Welcome to the WAN Show. I'm hoping that everything is working. I hate it when Berkel is left unsupervised in the warehouse and does whatever it is that he's doing right now, I don't even know what their channel super fun thing is but it involves an electric bike or something and I'm not going to worry too much about it.
But yes, the WAN Show is less than 20 minutes late because I actually came down at 1 o'clock today and started working on making sure that everything was functioning correctly. So that's why we are less late than we otherwise would have been.
Yeah, and Colton was like, oh man, the WAN Show might be on time today. Linus is working on it at like 1 o'clock. Colton is young and naive and stupid. He's not stupid. He just hasn't learned yet that the WAN Show is never on time. You know, that's just the way it is.
Alright, so we've got a lot of great topics for you guys today. Luke's actually on vacation. He's over in London working on some kind of high technology product launch. I'm fairly certain we signed an NDA so I'm just not going to say anything about it.
Nothing about it other than that he's there, he's doing a thing and I'm sure if your Google FU is strong you can figure out what he's doing and what it has to do with. But he's taking a few days off before the event.
And in the meantime, I am stuck back here in Canada literally unplugging and plugging in USB connections thousands of times. That is what I spent the last hour and a half or so working on.
Is it micro B? Yes. So that's your own personal hell?
That is yes. Basically. Well, it's only half hell because the other half is type C. So I teased this on social media a little while ago but I'm actually going to be doing a head to head comparison of how many plugs before micro B or type C break.
At least it's not non-reversible A. Because then before every plug you'd have to flip it over three times.
So we've got a lot of great topics for you guys today. First up, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has been announced and this one's a shocker. The screen is big.
Wow! The Nvidia Titan XP has been reviewed and benchmarked. That is to say by other publications, not by us.
So it's not called the XP, right? It's just the X, right?
It's called the Titan XP. Anyway, so Microsoft pitches technology that can read facial expressions at political rallies.
So, you know, we're that much closer to Skynet, I guess.
We're that much closer to... Okay, so question. Do they aim them at the politicians or at the audience?
No, at the audience.
Oh, because I was thinking aiming them at the politicians might actually be a lot more useful. Be like a lie detector.
That would be like an actual boon to society. Whereas this is just let's figure out who doesn't agree with dear leader and we'll get them out of here.
Actually, would it be helpful to tell us that politicians are just lying the whole time? I mean, we already know that in theory.
Anyway, what else we got? We'll talk about it in more depth later.
The world's first programmable quantum computer is apparently a thing. I haven't actually read anything about this topic, so we'll see what happens.
Yay, Colton.
Squarespace.
I think they should actually change their slogan to that. It should just be like, Squarespace.
Alright guys, so why don't we jump right into our first topic here today. The Galaxy S7 has launched our original article here. Did I say Galaxy S7?
See, this is where I run into trouble. This is where Samsung gets me into trouble by having multiple devices that are very, very similar.
So the original article here is from a non-tech, at least I think it is. It's hard to tell with all the soft layer ads on all sides of the website.
I'm pretty sure it's a non-tech. Shots fired, although those who live in glass houses sink ships or something.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it goes something along those lines. And especially with our resident ad man, literally sitting next to me.
It probably doesn't make sense for us to be too critical of ads. So usually the co-host's job is to take the link to the original article and post it in the Twitch chat.
Wait, you actually expect me to do stuff while I'm sitting here?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
I didn't sign up for that.
That's what I thought was going to happen. I thought you were going to say things and do things.
I didn't sign up for that.
So basically, it's about as similar to any S-class product that we have pretty much ever seen.
So spec-wise, you're getting a Snapdragon 820, in the US anyway.
For RAM, 4 gigs of LPDDR4 for storage, you're getting 64 gigs plus microSD expansion.
I mean, having microSD expansion on the Note series was, I think, a bigger deal when it was notably absent from the S series, but it has kind of gone full circle now and is back on the S7.
The screen is 5.7 inches, it's 1440p, it's S AMOLED, dual edge display, it's got a 12 megapixel rear camera, 5 megapixel front camera.
I mean, I'm just getting bored talking about this. A 3500 milliamp hour battery.
I think the more interesting aspect of the conversation is that Samsung apparently learned how to count from everyone else in technology.
Wait, yeah, we missed the Note 6.
Yeah.
I just realized that.
You didn't realize?
No, I actually, I pay so little attention to the Note lineup because it's kind of like, okay, let's say you were me.
Yeah.
Like Trojan releases a new line of like Magnum condoms, okay? So they've got like the Magnum X and they've got the Magnum XL and they've got the Magnum XP or whatever.
Are you really paying attention?
The Titan Magnum XP.
So for me, the Note series, and I will be reviewing the Note 7 at some point over the next little bit here and I'll say my usual thing, I'm going to say it's a big Galaxy S7 and it's too big.
Literally now.
Literally now.
They called it the Note 7 to line up with the S7.
So stay tuned for that or don't bother, it's totally up to you.
But there are some unique things. So the S Pen now allows you to turn videos into GIFs, which if you're a frequent Twitterer is going to be a huge boon for you.
So your tweets can now have 70% more GIF and not just the canned ones when you click the thing, you can make your own.
You cannot put the S Pen into the phone backwards anymore, which isn't to say you couldn't before.
The problem wasn't putting it in.
It would say you couldn't get it back out.
Yes.
This is cool. It's IP68, so that's dust and water resistant with the S Pen attached or detached.
That's pretty cool. Anytime you open up a large hole in an object, you are significantly reducing its ingress protection ability.
So that's pretty cool.
And this is the big one.
Samsung has introduced Iris authentication with the Note 7.
So I obviously haven't used it.
I haven't seen it in action.
I will definitely be commenting on that, but I do have an initial important question and we will debate this.
And I want to hear from you guys on this.
I'm going to go ahead and create a straw poll right now.
Do you feel like Iris Protection is A, any more convenient or B, any more secure than fingerprint protection, which we already have?
Do you want me to give my opinion now or should we wait for the...
Hit it.
I mean, I feel like there has to be more issues with Iris Protection, at least at first, right?
Because at this point, the sample size from the public on fingerprint is so massive.
So obviously, Iris has to be at a certain level in order for them to even have it on this.
But I mean, I would be a little bit hesitant, at least at first, like first generation of it for the public.
Obviously, it's been on other stuff in the past.
But in terms of something as ubiquitous as a Note series smartphone.
My take on it is that anything camera-reliant from my experience, Samsung does this kind of thing to themselves.
Anything camera-reliant on a Samsung phone.
And whether you want to talk Smart Stay, where the screen stays on if you're looking at it.
Or if you want to talk about, what was it, I think they had like hand gestures that you could do to take pictures with the selfie camera.
Samsung's had a lot of motion and camera-controlled features, most of which have been absolute garbage.
And just plain haven't worked very well.
And people are saying it is a sensor on its own, so it uses IR as well.
So that's good, see, this is why it's important for me to read Twitch chat instead of just going on and on forever.
But anything, okay, so with the exception of the touch sensor.
Anything Samsung's done that's like a biometric or natural human interaction thing has been either kludgy or basically not worked at all from my experience.
So I am both excited and also very skeptical to see how well this works.
Because it's all fine and good if it works on a brightly lit show floor or if it works during the day.
But is this the kind of thing that's going to work at night?
And if it doesn't...
IR, so it should.
Theoretically it should.
Theoretically.
Or is it going to work when there, or is it going to work, I mean, here, that's another interesting part of the conversation.
Is it going to work where there's a lot of IR pollution?
Yeah, like let's say you're on the CES show floor, is there going to be too much pollution?
I don't know, I don't know.
And the question that we have to answer then is if it doesn't work all the time, if it isn't bulletproof.
And quite frankly, I'd say the first generation of Touch ID was pretty good.
And now it's gotten to the point where phones are coming out, whether it's the Axon 7, whether it's the Galaxy S7, whether it's the iPhone 6s.
Phones are coming out now where fingerprint detection is so fast and so accurate, like even if your fingers are a little bit damp, that I almost always use it.
I use it all the time, I don't have to think about it.
Until iris detection gets that good, I don't personally feel like it is going to be more secure or more convenient.
Because as it is, you could make the argument that someone could steal your fingerprints, I mean they did it on Mythbusters.
You could make the argument that someone can steal your fingerprint, they can create a rubber mold or a silicone mold, and then they can spoof it.
In fact, I believe it's been faked on phones already.
So arguably, fingerprint is not the most secure thing. It's much more difficult to extract someone's eyeball.
Right.
However, there have to be other spoofing measures.
That's still pretty difficult. That's still pretty difficult to do, the fingerprint sort of creation thing.
I think if someone is that determined, they're probably just going to put a gun to your head and tell you to unlock the phone anyway.
So I don't personally believe it adds a lot of security, and I also don't personally believe it adds any convenience.
If anything, I see that being less convenient, because I don't know about you, but my phone's already unlocked by the time I get it in front of my face.
Yeah. A lot of the time.
Not this one, because the Axiom 7, you can't use the fingerprint sensor as a lock button.
Actually, wait, yes you can. Okay, sorry, I was wrong. It didn't do it a second ago there.
You just have to wait a little bit longer when you do that.
But it's really fast when you press the lock button initially.
But on the S7, where the lock button is on the front, and it is what I reach for first when I pull it out of my pocket,
it's unlocked well before it ever reaches my face in the first place.
So I don't really see that being a huge factor for me. Let's go ahead and check out the results.
Here's a bit of a tangent, but what if they were to use something like an IR sensor to try to inhibit stuff like texting and driving?
Where like, if there's some type of a gyrometer or gyro or whatever in your phone,
but it's like you're moving at a certain speed, you have to use your IR sensor so that you can't just unlock your phone when it's like down here by your side.
I mean, I can't see phone manufacturers...
Okay, so the cold hard truth is that people are going to do it...
Okay, the cold hard truth is that phone manufacturers aren't going to start interfering with dangerous user practices
that inconvenience the user that wants to do it, unless they're mandated by law.
So I don't see that happening.
I don't see it happening either, that was just like, what if?
Like, I'm just trying to think of a scenario where this could be potentially positive.
Like, I could see that being an app that a parent might install...
But I mean, okay, I'm sure Twitch chat is telling us stuff like this exists,
where it knows if you're driving that the phone shouldn't work.
Like, it's the kind of thing I could see parents installing on their kids' phones.
So that's something.
I could also see it being useful, and so we've got the results from our strop hole here,
where people are saying for the most part, not more convenient or more secure,
with about 40% of you saying it's either more convenient or more secure,
and only 14% of you saying that they think it will be more convenient and more secure.
So one way that it could add security would be if Samsung allows us to require both a fingerprint and an iris scan.
Yeah.
But again, I haven't had my hands on the phone.
I haven't looked into this a lot.
So stay tuned.
I will be covering it.
That will come later.
We'll see how it goes.
All right.
The Titan XP reviews and benchmarks have arrived for some...
Hey.
...outlets.
Don't hate on my Titan XP naming, all right?
Oh, these guys spelled it wrong.
They missed the P on it.
Oh, they missed the P, dude.
They missed the P.
All right.
So did you copy that into the Twitch chat?
Thank you.
So all right.
I actually talked about this.
PCper was live streaming on their way down to like QuakeCon or something.
I actually forget where they were going, so I'm just naming a random LANs.
QuakeCon right now?
I don't know.
I think so.
I have no idea.
Anyway, the point is PCper was on their way down to a LAN event, and they randomly...
Trout randomly called me.
And speaking of using your phone and driving, he had one phone that he was using to talk
to me, and he had the speaker of that phone held up against the microphone of another
phone...
That he was periscoping from?
...that he was...
He was actually...
He was only streaming audio, so he was...
Oh, okay.
...audio streaming from that one.
And I didn't know this until the end of the talk.
Let's give Trout the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah.
Maybe he had a hands-free solution going on.
We don't have video proof of any of this.
And maybe someone else was driving.
Maybe someone else was driving.
Maybe someone else was holding the phone.
Maybe PCper makes so much that he has a dedicated chauffeur, okay?
Maybe that's it.
Maybe Trout's just a baller.
All right?
Could be.
So anyway, I was talking to Trout about this.
And the way that NVIDIA handled the Titan X launch, I was kind of...
I pitched this to him, and he kind of went, yeah, I don't know, it sounds plausible enough,
but I doubt he knows one way or the other.
And if he did, I'm sure it would get someone at NVIDIA in trouble for him knowing.
But I was just like, you know what it seems like happened here?
Jensen basically woke up, poured a bowl of cereal for breakfast or whatever it is that
bazillionaires eat, was sitting there eating it, and went, I'm going to launch the Titan
X today.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I said that to you earlier this week.
Yes.
That's kind of how it looks like to me that this went down, because there were no materials
sent to reviewers.
We got an email, I think, like 10 minutes before, being like, hey, just FYI, Titan X
is going on in 10 minutes, good luck.
We didn't get an NDA.
We actually, I don't think we ever signed an NDA.
Nope.
It was 10 minutes before launch.
So the announcement, the announcement prior to the launch, so the announcement.
So we never had an NDA at any point prior to the launch, and there's a reason for that.
And the reason for that is that, so some people got their Titan XPs the morning of the launch
that night at 9 p.m. Pacific time.
We didn't get ours until noon about, or after, the day of the launch.
And I'm kind of sitting here going, like, honestly, I haven't talked to anyone at NVIDIA
about this yet, but when I do, it's not going to be a happy conversation.
I'm going to kind of explain a little something, I'm going to say, okay, so look, you gave
us nine hours, of which only six of them are working hours, because we're running a real
company.
We're a guy in a basement with nothing to do until NVIDIA decides to bestow upon us
a graphics card that we have the privilege of covering.
I mean, to be clear, yes, we do appreciate getting hardware from manufacturers so that
we can have timely coverage of it, but the way that that normally works is we get it
with enough time to do coverage of it.
So in this case, we got six actual working hours, of which, let's do the math backwards,
okay?
Of which, I'd say about 15 minutes of it goes into actually, like, filling out all the fields
on YouTube.
Yeah.
Okay?
About five minutes of it goes into uploading it.
About half an hour to 45 minutes of it is exporting it from Premiere, assuming we only
have to do that once, which sometimes we don't.
Like 20 minutes waiting for it to process on YouTube.
Yep, 20 minutes waiting for it to process on YouTube.
So we've already used up well over an hour of our six hours.
Okay.
I'm just saying, these are things that happened.
Editing it takes about six hours, okay?
Benchmarking it takes another, you know, probably-
Four to six?
Depending on the depth.
And for something like Titan XP, we would have liked to do more benchmarks because Nvidia
has come out and said, this is not just a gaming card, it's like machine learning, deep
learning.
All that stuff, yeah.
So we've never benchmarked a card for deep learning before.
It's never come up.
So it's the kind of thing where there's a bit of a learning curve.
So let's say there's a few hours of actually figuring out how to benchmark the thing in
the first place.
Yeah.
Aside from that, there's actually, you know, usually attending a briefing call so that
you have some idea what the crap is going on.
Not that I think there was one.
Did we even get like a white paper or anything?
No, I don't believe there was a reviewer's guide for it.
You know, so usually there's some time spent reviewing the reviewer's guide.
Actually, no, maybe he got it the morning of.
Something like that.
Okay.
Which is, it was not actually possible, oh yeah, oh yeah, shooting B-roll.
So this is another challenge because theoretically you could shoot B-roll like on the fly while
someone is working on editing in a linear fashion through the video and we've actually
done that before.
Yeah.
The problem is that there is absolutely no way to shoot B-roll of the card while it's
being benchmarked.
Well, I mean, you could get B-roll of it on the test bench.
Oh.
Brandon.
How long would it take to do B-roll of a graphics card?
If I'm doing it quickly, four hours.
So Brandon figures he could speed through one in four hours.
But that probably assumes that Brandon's working on one of those endless streams of identical
cards.
Do you remember when we did like three Windforce cards in a span of two weeks?
I've seen the Windforce card more than I think I've seen anything.
Yeah.
Good old Windforce.
So basically Nvidia gave us a literally impossible goal of having a video up on time for this
launch.
It was very frustrating.
But there's good news, now that I'm done ranting about how they really should organize themselves
a little bit better.
I mean, it's funny because between them and AMD actually, I don't think, I can't talk
about that one yet or is that one launched?
I don't know when the AMD is for that.
It might have been, I don't know, like the last couple weeks of graphics cards deliveries
and stuff has been like.
Okay, yeah.
The RX 470 embargo is lifted.
So that was another one where our RX 470 arrived today, our official one.
We actually already had one from someone else, but we didn't have a reviewer's guide and
we didn't have a driver yet.
So this is funny to me, 1080, RX 480, very organized events around them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Relatively speaking.
That's fair.
That was our RX 480 launch a month before, three weeks before we were organizing stuff.
That's three weeks before the event, which was a month and a half or something before
the launch.
Yes.
And then 1080, to a lesser degree, Nvidia does the whole like cloak and dagger.
We are Nvidia.
We are like super secret business, bro.
They do that a little bit more than AMD does, at least intentionally.
So in the case of both Titan X and RX 470, it's just amazing the contrast.
It's like, did they spend all the budget or spend all the time organizing these launches
and then just kind of go, oh yeah, I guess there's like other stuff too.
Like I really, I really don't understand this launch sequence.
Like it almost feels like, I don't know.
It almost feels like RX 480 was announced and then they were like, oh crap, like we
got to do 1080 very soon then.
And then it wasn't, RX 480 wasn't what they were expecting.
So then just this landslide happened because like there was misinformation or something
and someone thought they were going to be competing with someone else at a similar price
point and then they weren't.
So then they had to match up, which then caused the other team to keep going forward, if that
makes sense.
Like it just feels very disorganized this time around.
All right.
So let's talk facts about Titan XP.
It features a 16 nanometer GP 102 GPU.
So this is very close to the Pascal GPU we've been introduced to in the Tesla lineup, but
not quite the same thing.
It's got 3584 CUDA cores.
So when you compare that to the Titan X, the previous card, when you compare that to the
Titan X, it had 2560.
So this is a very significant uptick in CUDA cores and that pretty much comes from the
process node.
I think that may have supposed to be, that was probably supposed to be GTX 1080, I think.
Oh, is that 1080?
I believe so.
I can't remember.
Anyway, it has 224 texture units, 96 ROPs, a base clock of 1417 megahertz and a boost
clock of 1531 with hardware connects actually managing to get it to overclock to a continuous
like holding steady frequency of 1923 megahertz.
Yeah.
The old Titan X had 3072.
3072.
Thank you.
All right.
So it's got 12 gigs of GDDR5X RAM, so we did not see HBM2.
Again, this is a downgrade from the Tesla card and it's clocked at 10 gigahertz quad
data rate and a 384 bit memory bus for a total of 480 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth
and a 250 watt TDP.
So once again, Nvidia has one of the hottest cards on the market.
It's funny, people give AMD a lot of crap for having really hot cards.
The difference is that when it comes to performance per watt, the Titan X really does come through.
So it's about 20% faster than even non-referenced 1080s in some titles and as far as single
GPUs go, it is king.
I was actually talking to Shrout about this too, but it's gotten to the point where on
the performance charts in their reviews, it's like Nvidia land and then AMD.
It's gotten to the point where AMD has...
If they keep up the way that they're going, you give it another couple of generations
like this, AMD may find themselves a full generation behind Nvidia while Nvidia sells
graphics cards at a whopping 1200 US dollars a pop, lining their pockets, stuffing the
coffers and giving them more money to spend on R&D to cycle faster and faster and faster.
This is a troubling time, a very troubling time because Nvidia could easily slash the
pricing of their lineup and make it very difficult to recommend buying an AMD card, but Nvidia's
not really prone to do that.
They tend to wait until AMD puts actual pressure on them to drop the price, so instead they're
sitting there accumulating massive amounts of money to spend on basically whatever is
the next technology they're going to introduce, whether it's Game Stream or G-Sync or whatever
else that makes it so that at least some gamers are going to look at this card versus that
card and go, well, this isn't even a decision because AMD straight up doesn't have feature
X, Y or Z.
And I love how like you say things like Nvidia cards are performing better right now and
people in Twitch chat call you an Nvidia shill.
That's just the facts.
I don't make the rules, yo.
We're not saying like they're better in performance per dollar, although in some cases I think
the, no, no, no, the RX 480 was better than 1060 in performance per dollar.
I can't remember.
But it's just the facts.
Yeah some people rage something in Twitch chat says Nvidia won't let AMD go bankrupt.
I'm actually not convinced that's anything to do with the motivation at this point.
I think it's just a matter of not wanting to sell computer hardware at low margins,
not wanting to constantly iterate on new silicon as fast as they possibly can the way that
they were doing back in the mid 2000s.
And it's a matter of just being happy to sit and make ample margin and happy to have AMD
sit there as a measuring stick for why Nvidia's graphics cards are worth a lot more.
Trouble in times.
So yeah.
Just the $200 price hike is what really gets me.
It's the same as the 6950X.
It's like we're charging this because we can.
So I actually thought that there was some justification for the $200 price hike.
And I went back in time, I may have actually done this on Wancho when the Titan XP was
first announced.
So I went back in time and adjusted for inflation.
I found super crazy stupid halo products from 10, 15 years ago and compared them.
And the $200 price hike was definitely still unjustified.
But it's not as unjustified as the $700 price hike on the 6950X, but I can talk more about
that one actually.
Now I've, I've been working on a pretty interesting video that, that, okay, that does don't spoil
anything, but I won't, but that does put that price hike into a more, yeah, it puts it into
a different perspective for me.
So anyway, one thing that we're ignoring when we say Nvidia is jacking the price, et cetera,
et cetera, is that R&D costs are going up.
Generation by generation, R&D processes are going up at the manufacturing level.
So at Global Foundries, TSMC, Intel, and at the chip design level.
Pascal is a more complicated, more difficult to design product than Maxwell, than Kepler,
and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Back to Intel's price hike on the 10 core extreme edition, basically it's a Xeon.
So where it comes from is not wanting to cannibalize Xeon.
Because when I was working on my what CPU should I buy video, I actually worked into
my comparative sheet.
I worked all the, everything from Celeron's all the way up to the $7,000 four way E7 series
Xeon.
Or is it E5 4000, anyway, I forget the nomenclature is.
Either way.
Don't worry about it.
Anyway, I worked in the whole thing, and what I realized is that aside from the 6800K, which
is priced more like a desktop chip, and I think the reason for that is because they
kneecapped its PCI express lanes, making it suitable for desktop use, even two way SLI,
which is all we recommend around here, but not really suitable for server use, where
many, many expansion cards is much more likely to be a thing, except for the 6800K, there
is basically an equivalent Xeon in the current generation, and you can look back at the previous
generation and go, yeah, that was kind of the one that that was a successor to, too.
So they pretty much priced them like overclockable Xeons that don't have ECC, and you are paying
a slight premium for the Xeon because it has ECC, so it can handle server memory.
And that's it.
That's basically, that was the logic.
Do I like it?
No.
Yeah, the issue is now is that they're labeling it as a Core i7 and they're trying to sell
it to consumers, obviously very high end consumers.
At a server price.
At a server price.
And the other thing that bothers me here, too, is not necessarily what they've done
on the Extreme Edition side, because quite frankly, I've never recommended an Extreme
Edition to anyone.
I've never recommended that someone buy an Extreme Edition, it has not happened.
And that was true when they were $1000, and it's true today, now that they're $1700.
So it doesn't matter to me, it didn't make it any more or less likely that I would recommend
one.
To me, the part that I find more objectionable is that Intel has been in the range that I
actually expect people to buy.
So that's on the consumer platform, the consumer chipset and socket.
They've been selling us quad cores for 10 years.
Q6600 turned 10.
Or actually, no, not quite, sorry, not quite 10.
Will turn 10 within a year.
And that's like, still a sort of relevant chip.
Sort of.
It's like somewhat usable.
So Q6600 was launched at around $700 US dollars.
But within about, again, about a year, was down to pretty similar to what you'd pay
for a 6700K today.
So you could get a kind of not quite enthusiast, blah blah, Extreme Edition quad core for basically
what you're paying for it today, almost 10 years ago.
I think consumers should be getting a 6 core.
I don't see a reason why the enthusiast range goes from 6 to 8 and consumers are still stuck
with a quad.
I mean, I do see a reason.
Because they've had more emphasis on better onboard graphics, which I could end up completely
eating my words.
Five years from now, when those chips with the better onboard graphics are just blowing
through video rendering or encryption tasks or whatever the case may be, using that GPU
power.
But for now, putting onboard graphics on a 6700K just makes me kind of feel bad.
When it could have just had more cores or more cache.
Yeah, you gotta remember your perspective though.
As someone who always puts a dedicated graphics in a machine.
Yeah.
Like a lot of people don't need more than four cores for the little amount of gaming
and voice comm and music that they're going to be running, right?
That's true.
That's a factor in hyper-threading.
Yeah.
I just feel like if they could give us four cores nine years ago, then why can't they
give us a couple more today?
I'm sure that they could.
And they are higher performance cores.
Actually Anantek did a great article comparing modern CPUs to Conroe.
It's worth having a look at.
You guys should check it out.
Anyway, but go ahead.
Yeah, I just, I don't know.
I feel like they're trying to target someone who isn't you with the four core.
Which is probably smart in all honesty.
So basically what you're saying is that it's no freaking mystery that I'm salty because
I'm not the target market for the reasonably priced one.
Essentially.
Yeah.
Essentially.
Well, all righty then.
So speaking of money, Squarespace.
I am going to have to legitimately pull up my Squarespace integration notes because I
can't just, you know, talk crap about, you know, oh, you know, Nick is going to, you
know, blah, blah, blah.
I don't care what Nick has to say about my sponsor spots because he actually is close
enough to hit me right now.
So Squarespace has 24 seven support via live chat.
They don't offer telephone support.
It costs only $8 a month and you get a free domain if you buy Squarespace for the year.
All their templates feature responsive design.
So your website scales to look great on any device.
They all have a commerce module.
Your website comes with a free online store.
Their cover pages feature allows you to set up a beautiful one page online presence in
minutes.
Tell me more.
Everyone can now publish content in Apple news format directly from their Squarespace
blog module.
It's available to, Oh, that makes it available to millions of potential readers and you can
start a trial with no credit card required and start building your website today.
When you decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure to use offer code when to get 10%
off your first purchase, which is in brackets.
You'd like your, your salesman voice is the worst.
I'm sorry.
Make sure that you use off-code lightest at 1 8 8 8 6 5 6 square.
That's not a real number.
It's square.
Square has too many letters.
The fine print.
Well, maybe there's no E on the end, but like that's actually when I said, and are we going
to drop the U2?
Squarespace.
When I said, tell me more, that's actually, that would be a decent slogan for their, their
Apple news format.
Squarespace.
Tell me more on your Apple news format.
See now he's making up slogans.
What is with the double standard here?
I get crap for not sticking to the script.
You don't make up slogans, you just use old slogans that they don't use anymore.
I only did it because someone told me I should.
I hate you.
All right.
Moving on to lynda.com.
Lynda's used by more than millions.
More than millions.
Why do I even try?
This is what happens when I spend the hour and a half prior to the show, unplugging and
plugging something in over and over and over again.
More than millions of plugins.
I mean, technically millions is by definition more than millions or can be because I didn't
clarify how many millions.
So there was a multiple millions.
So three millions would have been more than two millions.
I feel like I've been plugging in a USB for three hours at this point.
All right.
So Lynda is a great way to learn online.
They've got more than 3,000 courses available and they're used by millions of people around
the world.
They've got topics like web development, photography, visual design, business, video editing, cinematography.
Basically pretty much anything it would take to get a fantastic job at Linus Media Group.
They've also got software training for programs like Excel as well as Photoshop.
Sorry.
One of the things you can learn on Lindo is a sponsor conflict with one of our other sponsors
for the show today.
So I decided to skip over that.
All the courses are taught by industry experts with new courses added every week.
And whether you want to set new financial goals, find work-life balance or invest in
a new hobby, ask your boss for a raise, maybe don't get any ideas.
You can improve yourself and bring your job set up to job skills up to 2016 standards.
You can get a 10-day free trial.
All you can eat, check out linda.com, decide if it's right for you at the link in the video
description or right there, linda.com slash wancho and plan start at only $25 a month
if you decide, yeah, Linda's awesome, which many, many of our viewers have given that
Linda has been advertising with us for like two years now, something like that.
And uh, they continue to get lots and lots of signups and we continue to not get complaints
about Linda, which because they're awesome.
Because they're awesome.
That disclaimer using linda.com does not guarantee that you will get a job at Linus media group.
Linus Sebastian's comments and slash or statements on the wancho are not always accurate.
That's true.
We should have that disclaimer just at the bottom of the wancho.
Linus Sebastian's comments, maybe warning wancho should be is for entertainment purposes.
It should not be considered a real source of news.
Yeah.
Um, speaking of real sources of news, I think Taron had wanted to jump onto the show.
Do you want to see, he wants to talk about space and weird stuff like that.
So Oh, okay.
So I'll go get, I'll go get Taron.
Um, okay.
That, uh, you do the, the, uh, the topics and stuff.
Goodbye.
All right.
All right.
Thanks Nick.
We've decided to make this more of a thing where like random LMG people sub in whenever
Luke or I are not here.
I think it's, it's been pretty fun so far.
I've been enjoying it.
All right.
So our next article here is originally from politico.com digital campaigns.
How can Democrats win with tech?
That looks like a fascinating discussion that they're having right now.
I've been tagged in.
Hi everyone.
Hey, how's it going?
Welcome to the show.
It's good.
So in Cleveland, Ohio, I'm going to do this one on my own while you figure out what the
next topic you want to do is in Cleveland, Ohio, Microsoft's research division advertised
the technology that can read facial expressions in a massive crowd so they can analyze emotions
and report back in real time.
So they're calling this real time crowd insights.
Hang on.
What's the resolution of the camera they're using?
Probably like NSA megapixels.
Oh, so the small camera scans the room.
There you go.
Okay.
While a monitor displays the captured image.
And there's actually a picture from the test here.
So we'll go ahead and pop this up.
Check this out.
This is like scary stuff right here.
59 year old male, 38 male happy, 37 female happy, 27 male neutral.
Have you ever done one of those age test thingies where it tries to guess your age based on
your face and notice how it's not really that accurate?
Maybe there's more accurate technology out there, but that's a doctored image.
You think that's a doctored image?
This is from a demo.
This is a screen grab.
Probably.
Oh, and then they cherry picked the one where the ages were pretty much.
Okay.
Well here, hold on.
Okay.
Do you think those are probably pretty much correct?
I think that girl looks younger than that.
Oh, well, it's kind of low resolution.
It's hard to tell.
Yeah.
I think this looks about right.
59 for that guy.
Yeah.
59.
Great.
Great hair.
It's hard to tell.
He's got a big nose.
That's not enough resolution there to be able to tell that.
Did you know that your nose grows your whole life?
And so do your ears.
That sounds like a myth.
No.
Then you must be very old.
And that's the end of that chapter.
Okay.
So anyway, anyway, okay, so I'm going to finish going through this while you find a topic
that...
Did you do the NASA one yet?
No.
So every five seconds, a new image would appear with data annotated for each face.
So they assigned a serial number.
This is great.
Assigned a serial number, gender, estimated age, and any emotions detected in the facial
expression.
And they keep track of the serial number and can identify the same person hours later.
No way.
So a Microsoft spokesperson said, for example, that you could use this tech at a Trump rally
or even the Super Bowl to find out how the audience...
What on earth are you doing?
I'm too short, at all, for this as it is right now.
Now?
Yeah.
Okay.
Now it's good.
So anyway, okay, so let's talk about how I expect this technology to be used.
Basically we are giving politicians a tool to lie to us more effectively.
Really?
Yes.
Wait, who is this technology for?
For them?
Well, the way it's being pitched is that it could be used at a campaign rally.
So that way, you could actually look, like imagine this.
This is like some next level stuff right here.
You could look, you could scrub through the campaign speech and you could see a hotspot
or you could see like a heat map of viewer sentiment during the speech.
Every time, so every time the politician says anything.
You can pander to viewers in real time.
Yes.
Just like that onion skit, which is a really funny video that you should watch instead
of the land show.
No, I'm just kidding.
No, no, no, no, no, let's keep, yeah, pander to viewers in real time.
I mean, can you imagine if the land show, if I had real life sentiment monitoring, like
say for example, Twitch chat, when they're like, Taran, I love you.
You just ate that sweet so damn fabulously.
So there you go.
Yeah.
In real time.
Yeah, because we can watch this, but it's like really annoying to do so.
Yeah.
And not as trustworthy.
So if we just had like, so it's basically taking people sad, angry, mad, and turning
them into a sentiment value.
That's cool.
So you could have a sentiment percentage in the crowd.
So the second that, you know, let's say Mrs. Trump, you know, pulls part of a speech from
Michelle Obama or the second that Hillary dodges a question about, you know, the fact
that she's being investigated in the middle of a presidential campaign, you know, I'm
not taking, I'm not quite frankly, I'm not taking sides at all in this one.
Now that I know who the two candidates are, I'm just kind of, yay, I'm Canadian.
This is not my problem at all.
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no.
Can you even vote?
Yeah.
I'm still an American citizen.
Yeah.
But can you vote if you're not living in America?
I think you vote based on the last state you lived in, which for me is Colorado.
Okay.
There you go.
So I enjoyed that.
Um, but like you could be saying something like, well, the most important thing to us
is jobs.
Yeah.
And, and then you could see like a dip and you could go, but that's not as important
as the environment.
Yeah.
Well, it's something comedians are good at this, where they'll start a series of jokes.
And if the audience reaction is really positive, they'll continue with that series.
But if not, they go onto the next joke, but now we can have it for politics and have robots
figuring it out.
And then you create a robot that's good enough at pandering and we won't even need politicians
anymore.
That's also another onion skit.
We'll just put the robot in charge.
Perfect.
Brilliant.
President Executron.
So there you go.
That's kind of, that's kind of my take on this.
There's that picture, by the way, you guys can, you guys can check that out.
Um, wow.
I just, it's a brave new world Linus.
Yeah.
I don't really have anything else to say other than, but the thing is like, we've heard of
all of these like interesting pieces of tech that sounds scary, but then we never really
hear anything else.
Yeah.
That's cause it's all happening behind closed doors.
I I've heard that like the security cameras at, I forget what it was, maybe Sears or target
or something like they're extremely good.
Have I told you this on the show before?
I think it's target like extremely good to the point where they know what you've purchased
before you go to the checkout.
They've actually already, I think it's target where they've already run you up.
Yeah, because the cameras are so high resolution, they track everything.
It's amazing.
And like, that's just the stuff we know about.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm sure professor Zuckerberg over there has plenty going on that we don't know
about.
And then like there were NSA satellites where that were decrepit and they're like, Oh, these
are obsolete now here, NASA, you can have these and NASA's like, Holy crap, these are
amazing satellites.
What have you guys been using them for?
And then NASA is basically like, okay, turn them around to point to the stars instead
of all of the people everywhere.
Cause that's frankly a better use for satellites.
Hey, for people like me, as I'm concerned, they're one in the same.
You're not a star, maybe a very dim one.
All right.
So let's talk about NASA's training program that involves consumer grade VR and quote
unquote Nvidia GPU technology.
I'll see.
This is like the perfect Linus and Taron topic.
All right.
So let's pull up the, uh, let's pull up the Nvidia blog here.
Nvidia reported this.
Uh, yeah.
Well, Nvidia is always bragging about anything you can use a GPU for.
They're especially fond of bragging about things that you can use a GPU for that are
not gaming.
Oh yeah.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
I can see that.
So let's, uh, run through the notes here once I get that switch back.
So they're embarking on a 15 year journey to Mars and VR is going to play a key role.
So they're actually going to be using Nvidia GPU technology combined with unreal engine
for consumer grade VR, physical mockups and models, wearable technologies and room scale
tracking.
And they're going to create what they're calling a hybrid reality system.
Very, very cool.
They want to create an extremely immersive and a realistic training facility at a lower
cost than traditional analog test fields.
Hang on.
This says a 15 year journey to Mars.
It only takes like nine months to a year to get to Mars preparation.
Yeah.
Training for sure.
But it's worded oddly in this document.
Okay, fine.
Let's continue.
So Frank Delgado and Matthew noise at NASA's Johnson space center hybrid reality lab have
the goal to create this low cost scalable platform to enable and out of the world experience.
So it's about incorporating the best elements of physical and virtual realities to get the
best of both worlds.
And there are already, I mean, it's a good thing they've given themselves just 15 years
for this because there are already ways to incorporate physical objects into a VR space.
One of the ways I've seen it done is with tracking dots.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
So you put these, that was actually a demo that I saw at the Samsung developer conference
where you basically put these like wired things with reflective IR reflective dots on them
so that the VR, so like the room scale VR cameras that are tracking you can also track
these objects and know what they're supposed to be.
So the puzzle I solved was like an Indiana Jones style, move the stone idol onto the
correct thing.
It was a real stone idol and also in the game.
Yes.
That's very cool.
Like it felt like what I was looking at in VR.
Why do they need virtual reality for this?
I mean, I mean they can't simulate a zero gravity obviously unless you go on the vomit
comment and then it's only like 90 seconds.
What are they simulating exactly?
So what they're simulating is, well they're making it more immersive because you could
make the argument.
Do you need that?
Yeah, I think so.
Well what I just, I don't know what they're doing with it.
So it's more versatile for one thing.
So if you were to create a physical training set.
Like a holodeck.
Oh, now I understand.
Yeah.
So now you can do, you know, a holodeck.
Yeah.
There.
Well the explanation, well if anybody hasn't watched Star Trek, then why are you watching
the WAN show?
You're not enough of a nerd.
And as long as they have props that are a reasonable facsimile of whatever it is they're
trying to do a training session on, then they can actually change the functionality of the
room very easily and very quickly.
There is a lot of potential here, for sure.
So they said that they're gonna, okay so they said that the Johnson Space Center's active
response gravity offload system, Argos, is an excellent candidate to combine this VR
system with a way of creating a sense of weightlessness.
Which would be much easier when a user is in a virtual environment than when they're
in a room.
Is that when they're swimming around in the water?
Um, I'm actually- So that's what NASA does to simulate a-
No, I think this is a different one.
So here we go.
This is a picture of Argos right here.
A small robotic crane.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I've always wanted to, to like jump around with a small robotic crane
getting rid of most of my body weight.
So this in VR- That'd be so, so, so awesome.
I would, I wish, can we rig one of these up?
We have, we have beams up there.
I mean I know NASA's budget has been cut, it's still a lot more than ours.
To be very clear.
We can get a grant from NASA and let the astronauts come here.
To Surrey, B.C. Surrey, B.C.
Quite a ways from Houston.
Let's see, John told me he was gonna mark some of the topics that he wanted to jump
in on, but it looks like he actually did not, did not do that.
Welp.
Okay, I have, was there anything else that you wanted to, that you wanted to talk about?
About NASA?
Or just about other, I'll look for one, shall I?
That NASA thing's very cool.
I'd love to like see, like training videos of that, to see what they do with it.
You know?
Be very cool.
I'm stoked on that kind of stuff.
Alright, so, dun dun dun, OnePlus is back in the news.
So the invite system is gone, but lo and behold, the original article here is from phonearena.com,
the phone sold so well without the invite system that they actually have to halt sales
of the OnePlus 3 for more than a month in 24 countries.
So in order to build inventory back up, sales will be halted starting August 9th at 6 PM
Eastern Daylight Time until September 12th for Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus,
Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania,
Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain.
Oh, that's fascinating.
So if you place an order before the sales halt, your phone will go out on the estimated
shipping date, but in the meantime, they're just like, yeah, sorry, we straight up do
not have enough phones.
But we have one, don't we?
OnePlus 3?
Yep.
Yeah, they sent us our review sample.
Yay.
What you got?
Oh, sorry, I wasn't paying attention.
I was listening to you talk.
It's hard to listen to someone talk and read at the same time, which is why when you're
editing a video, you put as little text on the screen as possible.
Fun fact.
All right.
Our next story here is from DSL reports.
Comcast says it wants to charge Bron, Bronband, Bronband, I don't even know what that actually
accent was.
Broadband users more for privacy.
So Comcast this week informed the FCC that it should be able to charge Broadband users
looking to protect their privacy.
Wow.
So the FCC has been crafting new privacy rules for Broadband that would force ISPs to disclose
exactly what they're collecting and selling.
It's almost like the FCC is on the consumer side for a change.
Oh, wow.
Imagine that.
And they're also working to provide opt-out tools for customers.
Can't you just use a VPN and just get around all this nonsense?
It'll be a bit slower.
Yes and no.
I'm not sure that it's a perfect solution, but yes, it would get around a lot.
But then you're basically paying for internet and then also extra internet on top of your
internet.
So basically you are paying more for additional privacy.
Right.
Now, I wouldn't trust Comcast at all ever.
So they're going to say, oh, you have more privacy now because you pay more, it'll be
fine.
Like every time you see Comcast's name in the news, it's something that they've done
to screw over their customers, right?
So basically in the news today is them saying it's well within our rights to screw over
our customers.
Oh yeah.
So they're arguing that charging consumers more money to opt out of snoop advertising,
so collecting user data and selling it to advertisers should be considered a perfectly
acceptable business practice.
What I want to know is where it came from in the first place.
Like when did I ever, aside from, you know, at the bottom of your statement, oh by the
way, our terms of service have been updated.
When did I ever say it was okay in the first place?
When did this ever become the status quo?
No, but that's that you just explained it.
Your terms of service are sitting somewhere and you're just supposed to read them every
time they've been updated and then be mad and then do nothing because Comcast is the
only provider in your area because they pushed out all the little guys.
So this is great.
And then hope for Google fiber.
They go on to say, thanks Comcast.
A bargained for exchange of information for service is a perfectly acceptable and widely
used model throughout the US economy, including the internet ecosystem.
Here's what I want to know.
When did the bargaining take place and, and where was the part where I got offered a discount?
Oh, that's what they're calling it now.
No, no, no, no.
Oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
Where was the part where I got offered a discount in the first place when they started augmenting
their revenue stream.
That is the bill that I pay, which I don't cause I don't use common retinitis.
So it would cost more without this exactly.
Which it wouldn't, by the way, it's like, I think about big picture things like this
sometimes where it's like a company can exist.
It seems it feels like, cause this is only the ones that you hear of in two different
like diametrically opposed States, either completely screwing over their customers for
as much money as they could possibly get and forcing their way into, you know, politics
and whatever, or being really nice to their customers and customers really liked them.
And that's why they make a lot of money.
It seems like it's only ever one or the other again, probably because that's the only ones
you hear of, but it's like, how does a company like Comcast continue to exist when all you
ever hear about them is just pissed off people?
Is it because they have their fingers in all the politics where you have to own everything
like that's, ah, it's like the human race makes progress 10 steps forward, nine steps
back.
We're getting there, but it's so frustrating to see the obvious answers to things just
be ignored.
And it's like, you know what?
Don't screw over your customers and they'll, it'll be fine.
They'll be fine.
Everything will work out in the end.
Long-term Comcast isn't even the first one to do this.
AT&T actually launched as a $30 or more premium if you wanted to opt out of their internet
preferences, which is a deep packet inspection program that tracks your browsing behavior
around the internet.
So that was back in Austin in late 2014 when they launched their gigabit internet service.
Oh, I had picked something, let me see here.
The next Google maps update could show how bad parking is.
Yeah, that would be actually very, very useful.
I'm going to go ahead and pull up the original article here, which is from Daily Mail while
you go through this.
This is a fact from my father who is a city planner.
Every car that you add to like the general, like a city requires seven parking spaces.
So you're going to have to justify that.
I know we've had this conversation distributed across, across the city because you have to
park at home and to park at the supermarket, you have to park at the movie theater, you
have to park at the bar.
It's like seven on average.
Like can I move it around a little bit parking at the bar?
I don't.
I'm done.
Yes.
Anyway, that's just, that's just a fun fact.
I actually haven't looked much into it.
I just believe my father when he says these things, but I'll get more info on that if
it's disputed.
Anyway, let's see if Taryn learns not to listen to his dad before he turns 30.
So I plan to lie to my kids about all kinds of hilarious stuff.
You're up.
Oh, okay.
Pull up the thing so people can look at it.
Okay.
Next Google maps update could show how bad parking is.
Parents per currently in beta could include text based alerts informing users to parking
shortages at their destination.
Oh, that's great because it already tells you if the store is going to be closed by
the time you get there.
Yep.
It's not always accurate, but sure.
Will allow for you to, just these little comments, man.
Will allow for you to account for both traffic and parking scarcity at your destination.
Service will likely be based on total number of spaces available in a given area taking
into account time of day and nearby public events.
Oh yeah.
Cause I went to the laundromat one day and it's like, where's all the parking?
Oh my goodness.
I can't get through.
Update also includes a feature that will fix when you accidentally reorient the direction
of the map with whatever, keeping it always in point, keeping it in always point north
mode.
No, whatever.
More details to come.
I like that.
Cause I fricking hate that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When I pinch to zoom in or out and it's like, no, that's not how I want to look at it.
That's not just for the parking.
That's for the whole map.
Okay.
Well then that's great.
I was like, why is it just for parking?
That's good.
Really interested to see how this impacts businesses because in the, in the analog age,
people would just have to like remember, Oh, there's not much parking on Robson during
the evenings.
And on Sunday Costco in the evening is nuts, right?
You would just have to remember stuff like that.
You know what?
You drive a bike, you never ever have these problems.
No one on earth drives a bike, ride a bike.
But now what you'll be able to do as a consumer, so it's like the digital consumer, the millennial
consumer is going to all of a sudden start shifting business away.
Like just do Google making this one update.
The millennial consumer is going to start going somewhere else in the first place.
Yeah.
For the sake of finding easier parking.
I see it happening.
Well, you know what I do whenever I drive anywhere, which isn't often cause I buy whatever,
but I will always do Google map instructions to my destination because it routes you around
traffic blockages in theory.
Well, I've had very good luck with it for the most part.
I've had some experiences not that long ago, sitting in traffic with a red line completely
between me and my destination.
Do you remember that day?
It doesn't tell you to get off.
Do you remember the day you guys did the hot dog channel super fun hot dog Olympics?
No I didn't.
I didn't participate.
Well, I was trying to get back to the office and there was a massive accident.
Oh yeah.
And so I fired up Google maps as I realized it was slowing down and it didn't, I saw a
red line all the way.
So it knew it was taking a long time, but my update like, or I'm sorry, my estimated
time of arrival was the same.
Only ticked one minute for every minute that passed.
Like it didn't update to say that it was going to take longer.
You know what?
At all system is in progress at all.
They're working on it.
What can I say?
It works better to have it open than to not have it.
So I'll always check, always check with it, avoided lots of congestion that way.
Jazz hands.
I do have an update.
This is really important because we talked about this on a previous wan show and the
facts of the matter are a little bit more complicated than they originally made out
to be by some Western media publications using VPNs, what UAE residents need to know.
So it's not always illegal to be very clear.
That is not what happened.
Sorry about that.
The legality actually hasn't changed and not all residents in the UAE who use the technology
could face imprisonment and fines.
So the confusion surrounding the impact of the law stemmed from inaccurate reporting
by foreign news websites according to a UAE based lawyer.
So what has been amended in the cyber crime law is the amount of fines that offenders
will face in addition to the existing provision on imprisonment.
So a senior associate at Clyde and Co suggested, so this is a lawyer, suggested that private
individuals aside from corporate organizations don't run the risk of going to jail and paying
a fine as long as they don't use a VPN to commit a crime.
That's all there is to it.
Oh, how would you know?
The use of the technology may still be punishable.
Well, basically what they're saying, basically what they're doing is they're taking something
that's very difficult to track and putting a horrendous punishment on it so they can
make an example out of whoever gets caught because it's fines up to like half a million
US dollars and imprisonment for like years.
So you just have to find a VPN that does not keep logs or at least says that they does
not keep logs.
And who really knows with all the gag orders going around, would you, would you knowledgeable
I am about something sort of, would you bet half a million dollars on any of that?
That's what they're, that's what they're half a million dollar fine.
That's what they want you to consider when you're like, I just want to, you know, pirates
to movies or I could, you know, be in the slammer and I mean, there's been a lot of
half a million dollars.
There's been a lot of debate about that sort of creating very, very harsh punishments for
crimes and whether that makes more sense than correctional facilities, especially around
the death penalty.
And also just like a general little bit of a punishment for everyone rather than a huge
punishment for some people, but the issue is catching them.
So there's been a lot of debate as to whether a, whether stiffer penalties actually serve
as a deterrent or whether the people committing crimes are just criminals and always assuming
they won't get caught regardless of what the penalty happens to be or not be.
Well, it's been, it's been sort of demonstrated either way and it's an ongoing debate cause
it especially centers around the death penalty.
Right.
Yeah.
Cause yeah.
Cause there's no hope for rehabilitation with the death penalty.
Yeah.
Like that's it.
So, and basically they're saying that there's, you know, Oh, well you should just make it
the death penalty for everything because then no one will commit crimes.
Yeah.
That'll work.
They'll die.
Yeah.
There's a Star Trek episode about that.
Exactly.
So this has been a debate for decades, literally decades.
Um, so I'm not sure if it'll end up working out for them in this case, but I guess we
shall find out.
This gives me some hope for humanity.
Facebook has tweaked their algorithm to show you less clickbait.
So the original article here is from the BBC Facebook to suppress clickbait stories and
Facebook let me tell you when they want to suppress something, man, do they know how
to do that?
They suppress something.
So they created new guidelines around sponsored posts that make it so that we have to put
hashtag ad and we have to, which was already the case, but we also have to tag on Facebook,
the company that sponsored it.
We have to tag their Facebook page and this is so that Facebook can basically turn around
and offer that company a chance to promote that post and what they do is they bury those
posts.
Oh, because you put ad on them and because you put, yeah, yeah.
So they're making it.
Oh yeah.
So their terms of service is that we have to identify it.
We have to identify who paid for it to them in a way that they can act on and then they
will just crush the reach of it.
There is a whole, there's two videos by Derek of Veritasium that you can watch about.
It's called Facebook fraud where he talks about promoting a page, promoting a fake page
and promoting his real page and how the more you pay in, the more you need to pay in.
There's just a huge number of problems with this whole like Facebook incentivizing you
having to pay them money to get any kind of visibility.
It reminds me a lot of microtransactions in games like Pokemon Go for example, where once
you start paying to play, you pretty much are stuck paying forever and it's just like
more money and every single thing that you do pushes you more towards giving them money.
So like that's not fun for anybody.
We paid for Facebook reach once.
Did we?
Yep.
Why did we do that?
I decided to try it.
What happened?
We got a few more reviews on the post and then it prompted me to pay more to get more
views.
Oh, what a surprise.
I just said that.
And honestly compared to creating, I mean this is something that I think for, for soulless
imaginationless companies might make sense to pay for reach, but for content creators
where our entire business is making content that people actually care about, for content
creators it is much, much cheaper and more effective to just make good content.
Yes.
The SEO thing for this is content is king.
But it doesn't help us when they intentionally crush certain posts.
Oh yeah.
Well of course they will.
It's just, I mean I stopped doing Facebook stuff like ages ago.
Like they're not cool anymore.
I'm surprised you ever were on Facebook.
Facebook used to be cool.
In the chat, tell us about when Facebook was cool.
It used to be cool.
Hold on.
We're going to stop pull this.
It's just this nonsense BS thing.
We're going to stop pull this.
Hold on.
We're going to stop pull this.
I don't remember what update it was.
I think it was like the timeline update where I was like, okay, I'm sick of this now.
I'm not going to keep on going.
It was a great way to keep in contact with your high school buddies.
Like if you watch the movie, what is it called?
Social network or maybe the social network.
Boom.
All right guys, check it out.
Check it out.
Facebook used to be cool.
Okay.
Twitch chat.
Very cool in that movie.
Twitch chat says 1990 ICQ was cool.
MySpace was cool.
It was cool.
It was also stupid, but it was also cool.
2006, 2009 year 1800.
This is why we never consult Twitch chat about anything by the way.
Well, this is what you're learning the hard way today.
What do you know?
What do I know?
I know not to ask Twitch chatting.
No, I was looking at the camera and asking that.
All right.
55% of people are saying Facebook was cool with 45% on my team.
Oh, well you didn't add turnip in there.
So I think all the trolls are on your team.
The trolls are not on my team.
Yeah.
They like never on my team.
They do not like me.
Okay.
The trolls love to hate on me.
It was cool.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
Do you want to throw John in here?
Because there were a couple of things that I wanted to do.
Presumably at his desk.
I'll go.
I'm bringing my M&M's with me.
I'm going to jump right into our next topic here.
Oh, thank you.
It's like a little M&M Santa.
The M&M's are a little salty.
I can't tell if that's like sweat or not.
Anyway, original article here is from Eurogamer.net.
Hi, Linus.
Hey.
How's it going?
Hey, everyone.
We have so many hosts today.
I actually like this.
Which one am I?
Number three?
You're number three.
Yeah.
The Xbox One S has a performance boost and it has been revealed and it has apparently
been benchmarked by Eurogamer.net.
Have you looked into this one at all?
No, I haven't.
It's like most of the topics I want to do what you do with Taran.
You didn't mark them.
I set up at the near the top.
I didn't know if near the top meant at the top.
At the top.
Next time put John.
I'm sorry, John.
It's fine.
That's fine.
We can talk about the Xbox One S. Let's do it.
So it was released August 2nd.
Has a GPU clock speed of 914 megahertz.
Wow.
How many?
Wow, Vancouver.
914 megahertz.
914 megahertz.
That's up from 853 on the older version.
It supports 4K as well as HDR media and gaming.
It's amazing what you can do with, what is that, 61 megahertz these days?
Who made the GPU?
Do we know?
It's still AMD.
Okay.
4K Ultra HD Blu-ray and 4K video streaming are supported.
That's a positive.
That's a plus.
HDR supported for games and video.
I just said that.
Okay.
Notes are redundant.
Important note, HDMI 2.0 will not be included.
So 4K is only available and up to 30 FPS.
So still, even now, they're not putting HDMI 2.
No.
When is this coming out?
So the thing to bear in mind is that this is based on an AMD, I forget what the architecture,
but it's GCN whatever revision, which did not support.
So it's like a generation or two old.
So it's a generation, yeah, I think it's two architectural generations old, but depending
on how you divide up AMD's lineup, given that they have products that are literally three
generations old still in their lineup.
And they've been rebadged.
Yeah, they've been rebadged.
It's really, really hard to draw a clear line.
It upscales 1080p or other content to 4K and Microsoft says, some games, ones that utilize
dynamic resolution and or unlocked frame rates may see a very minor performance improvement.
Our testing internally has shown this to be pretty minor and is only measurable on certain
games.
So we didn't want to make it a selling point for the new console.
So yeah, upscaling hasn't been a selling point for a while on basically anything so consoles.
Is this, what do you think of the Xbox One S?
What's the price point?
Do we know?
Yeah, it's out, isn't it?
I don't know.
I don't care.
I have no idea what the price point is.
I'm sorry.
I pay, I pay so little attention.
dbrand actually contacted me recently asking if I wanted an Xbox One S with their skin
on it for review.
And I was like, Oh, when's it coming?
And he was like, like, I have it.
I'm like, Oh, okay, sorry.
So are we just giving this a gigantic, a gigantic shrug and then I move on to, there was one
that I really wanted to talk to you about.
It was the 6% Netflix tax for Pennsylvania.
Right.
Well, I mean, you know, people compare the console and the PC space so much, but I mean,
I really feel like consoles or for a different type of consumer, they just want to plug something
in and go for it and they don't care.
Whoa.
That's a lot better.
Why was this up here?
Taron put it there.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Geez.
What are we going to do with that guy?
You tell me, but he, I don't know.
But uh, so I mean in that vein, I guess it would make, I think if you're in the console
market, the price, it might matter like a little bit less or say, Oh, you can get so
much more performance on a PC for this amount of money.
But at the same time, if you're saying, Oh, I just want something I can plug in and go
with and not have to worry about drivers or putting anything together and I want it to
do four K, then there you go.
So basically the Xbox one S is just another console to you.
It doesn't matter that it's smaller or like 60 megahertz faster.
All right.
Serious question.
Let's move on to this one's pretty interesting.
There's will be a 6% Netflix tax for citizens of Pennsylvania, USA.
So you want to want to walk us through this?
The docs here, by the way.
So it's Netflix is Hulu is Spotify.
If you have a, um, if you have like a Spotify premium subscription, it's so basically all
that stuff is going to get taxed now and you kind of streaming media thing.
So let's see.
What I want to understand is what would be the justification for a tax on streaming media?
The state might be broke like a lot of the states are, Hey, here's an easy way to make
money.
Let's just tax this thing that everyone else is watching instead of paying for cable.
So really that you think it's that simple.
So do you think it's as simple as them not get, okay, so a cable subscription is closer
to a hundred dollars a month, right?
Do you think it's as simple as them not getting there?
And I'm going to throw an arbitrary number because sales tax varies wildly from state
to state and even within Canada actually will real quick for you that it says right here,
done to help offset a $1.3 billion hole in the state budget.
Okay.
There you have it, but please continue.
So do you think this is as simple enough a calculation that we could just go, okay, so
a cable bill used to be a hundred dollars a month and let's say they had a 10% uh, you
know, sales tax and so they get 10 bucks for your cable bill.
So as people stop spending money on cable and they start buying Netflix subscriptions
for $7 or $8 a month, now they have to just charge like a $7 $8 levy to make up the difference.
I mean, is that what's happening here?
I don't know.
I mean, you already get stuck with like however many surcharges on your cable bill.
They might not call them taxes, but they're often like government fees or like something
or another.
So I don't know.
I think, I think states recently have gotten very, very upset when there are certain things
that people just buy just like you would buy anything else with or just how you would buy
anything else and they don't get, don't get a cut of the taxes for it.
Like cross border shopping online.
Yeah, back in North Carolina, where I'm from, they recently started having the Amazon tax.
They call it a use tax, but it's really just another sales tax where if you get an Amazon
receipt and they didn't charge you tax on it, you're supposed to, supposed to every
year say, Oh, I bought $30 worth of widgets or toilet paper or whatever else from Amazon.
And, and so you owe the state like, you know, a dollar or two on your tax return, but almost
nobody does it.
It's kind of a joke, but they still try.
I mean, that's the thing that's going to make that, that makes law so complicated in the
United States because that's what it is.
It's a United States.
It's not, it is hard.
Okay.
Don't take this away, but it's not as much of a country as it is a conglomerate of like
city States, but, but like actual States, that's part of, part of why the civil war
happened.
Yeah, exactly.
For a long time.
So yeah, it's not like America's happy about this situation either.
So, so I mean, here in Canada, it got us, it was as simple as the federal government
said, no, this will not fly.
This happened about four or five, five years ago.
They tried to attack streaming sources up here.
Did that happen?
No, not streaming services.
Cross border, cross border online orders.
Right, right.
And basically what they did is they put the onus on the retailer.
They said, okay, well fine, NCIX, you're located in British Columbia.
Good for you.
You are now responsible for collecting provincial sales tax from every province and submitting
that to those provinces done.
And it was implemented within, I think about a year.
That seems a lot simpler, but I don't know.
I don't know if it's just because we have so many more people or what, but, um, but
I also understand what you're saying, you know, the federal character of the U S and
Oh, like every state used to decide how they're going to try to get their cut.
So very, very interesting to me.
Yeah.
It's not going to come out to be a ton of money.
Like if you pay for, you know, if you send what, like 10 bucks a month on Netflix description
over the course of the year, that doesn't work out to be a whole lot, but still, you
know, there's going to be people who are angry about that, you know?
So all right, well I actually don't have that much left.
I'm sorry.
I screwed up and did the topics that you wanted to help with earlier on in the show.
Next time we do this, I'll, I'll make it more clear.
Is there anything else you wanted to jump through?
Did we talk about the set top box thing from the copyright office?
We didn't actually.
I think that one is our last topic.
Sure.
Uh, hold on.
Let me just pull it up here.
Set.
Oh crap.
Control F set is not the best, um, offset set top.
There we go.
All right.
So the original article here is from ours.
Technica.
I'm just going to pull this up while John walks you guys through what's going on with
this, this baby right here.
Oh, great.
As soon as you said it, my like Google doc just jumped everywhere, but let's find it
again.
Okay.
So I'll start.
Oh, there we go.
Okay.
Okay.
Go ahead.
Okay.
So we're going to talk about the FCC and the U S copyright office about whether cable companies
should be forced to unlock their set top boxes.
So right now, if you have a cable subscription, at least in the U S you get like a little
box that sits either above or below your TV, you hook it up with an HDMI cable, but everything
that comes to the box is copy protected in some form or another.
So it's not like in the good old days where you could just have a VCR recording thing
you want to onto a blank tape, um, is you can't just, you know, plug in a USB sticker
or a computer and say, okay, record.
To be clear, there are ways around it.
There are ways around it, but if you're just trying to do it without implementing any kind
of, you know, subversion mechanism or whatever, then yeah, you can't do it.
So, and it is illegal to copy encrypted content, but that's a whole other conversation.
Yes it is.
Okay.
So basically what's, so what's going on now?
So they're trying to wrangle over whether they're going to adopt this, um, FCC rule.
Um, the FCC is being a little bit more pro consumer in this case, they want to force
the cable companies to say, yo, you have to unlock your set top boxes.
So if a paying customer wants to watch whatever it is, Game of Thrones, whatever else, um,
and they're not in front of their TV at the time it's being shown, but they also, they
want to watch it like somewhere else.
They don't want to watch the DVR, they have to let the consumer be able to do that.
Right.
And the copyright office is saying, no, we can't because then you're just going to crap
all over the copyright owner's rights and there's no way, there's no way to like license
this out correctly and all this other stuff.
Um, so they're trying, they're trying to figure that out right now.
So
ah, and I mean you got to remember too that the cable providers are obviously going to
be putting pressure on anyone that they possibly can to salvage more ways for them to make
revenue.
I mean if they could sell the ability to stream it to your phone, to yourself while it's happening,
while you're on the bus, I'm sure they'd love to do that.
Don't, don't some of them already do that?
I believe so.
Yeah.
And all that, but they're trying to, they're trying to like increase or the sec rule is
designed to try to increase flexibility for cable customers.
And I remember that, well, I don't remember because I was either not alive or very young
when this happened, but we actually studied this a little bit in law school when the VCR
came out and that was like the latest and greatest thing, uh, TV, TV studios and movie
studios and cable providers were concerned that, oh, this is going to lead up incredibly
rapid copyright infringement and this is going to just, you know, undermine the entire system.
So it ended up going to court and we all kind of know how that turned out.
People use VCRs anyway to record Urkel or whatever people watch back in the nineties
and everything was okay.
The show is called Family Matters.
And people were still buying cable subscriptions.
So this is, this is kind of similar, but I think here the concern might be a bit different
because back in the nineties you weren't just going to send out 2 million free copies of
a TV show cause you felt like it, but these days it takes that amount of time to upload
something onto the internet.
So, and it's also a lot more user-friendly to record these days.
Um, like back then you had to, you had to hover over your VCR and what's the difference
between LP and EP?
I don't know what this is.
Oh no!
It's long play versus extended play.
Why are they named like this?
Um, so I think that's pretty much it for the WAN Show then guys, thank you very much for
tuning in.
Thanks to our special guests who joined us, John, Taren and Nick.
Actually, I don't want to thank Taren.
Thanks to our special guests who joined us, John and Nick.
And uh, Taren was here too, and we will see you again next week.
There goes the train.
Same bat time, same bat channel.
There goes that train again.
Fantastic.
It is really nice, and it's really nice streaming without any technical difficulties.
Yeah, I can't believe this is going to end.
No, closer to on-screen than I have been.
And just like, I've got everything working now, and the stream computer isn't being flaky,
so like, volume is all leveled correctly before the show starts.
That's good.