 Okay. It's when show time again, or that is to say it was when show time. About 20 minutes ago. About 20 minutes ago. Thank you for your patience. Those of you who are watching on YouTube, in a certain dimension, this is not very meaningful to you. We were on time today. In some time zone, we were on time. It's five o'clock somewhere, which is irrelevant because we don't start at five. Wait, yes we do. Oh crap. But not in that time zone. Not in that. Can we blame daylight saving time? Oh yeah. That was last weekend. That was it. So actually no one's going to be watching this week anyway. Like go look at the viewership statistics. Probably everyone was like, everyone everywhere else in the world probably thinks that- It doesn't start for an hour. It doesn't start for another hour. Yeah. So no, we're 40 minutes early. Whoa. No way. Oh my goodness. We are early for like most of the world. That's fantastic. We are so good at this. Like online content creators. Yeah. All right. So we've got a great show for you guys today. We specifically went out of our way to avoid talking about it last week. And the reason was that honestly, I just needed a little bit more time to figure out what the heck was going on here. The GeForce Partner Program. On the surface, this looks like some pretty jank, pretty scummy stuff. And below the surface, well, we'll talk about it later. But I mean, realistically, if I was going to say it's all good, I would have said that before. Yes. There was another big news item this week. Security flaws found in AMD Zen processors from CTS Labs. Wow. That's been a drama and a half. So we're gonna- And I think that even technically started last week too. But especially this one, super muddy waters last week. And it's a little bit more clear now. Still kind of confusing. Did you ever play the game at the beach where you would like stomp and then you'd get like the kind of Godzilla looking cloud that comes out around your foot. And then you'd be like, oh, that was fun. Stomp. And then you would get to the point where you couldn't really see the cloud anymore because you just mucked up everything. So that was last week. Now we've left it for a few hours and we can go sort of stomp around a bit again, but it's not clear either. What else we got? Okay. Apparently another Nvidia thing, they're both just slamming it this week. Apparently they're gonna announce RTX or ray tracing technology, which is pretty interesting. And another company is removing another headphone jack. Now it's the same headphone jack. Yeah, that's fair. Well, I guess it's a different headphone jack. You know what? Well, it's the same kind. Let's just roll the intro. Yeah. This video brought to you by Tetra and Brushbooks. Can you eat either of those things? No. That's a real bummer because I'm super hungry. I was like, I thought you were spilling into a spot for the other guys. No. Oh no. No, no, not really. I'm sure it's true. Well, it's all about the the I'm sure you can have these. Oh, I'm not gonna eat Reaper jerky if Savage Jerky is not sponsoring the show. They're right there. Yeah, they're right there and I'd feel better. Well first I'd feel worse. Then I'd feel better and then I'd feel much worse. Alright, why don't we jump into the news? This is gonna be like not very many topics but a very long time. Yeah, I'm not ready for the GeForce Partner Program. Not yet. Yeah, let's talk about something kind of trivial. Taking the easy fish first. Wow, you and I are gonna have to play... What's going on? We're gonna have to play Share the Power adapter over the next little bit here. Oh! Because I only got 10%. That's okay. I'm gonna... Oh, I'm on battery saver already. Well, okay then. I'm gonna turn down my screen brightness a bit. Okay, Sony removed the headphone jack from the Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact. They outlined the details of why they did this in their blog. This was originally posted on the forum by Die Hard Live. Would you mind doing a straw poll? Die Hard to Live. Yeah, I can do a straw poll. Heck yeah. Do you even consider Sony phones when buying a phone? That is a fantastic straw poll. Would you consider a Sony phone? Now, here in North America, Sony's market share is like... This is one of the reasons why I want to do this poll though, because we don't necessarily have just a North American audience. Exactly. It'll be a little skewed because we're live right now. If we were able to get these results from the YouTube audience, I think it would be different than what it's going to be now. Someday when we're streaming on Floatplane, and that stream can then go... We could have like perpetual polling. That like sits right under the video. That would be super cool. That would totally work. I mean, yeah, it's all sort of theoretical at this point because Floatplane is not particularly fully featured at the moment. That's fair. Last week... I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything. Last week hit a little deep. That comment's fair though. Yeah. Okay, so I've gone ahead. I've dropped the straw poll in there. But this was originally posted on the forum by Die Hard to Live. And they basically outlined the two reasons for removing the headphone jack that subjectively are probably about the worst reasons that you could do anything and contribute to, in my opinion... Oh my God. Was that actually... Okay. I hadn't read their two reasons before. Was that actually it? Or did we just like come up with that? Contribute to probably why I think... Probably why the straw poll results will be what I think they will be. Ha ha! So that's not good. Let's go ahead and pull up the results here. Would you consider a Sony phone? Remember, we didn't say would you buy a Sony phone. We said would you even consider one? Would you even think about it at all? We've got 26% of you saying yes. 74% of you saying no. And only 500 of you even bothering to vote. Which is some pretty low numbers for these Wanshow straw polls. Which I'm going to put that category as a wow, I really don't care. And no one is even still voting. Like the results aren't even rolling in anymore. Oh wait, yes they are. Oh, oh, and it's... It died off pretty hard at 635. It died off pretty hard. It's like still kind of going, but not too much. Okay, so here are the reasons that Sony outlined for making this decision. And you gotta remember, the strong opinion on this would be a yes. Anyone thinking no, like it's kind of effort for them to be like yeah, no. So like there's probably a way higher percentage of people that actually wouldn't consider it. But anyway. Reason number one. It looks more sleek without it. So by that logic, a human would probably look more sleek without an anus. But you probably shouldn't remove it. Reason number two. I thought you were going to hold it together on that one, but you couldn't. No, not quite. Reason number two. Other companies are doing it. Oh, so painful. Now, in fairness... Is that actually what they said? In fairness to Sony. In fairness to Sony. Hold on a second. Okay, look, do you want me to read the whole thing? This is part of the shift to our new ambient flow design language. In order to create the beautiful seamless design, our designers needed to remove the headphone jack. Plus, we were aware of the major market trend towards wireless headphones over wired headphones. So yes. They literally did say that. They literally did say that. Oh. So okay, in fairness to Sony, in defense of Sony, something that I'm not 100% sure if they deserve right now... No one cares about their phones anyways? No, that is not what I was going to say. To be clear there, I was also kidding. In fairness to Sony, I never... Oh, I never set the announcement video live. I was trying to figure out why so few people are watching. I used to like their phones until we had so many of them just bend in half. Yeah. Well, two, I think. Three? Berckels, mine, yours. Berckels did too? Yeah. Oh, I didn't even know that. How do you manage to do that? It was a compact. The compacts had the same issue as just less likely. It was just Berckel. He's an action man. Probably more action-y in his pants. Wow, I meant like wow. Okay, actually my defense of Sony is actually worse than anything you said. In defense of... In Sony's defense, the last time they tried to do something really innovative that was probably really expensive from an R&D perspective, because remember, Sony was the one that made waterproof mainstream. That was cool. Yes, that was very cool. That's why I used to really like their phones. And then it bent in half. And they still didn't manage to sell more phones because of it, but that's a whole other issue. The last time they tried to do something, they were the first to have a 4K display. Now, creating a 4K mobile display, you guys got to understand, when you have a feature on your phone, let's say OnePlus launches a 2560 by 1080 mobile display, OnePlus did not go and get that freaking panel created. They are a relatively small player. And when you're a relatively small player doing relatively small volume, you don't get to walk up to Samsung's display division or LG or AUO or Philips or whoever it is. You don't get to walk up and be like, yo, we need a custom SKU. It needs to have this color gamut, this response time. It needs to be this size at this resolution. They're going to laugh you out of their office. You get to do that when you're Apple, when you're Samsung. Believe it or not, Apple's notch display was custom created just for them. Because until Apple did it, of course, after Apple does it, which ties into Sony's other reason, of course, other people want it. But until Apple did it, nobody else was going to want that. So Sony would have had to actually create a 4K mobile display in that form factor for that phone that, quite honestly, they probably didn't sell a ton of based on our straw poll results. And also, you can just Google it. And just see the people around you, what phones they're using. So they didn't. Yeah, when's the last time you saw one? So Sony didn't probably get a great ROI on that particular, you know, breaking the mold kind of investment. Although even then, giving them credit for breaking the mold in that way is not entirely fair because they were just following an overall market trend. They were just trying to get out ahead of it in a way that was totally meaningless and stupid. Yes, and almost never even worked anyways. The phone ran in default 1080p almost all the time. And then you'd like view a picture that was in 4K and you'd have to wait a second. And then it would just like, and then change resolution. It was really weird. It was very odd. Almost everything ran at 1080p. But anyways. So I can see how they don't want to take any risks because you have to move a lot of devices to make up for any kind of R&D investment beyond just even the basics. But I'm just, I'm disappointed. I was thrilled to see that Samsung still had the headphone jack on the S9 and S9+. I think that, you know what? Yeah. The mainstream is moving to wireless. But Samsung is going to sell some handsets just for that. And I really hope that they do get rewarded for it. Yeah. All right. What do we got for our next topic here? Should we get into the Nvidia thing? They're just all big deep ones. I just have such a headache. There's this thing if you want to go pretty light and easy. No, no. Let's just, let's just get this out of the way. Okay. So the GeForce Partner Program. This was originally posted on the forum. This is actually an 11 page topic over on our forum. And it was posted by WMGroomAK. And this lady or gentleman, whichever it is, okay, let's go ahead and get the screen share going on here, basically read an article over on HardOCP from Kyle Bennett and said this, found all of this interesting if his reporting checks out. Because basically, and this is sort of the problem, this came to light from AMD bringing some of the details of what's called the GeForce Partners Program or GPP to his attention. And you got to look at, you got to look at no matter who it is. Like I get that whoever you're a fanboy of, whether it's AMD or Intel or Nvidia, I get that there's this like tribalism thing that's wired into us as human beings. And when someone else does it, it's the worst. And when we do it, it's just us getting back at them for being bad people. But you got to understand that any time any company brings something to your attention, okay, have you noticed them doing this? There's an agenda at play, there's room for spin. Almost every action is selfish, whether it's helpful to other people or not, there's some amount of element that is usually selfish, which is okay in a lot of cases, but it's just something to be aware of. Yes, you got to live your life sort of thinking about that in everything that you do. So the basic summary is that the story began when several sites, including HardOCP, were alerted to the goings on by AMD. In a blog post from March 1st, Nvidia outlined their new GeForce Partner Program, which ostensibly helps consumers identify brands that deliver the GeForce promise of delivering the best PC gaming platform bar none. So let's go ahead and pull up Nvidia's blog post that... Nvidia's very good at this. Oops. There we go. Let's pull up Nvidia's blog post that... Nvidia's so good at this. Sort of puts it in the shiniest possible terms what they're doing here. This is the headline. The GeForce Partner Program helps gamers know what they're buying. Oh boy. I was having trouble figuring out what I was buying before. I'm sure glad that I know now. Wasn't it like last stream we talked about how confusing Intel SKUs are? Graphics skus are not a huge problem on the Nvidia side. Yeah, actually. And even on the AMD side, they're not that bad. Higher number is more better. There was a little bit of confusingness for a section there, but it's kind of fine. The first number is the generation, and then beyond that, higher is more better. I think it got a little bit confusing on the AMD side when we had like Fury and Nano and a few other things. Actually, no, Nvidia does have some stupid BS going on right now where the 3GB and the 6GB version of the 1060 are actually different cards. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's fair. So hold on a second. Well, wait a minute. Is Nvidia rescuing us from themselves? Is that what's happening right now? We also had that stuff where the Titan XP and the Titan XP-P, that was not... Okay, that was really annoying. That wasn't great either. That was really annoying. So... Especially when the whole community nicknamed the first one the XP. Yeah. And then they called their next one the XP. Okay, okay. So fine. Okay, fine. You know what? Then let's play Nvidia Advocate. Go away. Let's play Nvidia Advocate and say they did need to do something about this confusing industry. So let's have a look at what they said. Oh, man. Wow, this starts off horrible, like right within the first two lines. The GPU and software of a gaming PC make all the difference in a gamer's experience. And together with our add-in card and system partners, we're dedicated to building the best PC gaming platform bar none. This is the GeForce promise. Partner program is designed to ensure that gamers have full transparency into the GPU platform and software they're being sold. Now, I'm a let you finish, but... Do you ever read stuff that just makes you, like, tired? I'm doing it right now. Which is I'm sure where you were going with that. I'm a let you finish, but... There was no ambiguity here. There's already marketing incentives and in some cases, like, basically an arm twisted behind the back like this, where Nvidia really has a lot of control over the badges that are put on, for example, a product box. Or in the case of add-in cards, even the overall design. Like, you could take a picture from the side of an entire shelf of cards made by MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, EVGA, and all the Nvidia ones would be basically the same. Because Nvidia has mandated, and they have lots of levers they can pull to control their partners, but Nvidia has mandated that they need to kind of look like this. And the levers that they can pull include pricing, allocation of the hot parts that actually sell, partner support, so things like providing engineering support for your custom boards, access, early access to the parts so you can begin development ahead of other guys. All this kind of stuff has existed forever and it's like totally kind of fine. Kind of. There's some issues in some realms, but most of it is fairly standard practice. Okay, fine is a relative term. Most of this is fairly standard practice for a lot of different industries. Yeah, depending on how it's done. So the thing is that we get a lot of sort of feedback from our community that the perception is that we're sort of like friends of Nvidia. But the reality of it is we're not friends with anybody. We are a business and we have business partnerships. And from a product perspective, we liken video products just fine. From a sort of how we perceive their reputation within the industry, we have some misgivings, ones that we have brought to light in the past. Yeah. Particularly, actually I think probably the most recent example is the 1066 gig and 3 gig. That's an extremely recent example. We didn't like the way they did that. Well, I mean, like we mentioned it this show, but there's also the recent change to GeForce experience. Yes, we've also mentioned that. Which was like we put them on blast for that. And I still don't install it and I still don't recommend it. And while I am not always at liberty to talk about, especially the sources of the frustration with Nvidia, that takes place behind the scenes, there's a lot of it that we're aware of and there's a lot of arm twisting. And, you know, think about it. Nvidia is like the partner that stands there posing for a picture with you and has their foot on your toe. Yeah, being like smile properly. That's the perception that I get a lot of the time. So let's continue reading about the GeForce promise here. This transparency into what you're buying is only possible when Nvidia brands and partner brands are consistent. So the new program means that we'll be promoting our GPP partner brands across the web on social media and events and more. So this sounds like, oh, Nvidia is doing great things for their partners. GPP partners will also get early access to our latest innovations and work closely with our engineering team to bring the newest technologies to gamers. Partners are signing up fast. They see the benefit of keeping brands and communication consistent and transparent. Does this not have like a, which Harry Potter movie is it where Umbridge takes over as the professor, the prim and proper, you know, lady who turns out to be like an absolute monster. I don't remember the name of it, but I think it's the second last one. Yeah, I don't remember anyway. It's not really important. The point is, does this not have like kind of a rules for, you know, proper behavior as students kind of vibe to it? The program isn't exclusive. Partners continue to have the ability to sell and promote products from anyone. Partners choose to sign up for the program and they can stop participating at any time. There's no commitment to make any monetary payments or product discounts for being part of the program. GPP ensures our engineering and marketing efforts support brands consumers associate with G-Force. That transparency will give gamers the confidence needed to make their purchase, whichever products they choose. Ooh. Now, I don't often feel the need to read out an entire press release from a company because a lot of the time, frankly, I feel like companies should pay me to read their stupid press release. Like honestly, press releases, that's not journalism. That's not objective. That's advertising. They literally pay someone to write it and then they pay like Marketwire to distribute it. That's what it is. Okay, so on the surface, this sounds like everything about this is voluntary and terrific. But let's look at the state of the GPU market right now. If you can get GPUs, you are making bank because of the whole cryptocurrency mining thing and pent-up demand from gamers who haven't been able to get GPUs because of the cryptocurrency mining thing. If you can't get GPUs, you are basically plum out of luck and NVIDIA, without doing anything that could open them up to a lawsuit, can plausibly say, we just didn't have enough for you. You were on the list. Sorry. And if you're, let's say, someone like EVGA, for example, you have other businesses. You sell motherboards. You sell crazy, ridiculously high wattage power supplies. Yeah, you sell power supplies. You sell cases even. But let's be honest. When's the last time you saw an EVGA motherboard out in the wild? So they sell motherboards, but do they sell a lot of them compared to someone like an ASUS or a Gigabyte? No, not really. And that isn't to say that they're bad boards. That's just to say that they aren't as popular. And that EVGA's business is very reliant on GPUs. So if EVGA couldn't get allocation of GPUs to say that their business would suffer would be a gross understatement. So NVIDIA's blog post outlining how this is all very voluntary, it just ensures that they get the benefits of being part of the partner program. It comes across a little bit disingenuous because that's not what's going on here. What's going on is that if you don't join the partner program, you're not going to get allocation and your business is going to suffer and you're going to have to lay off real people with real families who won't have a job anymore and won't be able to support them. And that's something that if I'm a company like EVGA that, for the most part, my experience with them has actually been very positive, I would like to believe that they care about. So you're pretty much joining the GeForce Partner Program. Let's go to the HARD-OCP article. Huge shout out to Kyle for doing what he was doing here. So HARD-OCP began interviewing AIBs and OEMs. I'm going to re-share this in Twitch chat because I showed it a while ago. Go ahead, hit Twitch chat with that. It's really important. So they began interviewing AIBs and OEMs who communicated a few things. One, that the GeForce Partner Program has terms in it that are likely illegal. Number two, that the GeForce Partner Program is going to likely tremendously hurt consumer choice. And number three, that the GeForce Partner Program will disrupt business with companies that are currently doing business with AMD, in particular, AMD and Intel. The other thing that he gleaned, and we haven't been able to verify this, because here's what you guys got to understand. I've never seen the agreement, and I know for a fact I will never see the agreement. It would shock me if anyone ever saw this agreement out in the public. But what I know about agreements like this is that, let's say, for example, that a gag order was done in an illegal fashion. Let's say I made you sign some kind of an agreement that says... This is a very spicy agreement. Yeah, spicy agreement, okay? If you talk about this agreement, I will kill you, and you will authorize me to kill you. Oh. Okay? Obviously illegal. But let's say it wasn't murder. Let's say it was something slightly less black and white than that. Like I'll kill your company. Yeah, like that. Which, to a lot of people, is kind of close. Yeah, I mean, people have committed suicide over their company's failure. That's what I mean, yeah. So let's say that it was something like that. You could break the agreement at some point, but until you fight me in court and prove that, depending on the way it's wording, because expensive lawyers can do expensive lawyer things, depending on the way it's worded, the onus could be on you to prove that you don't owe me whatever it was. So your business could effectively be destroyed in the years and after the money that it costs you to fight me. So even though I have an illegal term and I have a potentially illegal punishment for it, you don't want to be the one who steps out of line because I can punish you in the meantime in ways that would destroy you to the point where it would never matter if what I did was illegal because you wouldn't even exist to take a payout anymore five years, ten years down the road when you would be in a position to finally get your payout. Now that is a real possibility, and I'm not saying that I know that that's what's happening, but what I do know is that nobody is coughing up this agreement, and I do know that agreements like this do exist. Okay, so with all of that in mind, further information that HardOCP is publishing alleges that the G4th Partner Program... I'm not disagreeing with anything that you're saying, but to play a little bit of both sides... You're allowed to. Oh, I know, I know. But to play a little bit of both sides, alleges is a pretty important word here. There's a lot of... This is all according to Kyle Bennett's article on HardOCP. And a lot of it makes sense. And I'm explaining how it could make sense, but... And it lines up pretty okay, but like... Okay, yeah, so thank you. Yeah. Are you our legal department? I was sort of at one point. Long time ago. Okay, I don't want to talk about those things. We were in dark times. But like, yeah, I just want to make sure that's clear because while all of this may make sense and all that kind of stuff, it's not technically complete. It's all alleges. Okay, so Kyle's article further alleges that in order to have access to the GeForce Partner Program, partners must have their own gaming brand aligned exclusively with GeForce. Now think about that for a minute. Because that's been a huge trend over the last 10 years or so. I think ROG just celebrated its 10-year anniversary with the Rampage 5 Extreme. They had a 10-year anniversary edition of that port. And ROG was one of the...to Asus' credit, this was... Asus doesn't always get marketing right. But to Asus' credit, they built the ROG brand when I called it a stupid idea way back in the day. So kudos to them and the rest of the industry basically was playing follow the leader. Yeah, I would also say they have nailed it quite a few times. Asus' ROG, Gigabyte's Aorus, Lenovo's Legion. Who else do we have? Dell's XPS or Alienware to a greater extent. XPS is less gaming these days. It used to be Dell's gaming brand. I feel like Legion has been having more of an issue getting its... Well, they just launched. Like CES 15 months ago or something like that. So give them some time. But it also alleges that all of these brands will have to be exclusively aligned with GeForce. So even though Nvidia's blog post says, partners continue to have the ability to sell and promote products from anyone, the GPP documentation allegedly says that those who do not participate will lose benefits, like high effort engineering engagements, early tech engagement, launch partner status, game bundling, sales rebate programs. I'll get back to that one. Social media and PR support, marketing reports, and marketing development funds. So let's get back to sales rebate programs and marketing development funds for a minute here. The way the tech industry works, and there's a reason for it, because if you gave every mom and pop computer shop a $1 discount, they would take it straight to price and sell the product for cheaper, which as a consumer you might go, wow, that's great. But it isn't necessarily because we talked about this previously when Intel wasn't providing the support that we feel like they should on their previous generation chipsets in terms of patching for Spectre and Meltdown. The problem with just charging the bare amount is that it doesn't give you the business... war chest that you need to go to war in the event that you have to. And it's one of those things where it kind of relies on a business to behave in a manner that is in good faith acting in the consumer's best interest, but a business that is making a healthy profit is in a better position to, as an extreme example, still exist a year later when you come back for warranty support. You actually need the companies that you buy things from to make a profit. Does that make sense? Okay. So anyway, the problem with the IT industry is that it tends to be, and it's kind of a cultural thing, I'm not going to get any deeper into it than that, but it tends to be a race to zero industry. Volume, volume, volume, take down as much margin as you can so you can take the volume that your competitor would have been doing, force them under, and then someday we'll raise the prices. And you do eventually see that. The hard drive industry enjoyed a short period of great margins when basically everyone was gone, and then they were supplanted by the SSD industry and the mainstream. And to be clear, hard drives are still doing fine in the cloud. They're not going away or anything, but that business is a B2B business, which tends to be lower margins. So there was like a golden hour there for the hard drive industry. Here, do you need this? Yeah. Go for it. Right. So the way that the tech industry works is that the pricing is fixed. You just say, okay, look, a Core i5 8600K, that's $200 US. And then the way that you actually provide promotions or the way that you make someone like formerly, so when I worked at NCIX, the way that NCIX was able to differentiate from Mom and Popchops was not the sticker price. It was the back-end support because every CPU we sold, we got a couple percentage kickback at the end of a quarter. And every CPU we sold, well, you know, during Black Friday, we might get five bucks or 10 bucks off. Now all of a sudden, Mom and Pop, in order to compete with us, have to sell below cost, giving us an advantage. That's the way that you actually stay competitive. And to be clear, this isn't some kind of like subversive cloak and dagger nonsense because within sort of the mainstream stores that you shop at, Best Buy, New Egg, I mean, okay, some of these are kind of dated reference, or Tiger Direct, Memory Express, Canada Computers, Micro Center, Amazon, the programs are basically across the board pretty similar. And whenever someone finds out that they got a program that someone else got a program that they didn't, there's outrage. And usually the brand ends up kind of doing something to make it up to you. And then the other guy complains about that. It's all negotiations. It's business as usual. Now the problem here is that with GPUs in particular, NVIDIA maintains a lot of control over the pricing at every level to the partners and to the end users through tools like these kinds of rebates. So they sell the chipset to the vendor at some price X. But then NVIDIA could decide a week later to go, well, you know what, here's a sell through rebate, effectively lowering the price without actually lowering the sticker price, meaning that someone who has a multi week in some cases lead time between acquiring chips and then turning them into boards, delivering them to retailers and eventually selling through them might effectively have a bunch of stock that's overpriced now and no real recourse for getting rid of it. And so it's at NVIDIA's discretion to support you to get rid of it. Which is a fairly direct way, fairly strong but indirect way to sort of choke out a company. That's right. So game bundling, MDF and sales rebate programs are basically like saying, you'll never make money on graphics cards again if you were to remove all that stuff. Yeah. Okay. I forget where we were going with this, but partner brand aligned exclusively with NVIDIA. Partners have the ability to sell and promote products from anyone. But allegedly this behind the scenes documentation says they'll get all of the support cut. And to be clear, the public documentation doesn't say any of that. Okay. HardOCP has been told that if a company does not participate in GPP, they feel... Not by NVIDIA. Yeah. As if NVIDIA would hold back allocation of GPUs from their inventories. This has not been spelled out contractually, but the feeling is that it's done on a wink and a nod. To be fair, they said that the stuff we just mentioned, losing all these different things, was in the documentation. This is a feeling. Yeah, the allocation bit is a feeling. And then the next part that we're going to talk about is also a like... Feeling? Yeah. So it was expressed to HardOCP that publishing that article could damage HardOCP's relationship with NVIDIA. Which, knowing... Oh, well we've gotten to the end of it now. I guess we're in the same boat. Look at that. But knowing... And like, okay, to jump all the way back to the beginning of this conversation, in terms of... Like there's always... There's very, extremely, massively often... I'm not going to say always because someone's going to call me on that some weird way. But there's basically always a selfish reason for everything. Whether the selfish reason is tiny or huge, whatever. Saying, hey, if you release this, NVIDIA is going to be mad. Saying that to HardOCP was probably pushing them to release it. Because it sounds juicy. Then again, maybe not. Kyle's been in the industry a long time. And he's deeply connected. They may have actually had his best interest at heart. Possibly, but from articles that I've read from him before too, no issue pushing that kind of stuff. But let's take the helicopter up another thousand feet. And let's go, why were they talking to him at all? Yeah. Yeah, seriously. Yeah. So the particular warning might have been in Kyle's best interest. But the fact that they're talking to him at all is probably in their own best interest. And I'm sure they know that he likes juicy articles. And also for the consumer's best interest, potentially. Because remember, there could be a selfish kernel. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't benefit a whole bunch of people. And that you couldn't rationalize the benefit you're providing to yourself by saying, well, it also helps out all these other guys. Which is great in a lot of situations. That's honestly mostly how charity works. But you just don't know how much. How much of this is helping other people. How much of this is helping others. And for Kyle to talk about how this article could damage the relationship with NVIDIA, you can find a selfish kernel there too. By saying that, he's adding credibility to his own publication by saying, you know what, I'm willing to risk damaging my relationship with NVIDIA in order to bring you guys the facts. And in this case, this actually does look to me, and I haven't seen the partner agreement, and I won't admit to having talked to anyone about this behind the scenes, but this looks to me like it actually does have the potential to damage a relationship with NVIDIA. NVIDIA is... Well, it comes back to the portrait. NVIDIA smiles a lot. And they talk about partnership a lot. And what they mean is they have expectations of their partners, and if their partners don't meet them, well... Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. That's my perception. And a lot of people think that we're like super, super chummy with NVIDIA, but I've said before in the past, and I'll say it again now, we have done a grand total of three sponsored engagements with NVIDIA. We did some pre-rolls way back when we first started, and those were actually... that was a complicated thing because probably none of you even remember them. It was ten spots, and they were all for a particular EVGA graphics card, but the funding was being passed through via MDF from NVIDIA. So that one hardly even registers. Number two, we went down to California and hosted Mod 24, their modding event. We were paid what I consider to be a very modest fee for that kind of an engagement. And then number three, this was the first time they had actually done flat out a sponsored video with us ever. They did something with us in Q4 talking about how to game at 4K. They were actually pretty easy to work with, which was kind of refreshing, because we were able to talk about game consoles as well. We kept it very objective, and we told them up front. We were like, look, we never actually work with you guys on sponsored stuff, but there's this perception that we're in your pocket. So you've got to understand, we're going to have to approach this very carefully. And they were actually pretty cool about it, but that's the extent of it. We have worked far more extensively with AMD, Intel, ASUS. I think we've done more stuff with MSI. I mean, certainly more stuff with the regular partners like Squarespace. Zotac we haven't really done much big stuff with. I think more than NVIDIA. But we've done actually, yeah, we've done a fair bit with Zotac. Yeah. Okay, yeah. Like most people. So there you go. So are we putting ourselves at risk? Given that the relationship was finally starting to warm up and we were really getting some stuff done, a dedicated sponsored video with us is one of the biggest things that a partner can do with us. And we finally did one with them. Given things were starting to warm up, yes, we're putting ourselves at risk. But given that our business survived just fine for the five years prior to that, no, it's not a ton. So we're not going to act like white knights here or anything like that. But also said allegedly a lot. We said allegedly a lot because perception and that I'm not going to admit to having talked to anyone. I'm going to say this. I haven't talked to anyone. And I'm also going to say this. I'm not always 100% honest with you guys. So you can read into that, whatever you feel like. Speaking of honesty, there's a few. I want to add one thing before we jump into sponsor spots. But one thing I want to add to you is some of this stuff is future traceable. So you'll be able to tell. Yep. Just keep that in mind. Like one of the smart things you can do if you're trying to keep an agreement under wraps is you could give everyone slightly different terms. That's fair. That way if it came to light, you could kind of go, okay, if it was one of them, them or them. And then if something else came to light, you could go, it was them. So even if I knew anything, and I am being honest, this is honest answers episode, whatever this is, has Linus seen the agreement? The answer is no. I have not seen it. And I have been told by the people that I would never admit that I have talked to that I will never see it and that they will never tell me any details about it. That actually did happen as well. Anyone that I won't admit that I talked to told me they would never show it to me and they would never tell me the details of it. So that happened. So there you go. Yeah, let's talk about something not horrible. Here's spectrum glasses. My life is far less complicated right now talking about spectrum glasses instead of stuff. Because it's simple, okay? If you stare at a monitor all day, the blue light can be bad for your eyes. This filters it without having a huge impact on the color accuracy of the world around you. And compared to a software solution like Flux or Twilight, it's more effective. It's also kind of weird. I've got a Flux equivalent on my phone. I don't remember what it's called. And it's kind of jarring. Yeah, I know. It doesn't work that well. They're stylish. You've got tons of different styles to choose from, including ones for kids. They're high quality. They feel good. They feel good in the hand. They got a one-year warranty, not just in the hand, on your face too. It's like spectrum. It works great in your hand and on your face. Spectrum. You'll want them in your hand. You'll want it on your face. That would actually be an interesting commercial for them to run. It's just they like hand people glasses. They're like, wow, these feel great. And then they just like, they won't put them on. Now try putting it on your face. And the person's like, you know, you should try it on. And they're like, no, it just, it feels amazing. So they're primarily focused on the Canadian and US markets, but they're expanding to Europe and they offer shipping internationally. Check them out at spectrumglasses.com slash collections slash prospect, or at the link right there. I still think it's Prospect. Prospect. I'm sorry. Pro and Spectacled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm an idiot. Use offer code Linus to save 10%. If I was Spectrum, I would change our offer code to use offer code idiot. I would read it. I would read anything for money. That's what people think of me. So I might as well just do it. Just embrace it. Speaking of anything for money, if you're a freelancer or a small business owner doing whatever it is that you do for money, FreshBooks is here to help. FreshBooks is the super simple to use invoicing tool that actually does a lot more than help you create and send slick looking invoices. It helps you track your time with their time cheap function, manage your expenses and keep track of who owes you what. They've also got a feature that tells you when your client has looked at your invoice for the first time so you can put an end to the guessing games. The mobile app has all the functionality of the desktop version, so you can take FreshBooks with you wherever you go. It's available for Android and iOS. And if you have any questions, you can reach out to their support staff where you will speak to a real human. No phone tree, no escalations, no return calls, just answers. Go to freshbooks.com slash WAN for an unrestricted 30-day free trial and enter WAN in the How Did You Hear About Us section. All right. One thing. We did a one-topic WAN show today. People are running super hard with the allegedly thing. Everything's allegedly, and I love it. And then the other thing is people are saying that the offer code should just be ID10D. Oh, yeah, that could work. It's not a bad offer code. Pretty good. I'm hungry enough to eat Reaper jerky. That's... And I'm not being paid by Savage. That's pretty epic. Okay. I asked them for a sweater. I don't think I've ever done that from a company before. I liked their shirt. I liked the logo on their shirt, so I was like, you guys should make a sweater. And they replied. They're like, what kind? A high-quality one made from the freshest ingredients. But tastes great and isn't bad for you, jerky sweater. Oh, my God. That would be really gross, actually. Like your girlfriend would be like, I can't wait to get that off of you. And she's just like... No. That's probably not a good idea. Well, he asked if I wanted a hockey sweater or a more American-style sweater. And I was like, that's a good point. It would be kind of interesting to have a hockey-style Savage jerky sweater. That doesn't help, dude. I got the hiccups. Yeah. Water doesn't make it better. Oh, no. Float plane? Do you want to do float plane while you're all screwed up? No. Do the AMD thing. Do float plane. Do float plane. No. Do float plane? Okay. Fine. I hate you so much. That was a big bite. I haven't eaten in a while. You have to build up a tolerance. I'm straight up crying right now. I thought I did bad last week. Videos on float plane. What are OEMs? Original Equipment Manufacturers. I think everyone's heard this term. What is it? We explain. Scraping thermal paste. Oh, by the way, you're looking at the new layout of the float plane site. In order. Scraping thermal paste. Is Intel's thermal paste actually that bad? We get a bag full of processors, de-lid them, harvest the thermal paste, and then use it on a liquid metal CPU against normal thermal paste. Cool. All right. Nvidia's first SLI gaming setup. Reconstructed. 6,800 GTs on an Enforce board. We've been working on that for a long time. Yep. $2,000,000 clean room. Drive saver's data recovery tour. You should watch this. You want to. Yeah. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm really excited. TechWiki. How does eye tracking work? I saw that thumbnail. It's like, whoa. Testing the 56 core system. Holy spleep. We don't have bleeping on the LAN show. This was a simultaneous, or no, this was a short window. The laptop to buy right now, the LG Gram 2018. They added Thunderbolt. Great laptop. Intel CPU letters explained. I don't think that's actually on YouTube yet. And then we do do some exclusive content, not a ton, but I tested the Nvidia shield from the NCIX auction. So no spoilers, but that's over there as well. And I think that's pretty much it. I think that's it for us. I think that's all we got on there right now. You're doing pretty good. Yeah. You recovered quite a bit. I have recovered. Okay. So let's talk about the next completely AIDS topic posted by coaxialgamer on the forum. Security flaws discovered in AMD Zen processors. So this sounds on the surface like, oh, either. Yeah, you know what? Depending on what kind of a tinfoil hat you wear, this could sound like a lot of things. This could sound like Intel trying to make AMD look bad. This could sound like AMD actually having security flaws and like them being all like being up on their high horse when Intel was dealing with their flaws. Wow, they're a bunch of jerks. Or it looks like it may even be possible that this was an independent group looking to make AMD stock perform poorly so they could short it. So CTS Labs, a security company based in Israel, announced Tuesday that its researchers had found 13 critical security vulnerabilities that would let attackers access data stored on AMD's Zen family processors, including Ryzen and even their Epic server processors, as well as install malware on them. The vulnerabilities have been put into four groups called Master Key, Ryzen Fall, Fallout, and Chimera. Thankfully, nearly all of these vulnerabilities require root access in order to be exploited, but it does get sketchy. The researchers gave AMD less than 24 hours to look at the vulnerabilities and respond before publishing the report. Now that's not illegal, but that is not considered to be industry not being a douche practices. What else we got here? Standard vulnerability disclosure calls for at least 90 days so that the companies have time to address flaws properly. Google gave Intel six months to fix issues related to Spectre and Meltdown. So if it's less than 90 days, that could be like rivals, like Google and Facebook being like, I've got your thing. Yeah. Oh, well, you know, we gave you enough time to fix it. We're going public with this because it makes them look bad, right? It doesn't make you look that bad when a vulnerability goes public because everyone has issues. When a vulnerability goes public, but it's like already fixed. So if you're trying to cause PR damage to someone, you might go live in 30 days so that you could be like, well, they had a whole month to fix this and kind of plausibly say that. 24 hours? That's not even enough time to check your email. In some cases. The researchers pre-briefed media and a company that makes money by shorting the stock market before going live with it. Viceroy Research published an obituary for AMD just 30 minutes after CTS Labs publicized the vulnerabilities. So this is some sketchy stuff. Now, I'm not saying that these researchers aren't qualified to do CPU research. I don't know. There's been a lot of weird stuff, too. Like people tried to deep dive this. And one of the ones that I saw was like someone figured out that the backgrounds and all the videos were stock photos. So they're like they don't have real. They don't even have a real office or they may have a real office, but it doesn't look like super pro like that. Yeah. But at the same time, if you pay attention to the backgrounds throughout the videos, at one point in time, they're like middle frame on a photo that was taken mostly at the floor. So like the person would have to be standing on like a 70 degree angle off the ground this way for it to be realistic. Like I don't think they were actually trying to fool people. Yeah. It was also like a super overproduced kind of video, too, like it had kind of a sleazy vibe to me. But that's actually not surprising from a company that's probably not released a video like a Kickstarter. Yeah. Except that the production values were pretty good. So for some reason, they spent money to make a good looking video. But here, I think this is it. This is a great article from reborn.com. I'm going to go ahead. I'll post this for you guys. Banner. But check this out. Like this is actually done well. So they put money into looking like they had an office. OK, sort of. But hold on. Then look at this one. Yeah, that's the floor. Those servers are reflecting on this photo is taken from the floor. It's a reflective floor. I think. No, no, no. Oh, I got that wrong. Yeah. It's halfway down the server. Yeah. Never mind. So all right. I thought that was the floor right here. Wait, hold on. Are you? But no, I don't know. I'm not sure. I thought it was really reflective polished floor. But now I kind of think that's just halfway through the server. So does it look really, really janky? Yes. I guess that's basically all we have to say about that. Yeah. So there may actually be security issues. But yeah. There also might not be. Or they also might just be like giant jerks. All right. Nvidia's ray tracing thing. We're like out of time. Is there anything else that's like absolutely critical that we have to talk about this week? I feel so bad. James spent all day on this doc and we ended up talking about the Nvidia thing the whole time. Famous people play video games. That's a thing that happens. That's probably all we really need to say about that. Yeah. EA is turning Star Wars Battlefront 2 into a real game. Apparently. A real game. No one cares. The progression is now linear. Star cards or any other item impacting gameplay can only be earned through gameplay, will not be available for purchase. So basically they made their money, I guess. Or people stopped playing, I guess. One of the two. Starting in April, you'll be able to get appearances directly through in-game credits or crystals. All they need to do is make it Star Wars Battlefront 2 Battlegrounds. Or Battle Royale. Or Battle Extravaganza. And then they'll make all their money back. Yeah. They're going to be rolling out a bunch of new mods over the coming months. Cool. So there you go. Make it that and you'll do great. Twitch Prime now offers free games every month. Amazon just like spending that money, hey? Pretty nuts. Apparently, games from March 6 to April 3 will be super hot, which is actually amazing. If you haven't played it yet, great game. Sinfree, Shadow Tactics, Mr. Shifty, and Tales from Candlekeep, Tomb of Annihilation. Next month will be Tales from the Borderlands, SteamWorld Dig 2, Kingsway, Tokyo 42, and Dub Wars. Much like Humble Bundles, I would be surprised if these stay awesome. And it also looks kind of like they've got one more headliner game in each one. And then some other ones which may or may not be cool, but I'm not super familiar with them. Twitch Prime is included with Amazon Prime, by the way. So I mean, I already would have recommended an Amazon Prime membership. So I guess I recommended a little tiny bit more. Yeah. At the same time, if you don't want the entire world to be taken over, maybe consider not buying. Broadcom is not buying Qualcomm anymore because the US government blocked it. It's official. And SpaceX is trying to reach Mars in 2019. Go SpaceX. Cool. Thanks for watching the WAN Show. See you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. Bye. The WAN Show, like 40 minutes of one thing and then like, oh, by the way, something's up. Like the timestamps this week are going to be like four things. Giant gap, yeah. Wow, we got a lot of viewership this week. We should like do more exposés on Nvidia. I mean, I can't really think of anything at the moment. Are you guys super, all the Twitch viewers, are you guys super excited for the super clickbaity thumbnail and title on YouTube? Go to LTX. Yeah. Oh, we didn't do that.