Welcome to the WAN Show, guys. The weekly show where we talk about all kinds of things to do with My Little Pony, the latest furry trends, and of course, whatever's on sale at Hot Topic.
So first up we've got, as far as Hot Topics are concerned, AMD M- oh this is a tech show.
Oh crap.
Yeah, AMD Mantle. The Battlefield 4 patch is here. But don't worry too much about it because there's no driver yet.
Nope.
However, it should be noted, there's an email in my inbox. I will not confirm that I have read the email.
But what I will say is that it's from the same PR firm that AMD uses.
So you've read at least the from-
I know who it's from.
Have you read the subject line?
No, I haven't read the subject.
But I will say that that email was probably promising so I don't think we'll be waiting that much longer.
Our next headline, this is kind of awesome, Backblaze is creating sensationalist viral publicity for themselves again.
There was actually an excellent, excellent article done up by Tweaktown about how flawed their testing methodology was
when they basically came out and said like Seagate hard drives are garbage.
So we'll be going through that. Huge props to Tweaktown for that article.
South Korea has just been like, nope, no bloatware on mobile phones. Completely banned, which is super nice.
There's a few things like Wi-Fi connectivity is allowed to be hidden.
But it's like, come on, what do you kind of do?
It's like bloatware is now removable, which is nice.
Source 2 engine leak and possibly a game leak that ends in 3.
Although we'll get into that more later.
Yes, we will.
This week's show is brought to you guys by Hotspot Shield, the fast easy way to set up a VPN.
Their elite service is very reasonably priced and you can get a 20% off coupon by using offer code Linus.
You can sign up at bit.ly slash hsshare.
Big thanks to them for making the show possible.
So without further ado, let's jump right into our first topic, AMD Mantle.
Oh, you didn't want to do that one first?
No, I said boom.
Yeah, boom, AMD Mantle.
So there's been a whole bunch of news over the last little while.
It's finally coming.
The Battlefield 4 driver is finally actually dropped.
Or did I say driver? I'm sorry, patch.
The Battlefield 4 patch, that's 40 and slip, is finally here.
You can actually install it, although there won't be any point doing that unless you're running an AMD graphics card that's based on the GCN architecture.
Not that there would be a point for you if you did have one of those graphics cards anyway.
We could preload it.
You could preload it and be ready to rock.
But we're finally getting a ton more data and here it is.
So while you can't install the driver yet, we have reason to believe that you'll be able to get access to it very, very soon.
And this was the thing that I thought was most interesting out of all the information that's out there right now.
So AMD has released a little bit of information about what kind of performance improvements folks can expect to see using Mantle.
And I think many people were expecting their graphics card to sprout wings and fly.
So they were expecting to take an R9 290X and have that all of a sudden be deep into the double digits percentages faster.
When that's not necessarily the case, what Mantle will do is it will alleviate CPU bottlenecking.
So if you were in a situation where, I think one of the examples they give here is a 64 player multiplayer game.
So there's a 7970 and an FX 8350 where previously DirectX might not have allowed the CPU to fully leverage all those cores.
Remember that's an 8 core CPU?
And you might have been CPU limited, even that 7970 which is a reasonably powerful graphics card.
Well now with Mantle they're saying you can expect maybe even a 25% performance improvement by allowing your CPU to become unfettered.
Now I've seen reports of, particularly with very high end graphics cards, the improvements being on the lower side.
I've seen reports of with high end graphics cards the improvements being very exceptional.
But I think it's really going to depend on what type of level you're playing, what type of scenario you're doing.
And it's also going to depend on what the actual finished product looks like because I haven't seen anything super official yet.
This is mostly like leaked stuff here and there.
A big part is going to be, like you said, levels, area, what's going on, are you playing single player, are you playing a 64 player configuration, all that kind of stuff.
And the exact configuration of your machine. Do you have something that's underpowered in some area?
Do you have something that's massively overpowered in another area?
So it's going to come down to the perfect storm of all the different things happening to exactly how much performance you're going to gain out of it.
You know what's funny? I had it echoing. I had my Twitch stream going.
Every week!
It's not every week!
Every week! And barefoot's better.
What do people know?
Barefoot's better, man.
Anyway, I guess you know what? I'd love to do a Twitter blitz for this.
What do you guys want to see us compare?
Because we're in one of those privileged positions where we have access to all the hardware, and I'm going to give you guys three options.
So option number one is high-end CPUs, high-end graphics cards, take another run at Battlefield 4, except with AMD we run Mantle, with Nvidia we run DirectX, and see how things fall.
Or would you rather, rather than comparing high-end graphics cards with high-end CPUs, would you rather we have a look at the impact of Mantle on low-end CPUs,
and we instead take one high-end graphics card, let's say a Radeon R9 290 or something like that, and we take a range of different CPUs?
Or would you rather... actually that was pretty much all I had.
What would you rather we do? Because we're not going to be able to do everything.
I think AMD's promised me I'll have 24 hours before a public driver is released to run numbers.
Do you guys want us to focus on GPU performance with a single high-end CPU, or CPU performance with a single high-end GPU?
Are we taking a tweet from this, or are we straw-pulling it?
We're tweeting.
I was just making sure.
Yeah, go ahead and just tweet us with what you would prefer to see.
This is exciting. Oh, actually there was one other bit of Mantle news, so I mean, we knew this was coming.
It's not really Mantle, but it's the latest driver from AMD that includes OpenCL 2.0 support, HSA support for Kaveri APUs.
It also has some pretty badass spreadsheet support.
Yeah, so LibreOffice, this was posted on the forum by the SLS AMG.
The notification, LibreOffice is now supporting Mantle, so Mantle as well as OpenCL and HSA are going to be a huge emphasis for them when you're doing things.
And actually, AMD had some interesting use cases for this.
So one example was buying and selling stocks within very tight timeframes.
So when you have a live feed of data that you need your spreadsheet to calculate and spit out new quotes as quickly as possible,
they were showing HSA on a Kaveri APU versus an Intel quad-core processor and how much faster it could update,
so how much more granular the data you could get was, and it was actually very impressive.
And so while most people will give exactly this many cares about LibreOffice's ability to calculate spreadsheets slightly faster,
there are people out there for whom this will be extremely important.
We can't just gloss over it.
All of Twitch Chat is just like, what? What?
It matters. It might not matter to you.
What?
But it matters.
How does this make my game run faster?
Alright, let's move on to our next topic.
Valve's in-home streaming. I don't know if you guys saw the video we did on it already or not.
I thought it was one of the best videos we've ever done. I worked extremely hard on it.
Actually, my legs are tired.
Because the thing about in-home streaming is you have to have mirrored configurations of whatever it is you're doing in both places.
So in this house, that ended up being on two separate floors for the sake of what I thought was going to be improved convenience
and not having to haul things in one place and then run new network cables and stuff.
It ended up being a lot of running back and forth up and down the stairs,
but it was a lot of fun to do and I want you guys to check it out.
And you guys aren't the only ones that are going to be checking it out.
This was extremely exciting. This is the first time I have ever gotten any attention from Valve in any way whatsoever.
But on SteamCommunity.com, in the home streaming group, which you guys have to join if you want to have the home streaming beta enabled for you,
I was actually featured on their announcements tab.
There's also a forum discussion thing going on about it too.
Yeah, with 131 comments there. So I thought that was pretty much the coolest thing ever.
It felt like getting a gold star of approval from Gaben himself.
It wasn't.
I know, but it felt like it.
At least they know who we are.
At least someone there...
Someone at Valve knows that we exist.
...is aware of our existence.
And anyway, it's a great video. I hope you guys enjoy it.
I realized there was one thing that I actually kind of left out from the video.
And that was how good is the gaming experience other than when it's like fundamentally broken like on iFinity and 4K.
I actually didn't talk about it.
So that was a bit of a glaring omission. It's actually very good.
There is noticeably more what feels like jitter.
And there is, it seems like sometimes tearing is a little bit more noticeable.
But beyond that, I mean latency-wise, when you're running on a wired connection, how did it feel for you?
It was absolutely really good.
The only time with what configurations people expect to work that it was kind of weird was when we had that really low-powered system.
Did you have that in the video?
I did. And so you mean the one where we were only getting 720p 30fps on the Sapphire machine, right?
Yeah.
So it's not as simple as does the machine have enough horsepower to decode an H.264 stream?
That's what I think a lot of people thought.
And it's not quite like that.
It has to be able to do that while managing that network traffic, while sending commands the other way, and then it seems to just need some extra.
So a dual-core E450 APU, that's a very low-power older APU, was not enough for 1080p streaming.
But something like an Ultrabook, even a dual-core Core i5 or Core i7 Ultrabook was able to handle 1080p just fine.
The only issue is that most of them don't have Ethernet on board, so I actually just picked up a couple more of these USB to Ethernet adapters.
I'm going to be doing a Great Tech Under $100 episode again, and I'm going to include this as well as a couple other really cool things that I've been using lately.
Well, the problem is that I had never owned one before, and so I'd always kind of made do without it.
And then I bought one, and all of a sudden...
You need it all the time.
I use it during WAN Show, I used a Netbook to make a PFSense router for my house, so now all of a sudden it's tied up there and I'm like, oh crap.
More required.
One for the bag, one for the WAN Show room, and I'll probably be buying more of them.
Oh, and this one, this one right here, this pluggable USB to Ethernet adapter is gigabit, so 450 megabit per second max, obviously, because it's USB 2, but it's also rumoured to be compatible with Shield.
So stay tuned, guys. You could be getting a Limelight versus Shield versus Valve In Home Streaming, Wired versus Wireless latency roundup over the next little bit.
That's going to be really fun.
That's actually going to be really cool.
It's going to be a nightmare to do all the benchmarking for it.
Oh, it's going to be terrible.
It's going to be just awful. The worst thing ever. But I'm really looking forward to it.
Yay!
I hate my life.
Actually, I love my life. It's just sometimes I hate things about it.
So we should do the, yeah.
Yeah, let's do our Twitter blitz.
Okay, so Nathan wants different CPUs with the Kaveri APU for best CPU.
I think you're a little confused, Nathan. An APU has a CPU on it.
I would say, if possible, run all the CPUs, but at 8 gig or 16 gig configurations, that's not going to make much of a difference, Ludwig.
Mantle is not in any way rumored to optimize the use of more memory, more system memory.
Okay, that's one option, though. Running a lot of CPUs with maybe a couple different graphics cards.
So like one high-end, one $100, $150 card, like an entry-level gaming.
What I say we do, which this might be aside from this, but I'm assuming that I'm doing all the benchmarking.
I could help. Actually, I could legit help with this because it's only one run.
And we have two accounts with BF4.
Yeah, but it's one bench.
We could have multiple benches. We have...
So we could do two different, you could do one and I could do the other one, essentially, because you could do...
CPUs with one GPU.
And I can do the CPU with multiple GPUs.
We could potentially do this.
Yeah.
Yeah, maybe we'll set aside some time Monday.
Sure.
So Leonard wants mid-range AMD versus high-end Nvidia, just to see what happens there. That would be interesting.
Dietrich asks for GPU test first.
Dexter wants to see the high-end stuff. Let's see the heavyweight showdown.
I mean, you know what? That's, I think, what most people are going to be interested in, too.
Ashley wants the APU tests.
One over option two.
Okay.
Socks and sandals is better than barefoot. Thank you, Marius.
The lone PC gamer do both options while rendering a video.
I think most people don't game while they're rendering videos in the background.
VM generalizing. But I think in general it's correct.
I've done that.
I've done it, too.
Back when I used to have to edit.
But I think most people usually don't.
Running VMs while trying to edit things was always really interesting.
Anyways.
All right, so take mid-range CPUs and the same cards.
We're seeing, actually, a fair bit of each.
CPU modder asks for both.
CPU range. Comparing DirectX versus Mantle sounds like apples and pears.
Well, it's apple. Okay.
This. This.
Okay, I'm about to go on a rant here, Levi. I'm sorry, but you've started this.
You take the responsibility.
This is the problem with fanboyism.
There is no such thing as an unfair comparison.
I'm going to let that sink in.
Yes, there is.
There's such thing as a flawed experiment.
We're going to be covering that, please.
Okay, no, no, no.
There's a flawed experiment.
But a correctly conducted experiment can't be unfair.
Well, that means you're removing the unfair.
No, okay, okay, okay.
Because there is unflared experiments, but they are flawed.
Hold on a second.
Because, okay, okay, okay.
Unfair? I mean, like, emotionally unfair.
Like, it's not fair to benchmark AMD versus Nvidia and Tomb Raider because the 780 Ti is bugged in Tomb Raider.
That's not unfair.
That's just, it doesn't perform well. Sorry.
That's not unfair.
It's a perfectly good experiment.
It's just that one of the things failed and didn't do well.
That's all.
And an experiment is designed to reveal these things.
So, if you were to say it's unfair to compare Nvidia running in DirectX mode in a particular game that supports Mantle versus AMD running Mantle, that's not unfair.
That's a feature that they don't have.
That's it. That's all there is to it.
If this one performs better, but at reduced image quality, well, now we've introduced other variables and we have to talk about that.
But all other things being the same, if this one runs like this and it has this extra thing and this one doesn't, that's it.
That's all there is to it.
I think there can be unfairs.
And I think you just said one.
You could have different image qualities.
There can be something, it's still an experiment.
I really, okay.
From talking to Johan Anderson back at Nvidia's event, and this was at Nvidia's event, he did not expect there to be any image quality difference between Mantle and DirectX.
I'm not saying there is. I meant if you go in and go from very high to medium.
That's unfair.
Well, yeah, but that's not unfair. That's just stupid.
Yeah, but it's still unfair.
That's just doing it wrong.
That's stupid and unfair.
Okay, fine then.
There's no such thing as utilizing a product to its full potential being unfair.
There you go.
So, you're putting both of them in the best possible configuration they can be in and testing them against each other.
That's completely, that's fine.
That's exactly what we're going to do and that's fine.
Like back when AMD was having a lot of trouble with frame pacing, taking an Nvidia SLI configuration versus an AMD Crossfire configuration and saying this destroys this was fair.
I'm sorry your driver isn't good or not as good as your competitor.
That's not unfair, it's just fact.
And until it's fixed, it's just fact and you have to deal with it.
So, I don't want to hear about unfair, that's all.
In that.
Yes.
We're going to let things be as good as they possibly can as long as it's not hurting the experience in some way.
We are not intervening in some way that is nerfing one of them in some way to make it worse than the other.
We are allowing them both to go as hard as they can.
For as long as they can.
Alright, so this is interesting.
I did not expect anyone to do this.
It was fast.
You know he announced the first version of it on the afterparty?
Wait, this is V1?
Yeah.
Oh.
I changed your link.
Oh, you changed my link?
Whatever your link was didn't work.
No, I thought that was...
No, I'm pretty sure I had a newer link.
Whatever your link was, there was no download button. It did not work.
Is this newer?
If you delete that part of the URL...
Oh no, this has been updated.
He says we won.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is the newest one.
If you delete that end part of the URL, you can find his written link.
So I challenged someone last week watching the stream.
I said, look...
There's a lot of audio.
Anyone who wants to do it...
What?
Oh my goodness.
Okay.
Are you sure you want to open that, Linus?
Yes, I want to open it.
Geez, okay.
There's a lot of audio.
So we asked for someone to make the game...
Oh, hold on, I should just check to make sure the levels are okay.
Can't even hear it.
That's interesting.
It might be once you start the game.
Okay, well, we'll make sure it's not too loud.
Aw yeah, it's pretty loud.
Okay, we'll go ahead and turn that down a little bit.
There we go.
Alright, so I asked someone to make the game Candy Ass Candy Eaters.
There is an avatar that you can use here.
So I'm going to play on a medium.
So you get slick, and you eat the candy, and you avoid the...
What are these again?
Copyright symbols.
Copyright symbols, yeah.
And I think spaces jump.
So the idea is to collect as much candy as you can, while violating as few copyrights
as you can, to avoid getting sued.
So I can show you guys...
Oh no!
I'll show you guys what happens, what happens tonight.
Oh, I got sued.
I go to jail.
So, this was something where I actually, I paid the $100 bounty last night, where I was
like, okay, someone has to make this game, this is going to be awesome.
So this was because of King Games trying to trademark the word candy, among other things,
and go after anyone who had a game that was sort of revolved around candy.
So they're the makers of Candy Crush Saga.
And I think they were going after anyone using the word saga as well, which is like, really?
There's a few words they were doing.
So people are making like, Candy Saga Rush, and Candy Saga whatever, and all these different
things.
It's kind of awesome.
So, yeah, we should definitely have a thread somewhere on the forum where people post their
high scores, and it's actually pretty entertaining.
Yeah, it's not a bad game.
I've seen worse.
It's like, actually pretty alright.
The just for fun part is kind of insane.
Oh, this I hadn't seen yet.
I never play games just for fun.
There's this storm of candy.
I didn't know you could double jump.
Ah, interesting.
All the game mechanics.
Okay, we didn't say the game was perfect.
Just to be clear.
If you don't go too far out, you land on this little ledge, and then you can jump back in.
So like, if you really need to dodge a thing, and for some reason you can't go the other
way, you can like, shuffle out the wall.
Someone should make a game where you dodge coins.
And you're a dog.
Awesome.
I'm no bounty for that level.
I'm already poor enough.
Alright.
If you win, you should get candy, and it should be Candy Quest Saga Coin Dodger Edition.
So, there's more to Oculus Rift than just gaming.
This article is from Eurogamer.net, and is actually talking about a use for it that would
allow people to virtually swap bodies.
So, you actually, I think, did most of the...
There's not even really, honestly, that much else to say.
What happens is, you sit in similar proximity, and then to be able to keep the immersion
up, you have to kind of move in sync with the other person.
You do not want to play this.
I put like, flags all over that post.
Right there, right there, and right there.
So that you wouldn't play the video.
Alright, cool.
Anyways, don't watch the video unless you are of appropriate age, because there is nudity
within the video.
Okay.
But, essentially, what you do is, you have to move in sync.
So, because, like, if you grab your leg, or if you grab your arm like this, for immersion,
if you're looking down, to be able to see yourself, which is not yourself, it's the
other person, grab their arm, they have to do it at the same time.
So, all the movements are very sweeping and very slow, so you can do it at the same time.
A few things that break it from...
Stop it.
I'm just gonna...
Oh, I see.
A few things that break it, as far as I can tell, is like, when they're going like this,
and stuff like that, like, the guy is super hairy, so as he's going like this, and the
girl is, like, not hairy at all, it's like, well, that wouldn't feel the same.
Right.
At all.
Makes sense.
And there's a few things that would break it, in my mind.
But, yeah, it's interesting.
They have a few different reasons for doing it, so...
Where is it?
By doing this, they can participate in a virtual body swap.
They've entitled the machine Be Another, Machine to Be Another, and its whole idea is to explore
empathy and the nature of the self.
That sentence is hard to say.
The nature of the self.
It sounds weird.
So there you go.
If you could find a willing participant and set up a Be Someone Else machine, then...
It shouldn't theoretically be that hard.
No, I don't think so.
Because there's a...
We should do it.
You've seen the video now.
That got a lot more awkward.
There's cameras mounted and stuff, so it can feed out.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's really not that complicated, but it's interesting that people are starting to do
these ideas, because I think Oculus is going to be used for a lot more things than just
gaming.
Yeah.
All right, so Left 4 Dead 2 in Source 2 Engine leaks.
This is a PowerPoint presentation that was leaked by a fairly credible source, Seaboat.
Also known as Crazy Botox on a Train.
That sounds credible.
So leaked by Seaboat, and there's some before and after shots of what it might look like
on Source Engine, which of course has been heavily modified since it was originally released.
They've updated it to the point where...
I mean, really, you'll go back to the very first Source games, and they're hardly recognizable
as the same engine.
But the point is that it has obviously been upgraded significantly further than that.
So this would be Source 2, and then there also seem to be some hints that some game
with, you know, Half Life 3 might be coming at some point.
I mean, Valve is always so tight-lipped about this stuff.
Yeah, it seems really fishy to me, I have to call it.
So it was not announced by Crazy Botox on a Train.
This was a different leak thing, and it's super simple.
One thing about the Seaboat release was that the PowerPoint looked actually pretty fleshed out.
There was stuff on it, there was other slides that weren't shown, there was bla bla bla bla,
and it looked interesting and full.
The other one's just like a directory screenshot.
It's like, yup, cool.
So anyone could have renamed files and just been like, cool, leaked.
And then, why is it actually called HL3?
Yeah, I can't imagine they would do that.
Seriously? They didn't code name it at all? Really?
I don't know. It doesn't seem super crazy legit to me.
So I don't know about that one, but the Seaboat one seems quite a bit more legit.
This is interesting.
Yeah, this is really interesting.
So next up is Google has begun ranking ISPs the same way that Netflix did.
So Netflix released this report, when was that? That was what?
Not that long ago.
Six months ago, maybe?
Yeah, really not that long ago.
Remember, there's the speed your internet service provider advertises to you.
50 megabit or 100 megabit or whatever.
And then there's the speed that you're actually getting,
particularly for certain demanding services like on-demand video.
And typically, it is not anywhere near the level of what they're advertising.
And I find people like my mom are going to have no idea what that means.
My internet is this fast. What does that allow me to do?
No idea. So now this translates that information into something that makes a lot more sense.
My internet is capable of running YouTube in HD verified mode.
Oh, well that's good.
So HD verified, in order to qualify, you have to be able to run a 720p stream 90% of the time without any hitches.
A lot of people complain about YouTube issues, but maybe that's what prompted them to do this.
Because many of the issues, like you'll go,
OK, no, my internet's plenty fast. I can download something from here and it's fast.
But then I go to play YouTube videos and it's crappy.
That's probably your ISP dinking around, and it's actually less likely that that's Google
that is not able to deliver you the video in a timely manner.
And it's a lot safer for them to do that too, because especially with downloads,
they have a lot of time rated speeds and YouTube videos, you just see it lagging.
You don't know why. It doesn't show like it is downloading at this fast, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
One thing that I wish they did was I wish they had almost say different tiers.
Like why is it just you are YouTube HD verified if you reach this level?
Yeah, like gold verified would be nice.
Gold verified, so it's like 1080p or higher or like you are YouTube standard or YouTube HD.
I wish there was different levels.
This is really cool though. It shows the results in your area for who is HD verified,
who is standard definition verified, and then who is lower definition.
So apparently bell in my area is low rubbish.
I don't know anyone that has a bell connection.
I don't know anyone that has a bell connection.
I kind of wonder if that's mobile or something.
Yeah, that would have been weird.
I don't even know what's up with that.
But there you go. Very cool.
Who are some of these people?
It breaks it down into, so what quality people were watching at during those times.
So this is how many streams overall.
So the peak was around 8 or 9 pm, which makes perfect sense.
And then what percentage of them were able to run in HD.
That's really, really cool.
Telus Low Tier, for example, was only able to achieve about 80% of its streams in HD.
Cool.
But then that's low tier or whatever.
But then that's a low tier service.
It's interesting because that's a lot more translatable to someone who just wants an area of connection
and isn't really that interested in anything.
Normal people.
Yeah.
So time to rage face a little bit.
Yeah. Do you want to handle this?
I don't, see, my...
We can tag team it.
Sure. My almost problem with this is that it's the exact same thing.
And we will be saying the exact same things as we did last time because it's exactly the same.
But this time it's been scientifically torn down.
Categorically torn down. Analytically torn down. By Tweaktown.
So this was a great little article from Paul Alcorn where he basically goes,
okay, Backblaze's thing that they released where they graphed hard drive reliability
and failure rates over time showing Seagate to have an abysmally terrible failure rate,
which I called out at the time.
I said, well, it looks like a lot of these results are being skewed by one batch of a particular drive.
And there were other problems with it than that.
So he actually dug through Backblaze's excellent blog and found a lot of the information that he needed
to refute the claims that were being made with respect to drive reliability, which was really interesting.
So basically he dug through and went, okay, this graph is interesting,
but it can't possibly have a basis in reality because even WD's annual failure rate of 3%
based on what I personally already know about the margin that exists on a hard drive
for a company like Western Digital would put them out of business.
They wouldn't exist if that was their actual failure rate in the field.
So you have to consider a number of things.
So number one is these are consumer grade drives being used in an enterprise environment.
There was a lot of them that were ripped out of enclosures because something they found,
which is very true, is that a lot of times you can find cheaper drives in enclosures.
One of the things is you're not entirely sure which exact drive is going to be in there
and what bin it was and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
but they were mass purchasing to the point of having some of their employees banned
from buying hard drives from stores because they were buying so many.
And this was during the shortage.
Yeah, and then they were like putting out hit lists for people to go out and buy drives
from different stores for them and then giving them bounties for those drives.
They were crowdsourcing drives.
Like ridiculous so they could get these external drives and then do what they call shucking,
which is just like corn taking all the outside off and then using this internal hard drive.
So they're using drives from wherever the heck because they're getting all these externals.
Who knows how they were transported.
I mean that's a big thing guys.
Let me tell you, the failure rates for hard drives are affected in a significant way
by the manner in which they are shipped or delivered from wherever they're coming from to the customer.
So yeah, so sourcing was an issue.
The fact that the drives weren't all running in the same environment at all was a big issue.
So different enclosures, many of the failed drives were running in an older style of enclosure
that caused more vibration.
Some of the drives were going to be running near the center of enormous racks of drives
where it was, I think they were observing temperatures up to what, 10 degrees hotter or something like this?
It's like if you have an entire huge row of rack mount servers, like huge rows of them,
in the middle of the row, so rack, rack, rack, rack, rack, rack, rack, rack, rack, rack,
in the middle you'd find the hottest and at the top you'd find the hottest.
So the middle top drives are going to be quite a bit hotter than the other ones.
Yeah, so the huge temperature ranges, which there have been reports that temperature doesn't affect hard drive failure rates.
From them.
From, but the manufacturers all seem to be aligned on this.
I mean, you look at guys like Seagate and WD, they don't agree on much,
but what they do agree on is that vibration is bad,
and so that older enclosure that Seagate's drives were running in was terrible,
and they agree that heat is bad.
Hard drives have manufacturer-suggested operating temperatures that you should stay within,
and then lower is better, according to the actual manufacturers that actually engineer this stuff.
So basically, once again, Backblaze has gotten everyone talking about them by making a sensationalist headline,
and then they got Tweaktown to have to talk about them some more and generate even more publicity for them.
I mean, and the funny thing is the Tweaktown article isn't even hating on Backblaze,
because a lot of what they were doing was to help customers.
Was well-intentioned.
Really cheap storage.
For their customers.
It's like, okay.
So, but then just like, please stop sensationalizing stuff.
You know, please, that's all.
And like throwing companies, other companies under the bus pretty hard.
Yeah, I mean throwing someone like Seagate under the bus,
because like you wanted to make headlines, really feels like not a good, not a very good, you know, partner thing to do.
It doesn't feel good.
It feels really icky.
Yeah.
There was a, yeah, there was a bunch of stuff.
We've talked about it all, but like I think they're on their third revision of Backblaze server.
Another thing that bugs me too is in the more detailed charts,
you can find like there was years of difference between when drives were deployed too,
which is a huge deal.
Yes.
I mean, to actually determine this scientifically, you would have to have a controlled environment.
You'd have to source all the drives from the same place.
You would have to have them all performing approximately the same work.
I mean, that was another thing was that was their whole enterprise versus consumer grade drives one,
where they had them doing completely different things.
I mean, that's ridiculous.
I'll be the first to tell you guys an enterprise or server grade workload will kill a consumer grade drive.
Did I tell you how many drives failed in my Windows home server, my original one?
Didn't, weren't they just basically like candy?
They were basically like, I probably had anywhere between eight and a dozen drives fail
over the couple of years that I was running it.
And the reason for that was because of the way that Windows home server v1 worked,
data was constantly being shuffled around and balanced between the drives for redundancy
because it didn't use RAID.
So what happened was my boot drives would die
because the boot drive couldn't be manually removed from the drive pool.
So it had to handle running an OS and doing all that stuff.
And then it had to handle having data sort of swapped back and forth on it all the time
and that thing would thrash constantly.
And I just said they would just drop, die, die, die, die, die.
And it was a real pain when they died.
So I eventually replaced it with an Intel SSD, which is running to this day.
Because, I mean, it's not a ton of writes,
it's just a lot of random all over the place,
which will wear out a hard drive faster than it will an SSD.
Yeah.
Jumping to B Wi-Fi?
No, actually I wanted to go to Hawaii's post on the forum.
So speaking of PC component failure rates,
these numbers may actually be slightly more credible
because at least it's a wider sample
and is actual components that are being deployed into the field by a retailer.
There's still...
There are problems.
Yeah.
I know. There are problems.
The sample sizes vary anywhere from hundreds of units to thousands of units.
The...
Who knows if someone bought a whole bunch and then put them in a weird configuration.
None of them will be in the same...
Very few of them will be in the same cases, in the same configurations.
Yeah.
None of them are really going to be at the same temperatures, but it's...
Letting end users use them is not a controlled environment.
But it's much wider, which almost helps it.
Yeah, that almost makes it more relevant to the average consumer who's looking to buy something.
So there's lots...
Oh yeah, another thing to consider about this, guys,
is that it does not account for failed products that get returned to the manufacturer
because they have no way of tracking that.
This is only ones that came back to the retailer.
So some manufacturers in particular have notices right inside their packaging that says,
Hey, yo, go through us.
Don't go back to your retailer.
And I'm not saying...
They're not trying to hide anything from the retailers.
It's just that I think some of them feel like they want to be in charge of their own customer service
and do a great job of taking care of this customer that has a dead product.
And I think that's where the motivation comes from.
But there were just...
There were some really interesting numbers.
Gigabyte did really well with respect to average failure rates.
ASUS and ASRock did really well.
MSI didn't do very well, but it looks like it was skewed by one model.
That's cool because this breaks it out by manufacturer as well as by individual models,
which is really cool.
Where it's relevant.
Or where they had enough of them.
That's what I was looking for.
Where they had a big enough sample size.
Were you surprised by anything in here?
Um...
Not really. I mean, I worked at a retailer for years.
Yeah, I know. That's why I was just wondering.
And it's funny because there is so much talk from consumers about
who makes reliable graphics cards and who makes blah blah blah.
You know what, there's like four factories making all this stuff.
And they all have extremely advanced equipment
and they're all improving their QA processes all the time.
And you can do the simple math.
Which is like, I've seen accusations made that a manufacturer has huge RMA rates.
Half of them die.
You can assume that if that were the case, they would not exist.
There have been products that were extremely bad.
And you know, I'm not going to throw anyone under the bus here.
Okay, I will.
The Striker Extreme was a terrible product.
It was an awful motherboard.
RMA rates above 25% for that board.
Over the entirety of its lifetime.
There are lemons.
There's higher than that in this dock.
Yeah, so there's stuff like that.
But the thing that doesn't surprise me is that stuff happens.
And the other thing too, this is another flaw with this,
is that it's only I think what, six months of data?
Or a year of data or something like that.
Something like that.
Yeah, so it's a limited time frame where one manufacturer can just have a bad spell for a bit.
And then that can make them look really bad on this report when that's not necessarily the ongoing case.
Although it does include some data from the previous year in this report as well.
So it was very interesting.
Very interesting overall.
This is awesome.
OCZ petrol and octane SSD return rates in the 40 plus percent ranges.
And a lot of talk occurred about OCZ RMA rates.
And what I would say at the time is, guys, yeah, there are bad apples.
Petrol was a terrible drive.
I returned hundreds of them.
But without even selling them when I realized what was going on.
But something like Vertex 4 and Vertex 3 and Vertex 2 before that.
I ran those Vertex 4s for a really long time.
Yeah, and so did a lot of people.
You know what I mean? For like test benching.
And I beat the crap out of them when I was test benching.
So like, yeah, pretty cool.
So anyway, so there you go.
You guys should definitely check that out on the forum.
It's also posted on Linus Tech Tips Facebook, which I've started becoming a lot more active on.
So if you guys follow or like Linus Tech on Facebook, then you'll see things that I will post there.
It actually gets some exclusive content now.
Apparently there is a thread in PC gaming for candy ass candy eater high score bonanza.
Excellent.
I'm going to post that in the Twitch chat so people can find that.
Fantastic.
I'm probably going to jump on there at some point.
Because I actually find it quite entertaining.
B Wi-Fi. This is an article from Ars Technica.
Lets you steal your neighbors bandwidth when they're not using it.
But I think steal is a bit of a misnomer here.
Because what the video actually suggests is more of a Wi-Fi sharing concept.
So I'm just going to turn that down.
Mostly.
You know what, lets not even watch the video.
Because overall I'm kind of looking at this going like, what are you high?
You can try and defend it if you want.
I think it makes sense in certain regions.
I think you saw that in my notes.
Which is actually what they were targeting too.
I don't think, like where, anywhere that I have ever lived.
Nope.
Except for dorms at university, but then they would have their own thing.
Everyone would have their own login anyway.
So the way that B Wi-Fi works is you basically sign up and make your Wi-Fi hotspot part of a larger network.
That anyone else who has also signed up can jump on and jump off at will.
As they move around even.
So if you had a very very dense city, for example, and everyone was signed up.
The idea is that you'd be able to move seamlessly around the city and have Wi-Fi connectivity rather than relying on your mobile data everywhere.
The problem that I see for this is that even in a densely populated area, convincing people to use this.
Apparently they have been.
And that's because of their target audience too.
They're not targeting us. They're targeting, like they said, emerging economies and places that have terrible internet.
This is where you cannot have a Skype call at all.
Or where you cannot watch YouTube pretty much at all.
Or very low quality of each of them and very intermittent of each of them.
And the idea is allowing you to actually use some internet services.
This isn't really designed for people with Google Fiber.
This is not targeted at that.
They're pushing it out in certain areas of South America.
I don't think they have any plans currently for pushing it out in areas like North America and stuff.
This is targeted at a different audience. This is not targeted at you.
Yeah, but I mean, just, okay, fine, fine.
Okay, all of that aside from a sheer liability perspective.
Yes, there's that.
Do you want other people using your internet connection?
There's that, but recently, I don't see, okay.
Part of this, and I knew you were going to bring this up.
Part of this is I have no idea what the laws are there.
So where they're pushing it out, I have no idea how the laws come into play.
The states, at least, it was recently ruled that your IP is not valid identity.
Okay.
So in the states, it wouldn't be a big deal.
Not just that, though.
Forget IP being valid to identify you.
It's not like, you know, let's say someone was doing something illegal.
Downloading child porn on your internet connection.
Your ISP will know who that was.
They will know that that came to your connection.
Forget your IP and if someone's actually working with your ISP
to identify someone doing illegal things, it can come back at you.
Yes.
And you are responsible in many places for what happens on your internet connection.
Yes, in many places, but we don't know the laws down there.
That's true.
So I have no idea.
In the states, again, IP is no longer identity.
And there's some stuff that's going to have to go on.
If you read through the article, they have brought up security a few times,
but I don't know exactly what that means.
I don't know if it means that if someone is sharing your bandwidth.
That's another thing.
Like how exactly the router interfaces outside.
I don't know because they haven't released super technical information
as far as I can tell.
Yeah, it's very basic right now.
So maybe a lot of what I don't like about it
is just because I don't have enough information yet.
Yeah, because it just helps that router in some way,
however the heck that works exactly.
Yeah, because the idea is even when you're not on the go,
you can be in your house and your connection is rubbish for some reason,
but your neighbor has lots of available bandwidth
and you can borrow from them.
So does that mean that all identifying packets
would be coming and going from their router, not yours?
Like, I don't know how it works.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
And then the security thing, I'm kind of expecting that the only way it's secure
is that it's because you're sharing bandwidth,
you're not sharing an actual local network.
So I don't think they'd be able to see your individual computers.
How the devil would you do that?
An ISP would have to be the one load balancing there.
No, not necessarily.
Sharing bandwidth?
And they're talking about this in Wi-Fi terms.
Yeah.
You can't connect to multiple hotspots.
I mean just visible computers.
That's my only thing.
And I don't think you can connect to multiple hotspots.
No.
But I don't think that's what they're doing.
Okay.
They're sharing within the routers.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, let's see.
Well stay tuned.
I don't know.
All I could find on it was not super detailed information,
so I'm not really sure.
Ars Technica posts, this is like the best thing ever.
We actually had this discussion last week on the WAN Show,
is for better, for a more innovative
and more enlightened approach to technology,
would you move?
Would you pack your bags and go somewhere
with better internet and better technological infrastructure?
South Korea has banned unremovable mobile bloatware,
both from the carrier level
and from the handset provider level,
which was really surprising to me
because you look at how,
well, okay, up until very recently,
I don't know if you saw this, it's not in the doc,
but Samsung and Google have come to an agreement
that Samsung will begin removing
their functionality replicating apps.
I didn't see that.
From their handsets.
Yeah, so I think there's a couple
that are slated to go right away,
but you know how you'll have, you know,
calendar and like S calendar,
like mail, like S mail, Gmail, you know, I don't know,
snail mail, like you have all these duplicated applications
on your phone by default and you can't remove any of them?
Well, Samsung and Google have finally started
to come to terms on that or reconcile there.
And now like iPhones hasn't really been a big deal.
Android, it has to a certain degree,
but then like people have been able to get around it,
but then not that many people.
Yeah, I mean, my mom couldn't do it.
Exactly, so this does actually help a lot.
I've seen a lot of people be like,
well, well, I rooted my phone.
Good for you.
So it's completely fine for me.
I'm like, well, that's not the point.
Yeah, most people, well, I'm gonna blow your minds.
Most people don't root their phones.
We do, but that doesn't mean that everyone does.
And I don't even like doing it, it's a pain.
It's funny because so many people are like,
yeah, it's so easy, I can do it in five minutes.
Sure, okay, if you do it all the time,
maybe you can do it in five minutes.
It's kinda like when I say swapping a graphics card's easy,
I can do it in 30 seconds.
For someone who's never swapped a graphics card before
and maybe they have better things to do
than spend this time doing it,
they will have to go and read about it and make sure.
They will have to research which one to buy.
They might not know the best place to get it,
so they might spend more, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
There's a learning curve.
There's always a learning curve with anything new.
And every time I've rooted a phone,
there's been some kind of problem.
It's never at that simple.
When I did my wife's droid, I've only done two phones,
but when I did my wife's droid DNA,
there was a radio update that you couldn't access
unless you got the new over the air,
unless you rooted your phone before you applied
the new over the air, and then you had to do some
so you needed, it was bizarre.
There was very little documentation.
And then when I did my HTC One very recently,
because I have a developer edition phone,
there was blah, blah, blah, blah.
There was this and that and that.
And half the tools that are out there,
like one guy had his post removed
or he was banned from XDA or something,
but then you can find it elsewhere,
but then it didn't even work.
It's not that simple.
So that's all there is to it.
Unless you do it all the time
and you're just kind of going through a routine
and you've done this phone already
and you've documented it and you know what you're doing.
And if you have a super popular phone.
Yeah, that helps.
Because it was not easy for your wife's phone,
especially when I was first tasked with it
because there was literally no documentation.
But then if you go try and do like an S3,
it's actually not that hard.
But then that's because there's all the documentation
you could ever possibly want for every model.
But then that can be a problem too.
Because it can be overwhelming for someone who's new.
Yeah, that's true.
Where they don't know which guy to follow.
Sifting through it and there's quite a few
and some of them are more frustrating than others
and a lot of people pick sides, which one's better.
And then that's confusing because you're trying to take sides on an argument.
Like I know people complain a lot, my moderators included,
about all the threads that pop up on the forum all the time,
Intel versus AMD or NVIDIA versus AMD.
And I don't actually hate it that much
because I understand that guy.
Because he's probably just like, what?
I don't get it. What's the answer?
I want an easy answer and then I want to destroy some.
But like, I get it.
I'm not in that position, but I get it.
It makes sense.
All right, so I guess that was pretty much all there was to say about that.
Yeah, there's really not.
It's coming right away, which actually really surprised me.
Like normally you see these kinds of rulings,
like hey, stop doing that.
And it's like you got six months or a year to phase it out
or whatever it is, but I think it's like February.
Yeah, something like that.
Something ridiculous like that.
There's all pre-installed apps must be detectable,
but there's some stuff.
Deletable, deletable.
Yeah, but there's some stuff that they're kind of not worrying about too much,
which is Wi-Fi connectivity, near field communication,
customer service and app store.
I don't understand why Samsung needs an app store.
I was going to say the app store doesn't really make a lot of sense.
Or let me remove it.
Everything else kind of does.
And if I really wanted your app store, I would go get it.
Yeah.
Nintendo is not being allowed to stop certain types of hackers.
This is, I think, I don't know.
I don't know.
I think they should open up more.
Nintendo, I think, not, okay,
I don't necessarily think they need to open up their platform
because they're not going to,
so I'm not going to try and push them to do that.
But I think they need to open up to like indies
and people playing with their platform.
Now this, I can understand why they might want to prevent it,
although I don't understand region locks.
I just understand that it's part of their thing.
Yeah, you know what?
Twitter, if you guys can find us a fantastic article
about why region locks need to exist on games,
I don't actually understand.
The only thing I can possibly think of
is they're hoping there will be that one dude who moves
and then has to buy a new system and all new games.
But then like why are you being a jerk to that guy?
Just let him keep playing.
Like the one thing I can think of is maybe ESRB ratings,
like the mature ratings or whatever else.
And again, that doesn't seem that complicated
to just have a global game with all the ratings on it.
It doesn't seem complicated.
Another thing would be packaging guidelines.
Yeah.
So multilingual packaging.
I know in Canada.
But then just like don't sell them.
Have it so that you can't sell it in different regions.
But then why would you make it not work?
Well, okay, another thing is gray marketing.
So when it's different pricing in different regions,
having people just buy all their games somewhere on the cheap,
and it's like, you know what?
What are you going to do?
It happens on Steam.
It happens physically.
And every console gets a hack for not being region locked anymore.
But anyways, an Italian company named PC Box,
which is kind of funny,
has a little piece of hardware device
that allows you to play games from any region.
And Nintendo is not allowed stopping them,
although Nintendo, as far as I know,
hasn't done a legal reply yet.
Yeah.
So we'll see what happens there.
I suspect it's going to hold.
But we'll see what happens there anyways.
Speaking of Nintendo.
So a little bit of deja vu,
like the most accurate version of deja vu I've ever seen.
I've been saying for a little while
when people have brought this up,
like this just recently happened,
but then I couldn't really find the article.
It took me a really long time.
But here's a quote from 2011.
Well, okay, first of all, in 2011,
they were having the 3DS problems.
So now here's a quote.
For cuts in fixed salaries, I'm taking a 50% cut.
Other representative directors are taking a 30% cut,
and other execs are taking a 20% cut.
And that's exactly, like pretty much to the T,
what he's doing now because of Wii U.
So I, yeah.
There is still time for them to turn Wii U around.
I mean, talk about, I mean,
for anyone who didn't watch your video,
I didn't watch it,
talk about your experience with Wii U.
It's been really awesome,
and there's massive rooms for improvement.
One thing that a lot of people have to realize is that,
like especially, I'm talking to PC community.
We're a PC community.
I have no interest in any of the other consoles
running right now, as in new consoles.
So PS4 and Xbox One, I couldn't really care.
There's, the only reason why I could possibly care
is exclusives, and that I'm not super interested
in the exclusives on either of those platforms.
What I am super interested in is Nintendo exclusives
because especially first-party Nintendo exclusives
are freaking awesome.
And they're not moving to any other platform anytime soon
or at all ever, I don't really think personally,
but we'll see.
And like the state of PC right now is co-op games
are kind of few and far between,
and most games that you could possibly play together
with a friend are not really co-op designed
and aren't really like within the same house planned out
like a lot of Nintendo games are.
So if you have friends over, it's not the easiest.
Now it happens, but it's not the easiest thing ever
for everyone to bring their computer
and full rig set up every single time.
Because honestly, that's kind of annoying.
It's fun to do every once in a while,
but it's kind of annoying.
So if you can have something that has a lot of games
that are specifically designed for playing
with a group of people in a small contained environment,
that's kind of awesome.
And that's what Wii U is.
It's also not a Wii, which is kind of a really big problem.
And Nintendo has recently actually like very blatantly said
like, yeah, this is a problem.
Everyone thinks we use just this tablet accessory.
I can't even, like that is, we've had this conversation,
but that is so baffling to me.
But it's true.
That people could think that the Wii U was a handheld.
But it's, well, okay.
People thought it was an accessory.
Before I rip on them too hard,
did anyone watching think that the Wii U
was a handheld accessory for the Wii?
And actually, can you find that article
that walked through the reasons that people thought that the,
okay, well, we remember a couple of them.
So in Nvidia's, in Nintendo's advertising,
they often had the controller, it's a controller,
with the screen on it, front and the center stage
with like a small black box
that actually kind of looks like a black Wii behind it,
a large black Wii.
And then...
There's a lot of no's, but there is definitely a few yes's.
Really?
Okay, there are some yes's.
Why?
Okay.
There was not, I always knew.
But from the people that I've specifically talked to
in person that didn't know,
I should put out a straw bowl for this.
For the people that I've talked to
that specifically didn't know,
what they're saying is, like we just said,
all the pictures showed this handheld tablet-y thing,
and all the branding was saying,
now you can play your games on the tablet,
and you can do some stuff on the tablet,
and yay, Nintendo.
You know, they could have solved this
by calling it the Revolution.
That was a way better, or Dolphin.
Or Wii 2.
All their code names are so much better
than their console names lately.
Or anything that made more sense than Wii U.
Wii made no sense,
so I guess it shouldn't have surprised us.
But I mean, it's still...
Okay, all right, I concede defeat.
I guess it was possible, if you're not paying attention,
like the way that we do to tech news,
to think that the Wii U was more of an accessory,
but it still is sort of baffling to me
with how little I care about any given console.
I mean, I knew, but then again, again,
I do pay pretty close attention to headlines and whatnot.
So I'm gonna grab Slick's link to the straw pool there.
Whoa, that's so fast.
With better TTV, if you scroll up, it pauses chat.
I gotta get it.
All right, so anyway, they're cutting salaries,
and you know, I respect that.
I respect that a lot, cutting the executive salaries,
cutting leadership's salaries when a company makes a bad move.
A company is a ship, okay?
And when the ship hits something,
it's not the fault of the guy that was shoveling coal into the furnace
in order to power the engine.
He couldn't even see where it was going.
He didn't know.
You don't tell him that you don't need him to put coal in the furnace anymore
because you still need coal in your furnace if you're gonna go anywhere
after you ram into something.
I mean, the responsibility lies with the leadership
and the fact that they're willing to own that
and they're willing to cut their own salaries
rather than hurt their employees.
So there weren't any, there were no firings.
They just cut executive salaries I think is very respectable.
I mean, how happy would you be about working for me
if we had a really rough year and I was like,
everyone's getting cut except me.
Come on.
It's brutal and the thing is, we saw a snapback.
In 2011, we saw a snapback.
Company rallied, they dropped some prices,
they adjusted some things, they did a few things
and we saw a snapback and I fully see that again.
In what way, I don't know.
I already see 3DS making up a lot of money where Wii U isn't.
I don't think they necessarily expected 3DS to do as well as it is right now.
So I think that can help off balance the Wii U
while they hopefully fix it.
There was very recently a patch that massively increased boot time.
Interesting.
So you can boot into a game much faster
and they're thinking of other things.
They have a sale right now for like indie style downloadable only games
where if you buy one or if you already own one,
you get like 60% off the others or some crazy thing like that.
They're making pushes.
There's a few things that I think they can do.
I should have grabbed this.
I didn't realize we were going to talk about this topic this much
but there was a thing saying that you can play DS games on your Wii U now
but I don't know and I think it's like all downloadable store content stuff
but I don't know whether they were specifically talking about DS
or if it's like 3DS.
So I don't know what game catalog is actually on there
because I don't read into it enough
and I don't know if it's official or whatnot.
I didn't think we'd need it for the show so I didn't go into it.
Speaking of back catalogs, PlayStation 4 getting PS1 and PS2 compatibility is pretty cool.
Yeah.
Carry on.
Anyways, the poll right now is showing about 20% of people in our community,
so fairly informed tech people,
about 20% of them thought it was just a handheld.
All right.
Well, there you go.
I was wrong.
So if you jump out of the really informed tech community,
it's going to increase the further and further you get away.
So it's actually a pretty significant percentage of people.
It's amazing because, you know, honestly, like I don't see advertising.
I just gloss over it completely.
If I want to know about something, I will go specifically looking for it
and that's the way that I get my information.
So I don't often consider how much of an impact a TV ad might have
on someone's education level about a particular product
because to me, nothing.
I will not learn anything from your TV ad because I will specifically ignore it.
Whereas, I mean, if that's what people were going based on,
especially, you know, moms and dads with young kids that aren't really,
they haven't owned a game console in years, if at all, then...
Different direct things that I pulled while doing research
was like an editor for I don't remember what.
I think it might have been The Verge.
His wife was opening up the Wii U box from what he had recently purchased
and was confused as to why there was a Wii in it.
Right.
Because she thought it was a Wii.
She thought she was just getting the tablet thing.
She didn't realize there was actually a console that goes with it.
There was moms talking about like going to say Best Buy
and then being confused when employees were trying to sell them Wii U's
because she's saying I don't have the budget to buy this 300 and something dollar,
this was before the price drop, tablet, why are you trying to be this aggressive?
Like, leave me alone.
And they're like, but it's not.
And they're like, what?
Right.
Because they have no idea because all the branding when you look at it is a big tablet.
And they're like, I don't need my kids to have this Nintendo tablet thing.
Right.
So there's a lot of confusing messaging.
And I think Nintendo is taking the right direction a little bit.
If you've been watching trending Twitter lately,
if you've been watching Reddit lately, all this kind of stuff,
they're up there a lot of the time.
Well, I think the fact that beyond the initial hype,
PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are so uninteresting right now.
They're boring.
And Nintendo is the only one really making additional moves right now.
But like it makes sense and I see them trying
and the whole I have halved my salary thing was nothing but good publicity.
So I think they might be doing the right things.
There's 10 billion people right now that are trying to say
these are all the different things that Nintendo has to do to make better.
But what I think they have to do is Nintendo just has to try really hard
and I think they'll be fine because they're not they're not a bad company.
They're not stupid.
They're not stupid.
They're combining their handheld and console divisions.
They're building that new building so they can do it more effectively.
They're doing all this stuff.
They're working on it.
Just let them work on it.
They'll probably be fine.
Speaking of working on things, this was a mistake that I made last week.
I had said that the HTC One used a TN panel.
I was completely wrong.
It is IPS.
It's actually in their own FAQ about the One
which you can find on HTC's website.
However, I do...
So it uses Super LCD 3 which is IPS.
However, I do still remember finding information somewhere
and I don't know what the credibility of the source was
so maybe that was the problem
saying that Super LCD 2 was TN.
I could be wrong about that once again
but my point still stands.
What I said last week about not all TN panels being absolutely terrible is true.
Some are better than others.
Some are really hard to look at
and some are what I would call, okay, not bad, acceptable.
So there, my apologies for that.
This is awesome.
Yeah, I don't think it's the biggest deal.
I think the prescription part matters a lot more than the other part.
So Google is putting glass on different frames
and they are now supporting prescriptions.
That is the hipster-est looking person that I've seen today.
There's more of them if you go through the glass video thing.
You just automatically look like a hipster if you have glass though.
Not like a hipster necessarily.
Like a glass hole perhaps.
I actually haven't used mine in a couple weeks.
I haven't really seen you use it since the second day you had it.
Yeah, it's kind of stupid.
It's amazing how many people were wearing them at CES.
I was kind of laughing to myself.
What are you doing?
I don't think personally in the two seconds that I had to use it
because you gave it to me to use and I didn't even want it anymore.
You know how we're always like, we're waiting for revision 2 or whatever.
I'm waiting for revision 4.
Yeah.
I don't want this like little glass cube thing.
It's kind of terrible. I want it to be the whole lens.
The problem for me is that it's not adjustable enough.
I can't get the screen in a place where I can comfortably look at it.
It's like way up here.
And the problem is that my ears are not high enough up on my head.
This could help you then.
So this could potentially help because they have different frame options now
as well as the ability to put prescription lenses.
I think it can only handle from minus 4 to plus 4.
So no extreme prescriptions but it should handle the majority of people
who just need a mild prescription and want to use Google Glass.
So you still have to pay the $1500 entry fee
just to be part of the Google Glass Explorer program.
That hasn't gone away.
And you get to pay another $225 for the different frames.
And then you get to pay, they have new tinted shades,
$150 for those.
So there are 40 combinations of colours, frames and shades now.
Actually pretty crazy.
Speaking of things that are expensive, this battle in Eve.
So, yeah, this happens like every kind of once in a while
but this one was a little bit absurd.
Usually it will be like the biggest battle in Eve ever.
It was a little bit bigger than the last one.
This one is like the biggest battle in Eve ever.
It was insane.
This one doesn't make any sense.
Everything went nuts.
So many people lost so much stuff.
The kind of like not surprising this always happens thing kind of happened
where someone forgot to pay their bill on a building.
So that building holds sovereignty in the area.
If you have that, certain structures and whatnot are protected like stations.
You should explain what station.
Not everyone plays Eve.
So like if you have a space station, it is protected.
Like in that system?
In that system, yeah.
So within that system if you have a space station
and you have sovereignty there which is based on having another building
which has maintenance costs and whatnot.
I'm trying to not go way over crazy.
So it's like the creep.
Other people can't build on your crap while you have your creep building.
Kind of, but they can build the things that take that over.
But then they have to defend them and they have to go online.
Sure, okay.
But essentially if that goes down, it becomes much easier
to kind of shut someone's system down and take it over essentially.
System as in like area in space.
Solar system.
There we go.
So yeah, there's some people complaining
because apparently the holdings corporation that was paying for that building
had enough money and the checkbox was checked for it to auto withdrawal
so it should have never had problems with payments
because it had more than enough money, like tons of money
and the thing was checked and it still went down.
So they're pretty not stoked about that and they're claiming bug
and blah blah blah blah blah.
So we're going to see what happens with that eventually.
But who knows, I don't know.
I don't think anything's going to come from that to be completely honest.
And none of that will affect the fact that this cost $500,000 of real world money they're estimating.
Yeah, I've seen estimates anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000, so quite a range.
We'll see what it ends up at but there's been more of the estimates at the $500,000 range.
I haven't seen any list of lost ships or anything like that.
I know there's been over 100 Titans lost.
If you haven't played Eve, Titans are like...
When you first start playing and you're like, oh there's lots of ships.
What are the biggest, coolest ships?
The Titans are like massively, ridiculously bigger and more badass than all the other ones
and then everyone gets all excited and then realizes they can't fly them
for like a year and a half or something at the very least.
I don't remember exactly what it is.
But those are Titans. They're worth about $3,000 each
and there's been over 100 of them lost.
One of the guys from one of the corporations was talking about how in a previous war
it was such a huge deal and they had lost and whatever, whatever
and they lost 7 Titans and it was like a super big deal that they lost 7 Titans.
And this time they killed 40 within a small window timeframe
and were like, yeah there's still 12 hours until server downtime.
And there's server downtime like every day.
And they're like, yeah we're going to kill a whole bunch more, this is ridiculous.
Like this is insane.
Like every single time there's a giant big record in EVE it's insane
but this is even more insane than it was before.
Part of my problem with knowledge on this is I haven't played EVE in quite a while now.
Apparently it's 9 months straight of training to fly it
and then you have to have stuff for like fittings and actually be able to fly it well and stuff like that.
And Titans are interesting because people call them essentially coffins
because once you get in, like you can't dock in anything
because ships can dock in you.
And once you start flying a Titan you essentially fly that Titan until you die.
In the game, essentially.
So it's interesting.
Over 100 Titan pilots were finally freed from their coffins.
Freed from their coffins, that's one way of looking at it.
Yeah, I don't know. That was kind of insane.
I'm excited to read more about it
because a lot of the news I found on this is from 2 days ago
and a lot of it is estimations.
I'm excited to see the, like, this is what happened.
This is exactly what happened.
This checkbox was unchecked or this bill came out and they didn't expect
so it brought them below this amount of money.
Or CCP screwed up.
Or whatever, whatever, there was a mole or something like that.
I'm excited for all that information and I'm excited for the final dollar amount
because that should legitimately be pretty interesting.
What was also really interesting, I'm buying time for you to finish that.
What was also really interesting was reading the dialogues between all the players
because, like I said, 4,000 players.
And this was like, there was corporations from Russia,
there was people from the States, there was all over the world.
So there's people that took time off work,
like quite a few people that officially took time off work,
like vacation days, so they could go home and play EVE
because the player base in EVE is actually a little bit older
than quite a few games because some people call it a spreadsheet simulator.
So people were taking time off work and coming home.
People were like, I think some dude skipped a flight.
People were like stuck in airports playing on their laptops
which was super laggy.
Like the things people did to be able to defend their homeland
or to attack this area was insane and it's really interesting.
So if you have the time, like Google it, look it up
because even just reading some of the Twitter interaction
and reading through some of the forums is ridiculous
because this fight was just nuts.
Did I buy enough time to be clear?
Yeah, I think I'm good now.
Yes.
Wait, oh, hold on.
No!
Nope, need another minute.
Alright, my favorite thing to do in EVE
because I'm talking about nothing at this point in time.
Don't you have any other topics?
No, we hit the end.
I think there is something.
Oh yeah, artificial cheese is stupid.
I was at Subway today and they were like,
yeah, we're out of cheddar cheese, so do you want this?
I'm like, is that processed cheese?
And the girl's like, I don't know.
I'm like, what?
Is it cheese or is it plastic?
Because they're not the same thing.
Cheese is a dairy product.
Processed cheese is garbage.
And if I'm going to be paying for a sandwich
that has actual cheese that costs a lot more than processed cheese
included in the price, no.
You may not swap out artificial cheese for real cheese.
Why do we even call it cheese?
They're not allowed to call whipped topping whipped cream.
Why are we allowed to call processed cheese cheese?
It's disgusting.
Anyway, that was just a rant that I knew.
I'm so mad.
So she's like, well, we have shredded cheese.
I'm like, I'm melting it anyway.
Yeah, put that on.
That's fantastic.
Thank you very much for finding a solution to this problem
that was obviously going to upset me a whole lot.
I've actually been wondering for a little while
why people haven't been pushing,
like I don't really care that much to be completely honest,
but why other people haven't thought of this
and been pushing for forcing different names
on heavily GMOed products.
Yes.
Because if it is something different
because you have changed like DNA strains
and you have genetically modified it,
then is it still a banana?
Or is it something else and the organic one is banana?
Banana plus?
Banana you?
Is it still a banana?
Oh, I'll banana you all right.
Okay, so I think I am ready now.
I have been receiving many messages and trust me,
I always intended to do something,
but I wanted to keep it kind of quiet
because I don't know how I'm going to,
actually I don't know how I'm going to keep this quiet enough.
Okay, well, whatever.
Screw it.
He's going to figure it out.
Yeah, he'll figure it out at some point.
Like immediately.
Like immediately.
Okay, guys, keep your traps shut.
Can I trust you to do that?
Please don't.
We're trying to do a good thing.
Yeah, we're trying to do a nice thing here
and you guys are going to muck it up if you do things.
All right, so basically, I don't know if you guys know this,
but on linustechtips.com, there's actually a store now
and if you are not a forum contributor,
the store looks empty other than contributor badges.
So that's monthly subscription fees.
Those help us do all the things that we do.
Just so you know, it's not just for the forum.
If you guys appreciate the work we do
and you want to contribute to what we're doing,
we would very much appreciate if you'd pick up a subscription.
But if you are not a contributor, it looks kind of empty.
If you are a contributor, there are some things in there
and I will be adding a lot more.
Some of them are samples.
Some of them are things I've bought and don't need anymore,
but it's basically discounted tech stuff
and the discounts get better for higher contribution levels.
So be ready for that, guys,
because I'm going to be hitting it with a flood of stuff
sometime in the next couple of weeks.
But in the meantime, something that is accessible to everyone
is this item that I just created.
I only have one of them,
so only the first person will be able to buy it.
This is an MSI GTX 780 Lightning Edition
for 500 bucks plus shipping
and whatever applicable taxes are going to get billed to you when it arrives.
I'll ship it anywhere in the world,
but it should be noted that the chances of it arriving in one piece
are a lot better if you're within North America
because shipping internationally is sort of horrible.
So 500 bucks and the proceeds go to Austin Evans
to help him with something that is undisclosed at this time.
Well, I mean, his house burned down,
so obviously we know that something bad happened
and, you know, something has to be done.
But exactly what the proceeds will go towards will be disclosed later,
but that $500 is definitely for him.
So this comes out of our...
Someone's like, will you take Bitcoin? No.
So convert Bitcoin to cash and buy it.
This is something I don't understand.
Why do you need retailers to accept Bitcoin?
Because they all do the same thing.
They take Bitcoin at a horrible exchange rate,
like a terrible one.
Just convert it and buy things.
Anyway, sorry, sorry, I'm going to be ranting again.
So Austin's house burned down.
It wasn't his fault.
It was someone on a different floor whose heater lit on fire.
It burned to the ground.
He lost almost everything.
All he has is a safe with some personal belongings
that he didn't say what it was.
He's got his MacBook.
He has his phone, and that's just about it.
I don't know what his insurance situation was,
so at any rate, guys, I posted the link,
and someone's like, give Austin a job.
Austin doesn't need a job from me.
He'll be back on his feet in no time.
He's a good kid.
He's a good guy.
What did you price it at?
I put it for $500.
So that's about $100 under retail.
So proceeds to Austin.
Apparently it's gone already.
So if someone, if whoever tried to buy it
doesn't actually end up sending the money or whatever else,
oh, I really hope I set it to only one in stock
because I only have one.
Only the first person will get it.
Guys, only the first person will get it.
Oh, I set number in stock.
Oh, no.
Okay, that's probably because it sold already.
Two sold.
Sorry, guys.
Only the first one's going to get it.
Anyway, so the other thing to bear in mind, guys,
is that there are other things in the store,
and there will be more added.
These ones will go to the Linus Media Group coffers,
but this one, this one's for you, Austin.
Yay.
Yay.
And I think that's pretty much it for the show today.
I think we're probably good.
I'm really feeling like there's something else,
but I can't remember it at this point in time.
Someone just messaged me.
Wii U will have both DS games,
but they're marketing them as just DS games,
obviously, because of the missing 3D.
So I asked trying to specify,
does that mean I can play Pokemon X and Y on my Wii U?
They've got to lose the whole confusingness
with their naming scheme thing,
because you know what's really funny
is I was mocking people a little bit
for not knowing that the Wii U was a different console.
I didn't know the 3DS was a different console.
Than a what?
Than a DS.
I thought it was just a 3D screen version of a DS,
and so you could see things in 3D when available.
And then 2DS is not a DS, which was in 2D.
It's a 3DS, but in 2D.
Yeah, that's ridiculous.
But I have this DS Lite, which already does 2D.
Why would I need a 2DS?
A DS Lite was just a DS.
And a DS XL was a DS Lite, but they got to figure that out.
Maybe Japanese people have better memories
than us poor slobs over here,
and they can figure all this stuff out and memorize it,
but I can't.
So there you go.
I am just as guilty as any of you.
Oh, there's this thing at the bottom of the dock.
What's that?
Oh, that's hilarious.
It's so old.
I know it's old, but I had never seen it before,
and it's hilarious.
Okay, so this is an ancient article on Computer World.
This is back in 2011, March 2011, so almost three years ago,
where Asus is trying to cut down on shipping waste in Taiwan
and comes up with the idea of shipping their motherboards
in a box that also doubles as a case.
So, it holds the motherboard snug for shipping
and is constructed so additional components required to make a PC can be added,
said Debbie Lee, a spokeswoman for the Taipei-based company.
The product is on display at this week's Seabit, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
and here's a video of it that is the stupidest thing that I have ever seen in my life.
Speaking of houses burning down,
do you take a piece of electronics that is probably going to be fine
but may burn up and put it in a cardboard enclosure?
No, you do not.
Their whole thing was, okay, there are punch-out holes for ventilation
and a rear panel that houses the connectors.
Some people, said Lee, spend a long time looking for a case,
so this box is all they need until they find something.
Come on.
Anyway, I think that's pretty much it for the show, guys.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
We'll see you again next week, and apparently Luke has something.
I think the Newegg show is called the NAW show.
The NAW show? Shut up.
NAW.
Oh, NAW show. Really?
Newegg just named their new Friday show the NAW show.
It's like, are you going to bother to tune in to Linus after you watch?
Nah.
How much you want to bet they had that conversation off camera?
Those guys are such trolls.
I love those guys.
I love how it's, oh man.
We should move our show to Friday morning.
They just flipped it.
We should totally do it.
When exactly is their show?
It's like right before us.
I think the idea is people tune out and then tune right in to Landshow.
So I should just do really extended pre-streams every week.
Yes.
Really entertaining pre-streams.
I can pre-stream preparing the doc so people can get a little bit of a preview
and I can do live discussions with people about the doc
and then we can do the full show.
Yes.
That would be a way to stick it to them.
We need to figure out their exact start time.
Yeah, we need to.
I wouldn't know because I never watch their show.
Take that Paul and Kyle and Vu, Joanne, all you guys.
And all the other people whose names I forget.
There was one that I forgot his name like six times at CES.
Isn't that the worst?
Steve.
That is the only possible reason why I would like facial recognition on glass.
I know.
There's so many reasons why it's bad.
That would be awesome.
It would be awesome.
Just be like, Luke.
Because I've forgotten your name before.
I'm just bad with names.
It's just a fact.
So am I. I don't know.
People will forget my name and get super embarrassed about it.
I'm like, dude, I don't care.
Yeah, because I don't know yours.
I do the same thing.
You know what?
I ran into Yoinkerman from the forum I think a couple of times at PAX
and every time it was like I had no idea who he was again
and it's nothing personal.
I felt terrible because he's one of our biggest contributors.
He always tweets.
He's a really positive influence on the forum.
I've talked to him plenty through Twitter.
The way I usually recognize people is by their Twitter avatars
or their forum avatars.
Forum avatars.
When people change their forum avatars, I have no idea who they are anymore.
And I mean before MSN and Steam, this used to drive me crazy,
was Steam's history of people's usernames only went back as far as your local install.
Do you remember that?
Yeah, that was terrible.
That was ridiculous.
And now that they have nicknames, it's not as much of a problem.
But back before you could set nicknames for people, my Steam's friends list,
I have no idea who any of the people are.
I'm half tempted to just do a complete purge
and then start re-adding select people that make sense.
And I was doing a purge and I was messaging people.
I was like, who are you?
And they'd be like, blah, blah, blah.
Monkeyhood.
I'm like, oh, monkey.
Okay, it's you.
Okay, fine.
But they changed their name.
And I'm like, I don't know what to do.
Okay, our show is sort of done now.
We're just kind of talking about nothing.
Isn't that...
Cheese.
Isn't that basically the whole show?
I don't know.
What do you think?
Do you think that products should be renamed like GMO, like a GMO banana?
I mean, what have they changed?
Have they made it bigger?
Can they just call it jumbo banana?
But then is that going to end up trademarked by the company that made it?
And then are we going to end up with jumbo bananas and giant bananas and uber bananas and like...
Maybe it'll be like Kleenex and...
It's going to be an interesting 50 years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because I think, I honestly think someone's going to pick that up at some point and run.
Because someone's going to be like, it's not technically a banana anymore or whatever it is.
Once, and like maybe there will be a threshold.
Like once you get far enough away from the original definition of banana, it becomes something else.
Like when does it become something else?
Is a size change enough?
Like that's what I mean.
Is a color change enough?
I don't know.
If like a banana was bigger and a different color and therefore much more impressive,
maybe you would have to call it something else.
Or maybe it's strictly, like it might look exactly the same, but maybe it's based on technical changes.
So like if nutrition values change by certain thresholds, but then how do you define that?
How do you quantify the nutrition value of a grape?
Like, unless you test from every batch.
I don't know. Someone must know.
And then you have to do like a custom label for every batch.
I mean, how do they handle that?
I don't know.
But this is, I think that's going to become an interesting thing at some point in time.
I have no idea how it's going to work.
I don't know who's going to do it.
Can you imagine a banana big enough to make a multi-person size banana split?
Like by carving out the middle of the banana and putting in ice cream?
I mean, okay, there are problems with GMO.
But you want this like...
But let's think about the positive things here for a moment.
Let's like build a raft out of bananas.
Like what if you could carve Halloween pumpkins that were apples?
The pit of that thing is like big enough to beat someone with.
With the pit and the stem you could just be like...
It's like a flail.
Or like, you know, blueberries that were big enough to have like blueberry fights with.
That would be epic.
I think we're done here.
Thanks for watching guys.
We'll see you next week.
And you know what?
I'm super disappointed but you know what happened?
Is our YouTube upload?
In fact, I think I...
Yep, I saved this.
This is awesome.
Okay, well hold on.
Give me a sec here guys because it's probably going to break.
Hold on.
What does that even mean?
I don't know what this is.
What is that?
Add...
Hold on.
Screen region.
So this is a new one.
This is one I haven't seen before.
But when I tried to upload our announcement for the WAN party,
your settings could not be saved, invalid request, authentication expired,
which is ridiculous because I had just set upload.
And in order to change it, I just went to a different tab.
I'm clearly still signed in.
So our notification that the stream was live didn't go up until like an hour into the show.
And I'm really sorry about that.
But anyway, the archive will be up shortly.
Okay, peace guys.
Bye.