 Alright my friends, welcome to the WAN show. We've got a great show for you guys today, and by we I mean I have a great show for you guys today because while I will potentially have someone sitting in this chair, in fact they might rotate in and out, I am without my one, my only, my flame, Luke today. Luke is gone for today to a wedding. Not his wedding, so I really didn't feel like it was that important compared to being here with me for WAN show, but he insisted on taking a banked day for one of the days that he has already worked, so what could I really say other than, you vicious bastard, how dare you. I'm now Luke, I'm the new Luke. You're tall, but you're not strong like Luke. Well, not yet. There are arm rests, you can't get any closer to me than that. No, no, no, but there we go. Yeah, we're not centered. Okay, now we're a little more centered in the frame. So yeah, I'll be having Taron join me today and probably some other people who actually know things about tech at some point, and then I think, yeah, without further ado, I'll kick off what we've got for our topics today. So Windows 10, according to an article from Forbes, is apparently sending your PC's data to Microsoft, although there has been some debate as to what exactly it is that's going on there. I mean, look at this guy, he can't even figure out how to turn a laptop on, although in your defense that one is kind of tricky to turn on. AMD Zen-based Opterons shown up in slides in a debate at CERN, which is pretty interesting. I mean, it's not like it was so much of a stretch that AMD is probably going to have Opteron products based on their Zen architecture, but there you go. Now there are slides to go with them. AMD's Polaris graphics cards will apparently make the minimum VR spec more affordable for everyone. This just in, new graphics cards will make higher performance and lower prices more possible. Wow, that's really new news. More at 11. Did you just increase the size of my text? Yeah, it's really small. Well, you're supposed to use your computer. Well, I'm going to, but you were just like leaning really forward. Also, how do I get to it on my computer? Well, you don't know where the what the link is. Oh, for crying out loud, Terran. We'll do this while we roll the intro. All right, I got one more. I got one more topic to throw out here. Intel, according to Intel, chips to become slower, but more efficient. More at 11. Oh, weird. As myself. Yes. There can only be one. Are you going to talk about the gravity waves? No, actually, I don't have that in the dock. Oh, it's so cool. You can talk about gravity waves. Although I don't know enough. Are we still hearing us? Yes, they can still hear us. Because we don't have a very good audio control board. Well, no, they can hear us on purpose. I can make them not hear us. Oh, OK. I always assumed that was a mistake on your part. No. Every single time. I can make them stop hearing us immediately. Hooray. No, I want them. I want them because Luke and I will often, you know, my good co-host and I will often chat while the intro is rolling and will pretend that we don't know that the audience can hear us. And they'll be like, we can still hear you in the chat. And it's fun. It's fun to have fun. But you have to know how. That's really fun. All right. Let's go ahead and link to the dock still. Oh, you still need a link to the dock. Oh, you want to look at the dock. All right. There you go. All right. Enjoy. Enjoy the dock. So let's get into our first topic really quick here. This was posted by Tofu Man 89 on the forum. And the original article here is from Forbes. So let's go ahead and oh, what the hey, we'll look at Forbes as quote of the day and their interesting topics. Let's see if they suggest the topic we're about to look at. No, they don't. Interesting. All right. Thank you for that. So this is an article written by Gordon Kelly and that's the Windows 10 worst secret spins out of control. There have actually been quite a few updates. This is very much a go. It won't let me open it as Taron. It wants me to be Luke. Then just sign in with a different account. Well, I'm not Luke, though. Then that's why you click sign in. I already was signed in. Well, you're just with a different account. I already did this. There. And then you sign in as Taron. Well, why do I have to sign in twice? All right. Do your thing. All right. Oh, wait. What are you doing? Taron wants me to be Luke. What? Yeah. Use a different browser. Oh, for heaven's sake. There you go. All right. So basically, the gist of this article is that or the claim that this article makes is that by going through a process that involved using a DDWRT, if I recall correctly, DDWRT firmware flashed router, the author, well, the author pulled from a post on some Reddit clone or something where the guy took that router and analyzed what was happening, like how many attempts his fresh install of Windows 10 in a VM was making to communicate and with whom and determined that many of those servers were indeed Microsoft servers in spite of the user having turned off as many of Windows 10's phone home features as was possible, at least on the consumer versions. I was wondering about that when I was listening to all this Barnacles stuff that he posted about how to disable it all. I'm like, how do you know for sure that it's been disabled? Yeah. So now, so I OK, this was a user on VOTE, by the way. I believe the original post has actually been pulled down, deleted by user at this point. Now, I did read another very, very interesting article in response to this. This was also posted in the Linus Tech Tips forum post about this, where another author, completely different site, came out and said, well, hold on a second, why don't we have a look at what all of this traffic is? And it turned out that a very significant chunk of it was legitimate traffic, checking in with Microsoft's activation server, for example, to see if you've activated Windows, which is fair play. Some of them were even requests to the NPT time server, or NTP, whatever it is, were just requests to a time server to check the clock and make sure that it was accurate, which, as far as my experience has been, never works anyway, so I'd just as soon it didn't bother, but that's a whole other topic of conversation. And so that author determined that at least, I think it was something like 90% of this traffic was totally legitimate traffic. And part of the reason why there might have been thousands and thousands of requests in a short period of time would have been that because of the way that the router was set up, these requests weren't going through, so it would have been making repeated attempts. Okay, so the drama continues, and Gordon Kelly from Forbes writes a follow-up article saying, well, you know what, my point wasn't necessarily the thousands of communication attempts and what exactly was being communicated. My point was if that you are turning stuff down... Oh, apparently I'm peeking. I'm sorry. The point was that if they are turning... if you're turning all this stuff off, then they shouldn't be sending out anything. So originally, Microsoft didn't really respond to Gordon Kelly's article, to the first one, but they have since responded... Yes, yes, I know, I know. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. About what? I just turned it down. The peeking. Oh, the peeking. Well, can't we have like an auto gate or whatever the heck it's called on here to... We have a compressor, but it's hard. It audio is a big pain in the ass. I can tell you that from having to work with it. Okay, well, I can check real quick and see if we've managed to fix it, but it'll be hard to tell because I'm talking a lot quieter now, so... Whoa! Linus likes to shout all of his things all the time. I'm Linus. Okay, so basically, yeah, you know what? This actually has an indicator, so I could have been a lot more careful, and I'm very, very sorry to the audience right there. That was a mean thing for me to do. Turn down for what? Yeah, thank you for that. Okay, so anyway, the drama continues, and Microsoft has now finally responded to the second, to the follow-up article and said that sometime this year, they are going to make it possible to turn off everything. I think we have a somewhat of a time frame for the enterprise version, but I don't know if we have a time frame for home or pro users yet. But they recommend not turning it off, and now to be clear, I am not necessarily a tinfoil hat user. I don't think that Microsoft cares what I ate for lunch personally. I think they might care what everyone collectively is eating for lunch, hence the anonymized data. There is a lot of value to that, anonymized data mining, so I don't think they care about me. But the problem here, as the Forbes writer, as Gordon Kelly has pointed out, is that if you turn it off, if you opt out, it should be opted out. It should be fully opted out, and you should not have to send any further information. So, yeah, I guess, you know what? Here, I want to hear from you guys. I want to know if you care. And you too, you've just kind of sat there for a while. Do you have the doc yet? No, I have the doc. I've been looking at gravitational waves stuff. Okay. So, do you trust Microsoft to collect your personal data in a way that is not... Can I finish the question? To collect your personal data in a way that is not personally identifiable and that is not ethically incorrect. Well, I mean, what data exactly? Because for something like a smartphone, you kind of understand that it's a bit more public. But on my personal computer, I want privacy, I want protection, I want to be able to do whatever nefarious things I might get up to without Microsoft knowing about it even anonymously. I don't know. I mean, if any of you have read 1984, obviously, a bit of a different thing with communism and all that. But the whole idea of my computer spying on me just kind of makes my skin crawl. I don't like it. I want to opt out completely. That should be my choice. Yeah, totally. Okay. So, riddle me this then. Why do you accept this on your phone? Well, I don't, actually. Why do you accept it more? Why did you even say that? Why is it that the phone feels less personal than the personal computer? I'd love to hear from you. Feels less personal. Yeah. Well... What's private? I don't know. It was really annoying to me when I first got a smartphone, and you remember that because you gave me my first smartphone. I did. Because I had a crappy Fisher Price looking phone. He was literally not even using a flip phone. He was still using a brick phone. It was awful. But, like, I don't know. They do make me uncomfortable. I've just gotten used to it. It's like boiling the frog. I mean, every smartphone is basically a telescreen. It's insane how much data they can track from you with a simple smartphone. But I want my personal computer at least. I mean, I don't know. Maybe I'm just not used to it yet. Maybe I haven't been boiled the frog enough for my personal computer, and that's what they're trying to do. We've got some people in Twitch chat saying, because you use it in public. Yeah, maybe. So do you feel like because someone could be looking over your shoulder, you're not in your own home? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I can see. Yeah, maybe. Is that fair? Maybe that's the intuitive sort of idea that I'm getting here. This leads really well into one of our other topics, so I'm glad we're having this conversation. Yay! But I want to jump back into the results of that straw poll. Do you care if Microsoft collects your data? We've got a whopping 53% of you going with yes, and 32% of you not caring, and 15% of you going with the correct choice, which is of course, turnip. Yeah, whatever. You know what? I actually, as far as evil companies go, and yes, I understand that this is kind of dumb, and that what I should be doing is spending all of my time VPNing up and turning off all reporting and creating custom firewall rules within my router to block any un-wired. I installed Windows 10, and I left all the customer experience stuff on. I left it on default. If I'm going to trust Google with my data, then I really think Microsoft is the lesser of two evils, or has been the lesser of two evils over the last little while here. I use so many Google services for so much of what I do. Even our company uses Google for our company emails, which is about as personal as anything about me actually gets, really, the innermost workings of my business. So I figure if Google's got it all, then I give up. I'm almost just waiting for the hammer to drop on all this. All these companies have all this information about you. They haven't done anything super nefarious with it yet, but maybe one day they will. You'll get hauled away by the secret police tonight, maybe. Yeah, we've got a lot of people talking in chat saying it's not as simple as a yes or no answer, and I think that might be part of why we got so few responses to that straw poll, because usually we get a lot more. We've got people saying, well, just a second, it depends what they're collecting. If Cortana or Siri wants to know when my appointment is so that she can remind me, then cool. Or if they want to know my birthday so they can send me a little birthday wish or whatever. I don't need that. Well, it's not about need. It's about making the user experience friendlier, and that's what a lot of the data they're collecting is for. Yeah, yeah. But the NSA also told us that they can be trusted to have our personal information, and they totally turned out it couldn't be trusted. And what if maybe they are totally trustworthy now and they have no nefarious intents, and they're just collecting this data to do the best thing they can with it, great customer experience and so on, how do we know that won't change in the future? We don't. We don't. We don't. I mean, you look at how much Microsoft has changed in the last year with the CEO shift. Has it? Yeah. They're a pretty different company. And I've heard this not just from media outlets who read very different press releases. I've heard this from people internally at Microsoft. They're saying it really is different there. So, I mean, that's great. But what that means is if you can have a change for the better with a leadership change, and we're not talking like hiring an outside CEO. He didn't come from outside the company. We're talking an internal guy. So if you can have a change for the better by putting a different internal guy in charge, I think you can definitely have a change for the worse. Yeah. I mean, imagine if we put Taron in charge of Linus Media Group. That'd be a disaster. All of our videos would be about robots. Well, maybe not all of them. Speaking of which, do we have our co-host? The guy that... No, he's over there. I don't want to even... I hate that thing so much. I don't want to see it ever again. Hey, actually, this is a good opportunity for a straw poll because I found that the live audience is actually a little bit different than the VOD audience, the YouTube audience. So what do you think of Taron's hosting improvements? If you guys have... because I think that he has done a lot better. I got a lot of really good comments. Interesting note on the video that I just finished editing right now, which is the Flyfly SmartPed scooter kick assist e-bike. I'm less good of a host. I'm like more awkward. And the reason is the prompter was so far away because we had to get the whole bike in the shot that I could barely read it and saw as awkwardly reading off the prompter like this. And it just was awful. Also, there's no good teleprompter software in the universe. So that also sucks. There might be something, but it's like anything in the professional production industry where the half decent... Ten thousand dollars. Yeah, the half decent one is like add two zeros. Yeah, they're almost worth it at this point though. I mean, if it exists. You know what? I think we do need to get a bigger prompter. Oh, yeah. Because you're not the only one that has trouble with the... Oh, it's awful. It's way too small. Well, I can do that. Well, Linus is magical. He will like do a one take or a two take for an entire video. And it's like, oh, I have to make two cuts. And then it's done. You just start plopping on the graphics. All right. So actually really good feedback so far. We've got 63% saying great, mate. Eight out of eight. Yeah. 17% voting correctly for turn up. Okay. 16% saying okay and only 5% saying bad. Oh, yeah. If 5% of the internet thinks that you suck, you're doing really well. It's not bad. Well, not the internet. I mean, this is a very biased poll. I'm sure the more hardcore fans are the ones who watch live. Linus. I think that's fair. But you know what I've also experienced is that sometimes the more hardcore fans have been the ones that have been more resistant to change. Hmm. It was a lot of the hard cores that objected to Luke hosting videos back when we initially did it. I can hardly imagine. I mean, remember, do you remember the first time you hosted a Fast as Possible? It was awful. You were like, who is this guy? Why does he have a beard? Oh, yeah. Like my hosting was awkward and also lots of, yeah, but we didn't even properly introduce me. I wanted to put a lower third. Well, they would have hated you no matter what you did. And Linus was like, no, you don't need to put your name on there or any information about who the heck you are. It'll be fine. And it was awkward. It was awkward. Well, okay. They know me now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what's really funny too is Brandon is the only one who never got any flack. Really? Luke got flack. You got flack. Why Brandon? Ed got flack. People just instantly love Brandon. Why? And it's not just people watching our videos. My kids like Brandon. Your cats like Brandon. Yeah, like my son was really, really shy, especially at the beginning. You never worked out of the garage, right? No. You joined us at the house. Yeah. Okay. So back when we worked out of my house in the garage, my son was really young, very shy, did not like Luke, didn't like pretty much anyone. He's a big guy. But would give Brandon a big smile. That's so weird. Yeah. It's bizarre. He's just like a big teddy bear. Yeah. He's not as big as he thinks he is. Sorry, Brandon. You're not that ripped. You're not that ripped, Brandon. Brandon sucks. Quite on set. Yeah. Quite on set. Quite on set, Brandon. I put that in the video where you say that. That's coming up soon. That's like our new favorite is we just rip on Brandon because he'll be like somewhere else in the studio. And then when he goes to reply. It's like, no, quite on set. We're doing a video, Brandon. Yeah, we're recording, Brandon. You can't say anything, Brandon. You can't say anything back. So this is some good news for AMD. Mr. Troll posted this originally on the Linus Tech Tips forum. AMD's, oh, you know what? No. Let's not do this topic next. Let's do a different topic next because I had said that that last topic. Yeah, it was a great segue into something. It was a great segue into something else. And you never made a segue. Yeah. No, no. It's here. It's here somewhere. My segues are better than Linus's. I don't even need to do a poll to determine this. My segues are amazing. Speaking of whatever, yeah, something else. Here we go. That's not a segue. So this was posted by Jaws on the forum. Our original article here is from deep.web. All right. And the headline here is pretty concerning. Turning your phone on is consenting to being tracked. By whom? So, but this is it. And it's funny that we say this because you basically just said that you would be more accepting of that than someone tracking you when you're on your PC at home. And you didn't know why. Accepting. You didn't even know why you said it. Because boil the frog. Because boil the frog. But it's interesting that you might actually be more right than you would have even thought about. And if you'd thought about how right you were, you probably wouldn't have said it. Because this is the argument being made. So Baltimore police obtained an arrest warrant for Karen Andrews in 2014. Arrests. It's happening. In an attempt to find this person, they used his cell phone. Yeah, of course they did. Okay. So they requested a pen register order from the judge expressing intent to locate Karen. They used a hailstorm to track the phone and never disclosed this. Wait, hang on. A hailstorm? Yeah. What do you mean a hailstorm? Is that a device or an actual hailstorm? Okay, so a hailstorm is a machine that steals your phone's data. So there's a variety of different ones. Or is that like a stingray? It intercepts it like it acts like a telephone pole? Yeah, so it covertly intercepts mobile phone conversations in real time. Okay, so they used a hailstorm to track the phone. They never disclosed it. So basically it acts like a mobile tower and attacks phones that connect to it. It is indiscriminate and can easily end up scooping up innocent bystanders' information. So the Baltimore Sun reports that the police have used the technology 4,300 times since 2007. I'm not surprised. A response to a discovery request asking if police use a stingray was stalled until June 2015. And in June 2015, a judge concluded the information was intentionally withheld from the defense by police violating legal disclosure obligations. So, in the brief's first statement, it states, While cell phones are ubiquitous, they all come with an off switch. If a cell phone is turned on, it is receiving signals from cell towers and sending signals back out to cell towers. Unless you put it in airplane mode, right? The cell site simulator used in this case took advantage of that fact in order to locate Andrews' phone. Because Andrews chose to keep his cell phone on, he was voluntarily sharing the location of his cell phone with third parties. It's like, oh, it's your fault you left your blinds open when we looked inside your house. Except that what they really have is a device that looks through the walls because no one else has this thing that can intercept cell phone signals. With that said, I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit here. It is the case that if you have the blinds open of your house and someone can see what they can see from public property, not on your private property, then you are not private. Would you agree that turning on your phone, which it is true, it is true you are inherently agreeing to share information about your location with third parties, would you argue that that airspace is not private? Well, are the signals encrypted or not? No. Okay, can you encrypt the signals? Not, you won't have a way of encrypting everything. I mean... Encryption has to be supported at both endpoints and in flight, and so it's not a thing at the moment. It just sounds ridiculous to me, is all. And remember, it's not everything. You can enter your credit card information and that can be encrypted while it's being sent. But we're talking about voice here. I think that's dumb. I mean, if I'm Alexander Van Bell or whatever his name was, not Van Bell. Van Bell, who by the way didn't invent the telephone. Way to be an American about it. Sure, whatever. Like you're in your home making a phone call, and then you hang up the phone and the person answering, they're in their home listening to you. And just because you have a fancy wiretapping device doesn't mean that you should be allowed to listen to my conversation. I don't see the difference between picking up my phone and just leaving it on with the signal dial tone. And well, I mean, if you pick up your phone and you just leave it sitting around... And then someone hears something that you say, but they're somewhere where they shouldn't have been anyway, but they're in a public space. I don't like any of this at all. I just don't like it. I don't want to have to like, oh, you have your phone anyway. No, it's like, this is my phone. So I will make the argument that even if the police didn't do anything illegal to Andrews, like even if they were in public doing public things, I would make the argument that they did something illegal to the cell phone carrier because they do actually pay for the exclusive right to use those bands. Now, with that said, we have a cell phone signal booster here in our office that effectively acts as a little mini tower right here in our building and then translates everything in and out to a nearby cell phone tower. Yeah, but it's dumb. It's basically a relay. What if it wasn't? Well, then the laws would have something to say about that, I would hope. Well, the carrier wouldn't care. So the carrier is the one who owns the spectrum. They wouldn't care. Well, the carrier doesn't. It's legal. It's legal for me to have that. You think it would ever be illegal? Could somebody abuse this technology? Sure. I mean, that's what we're talking about. Everyone else in this complex could be talking on our booster. Couldn't they? Yes, they could. And then we could tap in and it be perfectly legal? In fact, our cell phone booster had an issue with it two weeks ago where our outdoor antenna was too close to our indoor antenna and it was causing an interference spike on someone else's mobile network. So our carrier didn't even know. But they showed up and they were like, hey, yo, you actually need to move those. I remember that. And that was definitely interfering with the service of other people around us who were not even on the same carrier. Because our cell phone booster is carrier agnostic. It actually works with every Canadian carrier. So someone in the next building over and the next building over there, because we got a ballin' cell phone booster with ballin' antennas, because we had really bad reception here. Oh, it was awful. Yeah, we couldn't use our phones in the building. But that means that they can have the benefit of our cell phone booster and we could theoretically intercept data. And that would be legal. I don't know. Okay, but if the police do it... Because that's the kind of thing that should be illegal. If the police do it, then maybe if they go through the correct due process, it is legal. But I think the argument being made here is that they didn't, they intentionally didn't disclose it, but they're saying, hey, well, whatever. If you turn on your phone, you should accept that third parties have your location. Dun dun daaa. I like it. What's the next topic? I'll try and find something that you'll like a little bit better, okay? So this was posted by Mr. Troll on the forum. The original article here is from WCCF Tech. AMD's Polaris graphics cards will make the minimum VR spec more affordable for everyone, targeting price points below $349 to deliver what would be a minimum recommended gameplay experience in VR. So this is something Luke's talked about a fair bit on the show. And really, VR is his wheelhouse, not mine. But I do want to talk about this a little bit. To have a good experience in VR, you not only have to run at a high resolution, because it's the whole retina concept all over again. It's like, why is 1080p just fine, and I can't see any of the pixels from like 10 feet away? And why do I need, you know, okay, that's a bad example. Because it's closer to your face. Whatever. The point is, yeah, the closer it is, the more pixels you need so you can't see them. So if it's right here, you need a ton of pixels. They need to be really tiny. Also, the resolution of your eyes increases as it gets closer to the center, right? So you need to maybe, what do they have, like eye tracking to put extra pixels where your eyes are looking? Do they do that? I think they do. Luke was talking about this. I don't remember. What are you looking at? Cock and balls, apparently. That's Nick Van Berkel. Okay, are we, yeah. We should never have put that window in. I know, right? Right, Nick. It was like you threw that book in, that's a full page spread. Full page spread. If you haven't seen that before, get out of here. Okay, so another factor is that we always talk about average FPS, okay? Like that's what everyone loves to talk about. I got 80 FPS average in Crysis 3 or whatever game it is. Average FPS is almost meaningless in VR. Because on a screen, when you get that chug or that stutter, it's annoying. It's not so jarring, yeah. On a head-mounted display, as you're moving around like this, That's super weird. That judder will make you feel motion sick. Oh, for sure. So what's going to become more important is the minimum frame rate. Yeah. So you're going to have to reach a high frame rate, which is also important for smooth motion, again, so you don't get motion sickness. You're going to have to maintain that frame rate all the time, and it's going to have to be at a high resolution. So AMD is basically coming out and saying their new Polaris architecture GPUs will be faster and more affordable thanks to their upgraded architecture, making VR more easily attainable for everyone. Which pretty much goes without saying, and is about like saying that Nvidia's new graphics cards will be faster and more affordable for equivalent performance, and Intel's new CPUs will be faster and more affordable. Wow. Except... It's the same thing, slightly faster, slightly smaller. Except... Welcome to CES. As well as sometimes bigger, if we're talking TVs. Faster and bigger, not faster and smaller, smart guy. It depends on what it is. Yeah. Sometimes bigger is better, sometimes smaller is better, sometimes we can't decide. And remember when phones wanted to be smaller and then bigger and then smaller? The iPad came along. And then bigger again? And then the thing that's not the iPad came along. The iPad's not a phone. The NFL, whatever. Oh, the Surface. Yeah, the Surface. Okay. Unless you're Intel, and this was posted on the forum by a person I just said, I think. Intel, chips will have to sacrifice speed gains for energy savings. Dun, dun, dun. But I don't get it. How is that different from just going back a generation, right? Well, back a generation, we didn't have as good power efficiency or power consumption in general. You mean from the power supply or in the chip itself? The chip itself. How much power it requires from the power supply. So, William Holt, executive VP and GM of Technology and Manufacturing Group, which is basically like big deal at Intel. I mean, what do they do other than technology and manufacturing? Says that new technologies in chip manufacturing will favor better energy consumption over faster execution times and is calling it an end to Moore's Law. So, he discussed some new technologies at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Fran, such as tunneling transistors and spintronics, and says, look, we're going to see major transitions and the best pure technology improvements we can make will bring improvements in power consumption but will reduce speed. So, spintronics is expected to begin to appear in commercial technologies such as graphics chips within 18 months, but Intel has not yet committed to tunneling transistors or spintronics or really much of anything. They're just saying, hey, look, guys, be ready for your smartphone or your tablet or your, you know, thin and light gaming PC to be more efficient and consume less power and have longer battery life, but don't expect it to actually be faster. Very, very interesting. So, we've been going through a long period of time now where we've been getting, I mean, it used to be, oh, man, it used to be so awesome. Like, within a single architecture, we would get multiple speed bumps that would give us like 10 to 20% performance improvements. It was freaking sick. And when we got a generational improvement, when we got a new architecture, it was like bananas. It was the bomb. Like, the article on the release of the Core 2 Duo on AnonTech probably has like millions and millions of views, whereas, like, I mean, we didn't even do a review of one CPU. We didn't even do a review of one CPU release from Intel until like three weeks later and literally four people complained. Like, it's gotten to the point where we get these tiny performance improvements, but what we do get is better power consumption, which on the desktop, most people, and some people do, but most people are less concerned about and what they would really prefer to have is more performance. And it looks like that trend is going to not only continue where we don't really get huge performance gains anymore, but it could actually get worse. Where it's like the new chip that comes out is going to save me money on the power bill here in the building, but is not going to make your video render any faster. But how much power does a CPU really use? Like, is it worth that minuscule amount? I mean, compared to putting the lights on and heaters and whatever? Which is a great question. At home, I would say, especially here in BC, where our power comes from falling walls, comes from falling water. And we have plenty of that. Which is basically free. No, it's no big deal. However, in places where the power is coming from coal, burning coal, or other fossil fuels, then yes, if you can change, if you can, like let's say, let's say a CPU consumes only 65 watts, okay? If you can cut that down by 10 or 20 or 25%, then we're talking, yeah, for the same or slightly less performance, then we're talking maybe 12 to 15 watts per CPU. In your home, does that matter? No. However, in many homes, let's say every home in an entire country had a computer that was 15% more efficient. You're going to save a lot more energy with just different lights and more efficient heating and insulation. Which isn't to say that you can't do all of those things. It's just to say that it is a factor. And if you're running a data center, which you just brought up. That's the huge savings right there. Where you're running literally 100,000 CPUs under one roof. But I'm thinking like cost spent to energy saves, like buying yourself a brand spanking new CPU from Intel to save something on your power bill is never going to be worth it for most people. It's going to be a lot more worth it to get LED lights, more insulation, stuff like that. That is a very interesting potential topic for a video right there. Because I actually did this a long time ago. Back when 80 plus gold efficiency rated power supplies first started popping up. And I kind of went, oh, okay. So let's look at this two different ways. How long do you have to run this computer to justify buying a new power supply outright? And how long do you have to run this computer to justify the more expensive power supply versus buying a cheaper one? If you were going to have to buy a power supply anyway. And in BC, it was like until the end of time. Like the end of, you know, that place in Chrono Trigger where the old man is standing on the little island. Like that's how long you'd have to wait. But in places like California where power is much more expensive because I think they're buying a lot of it from us. Or at least they used to be. Actually it didn't take that long. It took like three or four years. So I would be interested to know how many generations back you have to go for a full system upgrade to pay for itself in a reasonable span of time. Like within the lifespan of the system. Like probably like ever. Like the further back you go, the more reasonable it is to upgrade. Yes. Right. But I mean the stuff we saw at FreeGeek was nuts. Like those power supplies, those two massive ones on that giant. Yeah, those are great. It was amazing. What were they? 350 watt power supplies that are like this big? There were two of them and it's like, oh, we have this tiny one that will do the same thing for way cheaper now. And that's amazing. But where's the sweet spot? Yeah. But yeah, and like you could also factor in improving the installation in your home and changing the windows to like triple pane or whatever. Although really what you should have is like smaller windows if you want to save on energy bills. Factor that all in as well. I don't know if it would be so easy to test that. Yeah, we wouldn't be able to we wouldn't be able to look at all of those things. I mean, like I mean, seal up the cracks in your doors, you know. Yeah. Stop the heat from escaping. You know, just just go go nutso on it. Yeah, very interesting. People are saying this is basic physics, to be honest, the same amount of power will be used to boil water, something, something. I'm sure that is in response to someone else in Twitch chat now that I read a little bit more of it. I don't think that really has anything to do with what we're talking about. What I found interesting when I was learning about Bitcoin mining and like crypto coin mining and whatever. Yeah. Is that the energy you use to power the GPUs being released as heat is like the same as just having an electric heater, right? Because thermodynamics. So either you can use that energy to heat up your room or you can use it to heat up your room and get bitcoins, which is kind of cool. Although, of course, the equipment is very expensive and also it's not worth it anymore. So. But you get a bitcoin back in the day. I didn't get any bitcoins. You never you never you never mind one. Not Bitcoin. No, not one. Not any. Yeah. Rock on. All right, our next topic here is posted by Top Dollar on the forum. And the original article here is from Computer World. The Navy calls on researchers to create firefighting humanoid robots. That's awesome. That would be freaking awesome. Something straight at the side. I mean, this is one of those things where I don't see this within a within a reasonable amount of time taking over the role of the fire department and the people who work at the fire department. I don't see this as a threat to the firefighters jobs. No, for heaven's sakes. No, I see this as a significant improvement in the safety. Oh, yeah. Of firefighters in the in the much more immediate buildings on fire. It is in danger of collapse at any moment. Yeah. I mean, being able to being able to pilot just a firefighter drone walking around in there would be awesome. I mean, if they can build robotic arms that are delicate enough for a surgeon to perform a surgery remotely, then I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to be able to build a firefighting robot that can run in and grab someone and pull them out of a building. Now, there are going to be some challenges, of course. You're going to have to make it lightweight enough that it doesn't cause the freaking building to collapse just by setting foot in it. Now, riddle me this. Why humanoid? Because I think I have the answer. But I want to know if they say it in the article, why they want it to be humanoid. The context of this is the Navy. So they want these to fight on board fires. So I would imagine getting around on a ship is going to require some pretty humanoid like characteristics. Because it's built for humans already. That's right. That's why you build the robot humanoid. And I mean, ships are expected to be in service for decades. It's not like, you know, you develop this technology today and in the future, maybe you don't need a humanoid one. Maybe there's a rail that's designed throughout the ship that a firefighting unit can fly around on or whatever. But then you've got to install that everywhere. Yeah. If it doesn't exist, then yeah. If you have a humanoid robot, it will go and do everything that a human can do. And you can retrofit. Yeah. You can retrofit stuff with that. So the US military's Office of Naval Research is giving out a grant of $600,000 to a Worcester Polytechnic Institute professor to develop motion planning algorithms for firefighting humanoid robots. So the robot must be agile and able to move in tight spaces on a ship or a submarine. Yeah. I love this stuff. Very cool. Very interesting. Very cool. Very, very cool. Yeah. This is the kind of thing where like you hear about it and then you'd hear nothing for like 10, 20 years. Yeah. And then later they have a breakthrough and it's like, oh yeah, I remember that. Hey, that, I mean, stuff like that has already happened on WAN Show. Oh yeah. I've been doing WAN Show for like two years now, I think. It's a long time. Like we've had, well, no, it's a very small amount of time, but we've already had stuff where we like talked about it and then it turned into a real thing. Yeah. Which is pretty cool. It's always sad. It's pretty cool. Speaking of things that are pretty cool, I wish. I don't remember who originally posted this on the forum, unfortunately, but it was definitely there. And this actually happened last week, I think, not this week, February 3rd. Yeah. Microsoft has entered a definitive agreement to acquire SwiftKey. Is that bad? That sucks. Why does that suck? Because I love SwiftKey. Well, what are they going to do to it to ruin it? Nothing. Well, that's exactly it. They're not going to upgrade it. So Microsoft has entered a definitive agreement to acquire SwiftKey, whose highly rated, highly engaging SwiftKey software keyboard and SDK powers more than 300 million Android and iOS devices. Let's just have every company merge into one giant company. That'll be great, Linus. The by and large. By and large. Super store. So the SwiftKey blah, blah, blah. SwiftKey's tech aligns with our vision for more personal computing experiences that anticipate our needs versus responding to our commands, says Harry Schaam, executive VP of tech and research. They're looking to also integrate SwiftKey tech into word flow technology for Windows. And they're moving some of SwiftKey's staff to blah, blah, blah positions here and there, which basically means SwiftKey, which was awesome. And so many people are like, Linus, why do you like SwiftKey so much? The stock keyboard has flow typing. I don't care about flow typing. Flow typing is crap. SwiftKey's predictive text is excellent. And this is a mini cupcake, which is also excellent. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. Both of you. What's the story here? For this wonderful. This one's peanut butter cup. She's testing out mini cupcakes for a wedding. Testing out. Oh, then I have to take one. Yeah, go for it. Ah, so we're guinea pigs now. Thanks, Steph. Let's go with this one. Appreciate that. Oh, sorry. You don't mind if I say your name, right? I'm fine with being a guinea pig. Yeah. Okay. I didn't know if it was private or anything. Too late. Yeah, so Colton's fiance is apparently poisoning his boss and colleague now. That's fine. As long as it's delicious. I thought we were friends. Yeah. We're tight. It's supposed to be a gift of love. Ah, a gift of love. Like, I want to be together forever. I want to preserve you this way for all time. It's joc full of, ah, I can never think of words when I need them. What's the preservative that they use for dead bodies? Formaldehyde. Formaldehyde. Joc full of formaldehyde. Oh, no, I just got my new thing. It's depreserve forever, right? I don't actually think that it is formaldehyde when they embalm people. I think embalming fluid is a different thing. Formaldehyde is for dead bodies, technically, though, if you want to preserve them like in a jar. Well. That's very different, though. All right. You win. Okay, so I'm not an icing guy. Yeah, me neither. I really don't like icing. I always, when I have cake, the icing gets slopped off to one side and I eat the cake part. But what I will say is that the peanut butter cupcake is excellent. Okay. Yeah. I am down for the peanut butter cupcake. But if you were making it for me personally, which I don't expect, it's like there will be everyone else's and then there's Linus's one cupcake for just Linus. And then there's like $1 dollar for frosting. Then it would be like, it would almost have to have more like a chocolate or something like that. Because that's part of the peanut butter cup experience is. Chocolate? Yeah. There's a little bit of a punch to peanut butter. But you should talk to Yvonne because she's an icing person. She's into icing. Whereas like for me, if it's not like a super light cream cheese icing, then you might as well just leave. Yeah. Yeah. What's a tuxedo? Huh? Oh, this. It's good. It's fine. It tastes like a cupcake. You know? I mean, you know. It's great. I try to give, you know, specific feedback. I mean, I mean, I don't know what it's not. I mean, it's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. That is, wow. I've never actually had a peanut butter cupcake. I'm down for that. So, sorry. I'm super bummed. Swift key. I'm super bummed about Swift key, especially because Swift key on Android is already pretty much perfect. They fixed most of my minor complaints. Swift key cloud means that when I type in like G force, GTX, 980 Ti, the T is big, the I is small. Like it's amazing. It gets everything right. But on iOS, it sucks. And I was really hoping that over time, Swift key would continue to fix it. And I just don't really have much hope for that anymore. How hard is this though? I mean, it's a keyboard, right? It predicts what you're going to write. Do you use it? Yes. I use something. Can I see your phone? It's not installed on this one. I haven't switched yet. It's on the other phone. Okay. Well, it's pretty, it's, it's, it's, it's more complicated. If it wasn't complicated, Microsoft wouldn't have bought them for however many millions of dollars. I don't think we know. But yeah, it's, it's, it's predictive technology. It's really cool. Yeah. I'm, oh, I'm just, I'm just sad. I don't really have anything else to say about that. Other than that, I'm sad. I use something, Taren 2016. Awesome. Speaking of using something, if you were thinking, gee, I could use a VPN on my computer or my phone, you might want to head over to TunnelBear. TunnelBear is the easy to use VPN for mobile and desktop. It lets you tunnel through 20 different countries, allowing you to browse the internet and use online services as though you are in the aforementioned countries without getting on a plane and actually going there. It's easy to use, so you don't have to be a tech person and deal with opening ports and blipity blopity, all that stuff. You just hit the switch and boom, AES 256-bit encryption and your public IP address is ready to go. You just click on the button and your public IP is switched. Done deal. And if you have any trouble, their friendly support bears will help you out. No problems at all. And the best thing is that you can try TunnelBear for absolutely nothing. The first megabytes, first 500 megabytes are free. Fun fact about this. Oh, okay. My sister-in-law was looking at flights and she wanted a way to VPN herself to get cheaper on flights. And she was like, Taren, can I use your VPN? Which is a thing. And she was like, I don't have that one anymore, but you can use TunnelBear because it's free at first and just surf from any country and check all the flight rates. It'll pay for itself. So there you go. Actually, that's a very good point because you can get way cheaper flights by pretending you're from the Philippines or something. There's all sorts of stuff you can do to have them not gouge you so bad on airfare. So if you want to switch to an unlimited data plan, which is still very affordable, all you got to do is head over to tunnelbearer.com slash when and you can save 10%. When, when. Speaking of things that you can also use, hey, it's all things you can use. Lynda.com. You use Lynda.com. Oh, yeah. By millions of people around the world with more than 3000 courses available with topics like web development, photography, visual design, business, coding, and even software training like Excel, WordPress, and Photoshop. So whether you're looking to take your hobby or your career to the next level, Lynda's got the courses that you need taught by industry experts and in a way that is very digestible. So you can skip through the course. You can view the transcript to go back and review things. You can, you can click on the transcript to skip to that point in the video even. And also, if you already know somewhat about a topic, you can just read through the transcripts to see, oh, yeah, I already know this. Go to the next one. Oh, I don't know that. Click on it. It's fantastic. And what I really like about them, and I was always recommending Lynda.com to people before I worked here and before they were sponsors of ours, is that they give you like a fantastic base of knowledge that you can build upon, right? Like they don't skip anything. So you don't have gaps in your knowledge that you otherwise will if you try to piece stuff together, which is something that I've done a lot. And then I'll be like suddenly realizing, oh, I didn't know about this thing. I would have saved so much time, you know, in whatever program it was. So, I mean, it's self-taught is good, but there is some value to having a structured course in front of you to make sure that you don't miss any fundamentals. And the time that you'll save, it depends on the topic, obviously, is so well worth it. Yeah, like there's a reason why they're great. So plans started only $25 a month, and you can head over to Lynda.com slash Wanshow for a free 10-day trial. Yeah. And speaking of free trials and things you can use, Squarespace. You could take those new skills that you learned on Lynda.com and you could make yourself a site to show off all your mad, neat new skills or really whatever else you could possibly want to show off because Squarespace makes building a site easy for normal people, not just web developers. Last question to interrupt your pitch again. Have you ever tried to build a website yourself from scratch? Um, I had like a GeoCities site that was awful. That doesn't count. Like from scratch, getting your own server, doing the HTML, CSS. I worked with Luke through the processes of even stuff as simple as when we had the server at like NCIX and we needed port forwarding done and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. I mean, when there would be like something like a DDoS attack or whatever else, like it was awful. It is so, it is so hard. Even to do the simplest thing is pretty awful. And it's only gotten more complex. You used to be able to get away with an HTML webpage. Nope, not anymore. Even like you'll get hacked even. Like stuff's just showing up on my website. Like little, like people will... Oh, you're like Taron's animations and songs website? Yeah. Like, cause I used WordPress for it. It's down now. I gotta renew. But like you'll, you know, to have someone else take care of that crap for you. There you go. You gotta switch over to Squarespace. The internet is complex, my friends. Cause it's actually easy. Like the linusmedia group.com website has never gone down. Yeah, that's great. As much as we make updates to it or don't make updates to it. There's so many ways this can go wrong. And it's really, really easy to make small updates, add modules and all that kind of stuff. So they've got 24-7 tech support via live chat and email. All their templates, beautiful templates, feature responsive design. So they'll look great on a phone or on a larger screen. And they've got commerce modules. So with any of their templates, you can sell things through your website. You can start a trial today for two weeks with no credit card required. And if you use offer code linus, you can save 10% on your Squarespace site. Squarespace. Build it beautiful. Thank you, my Luke stand-in. Build it beautiful. Some of the best memes in the LTT meme thread on the forum are just like screen grabs of Luke. Build it beautiful. That's funny. This is cool. So this was posted by Doc Swag on the forum. Original article here is from PC World. And here's what I want to understand is why on earth hasn't this been a thing forever? When you buy a license of a game, why can't you just play it on any device you want? Oh, yeah. I feel much the same way about DVDs and Blu-ray discs that I buy. If I feel like viewing these on my phone, which by the way doesn't have a DVD drive the last time I checked. No, I would hope not. Then I don't care about using your stupid service of which there are however stupid many of them and are licensed for however many stupid devices. Because quite frankly, I switch phones more frequently than most people. And that is extraordinarily inconvenient for me with service like DRM type services like that. Google Play Music, by the way, is awesome. If you run out of devices and you run out of times you can run out of devices, you just call them up. They fixed it in like 45 seconds and offered me a Google Play credit for my trouble. I was like, that's incredible. Anyway, so I've never really understood why when you buy a license to a game, you don't just own the license to a game. It's not like it really costs any different. Well, I do know why. But anyway, if they can get you to buy a movie on your phone and your computer and a DVD, why wouldn't they? And same for games. So gamers who preorder the Xbox One's Quantum Break, which by the way, I'm not recommending to do, will receive a free digital copy for Windows 10 PC. Very cool. Now, I don't personally agree that that's a free digital copy. I think it is a paid for digital copy because you paid for it. But maybe more people will start doing this. But the game will manage save games cross platform, which is sick. That's awesome. And that's extra functionality right there. And Microsoft's chief plans to make the cross by a platform feature of the Xbox One, which in my mind should have been what they did out of the gate to differentiate the Xbox One. And I know licensing agreements with the game developers are complicated and all this stuff. And I get that. But I don't understand why this wasn't more obvious. What a cool and awesome and consumer friendly thing to do. So yeah, it's a baby step. It's definitely baby step. We're talking one game. But cross platform play, cross platform save games, cross platform in game settings, the ability to actually choose how I want to experience something. Very, very cool. Very cool. Love it. I mean, this is a way to use the cloud in a way that is not obnoxious. And you look at something like GeForce Now, Nvidia's cloud gaming service, where you are gaming off the cloud and you have to have a ball and internet connection. It's like, well, you know what? It's actually easier for me to just pack my Xbox with me to go to a friend's house. There's a reason the cloud to butt extension exists, because usually we hear about the cloud in some stupid way. Whereas this, if it's just like, oh, I go over to my buddies and we can use my cloud save of, you know, I'm obviously putting the cart before the horse here, but you know, my cloud save of, you know, Mario Kart, and we can unlock all the characters without me actually having to physically bring my console or my games. Right. Cool. Cool. Yay. Cloud features in a way that is not, you know, terrible. Or if like you can go over to your friends' house, you know, back to an Xbox example. If you can be like, yeah, hey, you want to play this game together that I just got? You go over there. You don't actually have to bring your disk. You don't have to bring your console. You can just sit down at his console. You sign into your Xbox account or log on to, you know, your live account on his Windows 10 PC or whatever or hers. And you can just play it and you can experience it together. That is so cool. And that is the way that it should be. I am all for personal licenses for things. And I am even willing to accept a subscription model for that experience where if I go sit down for anything, if I go, well, not anything, but for a lot of things, if I sit down in front of a computer, I want to have the full Microsoft Office experience. I am an Office 365 subscriber and I love it. And same for something like Creative Cloud. To be able to just be like, OK, on any computer, I don't have to have a CD key. I don't have to have a disk. There are some advantages to Creative Cloud, but boy, do I have opinions about it. I know it is not perfect, Taron. But this is probably worth mentioning. Adobe has committed to send out not one, but two technicians to our site to come investigate this month, to come investigate how we are using the products and some of the challenges that we have and help us improve our workflow, which for the first time ever as an Adobe customer, I really feel valued. And like the $600 a month or whatever it is I give them is actually going somewhere other than a black hole pit of money at the Adobe headquarters. It was my super complainy videos about Premiere that ended up setting this up. I never expected that anything would come from those. I just I make these videos where I complain about the features Premiere doesn't have. Yeah, and like are actually quite rude about it. Yeah, they are. Like super snarky. Can we talk about gravitational waves next? Because this is amazing. Sure. Do you want to hang out with me the article so I can pull it up? I already did. Wow. You are like a somewhat competent person. It's not the article. It's a Reddit mega thread, which I don't know, probably is a very excellent thing to get to. So anyway, gravitational waves. I don't know much about these, but it's kind of. Well, I'm glad you're informing the rest of us. It's kind of as amazing as discovering like electromagnetic waves almost sort of like we don't really know exactly what we'll be able to do with them. I just I usually I know a lot more details because this stuff really interests me. But basically it's an enormous discovery. This has been theorized by what is it special or general relativity? I think general relativity for like since Einstein and we just now determined that it is in fact a thing. So the direct detection of them. The direct detection has happened because in 1993 they had already indirectly detected them. Yes, they and a Nobel Prize or whatever in physics was awarded for that. Yeah. And now someone's going to get a prize for this. But check this out. What it was. It was so cool. It's so cool how they found these is they got like this thing that shot a laser that got split in two and then bounced back. And the tiny, tiny differences in the interference between those two lasers was used to detect if waves of gravity gravitational waves were happening because all of space time gets kind of warped. So they'll bounce back at different rates. And it's like just a minuscule amounts. And what it was that was detected was two supermassive black holes spinning together and colliding, which apparently output 50 times. This is amazing. Fifty times the energy of the entire universe during that event. Like and then and then we get this tiny blip back here on Earth like one billion years later. Isn't that amazing? Don't quote me on the 50 times thing. I saw that some physicist might have said that, but it's kind of hearsay right now. So you can check out the mega thread. Yeah, very much a developing developing story. Yeah. But but basically, I mean, like it's as exciting as discovering the electron because we don't really know what it's going to be useful for power, not energy, until. So there you go. OK. Until like future advancements. But like physicists are extremely excited about this. People are saying power, not energy, and it can't be more than the entire universe might have been a galaxy or something. Anyway, the point is a lot. I'll look for the source on that one. Yeah, but it was people are like, can I power my computer with them? No, you cannot. Welcome to Twitch chat. Um, all right. What else we got here? Oh, this is great. Ubisoft developer concedes that the division PC version was held back by the consoles. So we're back to more more digging by Ubisoft. Original article here was from Kit Guru. And this was posted on the forum by Rohit Kumar SP. So an unnamed developer stated that they had to keep the PC version of the division in check with consoles because it would kind of be unfair to push it so far away from them. Ubisoft sent PC games and a statement saying it has come to our attention that a comment from one of our team members has been perceived by some T some members of the community to imply the PC version of the division was held back and it is simply not true. From the beginning, the PC version of the division was developed from the ground up and we're confident players will enjoy the game and the features that this version has to offer and the feedback from PC players who participated in the recent closed beta supports this. Now, to be clear, I am not piling on the Ubisoft hate train on this one because I will be the first to hate on a crappy port. A port that doesn't have graphical fidelity sliders because they just couldn't be arsed. A port that says press A to continue when I do not have a gamepad attached and when I press A on my keyboard it doesn't do a bloody thing. That's what I object to. Whereas if they developed the game from the ground up on PC and it's well optimized and runs well, I'm not going to crucify them for that. If the game has to exist within the same mortal realm as the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, like if they can't just make a completely different game for the PC and the Xbox One, I understand that too. You can't be like, oh, well, we've got this great idea for a gameplay mechanic that would have the player, character, blah blah this, too many polygons, something something like that. If it's technically feasible on all of the platforms that the game has to be released on, then in that way, the gameplay paradigms might be held back by the consoles. But that's not the same as nerfing the game because they didn't want to create too much disparity in the marketing materials between what the PC version and the console version looked like, like what we saw with Watch Dogs. So Watch Dogs significantly better on PC? No, it was it was it was nerfed significantly from the original like E3 trailers that were shown. Oh, that sucks. So I don't feel like this is the same thing, but it could be proven that I am totally wrong and I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for nothing. I just I believe they learned their lesson and I don't think they were stupid enough to do that again. Then again, they are Ubisoft and they they they do they do dig. All right, I've got one more or two more rapid fire topics here. This was posted by Doc Swag on the forum. Original article here is from PC World. Let's go ahead and pop that up. Coming soon to a consumer laptop near you. Smoother video with AMD's FreeSync. So that's pretty cool. I mean, that was bound to happen eventually. I mean, the original demos of FreeSync were actually done on laptops because they're not inherently that different from like some laptops. The way that the display and the GPU interface is not inherently that different from the way FreeSync works at all. Oh, AMD's Scott Wosson. Good old Scott. This is posted by Doc Swag on the forum. Apparently tweeted an image of what looks like a Fury X2 or two Fiji GPUs or something like that. So Fury X2 is being teased. Wow, it's coming really close to Polaris. Maybe Polaris isn't going to be as fast as I had hoped because if two Fijis even makes any sense. I have no opinions on this topic. That's fine. Oh, actually. Oh, crap. Oh, there were man. Opera got bought for 1.2 billion by a Chinese consortium. So that's sort of a bummer if you if you cared about the opera browser, which I personally didn't. But I'm sure some people is Nick doing selfie sticks are actually banned in this office. Yeah. Also Disney World. So yeah. I'm going to take a selfie with you guys on the land show. What do you why can they see? Because I felt like I wasn't interrupting anyone's day. Oh, yeah. Would like with the giant penis. Yeah. In the window. Thank you for that, by the way. So 1.2 billion. Wow. Actually, yeah, there's been doing it. There's a bunch of really good stuff. OK, there is one more that I did want to discuss, though. So this was originally posted by Syntax VGM on the forum. The original article is actually from Wired and is about how Wired is going to handle ad blocking. So Wired is going to start offering a subscription based service for people who want to browse the site without ads. And they are going to block access to their content from people who are using an ad blocker. Now, there is no there is no like hard and fast tried and true. For sure, we can do this way to block ad blocking. But they're going to try. Has this been tried before? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Definitely. Has it succeeded before? I don't know, to be perfectly honest with you. Because one thing that might happen is people with ad block just won't visit them anymore and they won't pay. I don't know. I mean, you know, I mean, it's the whole it's the whole piracy argument again. Like, you know, well, I won't I won't I wouldn't have paid for it anyway, or I wouldn't have I wouldn't have looked at the ad anyway. I don't remember what it is. But OK. So anyway, a couple of quotes. So on an average day, more than 20 percent of the traffic to Wired dot com comes from a reader who is blocking our ads. We know that you come to our site primarily to read our content. But it's important to be clear that advertising is how we keep Wired going, paying the writers, editors, designers, engineers and other staff that work so hard to create the stories that you read and watch here. So there will be two easy options to access that content. You can simply add Wired dot com to your ad blockers whitelist. They're not even going as far as to say don't use an ad blocker because there are a lot of compelling reasons to use an ad blocker. When you do, we will keep the ads as polite as we can and you will only see standard display advertising. Or number two, you can subscribe to a brand new ad free version of Wired dot com. And for a dollar a week, you will get complete access to our content with no display advertising or ad tracking. I think a dollar a week is out to lunch. I can't think of a website on earth that I would pay a dollar a week rather than... I thought it was a dollar a month. I didn't even hear week because it was kind of... Ok, YouTube Red. I would pay the 10.99 or whatever 11.99 it is for YouTube Red. Per month? That's per month. Ok. But we're talking Wired wants something like what, 40% of the cost of YouTube Red or 30% or something like that. And it's one of those things where whether they like it and whether you like it or whether anyone likes it or not, the value of written is just not as high. It's not perceived to be as high as the value of video. Even though, and this is a point I've made many times, there are so many YouTube videos that would be way better as articles. Yep. Right? Because it's just pictures and talking. And... Just let me read it. Because there can be as much or more that goes into a really well done written article as a video. Yes, for sure. And there can also be a lot more that goes into a video than an article. Which isn't to say video is easy. We're not making that argument. I just push a couple buttons and the video edits itself. I don't know about you. So, we've had a really interesting discussion on the forum that goes back and forth between people who have different opinions one way or the other. So, there's the usual, like, okay, it's their right to set a price. The price is whatever they say it is. And if you don't like it, then you don't have to visit the site. There's people saying that Wired is shooting themselves in the foot because ultimately no one's going to be interested in advertising with them at all if they can't show massive site traffic numbers. Can they? Which they will be able to if they don't actively block people from accessing their site to a greater degree. Hey, 20% can be a pretty darn big deal. We can get 20% more traffic to our whatevers. That'd be awesome. And then other people are saying, blah, blah, blah, I shouldn't have to pay for it. Other people are saying just because something is posted on the internet doesn't mean it's free. And people are saying, well, they should find other ways to support it other than obnoxious ads. And I guess one of the things that I want to point out, and it was going to be a direct response to someone, but I didn't remember who it was and I didn't, unfortunately... Who reads what? Yeah, someone was saying, blah, blah, blah, of course you have the right to control your browsing experience on your computer and modify web code on your computer, but the content provider also has the right to block their ads. And so, you know, sure, we can have this arms race. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I really wish I could find the... Well, what did he say? Damn it. I don't remember. I'm trying to find the post and I'm very sad right now. Very, very sad right now. It's hard to think when you have a camera on you and it's live. The point I was going to make in response, though, is that if you back content providers into a corner where, I mean, frankly, we're doing great. We're surviving just fine. But many written sites are not, and that's where things like audio or autoplaying video or full page ads are coming from, is they are, in my mind mistakenly, getting more and more in your face about the ads in an attempt to keep their advertising revenues high enough in order to survive because, frankly, it is an awful lot of work to make good content, whether it's video or whether it's written. And it's unfortunate that people don't value the written content the way that they used to. So the argument that I'm making is if you refuse to subscribe and you refuse to view ads, one of the... Oh, that's a bummer. A SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44 million losses is an article I just pulled up here. I was just on the subject of companies not being able to finance themselves and so on. Then what you might find yourself stuck with is a lot more native advertising. And what native advertising can look like is things like those sponsored articles, things like that, where it's not actually immediately obvious. You know, like, what would it be? This plant that Dr. Oz said was amazing. You could end up with a lot of that instead. So, I don't know. Dun, dun, dun. All right. Well... Is that it? Are we done? Yeah, I think we're done. Wow, that's kind of a bummer. Can we talk about SoundCloud? Could be forced to close after $44 million losses? How do you lose $44 million? Because people kept investing in the company because they'll make money later. Right? Isn't that how all these websites work? What is SoundCloud's model? I think we pay them, but it isn't very much money. We do pay them. That's where all the WAN Show archives go up. So it might have to be moved somewhere else now. Sorry, guys. And, yeah, I thought you would appreciate this one. They apparently brought in $17 million in revenue in 2014. That sounds good. It's less than $44 million. Employee wages during that period increased 42.5% to 17.9 million euros, meaning that the average employee was paid 79,000 euros a year. What does SoundCloud need that many people for? Do they have like 100 people? What do we need that many people for? No! Hold on a second. Hold on a second. What? How many people work there? Isn't it just like a music uploading site? Interesting. Okay. Well, there you go. So thank you for tuning in to the WAN Show, guys. We will see you again next week. Same bat time, same bat channel. And maybe on SoundCloud, but maybe not. Yeah. Sorry. And yes, they can still hear us. Hello, Internet people. I conducted some scientific polls asking people like, do protons decay? Yes, no, or turnip? And turnip won. But then I was like, oh, I can determine real truths about the universe with polls on a website. This is how Fox News operates. Oh snap.