 Hey hey, and we're live! Welcome to the WAN Show, guys! I had a couple people complaining the volume was a little bit low in the pre-show, but uh... Oh, I don't know what this thing does. Okay, forget it. Nope, nope, we're done with that. Anyway, so the reason for that is that we actually talked quite a bit louder during the show. We got our announcer voices on. Dun dun dun! Dun dun dun! And our announcer hats. So guys, we actually have a fantastic show for you today. Our special guest this week is the one and only Tom Merritt of Sword and Laser, formerly of TwittTV. Now he's doing his own thing with some amazing support from the community, so we've got him on to discuss some hardcore tech topics, and maybe we'll pick his brain a little bit about the transition from, you know, working for the man to going indie. Something we can't relate to. At all. At all! Uh-huh. Alright, topics for today. This is gonna just have everyone in tears. The Magic the Gathering Online Exchange has closed. Oh my god. Which might not seem like a big deal, except that Mt. Gox stands for Magic the Gathering Online Exchange. I love the professionalism of this show. We're trying to bring breaking news to the people, and you're throwing your phone around. I didn't mean to, I'm sorry. It's my hat. Alright, next up, WhatsApp is still not a social network, according to me. We need a t-shirt. Everyone is bailing, and by everyone we mean like, everyone. Like, millions of people, but not actually six billion people. As bailing to Telegram. So that's a former competitor, and I say competitor because they weren't even really that significant. Until all of a sudden after the Facebook acquisition, there's movement going on. What else we got? You know that Twitter account, is Half-Life 3 released yet? And it's just like, no, no, no, no. And it's just a bot that says, no, we should make it. Is WhatsApp a social media network yet? No, no, no. And then Facebook destroys it and makes a whole new thing. Yes, yes, yes. Anyways, spritz is a kind of amazing thing, which may change how you read things on different platforms and different devices. Mainly smartphones and Google Glass and like smartwatches and stuff like that. That's going to be really interesting. We'll talk about that later. And Nintendo discontinues Nintendo Wi-Fi connections. If you guys are waiting for me to rant about something, this is likely to be it. That topic. That topic has, you know, I don't. OK, I'm not going to do this right now. It's intro time. Our sponsors today are Squarespace, the easy way to set up a beautiful professional looking website, and... Dun-dun-dun. Intel has an exciting new program. If you head over to Enthusiast.Intel.com, you can get details on how your unlocked Core i5 or Core i7 processor could give you access to some pretty exclusive stuff as part of Intel Club Enthusiast. More on that later on in this show. So let's kick things off right here with a big shout out to Ghost from the Forum for his help with a bit of a sort of producer role on the WAN show today. We are very, very grateful because we have a pretty fantastic show for you guys. Let's start with the HTC Power to Give. This is a program that much like other distributed computing, I guess, I don't know what we would call them, networks, programs, whatever you want to call them. Things like Folding at Home, Boink, SETI at Home is enabling you to take extra processing power you otherwise wouldn't be using. See, look, I got one of those too. See, it's kind of like the thing in the picture. And use it to contribute to a fantastic cause. So... This is actually really cool. One thing that I wanted to throw on here is that our folding team on the Forum is now 49th in the world. So that's awesome. And while this doesn't necessarily pertain to folding, as this is a Boink back end, not a folding back end, still very cool. And we do have a Boink team as well, which is again very strong. But Boink is fairly divided. You can pick what you want to go for. Folding is one kind of one direction. Boink is whatever the heck you want to do. Because they've got that one thing. I really shouldn't have said one direction. That was a terrible idea. One specific angle that they're going on. One vector. One vector. That should be the new brand, the new band. One vector. One vector is like a cheap one direction knockoff. Like slightly nerdier version. Yeah, nerdy one direction. Alright, I'm sorry. We got off topic there. Awesome. Okay, so right now for compatibility, there's beta compatibility on HTC One. The whole family, the HTC Butterfly and the HTC Butterfly S. Although there is much more compatibility coming apparently in the next six months. And it will only run while the phone is charging. So it's probably going to be more of an overnight thing. What that's going to do for your battery charging, I don't know. Although I fully expect that overnight, even running this, your battery is still going to be at full by the time you wake up. Yeah, I mean, and I haven't tried it yet. But if they offer configurability options, like where you can say, okay, don't run this when I'm charging during the day. But run it during these hours when I'm charging. Like time frame charging. Yeah, like I can't see this having a negative impact on your phone. Other than running warm, which based on the way that mobile processors are able to throttle themselves from heat, should actually be fine. They shouldn't overheat. It looks like a fantastic way to contribute positively. So you can actually decide if you want to contribute to medicine, science, ecology or whatever it happens to be. Like Luke said, folding at home is just protein folding. Like that's pretty much it. Which is awesome. And if everyone with an HTC One smartphone installed it, there's about a million. Oh, no, no, no, hold on. Sorry. There's more. If one million people with HTC One smartphones installed it, we could be looking at similar processing power to that of one of the world's 30 top supercomputers. So about one petaflop. It's like pretty epic. This could be a really big deal. I hope this expands. I hope it doesn't just stay with HTC. I hope this goes everything because I'd be more than happy. And with the heating thing that you talked about, it would be a really small investment to get some sort of plate that would pull the heat from it or to get like a little router cooler. Right. Or something like that that could just cool your phone down, which would probably be better for your phone and would just allow it to operate at a higher processing level. It gets warm while it's charging anyway. Yeah. So having it somewhere safe is not necessarily a bad idea anyhow. And neither of those things would really be a giant investment. So you opt in simply by heading over to the Play Store link, which I can sort of show you guys right here. So it's HTC Power to Give. There's already it's a five star rated app with over a thousand ratings already. So it looks like people are really getting on board this. And that is that is pleasing and good news. It's really cool. And they did it in a really smart way. Making it so it only does it when you're charging was really smart. I think if they didn't have that in place, I probably wouldn't get behind. But I'm not sure even if it wasn't the default. I think it would be a terrible choice. Yeah. All right. Speaking of terrible choices, Space Jam 2 is not as confirmed as we had thought that it was based on the rumors that were floating around last week. So unfortunately, the sequel to. OK. First of all, I liked Space Jam. Why don't they just do it? I wish they would. Like Space Jam was freaking awesome. I think saying freaking awesome should be there should be like an asterisk. It's freaking awesome in the same way that Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure was freaking awesome. OK, yes. It was it was like ridiculous. Yeah. But good. Yeah. Anyway. OK. So initially there was like there were rumors that Warner Brothers was partnering with Charlie and Willie Ebersole on Space Jam 2. They said the movie was still in early stages. However, reporters from ESPN are refuting the claim, but no one from Warner Brothers is denying anything. And they're saying it where while there wasn't substantive discussions, there may have been non-substantive discussions, which are it's not terrible. I liked it a lot more when they were in early stages of the movie because that means it's coming. LeBron James, who was rumored to be the star of it, said it would be great, but it's news to me. So I think even no matter how early the stages of the discussion are, if you're like deciding on who the main actor is going to be, they should probably know about it. Yeah. Especially if they're like a basketball player and probably busy. Yeah. LeBron James has a fairly busy daily life. He's got stuff to do, like throwing rubber balls through hoops. You know, I'm sure he has lots of other things to do. LeBron, if you're watching, I don't mean any offense and I'm very certain you're not watching, but like 100 percent. You know what was actually really funny? John Heder retweeted our contest. He's a million dynamite guy, for those of you who don't know who that is. So our giveaway was tweeted by John freaking Heder. Who managed to get John Heder to tweet about our giveaway? It's so cool. And there was a basketball player too, actually. Not LeBron James, but like pro level basketball. That contest spread all over. Speaking of which, today is the last day for entry. So anything sitting in my inbox, my midnight tonight counts. Anything else doesn't. And I've had a few people ask me how I'm doing the draw and it is going to be difficult. I'm going to be using random.org to determine. Once I've determined how many are on each page, I'm going to be using random.org to determine a random page for me. And then I'm going to actually have to click load more that many times. It's probably going to take me a while. I'm going to have a laptop sitting there that's just for that. And when I'm eating my dinner, I'll just be like, dum dum dum. That's going to be the only way to do it fairly. I wasn't expecting 50,000 people to enter the giveaway, which is fantastic, but also terrifying. Speaking of fantastic, but also terrifying, new way. Why is this terrifying? Well, it's terrifying potentially to UK e-tailers. And potentially fantastic for UK customers. So I think the article from Hexis is probably a little bit generous to new egg. Amazon rival new egg expected to launch in the UK next month. I think calling no offense to the new egg TV guys, because like nothing personal. But like my grudge match with new egg goes before their times. Before I was doing YouTube videos. It like goes way back because, you know, NCIX competes with new egg, particularly now that new egg is in Canada in the same way that a horse competes with a mouse in Canada in the US. New egg is a big deal. They are. They have an excellent filter based search mechanism to find technology. They have is so much better than they have great photos, like great product photos, which I've been informed that they actually take versus, you know, forcing the manufacturer to do it, which is why they are often so much better than what the manufacturer provides. But they have the same logistical disadvantages trying to expand into a new country that anyone else does. And they will be a small startup in that country compared to the established players the same way anyone else's new egg.ca is not a big deal in much the same way that I would be very surprised if new egg.co.uk was a big deal. And the only the only time I've ever seen a company get around this was actually Best Buy coming into Canada, because they just bought Future Shop. Yeah, they bought the existing what was basically Best Buy already. Yeah, yeah. So they just bought them. And the reason why they bought them was all of the warehouses and distribution lines. Yes. So they bought the logistics. Yeah. And then they went and put Best Buy stores right next to the Future Shop stores everywhere. And well, we see how that's working out for them. But actually, Best Buy Canada is doing better than Best Buy USA in terms of yes, but like generally probably still going to go out of businessness. Well, they're still going to generally probably going to go out of business. Yeah, but it might take longer. Yeah. Yeah. So so there's that. But here, here's the reason. Buying from an online retailer, why do you pick one over another one? Habit? Trust? Because with electronics, it's not really prices anymore. They're so close. Like it's you could shop piece by piece in places like you could go Amazon versus New Egg versus NCIX. And these would be cheaper here and these would be cheaper here. These would be cheaper here. And you could do that. But most people aren't willing to do that much work. Let's be honest with ourselves. Most people are just going to buy from one. And what I have found when I've been pricing out things for build guides, because I tend to start out with a price budget and then completely blow over it. But besides the point is when I put together a whole system from any one of them, it comes out about the same, even though there might be price differences as much as like 20 or 30 dollars on an individual part. It gets made up somewhere else. So I think that New Egg is going to struggle. But I also think that they don't really have any other ideas for how to expand their business because, you know, you look at what Amazon's done so well, breaking out of books into other things. But New Egg doesn't have the advantage of books in that the margin is phenomenal. So that's a lot of money to reinvest into other things. Electronics margins are terrible. Last time New Egg tried to go public. I think their net profit was something like one percent. So your net profit is after all of your operating expenses, which is just it's not good. No one's going to invest in that. No, no. And it's hard to it's hard to do things that make sense. Like despite being the white knight of the patent trolling industry and all that other kind of stuff that they were not that long ago, they don't actually have this giant wad of cash. Well, I'm sure they do, but not as giant as like Amazon or Apple. It's not the same kinds of resources. I don't think Amazon has much cash, actually. Well, they probably throw it around. Yeah. But I mean, not as not as much to work with. Let's just say that. Yeah. All right. So this is very interesting. This is a I totally called this. So check this out, guys. This is a tweet from Telegram Messenger. So I need to give you guys some idea of how big Telegram Messenger was before now. I'd never heard of it. Me neither. But it's a messaging app. Presumably, I've never even used it. Presumably somewhat similar to WhatsApp that it was the number one most downloaded iPhone app in 48 countries with 4.95 million people who signed up in one day, February 23rd. Kind of cool that their servers didn't just completely kill themselves. Yeah. That's one thing that I noticed, actually, was they were tweeting that out in no small part. I'm sure to keep the ball rolling and all this kind of stuff. And I heard nothing about, oh, my God, everyone to switch to Telegram. And it totally doesn't work at all. I didn't hear that ever. So so you can check out the full article over on Bloomberg dot com. The headline is The Zuckerberg of Russia Gets a Boost from the Real Facebook CEO's WhatsApp Deal. So there's a lot of there's a lot of talk about what's happening here. But let's go back to what we said last week. WhatsApp is not a social network. It is a utility. It's a it's a social network in the same way that picking up a phone and calling someone and talking to them is a social network, to which he said, well, you can have conversations with multiple multiple people across WhatsApp, you know, group conversation, to which I said three way calling. Yeah, three way calling is not a social network. And as much as the justification for the purchase of WhatsApp, there were a couple of different ways to look at it. So number one was well, the biggest justification was you look at it in terms of cost per user to acquire a social network that you can then figure out how to monetize, which made it worth 19 billion in cash and stock options, to which I kind of went, well, what's to prevent those people from just bailing the second you try to monetize anything they're doing or even before and way before apparently. So I actually just installed it, set it up and am already activated while you were doing that blurb. And as far as I can tell, it's like a blue skinned version of WhatsApp. Even the install process was almost exactly the same. So if you're looking for an alternative, not necessarily a bad idea. So they've got only 20 million registered users compared to WhatsApp's 450 million. So it's not like overnight. Telegram has become the new WhatsApp. But with as many as four point nine five million signups per day compared to WhatsApp's one million per day, it doesn't make WhatsApp look like such a shoe in winner in the alternative messaging space. And this is more reinforcement of my perception that you look at how quickly BlackBerry Messenger was completely displaced and became irrelevant. You look at what happened to ICQ, you look what happened to MSN Messenger. Something new just has to come along. And even more than with social networks like the way we saw MySpace just completely disappear. Like Facebook has shown that social networks can have some resiliency even once they start to try to monetize their user base. Messaging applications? Someone's going to come along and build something lighter weight that's more private and free and yeah. And they're going to capitalize on the fact that companies like Facebook think that that's worth 19 billion. So someone is going to get some seed funding and build something better in hopes that they get their 19 billion and it's going to happen over and over and over again. I'm sure the WhatsApp guys are super stoked. Yeah. That's like pretty much all I have to say. They won so hard. Oh yeah. Like they had like 50 employees. Everybody just has like the biggest smile on their face right now. And some of the scary part of this is that Telegram is seeing huge growth in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and throughout Latin America. Regions in which Mr. Zuckerberg had said that WhatsApp was strongest. So and this is before they've even tried to change anything. I don't think WhatsApp has even had a software update. Don't think so. Since the acquisition. Meaning literally nothing has changed. So just because of Facebook's ownership, people are jumping off board. And honestly, someone found the right application as far as I can tell, because like I just said, as far as I can tell, it's the same thing. Right. Which is like exactly what people probably wanted. They wanted the same thing, but not owned by Facebook. But I mean, the acquisition might still be OK. If they're gaining a million users per day, even if they lose five million a day for a period of time here, it's not like, you know, your mom or like, you know, my badminton buddies who aren't tech savvy are immediately going to switch. And with how people rate users for phone applications, they're probably not losing all the users that are going to Telegram. Yeah. They're probably just that many people also getting Telegram. So they're not necessarily losing all these people. That's OK. You know what? I'm actually going to disagree with what I just said, because in my mind, something like WhatsApp is kind of geeky. Like it's more geeky than picking up a phone or sending a text message or sending an email. Like my mom and grandpa have WhatsApp. But the only reason why they have WhatsApp is because I have informed them that they can message each other from very far away without fees. And they're both like, what the heck is this? And then eventually just got used to it. Right. So there is something to be said for being first and having that the Kleenex or the Xerox effect where you're you become synonymous with the service. So it's not like they're going to go away immediately. But but then the geeky people, the ones who advocated WhatsApp influence and drove that. I mean, to me, those guys seem like the kinds of guys who are going to be driving something else. So, well, everyone, like I said in the last show, people freaked out, which makes sense. I did as well when Facebook did that update where they can read your text messages and call status. People don't want that. Yeah. And it's a it all like I said, it's a big deal right now. Back off. And then then look at how we accept Google reading our emails. Is it just a matter of getting used to it again? Maybe. But people aren't getting used to it anymore. I don't know why Google gets a free pass. I don't know why Google probably because all other email services are free. Other email services are horrible. Yeah, it could have something to do with it. But like, you know what, guys, we want to hear from you. Are you going to switch to Telegram or are you going to look for something else? Are you going to, you know, look for a bit torrent solution, bit torrent chat chat? Yeah. Or are you going to keep using WhatsApp? You know what? Let's do it. Let's do a straw poll. On this topic, would you switch from Gmail? I think everyone's had the opportunity to switch from Gmail by now. And if anyone sucks, though. Okay. Okay. Hold on. Will you keep using WhatsApp? Okay. Answer. Yes. For now. No. Okay. This thing, right? Yeah. Create poll. All right, guys, I'm going to go ahead and post this in the Twitch chat. Please do share with each other. We want to hear from you guys if you're going to keep using it. Oh, come on. There we go, guys. That's the official straw poll. All right. Next topic. One one quick update. Someone just tweeted me. Apparently, Twitch plays Pokemon is very close to actually beating the game, beating the game, not in terms of collecting every single possible Pokemon, because that's impossible because they can't trade. But being the game as in beating the Elite Four. So that's kind of epic. A million monkeys on typewriters. Yeah. Eventually, they will. Eventually it will happen. Reproduce the works of Shakespeare. It's what like 1314 days straight now or something like that. But they're going to make it. So that's cool. So Seth Rogen to make console wars. This looks really interesting. I got really excited when I saw this because one of my favorite movies of all time is Pirates of Silicon Valley, which is this kind of idea. But Apple versus Microsoft. Something that worries me at the same time is the team working on this has done Superbad, Pineapple Express, and This is the End, which honestly is a good movie. Are great movies, but I hope that they're not trying to use the same direction for this. Or if they do, I hope it's somehow awesome because I'm sure they could do it. But I don't know what I what I expect to see from this is a Pirates of Silicon Valley esque film, which is still very entertaining to watch and stuff. But it's also a documentary at the same time. So the idea is it'll be the the early days of Nintendo versus Sega and which is a pretty big deal. And something that I actually know nothing about. It was the CD loader thing. This needs to stop talking. I got apparently someone that I know is probably watching the show and just sent me an invite to Telegram. Awesome. It's Nintendo wanted someone to make them. I'm fairly certain about this. Nintendo wanted someone to make them a CD loader for another console. Got them to try and do it. Or was this with I don't want this to be totally inaccurate. That might have been with Sony. I'm going to have a look at the results of our straw poll in the meantime. Wow. All right. Here, let's pull this up. Will you keep using WhatsApp? 67% of you are saying no with 21% of you saying for now and a tiny 12% of you saying yes. Now, with that said, you guys, I believe, represent the techies, the geeks, the influencers. So just because you guys are like, yeah, I'm going to switch now doesn't mean that WhatsApp will instantly lose the mainstream appeal that they've had up till now. But I think that over time, something like Telegram or BitTorrent chat could overtake it. What I'd really like to see, and this is something that really bothers me, but what I would like to see is a competitor for it, whether it's BitTorrent chat or whether it's something else that emerges that is not just mobile. Yeah, I understand that mobile is a big deal and you can sell your mobile app for 19 billions of dollars. But why the hell does WhatsApp not have a Windows client? Why does nothing have cross-platform compatibility? It's incredibly frustrating. I mean, even stupid things like the Air Video app that I use to stream video to myself or on Android Emit. Why don't you have a desktop client? People still use computers and I think that app developers would do well to sort of remember that once in a while. That's all. The sales of PCs are going a little bit down. It doesn't mean that the existence of PCs is going down. Okay, so I was right. It was Sony. Remember earlier before the show when I brought up the Sony thing? That's what I expected this actually to be about, was Nintendo versus Sony. But apparently it's Nintendo versus Sega. So I think it would actually be a lot more interesting if they did Nintendo versus Sony. Okay, well at any rate, I'm excited to check it out. Yeah, I think it'll still be really interesting. Although I would like to see the war of the CD loader because that's why Sony got into consoles in the first place. So like that would be really interesting. Why don't you tell them more about this? So Nintendo tried to get Sony to make them a CD loader for I believe it was SNES, although I could be wrong there. And then there was some bad blood. I believe the contract went sour. Someone was breaking the contract, something along those lines. And Nintendo backed out. I believe it was Nintendo that backed out. And then Sony got pissed off and said, well we developed this thing, let's make our own console and do PlayStation 1. And one of the biggest gaming regimes ever. Now with PlayStation 4, although Sony does look like they're doing fairly bad lately. So we've got lots of suggestions coming in. People saying Telegram does have desktop support. So that's cool. And I haven't really looked into Telegram much at all. This is kind of a new thing. And also people are saying that Hangouts is cross-platform. That may be true, but Hangouts is a giant steaming pile of poo. It doesn't work very well. It's not reliable enough. I'm sorry Google. And also, like, okay, like to get something like, what was I using? I was using Trillian with Hangouts for a while. In order to have a proper desktop client that does not operate within a browser or have anything to do with my browser. It's extremely frustrating. I use my browser to browse the internet. And I don't necessarily have enough desktop space that I want to pop out all of my chats and put them all over something. And I don't want them to pile up at the bottom of the screen and cover up the send button. So I can't send emails. Hangouts just isn't that great. No, it's really not. And people are saying it works about as well as Skype. I don't really have any love for Skype either. Skype doesn't work that well. So many times on the WAN Show we've been like, I wish MSN would come back so we could never use Skype ever again. We should take another crack at Razer comms. We haven't used it since the beta was in kind of rough shape near the end of the sponsorship thing. I've kind of heard it's still in rough shape. Is it still in rough shape? I'm not entirely sure. I haven't tried it myself. I don't know. I've done no testing, but I've heard it's still rough. Maybe we should take another crack at it because it was really good when we first started using it. Yeah, when we first started using it, I had my whole group on it. Like that was not, I say that because of sponsorship, my whole group actually did use Razer comms. And ever since then, we've just been kind of like floating around. Dolby Axum. We used in-game chat or other random things. So we're just like, oh man. Waiting for the next big thing. Yeah. Speaking of the next big thing, SanDisk introduces the world's highest capacity micro SDXC card. 128 gigs. That's ridiculous. I mean, isn't that incredible? It's absolutely ridiculous. Like I wonder when drives in computers are just going to end up being like huge plug-in adapters. We just put in a whole bunch of like micro SD cards and then it goes in through like a SATA connection or something. So the recommended retail price is 200 bucks. Although you can get it for as cheap as 120 bucks on amazon.com or $200 at Best Buy. Speaking of Best Buy being in trouble. So you get it for $119.99 at amazon.com. It's not the fastest thing ever. So it's rated at 10 megabytes per second write speeds and 30 megabytes per second read speed. So to put that in perspective, you'd have to write data to it for about three and a half hours to actually fill the thing. But that's not really the idea behind it. The idea is that this is the kind of thing that you can put in your phone. Neither of my phones, mind you, because neither of them have SD slots. But the kind of thing you could put in your phone and carry a massive number of videos and amount of music and all that kind of cool stuff. Without really thinking about having to offload from it. Now the scary thing here is if you're not already using BitTorrent sync to instantly backup any photos that you take or whatever else. Is that that's also a massive amount of data to have in one place and potentially lose on something that you keep in your pocket. In theory, except when your pockets have holes in them from the things that you're doing in your pockets that causes them to have holes in them. So something that's easily lost. It's a bit of a scary thing. But don't worry, you guys can make sure that you know you're responsible and all that. So the card works by stacking 16 memory dies vertically, each thinner than a human hair. Epic. Just like unbelievable. Oh my god. Like some of the stuff people do with technology sometimes is ridiculous. And the speed thing to go on that. I'm sure it'll get faster at some point in time. Yeah, it'll get faster. The cool part is that this is available now and that it will be expanded upon. It's like real not space age technology. I mean, to put that in context, the first micro SD card was launched in 2004. It was 128 megabytes. So in 10 years, the storage capacity and speed, this capacity has gone up a thousand times. Ridiculous. Anyways, apparently Telegram themselves do not do a desktop application, but it's an open API and someone else has made a desktop client. Okay. Much less interested. Much less interested. At least it works. And to be honest, with the amount of people that are now using Telegram, maybe this will happen in the future. Maybe they'll make it themselves because I'm sure they're much bigger than they were before. Yeah. And I'm sure investors are much more interested now. So they might get some more cash flow and then do that themselves. That would be really cool. All right. So let's get into this. This is something that people have actually been asking me to talk about for quite some time. Actually, ever since Logan did his audio myths video. So let's go ahead and fire this baby up. They took an interesting angle with this one. They really did. I think Tom's did a fantastic job of this article and this stupid Facebook thing needs to move. Thank you. All right. So the article has headlined, what does it take to turn the PC into a hi-fi audio platform? And the way that they did this is, I mean, okay. What they said upfront is, look, we haven't really done much in the way of audio in the past. Because Tom's hardware is about taking a scientifically easily validated and easily replicated approach to anything they do, which is easy with something like a CPU. You take a task, you throw it at the CPU and it takes however long. This is something that anyone else could run around and verify if they had exactly the same resources and exactly the same methodology. That's the scientific method. With audio, whether people like it or not, there is a lot of subjectivity. Because, and I've heard this argument made to me, Linus, there is no subjectivity in pure audio reproduction, to which I would go, good for you. But pure audio reproduction doesn't necessarily sound good. So you could create the purest amp, purest DAC, purest audio file and purest pair of headphones and you could have 99 out of 100 people say, oh, it sounds like butt, and not care. It sounds like butt. And that is why audio will continue to be subjective no matter how well we can measure whatever sound is being produced by whatever device being driven by whatever thing. So that's a big problem. So Tom's Hardware decided they were going to put objectivity into a subjective test by doing blind A, B, well it ended up being A, B, C, D testing. So they had four different sources, one of which was a high-end onboard solution, one of which was an objective to, one of which was, oh crap, now I forget. What was their, what was their really high-end one? Shoot, now I'm in trouble. There we go, there we go, there we go. Benchmark Media, yep, yep, yep. So a JDS Labs O2 and O DAC, Benchmark Media Systems DAC2 HCG, and an ASUS ZonaR Essence STX. That's the one I couldn't remember. So they have everything ranging from a $2 chip on your motherboard up to a couple hundred dollar DAC and amp that uses like an open platform design that anyone can manufacture. There's actually a member of the Linus Tech Tips forums, Mayflower Electronics, that manufactures objective 2 amps and DACs. And then up to sort of a $500 to $700 range ASUS external sound card all the way up to a $2,000 device. So what they did, and this is really important, is they leveled the audio volume across the different sources. So you turn all the knobs so that with one pair of headphones, you have to use a meter in order to make sure that the sound levels are the same. Because that can be a really easy way for one thing to sound better than another one. Oh, well this one sounds much more detailed. Well, it's actually a hair louder, so that's why you were able to. So what they did was they leveled all the volumes as close as they could. They did say up front that they weren't able to get the onboard solution quite as volume leveled as the other ones, but that no one noticed. More on that in a moment anyway. And then they just had four plugs, so they were able to have someone control eight different... eight different listen tests. And this was with a couple pairs of headphones. And then try to guess which was which across the blind test, and then find out how accurate they were. And I remember, I forget what the methodology is, but I think you have to get something like 90% of them right in order to prove that you actually were able to tell the difference. So, a couple of caveats. Number one is they only used 300 ohm impedance headphones. So what they determined was that with high impedance headphones, none of the listeners, including one of the people who had bought the $2,000 amp and DAC, and therefore had as much investment as anyone in being able to prove to himself that he was able to hear the difference, not one of them was able to tell the sources apart. So, okay, now there's a couple things here. So I mentioned the 300 ohm headphone thing. The impedance of your headphones versus the output impedance of your audio source is of importance. So the higher impedance your headphones are, the less important it is to have low output impedance on your audio source. So one thing that the objective two, that's the amplifier part of the ODAC plus objective two, does particularly well is very low output impedance, which, like I said before, doesn't matter much when you're running very high impedance headphones, but when you compare to something like the ASUS Zonar STX, which has fairly high output impedance, when you use much lower impedance headphones, something like 32 ohm impedance headphones, which are much more common for consumer grade headphones, that difference might be much more relevant. So Toms is already working on reproducing the test using different headphones to find out if this is applicable to that as well. But the conclusion of the article is something that they've been saying, and guys in the audio subforum, I still don't like your attitude sometimes. You don't like their attitude, maybe you should buy a Note 2. Thank you for that. Your day's not going very well? It would probably be better if you bought a Note 2. Okay, so anyway, so the conclusions that they've been saying, they've been telling us basically since Linus Tech Tips Forum started, that you basically can't tell the difference looks like, according to the test that Toms Hardware did, if nothing else, which I read and seems really well done, and I can't imagine Toms having any kind of a kickback from real tech to like, you know, promote that onboard sound is the best thing ever. According to this test, there's no real benefit to high-end sound. Now, I do have more to say on this. So your onboard sound might have as good a DAC as anything else, but there is a wide range in amplifier quality. So things like, things like, so amplifier quality as well as shielding and PCB isolation. So you could have a DAC that's great, that's the digital to analog converter that takes your digital sound and turns it into something your headphones and your speakers can understand. You could have a great DAC, but if you have a terrible amp that hisses or interference that causes, you know, when your mouse moves to hear that, we've all heard it, probably, I definitely have. That's not to say that every motherboard will have output audio quality that is equal to a $500 product. That's not what we're saying. What we're saying is that the DAC itself doesn't appear to be making a difference. Fascinating. You know what's funny is when I was advocating for sound cards, very, very hardcore, that was based on older motherboards. To be perfectly honest, I had made the switch from onboard sound to a sound card back in the Audigy 2 ZS days. That was when I switched over. And back then, oh yeah, it made a difference. Made a real big difference. Aside from adding more channels, it was much, much better. It's not to say there weren't driver issues here and there and all those kinds of issues. So that was the last time I ever really did a comparison. And when we released, I forget what video it was. I don't remember what it was. But anyway, there was a video I released and I had some members of the forum challenge me to try a newer motherboard. So that's what I did. I happen to have a ton of really great audio sources at home right now. I have a shit stack. I have an Objective 2 with an ODAC. I have a Zonar, whatever it's called, Essence 1. Did I say it's STX earlier? Sorry. Sorry. It was an Essence. Was it an? No, it was. It was an STX in the video. I'm using an Essence 1. Sorry. Sorry. STX is not an external sound card. I apologize. So I have an Essence 1 and I have the onboard sound on my P9X79 WS-E or whatever it is, ASUS motherboard. Couldn't tell the difference. The other ones can go louder, that's for sure. And on some of them, things like the sound floor is much more noticeable. So for example, using my IE80s, so these are pretty sensitive. They're IEMs compared to large headphones. I can definitely hear that particularly on the Objective 2, even if I turn the volume up, there's no hiss. So the sound floor is quite low on that one, which is good, because in the quiet part of a track, even if you're listening quite loud, it's nice to not have that hiss audible in the background. But aside from all that, there does not appear to be much difference. Oh, okay. Apparently I am. I am confirmed. I am going to see Sexy Phil tonight. So there you go. It's SXE Phil, by the way. Not Sexy Phil. I don't care. Anyway, I'm going to see Phil DeFranco's thing in Vancouver. Brandon B-roll, one of our camera guys, is actually not at work today because he's doing camera operation for the show. Yeah, he applied and he was planning to attend and now he's actually going to be filming it. So he's pretty excited. He's a bit of a source fed nerd. Yep. Get it? Oh, I just totally didn't get that at all at first. Oh, there was another conclusion from the Toms test and that was that 16-bit 44.1 kHz files are as good as you could possibly need. Anything more is a waste of hard drive space, which is a pretty strong statement. Hilarious. Now, I did have one issue with their test and that was that the only people who ever tried it were the testers. And what I would like to see them do, or even if we could swing it... Like an open testing?...is an open house where anyone can come and validate for themselves. That would be really cool. Because it's no secret that some people hear differently than others, which is another reason that purely objectively perfect sound is not necessarily the solution because not everyone hears the same way. So I would love to have people be able to... I mean, we have a big enough collection of headphones and DACs and amps. Guys, let us know. Tweet if you'd like to see us do something like that at some point. That would be interesting. Because I even personally run different equalizer levels depending on what I'm listening to. Meaning I am not listening to it at exactly what it's supposed to sound like. So, I don't know. And I'm becoming more of a basshead every day. I just turned up the bass ports in my IE 80s because I was like, yeah, Bieber's not bassy enough right now. Speaking of Bieber, our ever popular... actually, I don't know where I put this. There it is! Yeah! Better than Bieber. Everybody's favorite news segment where we pick something in the world that isn't necessarily technology but is definitely more important than what the Canadian wonder, Justin Bieber, is up to. So the Kepler mission has announced the... not necessarily, actually, I think... I don't really like the headline here. But NASA has discovered 750 new worlds. It's not just discovery. They have actually confirmed the existence of 750 new worlds. More importantly than anything else, four of which appear to be within the habitable zones of their respective stars. Cool. That's kind of awesome. If you guys don't geek out about this... I mean, I don't know what else there is to geek out about. Science and face is fantastic. Meant to say space. Yeah. But... The science of the face is fantastic as well. Maybe not as fantastic as space. Think what we could learn by studying Justin Bieber's face. Not much. The way it's captivated millions, though. See, but the problem is that there's too much of a diffusion layer between the face and him because there's so much makeup. You'd have to do much archaeological research to actually get to the face. To the face. I wonder if he still looks like he did four years ago. Under the sheen of glamour. Anyway, okay. No, I don't want to talk about him anymore. So 95% of the planets are smaller than Neptune, which to put that in perspective is about four times the size of Earth. And the discovery actually marks a very significant increase. So this is 750 new ones. A very significant increase in the number of planets that are confirmed or that were confirmed before. Actually, it's... We went from under a thousand to around 1700. Or around a thousand to around 1700. So that's absolutely huge. It's really cool. So one of the new habitable zone planets orbits a star half the size of ours and 5% as bright as our sun. I mean, there are a lot of things that the scientists don't know yet. Such as the composition of the planets. I mean, they could be predominantly gas planets or they could... I mean, they could have water on them or they could not. The habitable zone just means that liquid water could exist on them. It doesn't mean that there's water on them. It just means it could be there. Still a ton more to do, as always is the news, with any space sciencey kind of discoveries. But really freaking interesting. We should give NASA more money. Have I ranted about that on the show before? I think so. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Maybe at some point. I constantly kind of take the boat back. If we could figure out space instead of blowing each other up for just a little while. That would be fantastic. Then we could blow up aliens. Exactly. And why isn't that more fun? Yeah. If we can get Chris What's-his-name to go back up into space and not retire because he does not need to get out of the way for new astronauts because that's bull crap. He needs to stay up there so that more people can be more interested. And Chris Hadfield, there we go. More people can be more interested and so that he can build hype about it so that there can be more money into it and so that there can be more capacity for astronauts. He does not need to leave to make room. I don't accept that excuse. He needs to get back up there. We need to give NASA more funding and take the funding out of duck penises because that is stupid and just so dumb. And then we need to keep going with NASA's initiative to spread money into independent companies that are also trying to get to space because NASA is thinking about piggybacking on other companies because it could be much more cost efficient because if you're not a government run organization, you can do a lot of things like you don't have to buy from certain groups. That's a big thing in the government. You have to purchase from certain areas to keep competition free and open. Whereas if you were a private company, you could find the cheapest possible version of the exact thing that you want. Because there are certain times where they want to order a package of pens and it's like $50. It's like, well, nope, you can't go to Staples and buy one for two bucks because you have to do it through this pre-approved gateway or whatever. So yeah, I'm going to stop ranting about space now so we can keep talking about things. Should we talk about Spritz? Yeah, let's talk about Spritz. It's freaking awesome. So here, I think this is more applicable to you than it is to me for a couple of reasons. So why don't I do a brief introduction of what Spritz is and then you can talk about sort of the application. So Spritz takes what would normally the way you read is you have, in fact, this is great because you guys can see the way that you normally read. You have a whole bunch of words on a page or on a screen in front of you. And you actually move your eyes from word to word, looking for the part of the word that I believe they call crap. Now I forget what they call it. I think they call it the recognition point or something like that. But it's a little center optical recognition point. So you're looking for the optical recognition point of the word that allows you to recognize that word and interpret it. And Spritz estimates that anywhere from about probably 80% of your time that you spend reading is spent looking for the optical recognition point as opposed to recognizing, interpreting, and processing the actual word. So what it does, and I wish that the link here was actually to their homepage because we can definitely show it. What it does is it just takes one word at a time and displays it on the screen for you to read instead of putting all the words in front of you. OK, so you tried it, right? Now I tried it and was honestly very easily able to get to the top WPM that is available through their website thing. So the drop down menu that's right there, which I believe is 500. For context, guys, WPM means words per minute. Yeah, sorry. So if you can you check the drop down? Yeah, I think it's 500. Alright, so we'll go with 500. And honestly, I was able to quite easily go along with 500 words per minute. The reason why this is so awesome to me is I read incredibly slowly. I'm dyslexic and I can get through things and it's not like impossibly slowly. Just if I'm sitting next to someone and we're trying to read something at the same time before we scroll, I'm always like, oh crap, I need to kick it into high gear because there's no possible way that they're going to get there after me because I will always be the second one to get to the bottom page. A lot of times if I'm reading on my own, the amount of times I have to reread a paragraph is insane. I love reading, which is another frustrating thing because it takes me forever to get through books, all this kind of stuff. So being able to read news things or stuff for school, which is where I'm not trying to like absorb the essence of every single freaking word. And I just want to get the idea really quickly. This is awesome because if I can easily conquer 500 words per minute and hopefully easily conquer even higher than that, that would be very cool. And one of the ways it works is you're not supposed to intently focus directly on that area. You're just kind of supposed to. And I noticed it helped a lot when I tried not to try to say every word in my head as it went by instantaneously. And I just kind of observed it going. Did you notice that as well? And as you turn up the speed here, I'm going to crank it up to 500 for them. As you turn up the speed, it becomes more and more important to learn. And they say it takes about five minutes to learn how to do it. It took me less. It took me less than five minutes to be able to spritz at 500 words per minute very, very quickly. And I'm sure the more you get used to it, like I think they're saying it goes up to 900 or 1000 words per minute. I'm sure if you used it all the time and you just incrementally went up, you could actually get up there. It's pretty crazy. So, OK, I see the benefits. Their goal, I think, is pretty aggressive. I think they wanted something like 15 percent of the world's reading to be done via spritz by 20 something or other. I can't remember. Anyway, they have a very aggressive goal. And I see their point and I see the value for certain things like smartwatches. This would be a great way to read your latest text message. If you like a notification and you have like the option like read or spritz, you can say spritz and you could like read the whole thing. And like, I mean, a thousand words per minute. So that would be what six words per second or whatever that works out to. I'm not I'm not great at math. Two hundred and forty words per second. I don't know. No, no, that's yeah. No, no, no, not that thousand words per minute. So was that divided by 60? Thank you. Sixteen words per second. So if you could read it at 16 words per second, you could read a tweet. So one hundred and forty divided by 16. So it's going to be about eight seconds. You could read a tweet. That seems slow. No, that's not right. Is it right? Yeah, 16. Yeah. About eight and a half seconds you could read a tweet and it would just like appear on your on your watch or on Google Glass, for example, places where we're going to be stuck with extremely small displays. The place where I you just did one hundred and forty. It's not one hundred and forty words per Twitter thing. It's one hundred and forty characters. Characters. Right. That's the problem. So you could read the whole. There's no way that's right. Yeah. So assuming like an average of like five characters per word or something like that, you could probably read it in like two or three seconds or whatever. So that's really fast. Right. Thank you. Thank you. I'm sure that Twitch chat was freaking out. Well, they haven't yet because, yay, Twitch delay. Yeah, it's one hundred and forty characters, not words. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There they go. There they go. So, OK, I see the point of it for certain things, but I still am not going to switch to spritzing for a lot of the stuff I do because I'm a skimmer. So as fast as I could spritz an entire page of text, I guarantee you I can skim it ten times faster because I tend to be the kind of reader that goes, OK, I'm reading this S.S.D. review. I want to know about read consistency or write consistency, performance consistency. So I can skim a page probably at about this speed and look for the word consistency and then go back and read the parts that are important to me. And I might not actually read it in order. And that's my reading comprehension is very strong that way. Whereas if I actually read word for word, I may not remember as much. But I haven't spritzed extensively yet. And they're claiming that reading comprehension is improved by spritzing. Another problem that I have is the way that I tend to read books because I don't have a great memory for names and characters. So readings, song of fire and ice, ice and fire rather reading song of ice and fire is real challenging for me because there's so many characters that what I'll often find myself doing is going back and checking things. And spritzing wouldn't really allow me to do that. It would just like power through. But then if it improved my reading comprehension and retention, then maybe it's great. I don't think I'd be able to use this properly for a book because I think also like at certain speeds, blinking is even going to be a big deal. Yeah, I get this thing for an extremely long period of time, I think could be frustrating. But text messages, telegrams, whatever it comes down to, whatever you start doing short form email, stuff like that could be a lot easier to just fly through the news headlines. I'm sure RSS could come back in a big way. I know it hasn't gone away, but it's smaller than it used to be. If you could just be like spritz updates on your Google Glass every once in a while. Imagine how much more trivial crap you could process on Twitter with this. No, exactly. Like reading the home tab on Twitter would be viable. Right now it's just kind of difficult to deal with. Oh my god, too many things going on. All right. So what do we got next? Oh, this is probably going to be a loop topic. What? Oculus. Oh, yeah. Should I just like go through all of the Oculus things all of a sudden? Um, yeah. Star Citizen hangar support. Yeah, yeah. Oculus time. So it requires a minor edit to one of the files, but you can get Oculus Rift working in the Star Citizen hangar. I'm definitely doing that this weekend. Like there's no chance that I'm not doing that this weekend. So I'm super excited about that because being able to get into the cockpit of your ship. Of course, you can't fly anywhere yet. That's coming in dogfighting around April 18th. But you can get in the cockpit of your fighter or whatever you have and look around and actually see everything. Oh my god, that's so cool. There's also a big post on Neo Gap that was put up recently about someone who went to Valve. Valve is giving all of their tech to Oculus, as we already know. And the guy was just completely blown away about the VR room that they have going, which is set up where there's cameras around and stuff. And you're looking at QR codes and the QR codes can queue events. So while you're walking around the room, different things can happen. And one of the things that he said was he's not afraid of heights or anything. He's like very notably not afraid of heights. Yet when he walked up to what was portrayed as a cliff edge. Oh, I'm just like, oops, sorry, sorry. Oh, Twitch chat's probably freaking out. Were you just playing a video? Yep. Awesome. When he went up to what was portrayed as a cliff edge, he was actually legitimately scared to walk off and didn't for a little while until he was finally gathered his senses, I guess, and finally decided to actually take that step. And he said it was legitimately scary. That's very interesting. So I actually don't know a ton about this article, despite putting it in here myself, I believe. But we need to go. All right. Here, I'll bring it up if you want to just go through it. Sure. So this is, I guess, people exploring singular scenes with Oculus Rift. I actually haven't looked at this at all. OK, so basically it's the article on marketingmagazine.co.uk is about alternative uses for the Oculus. So they're talking about it with in the context of things like test driving a car, things like doing a virtual tour of a house that you're thinking of buying. I mean, imagine how this makes the world smaller. I mean, the way people shop for real estate now is you go to the house and you walk around it in order to get a feel for the space. What if you could just go to the real estate agent's office where they have like five oculuses that are like the communal oculuses? Oculi? Yeah, oculi, sure. You put one on and then you can do an actual. So, OK, right. So going back to that phone project from last week where you just walk around and map the place with the phone. And then you throw on an Oculus somewhere halfway around the world and you can actually shop for a new home somewhere completely across the globe. And experience it. I actually have totally read this. I just the title that was in the doc threw me off. I looked at the URL and figured it out. So, yeah, it's really interesting. And there's a bunch of other things coming into play, too, is some guy had an artificial hand put on. His hand was cut off for whatever reason, and he had it replaced with an artificial one. And he was able to through a screen so that he can't see it, reach and touch something and tell people what it was because feeling was portrayed. He could tell textures and stuff like that. So we could tell them what he was touching without being able to see it with an artificial hand. So if they can get that type of technology into something like gloves or something like that, and then you can wear an Oculus, you could walk around an environment and feel things and look at things and experience that environment without actually being there. This comes into play with a bunch of things that have been happening recently with like golf courses. Like you were just talking, you could shop for a house. You could also go through a walk through of a golf course. There's a lot of people that travel around to different golf courses because they're such amazing experiences. If you could walk the greens before actually going there, that's awesome. They've already done things with allowing you to go on essentially like Google Street View tours of golf courses. You can see the whole thing. But if you could virtually walk it, that's just even a lot more interesting. And I think not even necessarily just the Rift and not even necessarily just Oculus, but just VR in general, I think is going to be a huge marketing tool in the future. No matter what way you look at it, because now another thing that people have brought up is, you know how people have always called or not always, but the entire Twitch chat seems to only be interested in VR porn. Well, that's I'm sure that's going to be huge. There's no point in trying to shove that under a blanket. Oh, God. Yeah, I don't think it'll fit in there. That's going to be huge. But like people have been talking. I know I had to say it again. People have been talking recently about how Best Buy is just like an Amazon showroom. Yeah. Maybe you don't need an Amazon showroom anymore. Right. Maybe you just put an Oculus on. Probably won't need unboxing videos anymore. Yes, you will. It's a good thing we don't do them anymore. That was so funny. Like how few people even like cared when I brought it up at the end of that video. People that I talk to and I'll like bring up Linus Tech Tips and they'll be like, yeah, I like his unboxing videos. Like, oh yeah, do you still watch? And they're like, yeah, I'm like, interesting. Like that's cool. We don't do that anymore. So I don't know. I don't know how to tell you this. We actually don't do them. We haven't done one in like months. Quite a while actually. Yeah. So I don't know. Again, as every week exciting things in VR are happening. Yeah. And one of the big things from the article as well. So this is Mike Woods, the head of the company, VFX company, Framestore or something behind Gravity. Anyway, behind that movie is talking about using this for storytelling. So using real time game engines to do more interactive storytelling. So this to me, VR is great for gaming and it's going to be great for movies in some ways. I think, OK, I've heard the movie thing many, many times and like you're doing right there with the games and movies thing. I don't think it's going to be a movie. Games have been interactive storytelling experiences for a while now. Let's be honest with ourselves. Quick time events. Especially certain games. So if we could take Hollywood's storytelling ability, which you can like or you can hate on Hollywood all you want, whatever. But if we could take the raw talent that is available in the movie industry and bring that to the interactive storytelling experience, maybe we wouldn't have so many complaints about this game sucks because it was entirely story driven and the story was stupid. Maybe we would get interactive storytelling experience games like WALL-E, for example. Yeah. And we could be fat with our big juice and we could sit in our chair that we never move from just like WALL-E and experience them. It's it's it's ridiculously interesting. I'm excited to see what it comes from, and especially from people like the guys who made Gravity. Chris Hadfield aside hating Gravity and getting kicked out of the theater. But anyways, it'd be really interesting if you could move that to a VR experience because I'm sure different parts of that movie would like legitimately scare people. And you're moving from like a lot of horror movies nowadays just being jump scares, which is stupid, in my opinion, to actually inciting fear because you feel like you're actually in the movie, which I think is really cool. Apparently Reddit debunks spritz. Something something. This sounds too good to be true because it is RSVP rapid serial visual presentation. This technology being showcased here doesn't work. The technique was a massive field of research in military neuroscience in the 70s. They tested reading speed and comprehension using it. I'm just going to summarize their findings. It feels as though it works because we see all the words at no point do we feel we're missing anything. But that doesn't mean we can actually process the words. It doesn't increase rate of comprehension. Reading with RSVP can cause problems parsing sentences and normal reading or I scan around the page. This is the same reason. Yeah. OK, so we'll see. Why don't we just. And well, this is also the reason why you and I both said we wouldn't read a book that was based on reading Harry Potter. Yeah. We would quickly read headlines and different things that we don't necessarily have to fully absorb. This is actually something I exactly said. I don't want to necessarily absorb every single individual word. That's why if I was reading a book, I would read it normally. Because if I want to make sure that I'm getting every single individual word, I would read it normally. If I'm just grabbing a quick headline and the only two words I actually care about in the headline are like 714 and new worlds. So I guess that's three words. I'm not too worried about fully comprehending. We found blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because that's not really a big deal. I just want to get the gist of it as fast as I possibly can. So sure, read it. But I don't care. All right. So speaking of things that most people in the US won't care about, this phone. Here we go, guys. The Nokia XL. So this will be running Android. So the whole word on the street, yes, Nokia is going Android. Yeah, they're doing it. However, it will be a fully customized version of Android. So this is going to be a forked Android, which means that you're not going to have access to the Google Play Store. You're not going to have a lot of the support for Nokia, because remember, anyone making a device that is running a forked version of Android does not get support from Google like at all. I don't think they get G apps at all either, do they? I don't believe so. Yeah. So it'll be running a completely customized version of Android. You will be able to install Android apps, but you'll have to manually download the APK, which frankly isn't that big of a deal if you're if you're tech savvy and you're willing to work around it. The specs on it aren't particularly high end. They're actually nothing special. I mean, even the screen, I believe, is 400 by 800, 800 by 480. So that's WVGA, Wide VGA. So really nothing special, but it's supposed to be a low end device. So it's got a five inch display. It's going to be priced at around 109 euros or equivalent to around 150 dollars. It'll have front and back cameras. And so, yeah, so things like Play Store are removed and replaced with Nokia's App Store and Microsoft's OneDrive replaces Google Drive. And so this is just part of a new family of Android powered devices. But I think it's going to be really interesting to see how much acceptance something like this can gain because I think the only way they're going to be able to do it is by hitting that price point because it's really not that impressive of a phone. But would you buy a Moto G instead? How much exactly is a Moto G? 179.99. Then yes. That's an extra 30 dollars for a proper Android experience. I don't even know. Yeah, I probably would. But we're talking potentially about developing markets anyway where 30 dollars might actually be a really big difference. But then if you have, I don't know guys, tweet us. Let us know what you think. If you have 150 dollars to spend, do you have 180 dollars to spend? For you personally. Like if you're deciding between 150 dollar item or 180 dollar item, is the 30 dollars a factor for you? I think it's always going to be a B list for me. Like say I'm in that situation. I would honestly rather save for like two months if I had to or more and just get the better phone because I would rather Moto G over that. But if it was a situation that I have been in before, which is where like your phone is dead, you need something now if I only have 150 bucks. Okay, that's a fair point because I mean like technology in particularly, like I'm one of the biggest cheapskates around when it comes to things other than technology to be perfectly honest. But with technology, I have the luxury of getting, oh, oh, I didn't even realize. That's what I'm saying. Oh, okay. Oh, shoot. Okay. Yeah, let's get our guest. Let's get our guest rolling here. So let's do you want to do you want to start the call while I just sort of talk very briefly about this. Shoot, I can't believe I didn't. That's embarrassing. Yeah, like I've always had the luxury of well not always but like working at NCIX I'd get deals on stuff. Yeah. And then now we get samples of a lot of stuff. So I don't necessarily think about $30 the same way as when I'm buying a new tool for example. Yeah, yeah, exactly. When I'm actually shopping for things. And then. 30 bucks is a big deal. You're also much more interested in that type of stuff. So it's for other people. Maybe the phone isn't as big of a deal. So they want to save the 30 bucks. Yeah. And that's definitely see that like that is a $60 phone right now that runs Android. Right. And I'm not a tool hobbyist. Yeah. Whatever saw cuts the wood. That's what I buy. Got a wooden handle, composite handle, carbon fiber handle. What do I care? That being said, my my dad does use tools all the time and still wouldn't buy the more expensive tool. So I so I think different strokes for different folks. And I do want to hear what you guys have to say on Twitter, but we have our guest joining us. And I feel sort of super, super terrible right now that oh, does it have the right microphone on there? Uh, I hope. You hope. Hey, Tom, can you hear us? Yeah, I can. How's it going? Yes. Rock on. Okay. Let's go ahead. Throw up the guest. Don't throw up the guest. I mean, he's he's he's he's delicious. We wouldn't we wouldn't throw him up at all. So, guys, hey, Tom, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. I'm Tom from somewhere. ChronoFusion in the chat has never heard of. Nice to be here. ChronoFusion. We love you. ChronoFusion is our is our neighborhood purveyor of things that are not necessarily appealing to him or something. Captain, Captain Negativity and Positivity. Yeah, my apologies for being late. I just got done with Current Geek about 10 minutes ago or so. So thanks. Thanks for bringing me on. I'm looking forward to this. So for those of you who are like ChronoFusion and don't know where Mr. Merritt is from, give us give us a little bit of a brief history of you and what you do and what you're all about. Yeah, I've been kicking around for a while. I used to work at Tech TV way back in the day and I worked at CNET for several years and I did some shows for Twitter for several years. I've done some tech journalism writing and audio podcasts and videos and what I'm doing now, I'm an independent podcaster. So I have a daily show called Daily Tech News Show where we do what it says on the tin. We just look at the daily tech news. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then I also have several other independent shows. One called Cord Killers is about cord cutting. Another one called Sword and Laser is a science fiction and fantasy book show. And then Current Geek is like kind of a weekly wrap up of geeky stuff that I do with Scott Johnson. Those are the main shows that I do every week and I've got a few other indie projects out there as well. So tell us a little bit about how important your your community has been to your recent independence. It's been essential. You know, I've been lucky enough to be involved with amazing communities at Tech TV when I was doing the show Buzz Out Loud at CNET and at Twitter. And so a lot of them have continued to say, hey, you know, I like the stuff you do. How can we support it? And it's been overwhelming. It's been awesome. OK, we're just going to turn you down just a touch. I hear my bass is too bassy. You got that AM radio sound, whereas I have that excited chipmunk sound. AM radio isn't bassy, though. If I'm AM, I'd be good. But you got that nice sound to it because you're nice and close to your mic and you got that pop filter and all that. We've got like here. I don't know if you can see this, but we've got like a boom mic sort of above us. You guys are good, though. I was watching the Twitch stream. It looks great. Oh, thank you. We actually are using a Blackmagic cinema camera for our for our like video podcasting camera now. It's difficult. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm trying to look at you, Tom, but I got to look at the audience, too. And it's no worries. I've got you out of the corner of my eye, too, because I got to look at the camera. Excellent. So yeah, the we're using a Blackmagic cinema camera, which we also use for other projects. But now that we have it, we figured, well, hey, let's amp up the quality of our video stream. And, you know, $2,000 camera is never a bad way to go for a video podcast. No doubt. Yeah, no, it looks really good. So let's speaking of webcams, let's jump into our first guest topic here, shall we? The source that we have on this one is from The Guardian. But my understanding is you've actually talked about this before. I'm going to go ahead and just prime the audience on it here. So the Optic Nerve, a project that allowed millions of Yahoo webcam images to be intercepted by GCHQ. If that's not a giant security facepalm moment, I don't know what is. Yeah, this is a this is a pretty crazy story. It comes from the Edward Snowden leaks, obviously. And essentially what they were doing was capturing Yahoo chat video every five minutes and saving a still image into a big database. And what's interesting is they were actually had a lot of rules over how they could access it. They know GCHQ in the UK, so they have different rules in the United States. But they were saying we can only look for particular user names or similar user names. And that's where it gets dicey, right, because if I happen to have a user name that just sounds like the terrorists that they're looking for from Afghanistan, or at least the guy they think is right, I can have my images saved. And the other crazy thing is in the policy manual, they said you're going to see. So we were surprised to find out that people use these chats to show intimate parts of their body. And I'm like, you've never used the Internet before, if you're surprised by that. The document estimates that between three and 11 percent, because I guess they didn't pour through every single one. Three to 11 percent of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested contains undesirable nudity. I want to know how much desirable nudity there was. So is that the nudity other than like Scarlett Johansson? I guess. Yeah. No. And I honestly don't care about saying too much in defense of this because it's way over the line. But we did talk on Daily Tech News show about how do you do this right? And there are a lot of policies that they had in these leaks that were saying you can only ask for this kind of information. You can only see the metadata unless you're going after a very specific person. And they were trying to use facial recognition to be able to say just go. We don't want to look at it, just go through and find that. But there were problems because the facial recognition software couldn't tell naked flesh from faces sometimes, especially with them low res webcams. Right. Yeah. You know, you can you can start making some jokes about your what your face might look like to the facial recognition software. But yeah, it's it's it's just the sort of thing where. And we talked on my show about we want people we want them to find people who want to kill folks. Right. We do want that. But how do you how can you do that without trespassing on people's privacy like this? And one person wrote in and was like, you get a warrant. Right. But then how do you find this kind of information? It's tempting. Right. If you have the ability to tap into a cable and pull all these images and you could say you can just promise like, oh, I won't look at anything except, you know, the things that that are related to the to the person I'm after. Well, you got to trust people. And there's not a lot of trust out there right now. Well, there's not a lot of trust right now. And the problem is that why should there be? And OK, so there's there's there's sort of there's two things here is number one is do we trust the machines? Do we trust the algorithms? And earlier on the show, I actually OK, I said, should we let Gmail read our mail? Yes, I know. It's not actually an army of Google employees reading every email you send. That's ridiculous. But it is an algorithm that goes through and looks for keywords and then targets their advertising at you. And then who knows what else? Because that's the problem. If we trust the machine or we don't trust the machine, we inherently have to trust a person at some point. And that person can tweak the algorithm or someone somewhere has access to override whatever systems are in place because nobody builds a system that has no back door. And the problem I have again now, so sometimes I trust the person. In fact, a great example of that is Valve. OK, I think that the community, the gaming community trusts Gabe Newell of Valve. But companies are particularly companies that aren't private companies. They transcend the individuals. It's never about the individual person. So, Tom, what is the solution here? How do we trust anyone to do this? Yeah, I don't know that you can. And I think this is an example of when you don't have proper supervision, you don't have oversight. There's no one from the outside telling you to stop. You start to get things like this that internally make sense. Right. At some point, they were just like, we need to be able to go out and tap into a chat. How do we do that? And then it's step by step from there. Well, to do that, we just need to do this. Well, it's justified that because we really need to do it. And eventually you're scanning every person on Yahoo's video and saving still images every five minutes. And you've led yourself to believe that makes sense. Well, OK, maybe it did make sense, but it's way over the line and you've lost perspective. And if you don't have oversight, if you don't have someone from the outside saying, wait a minute, you shouldn't be able to do this. And if you are going to do this, you really need to show that it's absolutely necessary. And that has been shown in a lot of this stuff either. Right. They have not been able to demonstrate that this has led to any kind of significant prevention of terrorism. Then there needs to be somebody that says you can't do this anymore. The other side of this, though, is Yahoo. You know, they were outraged in public when they saw this and they said they're going to take steps to encrypt. They should have been encrypting all along. You know, everybody's been saying that for years and suddenly you realize, oh, all that stuff we said we should do, but we kind of didn't because it was hard and costly. Yeah, we should have done that. And now they're going to have to. But this is something that we've actually talked about a fair bit on this show. And that's that to the tech enthusiasts, to the guys like you and me and our viewers, really, the concept of digital privacy and its importance is becoming more and more to the forefront. Whereas to the general lay person, I would argue that it's becoming less and less of a thing about which that they are thinking on a day to day basis. The first time I saw someone who got their driver's license, take their brand new driver's license and post it publicly on Facebook, I just about crapped myself. And I was thinking, do you have any idea what you've just done? And they didn't. And as the technology continues to change, what's that project called? The scanning phone one. The phone one. Project Tango. Project Tango. Have you heard about Project Tango? Yes. OK, so as technology like that is all of a sudden built into the pocket of every person who grows up in a society where they really have a mentality that is, well, I'm not doing anything wrong. So it doesn't really matter if anyone's looking at it. How much more closely can we be spied on? And will there ever be a limit? Because you talk about an overseeing body, but then we have to trust them. And you can't let just anyone be the overseeing body because then you could be putting the terrorists right in charge of the whole thing. Well, yeah, there's turtles all the way down at that point, right? I mean, you just you can't trust anybody and nothing can be done. So you have to put a system of checks and balances in place if you ever want to be able to do anything. I do think that people are getting more security minded. I think when you see things like what you're talking about with the driver's license, it's emblematic of how not security minded we've been. We're growing up as a culture where people say, oh, I didn't even think about that because I didn't have to think about it before. And you're right. You're absolutely right that folks who are into technology and enthusiastic technology are much more security minded, especially about technology than other people. But I do think that those sorts of situations, because they're happening, because that person who would have never posted a photo online in the past now does because they have a smartphone, has to actually start confronting like, oh, wait, maybe that wasn't a good idea. Right. So I tend to be maybe I'm being a little Pollyanna about it, but I tend to be optimistic that this is actually all going to help companies get more secure. People become at least slightly aware of security issues where I don't think they ever would have before. I actually have to agree with Tom on this one because I used to see that. Yeah, that's fine. It's just my show. You know, I just pay your salary. You can beat your show and you can also be wrong. I've seen that in the past. I've seen multiple people post driver's license on Facebook. That exact thing that you just described. I've seen that more than once. I also saw that more than once years ago. I haven't seen that in a long time. I think people are doing bad security movements in ways that they don't realize, but they are learning things as they go along. And as a community, I haven't seen something as stupid as like social insurance numbers or remember that old thing like, oh, yeah, you know, if you post on Facebook, your social insurance number, it turns into pound signs. Like I haven't seen people fall for stuff like that in a really long time. Right. But then so I guess then what we can probably all agree on then is that it will continue to be an arms race and we just have to have faith in people to continue to learn. Definitely. OK, so let's talk another security sort of topic here. Something that tell me. What a perfect transition, right? Up front, man. Did you have any bitcoins in Mt. Gox? No, I've never kept any of my bitcoins anywhere but on a hard drive that's disconnected from the Internet most of the time. OK, see, and again, it's that security mindedness. Whereas when lay people like the not tech heads get on glom onto something like Bitcoin, they might go after it with an approach that's not necessarily perfect. So this was posted by Bonsai 99 on our forum. Mount Gox, which for those of you who actually don't know this, stands for Magic the Gathering Online Exchange. A lot of people don't know this, but they didn't start out as like cryptocurrency and like as a financial institution. Closes its doors without warning, apparently declaring insolvency. And as of I believe that was today, they basically came out and said, yeah, we don't have any of it. It's all over. Yeah, they they they filed the equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Japan. And this sort of fits with some slides that were leaked on Monday that showed that their plan, if these slides are accurate, is to wind down, apologize, reorganize the finances and come up with a new plan to restructure and try to keep people from going crazy and become a new company called Gox. They'll drop the magic. They'll just be gathering online exchange, I guess. And and the current CEO would step down. And the first step towards that happening was him apologizing and doing a deep bow in public for the company, which is kind of a normal thing when a Japanese company really screws up. And so the next step, if the slides are accurate, would be that they would name a new CEO and Mark Carpilis would set down, would step down. So if you did have your bitcoins in Mt. Gox, would a deep bow be enough for you? I mean, to put this in perspective for the viewers who aren't aware of this already, over 300 million US dollars worth of bitcoins are just it's suspect. I heard 408 million. So there's different numbers floating around. I heard 380 earlier today. So, OK, I've heard everywhere from low 300 to getting up to high 400. I guess it depends on whether you're looking at Winkdex or Coinbase or whatever. How you much they're worth. I mean, is that enough for you? Would you even allow would you even consider trusting this company again? No, absolutely not. And I know what they're trying to do. They're trying to salvage what they can from a company. But if Gox comes along with a new CEO and says, store your bitcoins here, hell no. I don't know what they could possibly do. Their only hope is to get people who don't really aren't really aware of the past and not screw up again. And maybe they'll be able to get some folks there. They're also the people who actually have bitcoins there that they can keep because those people want to get their bitcoins back so they can dangle that prospect of we can't give them to you now. But if we get the company back on its feet and get them rolling, we can honor your deposit eventually and you'll eventually get them back. One thing that amazes me is that they think that removing magic is going to get all the stigma away. Like you're still Gox. It still sounds almost identical to Mount Gox. This isn't going to make everyone forget what happened. And it's it's something where if this was a more mainstream thing, then I could see something like that actually working. I mean, we've seen the whole change the name of the company, change the CEO, and the history just kind of goes away. Yeah, we manufactured like something that had a chemical that killed a bunch of people. I mean, even I mean, look at something like Scotchgard. OK, the number of birth defects that came about due to the manufacture of Scotchgard about what, 50 years ago. Does anyone even remember this anymore? Do you even think about it when you see a can of Scotchgard on the shelf? Companies can come back and they can and things can be completely forgotten. But this is the enthusiasts that they pissed off. This isn't the general consumer who doesn't really give much thought to it. This is the guys who were really excited and did research to even find out about Bitcoin and mine them in the first place that they have pissed off. And I think that's pretty much game over. Yeah, I think it's I think you're right, Luke. You got to change that name, especially because of your points about it being, you know, the enthusiasts. It should be our sobby or something. Really sorry about being incompetent. The gathering. Yeah, on that exchange. It's it's it's not enough and it's too much. It's not enough of a change and it's too much of a massive theft of money, essentially. Well, OK, so who has the money, man? I want to know. I want somebody to dig in and investigate that because apparently they were using transaction malleability to steal coins for two years without anybody at Mt. Cox knowing that an inside job. Sounds like what was the plot of Office Space? Is that the right movie that somebody with it needs a stapler at the basement of Mt. Cox? Yeah. So, I mean, OK, tell me this. OK, so forget about this is something that I've that I've sort of as someone who doesn't follow cryptocurrency, maybe as closely as I should. I look at something like Dogecoin and I go, you know what? These guys might actually have the right stuff, because even though it started out as a complete joke. I thought you were going to say you look at Dogecoin and say a maze. But OK, go ahead. So a maze. Very money. Much happy. OK, that's what I say about it. Yeah. But what I but it is it's the much happy. They're really good at PR. Everything that comes out about Dogecoin is positive. We're going to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Olympics. We're going to donate this to charity. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. Whereas Bitcoin almost had because being first can either be an advantage or a disadvantage. And Bitcoin had the advantage of being first. They have that that that Kleenex effect where normal people newscasters on CNN or whatever are going to refer to cryptocurrency as Bitcoin until something is much bigger, probably for a long time. But then they also have the disadvantage of every mistake getting hung on their necks all throughout the beginning here. All of the negative connotations of Bitcoin that are that you can use it to buy drugs and sex and hit men is going to be hung on Bitcoin. Who do you see winning this battle? Is it going to be like coin, pure coin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin or none of the above? And are these guys all just trailblazers? And we should see them as what they are a way to make a quick buck and then cash out back into good old US dollars and wait for the next thing. What are you doing? I would stay away from coin. Yay. That would be my my one piece of advice. Thank you. Thank you. I'm glad we had you on the show. But honestly, yeah, I think the better I don't want to say the better money is on because then that's going to lead us to it down a whole other path. But I think Bitcoin has the advantage. And the fact that they're taking all of the flack is because they are the more solid system. And at this point, still the more proven system, even though they're not totally proven, they've been around longer and they've been through more. And I think that is their advantage is that there are all these other exchanges and you do have people setting up an exchange the day that Mt. Gox goes down saying, you know what, we still believe in this currency. So in a way, I almost feel the fact that they have all this bad press is emblematic of their strength because they're able to fight through all that sort of thing. If Dogecoin had a similar challenge, I don't think that they would survive. I don't know if Litecoin would. Maybe it would. Maybe Dogecoin would, too. I think it's I think there's a 20 percent chance maybe that one of these secondary systems comes along and finds an actual feature that is better than Bitcoin. But until something like that happens, I don't think the kind of the ebb and flow of Reddit and the Internet and opinion really matters in the long run. And another thing comes in where resiliency can actually help a lot, especially when you're dealing with something like currency, where being if you see a currency that's insanely like fluctuates all the time, it's scary. But then you're getting into coins. So you're expecting that at least some amount. But then when you see bitcoins where it can take massive hits like this, like Tom was just saying, and rebounds and still exists and climbs again, that's comforting. And I could actually see people coming back to it no matter how much I do like the charitable nature of Dogecoin. And I got nothing to say bad about Dogecoin either. I think they're hilarious and fun and cool. And I mean, one other possibility, too, though, is I mean, I think my question was probably poorly worded because I was asking who was going to be the winner without, of course, presenting the possibility that we could just I mean, it could just be like world currency the way it is now. Yeah, you can have 100 currencies. Yeah, I think that's fair. And I think that's, you know, I'll revise my answer in response to say that 20 percent might end up being like a 20 percent usage. Right. Market cap certain features that come along in these various coins along the way certainly could make them better for certain purposes. Right. And so, yeah, the market cap isn't the biggest, but they get used because they're really excellent for a certain kind of transaction in much the same way that gold will still get used for things. Yeah. Or euros or goats or goats or Canadian tire bucks. Canadian tire bucks. You know, I have paid someone in Canadian tire dollars once. You're not the first person I've heard say that. Yeah. How did you get enough? How did I get enough? Oh, my dad is a tool guy and he would always give me his Canadian tire money because it was it was fun. And then I wanted something from a kid at school and he wanted something from Canadian Tire. So I got lunch. I mean, it wasn't a big deal. Anything that someone will accept as as tender is cash. Yeah. All right. So I think that's all I had to say on the whole Bitcoin thing. You're ready to move on to Samsung Galaxy S5. Yes. The least exciting thing ever. I'm more excited about the gear fit than I am about the S5. That is sad. I know. And I'm not that excited about the gear fit. I think it's interesting. But yeah, I feel like I know it's a tick tock situation, right? Like every other release is not going to be as crazy as the previous one. But I really I'm struggling to find the big thing with the S5, which is the the the water and dust resistance. That is cool. That is a cool thing. It's certainly not enough to make me say and therefore I'm buying a Galaxy S5 as my next phone. The problem for me with that is that it's not breaking any new ground. No. Because what Samsung did in the past, I mean, take the S2. It was arguably the first legitimately really good Android smartphone. They brought the AMOLED screen to it, which was great for power and display and all those things. It was huge at the time. Like physically, the screen was very large at the time. The industrial design compared to other Android phones at the time was was really good. So it was really good in a lot of different ways. Whereas the Galaxy S5 and I even say the Galaxy S4 is not better. There's something that's better in every possible way, which makes it hard for it to hold the same kind of to be put on the same kind of a pedestal that I think Samsung would like us to. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. And I think it's a symptom of how close to commodification smartphones have become. Yeah, they're just, you know, we've reached the desktop computer phase or at least we're pretty close to really quickly. Yeah, absolutely. They have screens. There's only a certain amount of sizes they can have. And we've pretty much put one out in every size before they become a tablet. And they have touch and they have speed LTE speeds and the processors have maxed out. I mean, you don't get much out of having a bigger processor. Maybe you get a little more out of having more cores, but there's really not that much more you can do with them. I'm not saying that that's the end of smartphones. There's going to be somebody come up with some software development and maybe even a couple of hardware tweaks here and there. But it's more what you can do with other things with smartphones that seems to be where the more interesting avenues lie. I don't think anybody's come up with something terribly compelling there. But that's why I'm more interested in the gear fit, because I don't want to hold the Galaxy S5 with the heart rate sensor while I'm jogging. But having the fit with its heart rate center attached, that makes sense. And then it can log in, save things back to the phone later because it's got a little bit of storage that could keep stuff. I think that makes more sense. The S5 is just starting to look like a phone and a nice phone. I'm not dinging it. It's just if I was expecting to be wowed and amazed, maybe we just got to get used to the fact that, you know what, we're not going to get wowed and amazed anymore. There's going to be little features like this and that, and that's fine. And I think that's something the manufacturers are trying to fight against. But it's funny that you bring up the PC because they're doing it in exactly the same way they tried to do it on the PC. They're giving us more stuff that doesn't really matter and then expecting us to drool over it. I mean, they want us to get excited about more megapixels on the camera, just like they wanted us to get excited about more RAM on the PC, when truthfully for 99% of people, anything beyond 8 gigs and even 4 is probably unnecessary. They want us to get excited about, you know, a 4K screen or a 2560 screen. Whereas, I mean, I don't know about you, Tom, but I have decent eyes up close. I can see about as well as anyone with normal vision. And I can't really tell the difference between 720p and 1080p on a smartphone. Yeah, I know people who claim they can. And there's people who say, you know, there's certain applications that will benefit in zooming and this and that. But those are really edge cases. And I'm not saying they're bad, but they're not the thing that everybody's going to go, retina screening. That's amazing. Like we're kind of past that. Capturing in 4K, I think that that's a legitimate feature because that's something that you can later put on a 4K television and make a difference. But even then, some people argue that, well, 4K is, you know, at a certain distance, you can't tell that either. So I don't know. It reminds me, I was looking this up, actually, reminds me of the new processor that was put into my DVD player. I can't remember which one I had anymore. I think it was a Toshiba. It was a way to like DVD players had pretty much reached like this is what you do. You put in a DVD and you watch it. And the new one was like, and now you can play games, except you don't want to play games. And it's a stupid thing and it's horrible. It was just glommed on. Those kind of features we're starting to see in phones now. We've actually talked about this a lot on the show, the whole the slowdown of massive stages of progression with smartphone. And something that we've actually we're reviewing phones, but like not all of them. And a lot of the reviews are really late and like we're not we're not really super well known for reviewing phones. But one thing we're trying to do is be well known for reading wearables. Yeah. Because if you if you if you track phones, it bursted really quickly and then is kind of teetering off now. But wearables are becoming huge. And just like you were talking about, Tom, with the heart rate sensor on the gear fit, stuff like that. Moving away from the phone, moving these features away from the phone, but maybe having it be able to link back or something like that. Might be a really big deal. And I mean, I think Apple has demonstrated already that they don't think more processing power is really that important by putting the same class of processor in their iPhone and their iPad. That's, I guess, the point I was trying to make. They've basically said the iPad doesn't need to be faster because we could just as easily put something that's a little bit more power hungry in here. We could have kept the older, thicker form factor. But instead, we decided, you know what? This is actually really enough for now. We're just going to make it thinner because we can't come up with anything else to do. We'll go with something that sips power and battery life. Right. Battery life is a big concern. And if somebody could come up with a phone, they're like, this phone will last a week without charging. Suddenly, everyone's going to go buy that. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, there there are solutions. I mean, to me, wireless charging is is awesome. I mean, that's a fantastic feature. I look at the way one of my employees in particular is kind of hilarious. I look at the way he uses his phone. He has a wireless charger on his desk where he edits. He has a wireless charging pad downstairs where he shoots B roll of our products. And then he has a wireless charger at home. So his phone actually basically lives on a wireless charger throughout his daily life. And it only has to the battery is more like it's more like a UPS for when he moves away from his charger. Right. And that is one solution. But to me, yes, the slightly thicker phone and I don't think phone blocks is the answer. But the slightly thicker phone that actually comes with a big battery is going to be the one that kind of everyone looks at and goes, which whoever company ends up being, whether it's HTC or LG or someone, the enthusiast community is going to look at them and go, wow, that thing's kind of blocky. But I'm going to buy it because this is what we've been asking you guys for for so long. And we don't want cheesy battery cases that go on top of our devices. I mean, Motorola Max was really much more popular than the other Motorola phones. Problem was it was still a Motorola phone, so it didn't catch on as much. But yeah, packing a little extra battery life is a huge deal. I'm thinking more about somebody who comes up with a battery technology where they say, hey, guess what? It's still thin, but this battery lasts a long time because we did graphene craziness or whatever. You know, I want to see that. I think to get to the level he was also talking about where it lasts for a week, you kind of need to do that. Because you can get these extended, bulky battery packs. It's usually like one more day and they'll be heavy. Yeah. So basically what you're trying to say is that Galaxy S5, you're not going to be running. What phone do you use? I'm curious. I have an iPhone 5 right now, OK, because I just don't care anymore. I have all my services, you know, are not Apple related. And this was the last phone I bought and I haven't felt a need to upgrade it. You know, what's really funny is I actually so there's a reason for this, but my SIM is actually in my iPhone 4 right now. Oh, yeah. And it's been in there for a few days because I grabbed a Moto X from the office. I was done doing my Moto G review and the Moto G as great as it is, I have an 8 gig one, which isn't even big enough for my music library. So I had to get off it. So I popped my SIM out of that and I was like, OK, I'm going to throw this. You know what? I'm going to go to the Moto X and I had forgotten that the Moto X uses nano SIM instead of micro SIM. So I got home and went to pop it into the phone. I went, oh, crap. So the only other phone I had was my iPhone, which I use as an MP3 player. And that's all I really do on it. And it's been three days and I haven't actually managed to switch off of it yet because I'm too lazy to go find a SIM removal tool and put my SIM back in my one because I just don't care. And for those of you that are wondering, yes, it's smaller and yes, he could cut it, but he's worried about cutting it because of going upwards incompatible. Yeah, I do phone reviews. So it's like real inconvenient if I can't use my SIM because I believe the way you should do phone reviews is you should actually switch to the device rather than the way that I see a lot of people do phone reviews where they like, you know, go through what I would call a synthetic test where they kind of do what they would do. I think you should use it. So I have to have some road testing. I agree. Road testing. So I'm 100 percent with you. IOS Android actually doesn't matter much to me. There are things I miss about Android on iOS. I mean, even just things like not being able to customize whatever Apple calls that little thing you slide up from the bottom. The fact that I can't change that stuff. And I like widgets. I have a Nexus seven that I use and the power you get over it is great. I think one of the problems with iOS is that that customization is starting to mean less fewer encryption options. You're starting to see some really good encryption apps for Android. And that might be enough to tip me back to saying, OK, I actually do care again. Right. That's a good point. My brother did something talking about widgets with Nexus seven. My brother installed the Nexus seven. Well, paid someone to install a Nexus seven in his truck because it didn't have tablet support or anything like that and got it hooked up with I think it's called Microsoft sync. Pretty sure that's what it's called. Oh, in the car. Yeah, I think you're right. And it's absolutely fantastic. And he has a widget set up that in like actually interacts with the car and tells him what's going on with different gauges and what's playing and all this kind of stuff. It's very cool. Well, there's also there's a there's a similar thing called automatic that you can get that plugs into the ODB port on any car. Yeah. And and you can use it on Android and iOS. Is that is that what he's using or is it something else? He's going directly through Microsoft sync. OK. I think now that you bring up the automatic thing, I think he might be usually using that for the gauges. OK. Yeah. Getting direct information from his from his engine. So that might actually be how he's doing that. I haven't been too in on that project. That's been a lot of just him. It's just really cool. Cool. So, Tom, I'm not going to keep you much longer here. I think we've gone over the half an hour that I promised already. But this is something that we talked about earlier on the show and we talked about last week. And I'm sorry to bore the audience with it, but just tell me your opinion on this. You've been in the industry a long time. Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp was predicated on paying for like kind of a price per user of a social network. That was the rationale. Correct. I've heard that. I haven't heard Zuckerberg say that particularly. But he did say that he would pay. He would have paid more for WhatsApp if he needed to because it's the future. He made some rather vague hand waving statements. But, yeah, it seems like they're getting they're getting a lot and the audience seems to be the most valuable thing people can latch their eyes on to. So my problem with that is I would make the argument WhatsApp is not a social network and is just a commodity just in the same way that I see Q or MSN or any other one of those services that have come and gone over the years is. Would you agree with that statement or would you not? I just I want to hear what you have to say. It gets into semantics, right? I mean, a social network, the way we think about a social network is a Facebook or maybe in the olden days, a my space, but a Twitter, something where you follow people, people follow you and you exchange information. What I think is happening is a lot of people are not using Facebook and they're moving on to these messaging apps like Line and Cacao Talk and WeChat and WhatsApp and using them in place of social networks. So they're using them for some of the same things, keeping in touch, telling people things, exchanging stickers and what you know, all these other things that they do. Google Hangouts for iOS just came out today with stickers. That's that's the big trend. That's the hotness. So I think a lot of analysts don't know what to make, because if they say messaging apps, it leaves out all of these other things that these apps are doing. There's a whole games aspect of them. But if they say social networking, then it sort of lumps them in and it feels like, OK, they're sort of on the continuum. But I agree with you that they are not the same thing as a Facebook. They are similar to Twitter, but it's it's a different spin on it. It definitely messaging apps are definitely where the audience that used to be enamored with Facebook and Friendster in my space have now migrated to. How the hell do you monetize it, though, when people can switch like that? Yeah, well, you you keep them in by giving them all these features. One way to monetize them is get them addicted to games, which is one of the ways Kakao is doing it. And that's working for them. They're making tons of money. Lines doing the same thing, I think. WhatsApp's got a really interesting way of saying, you know what, we just we make it really simple and make it easy to use. So you won't want to leave until your friends are there. That's always the thing that locks you in anyway. So and they are like, we'll just make it charge you a dollar a year and you won't even care because it's a dollar. And you're getting a lot of value out of it because it's the way you keep in touch with your friends. To me, it's a harder thing to get them into a messaging app. Like we were talking today about TechSecure, which is one of these apps that's really taking advantage of the post Snowden mindset to say, let's come up with a really honestly good encrypted way to communicate with each other. And it's got some take up among that crowd. But how does that how does it ever grow outside of that? Goes back to what you were talking about. People not really caring about security. They're like, well, but I'm on WhatsApp, so I'm just going to keep talking on WhatsApp. I don't care about security. My mom's on WhatsApp. How am I going to convince my mom to install, you know, block message secure and crypto? What's up, Jimmy? Why do I have to install telegram? My mom just installed Skype and she like added me. She's like, oh, have you used this before? I'm like, oh, like this happened two nights ago. Let me show you the scars, mom. Oh, back in the early days with IP problems. All right. So I think that's we're actually over the time our show is supposed to end. So, Tom, thank you so much for joining us. I would like you to take a couple of minutes and like pimp your shows, help our viewers know where to find you. We got about 30, 3700 people on right now. So if you guys enjoyed Tom, make sure that you listen real carefully right now, because he's going to tell you where he's at. Yeah, I think probably if people are enjoying your guys conversation, they might enjoy Daily Tech News Show as well. It's Daily Tech News Show dot com. It's an audio podcast. You can subscribe at the website. You can search for it in your favorite podcatcher. And it's listed in almost all of them at this point. But if you can't find it, go to Daily Tech News Show dot com. You can subscribe directly there. It's user supported. There's no advertising. We just focus on having good guests talking about the news of the day every day. There is a video version. There's an unofficial video feed that the fans have put together. And because I do it on a Google Hangout, I actually have a YouTube video that's just created automatically. So that's there as well. And I hope people take a look. Check it out. See if they like it. Then subscribe if you do. And anything else that I'm doing is available at TomMerritt dot com to your M-E-R-R-I-T-T. I already seen messages in our chat saying Tom, Tom's awesome. Oh, thanks. He has the more mature tech show. Yes, you guys are right. Tom has the more mature. It's a nice way of saying old. Well, there's there's anyway, people are saying that. Why are you going to be like that? Geez. People are saying he was a great guest. We'd love to see him back. So I think that the audience says it best if I say that you were a great guest. I have to say that because it's polite, but they don't have to say it. So thank you, Tom. You were apparently a great guest and we'd love to have you on again sometime. Oh, thanks, man. I'd absolutely love to really enjoy talking to you guys. You know what you're talking about. It's fun. Thank you. Thank you very much. Take care. All right. Cheers. All right. So guys, that was Tom Merritt, the Tom Merritt, not Tom Merritt of Twitt TV anymore. And speaking of his show being entirely user backed, ours is not. So let's go ahead and do our sponsor spots here. So guys, visit squarespace.com slash Linus to get a free trial of their website building software. And I say software kind of lightly because it's more like you cloud based interface. All the software runs on their side and all the website hosting runs on their side as well. So that gives you a couple of advantages. Number one is you can access whatever you're doing from anywhere. Number two is anything that you change is done on the fly. And number three is that it is scalable beyond the wildest dreams of someone who's running a WordPress site on a server sitting in the corner of a room at their former employer. Rock on. That's what we used to do. So Squarespace has many templates. I think they've got over 20 templates now that allow you to build your own website, whether it's a blog or a store or a, I don't know, a portfolio or just any website you would want. I mean, the store part is actually really interesting because they added full fledged e-commerce support. And actually not that long ago, they've got a logo designer and this is all extremely good stuff. More importantly than anything else, it's really easy to use. So you can go ahead and you can try it out for free. I believe it's for two weeks. And then if you like it, then you get 10% off by using offer code Linus2. Or I think we're actually switching to Linus in the future anyway. So if you put Linus with a number after it or just Linus in the offer code, then you will get 10% off, which is pretty darn sweet right there. Oh, last thing that I should probably mention. This is something cool. So I think up until the 14th of March, if you want the opportunity to work for Squarespace, they're hiring 30 engineers. If you go to beapartofit.squarespace.com, then you can go check that out. And if any of you get hired, I believe I get a trip to New York. So do it under my thing. I don't have a thing. Try to do it under. Create one for me, apply, get the job and then give me the trip. Yeah. So anyway, that's Squarespace in a nutshell. I think I pretty much covered it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So then our other sponsor, this is something new, you guys. Intel Club Enthusiast. What's Intel Club Enthusiast? Well, I just said it was new. So you're not expected to know what it is. Intel Club Enthusiast is a club for enthusiasts run by Intel. End of integration. Okay, let's move on. No, I'm just kidding. I was like, what? If you own a Core i5 or Core i7 processor that is unlocked, so a K series or X series, you can head over and register at Enthusiast.Intel.com and then you can register your product and you are eligible for exclusive offers. So it's only just launched. Like this went live like two days ago. So there's a lot of plans for the future. But Intel has, you know, they're going to have offers like, oh, you could get an upgrade, you know, on the cheap from participating retailers. They're going to have offers like potentially in the future events that you could attend. And there's going to be perks that are just there just for being part of Club Enthusiast. So you don't have to do anything special other than already own Core i5 or Core i7 unlocked processor. So I can't really give much more detail than that. You guys are going to have to go check it out. So that's again Enthusiast.Intel.com. You ready to fight for enthusiasts? Oh, I am ready to fight. What are we going to fight about again? Well, we're not fighting. Oh, we're not. We're fighting, but we're kind of on the same side. Oh, OK, cool. Yeah. So we're going to crusade. Yeah. OK. Oh, is it going to be that? Well, it probably should be. Oh, my goodness. We are completely out of time and we still have like six really good topics. We have to do that one. Wow. OK, because that one's in the topic call out. OK. Well, here, why don't we skim through a couple other ones just so that we can't bail? OK. Oh, man. Update your Mac now if you can. There's a security vulnerability that is in older non updated versions of not only OS 10, but also iOS that basically OK. And it's iOS 6. And get this. If you have a device that is capable of upgrading to iOS 7 like this one, even though iOS 7 runs like crap on the iPhone 4, you are not getting an iOS 6 security patch. If you have a device that only runs iOS 6, then you get a patch. Come on, guys. Anyway, upgrade your Apple product. There is a programming bug that caused Apple's SSL code to skip over vital checks of a server's authenticity when establishing a connection. So an SSL secured connection is used for things like exchanging credit card information, personal information, logging into our forum or buying stuff from our store, logging into our forum. This is just a total freaking disaster. A malicious router or Wi-Fi access point could intercept all kinds of what would be SSL encrypted traffic from the machine that you're using. So particularly on a machine you're going to use in an unfamiliar place or just in general, please update your software right away. Speaking of Apple and things that were rumored not that long ago, you know, an Apple Tesla joint venture on for batteries. Tesla has announced plans to build the battery producing Gigafactory, or as we'll call it Gigafactory from now until forever. So this was originally posted on the Linus Tech Tips forum by No Name 7931. The original article is from The Verge. Please go away on-screen keyboard. But the objective is to have this factory producing this factory producing as many batteries as the entire world is producing now. Boom. By 2017. By 2017. Which is like not far away. Yeah. So that's like three years and change. Incredible. Pretty epic, actually. Should be good for, you know, battery powered cars, which of course Tesla has no interest in having more batteries for. So they'll be partnering with other battery manufacturing folks to reduce costs after. Yeah. So after one year of production, Tesla predicts the battery cost will drop by 30 percent per kilowatt hour. And they want it to be an extremely green factory. So solar power, essentially zero emissions, no toxic elements are going to come out and recycling capability will be built into it, says Elon Musk. And if there's any sort of CEO visionary that we're going to trust, which is in line with what we were talking about earlier in the show, he's probably one of them. In terms of doing what he's saying he's going to do. Yeah. Doing what he says he's going to do and generally being trustworthy. Yeah. All right. LG names the most innovative company of 2014. Cool. I want to quickly do this one. Won't take that long at all. CCP, the developers of Yvonline are going to be constructing a monument in Reykjavik, Iceland. It's going to have the names of all the main characters that are subscribed right now, as far as I can tell. It is a gift to Reykjavik because they have hosted CCP for 16 years or whatever. It's actually kind of awesome. They're going to have a laptop buried under the monument acting as a time capsule, which is also really cool. And then that's literally all I have to say about that. That's what the monument is supposed to look like. Here's some concept art of what it's going to look like. Very futuristic looking. Go figure. Yeah. Makes no sense for it to be futuristic looking. It's kind of cool. It's cool. Shout out to the players. I think it's pretty awesome. I think it's fantastic. Yeah. I resubbed so my name will be on it because I played for a long time. I played for a long time. So I was like, I want my name to be on the thing. You resubbed just to get your name on the thing? Well, I'm playing again. OK, guys, tell me this. Would you subscribe on the Linus Tech Tips Forum? Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. If we built a statue of Gabe N at our headquarters and put your name on it, I actually priced it out. It would cost us about 30 to 40 thousand dollars to build a bronze life size statue of Gabe N. You think if we did that, he'd like come chill for a little while? I doubt it. Imagine he'd come on the wine show. He'd probably be creeped out as all hell. Yep. Yeah. I don't think he would do it. If I was him, I wouldn't do it. But would you guys contribute if we told you we had to raise 40 grand to build a bronze Gabe N? We should do like a Kickstarter. So if we don't hit the limit, then we don't do it. And everyone gets their money back. Should we just do it? We should probably just do it. It'd be epic. OK, I'm not committing now. We can use him as a mannequin for like for cool tech that comes out. So like when another Oculus comes out, we could like put it on him. Well, we won't be able to put much on him in terms of wearables. I love you, Gabe N. I knew you were going there. That was perfect. OK, anyways, we don't have much time. We should keep going through this show. Yeah. OK. I think we're we're ready. Forget that one. OK. OK. OK. Let's move on. So fight time. Yeah. Wait. Pokemon episodes are going on Netflix. Oh, right. OK. That's all I really have to say. Pokemon episodes going on Netflix. And movies and stuff. OK. Moving on. Never really cared much for the show. I totally did for the first season. You're really young. I haven't watched it other than the first season. But now I might. I don't know. I'm stoked. I want to see the first season again. Oh, my God. I'm actually pretty excited. This might be the first time I ever actually get Netflix. Really? I've never been a part of Netflix before. I'm obviously going to have to do that thing so I can get the thing from not in Canada. Right. Yeah. Because the Canada one sucks. Right. But yeah, we we have like we have like a lifeline to Hotspot Shield. Like if we ever need help with anything, we just like email them. Speaking of which, so do our users. I actually had someone tweet me saying they were having an issue with the trial and I emailed it to Hotspot Shield. I think within about a day they had someone from their team contact that user. So Hotspot Shield is one of our sponsors. Not today's episode, but you know, just letting you guys know that they do help us out. Yep. OK, so this posted by Crispy345 on the Twitter. Nintendo is discontinuing their Wi-Fi connection service. So examples of discontinued functionality is online play and matchmaking, leaderboards and tournament data, sharing of user generated content like ghost data and user created levels, user exchange of in-game items or characters like the global trade station and free add on content or download such as new levels, in-game items or mystery gifts. Really, Nintendo? Usually we're pretty stoked with Nintendo on this show. Really, Nintendo? Not this time. I don't think we can even put better than Bieber up on the screen right now because that is not better than Bieber. I mean, OK, I don't even have a DS anymore. Just like total transparency here, guys. I don't have a DS anymore because mine broke. And so I wasn't even butthurt with Nintendo about that. It has a legitimately defective. The DS lights shoulder buttons are defective. Like the design wasn't good enough at least certain points in the manufacturing runs of it. But I still was OK. Because if I ever did get a DS again, I could fire up my Mario Kart cartridge and I could race with people online, which is great. But. They're just discontinuing it. It's complete devil's advocate. I don't agree with this side at all. But did you ever even actually do that? Yes. You actually did play online. Yeah, absolutely. The mass majority of people don't. So what? If the majority of the people aren't using it, it's not like you're updating Mario Kart DS. It's not like you have to, you know, change something about the way the online service runs. They could have even said they don't support it anymore. But this is a complete service discontinuation. Like they're not allowing you to do those things because they're shutting it down. So stuff on the box of my game cartridge doesn't work anymore. Yeah. And like, of course, this would happen at some point in time. I did not expect it to happen yet, especially looking at the track record of Nintendo, like how long they supported NES for. That was always one of the big things that people held on a pedestal for Nintendo. If you were ever in an argument about Nintendo, that was like, yeah, but they're an awesome company. Look at how long they supported NES for. Now it's going to be like, yeah, but they kind of ditched like pretty hardcore on one generation back, like not even that far back. They didn't pull a Microsoft where they're like, yeah, we're not going to support XP. Actually, we're going to support it for a while and then not support it way later than the original date that they proposed, which was actually kind of cool. No, this is effective May 20th. So the Wii, Nintendo DS and the DSi games are all affected by this. I mean, the Wii wasn't current that long ago. And we know that not everyone with a Wii upgraded to Wii U. Yeah. We know this. Definitely. So there are a lot of people who still have, however much they might use it, a for them perfectly functional gaming console that now they are discontinuing. They're online services for. But of course, you will still have access to the Wii Shop channel and the DSi shop. Essentially, if you can spend money. So, yeah, the things that you can't spend money, it's not going to happen. Free add on content no longer support. User created levels no longer supported, but you can buy things. Yeah. Not impressed with you. So why don't we do a quick Twitter blitz here, guys? We haven't done one of those pretty much all show. We did a little bit. I had asked you guys something earlier. I forget what it is now, but. Yeah, I didn't see many responses, so we didn't end up we didn't end up replying to that. All right. In before Langley bylaw to stop it. It could be inside of the building. I think Lord Gayben would like the money to be used for charity instead. Yeah, that's cool. But I would rather build a statue to gayben. I'm already contributing, but I go up to gold for a month. Absolutely. And a second statue love. So everyone's just tweeting at us about bronze gayben. Jailbreak your iPhone and download the SSL patch. I don't really care. See, that's exactly. See, I think you're missing the point of why I'm using the iPhone. I'm using it because I don't care. Does not care. Not because I want to tweak it and like fuss about with it more. Why don't I use a start menu on Windows 8? Because I don't care. I just what? I mean. I kind of agree with that guy. Well, then you use the touch functionality of your screen. This is a touchscreen ultrabook. Yeah, so he and he actually does legitimately use the touchscreen on his ultrabook. And there's absolutely OK, I have Twitter background. Yeah, I need a cool Twitter background. I'll ask Ed for one. I have eight, nine, ten programs pinned to the start menu. Those are the only ten programs I use on this notebook. Yeah, and what I need a start menu for. And he's using touch. And if you go to the Windows 8 modern UI, I don't know, Metro, whatever. If you're using touch, it's it's not that bad. I've never once used the modern UI for the main reason being that all the modern apps are garbage. Yeah, particularly the picture viewing one and the movie watching one. The first thing I do as soon as I get a Windows 8 device is I change the defaults to Windows Gallery Viewer or whatever. The old one, even though it's a piece of crap, too. I've got a buddy that works in IT. He works in like an office building actually in Vancouver. And he has a batch file script that does that automatically. Nice as if someone ever brings in a new device or they do a new computer or anything like that. Whoop, because it fixes so many ticket reports. I'm just like, this isn't working. I'm locked in the screen. Whatever, whatever. Yeah, like I open to try to open a picture and I like I can't I can't move. I can't do anything. Yeah. Anyway, tons of those problems. I missed five years ago when I could lose my charger because I didn't have to charge my phone every day. Yeah, I know. Right. Life on a wireless charger. Nexus five people know. So people are talking a little bit more about the sort of our phones just a dead end and doesn't matter anymore. Whoop says I'm all for high resolution screens, even if only for the sake of progression. But like, do we need progression for the sake of progression? I want high resolution screens on phones so that that technology can be cheaper and Oculus can get it. Yeah. Everyone just wants to talk about the Gabe N statue. Statue should have a steam logo. Is DDR4 coming out at the end of the year, the summer? I have no idea. It'll come out when it comes out. It'll be faster and we'll use less power and it'll be higher density. And we'll test it. My GPU is running at 100 percent on idle. Why? Is it possible that you're coin mining and you don't know about it? Something's wrong. Yeah, something's wrong. Go on the forum. Yeah, go on the forum. Troubleshooting section. Getting kind of big, actually, which is good. I used my Wii a week ago for Mario Kart and did a bit of online and missed how fun it was. So like, I know people do it. It's just not a super high percentage. But then exactly what you said, it's not a super high percentage, so it shouldn't be that big of a deal. When I gamed on my DS, playing Mario Kart DS or whatever they call that one, it wasn't right when it came out and people were on. You could get a match. Especially with stuff like Mario Kart. Certain other things maybe not. I tried to play on my 2DS, but 3DS game. I'm trying to remember the name of it now. What's the old story of the guy that has wax wings and flies two? Kid Icarus. I was trying to play Kid Icarus on my 2DS and went to go play multiplayer and no one was there. But I'm like, I'm trying to play Kid Icarus. I'm not trying to play Mario Kart. I guess I could have expected this. There is no reason why Mario Kart DS couldn't be enjoyed a year or two or three or four or five from now. Yeah, yeah, definitely. What headphones do you use for listening to music on your ProGrade station? What about on the go? I use mostly my HD 600s when I'm at home. However, sometimes the Denon D2000s. I really like those as well. And then when I'm on the go, it's always all about the IEMs. I have my IE 80s on me. If you ever see me on the street and you want to test this, just walk up and be like, Linus, do you have your IE 80s in your pocket? Be like, no, because they're in my ear. Or yes, that's the other answer. How about a bronze Linus statue? I don't think anybody needs that. I wonder if it would be considerably cheaper. Because it'd be like... Oh, that's terrible. That's terrible. How can you say such a thing? It should be. Or maybe it's like that material thing. Apparently it's because GameSpy shutting down the... I don't care. I don't care why it's going down. Fix it. Statue would get us some press. Yeah, probably. Probably terrible press. Is hotspot shield slowing down internet speed a common issue? That's just a reality of using a VPA. Because you're relying on their connection and the signal has to be physically rerouted. So it's like further. The latency is worse. Have either of you played Thief yet? Any thoughts? I think it's a lot better than a lot of people have been saying. Honestly, I think people have jumped into the game, played for like five seconds, and been like, this game sucks. It's not as hard as Thief used to be. Because they didn't click on the custom difficulty button and click classic Thief custom difficulty options. Come on! There's ten... It's one of the most... You can customize the difficulty with such a fine comb. It's amazing. Well, they're used to not having an options menu. So nobody looks for it anymore. But it's not... When you go to create a new game, it's like Thief... Well, what is it? Rogue, Thief, Master, and Custom. If you go to Custom, there's a huge list of custom options you can do. Some which are insane. If you're detected at all, you just instantly fail. That's one of the options. So if you're worried about how difficult it is, you can make it insane beyond logical levels of difficulty very easily. Or you can just turn off all the new things and make it classic Thief style difficulty very easily. And everyone's complaining about that, which is fixable. But not enough people are complaining about the audio, which is horribly, terribly broken. Which is ironic because when I last saw it, which was back in September, whenever GPU14 was, when I was in Hawaii for the AMD event, they had true audio running on it. And the audio experience of Thief was going to be a big selling point. Whereas, I mean, there's reports out there of like outside ambient sound effects drowning out the conversation you're trying to have with someone two feet in front of you. And I would have it where it's like, oh my god, someone is talking right beside me and I'm a thief. I need to be not detected. And someone is talking right beside me and I turn and look, no one's on this floor of the building. The guy who's talking is downstairs in a different room. And the positional audio is like, hello. It's like, oh my god. And that's so off putting when you're trying to sneak around and it feels like people are talking directly beside you the whole time. Like it feels like a guard that is in a different floor of the building is sitting right there talking to me the whole time. And I'm just like trying to sneak and steal things. It doesn't make any sense. Why are you so ridiculous? It's silly. I hope they fix it. David asks for a recommendation for a good inexpensive gaming laptop. I think the weapon of choice out there right now is Lenovo's Y series. I haven't really I haven't shopped for a gaming laptop since. Ever. Actually, yeah. Have you ever bought a gaming laptop? Neither have I. I mean, with that said, it's not like I don't understand what's good about them. I've sold lots of them. Yeah. I've sold lots of them to people who I knew would be really happy with them. It's just that it's it. You know, it's the kind of thing that would probably make more sense for me today than it ever did in the past because I used to be a lot more mobile than I am now. I still don't know because you've seen the kit. I haul around whenever we go places. If I'm going to use a laptop, I'm bringing my own mechanical keyboard and mouse. Right. So like I need so much space that if I bought a gaming laptop, it's so much stuff to haul around. Because I would need I need an external mouse. There's no way I can get into the trackpad. My justification for it would be that would be excellent as a portable workstation or even just to completely replace my workstation here because a lot of the gaming laptops now support multiple displays out. So you can legitimately have a great productivity workstation that then you take home with you. That's very true. And another thing I was trying to say, I've seen people do this is where they don't haul around a keyboard and mouse. They haul around a controller. Right. And they'll play more games that you used to see on consoles like racers and whatnot. Right. On their on their gaming laptop, which like, OK, that makes sense. Controllers are much more portable than a keyboard and mouse. So that makes sense. What is your opinion of the best monitor? Impossible to say. Incredibly long discussion. Yeah. What did I think of the A.T.H.M. 50s after all? They're OK. For the price, they're really good. I didn't think they were that comfortable. I think that the comfort of them is not as amazing as it's cracked up to be. I also found them a little bit harsh at the high end, but my hearing is a little bit more sensitive at the high end than it is elsewhere. So that makes a bit of sense. Something with something with a perfectly flat frequency response curve might not sound that great to me. It might be kind of fatiguing for me to listen to. Whereas some of the some of the roll off that you get from something like an essence one where you have higher output impedance with low impedance headphones is actually somewhat desirable to me. Except that I miss out on some of the bass. So yeah, they're good. I would recommend them. Just not as comfortable for me as they are for some people. People are like the Wii is eight years old, but I still play Brawl online. Yeah. See, this is what I'm talking about. Gold game then too expensive. Yeah. Her DirectX 11 is getting an update a lot like Mantle. There's not a lot of substantiated evidence for it yet. Yeah. We'll hold off. Only if it's six meters tall with a crown upon his head and a cat in his arms. I still use the Wii and I have played Mario Kart recently on my DS. I am disappointed. They're just super Smash Brothers like people play that online like crazy. Yeah. That's something I didn't even think about is on the Wii level. There's even more games that people play a lot. Check out Tom's mic. We could definitely use better mics on this show. Huh. There you go. 327 bucks, but that's how he gets that sound. That's why it like sounds really good. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we're done here guys. Thank you so much for tuning into the WAN show today. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Just as a reminder, our sponsors today were Squarespace, the fast easy way to build your own beautiful website that works on desktop and mobile and all that good stuff as well. As Intel, join Intel Club Enthusiast for exclusive offers. Head over to Enthusiast.Intel.com. And a huge thanks to our guest, Tom Merritt for joining us. So you can find him in all the ways that he said earlier or just forget all that and Google Tom Merritt, M-E-R-R-I-T-T. And you'll find him really easily that way as well. He was a fantastic guest and we'd love to have him on again at some point. So anyway, guys, thank you again very much for watching and we'll see you again next week. Same bat time, same bat channel. Thank you.