sleeping anyway?
So it's not the best thing ever,
even though there are definitely benefits.
And I know indie devs that have gone both ways.
So I don't know.
I do know that as well, actually.
I do know that as well, actually.
I do know that as well, actually.
I do know that as well, actually.
I do know that as well, actually.
All righty then.
Now to be clear,
Valve's internal structure is not universally praised.
I mean, I don't think anyone complains
about the snack room, but like.
No, no, no.
I think our snack room is exactly amazing.
I actually have an upgrade to our snack room.
Do you?
Yes, it's a gumball machine that legitimately works.
But you have to put money in it.
Oh, no, of course.
Oh, man, of course.
It was mine when I was a kid.
My aunt brought it over to my house
and I was just like, oh, sweet.
I think it takes quarters.
Okay.
My neighbor at one point in time
had this like old school pot machine
that you had to put money into,
but then he had just cut a hole
so the money just fell back out.
Yeah, that's not gonna happen.
I know.
Great idea, though.
I like the way you think.
Right now, the gumball machine that we got from Super Fun
is broken to the point where,
to get gumballs out of it, you just take the top off,
reach in and pull the gumballs out,
and then put the top back up.
Not very secure.
I wish I hadn't invested in that gumball machine.
Oh, okay.
Now, to be clear, guys, not everything is perfect there.
They don't have like a hierarchical hierarchy.
Yeah.
But, come on.
There's like the,
I don't know what they exactly call it,
but there's like, obviously,
Gabe is kind of leading things,
and he has his like right hand, left hand
kind of group of people,
which he kind of has lead other people.
It's just, it's not like a very clean cut,
extreme structure, but it's also not completely flat.
So it's been criticized as being a little bit
like high school because there'll tend to be
people staking out their own claims and clicks
and stuff like that.
Although, I mean, there's some great stuff.
You know, there are no shareholders.
It is a privately held company,
so you don't have to ship something
unless you're happy with it.
There's also the fact that you can take
as much vacation time as you want,
which sounds kind of like being self-employed
because that's just another way of saying,
you know, we have this loose culture
where you can work however hard you want,
but like other people are gonna be working hard, so.
You can just get fired.
It's almost like a peer pressure system.
Yeah, yeah.
As opposed to just.
And I'm sure it'll come down to like
if you have some super crazy awesome trip,
you can be like, oh, hey, cool, this is great,
and a lot of people are gonna know what you're doing,
and you go do that and come back and then work hard again.
Yeah.
Continue to work hard is probably fine.
And the high school thing,
I think any time you ever even try
to have any amount of a flat structure,
you're gonna run, with this many employees,
you're gonna run into that type of a situation.
I think any time you try to add
more than a half a dozen employees to a company,
nevermind the structure,
you're gonna end up with high school or daycare or both.
Like, have you ever worked at a big box store
of any sort ever?
It's just an extension of high school.
It doesn't even matter how old the people are
that worked there.
Just an extension of high school.
Best Buy was my best example for that.
I used to work in Geek Squad when I was really young.
I was in grade 10, I think I started working in Geek Squad.
And yeah, the whole store is just an extension
of high school.
It's redonkulous.
So yeah, again, nothing has really changed here.
Valve has always been that like,
everyone wants to go work there
because it's awesome company,
and they're not EA, woo!
And like, cool, they did a study about it,
but yeah, this has been known for a very long time,
so it's not exactly new.
I got a straw poll for you guys.
Wanna hear from you.
What is your workplace like?
So I'm gonna hit up the Twitch chat with this bad boy.
We'll run that while we do our next topic here.
What do you think ours is out of that?
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam.
I don't think we're very high school, like.
I mean, part of it is that...
I think it's how you defend the high,
I mean, I think it's how you define
the high school-like thing.
Okay, we're kind of high school-like
in that we're very casual,
but we all get along, which is not,
I think the connotation of high school-like.
Is the clicks and the fighting and the...
The clicks and the pettiness.
I don't think we're very petty.
No, I think we might have some features
of a possible high school label, though.
Yeah, probably.
There's like the Friday after work,
when everyone kinda like groups up in the main room
and just talks about like random crap.
I don't know.
Right.
Or that bottom one, which no one is voting for.
Yeah, mature, cohesive, and teamwork focused.
Yeah, dawg.
All right, what's our next topic?
I gotta keep this here.
Pretty much some of the same,
whereas nothing's ever changed,
which is digital distribution finally reigns the PC market.
I think we've all kinda known this for a long time.
Even in the article, they talk about
how as recently as 2010,
there was only 48% of the game purchases were made digitally.
Isn't that amazing?
That's half in 2010.
Apparently, it is now 92% as of 2013.
It's not even 2013 anymore, it was 92%.
And you know what?
You don't have to be a crazy, amazing mathematician
to figure out that these are some really big numbers.
So you look at, okay, you look at a studio,
you look at someone like Microsoft.
Or did I say Microsoft?
Ubisoft.
I got a lot of hate going on on Microsoft in this episode,
so maybe you'll be catching more of that later.
So you look at someone like Ubisoft
and how they're looking at, okay, well, 13%
or whatever it was, we talked about this last week, 17%?
I think it was.
Let's say about 15% in hedge our bets.
So over a 10th of their overall business was PC gaming.
Then you look at that and you go, okay,
well, Ubisoft's a public company.
You can look up exactly how much revenue
they had in a given year.
So then you kinda go, okay, well, Ubisoft
makes up whatever slice of the overall gaming industry
that there is, and wow, holy crap,
are we ever talking about a lot of hundreds
of millions of dollars that has shifted to digital.
And so...
Kind of a really big deal.
One thing that I have to say about this, though,
at the same time. It's nice to be valid.
Yeah, yeah.
Is that they're saying as recently as 2010,
only 48% of the PC game purchases were made digitally.
That only is kind of hilarious.
Yeah, I know, right?
Even since then and before then,
it got to the point where it was difficult
to buy PC games physically.
Yeah.
There's been a lot of stuff where there was no option.
Well, you like to buy games physically.
I do, and I try, and it's been hard since before 2010,
and now it's nigh impossible for a lot of different games.
In the last 10 years.
Actually, it's kinda neat,
because I'm coming up on 10 years of having known my wife.
So I can kind of, like, I can say,
okay, I can talk about a 10-year period very easily.
When I met her and we'd go to the mall,
it was entertaining for me to go to the EB Games and browse
while she went and shopped.
Yeah.
In that time, it's gone from,
it actually, the PC gaming made up
a significant chunk of the store,
to PC gaming is like one side of one unit,
and it's like, it might not even be.
So they'll have the latest title,
and they'll have a few copies of that on an end cap,
and then they'll have some copies of, like,
StarCraft II.
COD and Blizzard.
Yeah, or they'll have, like, whatever,
some staple type games, and then that's it.
Yeah.
So they kinda did it to themselves.
On the other hand, I can understand
whether or not it's stocking it if it's not selling, so.
Yeah, but then, yeah, that's like,
it's not even just places like EB Games, though,
because I think a lot of different gaming companies
are straight up just not releasing
physical copies of the games.
It's not like EB Games is specifically trying
not to, or GameStop or whatever,
is trying not to stock these things.
I think they might not even have an option,
which is kind of frustrating.
Yeah, it's not like something like, you know,
a Humble Bundle is realistically
gonna have a physical copy. Exactly.
Or a lot of indie games in general,
which are becoming a really big thing recently,
or stuff like League and Dota,
which is brought up in here a lot,
where a lot of purchases are going towards
stuff like League and in-game micro-style transactions,
which are getting calculated into this percentage number,
even though they're not actually a, like,
A discrete sale of a game.
Yeah, you bought this game.
It's not that, but it's still being calculated
in this number, which it should be.
That makes sense.
But, yeah, I don't know.
I feel like it was forced into this position.
I know there's a lot of people
that do prefer the digital distribution style,
but I think people like me, who want physical copies.
I'm raising my donger, too, you just can't tell.
Ha ha ha.
You can tell that I rose mine.
Oh, man.
Ha ha.
Awesome.
So I think people like me that actually want physical games
were kind of forced out of being able to buy them.
But you guys are basically dumb, so.
Yeah.
I mean, there are legitimate reasons to need physical games.
Slow internet connections.
You know, guys in Australia,
not that they can buy games at all,
because they come out however many months later.
It's like, Australia, screwed, and then screwed again.
Screwed some more.
When I used to live with my parents,
it made a lot of sense,
because we didn't have an amazing internet connection.
So it was actually a lot faster
to just drive to the freaking store and drive back.
Right.
Like, it just was.
But that being said, a lot of games now,
you go to the store and you come back,
you put the disc in, and it's like, okay, download it.
Yeah, I know.
Download this. What?
How big was the patch for?
50?
Sorry?
50 gigs?
You're talking about COD?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, there was another one that we installed recently.
It was a PC game, and it had something like a six gig patch.
Was it Battlefield 4?
There was like a day one or day two patch
that was huge. Yeah, I don't remember what it is.
Can't remember, but-
Might have been Battlefield 4, yeah.
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
I know Titanfall was massive.
Titanfall's 50 gigs.
Yeah.
So I get that, I get that.
Yeah.
All right, so what's our next topic here?
More news about high prices of DDR4.
Yeah, oh, should I go get our DDR4?
Oh no, we already showed that last week, anyway.
We have other DDR4, but it might be on a test bench.
He doesn't, he means like he laid it on-
Yeah, that's what I mean.
Yeah.
I didn't say anything about having a motherboard
in a DDR4 compatible CPU, of course.
It's just sitting on the test bench.
Mind you, if you were to, you know,
type anything about DDR4 into Google,
well, whatever, I'm reading all the same rumors
you guys are reading, right?
Of course.
So anyway, Australian site PC Case Gear
and UK site scan.co.uk both released pre-order prices
on some Corsair DDR4 products,
including their new Vengeance series
as well as Dominator Platinum.
So we are looking at pricing
that is double digits percentages more expensive
than DDR3.
However, and this was originally posted
on the forum by Blueprint,
there's another article that spins it
in a bit of a different way.
And this was originally posted by Lucapee
and it's from Overclock3D.
G.Skill, their rip jaws for 3000 megahertz DDR4 kit,
which may or may not be on one of my test benches.
Laying on it.
Yeah, laying on it.
That exact kit.
In the package still
because there's obviously nothing to put in it.
Is actually gonna be priced pretty similarly
to a 3000 megahertz DDR3 kit.
To which I kind of go, okay, well, that's cool.
Because at least those hyper overclock DDR3 kits
that hardcore enthusiasts who want lots of cores
on their CPU, for example,
might have been inclined to go towards anyway.
At least those will be fairly similar.
Although I could also make a lot of arguments
for us not really needing 3000 megahertz DDR3 kits
in the first place.
We've made those videos.
So anyway, the G.Skill one is priced
at 360 Great Britain pounds.
Whereas eight gig kits of DDR3 at that speed
are 320 Great Britain pounds.
So there you go.
I don't think that really applies to a ton of people.
But it is interesting to see that maybe there isn't
the most massive price hike ever.
And to people looking at it going,
okay, yeah, they run at the same frequency,
but the DDR4 kit is gonna have looser timings.
Something that a little bird told me
is that primary timings might not be
as much of a concern with DDR4.
And we might be looking at a situation
where actually playing around with secondary timings
called so because they're not the main five timings
of a DDR memory module,
but rather they're more about inter dim communication
and that kind of stuff.
Those secondary timings may,
or sorry, did I say inter intra?
Those secondary timings may actually end up being
very, very important.
And something that the maker won't really be able
to advertise in the traditional sense.
So we're either gonna see memory manufacturers
shift towards giving us a much deeper set of timings
when they spec out their RAM,
or people might just end up being pretty confused
for a bit here.
So there you go.
It's gonna be pretty interesting.
Although that is still,
no matter how much you wanna say like,
oh yeah, well this kit compared to this ridiculous kit
is actually not that bad of a deal.
Still way too expensive for me.
I will jump on that bandwagon much further in the future.
Did you, okay, have you been an early adopter
to any memory tech?
No, I waited for DDR3.
I waited for DDR2.
Cause the first DDR3 platform was what?
LGA 1366?
No, the first DDR3 platform was 775,
but it made no sense at that point.
I think this is the first time in a while actually
that we haven't seen a single socket
have multiple memory platform compatibility.
Because it's always been this early stages,
very expensive time period has been at a time
when it doesn't really make any sense to buy it anyway,
because it performs the same and it's on a chip
that was really designed for the previous technology.
Yeah, cause I had dominators on 775, which were DDR2.
Yeah, cause moving from DDR1 to DDR2,
when AMD was really the enthusiast platform of choice,
we did get new SKUs and we did get a new socket,
but we didn't actually get a micro architecture update.
So it was the same performance.
You could just pay more for memory
or not pay more for memory.
And that series of processors
was very dependent on latency.
So DDR1 performed really well in the real world,
aside from just running memory bandwidth benchmarks.
The DDR1 to DDR2 change was the most hilarious.
Yeah, and then DDR2 to DDR3.
I think DDR2 to DDR3 was pretty stupid
because basically that was the P45 days
when pretty much Gigabyte or Asus or whoever
would have like the motherboard for DDR2
and then the motherboard for DDR3,
this one would be like a hundred dollars more,
not faster, less stable because early DDR3 was bad.
I saw more people blindly adopting DDR2
than I saw people blindly adopting DDR2.
Well, they probably got burned when DDR2 was bad.
Probably.
I mean, DDR2, that was the N4 680i days.
Like that was when the problem was the chip set was bad,
like the enthusiast chip set of choice was terrible
and the memory was just not validated properly.
Like I remember OCZ SLI sticks of memory
putting them into 680i boards.
They were only supposed to work in one board
and they wouldn't work.
I used to hate how they did naming at that timeframe
with like SLI and all that kind of stuff.
It's like go away.
Speaking of which, both OCZ and using existing branding
to try to sell completely unrelated products.
Great segue.
Thank you.
Here we go.
I got the whole doc up here.
This was originally posted by brainless906 on the forum
and AMD is planning to, well, not planning to,
they're planning to sell,
I guess they have already released their AMD SSDs.
So they're calling these the R7 240 or something like that.
I remember it being funny
because when my review sample arrived,
the box was labeled R7 240
and then the description was video card
because a lot of these companies
when they fill out their invoices,
they just have a standard one that they put
kind of no matter what they're shipping.
So it just says video card.
I'm like, why would they send me an R7 240?
But actually it was an R7 series SSD.
So it's based on the OCZ Barefoot 3 controller.
It's got some Toshiba 19 nanometer class NAND on it.
There are a few reviews out.
Basically it's an SSD.
It's not terribly expensive.
It does come with a four year warranty.
It's more expensive than the 840 EVO.
It is a little bit faster.
It comes with a cloning software.
To me, this is kind of one of those things
where I look at it and go,
if you were really determined
to build like an AMD outed system,
then you could buy this and it would be fine.
There's nothing wrong with it.
There's nothing wrong with the Barefoot 3 controller.
Truthfully.
It's just, it's boring.
Yeah, it's another commodity SSD at this point.
I feel like we don't really need another SSD player.
We have a number of very strong SSD players.
Yeah, we kind of don't have another SSD player
because nothing on this is actually manufactured
or designed by AMD.
I understand why they might want
to get into the market that way.
I mean, that's how OCZ did it.
They went from rebranding into links
and Sanforce controllers to designing their own IP
and their own controller by acquiring into links,
mind you, but they still did it.
And you look at even companies like Intel
where sometimes they design their own controller.
Sometimes they just write a firmware,
but they're always using their own flash.
You look at guys like SanDisk
where they use their own flash.
They actually fab flash.
So even though they're using someone else's controller,
they're contributing something they made.
In this case, AMD is coming in very late,
contributing nothing that they've actually designed
or manufactured and the pricing is fine.
It's just not gonna be, you can never compete
with someone like Samsung who is fully integrated
where they're taking the margin
on the flash manufacturing,
they're taking the margin on the controller manufacturing,
they're taking any margin that would exist
in terms of a software license,
and they're taking the margin on the finished drive
that they put in a box and deliver to the customer.
So at every level, they're taking their margin.
So how was AMD supposed to compete with that?
Yeah, I don't know.
I was fairly underwhelmed
because they had all that hype built for this.
Well, the hype might be for something else as well.
I'm not sure.
They have a live stream scheduled this weekend,
although it's at 7 a.m. my time.
So they were like, Linus, are you gonna tune in?
I'm like, no.
Was the live stream for this weekend
for the Star Citizen thing, though?
I don't know.
I don't think we can say what the live stream
this weekend is for.
I know what it's for.
Don't try to, oh, okay.
God, we have to play into the rumors that are out there.
Okay, what are the rumors?
There was a tweet for, let me see if I can find it.
Oh, geez.
I thought you were gonna break our NDA.
Nah, man.
Okay.
Chris Roberts, no.
I don't know where the tweet is,
but someone from AMD was like,
you should watch because Star Citizen news.
Oh, okay.
So I was like, oh, Mantle.
Because that's probably what that is.
Maybe.
I don't know.
But we already know Star Citizen is getting Mantle.
I don't know.
We already know that, okay, sure, yeah.
But what else is gonna be in the Star Citizen news, right?
And the Star Citizen actually getting Mantle,
I think has been moderately up in the air.
I don't know if it was 100% confirmed.
No, I think it's a confirmed title.
Is it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It doesn't have it yet,
but it's confirmed that it will at some point.
Although with AMD releasing everything
to the OpenGL Chronos group,
I don't know how much sense Mantle will make
by the time Star Citizen actually comes out anyway.
By the time Star Citizen actually comes out.
The year 2070.
All right, so other AMD news
that is actually much more exciting,
posted by Tech Fanatic,
who is our resident AMD news poster,
is that Richard Huddy, AMD's gaming site,
wait, didn't we talk about this last week?
I don't think so.
Oh, okay, well, just in case we didn't,
or just in case we did,
we'll cover it, but we'll do it pretty quickly.
We might have.
So FreeSync is gonna be looking at a very minimal cost
for monitor manufacturers.
Could be between 10 and $20 in total cost.
Although something to understand, guys,
is that 10 to $20 of cost,
the general rule is that by the time
the end user actually holds that product,
it's gonna be about double that.
So you have to understand that their retailer
is gonna want their margin,
the manufacturer is gonna want their margin,
the MDF program that they have
with whoever is gonna want their margin.
They're gonna build in some extra margin
for people to return the product
because now it's a more expensive product
that people might return
and they might not be able to do anything with it.
So all those things,
we're looking at about double of a bomb cost, typically.
So there you go.
So it'll add anywhere between 20 and 40 bucks.
So here's the tweet.
It was from at AMD Radeon.
It says, we know you're excited about Star Citizen
from Robert Space Industries.
You'll want to tune into
hashtag AMD 30 live tomorrow, Billy Link.
Oh, okay, cool.
So I just, yeah, I don't know.
So anyway, the exciting thing about it
is that we could be looking at FreeSync monitors
that are sampling next month
and could arrive to consumers in early 2015,
which compared to G-Sync, which is here now,
is kind of unfortunate,
but is not as long as I thought it might take.
So if you were looking to hold out
sort of a little bit longer
as opposed to another nine months to a year,
then you're in luck.
Especially with how kind of slowly
Graphis technology is coming out.
So if you're pretty good right now,
you're probably pretty good for a while.
Yep.
All right.
One of your three monitors?
I know you're gonna be excited about those.
Yeah, so this was posted by Notional on the forum,
and LG is unveiling three new monitors.
A couple of which,
well, one of which gets me really excited,
one of which gets his panties pretty wet,
and the other one of which is almost there.
Yeah.
For both of us.
All right, so the original article's on Guru 3D.
Why don't I do the one that I like?
So that monitor that I love ever so much,
the UM9534, I can't even remember the model number,
because 34UM95 is what I think it is,
they are gonna be releasing what looks like
pretty much a curved version of that.
Now, curved displays,
we've actually done the fastest possible on this before,
they don't make sense in every context.
In fact, a lot of the time, they're basically stupid.
You should not be buying a 42-inch,
or even I'd say a 50-inch curved TV for your living room,
because unless you are a forever alone,
and you only watch TV by yourself always,
the problem is that a curved TV
is gonna deliver a slightly better viewing experience
for someone in the sweet spot,
but an actually worse one for anyone who's outside of it,
and a flat TV is gonna be a better bet in that case.
However, once a display gets large enough
that multiple people can fit in the sweet spot,
so to speak, cram them in there, it starts to make sense.
Now, with a monitor, A,
you don't have to worry about multiple viewers very often,
so that threshold for when a display is big enough
is gonna be more easily achievable,
and for number two, this is big enough, 34 inches.
Sometimes I feel, sitting in front of my monitor at work,
like a slight curvature would be really nice,
so it's 3440 by 1440,
I think it's six milliseconds of response time,
so pretty much the same as the other one.
Nothing special with respect to what they're claiming
about input lag or anything like that,
so I'm not expecting it to be amazing for gaming,
the way that the 29-inch one is a little bit better
than the existing 34-inch one,
but very exciting from a productivity standpoint,
and for gamers who are more interested in the immersion,
I personally, in spite of our recent
Surround Gaming Build Guide,
I personally find a larger, wider screen without bezels
more immersive than bezels,
and you'll notice I said very carefully in that video,
if you're into this, then this is the ultimate setup,
but for me personally, I'd rather have a single screen.
I've also never really been into
that multi-monitor Surround Gaming thing.
It makes sense, I've seen it in some situations,
especially for flight sims.
Yeah, or driving simulators.
Where those windows aren't,
it's not even necessarily curved,
those are dedicated to windows in the vehicle.
Yeah, and if you're supposed to be in a cockpit anyway,
what's another support structure
or whatever for the glass, right?
Like, I'm okay with that,
but first person, it doesn't do much for me.
Yeah, me either.
So the next one is a 31MU97 31-inch true 4K monitor.
The only thing that gets me-
You should clarify what true 4K means.
I was just gonna jump into that.
Were you?
You were gonna jump in?
Mm.
It's 4096 by 2160, which I believe is like,
19 by 10.
That's what it stated on Wikipedia.
Okay.
So I was kind of hoping for 16 by 10,
but you know, it's all good.
Close enough, and that's kind of the resolution
that I've been waiting for for a long time.
So excited for that.
The only thing that kind of gets me
slightly worried about this is
the fact that it's 31 inches.
I know you have experience
with really, really large monitors,
but I'm not necessarily sure if I'm ready to jump that high,
considering I use 24-inch monitors.
But something I have been thinking about for quite a while
is getting a really big monitor in the middle of my setup,
and then setting my two current 24-inch monitors
into vertical mode on the side.
You know, it's funny you bring that up,
because I, by the way, that aspect ratio
is apparently 256 to 135,
and that's rounded to the nearest whole number or something.
So, yeah.
I don't know if that's right.
Anyway, the point is,
width and height, yeah, I think I entered it right.
What were you saying?
Right, so size of monitor.
When I originally went 30-inch,
and I used a 30-inch monitor for a few years,
a Samsung 2560 by 1600,
I liked it a lot.
There was an adjustment period moving to it,
and I got used to it, and I really liked it.
How big was that one again?
Sorry. That was a 30.
30, yeah. So I got used to it.
But you know what?
I've since gone down to 27-inch 16 by nine,
and I never miss my 30-inch.
I never miss the extra screen real estate
once I'm at 1440 tall,
when at 1080 tall, I don't like it,
and I would rather have an older 16 by 10 aspect ratio,
or even, maybe even a square one compared to that.
I don't like 16 by nine small, wide screens at 1080.
Me neither, which is why I've been sitting
on 16 by 10 for so long.
And I'd be okay with going bigger than 24.
I just don't know if 31 is-
27 is a really nice place to be
for a single monitor setup.
And honestly, if I was running multi-monitor,
I would prefer 24.
Yeah.
So that's, but that's why I've been thinking about that,
that one large one in the middle,
and then possibly the two verticals on the side.
You know what I really want to do as a project?
Because, I mean, okay, with both of us,
the big issue with multi-monitor is the bezels.
But there are a lot of monitors
where you can strip them down,
and you can take all the plastic stuff away
and end up with very, very thin bezels.
Because the bezel is effectively there
to protect it a lot of the time.
So if it's just going to sit on your desk forever,
there's no reason not to remove it.
I'd be interested to do like a project build
where we strip down three monitors,
use our Ergotec stand, and see if that helps.
It's not a bad idea.
Just kind of sit in front of it
and take it in and decide.
For what exactly, though?
Because I still think first-person kind of style
is still going to be messed up,
and I still think that kind of cockpit driving style
is still going to be awesome.
I don't think you can get away from that
because of the wrapping.
Because you're going to get the weird warping effects
on the far side of the screen
where things are on a really weird angle,
they're stretched and they move too quickly.
I mean, if games had better support for it,
I think I'd feel better about it.
Like if we were, if basically you could set up the game
where it's like, look,
here are my three discrete camera angles.
I want it to look like I'm turning my head this way
as opposed to looking like, you know,
the scene is made of silly putty.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
If there was better support, I think it'd be really cool.
But it just like super breaks
in most games that you put it in.
Unless you're willing to put a fair bit of work into it.
And then a lot of the time you can fix it.
Yep, if you utilize all these little custom tools.
And then there's the last monitor,
which is like almost super cool.
It's the 24GM77.
That's a 144 hertz gaming monitor
with dynamic action sync,
which drastically reduces input lag, apparently.
So they're saying less than one of the second response time
includes a black stabilizer and motion 240,
but does not seem to include adaptive sync or G-Sync.
I am at a point now where I don't know how I would feel
about investing in an expensive gaming monitor
that doesn't have G-Sync.
We actually have a review upcoming
of BenQ's XL2410 something, 2411 something.
And we'll have to,
like basically I think Luke's gonna be doing that one.
That was what we discussed.
I think so, yeah.
So what I've done is I've handed Luke
our G-Sync engineering sample ASUS monitor and the BenQ.
And the analysis is gonna be, look,
if G-Sync costs another hundred bucks,
is it worth it to invest in a high refresh rate monitor
that doesn't have G-Sync at this point?
And I think that's really gonna be the angle.
Yeah, I haven't gotten that ASUS one from you yet.
Yeah, I gave it to you.
It's on your desk in there.
You complained about the power adapter.
Oh yeah, I was using it for something else.
I didn't realize that was like to take
and go compare things with.
Yeah. Okay, cool.
Yeah, go to town.
I was using that for the mouse, G402.
Right.
You know what?
That monitor has like a G-Sync module in it.
And I know Nvidia has like the layout
for how to make a harness to hook it up to the ASUS 32 4K.
If I can get one of those harnesses from them,
I am so doing a Frankenstein project
and 4K-ing G-Sync-ing that monitor.
That would be really cool.
Yeah, then I'll bring all the other monitors
back to the office and I won't need an upgrade for years.
Perfect, do that.
So you stop stealing every monitor we ever get.
Yeah, the ROG Swift went home so fast.
Gone, never saw it again.
I never actually saw it running.
From CES, when I first saw it, I was like, it's okay.
And then when I got it on the desk, actually using it,
I took the PA off.
Especially stuff like monitors.
It's hard to get a proper first impression
when you're at a show.
At a show is terrible because the lighting's
whatever the lighting is.
And you've got like four minutes
of whatever demo they're running.
It's not the right context to have a proper experience.
Often that demo is running because it's repeatable
or easy to maintain instead of being the best thing.
Or because a booth babe can fix it if it's broken.
Yeah, that's what I mean.
They're not gonna have catastrophes on the floor
where they have to show you that they're running a PC
instead of an Xbox.
That's what a lot of them are gonna be tuned towards.
Wanna rant?
Ah, oh, man.
You know what, why don't we do our sponsor spots
and then I'll rant on this product.
Okay.
I don't, I don't, ah, anyway, okay.
Let's do that first.
So, big thanks to lynda.com for being a sponsor
of the WAN Show today, guys.
lynda.com is a fantastic place to go and learn a new skill.
You can pick up some digital photography tricks.
You can pick up some video editing tricks.
You can pick up, you know, oh, I don't know.
And pretty much, it goes beyond hobbies.
Like, it's cool because the way
that their lessons are structured,
they're coming from experts.
They are set up so you can almost kind of follow along
in a course and if you wanna pick up
some real programming skills, for example,
you use lynda.com as kind of like a pseudo school.
So yeah, they don't award you with, you know,
a diploma or whatever else, you know,
because yay, online diplomas are probably worth something.
No, it's more about the knowledge
that you're actually gaining because there are
at least two people here at Linus Media Group
who on a day-to-day basis use their lynda.com knowledge
that they learn by being subscribed.
So, lynda.com slash WAN Show for a free seven-day trial
because if it's not for you, then you can go ahead
and cancel it and you can just go, okay, yeah,
this isn't that useful for me
or I don't have the time right now or whatever else
and just give it a shot.
And if you don't have the time to commit to like every day,
I mean, even some online courses,
it's like you attend the seminar at that time,
lynda.com doesn't work that way.
You can tune in when you want,
you can tune out when you want
because it's a subscription-based service.
So I guess ultimately they don't really care.
Yeah.
When you're tuned, when you're done.
Yeah, that benefits you too.
Yeah, I mean, it's good for everyone that way, I think.
Yeah.
So there you go, guys, lynda.com.
Thank you, free seven-day trial.
Also, this is fairly exciting.
You wanna talk about what you're gonna be doing at the show?
Honestly, I expect a lot of what the show is gonna be
is running around to different motherboard manufacturers,
checking out something specific.
No more information.
Hopefully that's what's gonna happen.
We're gonna be, just like we've been doing for shows
for a while now, that's probably really loud.
Why is that so loud?
I don't know.
Sorry about that.
Just like we've been doing for shows for a while now,
when it's a gaming show,
we will be releasing a bulk of it as actually hardware stuff.
A lot of the hardware guys are going to these gaming shows
because they wanna show people that are gaming
their hardware.
Kinda totally makes sense.
I wanna show people my hardware.
I always show people my hardware.
So yeah, we'll be checking out a lot of that kind of stuff.
We'll also be checking out gaming stuff.
I'm trying to get in contact with Blizzard,
but it doesn't really seem to be working,
so we probably won't have any Warlords of Draenor stuff.
If anyone from Blizzard's watching,
hey, we're a thing. Hello.
Thank you. Hello.
We'll probably have an Indie Megabooth Roundup video.
That's been seeming to work well lately.
Instead of a whole bunch of individual indie games,
we'll just do one top five things that I saw
while walking through the Indie Megabooth.
And I'll be down there for Saturday.
Saturday.
So I'll be around on the show floor on Saturday.
So if you run into me, come say hi.
Hopefully not when I'm in the middle of filming something.
Thank you.
It's great to hang out.
And so we wanted to give a big thanks to HyperX
for actually enabling us to be there.
So I'm just gonna screen show you guys for a second.
They actually, they've been asking us a lot lately
to kind of draw attention to their HyperX YouTube channel.
And I was like, yeah, okay, we can do that.
And you know, cause a lot of the time
manufacturer YouTube channels are really not that great,
but they've actually got some pretty interesting stuff
going on here right now.
I don't know if you've actually checked it out.
I have.
But Social Blade is my kind of ultimate.
Oh, I haven't checked their social.
Creeper thing.
And check this out.
They've gained 20,000 subscribers in the last 30 days.
They have 42,000 subscribers total.
They are growing crazy fast right now.
They are actually, yeah.
And they're putting out a lot of content
that I think will be really interesting to people.
Like where are these,
they had some interviews that are like a quarter million
views, like check this out.
Where did it go?
Yeah, here we go.
I'm a cutie pie, 282,000 views.
And it's such a simple format.
It's like, it's 20 questions.
And they're like the simplest things.
Like there's questions about his hair.
It's kind of casual.
It's pretty cool.
And I was like, oh,
these guys are actually doing YouTube kind of right.
Most manufacturers really don't get it.
It's like, yeah, we want to put all of our ads on YouTube.
And they have some ads on the YouTube channel too,
to be very clear.
We even made a couple of them.
But.
I'm not surprised though,
because when we went to go check out their head offices
for E3, I got that vibe.
Right.
From their HyperX tour thing that we got to go through,
checking out like their gaming room and stuff.
It was like, okay, yeah.
They're actually kind of focused
on making something awesome.
So guys, yeah.
So thanks to HyperX for being our gold sponsor
for PAX Prime this year.
And guys, check out their YouTube channel.
If you want to have gaming content
and learn about new memory and USB drives.
Stuff like that.
All those good things.
All right, so time for,
I kind of want to start like a rant segment
for Linus Tech Tips.
Cause there's some stuff that I could just,
that I could just do.
And this isn't.
We kind of do this.
This isn't quite that bad.
This is more like a square peg round hole type thing
as opposed to something that's just uniformly terrible.
We don't call it a rant segment,
but like Beats by 50.
That was pretty ranty.
Streets by 50.
My bad.
So you guys probably recognize my daily driver phone,
the HTC One M8.
Dun, dun, da, da.
Whoa, Windows Phone.
Wow, I didn't know about that.
So now there's a Windows,
there's an HTC One M8 Windows Phone Edition.
It's a Verizon exclusive right now.
Although I saw a rumor that Sprint's going to be picking it
up as well,
which has only caused a little bit of trouble for me.
I had to program my APN manually.
And then I had to contact HTC directly
because Verizon customer support wouldn't do it for me
in order to get internet tethering enabled on the phone.
I'm like, look, I got my phone working.
Everything's cool.
Everything's fine.
I just need you guys to,
because I'm not on your network.
So I don't see why you would care if I internet tether.
I need you guys to like come out of the stone age
and turn that crap on on my phone.
Thanks dog.
And they were like, oh yeah,
we actually can't do that because,
you know, you're not a Verizon subscriber.
I'm like, well, I can't be a Verizon subscriber.
I'm in Canada.
Do you have service up here?
No, I didn't think so.
So can I give you the SIM information
for the SIM that came in it or the IMEI for the phone?
So sir, you know,
the reason that you're having a bad experience
with the device is because, you know,
you're getting these headaches
because it's not a Verizon network device
and it's, or it is a Verizon network device
and you're not in the Verizon network.
Look, I don't care.
I'm not going to be a Verizon customer.
I don't live there.
Turn the feature on.
And then I, so HTC ended up being able
to take that care of that for me, but sorry.
Verizon rant over.
Dietrich W, thank you for posting this in the forum.
We have some details about it, obviously,
cause I'm working on my review for it,
but it is pretty much exactly the same hardware
as the 1M8 Android edition.
There are some changes.
The radio is slightly different.
So it supports fewer frequencies,
which because it's a Verizon exclusive device,
I guess that makes sense.
Maybe they were able to cost it down a fraction
of a couple of pennies or whatever
that would work out to in that way.
And you know, you fire it up and it's,
it's the Windows phone experience.
Do they have the same problem with the glass on the camera?
I don't know.
I don't know if that's been resolved.
I just, I know, I know some people would care about that.
So I'm not really sure.
Yeah.
It's really hard to say when it's brand new,
but I'll be using it for at least a couple of weeks
to get a really good impression
of what's going on with this phone,
because I want to be fair to it,
but I'm running into a lot of issues
and they're not related to the 1M8.
The 1M8 is a fantastic piece of hardware.
This is a great device.
I love it.
The problem is that I really don't feel like Windows phone,
the experience scales for an enthusiast.
I feel like for basic functionality,
text messages, email, phone, navigation,
once you pull the crappy Verizon navigator off
and put on a real one,
which you can find for free in the, in the store.
I feel like it's fine for all that,
but if you're actually trying to do anything on it,
there's just, how?
And it's, it's just, it's little stuff.
Like, okay, there's no hangouts client.
Like, really?
I use hangouts every day.
That sucks.
It's like super crappy.
So you have, you're gonna have to get ready
for a lot of workflow changes
that you're not gonna be accustomed to,
even if you've done the Android iOS switch before.
Like I actually switched to iOS recently.
I've been using my iPhone 5S for a couple of weeks now,
just because I'm getting ready for the iPhone 6 to drop
and I wanna be somewhat familiar with the platform,
so I'm not just figuring out iOS again
when the time comes to review that device.
And going from Android to iOS these days
is pretty seamless.
Dropping onto Windows phone, man, there's nothing.
Like the Instagram clients have beta.
Like Gmail has no, like, and we're talking Google services,
so obviously there's not a whole lot there.
But Gmail has no native client,
so you can use the built-in one,
but then you're gonna have just that stuff
that feels very Stone Age,
like notifications that are sitting on your phone
for emails that you already checked on a PC
because they don't go away,
because it doesn't work that way
when you're not just using Google's client.
I actually, I'm gonna cover this in much more depth
in the actual video,
where actually throughout my time using it,
I'm gonna be creating a list of apps I looked for and found
and apps I looked for and didn't find.
And some of those apps I looked for and didn't find
are gonna be pretty spectacular.
Like one of the things that I hate about it
is the keyboard, and I was like, just, you know, curiosity,
does, because look how much of the screen
the keyboard takes up.
Whoa.
When it's got predictive text on there, it's up to here.
What's with the stuff on the bottom?
I can't see the side.
That's send, attachment, voice thing.
Yeah, it takes up a lot of space
and you can make the navigation bar go away in the bottom,
but you use it so often,
you're gonna want it most of the time anyway.
So I wanted to change the keyboard and I was like,
oh, I wonder if there's SwiftKey.
So I looked it up and it turns out
that the only things that come up for SwiftKey
are outright scams.
One of them has seven one-star reviews
going back to about three weeks ago saying, this is a scam.
It's a $1 link to the SwiftKey website.
Yeah, like just bad.
Like it's not even a terrible keyboard,
like wallpaper that looks like a keyboard.
Like they didn't even do anything.
It's just a link.
And Microsoft hasn't removed this from the store.
And I think that-
Same problem, this segues into our next topic.
I know, but I'm not gonna let you do it just yet.
So I think my problem with the 1M8 Windows Phone Edition
is effectively HTC has done their best here.
Their camera app is as easy to use as the window
or as the Android version.
They've actually got BlinkFeed as a live tile.
So you can still use BlinkFeed if you're into that,
which I've actually started using more lately.
Oh, it still has double tap to wake.
So there you go.
Like it's the 1M8.
It's just on a platform
that just doesn't feel enthusiast friendly, like at all.
And the whole live tile concept, it's very beautiful.
And you know, going like this,
oh, you can go look at your apps and do whatever.
The problem is that live tiles change visually,
which if you look at someone like McDonald's,
how often do they change their logo?
Why do they not change that?
Recognizability is good
when people are trying to find things.
So to me, live tiles changing what they look like
is not necessarily a very positive thing.
And you might go, okay,
well Linus just memorized where they all are.
To which I would say, yeah, that's fine too.
Except that unlike Android and iOS,
you don't have discrete pages
and you can't create subfolders.
So you actually, once you start scrolling,
remembering where everything is on the page
goes out the window.
You can't muscle memory, you know,
scroll down, you know, three eighths of a decimeter
and then click on this part.
It doesn't work that way.
So, hey, that's a unit of measurement.
Just no one uses it.
I know, but.
Well, I wanted to say three eighths of an inch,
but that's not enough to be an actual,
so I changed it to decimeter mid sentences.
Anyway, cause no one uses fractions
of metric measurements either.
So it was just a completely broken thing to say.
Anyway, the point is that it's once you,
if you're gonna install more apps
than what fits on like one home screen,
it just doesn't scale very nicely
and it's not intuitive to use.
So I was really hoping that Windows Phone
would have matured a lot since I used it a year ago
on an HTC 8X.
I think it did.
I think it matured into a giant scam machine.
Okay, so that's how you're gonna segue
into our next topic?
Okay, so just post.
I'm just trying to make sure that you have
anything left to still make a video about.
Posted by jmaster299.
Oh, I'm gonna have lots.
I mean, I'll say mostly that stuff.
I know, I was more trolling than anything.
Troll yourself.
Talk about this.
So this is for Windows Phone and like Windows 8
where there's the Microsoft Store.
And this headline written by jmaster here
is pretty sensationalist.
Microsoft willingly allowing malicious apps
in the Windows Store to obtain a cut of the profits.
That is some tinfoil hat stuff there.
The to obtain a cut of the profits thing
is maybe a little bit sensationalist,
but willingly allowing is not sensationalist.
Yes.
That's actually a thing.
I know, they have allowed the apps to.
Okay, okay.
And they have to be manually approved.
You talk, you talk.
So the stores are crammed with fake versions
of popular paid apps like Linus was just talking about.
You can look for something and it'll just give you
a link to download it.
That's an extremely common situation.
And even the descriptions on some of them will be like,
helps the user to know how to download and use this thing.
But it's not how to use it or anything.
It's just a link to the proper app
where you can download it for free.
That's it.
And I believe the iTunes one is $9.
They provide you a $9 link.
Ridiculous.
That should never be manually approved by an employee.
That is insane.
Microsoft does claim that in their store,
everything is manually approved by an employee.
So that whole willingly knowing that they're having
scam apps has to be true or they're lying about that.
Someone knows, but I don't think that the people
creating the policy for the approval of apps is,
they must know at this point.
It's been in the news so much and you think,
if you ever look at the store,
like I believe even a search for VLC
comes up with a whole bunch of paid versions
that are just links to download,
which is like, okay, come on now.
And like that one that I was just talking about,
$9 for a link to iTunes.
iTunes is extremely common.
They must've ran into this at some point in time.
There has to be someone reporting it up the chain
being like, hey, there's a $9 link.
And there really needs to be an after the fact
review system for ones like the one I mentioned
where it had seven one-star reviews
going back several weeks.
Anything that's got like two or three one-star reviews
in a row, that's gotta put up some major red flags.
I mean, the app creator didn't even bother
to create a spam account to give it a five-star rating.
It has literally nothing to get past a filter of any sort.
Nothing, no attempt made.
So there must just not be one.
Where he's coming from with the whole
trying to skim the profits thing,
which I don't know how necessarily real that is.
What the?
But they, see, they're giving money out at this point.
So I don't know if it totally makes sense.
They're running a keep the cash promotion
where they paid developers $100 for each completed app.
So if you're trying to get those $100 things,
if you put a link in and upload it as an app,
you just made a hundred bucks.
So obviously a bunch of people are gonna wanna do that
and you can make up to $2,000 per developer.
So if you want pretty much free $2,000,
just make a bunch of apps that link to other apps
and you're done.
That's kind of fantastically horrible.
And you know what?
It aligns with their seeming desperation
to deliver search results when people search in the store.
Like I searched for T-W-I-T-T
and instead of bringing up things like carbon,
it brought up official Twitter
and then it brought up like Facebook and Instagram,
which I'm like, okay,
those are at least within the same category.
And then as you continue to scroll down the list,
things get less and less related
to the point where it's just like,
you know, it's not about delivering more results.
It's about delivering the most relevant result
and it really feels like they aren't there yet.
And speaking of that, in April, 2014,
they announced that they have over 400,000 apps
combined between the Windows Phone and Windows,
just normal Windows Store, but that includes all the scams.
So they have some amount of incentive
not to take them down because they can keep that
in their number of apps that they have.
And if they axed all of these scam apps,
that would greatly reduce their total amount of apps
that they can claim that they have.
Also, Microsoft takes a cut of every sale,
of every app sale.
So this is where people are thinking that they want
to keep them around.
But honestly, looking at the like tiny little
miniature microscopic droplets
that has to be in their revenue stream,
I don't see them taking that giant risk for that.
That doesn't make a lot of sense.
I think they're a lot smarter than that at some level.
Yeah, so I think something's going wrong.
I don't think it's because of the money,
especially because they were giving out $100 per app
for people to just make them in general.
Yeah.
I don't see this being a money gaining opportunity.
If I was gonna create a program like that,
I'd probably have a bigger payout
for like people to create one app.
Cause how could an individual developer
create 20 quality apps within a reasonable period of time?
That's just stupid.
And like maybe have a bigger payout
and be like, yeah, you get the money,
the really big payout,
when you have a certain ratio of stars.
Or something.
Like say you have to have three star minimum
or something like that.
It has to be useful.
But then like pay attention to the star ratings
and make sure that they're not just all scam,
which is very common lately.
Yeah.
All right.
Happy topic.
Yeah.
So speaking of wanting people to like you,
Disney is rumored to be working on an unaltered release
of the Star Wars trilogy,
the original trilogy,
not the one no one cares about,
on Blu-ray.
Now, as someone who has seen the Blu-ray enhanced versions,
wow, they look a lot better than the original releases, man.
Like they did some serious work to clean that stuff up
and make it look like really good.
By the way, once I was looking for it in A New Hope,
you can easily spot the Stormtroopers
with gaffer tape on them.
Yeah?
Yeah.
That's funny.
Yeah, especially in the Blu-ray version.
So I've seen the Blu-ray version.
I've seen the original releases.
The problem is that I cannot take A New Hope seriously
if Greedo shoots first.
And it seems like a stupid petty thing,
but I went back and watched the original release
on like VHS cassettes pretty recently.
It was actually kind of awesome.
And the way it's cut together, the way the music flows,
the way everything happens, Han is a bad-ass
and shot the dude because he's tired of his crap.
Boom.
And like the way he tips the bartender
like a couple bucks for leaving a dead body in the,
you're not gonna convince me
that he's some kind of white fricking knight at this point.
Come on.
He's clearly, this doesn't even phase him at all.
Blowing someone away in a bar
does not even register on his radar.
So anyway, I am super excited to see this.
I plan to buy it.
If it happens.
And you know what?
If it happens.
Even if it is a rumor and wasn't being worked on,
they should scramble their ass and get this released
because they're getting all good publicity right now.
If Disney was looking to gain the favor
of the hardcore fans,
like you think about the hardcore Star Wars fans,
how many times they've been crapped on
in the last 20 years?
So many.
So many times.
They're gonna be going into Disney's first crack at this
with a negative vibe
as opposed to going in excited,
ready to be blown away.
They're gonna be going in expecting to be disappointed.
And I think Disney's gonna have to work
that much harder to impress them.
Whereas if they do this ahead of time,
I think it's a very different aura
that walks into that theater for the first screening.
Yep.
So they really, really should do this
even if it is just a rumor.
All these rumors are coming from comicbook.com
so we don't even know how credible this is.
But the rumor is that the project
is taking longer than expected
due to damage to the negatives.
But I'd be super stoked if this happened.
Yeah.
All right, so speaking of things
I'd be super stoked if they happened.
Google's driverless cars
can keep up with the flow of traffic.
This has been very like-
Posted by Victoria's Secret.
A lot, see, this is what I'm talking about.
The titles for a lot of these things, in my opinion,
have been pretty sensationalized.
Because designed to exceed the speed limit,
they're not designed to purposefully just be like,
ha ha ha, we're going too quickly.
But they have a threshold where they're-
Take that, copper.
Yeah, they have a threshold where they are allowed
to go slightly above the speed limit.
I don't think it's that fast.
10 miles or about 16 kilometers an hour, which is-
That's pretty fast, but that's what they're allowed to do.
They're not programmed to do this.
But in a lot of areas, it's perfectly reasonable.
Yes, because they're keeping up with the flow of traffic.
Because it has been proven time and time again
that not keeping up with the flow of traffic
can be very dangerous.
Yeah, like proven, not speculated.
Not speculated.
By like Reddit, but proven that it's dangerous
to go too slow.
Oh, you mean speculated by Reddit.
Yeah.
No, no, no, proven by like actual-
Science.
Yeah, so they're not designed to just go out
and exceed speed limits because they're wanting
to get there quickly.
They're designed to keep up with traffic.
And if that has to do with exceeding the speed limit
by a fairly reasonable amount, then it's okay.
But they're not gonna like keep up with traffic
if traffic is going 200 miles an hour.
Because, yeah.
So another interesting thing along the,
also related to Google's driverless cars from this week
is that the state of California is telling Google
they don't want them on the road unless they have
a steering wheel and pedals so that the driver
can take immediate control if needed.
And this is gonna be a big debate for a while
because part of the safety of driverless cars
is gonna be taking human error out of the equation.
So for now, Google is retrofitting the ones
that they've already made is my understanding.
But the ones, like the actual official Google car
was not supposed to have a steering wheel and pedals.
So this could, yeah, this debate could rage for a while.
In the UK, they are looking to allow Google's cars
starting in 2015.
So once again, someone else is more progressive
than the United States where the innovation
is actually happening.
Yeah.
It's kind of funny when you look at it that way, isn't it?
It is funny.
I mean, what makes the United States a powerhouse?
Research and technology.
It's like, no, we don't want it here.
I find the United States almost more than any other region
though is very scared of having things go out
of people's hands.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny
because I was about to say movies and TV shows
probably don't help, but this actually reminds me
of a fantastic, I think it was a two-part episode
of Doctor Who where some bad guy,
I don't remember exactly the context.
I think it's another Time Lord or something
or can't remember, some bad aliens or something.
So basically the plot of every Doctor Who episode ever.
They were using a car manufacturer
to that was, it was like better emissions or something.
It was like a thing that you could install in your car
and then they just had them like drive people
into lakes and stuff.
So it's not like that kind of content doesn't exist
in the UK, it's just you have to also have your feet
on the ground in reality.
And realize that you don't live in that world.
And look at something that has actually been
very well tested at this point.
What is it, 700,000 miles of logged travel on these cars.
The only accidents have been like.
Caused by another driver.
Yeah, not them.
I don't know, what was I gonna say?
Right, iRobot, there's the manual takeover thing
but then it doesn't really help.
Yeah.
It's like, okay, yeah, I don't know.
What people are scared of obviously
is like technical failure but then.
And people don't like giving up control.
Yeah.
I mean if someone told me, if Google told me,
look, actually this is a perfect example.
If Google told me, hey, we've come up with an automated way
to look at your video, so you just upload it
and then we'll create the perfect title, thumbnail
and description for you.
I'd be like.
You'd say no.
No, you high?
And we're not even talking about my life.
We're just talking about my job at that point.
To be honest though, if it worked after a long time,
I would eventually let it just do it.
I would just want my own testing done on it, that's all.
Right.
To be completely honest.
And then what you could do is like just let it go
and then if something's wrong, just go edit it later.
It's not as consequential as driverless cars.
But I don't know.
And that brings in the same debate where if you crash,
at least it was your fault.
Yeah.
If the AI crashes, it wasn't your fault.
Even if the odds of you crashing were much higher.
Yeah.
I'm just saying that's an argument.
I've probably logged less than 700,000 miles of driving
in my life.
Let me just think.
Oh yeah, definitely less.
Probably about a half to two thirds of that.
But I have been in at least two or three at fault accidents
in that time.
So on the other hand, in the last five or six years,
I haven't been in any.
So do you look at this and kind of go,
oh, okay, well, for new drivers,
but then they'll never get any experience.
And we're gonna be talking about previous generation people
who are not used to this newfangled technology.
Would you trust your kids to it?
Like that's something.
Like would I trust myself to drive around
in a self-driving car?
Actually, probably.
I would probably ride around in one.
But if I were to buy a self-driving car for my family,
like one of the sort of utopia,
amazing future types things that I imagine
is that every household will only need one vehicle
because it can just go where it's needed.
It'll go pick up the kids and take them to karate.
And then when it's done with that,
it'll go pick up me and take me there to meet them
and watch them.
And then it'll go pick up my wife when she's done work
and take her to come and then we'll all go together home.
Like that's amazing.
That's so cool.
But would I really just let a car go by itself
to pick up my son when he's done, you know,
the day at kindergarten?
I don't know how I feel about that.
And what if it gets to the point where the car
should obviously actually have cameras all over the place
and you can connect to it at any point in time.
So you can see it drive up to the building
that your son's at.
You can see your son get into the car.
You can say hi to your son. Maybe I'm too old
for this stuff.
Maybe virtual presence devices are weird me out a little.
I don't know, man.
What if it gets to the point where virtual presence.
Hi iPad dad.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But seriously, what if it gets to the point where you've
seen that thing where you can attend a conference
or convention through that wheeled iPad, right?
What if that becomes way more intense?
What if you're controlling an Android?
What if you could literally carry your son out of the car,
but it's not your body?
I'm giving him a robot hug and I'm getting an iPad kiss.
I meant like, I meant more like if the car crashes.
If the car crashes, oh man.
I don't even know.
The car crashes and there's this like metal,
like heavy duty emergency droid sitting in the car.
And you can just be like, take over, pick up, carry out,
call 911 on its built in Android software.
I don't know, man.
That's very safe.
I wasn't even thinking about not being there
in the event of an emergency.
I was just thinking about how impersonal the whole thing is.
Right.
That I didn't think about.
But now I'm thinking about emergency.
All right, so in the non-controversial
and definitely excellent vehicle news,
Tesla increases their warranty drive unit warranty
or the drive unit warranty on the Model S
to eight years and the battery pack.
There we go, yeah.
Wow.
Eight years, infinite miles.
Isn't that amazing?
You can drive as much as you want.
Elon Musk has said it will moderately,
it will have a moderate negative effect
on Tesla's earnings in the short term,
but it's the right thing for Tesla vehicle owners
in the early stage of their company
and he's confident that they'll work it out well
in the long term because Elon Musk is a massive badass.
Dude.
That's pretty much it.
Posted by SamCool55 on the forum, by the way, thank you.
It's going retroactively to people
that already own Model Ss.
So if you bought a Model S early on,
you're getting this warranty despite not having it
when you originally bought it.
I mean, eight years.
Like if you think about that, my car is a 2003
and three years ago, you could probably make the argument
that it had kind of served its purpose
to the original owner
and if that original owner wasn't a complete cheapskate,
they were probably gonna resell it.
In fact, I have only owned that car for about eight years
because I bought it as an end of lease deal
from someone who leased it for a few years.
And this can be transferred
to infinite amount of owners either.
Wow.
So infinite miles, infinite owners, eight years.
So assuming that my car has reached the point
after the time that I've owned it
that I might have to do some maintenance
like a battery swap on it
is not unfair and not unreasonable.
And this is the first time
I've really seen a car manufacturer step up
and instead of warranteeing what is safe,
warranteeing what is reasonable for a consumer to expect
in terms of a vehicle lifetime.
Because by eight years, it's dinged up, it's scratched,
it's probably gotten its windshield broken a couple times
from random debris on the road.
There's stuff that can reasonably be wrong with it
that's nobody's fault.
Given how much detail and quality
they put into their paint jobs, which is insane.
They have someone white glove
hand over the entire surface of the car
just to make sure it's perfect, every single one.
Like I would hate to get that thing scratched,
but it's probably gonna be scratched
in the eight year lifetime.
It's gonna happen.
So this means you get infinite usage
of all of Tesla's supercharging stations,
which they're constantly putting up more
for the lifetime of the product, not eight years.
And you get an eight year warrantee
on your drive unit and battery, which is like,
if you look into how they're made, pretty much everything.
That's cool.
That's so beast.
Awesome.
I'm excited for their more consumer friendly cheaper car
that they're gonna come out with.
Who knows if it's gonna have all this kind of stuff,
but knowing them, it'll be pretty awesome.
So speaking of how difficult it is
for me to switch to Windows Phone,
this was originally posted on the forum by Builder,
and there's an article here that
I think actually hits on a number of truths.
And I think that the basic point of,
or like, okay, the headline that Builder put in is,
choose Firefox now or later you won't get a choice.
And the article really looks at Google's dominance.
In terms of how many people that they have won over
to their ecosystem and how much power that gives them
over you not being able to switch to something else.
Like I can switch to iOS because iOS was so dominant
and Google has supported it up until now
and doesn't look like they're gonna stop
supporting it anytime soon.
But a new platform, someone who's trying to break in,
like Microsoft, who's getting no support from Google,
the fact that I am so deeply rooted in Google's ecosystem,
whether it's Drive or Hangouts or Gmail,
I use Gmail for my personal and for my business email,
I see the point.
If you don't stop using Google services,
you may never be able to stop.
And if they become your service provider
for everything that you use online and your ISP
at some terrifying point in the future,
basically we won't even need to worry about the NSA
because Google will have all the information
we were ever worried about the NSA having.
And Google might have been in the past,
up until now even fairly consumer oriented,
but that doesn't mean that their leadership
is gonna exist forever.
That doesn't mean that as a company,
their culture can't change very dramatically.
I mean-
It already has, we've seen it happen.
It already has changed very dramatically.
And these are very young companies
that we're entrusting a lot of information to.
They're not old companies like a Nintendo,
where we can look back a hundred years
at what their culture is and how they've evolved over time.
We're looking at companies that have gone
from zero to enormous in a span of five or 10 or 20,
or even two years sometimes.
Kind of insane.
That's how fast they change.
So be prepared for them to change that fast.
So I don't know.
I just, I thought it was a really interesting,
it was really interesting food for thought.
And the original article was from robert.ocalahan.org.
I've already been trying,
I've been looking into switching to Photonmail for a while,
but Photonmail is taking a while to really become a thing.
Right.
So waiting for that.
And I've been looking into changing to a lot of things,
but the problem is whenever Google steps into a market,
everyone else has basically forcibly stepped out.
Yep.
Because everyone moves to that.
So there's no real like great calendar app anymore.
Yep.
Because everyone just uses Google Calendar.
Google Calendar is not even that great.
No, it's not.
Actually, it's kind of annoying.
I'd love to have a better calendar.
So would I.
I mean, here's like the simplest-
Now someone's gonna message us with a better calendar,
which is fantastic.
Please do that.
Like here's the simplest thing ever here.
I'm just gonna pull up a blank calendar here on my screen.
So like, here's an example.
What if I wanted to take this event
and like drag it past here?
You have to put it on that bottom row and then go down.
That's ridiculous.
Like that's the stupidest thing ever.
How did they not?
How did nobody catch this ever?
Anyway.
I don't know.
It just kind of horrible.
So it's kind of scary.
I've been saying this for quite a while actually, but.
We don't have a better option.
We're just grousing about it.
And the problem right now is,
I've brought this up in a few different WAN shows.
There's such mass fight for speed in browsers right now
where they're just iterating releases incredibly fast.
If you look way back,
Firefox didn't release releases all that quickly
until kind of Google Chrome came in
and then they both started fighting
and they're both releasing as fast as they possibly can
to try and stay on top of.
I like this.
Ionic Meteor says,
Outlook master race.
And I'm 50 years old.
Yeah.
Yeah, they've been fighting for these iterative releases
which are insane and they just break everything.
On my personal computer.
Flash hasn't been working in Firefox for months.
On my personal computer at home,
I can't use like most social media websites on Firefox.
And then I can't view YouTube videos in Chrome.
What?
So I have to use two different browsers
so that I can actually get functionality across all of them.
What the hell?
Since when did this happen?
Just give up.
It's freaking fast enough.
Fix everything.
God, one of you.
Firefox, I wish Firefox would just like step back
and be like, okay, you can be 1 billionth of a second
faster than us.
Who gives a crap?
Everything's gonna work on our browser.
You know what?
That would be great
because Waterfox is doing it right now.
I'm rooting for Internet Explorer, the rebrand.
Yeah.
I'm holding out for that.
Maybe they'll get it together.
I doubt it though.
I doubt it, but maybe.
If I'm gonna blindly-
That would be cool.
If I'm gonna have blind faith in something,
I guess that'll be it right now.
Just throw to the third team that no one knows about.
Yeah.
I don't know.
All right.
Asus is teasing a new smartwatch posted by D-trick W.
Luke Hughes Opera?
No, it's not better.
Yeah, I know.
I've tried.
Opera is so impossible to use.
Yes.
But part of the issue I have with Opera
is using Google services with it.
Like, YouTube is just broken.
Like, and I'm not talking viewing YouTube videos.
I mean, the content creator tools cannot use.
All right.
I have Opera on my computer.
I do use it.
So basically, time has been transformed
and we have changed is a quote that they're using
and they are gonna apparently give us
some more details on September the third.
Hooray.
So there we go.
Apparently it'll be priced somewhere between 100 and $150.
I guess that's all we really have to say about that.
Why don't we blast our way through
some more of these like quick fire topics.
All right.
You just pick ones that are interesting to you
and I'll pick ones that are interesting to you.
Facebook is offering bounties for bugs
found in Oculus Rift.
This is not the first time we've seen this
on like a hardware model,
but it's interesting how Oculus Rift,
which is a company that will be releasing
and publishing games and their Rift device
and possibly other things in the future
is offering a bounty for finding bugs
with a minimum reward of $500.
When we see early access being such a big,
pathetic, useless piece of crap
and then we see companies like Oculus
throwing bounties at people.
I just found that to be a weird contrast.
Yay, Facebook accusation.
Yay.
Pretty much.
All right.
I've got one here.
There's an app called, shoot, what's it called again?
Called Ignore No More,
that allows a parent or guardian or someone else
to stop their kids from ignoring their calls.
So, you know, you wanna get your kids some caller ID,
you kinda go, yeah, sure, you can know when I'm calling,
but if you don't pick up my calls,
then I will remotely lock your phone so you can't use it.
So if you're not gonna talk to me,
then you're not gonna talk to anyone.
And we actually had a lot of people
on the Linus Tech Tips Forum
get really upset about this
and kinda go, ooh, invasion of privacy,
this, that, or the other.
No, it's not.
If part of the deal is, look, Junior,
who's 13 years old or 12 years old
and probably, you know, in my generation
would have been considered too young
to have their own phone.
Like, look, Junior, you want a phone?
Sure, that's fine.
But I expect it, part of the verbal contract here
is you have a phone so we can get in touch with each other.
If you are ignoring that part of the verbal contract,
then you don't deserve to use your phone right now.
That's it.
So what they have to do
is they have to call their parents back
to get an unlock code.
I think one of my parents might call me out on this,
but as far as I can remember,
I paid for my cell phone for the entire duration
of having a cell phone.
Okay, my parents paid for mine
because the deal was that I got a car and a cell phone,
and I have four siblings.
So the deal was I had to be available to drive people.
Oh, that makes sense.
And I had to be accessible.
And I got a car and a phone out of it,
so I was like, yeah, deal.
I was a nerd and all my friends came over to my house
because we had all the coolest stuff to play with
in terms of video games or whatever.
So I didn't really need one.
Yeah, I lived in the middle of nowhere.
It was a 10 minute drive to the closest convenience store.
We had horses and stuff.
So for me, it made a lot of sense
because my parents actually probably made out like bandits
in the amount of time that they saved.
Me driving to town, which is 20 minutes there
and 20 minutes back, every time someone else
needed to miss the school bus or whatever else.
And that's worth it for you
because you have a car and a phone.
Because I have a car and a phone, dog.
Actually, I didn't even want a phone.
The only reason why I got one
was because the girlfriend I had at the time was like,
dude, what the hell, get a phone.
I know you don't want a phone
because whenever you lose or break your phone,
it's impossible to get in touch with you
for like two weeks while you drag ass about replacing it.
Oh man.
Anyway, I mean.
They're so expensive.
I mean, I think that people were upset about this
because they saw it as something that parents
would stealthily install on their kids' phones.
But that's not it at all.
Because it tells the kid, yo dog, your phone's locked,
call your mom to unlock it.
You have to know that it's on your phone.
This is part of the deal.
Yeah.
Okay, so next one.
Jump to the user modifies the Windows load screen thing.
Sure.
Because that's awesome.
Really, you're taking that one?
I wanted to do that one.
Well, okay.
No, no, you can have it.
Hitchhiking robot makes its way across Canada.
Oh yeah, that's pretty cool too.
Boom.
I'll search for hitch.
There we go.
There you go.
The hitch bot.
So apparently.
It's posted by QwertyWarrior.
QwertyWarrior wanted to be a huge jerk
and name the topic for this.
Robot tricks gullible Canadians.
Yeah, I didn't even load up his post.
Because he's a huge butt.
But anyways, almost everyone that took this robot
along with them knew it was coming before they even got it.
And not like a nice huge butt, like booty.
We're talking like sagging and like hasn't been cleaned.
Divided.
Yeah.
With like, you know, gross.
Yeah, that's the kind of butt.
Anyways, sorry, carry on.
Yeah, so almost everyone that picked it up
knew it was coming before I ended
because it had been blasted in the news.
And the idea was it came all the way from Halifax,
Nova Scotia to Victoria, D.C. by hitchhiking.
So that's the little hitchhiking robot.
And someone has to pick it up
and then take it along with them.
And it made it all the way, which is kind of amazing.
Especially with reading through the comments
of our super high class, totally upstart citizens
on our forum who basically all said
that they would just steal it and take it home.
But yeah, so there's the hitchhiking robot.
Someone finds it.
This is obviously scripted.
Obviously a promotional video.
Yeah.
Oh look, I pick it up and I put it in my car.
And apparently it could like talk to you
on some very basic level and stuff.
And it could tweet out
and it could do some other stuff too.
That's cool.
So all it got was like scratched.
It got scratched and it's a LCD protective thing.
It had like a small crack in it and stuff.
But it made it all the way,
which is actually kind of fantastic.
Again, especially considering the massively amazing citizens
of the LTT forum who all said they would steal it.
So this is cool.
I love this video.
Oh, this is awesome.
Yeah, this is like super, super bad ass.
Oh, there was no sound.
I heard it.
Did you?
Yeah.
No, I mean, I don't think on the stream there's sound.
Oh, it's not going through the cable.
There we go.
So it actually has the intro music as well.
And he has guides on there on how to do it
if you want to figure it out.
And what was I going to say?
He said apparently his fans aren't actually that loud
because a lot of people grilled him on that.
It's just because he had to crank the volume a lot.
So you could probably hear it.
That is so cool.
I think it's actually pretty sick.
Oh, you got maybe one more?
I've got one more that I want to do.
The Minecraft hard drive thing.
Is that what you're doing?
No, I wasn't even going to do that.
We have so much stuff this week.
No, I wasn't even going to do that one.
Okay, Google's planning to introduce accounts
for children under 13 posted by Victorious Secret.
It's going to allow parents to dictate some of the terms
of how that Google account will work.
I think this is really important
because as it is, kids under 13 are using Google accounts
and they're just not being regulated correctly.
Okay, you're next.
They're not being regulated at all,
which is kind of ridiculous.
In Minecraft, someone made a, I think,
single kilobyte hard drive.
Yep, one kilobyte.
Which is actually kind of awesome.
It's interesting to see this kind of stuff.
I've seen, in my opinion, slightly more interesting things
on the incredibly ridiculous side of things,
but he's got to the incredibly ridiculous side of things
at all, which is super cool.
So it's pretty cool to show.
And he shows like miniature versions of it
so you can actually understand how the whole thing works,
which is awesome because a lot of these really big projects
don't have that.
So he basically shows you the fundamentals
of what you need to know so that you can build your own,
which is, again, super awesome.
But yeah, it can store one kilobyte of information.
Yep, very cool.
Pretty cool.
My next thing that I wanted to hit was...
China Thebes.
No, actually, I wanted to do,
EA is not sending reviewers copies of Sims 4.
So this was posted by Mind Tricks on the forum
and the original source here that we have is kitguru.net.
That is...
And okay, so they're not sending out review copies.
Also no, if I remember correctly, toddlers.
No toddler stage.
And no pools.
No pools.
It looks like, I mean, we have this conversation every time
there's a new Sims where it's like,
yeah, they downgraded a bunch of crap
because all those expansions that you went and bought,
you're gonna have to rebuy them because the base game
doesn't include the expansions of the previous games.
But how can it not include pools?
Or like developmental phases of the Sims.
Yeah.
Like they're right in the title of the game.
Yeah.
Like those are two pretty fundamental things, guys.
What are you doing?
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Ultimately it's more complexity in terms of what text there
and what isn't there.
Oh yeah.
And what we have to build to support this.
How do we cut down into the terrain?
How do we get Sims going through portals
across different levels of pools?
There's so much more going on in the background
that you don't end up seeing just to have a Sim go swimming.
But it's like, well, you did it before.
And like same thing-
And it's been done since like a really long time ago.
Like, come on.
It's not that hard.
We're losing some of the open world aspects.
So there's going to be actually loading
as you go between zones.
Oh God.
Yeah.
I don't know how they can,
like it must be a really hard job to figure out
how to make your product consistently worse.
No, it can't be that hard.
It's gotta be hard.
Cause how do you, how do you pick pools?
Buildings can now have a maximum of only two levels.
So I don't know.
On the one hand, I think one super,
I don't think this is what they had in mind,
but I think one super cool positive effect
of them not giving reviewers early copies of Sims 4
is that that really opens up the door
for the average consumer to create a review
that can actually generate a fair bit of traffic.
Because we know that when we release a video
about a piece of hardware and we're two months late,
it'll get X amount of exposure, even at our level,
even with all the subscribers we have
and all the tweets that we can send out and all that stuff.
And if we release it at release date,
when everyone else hits it, we'll get X times something.
And if we release it early,
then we'll get X times something much bigger.
That's how it works.
And that's why there are embargoes and NDAs
and release dates so that no one gets an advantage.
But by no one, they mean no one
who's a well-established media outlet.
Whereas having just an on-shelf date
where everyone goes to the store
and buys a copy of the game,
I think let's grassroots reviewers have an opportunity
to be like the one to break the story.
And especially in gaming, like we're pretty big.
We can't get interviews with anyone
because we're not established in gaming.
It's impossible for us to properly get proper interviews
with any big AAA developers.
We can't get interviews with Blizzard.
We can't get interviews with Ubi.
We can't get interviews with 2K.
We can't get interviews with anyone.
I mean, on the hardware side, someone like Oculus,
you interviewed Palmer.
Like on the hardware side, we're good.
We actually have that street cred.
And we even have the street cred for gaming hardware.
Like it's not that tenuous a link.
Whereas if you are completely a nobody
walking around on the show floor at PAX,
you don't stand a chance.
Whereas if everyone kind of stopped
giving out pre-release copies and went to,
I don't know, I think it could be interesting.
To interject here for a second,
the Palmer interview, we only got
because I ambushed him in the booth.
That wasn't preset.
We still don't have a proper media contact there
that will actually answer anything.
And in the Palmer interview,
he said that he did really in fact like Linux
because he thought we were Linux tech tips.
That was the cut that didn't end up getting in
because there was no audio recording
because Brandon rushed.
So maybe not as cool, but they're like,
they're more actually a gaming company.
Yes.
And they are, everyone ever wants to interview them.
So if you contact their press email,
there's pretty much no chance you're gonna get a reply.
It's basically a dumping ground.
I know that for a fact.
You have to have one of their individual emails
and then publicly broadcast.
So like we, yeah.
I have it on good faith
that he actually liked that interview,
but we still have no way to properly contact him
because he told us as he was leaving
that we should talk to his press guy.
We went to go talk to his press guy
and he was like, yeah, no message the media contact.
We're like, yeah, that's not gonna work, is it?
He was like, ah, I'm like, okay, whatever, fine.
All right, well, I guess we suck and we're not important.
Here we go.
We're important to some people.
Yeah, we're important to someone.
I just wish we could get.
Actually, I feel pretty important right now.
We have over 6,100 people watching right now.
You guys are amazing.
I know, right?
Tested always gets the cool Oculus interviews.
I'm so jelly.
So is that pretty much it?
Do we have anything else?
We could do that horrible, stupid thing
that the Chinese theaters are testing.
Yeah, let's end with that.
Yeah, let's end with that.
Well, this is ridiculous.
I mean, maybe something is getting lost
in translation here, but like China,
you guys, are you guys serious, brah?
So check this out.
Cinemas in major cities in China
have started testing the bullet screen,
which allows the audience to text comments
about the film that will be shown on screen.
They are filtered and people have to pay to submit them.
I think it's like 10 cents or something like that.
Equivalency of 10 cents.
Equivalent of 10 cents.
Sensitive or forbidden words like swearing or democracy
are probably gonna get filtered there.
But yeah.
And it has to be approved to be a bullet screen film
by the writer and their contract with the producer, so.
I can't think of anything
that anyone sitting in a theater with me
could contribute to my viewing experience
by putting it in front of my face
while I'm trying to watch a movie.
That is ridiculous.
Okay, I can see having something like chat
with other people in the theater,
like a Twitch chat style thing.
That's what I thought it was when I first heard about this.
On your seat or like on like, okay, okay.
So say for example, they have a wifi hotspot
inside each theater so people can tune in on their phones
and chat with each other.
You know, some people get really bothered
by the glowing screen and the dark theater thing.
I personally give exactly zero craps about that.
I'm not gonna turn my phone on
because other people find it rude.
But if that was the route you wanted to go with this,
that's a lot less intrusive
than putting someone's freaking text message
on the screen while I'm trying to watch the movie.
So if you like logged in, if there was an app or something
and it was like, let's discuss the movie
while we're watching, that way it's very optional.
People don't have to look at it.
That's, this is ridiculous.
This is just stupid.
This is the worst possible implementation I can think of.
I had like a semi-emergency thing once
where I needed to be in texting contact with someone
and I was in a movie theater.
So like you'd think just leave,
but it was very intermittent messages
and it wasn't like I was, there was no point in time
where I knew if I was gonna get another one
that I needed to reply to and stuff.
Hold on, people are like, but Twitch chat is retarded.
Like this is exactly why it shouldn't be across the front
of our video right now.
Yeah, so if someone wants to talk to them,
they should be able to.
It should be optional.
Exactly, and what I did was I put my sweater on backwards
and put the hood up and then used my phone under it
so there was no light emission at all.
Nice.
I was like, problem solved.
Yeah, I guess that's about it.
We can after show to talk about anything else
if we want to.
Yeah, I promised to do a garage sale this week,
but I don't feel like it.
I've barely slept.
I have a newborn.
You know what, maybe what I'll do
is I should start just listing them at night
and we can just say, hey, there's garage sale items.
And then like, hey, there's a price drop
on your after party stream or something like that.
Sure.
Or something, I don't know.
Or maybe what we could do is we could do
a really short garage sale after the show.
Maybe I'll prep this next week
and I'll just be like, here's all the items
that are gonna be available tonight.
And then set them all live.
Yeah, stay tuned.
Or something like that.
All right.
Good night, everyone.
Thank you for watching the WAN Show.
Thank you to our sponsors, HyperX and lynda.com
for making this episode possible.
Thank you to Luke for making this episode possible.
Thank you to Linus for making this episode possible.
It's all about the fishing for thanks
and fishing for compliments, right?
Wasn't fishing for that at all.
Your shoes look so great today.
Oh my God, your dress is fantastic.
Thank you.
Aw, dang it.
Okay.
They can still hear you.
Oh yeah.
Derp.
Speaking of derp, there was one other big news thing this week.
It's like Reddit and a bunch of other awesome...
Hold on, let me find it.
Where's derp?
Imgur, Twitch, Fark, and Stack Exchange Research Partnership.
I think Reddit was also involved, at least I thought so.
The point is it's called derp,
and it stands for Digital Ecology's Research Partnership.
Can't believe they called it derp.
Reddit, Imgur, Twitch.
Oh yeah, I said Reddit.
See, this is why I can't do an after party
or a garage sale right now.
Clearly not capable.