Welcome to the WAN Show, guys. The show where I and my co-host, Luke Slick-Lafreniere, talk to you about the latest in technology and gaming and all that good stuff.
You know what's funny is I do most of the talking on this show, but it still feels really weird to have this thing next to me.
I was actually really hoping that Luke would be able to join me on the show this week, but that is unfortunately not possible because I haven't heard from him.
He landed in Boston like yesterday early morning, I think, or the night before. I don't even know. He flew out Thursday very early morning, so must have landed in Boston Thursday night.
Other than getting a call from him, you know, hey, we landed safely. Did you ever arrange a shuttle? To which I said no.
I haven't actually heard from either him or Brandon, so they're going to be there doing all of our PAX East coverage, which you guys can look forward to finding on the channel over the next few days here.
They're going to have a lot of emphasis on the indie mega booth because that's something that Luke is super passionate about.
But they are going to make the rounds to some of your favorite hardware vendors like Cooler Master, as well as I think they're going to swing by Kingston.
And there's at least a couple other ones. Oh yeah, Intel for sure. Intel is powering our trip to the show, which I've mentioned on the last few WAN shows.
So between Intel and Corsair, that is the entire reason that Luke and Brandon were able to go.
I'm going to try and do a little bit more audience interaction today just because I don't have I mean, you know, this guy is like, you know, I like interacting with no, no, not interacting like that.
I love I love interacting with my dummy right here, but not having Luke here is just a little bit unfortunate.
People are asking me to go get Taran. I would love to, unfortunately, because my human physiology requires me to sleep once in a while.
I wasn't able to get this Friday. So today's fast as possible scripted yet to film it Thursday evening before I went home.
So I had to film it when I got back from NCIX today, which means that Taran is actually editing right now.
So Luke and Brandon are in Boston and Edsel is still at NCIX and then Taran is the only one who's here with me.
All right. So let's let's go through some of the fantastic topics that we've got today before we do our intro here.
So let me see. Will.I.Am says he developed a smartwatch.
I personally would absolutely love to check it out.
It's going to be coming in a little while. He funded it, used his own money to develop it.
So more on that a little bit later. The word on the street is also that VESA has accepted FreeSync as part of the upcoming extension to display port called 1.2A,
which could be very, very good news for gamers. Google is taking another crack at the living room with Android TV.
More on that later. And the Blackmagic Ursa. OK, maybe you guys don't maybe you don't think you care about camera technology.
But riddle me this. Have you noticed the dramatic change in the quality of our videos over the last year?
That is thanks to camera technology. The reason Wanshow looks so crisp compared to a lot of other streams is the Blackmagic camera that we use to power it.
That's their first camera, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. It's a two and a half K camera.
Now, this one. OK, I'll tell you more about it later. But anyway, trust me, it's like really freakin cool.
It's like this upgradeable camera. And then, oh, this one's really cool as well.
So there's a new battery technology potentially coming seems to the researchers seem to be very confident about it.
That could allow your phone to be recharged in under twenty five seconds.
And I don't know where I got the number twenty five from. I'm sorry. Under 30 seconds. The demo was twenty six seconds.
So twenty five. I'm just there's a new technology that could allow your car to go from zero to five hundred miles an hour in three seconds.
So I'm just making stuff up at this point. But I'll tell you guys more about that later on in the show as well.
Why is there no sound? I'll just make the sound.
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.
I'm gonna kill Edzell.
Because he forgot to put the music in.
Ah yes, our sponsors of the show today are Asus, ROG notebooks, and dollarshaveclub.com.
Shave time, shave money.
Big thanks to both of those sponsors who we will tell you more about later for making this week's episode of the WAN show possible.
Or at least helping us actually make a living while we do it.
I mean it would be possible to do anything.
I mean, you could make a battery that recharges in 25 seconds, or a car that goes from 0 to 500.
No, okay, I'm just gonna stop with that.
No, it's not actually funny for me to make up things.
Make up things and present them as news.
Linus Media Group, that should be our tagline.
Alright, so, Will.I.Am claims to have developed a smartwatch.
The article that we're gonna be checking out here is from Engadget.
But this was posted on the forum by Kooza.
Thank you very, very much.
We really do appreciate when people take the time.
Make up things and present them as news.
Oh, for crying out loud.
Stop that.
Why you do that?
Why you do that, Twitch?
Why you make that the automatic default setting there?
Alright, so we appreciate when people post in the news section of linustechtips.com
because we love how active the forum is and how easy it is to find all the latest cool tech news there.
Alright, so the article from Engadget.
Will.I.Am, there he is.
Like, he's actually wearing it.
This isn't like Kanye coming up with, hey, I invented the white t-shirt.
And, okay, actually it is kind of, it's kind of the same.
Or at least it's not different in the way that I was presenting it.
I was going to say, you know, it's not like Kanye claiming to invent the white t-shirt, but actually he didn't invent a t-shirt.
But he, I mean, he did, I guess.
He did create this white t-shirt that you could buy and spend a lot of money on.
But this isn't like just some random claim.
He's actually wearing the thing and talking about it.
So he started the company himself, okay, funded it, used his own money to develop it.
It can apparently stream stored music via Bluetooth and make calls and access Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram without having to connect to a smartphone.
I'm really interested to see how this works.
A lot of this stuff does potentially make sense, being able to stream music via Bluetooth.
So if it was like a Bluetooth player that you could then use like your Jaybirds or something like that to play music over, then okay.
But if you're going to be able to make calls on it without having to connect to a smartphone, hey, maybe there's a reason that Intel named Will.I.Am.
It's Director of Creative Innovation back in January 2011.
So, you know, it's not like he's just so far out there in imagination land that serious companies like Intel are ignoring him.
So it's rumored to be coming sometime in the next sort of little while.
And I will tell you what, if you guys want to see it, I will review this.
So apparently there's a spider behind you.
Okay, Aldi, if we have any mods, that's a perma-ban. See you later.
All right, actually maybe I can just do that.
Aldi, you're gone. You're gone, man! Ban! Perma-ban! Never going to unban you. There you go. Yeah! Woo!
All right, so let's move on to our next topic here, and that is, this is all, this is such good news.
All right, so I was originally, I originally had this brought to my attention from, by an article on PCper.
So my bud Ryan Schrout's website that I guess he does tech stuff or something, I think he makes videos too.
Anyway, VESA may, so this is allegedly, may have accepted AMD's FreeSync.
This is so cool. So I made an awful lot of noise about Nvidia's G-Sync back when they first showed it off.
Since then, my enthusiasm has naturally somewhat dwindled to the point where it's like,
are we ever going to actually get to use this thing? Because it's a great technology.
What G-Sync basically does is instead of refreshing your screen at a fixed interval, okay?
And this is particularly important when gaming.
Instead, it waits for your GPU to render a frame and then refreshes whenever it's ready.
And I've had people message me and say, oh, well that'll be leggier.
No, actually it'll be less leggy because the problem with this, this constant refreshing,
is either you're going to slow down your, your GPU.
Either you're going to have to kind of sit around and, and wait for things and then have them be displayed,
or you are going to have to see partial frames one on top of the other and you're going to get tearing.
What G-Sync does is it makes sure that the frames are delivered as quickly as possible once they're ready,
and that you only get one frame at a time rather than like, you know, the top of Lara Croft's body here
and the bottom like over here.
And you're just like, okay, so I could enjoy the bottom or the top separately, but not the whole package, right?
So, not that people play games just to, you know, scantily clad female lead character.
Shame on you!
Anyway, um, I forget what I was talking about now.
Right, so AMD came along and at CES they showed off what they were cheekily calling FreeSync.
Now FreeSync was basically exactly the same thing and that was the ability for the display to only refresh
when the GPU was ready or when something on the screen changed,
because FreeSync was using something that was developed for power saving in laptops.
So, Nvidia's response at the time was, well, FreeSync, the scalers that are being used for this,
A, they're only in notebooks and B, they're not designed for the type of use case that would have it being used constantly.
I mean, with G-Sync we developed this robust piece of hardware that's really future proof
and really designed for that kind of a workload.
Well, FreeSync, yes, was a bit of a Frankenstein experiment at the time and I see Nvidia's point,
but if it becomes part of the DisplayPort 1.2A standard, which allegedly it will,
we could all of a sudden see basically every display have this GPU triggered refreshing enabled on it.
Holy crap, DisplayPort, you just won.
Like, you just won.
Not only are you ahead of HDMI, because HDMI 2.0 is still not existent,
you can't actually buy anything with it, and DisplayPort 1.2 has been available forever and already supports 4K at 60Hz.
Now, you are going to be in every gaming machine anywhere, and rightly so.
Like, it's just such a shame that the Xbox and Playstation 4 couldn't have something like this.
I'm not even poking fun at the console gamers right now, I'm just legitimately sad for them,
because I'm sad for the entire industry, because as long as you have to keep trying to design games to run at a fixed frame rate,
which you have to, because frame rate fluctuations will cause either lag or tearing on consoles,
where we're stuck with these constant refresh rate monitors.
So as long as the games industry has to account for that, we can't see them move forward and push for a little bit more visual quality,
and so what if it dips down to 48 frames per second, or 53 frames per second, because it'll still look really good and really smooth.
Because that is something that G-Sync, and by extension, I suppose FreeSync, will do very very well.
So, fantastic news right there.
Next up is Android TV.
So The Verge got an exclusive scoop here, where they are showing off what appears to be the interface of Android TV.
And what I thought was one of the most interesting things about this article, was how little information it actually seemed to contain.
So we've got quotes from Google saying things like, here, let me just track this down.
Android TV is an entertainment interface, not a computing platform.
It's all about finding and enjoying content with the least amount of friction.
What does that mean?
I mean, we saw Google TV in the past.
I mean, that was a total disaster, just because, I mean, I think they made claims.
This is in The Verge article as well, so they made claims like the majority of TVs in 2012 would ship with Google TV.
But what was the difference?
Like, I understand some of the things they're saying here.
So they want the interface to be cinematic, fun, fluid, and fast.
And they want no more than, I think they're saying, three clicks in order to go from turning it on to actually watching content, which I think is really cool.
But beyond that, what is the actual difference between a set-top box that plugs into your TV that is an entertainment interface and a set-top box that plugs into your TV that is a computing platform?
If anything, I would say if you're going to call something an entertainment interface, it would be something more like Chromecast,
where you'll have specific apps developed for it, but really it's more about the experience and not about the Chromecast actually being a computing platform,
a powerful piece of hardware.
And right now, it's not clear how Android TV is going to slot into the whole ecosystem or how Chromecast is going to slot into the whole ecosystem,
but what we do know for now is that Chromecast will continue to exist.
So screenshots are now showing Google's own apps like Playmovies and YouTube and Hangouts,
but there are also third-party apps being shown like Vivo, Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, and games.
So to me on the surface anyway, what this looks like is just developers having to make multiple different interfaces for different Google products,
because there are plenty of set-top boxes.
Amazon's recent Fire TV that use Android, although Amazon is a bad example, I guess, because it doesn't run stock Android by any stretch,
but there are Android-based players from even small manufacturers like Pivos,
so you're going to have to have an interface for Android that hopefully looks somewhat good on a TV.
You're going to have to have an interface for Chromecast that looks somewhat good on a TV.
You're going to have to design an interface for Android TV that looks good on a TV,
and it just seems like an awful lot of hassle.
But maybe they have a better plan this time, and maybe all that I'm saying right now is going to have nothing to do with anything.
I see a lot of people complaining about mods in the Twitch chat.
Sorry, there's not a whole lot I can do about it right now,
but we do have plans to work out a different chat system that's a little bit easier for us to moderate, so stay tuned for that.
All right, guys?
This is something that I'm getting pretty tired of, this next topic here.
Now, NVIDIA released a new driver, and they came out with all kinds of claims with respect to performance.
So they're basically saying,
Look, we're going to have DirectX 12 on all of our GPUs that supported DirectX 11 AMD,
and we're going to release a DirectX 11 driver that stomps all over Mantle anyway.
So here, check this out.
So screen sharing here.
This was posted originally on the forum by actually a couple of different folks.
I'll credit them later, but the 337.50 beta driver was claiming that it would deliver up to 64% faster single GPU performance
and up to 71% faster SLI performance just through optimizing the DirectX 11 driver that's available now.
Now, I have heard members of the press muttering under their breath, talking to each other,
not going to name any names, about every time AMD or NVIDIA releases a big driver update
that claims to completely turn the world inside out by delivering amazing new performance to the existing GPUs that they produce.
And the comments go a little something like this.
Maybe, maybe they'll actually have changed something a lot this time, but I doubt it.
And I even heard one of them talking directly to either AMD or NVIDIA, not going to name any names here,
saying, look, if I spend the time to benchmark this thing, am I actually going to find this number you're claiming or is it just a waste of my time again?
So the press in general is a little bit sick of the whole claims that don't really seem to add up thing.
And unfortunately, it looks like this is maybe more of the same.
OK, there are improvements, but there might be a little bit more of the same going on here.
So we referenced articles from two of my favorite sites.
We actually didn't have the time, just didn't have the bandwidth to run the benchmarks ourselves,
but these are both very trustworthy sources.
Trust me that they're good for it, I guess.
So Anantek and PCper, so they both did pretty darn good articles on the new NVIDIA driver.
And the conclusions from both of them basically amounted to this.
Anantek's test indicated about a 10% improvement in performance in BioShock Infinite and Metro Last Light.
SLI performance increased 10% for Grid 2 and 76% for Total War Rome 2,
although Total War Rome 2 was pretty far back in terms of optimization.
So anyway, a 76%, that means they did achieve it.
So 76% performance improvement in a particular game is good.
NVIDIA boasts huge performance gains in older games.
So, you know, Call of Duty Black Ops is getting 20%, I guess.
SLI has seen slight performance increases,
and NVIDIA has been working on some mantle-optimized games and all this kind of stuff.
But the basic conclusion was that performance was only really increased in some pretty specific games,
and for the most part, the sensationalist headline performance improvements were pretty difficult to find.
And I guess, for me, this turns into a bit of a can I trust you issue.
Like, I don't mind when NVIDIA provides us with reference benchmarks when they release a new GPU.
In general, they've done a pretty good job of it, where they say,
okay, if you take our card and this AMD card and you run them side by side,
here's about the performance improvement you can expect.
We're still gonna run our own benchmarks anyway, we're not just gonna take that at face value.
But it's nice when they at least give us a reference so that when we run something and it's like totally not the same,
we can go back and go, oh crap, did we screw something up?
This is... it just seems like a headline grab, and I find it frustrating,
because I had another similar experience with NVIDIA not that long ago,
where I was reviewing a gaming notebook that had NVIDIA's latest GTX 860M graphics card in it,
and they've got a new feature that they're calling Battery Boost,
where they're claiming up to two times the battery performance.
And I mentioned this in my notebook review, where I said,
I got about an extra two minutes of performance, not two times performance,
although I did admit at the time that I do need to do a follow-up,
but I mean, I don't think there was too much to go wrong with my test,
because the way the technology is supposed to work is that instead of allowing the notebook GPU
to work as hard as it can to deliver, you know, 60 or 70 frames per second,
you can limit the frame rate at like 30 if you're okay with that gaming experience on battery life
in order to preserve some power. So I just found a part of Crysis
that normally would run at like 55 frames per second with battery,
or 45 frames per second I think with battery, and then I turned the limiter on to 30 frames per second,
and I just left it there with a time-lapse camera on it, and the battery died, and it shut off,
and it only was about two minutes different, so...
I don't know. I don't know what else there is for me to really say about it,
other than I just find that pretty frustrating.
So I'm going to go ahead and add at least one mod here.
There we go. Boom! I have added a moderator, so I don't think one mod is going to be enough,
but like I said, we're working on a solution, but there you go.
Alright, now this next thing is something that is pretty, pretty close to me,
because I do make videos for a living now.
This is from NAB 2014, and it is the Blackmagic Ursa upgradeable 4K digital film camera.
Now, you guys might ask yourselves, for those of you who aren't that familiar with film equipment,
why do we still call it a film camera? Like, what does that actually mean?
That means that they are trying to achieve a more film-like look,
which many content creators still agree is better than that digital camcorder feel
that you get with a lot of digital solutions.
So products like the Arri Alexa, which actually isn't even a 4K camera,
so I'm going to let that sink in, but gets used for video production, for feature films.
It's not even a 4K digital camera.
What they've achieved with that is a film look, and a color, and a feel to it
that is closer to film, while avoiding the pitfalls of film,
which are mostly that it's cumbersome to work with, and that it is extremely expensive.
That's number one.
So what Blackmagic's trying to do here is create a 4K camera that is kind of ENG size.
So, like, you know those ones for, like, news crews that they carry around on the shoulder mount?
So it's about ENG size, and not just big, but also incredibly feature-rich.
So they are allowing upgradable sensors, upgradable lens mounts.
It has a 10-inch display built into one side of it.
It has two additional displays, so aside from being used for ENG use,
it could be used on, like, a multi-, you know, with a multi-person crew on a video production set
for commercials, or even feature films, with, like, one person monitoring scopes on one side,
and one person monitoring what the lens is actually looking at on the other side.
Like, up to three people working per camera.
It's got all these screens on it, it's got professional quality inputs and outputs,
so it has 12G SDI, which means that you can basically output directly with one cable, 4K,
it supports internal dual RAW and ProRes recorders, so it's using the upcoming CFast standard
that's kind of like an extension of CompactFlash, so unlike the cinema camera, it doesn't use SSDs,
but at least this is a standard media, as opposed to a lot of recording solutions that use proprietary media.
In fact, the one that we use for our Sony camera uses proprietary SSDs,
so it's a firmware lock that doesn't allow us to use other things.
And then it's got, you know, XLR input, it's got...
So the two 5-inch touchscreens that are on both sides of the camera,
so you can put your settings, controls, monitoring tools there,
and then the big one is the upgradable sensor.
So it comes in at only $6,000, which sounds like a lot of money to you guys,
but to put this in perspective, the Sony FS700 was around that price when we bought it,
I think around $7,000 when we bought it.
It has a 4K sensor in it, but it's only capable of recording directly to 1080p
without an expensive firmware upgrade and an expensive external recorder,
so our camera has actually cost us well over $10,000 by the time we're actually shooting 4K with it,
which we aren't even able to yet, because we're still waiting for another firmware update for our recorder,
but that's a whole other story.
So this is only $6,000, records to 4K immediately,
you can upgrade the sensor to future standards, like 6K, 8K, or whatever,
you can upgrade the mount to put different lenses on it,
and it just freaking blew my mind.
And the fact that it uses open standards and comes in at only $6,000 is just unreal.
I'm gonna head over to Twitch chat and see if things have sort of gotten a little bit less out of control.
Yes, indeed they have, in fact.
Alright, let's move on to our next topic here.
I think this is gonna be a pretty short show, just because there's not a whole lot of room for discussion
between me and Luke over here.
So this is a cool demo.
Now, one of the things that I have criticized Thunderbolt for is that it just isn't Ethernet.
It doesn't allow the same kind of flexibility that Ethernet does in a multi-user scenario.
So having 10 gigabit Ethernet on my PC, to me, is more important than paying a premium for a Thunderbolt-enabled PC,
and then paying another premium for a Thunderbolt-enabled storage enclosure.
Well now, Thunderbolt 2 has been shown off enabling a 10 gigabit per second Ethernet connection
between, not only from Mac to Mac, but between a Mac and a PC.
So now, your Mac Pro with its six Thunderbolt 2 connections, and Gigabyte, for example,
so your PC motherboard with dual Thunderbolt connections,
now, all of a sudden, you can create a super fast network that can connect to Thunderbolt-enabled expansion devices such as storage.
This makes Thunderbolt a much more feasible option to me,
because a lot of what we do is in a multi-user working environment,
where everyone needs to access the same resources at the same time.
And for that reason, Thunderbolt has just made no sense to me,
and the Mac Pro in particular has made no sense to me,
because it cannot be expanded to 10 gig Ethernet without buying a Thunderbolt enclosure,
Thunderbolt to PCI Express enclosure, and then putting a 10 gig Ethernet card in there,
and now you're adapting this to that to that to that,
in order to just access a network resource,
because it only has one gigabit Ethernet built into it.
Well now, Thunderbolt looks a little bit more feasible.
Now, I do see some negative comments about this technology,
and one person put it pretty well and said,
well this is ridiculous, we're moving away from centralized switching,
and we're going back to what, like token ring?
So you actually have to network each computer on a network,
you have to like kind of daisy chain them all together,
which feels kind of stupid,
but, and I see that point,
but I also see this as a pretty good intermediary solution for folks that don't want to drop,
you know, 300 to 500 bucks per adapter on 10 gigabit Ethernet cards,
and then build themselves a NAS or whatever else,
so now you can just buy a Thunderbolt enclosure and go ahead and do that.
So they showed off transfer speeds of 150 megabytes per second,
which, not actually that impressive, we'd be looking at,
we would want, wait a minute, hold on,
yeah, we'd want to see quite a bit higher than that for 10 gigabit,
but at least it's handled, or at least it's working.
Now, in line with the whole Thunderbolt expansion versus internal expansion conversation
that inevitably comes up whenever we talk about Mac these days,
we actually have a Hackintosh build guide coming very soon,
and I'm going to cover this in quite a bit more depth in that video,
but in that build guide, I guess I, you know, I have notes in here that I wanted to talk about that,
but I guess I kind of talked about it already,
because I talk about the merits of Thunderbolt expansion versus PCI Express expansion
and how one can be beneficial or the other can be beneficial,
but I guess I'll just do this then.
I'll tease our upcoming Hackintosh video.
It's scripted and shot and sitting in editing now,
so you should be expecting to see that sometime about mid next week.
Editing takes so long these days.
I mean, it's great that we're able to deliver so much better production values than we used to,
but it is so expensive, you guys, and it is so time consuming to make videos
like the HTC One M8 video that we released last night,
where that's like, I was talking to Jack from NCIX today,
and he was saying that, you know, blah, blah, blah,
video production this, video production that.
We were just kind of talking about it,
and I was telling him why I'm not planning to do a Galaxy S5 review.
Samsung reached out to me.
They said they have a loaner unit that I can borrow for, I think, 13 days or 15 days or something like that,
and then it needs to, by that time, be in the hands of the next reviewer,
and I basically went, you know what, I'm not going to bother.
They can send it to me, and I'll try it,
but if it's not a unit that I can actually set up as if I'm going to use this
as my daily driver for the next six months,
then I just don't feel that incentivized to bother with it,
and frankly, I find it kind of insulting because doing a review like the M8 review
is a bit of a different approach for us.
I try to use the devices as if I'm planning to use it forever.
I try to switch to every device that I use
because I think that that's the only way to review it properly.
That's the only way that you can incentivize yourself to work through the problems,
and that's the only way that you can avoid convincing yourself
that this lock button isn't going to bother me in the long term.
You have to actually think about it.
If I'm going to be using this for six months, then will it be good enough for me?
And you could kind of sit there and go,
oh, well, Linus, you just want free phones,
and it's not that because for the cost of me making this video,
I was telling Jack this, it cost me about 20 labor hours,
which when you have employees that make a decent living wage
and you give them benefits and you pay into their pension plan
and you do all this stuff, costs me well over $500 to make that video.
I could literally just not make a video and I could go buy an S5,
and that would work out just fine for me because that $500 doesn't even factor in
the time that I spent using the device and tinkering with it
and compiling my notes and scripting my review, all right?
So I basically went, okay, yeah, you guys can send one to me,
but I'm not going to make a review because if I'm not worth the effort
or worth the resources to send a phone, then quite frankly,
you're not worth me spending $500 to make a video about it,
and it's just kind of leave it at that.
So I don't even remember where I was going with this.
Hackintosh preview, how did I end up talking about this?
Hackintosh preview, wow.
Speaking of Samsung phones, this is really cool.
So the BBC has this article talking about a battery that right now
is not miniaturized enough for cell phone use,
but is about the size of a cigarette package,
but can be charged in under 30 seconds.
So they charged up a Samsung Galaxy S4 that's Frankenstein hooked up to this thing
in 26 seconds at a demo. Holy crap.
And the craziest thing about this technology is that we're actually not that far away
from it being a product that can be commercialized.
This bio-organic battery uses tiny self-assembling nanocrystals
that were first identified in research that was actually being done into Alzheimer's
back at Tel Aviv 10 years ago.
And the team is using these nanocrystals in order to create batteries
or even other technological devices such as a replacement to flash storage chips.
So they're even showing off these organic chips or whatever you want to call them
in battery applications, in chip applications, storage applications,
and they're showing off that they can achieve write speeds up to three times
what we can do with current NAND flash.
The batteries, so back to the batteries, are likely to be 30 to 40% more expensive
to manufacture, and the final product will likely be about twice as expensive
as those on the market today.
But what would you guys give? Would you pay?
Like, I mean, okay, let's say just for a second,
I just bought a replacement battery for a Droid DNA, and I think it cost me about 50 bucks.
So let's say it added $100 to the price of a top-line smartphone, or even $150.
Would you pay the extra $150 for a phone,
and I'd love to hear from you guys on Twitter, actually.
Let's Twitter blitz this, Linus Tech.
Would you pay an extra $150 for your phone, the one you own right now,
if it had wireless charging that you could basically put up against the pad
for 30 seconds and fully recharge it?
Let's say for a second that the pads also cost twice as much.
So right now you can get a Qi pad for about 20 bucks.
So let's say the pad costs 50 bucks.
So you're spending almost $200 extra out of pocket to have that solution.
I'd love to hear if you guys think that's worth it, because I totally do.
I am tired of batteries just running out of life and being frustrating.
All right, now I have received a ton of requests to review this bad boy.
This is the G502 Proteus Core tunable gaming mouse from Logitech.
It is available at a very reasonable $79.99 when you consider all of the features it has.
So it's got weight controls, it's got 11 programmable buttons,
it's got DPI shifting, it's got upgraded ergonomics,
it's got their dual mode scroll wheel, which is actually really cool,
so it can either be clicky or you can just flick it into free spin mode.
It's great for things like working on Excel documents.
And this is the big one.
It's got a 32-bit microcontroller with the most accurate sensor on the market,
is what Logitech is saying.
What they're saying is that the resolution of the sensor is 1,200 DPI
without any tricks, without any tomfoolery.
Fascinating.
Now, we've actually got a sample of the mouse already.
So yes, a video about this mouse will be coming,
but I haven't actually tried it personally yet.
Edzel is actually kind of our mouse expert these days, I swear.
He's like constantly reading up on mouse sensors and firmwares.
He's bought about three or four mice in the last little while.
He's talking about switching out the clicky switches on a Zowie mouse
in order to swap out the ones they're using for Omron switches.
He's turning into a total mouse geek,
but it's great because I was able to give the mouse to him,
and I've got his initial impressions already
that I'm just going to tease you guys with now,
where he said it is a little bit on the heavy side,
but that the tracking is actually very, very accurate.
So I have his initial impressions, and we will be providing you with that,
but this worked out really well because I don't remember where I was going with that.
This is the problem with not having him to keep me grounded,
as I just kind of like go.
But very, very, very exciting, and definitely a first in the industry.
I mean, it's Logitech, so their software is going to be stable.
They've got a three-year warranty that is legendary.
I've had to use it a couple times myself,
and it's been a satisfying experience every single time,
and I guess that's pretty much all I have to say about it.
Luke will have a chance to check out the ergonomics of this mouse at PAX.
I think he did plan to swing by the Logitech booth,
so maybe you guys can expect to hear his impressions on it,
even if you haven't heard mine yet, because all I've held is the box.
I handed it to Ed, and I was like,
Yo, you're into mice these days, man. Check this out.
Is it good? Is it not? I gotta know.
All right, speaking of things, are they good and are they not?
I am, I don't know, I guess maybe I'm just like jaded and tired,
and oh, no, I want to do my Twitter blitz.
Yay, Twitter blitz before Linus gets all jaded and tired of things.
Yay, okay, Twitter, boom.
There should be a rule that people should have at least 100 posts
because there's so many fake accounts on the giveaway.
Nope, we're not going to create a rule, but what we can do is audit by IP,
and we actually have a couple of other fancy tricks as well, so don't worry.
We'll know if people have duplicate entries.
All right, Marco says, Yes, definitely worthwhile on that new battery idea.
Tyler says, Not in the first gen. Wouldn't pay $150 for it,
so maybe second or third gen, they can have my money.
Casey says, Yes, even if it was thicker and produced more heat, all the yes.
John says, Hell yeah, that's a bargain in my opinion.
I would love to charge a Note 3 in 26 seconds.
Anthony says, Hells yeah, so much rent. Hell yes, hell yeah.
Yes, I would pay. That is a bad word, Danny.
Luke says, I would totally pay $200 for a phone that charges in 30 seconds.
Look at this, wow, wow.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, no doubt, no doubt ever.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Well, there you go. It's basically unanimous.
If we could get batteries that maybe aren't higher capacity
but give us more flexibility in terms of how we use them in our daily lives,
like if you had a charging pad in your car,
so you could just kind of chuck your phone on there when you get in the car
and then it's like completely done, you take it off like 30 seconds later,
set it up with your nav and you're ready to go.
Like if it changes the way that you use your device,
people are definitely still willing to pay a lot for phones,
which is something that I meant to discuss more in my M8 review was,
is there still room for 600, 700, $800 flagship devices
in a world where the Nexus 5 exists at $300 or $350 depending on the capacity?
And you know what?
Before I had my hands on the M8, I probably would have said no.
And when I get my hands on some of the new stuff that's coming,
like the OnePlus 1, I might say no again.
But the experience of using the M8 really does justify,
maybe not as a discrete handset purchase,
like if I was someone who bought my phones outright,
so I'm spending twice as much on it, maybe it doesn't justify it for me,
but it does justify the additional expense
if I'm someone who buys on a carrier contract with a subsidized phone,
so I'm only paying another couple hundred dollars for it.
I think there is still room for premium phones with premium features
that really do feel different from plastic phones with plastic features.
For Samsung, on the other hand, not sure that I feel the same way,
where it's just like, oh, you wave at the phone in order to enable more features.
But like I said, I haven't actually been hands on with the S5.
I haven't heard back from them yet, so I'm not sure if they're going to be sending me one.
I did say that I would talk about it on WAN Show,
even if I don't do a dedicated review of it, and that I would use the device,
even if it's not something, right, I remember where I was going with that whole spiel before,
is the reason that I ask for a keeper unit,
is because I don't feel like setting it up and actually using it
if I'm not going to actually use it enough,
I'm just going to have to wipe all my pictures and wipe all of my settings off of it shortly,
and then go and, you know, re-sync my actual daily driver back to it.
I mean, it's one thing if I end up doing that anyway, because I don't end up liking the device,
but that comes with the territory.
It's another thing if I end up liking the device and it becomes my favorite device,
which hasn't yet happened with the Samsung device, so it hasn't really been that big of an issue,
but if it becomes my favorite device and then I send it away, I go back to using something else,
new devices roll in and I want to compare them against something that I really like
and I don't even have it in my hands anymore,
I believe that, this is where I was trying to go with this,
I believe that comparative analysis needs to be done side by side and not from memory.
That was my whole point with that thing.
Jeez.
Alright, so let's go back, aside from being a waste of time and money for me to make a video about it
when you're not even willing to invest, you know, just, well here's the product that you're doing us a favor
by generating exposure for, or not doing a favor if I end up giving a negative review,
but that comes with the territory, that's any reviewer.
Alright, speaking of any reviewer, there are any number of different reviews on the Radion R9295X2,
except one from yours truly, because we didn't get seated a unit.
I've had quite a few people complain about the fact that we've been uploading speaker videos
as opposed to an R9295X2 video and all I could really say is there's nothing I can do
because AMD didn't seat us one.
We were included in their viral marketing campaign where they sent pictures,
they sent a picture, they sent Pringles, and then they sent like this disc that had this like video on it
that I didn't look at and then had a slide deck that actually told me everything I needed to know about the GPU
and then I only found out a few days prior to launch when I was like,
hey, are you guys gonna follow up with a card at some point here?
That I wasn't getting one.
So I didn't get one, that's why I couldn't bring you guys a review of it, unfortunately.
I don't think I am going to get one from AMD.
I sent a yo, what's going on follow up and I got a response that there may not be any more sample units
or there might be, but I haven't heard anything further yet, so we'll see what happens.
But the good news, actually I have two pieces of good news.
So good news number one is that there are plenty of reviews out there from sites that I consider extremely credible
and so we can definitely check those out.
And the other good news is that it's a dual GPU card, so people always do this.
They kind of go, hey Linus, how do you think the new rumored upcoming dual whatever is gonna perform?
And I say, hey, it's gonna perform just like two of those, because that's all it is.
It's two of those.
AMD has done some innovative things here, but I didn't even need to benchmark a 295X2
to get a pretty good idea of where it was gonna land.
I can throw two 290Xs in the system, I can throw water cooling on them,
like not great water cooling, but water cooling or like a great air cooler, like go outside in the cold or whatever,
and I can tell you how a 295X2 is gonna perform.
So that's the other piece of good news.
And the good news number three is that good guy Austin Evans has packed up his 295X2
and put it in the mail today for me.
So you might see a full review, you might just see some impressions once we get it on a bench,
or you might not, because we're pretty late to the party at this point anyway.
But let's get into how the credible sources of information have evaluated this card
since we haven't tested it ourselves.
So from BitTech they say, in nearly every way the R9295X2 is dual GPU done right.
In every situation it simply works and damn well too as its scaling is seriously impressive.
So it's got a pair of overclocked, albeit very moderately overclocked, R9290Xs,
and it performs about like what you would expect.
However, you can again expect some separate PCB R9290Xs to give you similar if not better performance
because they have their own dedicated VRM circuitry that has more room to breathe
and you can potentially squeeze more overclocking out of them for that reason.
So just like any dual GPU card ever before.
Tom's Hardware actually made a really interesting point and that was that you will be able to buy two
for the same price as the dual GK110 based battleship, the Titan Z.
Clearly though, that comparison leaves one super dreadnought smoldering.
That's a quote from Tom's Hardware because the Titan Z costs $3,000 or twice the price
and is probably going to perform similarly if not actually a little bit worse,
with the key difference being that it is air-cooled.
But would you really pay twice as much for air-cooling versus water-cooling
or would you rather buy two 295X2s if you can figure out where to put both of those radiators.
In fact, there are some cases that will support that.
So there's the overall impressions of the 295X2.
I don't think I have too much else to really say about it.
Other than that, I do appreciate what AMD has done with their last two dual GPU cards.
So with the, shoot, I can't even remember their bloody branding for the thing.
The 7990, there we go.
With the 7990, they change it every generation.
They've done it again.
It's like, is it a 3870X2 or is it a 4870X2 or is it a 5990 or whatever they call that thing.
They change it every generation.
So with the 7990, they introduced an open air cooler
and this was because they had to in order to keep the bloody thing cool.
So what that meant was worst case temperatures but better GPU temperatures.
And I looked at that and I went, that's great.
Why are we relying on the GPU card manufacturers to give us these non-reference cooler designs that keep the GPU cooler?
I understand that blower designs are better for certain builds,
but when we're talking dual GPU cards, I think we're talking about systems that better have some airflow through them anyway.
So I appreciated that and I appreciate once again that AMD has made this card water cooling out of the box.
So yeah, it's only a single 120mm radiator and yeah, it's an Asetek all-in-one solution.
So it's not the greatest performing thing in the world,
but what I think a lot of people were surprised to discover is that on a graphics card,
you don't need the greatest thing in the world in order to still get really, really impressive thermals.
Like I've seen reports around the web of these cards running as low as, you know, 60 to 70 degrees under load.
That's running at full speed because people look at their CPU and the temperatures a CPU runs at.
And they look at their GPU and they look at the temperatures a GPU runs at.
And I think the assumption is that there's some kind of correlation between something's temperature and the amount of heat that it is outputting.
But there isn't. Your CPU has a much more optimized cooler on it because it has a lot more space.
So just because they both run at 80 degrees doesn't mean that a GPU actually kicks out that much heat compared to a CPU.
So just because you could throw an overclocked CPU on a slim 120mm radiator design and you still get like, you know, 80, 90 degrees on it,
it's like, yeah, why did I even do that?
When you throw that on two GPUs, you can get great results because now you're taking that cooling out of that horrible form factor.
That dual slot form factor that's just totally inadequate and you're moving it to a nice big 120mm fan
that's getting the heat from those GPUs carried to it by water, which is much more efficient than air.
So I think that's a really innovative, really cool thing that AMD has done with the...
What's, what's someone saying? What's incorrect? Hold on.
I'm curious now. Twitch chat. Someone's saying I'm incorrect about something.
No. No idea what you're talking about anymore. Oh, someone says that's incorrect.
I'm pretty sure that nothing I said there was actually incorrect. Yeah. Okay.
Anyway. Someone asked, where's Luke? He's at PAX.
So there. I did some Twitch chat interaction, especially now that it's, uh, now that it's not a total disaster in there.
You know what? Speaking of total disasters, this isn't a total disaster at all, but let's go ahead and get into our sponsor break here.
So, our first sponsor of the show today is ASUS.
This, my friends, is the G750JZ, and what I really wanted to be able to do on our first spot
for ASUS's new ultimate performance gaming notebook was have used it a fair bit
and tell you a little bit about the gaming performance and a little bit about what it's like to use it.
But unfortunately, Luke took the one that I started setting up, so I was able to use a couple of things.
I definitely appreciate their new keyboard implementation with nice long travel time,
and I was able to set up a couple of things. I definitely appreciate the looks and the fact that it actually runs cool enough
that I'm running this thing on my lap right now, which you can't always say about gaming grade notebooks.
Luke took it from me and was like, oh, hey, that's our editing machine for PAX East. Bye!
So I was like, okay, I was actually gonna use that, so we do have two of them,
so each of us will be using them for about the next eight weeks, which will give you guys by the end of it
a pretty good idea of what it's like for us to use them. We'll definitely talk about our impressions on the show here.
But it just means that the one that I had set up wasn't set up, and I had to, like, pull it out of the box now at the last minute,
get everything installed on it in order to just do the show at all today.
But what it also means is it gives me a way to talk about the ways that these high-performance notebooks can be used.
It's not always just about gaming. Luke, first thing that went through his mind was, holy crap,
Thunderbolt port, Core i7 quad-core with hyper-threading, so nice high-performance CPU,
and 880M graphics card, which can be used for CUDA acceleration in Premiere.
And he was like, mobile workstation! Yoink!
It's because normally when we travel, we would take a shuttle or a Silverstone SUGO machine
that has, like, a full-size desktop CPU in it, so actually we use six cores for almost all of our editing machines,
and normally we take that when we travel. But because Luke and Brandon are traveling to PAX East on their own this time,
they were really excited about the opportunity to take a notebook that is fully, like, high-quality video editing capable,
so Brandon doesn't have to lug his ancient heavy thing that's, like, super, super slow, and they don't have to take a desktop.
So there you go, guys. The workstation usage model is another valid one for stuff like this,
and of course you can play games on the go if you want as well.
So let's move into our next one. This is another... I'm trying to talk about our sponsors here, right? Dollar Shave Club.
So, normally, I would have my little bin that has all of the different Dollar Shave Club handles,
their shave butter, as well as the One Wipe Charlies, that's the one thing that these guys left for me,
and I would be able to hold them up and talk about how Dollar Shave Club is a great way to save money and save time
by not dealing with the hassle of going to the store and finding a salesperson to, you know, unlock the cabinet for you
and give you new razors and then pay a bunch of money for them and then go home and just, bah, waste time, waste money.
So I would be able to talk about how it's great and I'd be able to, like, hold up the razors and show you,
but the razors are so good that my staff has absconded with all of them.
So I did offer Luke to try before Blade One, so I gave him both the package of cartridges that comes with your monthly subscription to Dollar Shave Club
and the handle, which he promptly took with him to PAX, so...
And those of you who were saying in the last Dollar Shave Club ad that we did within our video that Luke doesn't shave,
yes he does, people with beards still shave, you guys, they have to, like, shape them and clean them up and stuff, anyway.
So Luke took that away with them, so I don't have anything to show you there, and then Taron, the new guy, was like,
oh, those look pretty good, and he's, like, picking it up, he's like, oh, can I, uh, can I try this?
I'm like, yeah, sure, whatever, because we got, like, our pack was enough for, uh, for everyone to, like,
well, not everyone, it was enough for me to have enough to use for a month, because they provide a handle with your first order
and then four cartridges, or four blades, each month so that you can use a fresh one every week, so you're getting a nice clean shave.
So I was like, okay, well, I've got a one month supply, I guess I could ask Dollar Shave Club to send me a renewal sooner,
and then everyone else can kind of try, try one head, so we're not sharing shaving heads, because that's disgusting.
So he took off with it! So I don't have that either, he's, like, he just completely absconded with it, he's got the handle,
and, uh, the entire thing of, uh, six blade cartridges, so I don't have anything to show you guys, except the One Wipe Charlies!
So One Wipe Charlies are the, uh, are butt wipes for men, they're peppermint scented, they are moistened so that you do a good job.
You do have it here! Awesome! How is it, by the way?
I haven't tried it yet.
You haven't even tried it yet! Here I am, all upset that everyone's stealing my things, and they haven't even done it yet.
Okay, well there you go, guys, there's the, uh, see, we've cleverly labeled, this one's Linus', this one's Terence,
and there's the nice, high quality, grippy metal handle that's included with the, uh, with the six blade version.
I'm gonna go ahead and bring up their website, because I spent this entire, uh, I spent this entire thing complaining about everyone stealing the stuff,
because it looks so good, and it turns out that only one of my employees is stealing everything.
So I'll go ahead and fire it up.
So the whole point of Dollar Shave Club, since I haven't actually managed to talk about that a whole lot,
is that they have a warehouse where they ship to you once a month for new razors for your handle that they provide to you on your first subscription.
They do it at a cost that is lower than buying them from the, you know, shopping center or wherever else you get them.
You can see that, uh, Mike here has put it so well, our blades are, you know, bleeping great,
he's got a whole, actually very funny commercial that you guys should definitely check out,
just if you search for dollarshaveclub.com on YouTube, you guys can check that out,
and, uh, all of that they do for very, very reasonable prices.
So the four blade one, the one that Luke is actually using is only six dollars a month,
and that's with shipping and handling included in the US, and the service is also available in Canada and Australia.
This is one of the most disjointed integrations I think that I've ever actually done, but I really hope you guys get the point.
Save time, save money, Dollar Shave Club, check this out.
And this is really cool because I think this might be new, because when I was first looking at them,
their Canadian prices, I think, were higher, or like shipping and handling wasn't included, but check this out.
This is the first time that I've seen a company that's US and Canada that has very competitive pricing on their Canadian service with shipping included.
That's really cool. It's fifty cents more expensive in Canadian dollars for the four blade razor versus in the US.
Now when you factor in that the Canadian dollar is about ten percent behind the US dollar,
I think it's like five to ten percent right now, I haven't looked at it in a couple weeks,
they're basically just doing a currency conversion.
When you factor in that shipping is so much more expensive in Canada, that's freaking impressive,
and like A plus Dollar Shave Club for doing that.
In fact, I think the nine dollar and fifty cents executive one is less than the difference in currency, more expensive,
because it's only fifty cents more expensive as well, so kudos to them for that.
Alright, so with our sponsor messages out of the way, did I ever even actually switch to the Dollar Shave Club?
There you go, dollarshaveclub.com slash linus.
Make sure you use my referral link when you guys sign up.
We've actually had a lot of people sign up and leave really positive feedback about the products already on my Twitter,
so do sign up, do use the offer code so that we can keep having Dollar Shave Club sponsor the WAN Show and all of our other great content.
Hopefully you guys enjoy, and I think now we're pretty much done.
Alright, so let's move on to our next topic here, which is the heart bleed bug.
This is a big problem. I was actually tempted to just do a dedicated video about this during the week,
not because I'm a total expert on SSL encryption and secure web access.
I have a basic fundamental understanding of how it works and why it's important to encrypt certain data that's sent over the internet.
So for example, when you interface with a website like linustechtips.com,
it's important for us to encrypt your username and password,
but it is not important for us to encrypt the post that you're about to post publicly.
So that's the fundamental thing that's going on here.
SSL encryption exists to protect in-flight private data as it's being transmitted,
so things like credit card numbers, passwords, and the like.
What the heart bleed bug is, is it is a problem with up to an estimated two-thirds of the sites on the internet,
including some very frequently used, very, very big sites.
It is a bug that would allow stealing, allow theft of the information that is being transmitted.
So there's all kinds of different things that use SSL.
So for example, web, email, instant messaging, and some VPN solutions are using SSL in order to secure your data,
and heartbleed.com was actually able to prove this problem existed by stealing from themselves
the secret keys used for their X.509 certificates, usernames, passwords, instant messages, emails,
and business critical documents and communication.
The bug has actually existed for around two years and a successful attack would leave no trace.
So if your VPN solution, for example, has not done anything about heart bleed,
you might want to cool it on using it for the time being until they've proven that they have fixed any of the vulnerabilities
because that is pretty much the only way to even know that you haven't been compromised
is to just not transmit any secure data over the internet in the meantime,
which is kind of terrible. It's been a while since there's been something that devastating.
All right. Let's move on to our next topic here.
This was originally posted on linustechtips.com by Ashley. Thank you very much.
And that is that Netflix is now streaming in 4K, starting with House of Cards.
This is a bit of a mixed bag for me.
So here's the article on The Verge. I'm just going to go ahead and flip back to me here.
This is my show. This is a bit of a mixed bag for me because as much as I appreciate 4K content for some things,
I appreciate that when we are going to switch to 4K, which we are for our videos,
it is going to enable a higher bitrate playback mode on YouTube that will allow even 1080p viewers to experience better quality.
I appreciate that. I appreciate that as part of the 4K production workflow,
we have the flexibility to take a 4K frame that's this big and punch in this small on it
and get still a 1080p full HD image so we don't have to necessarily switch lenses if we want to get a close up.
That's really cool, right? So we could just take a bigger image and then punch in in order to do really fantastic close ups using a digital zoom.
I appreciate that about it. But what I don't really much care for is the fact that it's going to have an impact on bandwidth for Netflix streaming users,
something that is a concern if you have a provider that limits your bandwidth.
I don't appreciate that it's already a concern for Netflix to be able to stream 1080p with any reasonable level of quality.
Like I don't know if you guys know, this should be a topic for an upcoming Fast as Possible.
I don't know if you guys know the mechanisms behind it, but there's more to the quality of a video stream than just resolution.
A lot more. I mean, I could give you guys a video stream that's just 1080 by 1920 black pixels that just refresh.
And that's not quality. So just because something has a resolution doesn't mean it's a quality video feed.
So bit rate and color depth, which is largely affected by the bit rate of the media, actually to me has a very, very noticeable impact on the viewing experience.
And when I'm watching videos on Netflix, I just, ugh, it's really ugly sometimes.
The way that their dynamic throttling will scale back the bit rate so that you get these blocky chunks of low color depth, and that's at 1080p already.
So if you were to tell me, okay Linus, I want you to give up some more color depth so that we can throw more resolution at you that you might not even appreciate from so far away from your TV,
I'd go, eh, maybe, sure, no, probably not.
So they're saying right now, look guys, don't expect a mass roll out of this right off the bat.
So they're realistic about it. And on top of all of this is that it's going to use more bandwidth and Netflix is already having trouble dealing with all the service providers to get their service actually provided to their customers at a reasonable degree of quality.
And that sentence didn't actually make any sense, but I hope you guys get the point.
So they're saying, don't expect a mass roll out, and even by the end of the year, the 4K selection will be very small, but there you go.
They've got it. So if you were to buy an inexpensive 4K TV from Seiki or, check this out, this is a review that's coming soon.
An inexpensive 4K monitor from the likes of Samsung.
So yes guys, I have gotten myself the UD590 from Samsung, 4K 28 inch TN monitor available for $700, holy balls.
Then you would be able to map a pixel to every pixel and enjoy that content natively.
But I'm just not necessarily convinced, especially from what I've seen of that monitor so far.
I did have one open at NCIX today that I was able to check out. I'm not convinced that it's really worth it.
Alright, DirectX 12 will double Xbox One performance.
So this was originally posted by TopWarGamer on the Linus Tech Tips forum.
Thank you very much for posting that, and the original article is from BGR.com.
So they have a game-changing update that will double Xbox One performance.
Now, my problem with this comes back to the whole NVIDIA discussion earlier, where it's,
are you really going to be providing double the performance, or is it going to be like double the performance in one game that was already fairly well optimized anyway,
and it's not really going to make a difference to most people.
And other than that, is it just going to be a marginal incremental improvement?
And I don't know yet. There's still a lot of room for Microsoft to improve things about the Xbox One,
but a lot of the benefits of DirectX 12 seem to have to do, at least from what Microsoft said,
maybe they're keeping some of their cards close to their chest,
but a lot of the benefits seem to have to do with allowing more low-level programming for the GPU from the game makers.
But that's something that we've already had on consoles for quite some time,
and it's something that Sony could just as easily enable on their platform, whether they're using DirectX 11 or DirectX 12.
And from what I've heard, like word on the street is that we're not that far away from bare metal on these consoles already anyway,
so that to me kind of goes, okay, well if we've unlocked a lot of the potential of the hardware,
is this just going to be software tomfoolery and smoke and mirrors in order to try to get games to run at 1080p,
because that's one of the claims that they're making, or is this a total game changer as you say?
And it remains to be seen, this, and also remains to be seen, oh yeah, I remember where I was going with this,
sorry guys, again, like my train of thoughts just like run away, I haven't slept a lot this week.
Right, Microsoft still has a lot of room to improve things, whether this update improves anything or not,
because their whole cloud-based compute thing where they can use that for physics effects or simulation stuff,
where it's not terribly important that the waves of the ocean react with the same split-second precision as an opponent,
so there's a lot of room for Xbox One to improve its performance,
I just don't know that this is going to be the difference between 50% performance and 100% performance,
but it will bring multi-core processing to the Xbox One, something that I'm kind of baffled that it didn't have in the first place,
but you look at how long Microsoft's been working on DirectX 12, I guess they're just kind of waiting it out,
they're going to wait until it's done, and they're going to release it when it's actually ready,
because I think they said what, they've been working on it for four years now?
Alright, Seagate has announced a 6 terabyte hard drive, it spins at 7200 RPM,
so this is not your grandpa's cheesy high-capacity hard drive that spins at lower RPMs
in order to make it reliable enough to deliver that kind of capacity,
it speeds at 7200 RPM, it's available in 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 terabyte capacity points,
it has 128 megabytes of cache, it can feature a SATA 6 gigabyte per second interface,
and up to a SAS 12 gigabyte per second interface,
it does not rely on being helium-filled like Hitachi's 6 terabyte drive,
and Seagate is using what they're calling their 8th generation perpendicular magnetic recording technology,
and what the register has figured is 5 platters to achieve this milestone.
Great, I guess. I mean, it's going to be really cool for people who want to have lots of storage,
I think that for quite a while it was stagnant to the point where I kind of went,
okay, what is the upgrade path for someone who has a dual bay NAS,
because we've only gone from like 1 terabyte to 3 terabytes in the last little while,
and it's gotten to the point now where you don't look at that and go,
okay, that's triple the capacity, you look at that and go, oh, that's only 2 terabytes more,
and I'm accumulating data at such a rate that it's not necessarily enough.
I mean, to me this is exciting because it is a legitimate upgrade for someone who bought sweet spot,
you know, 2 terabyte drives quite some time ago where now they can triple their capacity,
and that means adding a full 8 more terabytes of storage to their setup.
But other than that, I don't know, I guess it's another hard drive.
It's going to support, you know, encryption, it's, oh, okay, what's cool is they are going to have one available
right off the hop that is rated for 24-7 operation, and some ludicrous number of writes per year.
I think it was something like 500, hold on, I don't want to quote this wrong,
because I've made up enough things on this show, 550 terabytes per year,
so that's enterprise class types of workloads right there, so that's exciting I guess,
but those drives will continue to be more expensive than most consumers will be willing to spend.
I guess for me it's just, I guess it's a shot in the arm for mechanical storage,
because especially now that we're getting 1 terabyte SSDs in that dangerous $500 price range,
it's starting to look pretty tough to justify a hard drive as your boot drive
if you're someone who's, you know, buying a reasonably high performance computer.
Now, our next topic, this was originally posted on the forum by QwertyWarrior,
thank you very much, and the original article is from NextPowerUpBeta,
is Project Aura, some more details emerge.
Project Aura has received a module developer kit 1.0 release that has outed some of the guidelines,
so it does a couple of things here, is it shows off what we can expect a Project Aura smartphone to look like,
so we've got a side view where they show what the screen, and in this case looks like speaker
and front camera module will look like, and how it will be sandwiched with the rear modules,
which can be sizes like this, so 1x2, 2x2, or 1x1, which will contain things like processors, batteries,
and all kinds of cool stuff like that, and more importantly than anything else,
this MDK 1.0 news reveals that an Aura phone, if you have a couple of batteries on it,
will actually be capable of staying powered on, not only while you swap a battery,
like right now, that's the phone feature to have, and that's like why Samsung keeps building plastic phones,
is a user replaceable battery, so that if you run out, you could switch it out.
Well, Project Aura phones, I should probably stop calling it Project Aura,
so while an Aura phone will allow you to hot swap a battery,
so you will actually be able to leave the phone on while you replace your battery with something else,
or like if you've got like a couple batteries on, you'll just be like, yeah, I'll pop this one off,
and put a replacement on there, run off this one in the meantime, that is really, really cool.
There are some more guidelines, so they're saying that the modules should have a smooth, flat, pebble form,
and they are saying that we can expect to see three different form factors, mini, medium, and large,
which will presumably be some kind of a phablet, and is coming later, after mini and medium size.
Our next topic, and this will actually be our last topic, this has been a fairly concise show,
I've gotten through everything that I really had planned fairly quickly here,
this was posted by AlexGoesHigh on the forum, the original article is from The Verge,
and Google will for one day let anyone in the US buy glass.
It will come with a free shade, in addition to the Google Glass itself,
and it will be available for, we are, let me have a look, Google is about to make,
okay, I don't see any confirmation here, includes an Explorer program expansion on April 15th,
yep, there we go, so it will include a free frame or shade with the purchase,
and it will cost $1500, just like it has for everyone who's joined the Explorer program.
Now I actually bought a Google Glass not that long ago, and so if there's anyone in Canada,
or outside of the US, who wants to buy mine off me, because quite frankly,
I didn't end up using it pretty much at all, it's extremely uncomfortable for me,
I'll be willing to sell mine for $1500 and I'll throw in, I have a clear lens, and I have a shaded lens,
and it's in basically pristine condition, I've hardly touched the thing, so there you go Google,
I'm one-upping you by allowing someone anywhere in the world on the 11th, not the 15th,
to pay $1500 for a Google Glass instead, I'm just trying to recoup my money on it,
because I just found it too uncomfortable to use, the problem that a lot of people don't have,
but for me is a big issue, is the way that it sits on your ears, because my ears are not level on my head,
so when I hold my head upright, my ears are wonky, it's hard to tell unless I'm wearing glasses,
but all glasses sit on me like this, and what happens with Google Glass is that that puts the display
way outside of where I can actually read the thing, so I just, I was gonna do a review on it,
but I was just like, you know what, screw it, this is so uncomfortable it hurts after like half an hour,
I'm not finding it useful because I can't even see the thing, so forget it, and I intended to flip it like ages ago,
and then I never got around to it, so this is as good an opportunity as any, so I'll be doing that on the garage sale,
after WAN Show here, and I think, wow, I think that might be pretty much it,
I planned to have Luke join me to call into the show for PAX East first impressions or something like that,
but I haven't, okay, doo doo doo doo doo, please just speak favor, oh, okay, so there's that,
nope, nope, I don't have a reply from Luke, so it looks like he won't be joining us,
thank you guys very much for joining me on the show, people are asking for a Pebble Steel review in Twitch Chat,
yes, that's coming, I ordered one, still not here, so that's gonna be part of my review, that's for sure,
or are they just asking for a Pebble review, I've done a Pebble review, my Pebble review has like 200,000 views,
you guys, someone's like call Luke, I won't be calling Luke, he's roaming right now, so that would be a big problem,
thank you very much guys for tuning in, all 4100 of you, I am always just so overwhelmed that so many of you give up your Friday afternoon or Friday evening
to spend it with me and hear about the latest technology, stay tuned for all the PAX East content that's coming this weekend,
so that is brought to you by Intel and Corsair and a huge thanks to Luke and Brandon for giving up their sleep and their weekend
and in Luke's case, his health, he's actually sick and he's still doing the trip, so like rock on brother,
huge thanks to them for bringing us a bunch of cool content from the show and I will see you guys next week on the WAN Show,
same bat time, same bat channel.