 All right ladies and gentlemen welcome to the WAN show and everyone else too. Welcome to the WAN show. We are finally live. I was helping Luke create... Is he... what the... I was helping Luke create custom length Ethernet cables by basically looking at what he was doing going, wow, gee, that looks too hard and then going and getting some Ethernet cables I happened to buy a few months ago that happened to be the length of the cables he was trying to make and handing them to him. So he should be wrapping that up pretty darn quickly and then he'll be joining me here on the show. We've got a great show for you guys today. Gonna be a lot of discussion around Mobile World Congress. Obviously that was the big thing that happened this week. Lots of news about the latest happenings in the desktop computer world. I need like a cricket sound effect that I can play. So lots of stuff from the biggest handset makers, your Samsung, your LG, your Caterpillar. Evidently that's a thing. So we'll be talking a little bit more about that. Actually the Caterpillar phone looks really interesting. I'm hoping to be able to get one for review. What else we got going on? DirectX 12 explicit multi GPU mode has been tested by PC World. So we're gonna check that out. I don't know. I'm sure there was something else that's interesting. AeroCool's Dreambox chassis kit. Potentially a more maker-friendly chassis than we've ever seen before. And software piracy apparently hurts Linux adoption. A research study find. So more on that at 11. This is so funny. I got a guy in the chat that's like, sorry I'm late. Can you start over? Like yeah, I wish that was a thing that I could do. All right. So here we go. We're starting over. Welcome to the WAN show guys. Boom. Let's roll the intro. Oh boy. All right. So I think the first topic today is gonna be, let's see, what can I handle without my dynamic duo Ultimo sidekick here? I'm sure there's something. You know what? Why don't we jump right into the Mobile World Congress stuff. If you have to go make ethernet cables somewhere, I think that's totally fine. Because basically I'm gonna be listing specs for the next 20 minutes, which I actually won't. And by the way, the battery on your laptop's low. Get wrecked. I love how Dell says strike the F1 key to continue. It's like you have to be really sure. They want you to not press, not push, not even hit. You gotta strike. You gotta hit with precision, accuracy, intimidation. I'm just stalling for time at this point. All right. So let's jump into the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. Unlike last time, it looks like we're going to be seeing an S7 and an S7 Edge that aren't just complete equivalents of each other with one of them having a curved screen. So with the S6 and the S6 Edge, they were actually kind of two versions of both. There was the Note, which is sort of like a Galaxy S6 larger. And then there was the Edge Plus. So this time around, the S7 and the S7 Edge are just totally different. So the Edge now is a larger phone. So it's actually got a 5.4-inch display versus the 5.5-inch display of the S7 Edge. They're both running quad HD Super AMOLED displays and they're going to be very similar to their predecessors in that regard. The camera is a big change on going from the S6 series to the S7 series. So they're going down from a 16-megapixel camera to a 12-megapixel camera this time around. They are doing the whole HTC Ultra Pixel thing, except that there's a power bar there. No, the other one. So they're actually reducing the pixel count in order to use larger pixels for better light capture, especially in low-light conditions. But hopefully, like Apple, they're doing it right. So they're doing it in a way that's not going to hurt the performance of the camera in more normal shooting scenarios, something that many people complained about with the 1M7. This is cool. So we are getting back the IP68 water and dust resistance. So they are saying that it's going to allow for submersion in up to one and a half meters of water for 30 minutes at a time. And we're getting some beefed up specs, of course. So Snapdragon 820, Exynos processors in some regions of the world. This is so bizarre to me, the way Samsung does this. It's like, this region, this and that region. These people want to process this way. But then again, and you know what's funny is they get away with it. Like you look at how much crap Apple took just over using two different foundries for the same damn chip design. Meanwhile, Samsung's like, oh, yeah, we're just a completely different processor. Don't worry about it. At least that is done by region, though. With the Apple one, it was like a gamble. Yep. What one do I get? Who knows? Complete poop mix, so to speak. Some other big changes. So we are getting back. Micro SD expansion, Samsung either heard their customers loud and clear, or this is nothing that they didn't know already. And they intentionally withheld that from the last generation to hope for there to be some reason, some reason for people to upgrade from the S6 to the S7. There's also four gigs of RAM this time around. Actually, I don't know if the, I know, I think there were three. S6. I'm, I'm, see, it's all blurring together because it's like, yay, new phones, back bump. Really premium looking devices this time around with like glass and metal and all that kind of stuff. So that's again, huge step in the right direction. Love that from Samsung because they do it really well when they decide to do it. No removable battery, but the capacity on the S7 looks pretty good. It's got a 3000 milliamp hour battery and that combined with Android 6.0 Marshmallow with any power saving features we gained there should be enough for you to get great battery life, even if you use the always on display feature. So Samsung is claiming that you lose only about a half a percent of battery per hour in its tests by having the display on all the time. So that's just displaying love. So critical information. I mean, this is something that I've seen before. You've probably seen before things like smartwatches that use AMOLED displays will have an always on display so that, oh, it's funny. I'm holding tape. There you go. You can whatever you can barely see it. Whatever here against the purple background. I don't do it. There you can. Oh, and I've seen sort of ambient display modes on phones before like the droid turbo that had that proximity sensor that you could just kind of wave at it whenever you want to see it. Honestly, that works really well, but this seems pretty good and it won't necessarily be on all the time. It does have a proximity sensor as well. It just uses it for the opposite purpose. So it'll actually turn off those pixels that it's illuminating to tell you the time or notifications or whatever else and whenever it's in your pocket or face down on a table or whatever else. Although if you're the kind of person who puts your phone face down on a table, feel bad. Feel bad about that because there can be small like micro fragments of actually surprisingly hard minerals. Like I don't know if people know this, but like sand is not necessarily all native. Sandstone. Okay, there's all kinds of minerals and elements and deposits and junk in just regular ordinary sand to the point where my iPhone 6s is scratched to crap just from going in and out of my pocket from getting bits of dust and debris and sand in my pocket because I didn't put a Phantom glass protector on it. I know I even have one. I have two. I have a normal one and a privacy one and I was just like, you know, YOLO. I'm going bareback on the 6s because I did so well with the Droid Turbo, which doesn't have a Phantom glass protector for it. So I never even had the option and I'd like had it for over a year and I was like, oh, this thing's still doing really good. I'm like getting good at this like taking care of my phone thing. With that said, not all glass are not all scratch resistant glass is made equal even from Gorilla Glass. Like I swear with exactly the same treatment. I have encountered phones that scratch very easily they're using the same kind of glass as ones that just seem to be completely bulletproof like that Droid Turbo and seem to be nearly impossible to scratch. I think there's a binning process that goes on that Corning seems to not talk about where there are different grades of even every type of Gorilla Glass and it might be a little touch of the old luck of the draw as to whether you get a good one or one that is not as good. We can briefly go over the S7 Edge. So larger display like I said five and a half inches. The back of the device now has a curve to it as well making it more comfortable to hold. Has a 3600 milliamp hour battery and other than that looks like pretty much the same darn thing. So I'm doing way fewer phone reviews these days. There's a couple of reasons for it. Number one is I just don't think they're that different from each other anymore. Yeah and number two is that I was getting it was really wearing on me because not all reviewers do this but I actually switch to the phone outright that I am reviewing. I take my SIM out of my normal phone and while these days because I use Google Authenticator for pretty much everything. I do still need to carry around my daily driver phone because switching over all that stuff is a real bear. I only use the other phone for everything else and it has just been wearing on me to be switching phones all the time like that. So I only plan to review one of the Galaxy S7 and the S7 Edge. So I'm going to do a straw pull here guys. I want you to let me know which one you want to see. Here we go. Straw pull man. They make it easy to do pulls. Boop! There you go. So I want to see what you guys want to see. I mean I want to know what you guys want to just okay whatever I'm going to click results now. Some more interesting phones. So the LG G5 seems to have kind of jumped out in front of everyone else on the whole modular phone concept. Certainly not to the same degree as someone really guys the Edge. It's a five and a half inch device. I can practically write that review right now. The phone's really nice. It's really fast. Samsung continues to make improvements to touch whiz, but it's too big for my hands. I actually am personally a lot more interested in the S7 than I am in the Edge. Apparently very few of you are interested in it at all though. This is one of the lowest percentage voter turnouts I've ever seen. We've got 4,700 people watching and like a thousand of you voted. Okay, there we go. It's a little better. 1,500. Looks like the S7 is making up some ground here. But wow, you guys are with me on the whole phones just not really being that interesting anymore thing. It looks like the G5 does look legitimately interesting though. So not modular to the same degree as something like the phone blocks concept where the idea was you'd actually have like almost like a breadboard with like a screen in front of it. And then you just have like these modules that you can modularly plug in or take out and even claiming to be able to do things like a hot swap a battery module while the phone is running. That's not out yet. That's something that's in a lab somewhere that probably will see the light of day in the future. But for now the G5 does offer some modularity. So the original article here, this is posted by Nin Shadow on the forum. The last one was Chrisro996 and our original article here is from Android Authorita. So they've got basically most of the phone is not modular. So phone blocks was like, yeah, you could like put in a new processor and RAM and storage and blah, blah, blah. This one, most of it is not modular. It is pretty much a phone. They've still got the power button on the back. Although thankfully for me, I prefer this. They've moved the volume rocker to the side of the phone. Then it's got I think it's a 2800 milliamp hour battery. It's got some dude holding it up here. Design and build quality. Oh, yeah, they're going for a much, much more like premium feeling design to it. It's got this actually kind of reminds me of Nexus S, the original Nexus. This actually looks like this rounded business here. It feels like kind of a dated design language. Yeah, Nexus S. Yeah, like the white one that I had. Yeah, it really reminds me of that with the with like a sort of the curved look to the bump. But I mean, as long as it feels good in the hand, then I'm not going to give them. I'm not going to give them too much flack over that. But there's a few unique features to this one that actually make it really interesting to me. So Snapdragon 820, Adreno 530, 4 gigs of RAM. Don't worry. None of that was unique. Yes, it is 2800 milliamp hours for the battery. I did just check on that. No support for wireless charging. Oh, yeah. The last thing that's a total bummer and a missed opportunity about the S7 and the S7 Edge. Micro micro B USB connector. Hey, it's 2016. If it's not type C, I don't want to see it anymore. Get it? I don't want to see anything else. It's not a joke. It's just dumb. Anyway, so the G5 supports quick charge 3.0, but no wireless charging. It has a dual camera setup. This is where we're starting to get into the cool stuff. So it has a normal, it's funny my notes say normal angle. Dang it, cool. So it just has a more standard 16 megapixel camera. Then this is cool. It has a wide angle 8 megapixel camera and the phone can actually stitch inputs from the two cameras into one image. And it also allows you to switch between the 135 degree wide angle and the regular camera manually within the app with an instant transition. This is one of those, it is so difficult to get the best of both worlds unless you just put two cameras on it. Problems and LG ran out and solved it by putting two cameras on it. Because one of the things that I liked so much about the S6 was the relatively wide angle lens, particularly on the selfie camera, which made it so that you didn't have to have that, you know that selfie look. Like the, you got the one arm out and you're like trying to make your face square to the shot and trying to look natural, but you can't get it out far enough to get a decent picture. Well with a nice wide angle lens you don't have to. You can be very comfortable, you can be very square and the phone can be very close to you. So having the ability to take wider shots of close up subjects or, and this is the problem with that, or to be able to get a reasonable clarity on a shot of something like, you know, you're at a hockey game or a basketball game or something and you know, you're that person, because everyone does it and it's like, oh, this picture of this player is special because I took it. Then you're actually able to do that in a way that you otherwise can't. Alright, aluminum unibody, power button built into the rear fingerprint sensor. Fingerprint sensors are a great thing, especially when they're well implemented. I am such a huge fan of that. I really wish it was better on the Z5 Compact. It's a funny thing about this phone. It was something that I was not able to really tackle properly in my review, but that I can follow up with now. No matter how many times I reset my fingerprint in the settings, it works great for a bit and then stops working great. And while you could say, well Linus, it's obvious the answer is that you're a morphling. And your fingerprints change over time. I really don't think that's it because the iPhone 6S that I reviewed before that and I'm now using now after that review, works instantly just fine anyway. So let's get into the modules. So what they're allowing you to do is swap. It looks like a single module, so you have to kind of pick, okay, what's my specialty? So they're allowing you to remove the bottom cap of the phone and swap in these modules. So this allows access to a replaceable battery or you could add something like a camera grip, which gives you manual control for shutter and zoom, as well as an increase in the battery capacity, so another 1200 milliamp hours. So that brings it up to 4000 milliamp hours if you have that grip on it. They've also got one called the LG Hi-Fi Plus. So that's an audio module from Bang & Olufsen, which features a 32-bit, as if that means anything, DAC as well as a dedicated 3.5 millimeter headphone port. And there are apparently more modules to come. I can't think of too many modules that I would particularly want to add to a phone. So I guess I'd like to take this opportunity to hand off to you guys and ask you, what exactly would you add to a phone? So let's do Twitter blitz here. I want to hear from you guys at LinusTech on Twitter. What module would you like to see from LG? Let's go ahead and put that right there. PC building a fridge, does it work? Come on, let's bring on those tweets. Bring on those tweets. As many battery modules as I can get. Who does an hour-long podcast all by himself? Not this guy. And not this guy. I love your timing. We've actually both done that before. We have both done that before. All right, come on, guys. Come on. That thing that I'm working on is pretty much as far as it can go until I need to make large amounts of noise. Okay, cool. We can talk about that. Why don't we talk about a couple of the videos we've got coming? YOLO, right? Why don't you do yours first? I could just do it in the background. Do it in the back or do it in the background? Maybe both? In the background. So we're talking about that one? Does Twitch allow that? Yeah, sure. So basically, essentially, I live in a rented place like a lot of people. And when you live in a rented place, usually they don't want you to drill giant holes in the wall because that can suck. Sometimes you can get away with it by just not telling them, but that's not really an option with my landlord. So instead of putting my networking on a wall, I'm putting it on a board, which I can just lean against the wall. Because up until now, all of my networking kit, my access point, my router, my modem, my giant switch, all of it was just in a pile. And all the cables were just going everywhere, and it was disgusting and horrible, and I hated it. Back to the pile! So instead, I'm mounting it on a board. That's what I'm doing over there. So when I was off screen, I was like Velcroing stuff down and routing cables and doing stuff like that. It's not perfect, but I'm doing it really fast. I bought a $1000 HDMI cable today. People on Twitter are freaking out. They're like, no, that's too waste of money. I'm like, I know, I know, I know. Trust me, I know. You guys who watch the WAN show, you guys are the inner circle, okay? So I'm not going to tweet out, I know, because if people have been watching long enough to follow on Twitter, and they don't know that I'm aware of the issues with $1000 HDMI cable, then they can just wait for the piece of content. They don't get to be inner circle, okay? So I know. The point of the video is that someone... Remember that I'm not buying an HDMI cable to own an HDMI cable. I am buying an HDMI cable to make a piece of content about a aforementioned HDMI cable. And the issue with the high-end cable industry is that you've either got the people who... I can't figure out why, but they either buy into the snake oil because they get given the cables, maybe, I'm guessing, or they buy into the snake oil because they bought the cables, they can't return them, and they can't admit that they got fleeced. And I think that's where a lot of this... Defending purchasing decisions. Yeah, I think that's where a lot of these myths get perpetuated, because the only people willing... the only people who have them to talk about them fall into one of those two camps, for the most part. So everyone else, all the other people who know better, are too smart to buy one. So what I'm doing here effectively is I am taking it for the team. Yeah. I just spent $1000 US dollars on an... Oh, that's so much worse....on an all-silver. We are talking silver wires, okay? Whoa! The premiumest of the premium, one-meter cable, and then I am legitimately going to benchmark it in a way that should actually be meaningful. Oh. Yeah, see, that's the part you didn't know, I bet. No. I thought you were just going to rag on it. Yeah, well, I am going to do that, too. That is unless it actually turns out to perform better, because in my benchmark, there is a chance. In fact, my benchmark will give it every advantage, because while watching a video or listening to audio over a aforementioned HDMI cable literally cannot, at least on this earth, be affected by the silver wires, I believe that it is possible, if the design of their cable is truly superior, that I will be able to overclock a monitor further with it. Oh. Because monitor overclocking is dependent on the cleanliness of the signal, as well as the headroom that's left in the scaler of the monitor. So my intention is to take a high refresh rate, high resolution, free sync monitor, so it's got a high powered scaler in it, and then using HDMI 1.4, I am going to overclock as high as I can with the silver cable, and overclock as high as I can with a $4 cable from Monoprice. If it performs better in a repeatable, consistent fashion, then the cable is superior, but that won't change anything about... It won't make it worth $1,000. It won't make it worth $1,000 in any meaningful way, because you could just get a DisplayPort cable. And you're not overclocking your home theater, because all the content you're watching on that runs at 24 to maximum 60 frames per second. Someone in the chat brought up a point saying, overclock your monitor, but you just spent $1,000 on a cable, so why didn't you just buy the better monitor? That's not the point. Because you can overclock better than the best monitor. Yeah. Huh? Huh? All right? Huh? Also, the point is just, is the cable better in any possible way at all? Yes. And so we are going to do our best to answer that question that no one cared about, because no one was going to buy that cable who watches our videos definitively. So yeah, I don't know. It should be cool. I'm looking forward to it, because that's the kind of stuff that's really fun for me, is taking the general wisdom and actually testing it, which I guarantee you, I guarantee you, almost every single person who says, expensive HDMI cables are a waste, has never used one. Which doesn't mean that they're wrong. It doesn't mean they're wrong, okay? I'm not going to... It just means they haven't used one. They're taking what someone else said as the truth. You're not wrong with me. I have not used one. I have not used one. Yep. So I'm going to use one for the first time. So we should validate our claims. Yep. Those are the workshops all about. You want to try it too? Sure. Okay. We'll both try it. We'll try it together. We'll audition the cable. We'll have a listening party. Check out how danceable it is. Ooh. Ooh. What other ones are ever going to get that reference? Oh, I think so. I think that's pretty famous. The danceable cables. Expensive cables. You should. Oh no. Heavens no. All right. So let's jump into... Ooh, this is great. This was supposed to buy goodbytes on the forum. I swear. I think he would actually curl up into a ball and die if someone else beat him to the punch on some positive Microsoft news. And this is some pretty positive Microsoft news. The HP Elite X3. We talked about the leaks last week, but obviously there are more details. It is announced and it is designed to be your Windows phone, laptop, and desktop. To which my reply would be, sorry, goodbytes, and everyone else who thinks this is relevant. This is not relevant. We're not there yet. It's running a Snapdragon 820. It is running 4 gigs of RAM. It's got... Hold on. I'm going to have to... It's being slow to switch between scenes for some reason. 4 gigs of RAM is not nearly enough. The amount of tabs that I run on my desktop... Casual desktop experience. Okay, it's not nearly enough for me. No, it's not nearly enough for you, but it's also a phone. I need 32 gigs of RAM for my tabs, bro. Me too, sadly enough. I run out of the 16 gigs of RAM on my computer upstairs sometimes. You like, inducted me. I used to be great. I'd have like 5 tabs open at a time. Lots of tabs is great. And then I used to laugh at you because you'd have way too many tabs open. And now I have like 4 windows of the same browser and they all have too many tabs. You want to hear the truth? What? You got busier. Yeah, it's true. And it's not about being too busy to close a tab. It's about that you're legitimately working on every single thing that's open in a tab. And when you get that busy, you start to think about your time very differently. The 3 seconds that it takes to type in a URL is not worth the organization of not just having that tab open already. And when you're really busy and you work on the same tasks repeatedly, you actually learn. You remember where it is. Yeah. Tab number 1 is my work Gmail. Tab number 2 is usually my second work Gmail for when I need to reply to something. Tab number 3 is going to be my personal Gmail. Well, no, not my personal, my YouTube, like personal Gmail. Tab number 4 is this. And you actually end. So it's like this chunk is usually like something I was working on a while ago and then I need to get back to this chunk is what I'm working on right now. It's not that hard to find things. It's faster than opening up a new tab. I have a whole window for form management, which has like the tiered system that you're just talking about. I have a whole window for like emails and like so like work email. I have work email inbox and then I work email like working on whatever this is. Social land. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Social land. Like whatever music is currently going on, all that kind of stuff is in that window. Then I have like working on video A and then working on video B. Yeah, man. Tab life. And all of those have stacked. Yeah. Tab life. Ridiculous. All right. So back to the Elite X3, which for... Firefox crashes like four times a day. Well, that's because it's Firefox. Chrome has its own issues that my Chrome at home is just brain explosion. Like total brain explosion. My Chrome on my laptop has another... has an issue too. Like whenever I VNC into our servers, Chrome... it's the one computer it doesn't work perfectly on. It's just... Just ridiculous. I remember the whole idea behind Chrome. Remember the commercials? Lightweight. No, I'm gonna get back to that. I have not forgotten it's sitting there with the new notifications waiting for me to hit that. Oh yeah, the light... yeah. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about the Elite X3 though. The most powerful Windows 10 mobile device you can get. 4150 milliamp hour battery. That I like. 5.96 inch AMOLED, quad HD display, quad core, Qualcomm, blah, blah, blah. 64 gigs of storage expandable to two terabytes with micro SD. Although if you're storing two terabytes of data on a micro SD card, you need to reevaluate your strategy. That's a really terrible idea. I don't... I can't think of anything that could be enough to be two terabytes, but that could be unimportant enough to put on a micro SD card. I could be wrong. It's got a 16 megapixel rear camera, 8 megapixel front camera, Windows Hello, Iris and fingerprint scanners. That's pretty darn cool. IP67 rating for dust and waterproof. Military standard 810 rating, one meter drop. Very nice. Qi and PMA wireless charging. Holy freaking crap. Bitlocker encryption. Image encryption. Yes, and here's where we get into the really interesting stuff. Because it has Continuum, it allows you to either wirelessly or... Oh yeah, USB 3.0 type C. Way to go. Wiredly... Shut up. Wiredly or wirelessly. You're so mean. Connect to a couple of accessories that HP has. So one is this dock that I forget what it's called. It has a stupid name. HP really needs to learn from Apple. Have a cool name. Pencil. Have a pretentious name. Because for better or for worse, it helps me remember it. That gives you a display port, which by the way can be adapted to HDMI. Two full-size powered USB 3.0 ports with device charging capability. One USB type C connector and a Kensington lock. And then there's actually a laptop that has no actual system in it. It has a 12.5 inch screen, keyboard, touchpad, speakers, headphone jack, Ethernet port, two full-size USB 3.0 connectors, one USB 3.0 type C connector, and a 48 watt hour battery that does not feature its own CPU. The phone actually transmits to the laptop wirelessly, so you can keep it in your pocket once it is connected to the laptop. Very, very cool. So hold on a second, Linus. That sounds awesome and it sounds like you're amped on this. Great point. Except the reason I'm not amped is because it needs two more generations. And this is not HP's fault. This is Intel's fault for not getting their head in the game on their mobile x86 processors. Tell me about this when it runs x86. Because the beauty of Windows is the application compatibility. The Achilles heel of Windows Mobile is the application compatibility. I mean, I was browsing aimlessly on the internet, and I came across an article that The Verge did on the apps that are not only not developing for Windows Mobile, but pulling their apps. And it was terrible. It was like American Airlines, like Pinterest. It was just devastating, devastating apps that are discontinuing development or flat out pulling their apps from the platform, citing a lack of users as the reason for it. So until you can tell me about x86, Intel-powered phones, I'm really not that interested. But when you can, wow, am I ever excited about this. Like, as someone who carries around a supremely OP laptop, I also have recognized that other than my Chrome hungry hungry hippoing, I don't need that much power when I'm out and about. So something like this could be fantastic if it has compatibility for all the stupid junk I needed to run. And is maybe a little bit more powerful. And is maybe a little bit more powerful. Because given two more generations, we're going to have 8 or 16 gigs of RAM in it. We're going to have a more powerful CPU. We're going to have everything that I can imagine today wanting, although my needs might change in the next year. And year or two, right? So it might get even worse. Razer has confirmed they're sending over a Blade Stealth. We're really late on that. I actually looked back at my emails, and they were like, let me get back to you tomorrow on availability. It was like five weeks ago. So today I was like, I'm getting requests to review the Blade Stealth. Like, do other people have reviews up? And there's some people with reviews that are like almost a month old at this point. I'm like, yo, are you guys sending one? They're like, oh, oh, yeah. So they're sending it. I'm hoping to get my hands on their core as early as possible. And I'm going to cut, yeah, the external GPU box. So I'm going to kind of dig a knife into their side and be like, yeah, you guys got me the Blade Stealth super late, so I really think I should be the first with the core. This is the kind of stuff that goes on behind the scenes. I don't know how much they like me, though, to be perfectly honest. Like, Razer, like, that's the thing is like I'll play those games, but like ultimately when the device arrives, I'm just going to say whatever. Like, Razer's gotten some pretty bad reviews here over the years. They've also gotten good ones. They've gotten good ones. They've gotten really good ones. Do a better job. Get a better review. They also, with that said, they also at least, you know, like I don't think they intentionally snubbed me on the Blade Stealth or like were late on the Blade Stealth. I think it was probably just a thing they missed. They have a pretty mature attitude about it when we say something negative about their products. Like, that's something that a lot of people I think worry about because we have relationships with pretty much every company whose products we review. Like, there's people that we're going to have to talk to when we publish a really negative review and say, yep, well, we didn't like it. Sorry, that's the reality of it. We've done that. We've got some pretty inflammatory stuff back sometimes. The mounting thing, are we still talking about that? Which one is that? The cooler. The cooler. Remember it was really hard to install and we were like, what the hell? Oh, yeah, the, who made that? Be quiet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So stuff like that. Like, yeah, they weren't happy about that. But actually, it's not like they stopped supplying us with review samples. And that's something that I think viewers, I hope viewers should recognize and understand is that even if we say something negative and even if they don't like it, the mature companies, the guys like a Corsair or a Razer, are going to continue to deal with us regardless, which I think is better for them, better for us, and better for the consumer. Because ultimately, if the company tries to control what we say, we will make the decision to either buy the products ourselves if we think they really need to be covered, or we just won't work with them anymore. And Astro is a perfect example of that. I actually covered that in a video that I don't believe is released yet. But they straight up never replied to an email from me after I released a negative review of the A50, which quite frankly is everything I said it was. It's just plain not very good. It was not as good as any of the other wireless headsets I tested it against. Right. Like, I'm sorry, I don't make the rules. Hashtag 420. And it's one of those things where I think it comes down to the pedigree of the company as well. Like, I like to bring up Corsair because they do a really good job of being big boys about it when we don't like something. With Corsair, we're like, yeah, we don't like it. They're like, okay, what can we do better? Yeah, that's a good point. Or no, we don't agree and this is why. Because their pedigree is enthusiasts. They actually care. If you look back at Astro, and I'm not going to make disparaging remarks or anything like that, but if you just read their company history, they are literally a branding firm. That is literally their core business that they did, and I believe still do, that they just kind of went, oh, well, we're really good at this. I'm assuming. Making assumption, okay, that it seems like what they did is they went, oh, we're really good at just taking something and building a brand around it, so why don't we do that with our own stuff? And so do I necessarily think that they approached it with the same level of enthusiasm and engineering adeptness, skill, knowledge that someone else might? My perception, based on that the product was straight up not as good as what Corsair and SteelSeries both brought to the table is no. So there you go. That's what I have to say about that. I don't know how I got on that topic. When I aimed. Let's jump into that Twitter blitz that I had promised to do with you guys before. So what would you guys want to see? A good vibration motor. It's such a good vibration motor. Anyway, PCI Express. I can't see I agree with that one. What was this question? What modules do you want to see? Oh, that would be. I forgot the question but turn it up. You're correct. Maybe an antenna upgrade. That's an interesting thought. Although I don't think we're antenna limited the same way we were when we had to pull up the little thing before we could make a call. More storage. Okay, like if you don't want micro SD storage, like if you want SSD storage, then I could kind of see that. 3D scanner. That's such a giant add-on module. Yeah. It seems like you wouldn't be able to go, okay, I want more storage and battery. Or maybe not micro. You use full size SD and you get like two of them. Or no, if it had like an SSD. Sorry, SSD. No, I know, but that would be huge. No, no, not like two and a half inch SSD like Apple did with the iPhone 6 where it's like you want a little compact SSD. I could see that. Desktop grade GPU. Everything you guys want is terrible. I'm sorry. Better internet. Audio module. An awesome camera. Okay, it doesn't really work that way. It's just a module that kind of like slides into the bottom. But to Ali here, like when phone blocks, when and if phone blocks becomes a thing, that's the kind of stuff that that'll do. Yono Joono wants the audio module. I feel like a powered amp. Alexia7 uses micro USB because of the Gear VR. Yep, that makes perfect sense. Thank you for pointing that out. That doesn't mean I have to be happy about it. They could really send you. Decent front facing speakers. Okay, it's a little module that slides into the bottom. So I don't know how well that's going to work. I love you guys. But I think maybe we should have shown a better picture of the thing that we were doing. Thank you for that. $1,000 HDMI, you should. Better phone. All Linus videos all the time. Stylus module. Windows and VM with Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Hmm. Okay. Infrared. Two micro SD. Two more micro SDs. Hang in there, Tony. Read the reviews off Amazon. Oh, people, everyone's talking. Okay. So that was one of our less successful Twitter blitz. That was rough. Usually you guys have a lot of like really, really great suggestions. But it probably would have helped if I'd shown better. So when the chat said a type C module. A type C module. Doesn't the G5 use type C already? Let me check. I'm not sure. I missed that part. That's a lot of notes, bro. That's not in my notes. So if it's already got a USB connector, and quite frankly, if it supports wireless charging, it's less of the crappy durability of the micro B is less of an issue for me. It could be kind of cool though, if the charger for the phone was modular. Just in case you screwed the charger up by like having it in your pocket and having it torque or whatever, if you could be like, oh, well. Right. Yeah, it's like, yeah, I'm eating, you know, 60 bucks or whatever overpriced price tag they want to put on something like that. At least I don't have to buy a whole new phone. At least I don't have to buy a whole new one. Before we jump into our next topic, now's a perfect opportunity to talk about fresh books. People in the chat are saying it's type C. Okay, it is type C. Thank you for that then. I thought so, but it wasn't in my notes, so I couldn't double check. Fresh books is the easy to use invoicing software that helps small businesses look professional and get paid faster. Not only will you look more professional, you will be more professional because it helps you stay organized about the way that you're spending your time, the way that you bill people. And if you just like walk up with like a paper invoice and go like, please give me a check or cash, it doesn't look nearly as professional if you have like a system already in place. You look fly by night compared to if you have like a, like you can take credit card or you can take check. Looking flexible is a huge part of looking like a bigger business. Like looking like you're successful is, and it's kind of a funny thing because there's got to be people on earth who would go, oh, that contractor takes credit card. Therefore he or she must overcharge by two and a half percent in order to compensate for the credit card fee. There's probably someone on earth who literally finds the contractor who only does paper invoices and checks because they go, that's my kind of cheapskate. I want them to use the worst materials. But to the rest of the world, looking like you've got your stuff together and like that you can afford to have proper systems in place for things like invoicing and payment, it really helps your professional image and gives people more confidence to book with you. So whether you're doing small time computer repair or whether you are teaching dance lessons or whether you're a plumber or just a general laborer, contractor, landscaper, FreshBooks lets you keep track of all that stuff in one place in the cloud, send invoices, get read confirmations so that you know that they've got your invoices and even allows people to pay by credit card through FreshBooks. So if that sounds great, you want to take your business to the next level, get organized, save time, spend your time doing the work that makes the money instead of calculating the money that you already did work for, then head over to freshbooks.com slash when to claim your free trial today. That's actually the most frustrating thing. When like, especially when you're starting a new business and you're just like, I need to do as much as I possibly can. You don't want to just like sit there and do paperwork. Nope, paperwork, paperwork is a bummer. You know what's not a bummer though? Squarespace.com. Squarespace is the website builder that You should use if you want to build a beautiful website today. All you've got to do is pick from their wide variety of different templates and whether you want to build a blog or a store or a personal portfolio or any other type of website that you could possibly want to build. They've got the store module actually built into, I believe it's all of the templates at this point. Then You should use one of those Squarespace templates, create your website, use the online builder tool, which is so easy that even I can do it. And then I'm trying to set it up and I can't do it. My brain's not working fast enough today. So you set up your website, get it live and the stability of it in our experience has been absolutely fantastic. If you're having trouble with it, then you should contact their tech support, which is available 24 seven via live chat and email. And you should head over to Squarespace.com and use offer code Linus today to save 10% and build your website for the first two weeks for free to decide if you should go ahead and extend it for the full year, which by the way will be including a free domain, which is an offer that you should definitely take advantage of. Although you should.com is probably taken. So Squarespace, you should build it beautiful. Good job. That's difficult. Not for me. For you. That's difficult. It's when my brain's working faster. I'm not having a fast brain day today. When my brain's working faster, I can handle it a lot better. Will you speed up before the shoot tonight? Yeah, that's going to be rough. All right. So we've got a video coming on this. You filmed this, right? The Valve VR performance test. Okay. So the OP is not filled out here. Original article here is from KitGuru. But Valve released their VR performance test. It's there at that portal based demo that I got an opportunity to do at CES. And the point of it is basically to determine if you have the horses to run in VR, with the conclusion being that the odds are excellent that you indeed do not. Luke's got a video coming out where he talks about this benchmark as well as I think you're going to encourage people to create a database of... Yeah, so you should still watch the video. But what it really kind of boils down to is that we have a fantastic Cinebench community on the forum. I think it's made by Jumper118. Hopefully I remember that correctly. And it's awesome. There's over 500 submissions. Everyone submits their Cinebench codes. I actually look at that every once in a while just to check where things are sitting. It's pretty cool. And I want to create the same kind of thing based around Steam VR performance test results. To figure out how ready the actual enthusiast community is. Because there's problems and I go over it in the video. Yep. Because as interesting as the Steam hardware survey is, I have a lot of machines personally... Yeah. A big part of the video talks about... That are not gaming machines. Yeah, junk data that's in the hardware survey. Which isn't necessarily junk data for game developers that aren't developing for VR. But how many machines do you have that you actually intend to play VR games on? Probably one or zero. And I have like seven machines in the hardware survey at least. Yep. So like... Yeah, I don't know. I mean with the number of test benches that I set up, I've got to have dozens in there. Yeah. To be perfectly honest. Yeah. And... The unthinkable has happened. Radeon and GeForce. Together. In DirectX 12. Dun dun dun dun dun dun. So this is the DX12 explicit multi GPU mode. And the way that it supposedly works is that it takes any DirectX 12 compliant device and utilizes its resources in the best way possible. Oh wow, we need to go pretty soon. Yep. In the best way possible for a performance boost that is not reliant in any way on SLI or Crossfire and can indeed work across mixed vendor multi GPU setups. So PC World tested it out. And this feature is still in beta by the way. But it will make its debut in Ashes of the Singularity which is launching next month. And so Gordon Mott PC World benchmarked with a resolution of 2560 by 1600 with the crazy presets. Two GTX 980s with SLI, a single GTX 980, a single Fury X, and GTX 980 plus Fury X. Which will be the really interesting one. Got the results here. So the GTX 980 plus Fury X actually performed the best at 56.3 frames per second. With the 980 plus 980 SLI off, multi GPU on, outperforming 980 plus 980 SLI on. Now, with that said, this is just like an FPS graph. FPS average, not like, we need PC per to break this down. Yeah, we need Captain Shroud to have a look at the frame times, tell us if there's stuttering or micro stuttering or any kind of other anomaly in this data that is not evident unless you're using a capture device and Nvidia's tool in order to see. Yeah, because something like this where it's a technology, there's a new technology, we need a much deeper dive to figure out what's actually going on. If Nvidia could just go, okay, balls to the wall, here we go, we're going to use all the processing power of the GPUs, I suspect they would, but they've been really focused, like all their messaging about SLI since the launch of the 980 has been about smoothness, butter smooth, consistency of the frame delivery, not necessarily about the frame rate. They deliver good frame rates, there's no doubt of that, but that's not what they're talking about and not what they're focused on when it comes to driver and hardware development right now. So it's possible that that frame rate is not meaningful, it's also possible that this is like bananas and the coolest thing ever, sort of, because there is one big caveat, and that is that the developer has to specifically implement this feature. Oh. And based on how many developers, even today, are still not working with Nvidia and AMD on Crossfire or SLI support, let alone at launch, like at all, I don't have much hope for this being the way forward for gaming. And building your system based around the idea that whatever game you're going to play has this enabled is crazy, unless you only plan to play games that are already out. Yeah. So, yeah. This was posted on the forum by Cloaked, and the original article here is from Business Insider. A 19-year-old made a free robot lawyer that has appealed $3 million in parking tickets in the UK. Pretty cool. The government's super stoked about this kid's robot. Yeah. That's awesome. So hiring a lawyer for a parking ticket appeal is not only a headache, but can cost more than just paying the ticket, which is one of the things that they rely on. It's way less hassle to just pay the ticket than it is to try and fight it. However, with the help of this robot created by Joshua Browder, who is 19 years old, all you have to do is give the robot some information, and it asks you these questions and generates an appeal letter, which you then mail to the court without ever requiring a lawyer to draft the letter. That's awesome. It can also help with delayed or cancelled flights on payment protection insurance claims, and he's working to program US city laws into the bot, starting with New York. He does this for everything. I know, right? Browder doesn't think that robots will be dealing in the US Supreme Court anytime soon, but he says fewer lawyers will do mundane tasks, and people will save money on stupid little disputes, which I absolutely love. Not only that, but it learns. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So the more people use the robot, the more intelligent it becomes. So I guess any time it fails at something, it might analyze why? I'm not sure exactly how it learns, but entrepreneurs are already talking to Browder about implementing the bot into cars. So I'm not sure exactly why you would need to be able to dispute your ticket directly from the... I guess people that want to deal with it immediately. I guess so. Or maybe if there's new cars where they don't just have to put a ticket on your dash, where they can give your car the ticket. And then you can dispute it completely automatically. I don't know, man. I can't see, you know, I can't see Impark being that stoked on that. I don't care if Impark is stoked on anything, though. Yeah, me neither. I hate those guys. They're so freaking annoying. I've never even gotten a ticket from them and I hate them. This kind of sucked. You were actually in the middle of working on something that used... Oh my God!...Mint Linux last week. So this was posted by Pandolf on the forum, and the Mint Linux ISO download was compromised. So if you installed Mint off of that ISO, it actually had a backdoor in it. Can you explain how the crap something like that happens? It wouldn't even actually be that hard if they had access to the server where people are downloading the ISOs from, and they just replace the ISO with one of theirs that has extra stuff on it. That's kind of all they need. And even the most conscientious downloader who's checking the MD5 checksums... If they could just replace the MD5 checksum on the download server, then you have no way of checking that the ISO you downloaded is actually compromised. So I was using Mint. It doesn't actually matter. I could use a huge array of other things, but it's just frustrating because I had to start not quite from scratch, but I had to re-download other things and re-set up my whatever and things aren't... That video is not going to be coming for a while. Doc Swag posted this one on the forum. The original article here is from WCCF Tech... Dang it, Brandon. Actually, it's hard. Okay, hold on. I think our stream computer is running off of the UPS right now. What just happened? No, no, no, we're not. We do have power. Why doesn't that have power? Okay, and that's not working anymore? Okay, because it's not on at all. Yeah, it's not even glowing slightly. This looks kind of cool. Yeah, it's like a... Halloween edition. We need to... I kind of like it. We should do like a really... Where's my phone? Yeah, I want to do like a spooky story. We should do like a really serious WAN show. I don't know where your phone is. It's not where your phone is. Anyway, so PlayStation VR, effectively 60% more powerful than an equally specced PC, apparently. Very, very interesting. The way that they're achieving this is the usual console advantage. So with the lower level access to the hardware, with the fact that game developers can program for a specific set of hardware, so all those things that we're used to seeing, but there is also some unexpected secret sauce as well. So let's go ahead and pull this up. Sony's Richard Marks held a presentation during the AR-VR Vision Summit, February 10th to 11th, and the presentation provided an overview of PlayStation VR and the basic development process. Apparently, thanks to the fixed hardware, the latency is extremely low. We're talking less than 18 milliseconds, which doesn't sound that low to me. There's some problems with this. It's got a 100-degree field of view. I do wonder if that's a typo in our notes, though. That is possible. Super low latency of less than 18 milliseconds. Mind you, if that's end-to-end, that's pretty damn impressive. It's probably end-to-end. Okay. 100-degree field of view, which is... Yeah, okay. That's not too shabby. I haven't tried Project Morpheus. Now, the 60% more powerful than same-spec PC point was apparently reported by middleware providers, not Sony, and has also been confirmed by a VR developer on Reddit. Brandon, I really don't think that light is on. Okay. Who said, PSVR is extremely close to being on par with Vive and the Rift with a GTX 970 based on the tests that I've done. Wow. So if your app runs at 90 Hz on a PC with a GTX 970, then you should be very close to 60 on the PS4. And with the 120 Hz reproduction applied, it is glassy smooth. So, PSVR only required about one quarter of the render target size that Vive requires. The PS4 has hardly any driver overhead compared to Windows. The draw calls on the PS4 are faster than with DirectX 11 on a PC. I noticed that DirectX 12 is being conveniently ignored here. There's also a 20% buffer for classified techniques. That further reduced the render target size. So the Vive render target is 457 million pixels per second. So that's 1512 by 1680 times 2 times 90 Hz. Whereas the PSVR is approximately a million. 1920 by 1080 by 60 minus approximately 20%. But we don't know what that 20% is. Yeah. If... I'm going to just wait until they come out. Yeah. I mean, to say that a 60 to 120 Hz upsampling or... What are they calling this? Reproduction. Reproduction. Works well? We'll see. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, even for video playback, I have found that those kinds of, you know, clear motion technologies are very... they're great as long as the motion is predictable. And the processor, which by the way, doesn't operate at 18 milliseconds. As long as you give that TV's processor a lot of time, and as long as the motion is predictable, can actually be like... Wow, I didn't know that there weren't actually more frames in the original content. Like, very believable. But something as unpredictable as a game, an interactive medium, We'll see. Yeah, I mean, I want to try it. That would be cool. Might sound a little bit weird coming from me, but that would be absolutely fantastic. Because right now, what VR needs mostly is just wide adoption. So if a huge amount of PlayStation players get behind it, and then VR becomes a super normal thing, sick. Yeah, great. Yeah, that's awesome. Bring it on to the mainstream. I'll believe it more when I see it, but awesome. The OP here is Mr. Troll, and the Gears of War Ultimate Edition PC gets screenshots, file size, and requirements. Apparently the ideal specs are 16 gigs of RAM with a 980 Ti or an R9 390X. Wow. To be fair though, the minimum specs go down to a 650 Ti and a 260X. Which is exactly how PC games should be. They should scale all the way down for people who don't have the horses, and they should scale all the way up for the people who are investing all this money into a gaming experience that they want to have that games refuse to deliver because of the consoles. Because the ideal specs are like a chunk above the recommended specs. Yes. Which is sick. Super down with that. Yeah, so minimum is 650 Ti with an AMD FX6 Core or a Core i5 at 2.7 GHz. Recommended is a GTX 970. Which is actually the highest percentage graphics card on the Steam hardware server. Yeah. So like, sure. So like, I get it. Okay. I'm stoked because I've never played Gears of War. I played one of them, very possibly the first one. Well, I'm stoked. I'm going to play it. I haven't actually played a game in the last little while, so I'm going to play that. That's my objective. Really interesting article. This one was posted by Patrick3027 on the forum. Original article here is from TorrentFreak. Software piracy hurts Linux adoption research finds. Most of the research, sometimes it's research, into piracy is focused on determining how it hurts paid software options. Like Microsoft Office or Adobe... Wow, I can't remember. Why can't I remember what Adobe Premiere? I was trying to figure out for so long how this would even be possible, but now I totally get it. Yeah, so this new research suggests that software piracy has a detrimental effect on the adoption of the Linux desktop operating systems. And I would go as far as to say that, A, that makes total sense. And B, that you could say the same thing about any free software. And free software is driven by user base. They benefit from whether it's ad-supported or whether it's donation-supported. The more people who use it, the better. And if people run out and just pirate paid software, then what they're effectively doing is they are taking the wind out of the sails of open source or free to use software developers. Which is a really interesting new way to think about that. So the way that they tackled it was they looked at... Actually, the notes for this one are not very good. But they looked at it on a regional basis. So they went, okay, this country has an estimated piracy rate of this. They accounted for factors such as the GDP of the country and local anti-piracy efforts. And estimated that the number of Linux users would increase by 50% if all piracy disappeared. I'm surprised it's that low. I think that a lot of people pirate simply because they can, not because they can't afford the software. So I think that's why they're trying to factor in things like the country's GDP and average income. When I did, I'll admit to that, it was completely because I couldn't afford the software. Right. Like 100%. There was no way. It was a mix for me when I did. There was definitely some... There's also ease of use things. I straight up can't afford this. And then there was other like... You know what? Actually, you know what? I did pay for Vista. I was going to say stuff like Windows Vista where it's like, yeah, I'm going to use this for like a bit and I'm probably going to go back to XP. I've pirated to test things. I did pay for Vista though. I liked Vista. It was fun. Because you had a super OP computer. Yes, I did. I don't want to get into that conversation. And that's the other thing too. I think that's where the piracy, because I can't afford it, argument gets really inexcusable. If you went and spent a bunch of money on your computer and you can't afford $100 for a Windows license, then I don't know how your computer budgeting worked. And all of that. Are we done? Do we need to go? Yeah, I think that's pretty much it. We should probably get crack-a-lackin'. Thank you guys for tuning into the WAN show. We will see you guys again next week. Same bat time, same bat channel. Why are you holding that? Get it? No one's going to understand, but you might understand. Oh, yes. Yeah, we're going to play hockey. Yeah. It's not how you use it though. This is a Gordon Freeman crowbar. It is used like this. It's the only correct way to use a Gordon Freeman crowbar. Good call. All right, thanks guys. See you next time. Yay!