 Oh, all right, it's when show time again. Here, we gotta get our spacing right here. There we go. Perfect. Oh man. You always push me away from the mic so you're way louder than me. No, I'm way louder than you because I'm way louder than you. I push you away from the mic because I'm the one who's actually, you know, looking at the show and okay, yeah. Okay, here, hold on a second. I think we look symmetrical. You know what? Here, just a second, hold on. Let me explain. Let me explain something here. Let's go ahead. We'll give you guys some screen capture to look at here instead of James. There you go. Okay, so, oh, that really doesn't work very well what I'm doing right now. Okay, that's not really the point. The point is, look at the distance here. See this distance? Not enough distance. You gotta, there. See, I'm actually doing- I thought there was a no mansplaining rule on the WAN show. No, no, you're allowed to WANsplain. We've been through this. So we've got a lot of great topics for you guys today. Topic number one, where is Luke? Which is, I'm sure, the only one that you actually care about at this point because this fricking, can you take those off? I'm not taking them off. Oh, you have to take them off. Man, I feel like J.C. Denton. He's not using the laser. Okay, so, Ed, can you cam up for us for a second here? Can you just show them what the heck is going on such that James figures he needs? Wow, thank you. I'm sure glad I had a professional camera operator do that. That's much appreciated. So that right there, look at that. He knows how to use the focus ring and everything. I'm holding a selfie. Yeah. So that right there is our new laser cutter and these, no, no, you can't wear them the whole show. Let me tell you, the whole sunglasses during a tech video podcast thing has been done. No one likes it. My vision is augmented. Have you even played Deus Ex? This is sick. This is harsh. I have played, hold on a second, which one is? It comes out with specific wavelengths. Yeah, it cuts out all the BS and leaves you with awesome. No, can you, no, no. Can I at least just continually put them on, like periodically throughout the show? You can only keep them on for a maximum of 30 seconds at a time. Deal, starting. Okay. And, and they have a 10 minute cool down. No! 10 minute cool down. By the way, yes, I have played Deus Ex, but I only played the widely regarded as kind of crap sequel. Invisible War. Invisible War. I actually enjoyed it having not played the original and never playing one since. I actually really enjoyed it. Yes, Ed? Yeah. Do you really, really not wanna miss Badminton? Yeah, I really don't wanna miss Badminton. This guy's trying to send me on a freaking, also you didn't center our camera. Way to go, Ed. Or did he? No, not quite. It needs to go a little bit more towards James. Thank you. He's trying to send me on a business trip during my Badminton night. I get one night a week, one night a week when I get to go out and do something fun. And this guy wants to send me to, where are you trying to send me? LA? Yeah. Pfft. One syllable cities. That's two syllables. La. Oh. Eee. All right, so we've got a lot of great topics for you guys today. Gigabyte responded via email. I hope I can talk about this. I think it was kind of a statement. So they responded via email to my question about exactly what the heck is going on with motherboard or with Coffee Lake performance from motherboard to motherboard. And I've also heard from Asus, so we'll be talking a little bit about that. Activision has patented a technique for social engineering microtransactions in games. I love it. It's way more evil than it sounds. And it sounds pretty damn evil. So that should give you some idea. What else we got? Oh, I can talk now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ah, reportedly Apple has cut down production of the iPhone 8 for November and December by a large margin. Cut down. Cut. Cut. Asked. And a Pixel 2 XL color issue that Linus may or may not have experienced. I actually wanna know. We'll get there. You know what, I haven't. Okay, yeah, you know what? Why don't we roll the intro? We'll talk about it later. We'll talk about it later. Wanjo. And we'll also do that first topic I promised. Where is Luke? I'm wearing the sunglasses now with the 30 seconds doesn't count until I intro. Hey, you have one fan. TavorX95 likes you. Lots of people like me. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. You have one fan. That's not true. Do you want me to send you screenshots? Darbullets, JamesJustNo. That guy doesn't count. That's a child. DieWolfLoust, where is Luke? That's cause he's pleasantly surprised to see me. ZenWalrus says you're sick. And I think he means like disgusting, not like good. So those are both good to me. Those are both good to you. Sponsors. I forgot we were still on the intro screen there. I don't know how I'd manage it. How hard is this? This much frame. There's like this much extra. I always tell the camera people, I'm like, can you center the arm in the frame? And they're like, yes. And then they don't do it. I think they're just messing with me. I think at this point, people are actually just screwing with me when they do things wrong. All right, so why don't we get into coffee like performance first? Have you heard about this? Have you seen this? Have you heard about this? Yes, I read it. So it comes down to a feature that is enabled by default on some boards, but not enabled by default on others. Yeah, so Asus' statement was actually, I'm gonna have a quick look at my email here and make sure that this is on the record. Because it's one of those frustrating things where sometimes we actually know more than we can say because industry contacts don't wanna get themselves in trouble. Mind you, there's a pretty funny story actually about Asus and being sort of on the record when you thought you weren't on the record. No, no, no. Put them on. No, I'm not going to. I'm gonna put them here. Being on the record when you didn't realize you were on the record and saying something that kind of threw Intel under the bus. We'll get to that later. But first up, yes, I actually asked, do you guys have an official statement on the whole auto overclocking thing? So the whole discrepancy between, it was especially visible in heavily multi-threaded tests like Cinebench between one reviewer's results with Coffee Lake and another's where people were getting up to like 300 point differences in Cinebench seems to have come down to some motherboard manufacturers, most notably Asus, enabling a feature by default on their boards that effectively overclocks the CPU right out of the box, running all of the cores at the maximum turbo rather than just one or two or however many were supposed to be enabled at that particular speed. So I asked, and this is my subject line, so I think I've absolved myself of any responsibility for this being something that can't go out to the public, for an official statement from Asus on the whole auto overclocking thing. But I actually, you know what, I should probably talk about Gigabyte's statement first. So they proactively sent this to me and they're basically just like, good luck. No, no, I can read this. They're basically just like, hey, I just watched your WAN show. That's cool, Gigabyte watches the WAN show. Like you guys are the WAN show, you guys make the news. I'm just like blah, blah, blah, like this about it. Just wanted to comment on the variance in scores. There's been some discussion over Intel Turbo Policy and enhanced multi-core performance. I'm sure you are aware this is a feature that pegs all cores at the max turbo frequency. So in the case of the 8700K, this is 4.7 gigahertz across all cores. Now something that's really happened over the last couple of generations of Intel's turbo boost technology is that the difference between base clock and max turbo clock has increased a lot. So it used to be that if you had a multi-core enhancement feature and you just boosted everything, it was just a little bit. And the reason they've done that is so they can get higher efficiency, better battery life, higher efficiency CPUs overall? Yeah, basically. So the idea is that Intel's going, okay, well here's what we're comfortable rating it for when all the cores are operating and we want to tune it better and better and better for lightly threaded workloads so you can get more performance out of just like a game that only utilizes one or two cores or any other single threaded application. So you can, but they wouldn't have rated the CPU for 4.7 gigahertz on all the cores at the thermal and at the power consumption targets that they have. So there's gonna be a stability issue there and that's what this person from Gigabyte is hinting at. Yeah. The reason they don't put it on by default. There's potential for a stability issue because it is in effect overclocking. Or just heat. And it produces more heat. And so this is why our 8700K review had our chip consuming a lot of power compared to what we might have expected. And we probably should have investigated that further. So we were using an ASUS board. We were using an ASUS board. So we've typically used ASUS boards for our launch coverage of any new CPU for, I don't know, the last five, five or six CPU launches. See how he drinks water to buy himself time. I drink ASUS water. But the reality of it is that we've found, it has really more to do with the pre-review support for us. The fact that we can email any time night or day and we're getting a response within like 20 minutes. And that has really made our lives a lot easier when we're trying to iron out what are often bugs with the CPU, with the RAM, with the board. Being able to get new bioses that address these or get answers when there is no bios to address it helps us out a lot. And that's the main reason that we've been doing that. So we had, we were running the board at default, which we assumed was kind of okay. So here's my response from ASUS. Well, we've been doing it that way for a few years. So they're basically saying, like, hey, this isn't really anything new. So I really don't know what there is to say. We, the motherboard makers in general, this is kind of the statement, we get slammed for enabling it, then we all disable it. Then we get slammed for not doing it because it's kind of free performance and kind of within spec. Then we place warnings on enabling it and that gets ignored. So I guess now we're back to not enabling it with some new bios updates next week. Do you have an opinion on whether or not they should enable it? I'm standing here, I think you should have it off by default. It's still a feature that's included. Is it just a switch you turn on in the bios? So it's easy to do. If people, as long as people know about it, that you're not losing out on that free performance, you'd still have it available to you if you want it. But how would people know about it? I would argue that the average user, even the average user who builds their own computer, isn't gonna touch a feature called multi-core enhancement. Sounds pretty sweet to me. Yeah, it sounds pretty sweet, but there's also like a lot of stuff within a bios that might seem sweet on the surface, but you turn it on and your computer doesn't boot anymore until you, you know, cause remember you're a novice user. You go into your manual, you figure out what the hell a CMOS reset is. You go find that stupid button or header, you know, 15 minutes, 30 minutes later, you got your computer back on, you kind of go, whoa, I'm not gonna touch any of that stuff anymore. It would come down to marketing. But you can't market something that's just, I mean, I guess you kind of, you can, but they don't want you using that anyway. Like if you're a ASUS or Gigabyte or MSI, they've all got auto overclocking tools that are much more sophisticated than that built into their boards that are like turning up the speed, testing it to make sure it's okay, turning it up some more, testing it again, and they want you using that stuff. So how do those features reconcile with this feature if you have them both on? It's a good question. Truthfully haven't played around with it a whole lot. Nah. So, honestly, I don't really plan to because I don't really personally recommend either of them as the most optimal way to overclock. I still believe that doing it manually yourself is the best way to overclock. So, yeah. Apparently we're slightly out of focus. I just, I don't even know, I don't even know why we have camera people anymore. Speaking of which, I need a camera person right now. I need an adult. Oh, Alex is taking the wheel. Oh, wow. He's taking the focus wheel. Hey, actually that's not bad. Damn, girl. That's not, that's not. You should have seen the celly you just did. I can't do it, but he did that knuckle slap thing. Come show them that weird thing that you do. Give us the celly. It weirds me out. I like how you only do it twice. You can do it more, but it just gets weird after that. All right. Are we onto the next one? Yeah, let's move on to the next topic here. Activision. We're gonna do that topic. Oh, I do though. Yeah, we'll do that topic. All right, all right, all right. We'll talk about it. So this was originally posted by WMGroomAK on the forum. The original article here is actually from Rolling Stone of all publications. Well, there was a more original one, but the site had that slideshow format, so I wasn't messing with that. Okay. So James, how on a scale of one to AIDS plus cancer plus leprosy, where would you put Activision's research into using matchmaking tricks? So you guys know in-game matchmaking, like pairing one party with another. Using in-game matchmaking tricks to sell in-game items. If I work there, if I'm an executive or a shareholder, this is awesome. Do you own shares? This is so sick. In Activision. No, I don't. Okay, so then how do you feel about it now? Gaming perspective, it's all over, folks. Throw in the towel. Games suck from now on. This is a brutal direction for developers to go. Well, no, hold on. There is some good news. They've actually patented the technique. So not all games suck. Hopefully no one else can do this. Just all the huge major titles from this giant company. So okay, let's get into this. Activision was granted a patent this month for a system it uses to influence players in multiplayer games to purchase game items through microtransactions. So the system uses, it alters the matchmaking process. So typically, players are put into games together based on a wide variety of factors, including skill level, internet latency, and your availability of friends. And that's the way it should be. You should be skilled so that everyone's playing a fun round of, you know, counter go source or whatever it is that the kids are playing these days. Right, but now they've added this. You know, RuneCraft. Extra vector. Yeah. This extra vector of market into the matchmaking process that basically tries to get you in the game with people who have bought stuff that you haven't bought yet. So that psychologically, you kind of see them using it and you want to buy it. And it also, so the article also describes part of the technique being to take inexperienced players and intentionally put them in close proximity to players who are good at a skill that they aspire to be good at and who have an item that appears to be related to that skill. So let's say that a really skilled player has like a great sniper rifle, for example. Then they're gonna pair this player who, and you can tell so much about people from the way that they game actually. Well, I mean, you can tell a lot about how they want to game. Anyway, so someone's like always playing sniper classes, but sucks. You can tell. They don't even think at skill level. Aspire to be a sniper. No, no, well, there's that too. There's multiple aspects of it. So they'll take like an unskilled sniper who wants to be good at sniping, they'll put them near a good sniper who has great equipment like hat of plus one sniper bot or whatever. Free medium stuff that they paid for. That they paid for and kind of watch. Right. And then continually retool it and re-optimize to get more people buying microtransactions. If my children ever pay for an in-game item, I'm cutting them off. They're out of the will. They're gonna be out, dude. They're out of the will. That's gonna happen really soon. You guys heard it here first. Out of the will. Can I get in there? Because digital, like in-game items, I don't know. See, we're old school. It can be kind of cool. We used to just buy a game and have the whole game. Then expansion packs came out and that was just bonus and awesome. Then it all went to shit and now it's. Poo. We don't swear on the watch though. DLC is just like how you get the whole game. Okay, hold on, hold on. So what I realized when I was talking about cutting my kids out of the will is that I think I've actually bought digital items before. Shh, they don't know. I know, I know. So they won't be cut out of the will. But, but, but if they spend too much on them. What's too much? Then they're cut out of the will. So they're not gonna be written in the will? Too much is this much? Yeah, too much is, you know, I think more than, you know what, that is a really good straw poll question. Okay, so I wanna frame this in a pretty specific manner because there's a couple of different ways you can define too much. Like, I would take a free to play game where the in-game items are purely cosmetic and it's not a pay to win. And I would kinda look at it and I would go, you know what, buying a skin or two or a character here and there to support the developer who's running a free to play game but has a lot of costs associated with it. Big time. Probably okay. But if we're talking triple A title, like we're talking like a 69.99, 79.99 triple A title, or worse yet, like a collector's edition that came in a tin. So you've like already spent 130, 150 bucks on this thing. And you can't even put the Master Chief helmet on because it's actually mini. Right, and you run out and you blow like another 50 bucks, 100 bucks on it. I think that is totally different. So I wanna create a specific scenario for you guys because we're talking Activision Blizzard here. So we are not talking about free to play games. Okay, you pay for the game. So let's say a $50 game, just for the sake of argument. I know that's almost nothing is 50 bucks anymore. It's either more because it's triple A or it's like 20, 30 bucks because it's indie. But let's say $50 game, acceptable amount to spend on microtransactions. I think you should attach a timeframe here. Because if I'm playing WoW for like six years and I spend $300, whatever. But if this is a period of six months or something like that. Okay, yeah, that's fair. Per year. First year, okay. Let's do per year, okay? So first, for you hard cores out there, I'm putting in the zero dollar option, okay? Don't worry, I'm putting in the zero dollar option. Okay. Hard cores or cheap skates. Okay, so I've got a... Okay, while you set that up, I wanna talk about another thing that this algorithm does that just takes it to the next level. Once you do make an in-game purchase, so they put you in a match with the expert sniper, you were totally attracted to it, you ended up buying this sniper rifle. Once you made that purchase, they're then going to take actions that make you feel good about that purchase. They don't want you to regret the purchase. So on your next match, they're gonna put you in a game where you're not in a close quarters match. You're gonna be put in a game where that purchase is advantageous. They're gonna put you in blood gaults or whatever. A sniper friendly match so you can actually... When's the last time you played video games? That's old school, man. People like the... I know it's old school. They like the throwbacks. I know what it is. Hell yeah. It's old school. That's a classic, blood gaults. They made that map four different times. It's in every game, every Halo game. Okay, anyway, they're gonna put you in... Blood gaults. Into a map where you can... Twitch chat is flipping out to blood gaults. They love it. Wow. It's the last online Halo game. Oh, okay, okay, go, go, go, go, go. Fire James, fire James. Okay. Fire that guy, he's too young to know what blood gaults is. You should be getting an Xbox on eBay just so you can play it even if you weren't born yet. We need a Linus Tech Tips Halo 1 server. Boo, yeah. Agreed? That'd be sweet. Okay. You guys would be down? I'm like still playing it. Okay, I'm not so old school that I am advocating using the original Fatty controller. That controller sucked. You're allowed to use the X controller. Chill gaults, chill gaults, chill gaults. You know Halo 1 is still like $30? Gaults tips. You can still buy it. Halo 1 custom edition is $30. It's like the first game that I've torrented in forever because I was like I'm not paying $30 for this. It's terrible, terrible. Okay, all right, all right. I'm gonna let you finish, I'm gonna let you finish but. Basically the thing that sucks about this is that you can tell from the language and the patent that this is not just going to be affecting in-game purchases like skins and aesthetic things. The language talks about weapons and that just means that the developers are gonna have a monetary incentive to make it play to win. So to me that just looks like this is the direction we're all going. The thing about this kind of play to win is it's like a sicker, more insidious play to win because instead of it being, okay, instead of it being, or did I say play to win, pay to win? Instead of me being able to pay more to just have better crap than you and walk in and stomp you. I have to lose to you. Hold on. It'll be pay more and get a Faco ego boost because they're just gonna pair you with crappier players. I can imagine that when they first roll this out. They're gonna trick you. When they first roll this out, you're gonna be on the team. You're gonna be on the same team as the guy with the awesome gun. But then they're gonna find out that it's actually more effective if you're on the opposite team and you just get lit up by this guy with the awesome gun. You're tired of getting so pwned that you go and buy the gun yourself. And then you get to the awesome feeling of wrecking noobs. I mean, at what point do they then take it a step further and they start actually fooling you into thinking you're playing against people you're not. Like, what if they could use a neural network to figure out which people in game you actually know and which people you don't so they could have you playing against the guy. You're playing against the guy who's ripping you apart with a sniper rifle from the other side of the map, okay? Or the guy that literally gets out of the banshee and manages to drop it on you every time. Oh. Terrible. It's all Halo all the time now. It's all Halo all the time from now on, okay? And then in your next game, they just overlay that person's real avatar and real onscreen name with this guy and you destroy him now that you bought your new gun. Do you think they could get that evil? Why not? I mean, it's just a digital identity that is actually ultimately pretty meaningless as far as it goes if they take two randoms who don't know each other. They just sprinkle bots in. Just sprinkle super advanced bots and they are just pimped out, swagged out. The guns are shooting hot pink bullets so you know. Is this where we're going? Holy crap, right? This leads us pretty squarely into another topic we have. Does it? All right. Yes, it does. Speaking of AI that's just so killer, it can wreck you every time. Remember AlphaGo, the deep neural net that managed to swamp all the world's top Alpha or top Go players in the last year? So this is from Gizmodo here. Here you go. All right. Tell me about it. Okay, so AlphaGo, the first artificial intelligence to defeat a grand master at the game Go just got a major upgrade. In a tournament that pitted AI versus AI, the regular AlphaGo got completely wrecked 100 games to zero by the new version of AlphaGo called AlphaGo Zero. Why did they call it AlphaGo Zero if it gets 100 and not zero? Because it's singularity, baby. How is zero singular? What? Do you know what singularity is? Yeah, yeah. It's like converging to zero. I'm making this up. What? But I'm trying to justify the name here. What are you talking about? Okay, the thing that's cool about this is the original AlphaGo had a training data set of thousands of previously played Go games, played by humans that were amateurs or professionals at Go. This is a completely unsupervised reinforcement learning algorithm that had no training data set, no training data set. It started only with the rules of the game Go and in three days could beat the original Go. Isn't that insane? So it played 4.9 million games against itself to acquire the expertise needed to beat the original AlphaGo. For comparison, the original AlphaGo had 30 million games for inspiration. Wow, after 40 days, it defeated a more sophisticated version of AlphaGo called AlphaGo Master and that was the version that defeated the world's best Go players last year. It gets even crazier. It did this, not only is it better, it's not even that they just like threw more computing power at it, it's way more efficient. The original AlphaGo Master had 48 TPUs or Tensor Processing Units. This one, four. Four TPUs. That's an order of magnitude more efficient. Now this is like not general AI at all. Yeah, this is playing a game. But it's like, it's, it's, it's, it's, okay. But this thing could wreck you at Halo 2. I don't, well, okay, so that, okay. It'll smash you with banshees every time. You're getting stuck from across the map. No scope headshots. There's pistol headshots. Yeah. All right, one more topic before we go into ads. This was originally posted by Jamie Scone. Jamie, Jamie Scone, whatever, on the forum. Jamie is gone. And the original, oh, Jamie is gone. The original article is from kitguru.net. No, I don't want your notifications. Apple reportedly cut down iPhone 8 production already. I mean, if it, if it wasn't a strong enough indication that iPhone 8 isn't doing particularly well, that there were literally no lineups. Like that was a big thing with the iPhone 8 launch. This seems to be, this seems to pretty much drive the point home. Apparently iPhone 8 and 8 Plus production has been reduced by about 50% for November and December, which are typically pretty strong sales months for mobile devices. And this is apparently the first time Apple has reduced iPhone production so early in the cycle. This is really worrying, considering like, the bright side of this would be to assume that all these people who aren't buying the 8 are just waiting to buy the 10. But. But they probably won't even be able to buy the 10. And the other issue is that apparently a lot of people are opting for the iPhone 7 instead of the 8, which is frankly a decision that, okay, A, makes a lot of sense to me in the first place because the iPhone 7 and 8 are really, really not very different. You're getting way more I's per dollar. And number two, the more people go out there and buy the iPhone 7, the longer the support cycle we are likely to see on that product. Because, and this is something that actually comes up fairly often when I'm talking about, you know, what tech product you should buy. A lot of the time, it doesn't work out to be in your best interest to go and buy, say, the most expensive motherboard. Because a lot of the time, what can end up happening is because they sell so few units of that model, it might end up with a very short support cycle and a much smaller install base of people to call into tech support and complain if something goes wrong. They might end up with more compatibility issues down the line because of that smaller install base, installing a wide variety of hardware to, you know, find out if there's any issues and report them to the manufacturer. So owning the like, the popular one can actually be really good because the iPhone 7, here's another thing, if there's a huge install base, even not directly from Apple, even if we're talking from app developers, if there's a huge install base of these iPhone 7s because Apple was effectively selling them for two years at full speed, then you're gonna see app developers really focus on optimizing for that phone for a longer time into the future as those iPhones start to have their screens broken or start to be replaced. It's just gonna take longer before you aren't worth investing in anymore. So the fact that there's this momentum on the iPhone 7 becomes sort of a self-reinforcing positivity snowball, and the more people realize that the iPhone 7 is a great choice compared to the 8, the more it will be a great choice compared to the 8. That's where I was coming to with that. That's your positivity snowball? That's my positivity snowball. So I mean, I ended up, just by chance, with a couple of those types of devices. So the iPad 1 was a big steaming pile of beta. It didn't end up being supported for very long. It was thick, the battery life sucked, it was super slow. iPhone 2, did I say iPhone? You said iPad. Okay, good. iPad 2, way better in every way, like fantastic, and made a ton of sense as a product for quite some time because even the ones that came after it were adding things like high-resolution displays that actually ended up hurting battery life as much as they increased the resolution of the display. They ran hotter. The iPad 2 had stuff going for it for three or four generations afterward. It wasn't until the Air, I think, that we got one that was higher resolution and better battery and ran cooler. It was better in every possible way. So my iPad 2 ended up getting supported almost forever. And the same with the iPhone 4. And I ended up with both of them at the same time. I was like, this is great. Apple supports other devices for four or five years. This is awesome. But it doesn't always work out like that. So it's really nice when you end up with something like that and it looks like the iPhone 7 could be another one. I personally wish it had been the 6S because it has a headphone jack, but, sorry? Yeah, it's the Apple Watch. Oh, yeah, the Apple Watch. What about it? The S4. Oh, you're just upset because you lost that playlist feature. Yeah, so Apple, right, does not behave in this way every time. You have a second gen? Yeah. Second gen, yeah. Ed just lost a feature that was deprecated seemingly, and we have no insider knowledge at Apple or anything, but seemingly to make room for a new version of the feature that is only available on the new one that has LTE connectivity. So you're just gonna buy the new one, aren't you? What? You are, aren't you? What? You're crazy. Are you already wearing it? No, no. Did you already buy the new one? Did you already order it? That's crazy. Are you going to the Apple store this weekend? He's already on the Apple store right now. I have to get this replaced because I have a chip on there, and I'll sell this one. And you'll sell that one and get the new. Are you really gonna get the new one? I want to. Thank you. Oh, see, you are everything that's wrong with, oh man, you're killing me here. He's one of those Apple people. Do you actually need something? What can I do for you? Are we sitting in a shooter video? Oh, to where? LA. Oh, when do I have to decide? Sooner is better. Wait, today? Like, are we making a thing for us there? I don't know. Probably not. No? Let's go with no. I don't know. We'll talk about it later. We'll talk about it later. Okay. Right, right. We've got to do our sponsors. Sponsor number one is iFixit. Please put those glasses on. What? All right. Try it, you'll like it. I will wear the, oh, they're not even here. No, they were stolen. I'm serious, they're not there. Oh, man. No. Sponsor number one is iFixit. iFixit is all about the culture of repairing your own stuff. Because why should you pay a manufacturer a bunch of money or throw something out contributing to waste in our world when you can repair something yourself for often a fraction of the cost? So iFixit has tons of great guides for taking apart, repairing, and putting back together your electronic doodads, be they phones or computers. And they've got tons of amazing tools, including their ProTech Tool Kit. It's now only 60 bucks and comes with a bunch of great stuff, including their 64-bit driver kit, a wide variety of plastic, okay, I can't even take myself seriously wearing these things. They're so dope, you look like a superhero. The full coverage up here. That guy from Watchmen. They've got ESD safe tweezers, they've got prying tools, they've got suction cups, they've got all kinds of great stuff, and it's backed by iFixit's lifetime warranty. So go check out the 25,000 free repair guides over at ifixit.com and get your own fully loaded ProTech Tool Kit at ifixit.com slash Linus for just 60 bucks. Bringing us to savage jerky. You know what? Luke isn't here to make me suffer this week. We know, we get it. So I'm actually just going to mow on my favorite savage jerky, the maple buffalo bacon. Yes. Stereotypical. Yes, it's only a two-star, two-star hotness level, but quite frankly, what was my drawing power anyway? Do you really think I'm more than a two? Out of what? Wait a minute, is this the maple? Yeah, I think this is the one I like. Do they have more than one maple bacon? It doesn't even offer me any. They might. Wow, this is really nice too. No, it's mine. Well, you're a vegetarian. I still want to smell the bag. Here, you can have some if you want. Unbelievable. There you go. Oh yeah, this is a new flavor. This is nice, so it's like. Can I at least waft? Yeah, you can waft it. It's really good. You probably won't be able to smell the maple. God damn, that smells good. You can't swear on the show. We've been through this. What are you counting as swear words now? Heavens to Betsy. You can say heavens to Betsy. Are you sure? So Savage Jerky is made with the best ingredients without nitrates or preservatives. The goal was to create a snack that's full of flavor and spice, but that isn't bad for you, and they've got 13 different flavors. I'm a huge fan of the Mojo, maple, maple bacon. That's freaking awesome. Is it original is what they call it? Yeah, original. That one's really good. The salt and peppers are really, you know what, they're all really good. And if you're not into just tasty, and you want stuff that will melt your mouth off, then they've got jerkeys. They've also got hot sauces made with Carolina Reapers. These are some of the hottest peppers in the world. Trust me, they will light your mouth on fire. They will light your butt on fire. I can test, I can test. You can use offer code LTT to save 10% on your butt fire over at savagejerky.com. So that's offer code LTT, save 10%. And, oh, all orders this week, we'll get a koozie or a sticker if you use our code. Leading us- You're one of those koozie people. A koozie person? You don't say cozy, you say koozie? Oh, I had never heard it said aloud. Oh. Yeah. You've never been to a barbecue? That- No one ever invites me to things. Yeah. I'm going to one this weekend. You should hear about it on Monday when I come back. Wow. Speaking of, you know what? Hold on a second. We're going to do our next sponsor spot in a little bit. We'll move on, hold on. Cause I got to side rail us for a little bit here. You went to WWE this week. Yeah, nobody asked me about that. I went to SmackDown Live. I actually have. Check this out, check this out. Here, I sent an email to myself. No. To remind myself. Really? Ask James about WWE because here it is, here it is. So I sent this to myself on October 17th, three days ago. Cause the day after, cause I was like super, I was super curious. What was WWE? I mean, you're not like a WWE fan, right? No. So you think it's kind of ridiculous. I watched it as a child and then watched it for way longer than I would have because my friend was super into it. He didn't know it was fake. Really? No, I'm just joking. Of course you know it's fake. It's kind of like, it was kind of slapsticky. Slapstick comp. There's a couple LOL moments watching it live actually. None of the big superstars that I know of were there, of course, cause they're all retired now, like Stone Cold. It's not going to show up. So it was all like no names to me. So I felt more like I was at like one of those Mexican wrestling events, just cause they're all no names and they're doing stupid stuff. And one guy actually had a Mexican wrestling mask on. So that contributed to the feel. Family fun and pretty entertainings. How much was it? 20 bucks. That's why it went. It was sweet. All right. It was sweet. So tell me, how sweet was it? Was it sweet in a, this was a great way to turn my brain off for two hours on a Tuesday night way, or was it great in a like, I'm going to start finding out who these guys are and following the storylines. Not a chance. It was great in the, like, I get to hang out and like have dinner and spend the evening with my childhood friend who I only get to see like every quarter kind of way. And it was only 20 bucks. It was 50 bucks, wouldn't have done it. No, not a chance. Sorry, childhood friend. You're worth 20 bucks. I'd hang out with him without. But not 50 bucks. I just wouldn't have went to that with him. But yeah, it was sweet. Best part was the, the voice announcer guy. Yeah. I love that, the ability to like grab the microphone and you know, like the let's get ready to rumble kind of guy. Are we even allowed to say that? I know we can't do it with the intonation. He has that like trademark. Yeah. The intonation. You have to say it like Stephen Hawking style. Ready to rumble. I don't even know if you can say it at all. Oh my goodness. It's one of those things like the whole, the whole copyright on happy birthday that actually recently was, that one was overturned. But where like nobody even realizes that you like can't say this stuff cause they'll actually go after you. Do you know that Rudolph was invented by Coca-Cola? No. Let that bake your noodle for a second. They also made Santa Claus red. Enjoy Coke. How about that? How about that? All right. Okay. Let's do our last sponsor spot now. Sorry for that totally unrelated aside. Sewel direct. Check this out. This is a new sponsor, right? Connect anything. In a nutshell, they sell all sorts of audio visual equipment. Cables, extenders, they specialize in HDMI cables, extenders, switches, splitters, speaker wire, banana plugs, IR remote control extenders. And they cut out the middleman by designing and manufacturing the products themselves, which they sell directly to you. So we've got a couple of their HDMI extenders. So all these are, oh, okay. Yeah. These are cool. I've seen these before. These are HDMI over cat five adapters. So basically instead of trying to run a super long HDMI cable, which either doesn't work or you have to get a special active cable. What you do is you plug your HDMI in, then you've got this active module here that needs, what is it? Yeah. Five volt power. Then you run ethernet and you can actually run it quite a lot longer than you would be able to. So this guy right here, this is the HL 10 I wanna say. Let me just double check. I don't wanna say anything incorrect. Bah, bah, bah. Oh yeah. This guy will do 175 feet with a 1080p HDMI signal over cat five E or cat six with zero compression. And they've got other stuff that'll actually do, wow, 390 feet. Pretty cool. So two senders and two receivers, each sender can be sent to one of 64 channels by the buttons on the front or a remote. And you can check out all of this. Oh yeah. This sleek little monolith. What's this puppy? That's the baller one. That's the, Boom. This is the 390? That's the HD link, HL 21 HDMI extender plus matrix over network. Is this the one that goes 390 feet? So any receiver connected to the channel that you select will receive the video signal. This one is H.264 compression though. So you can check out these videos, or these videos, these products, and more at the URL shown on screen. So that's sewelldirect.com slash Linus. It's got that, that new HDMI over IP smell. I actually like the smell of new electronics. Give it a sniff. Yep. It's got that, it's that fresh PCB smell. You know, when they manufacture it and then they put it into the bag, it stays all sealed in there, you know? Even if the bag's not sealed. Even if you can't get it back in the bag after. It stays in there. It stays in there pretty good. All right. I'm just gonna give up on that. Good work, James. There. That's a Tyler drop. All right. What else we got here? Like what's interesting? Did you know that Google's first system-on-a-chip, designed in-house, is in the Pixel 2 that you've been using all week? No, you didn't know, because they just announced it now. Really? There's a chip in there that you don't know about. The Pixel Visual Course. So this was originally posted by Z Ramsey on the forum, and the original article here is from The Verge. Google's first mobile chip, and that's not an SOC, that's an image processor. Dang it. What? You're telling me The Verge is wrong? Hold on a second. What are they saying? Okay, hold on, hold on, hold on. Pixel Visual Core SOC. Purposeful version of call host, and purpose in this case, accelerate that. Okay. So my understanding of the definition of an SOC is that it has to have basically all the elements of a, of like a more traditional, like CPU, motherboard, GPU, I.O. Wow. Especially among academics, SOC is sociology. Why don't we look for a much more better definition? Wow. It's pronounced soch. Yeah, I'm gonna have to double check the definition here, because I wouldn't think an image processor would be an SOC. So it integrates all components of a computer or other electronic system, may contain digital analog mixed signal and often radio frequency functions, all on a single substrate. Okay. Well, if they're calling it an SOC, maybe there's more to this thing than I necessarily thought, but here we go. We've actually got a, we've got to look at it here. So the coolest aspects of the Pixel Visual Core are maybe that it's already in Google's devices. They both have it built in, but laying dormant until activation at some point. Yes. It's laying dormant until they activate it over the coming months. So right now it's used just to process HDR plus stuff, way faster. Faster than you've experienced it. It hasn't been activated yet. Interesting. And that's not all. They're actually gonna use it for more applications than just that. They haven't told us what, but we'll see more image and machine learning enhancements being added to the Pixel 2 over the coming months. Very interesting. So here's a look at it. So here's the cores. Here's the link to memory. PCIe. Wow. Huh. It's super interesting to me that they didn't announce this that they're made by Google hardware event. I guess they didn't have it ready in time, but they still ship devices with it. They didn't have the software implementation ready in time, so they just laid low until now. You would have thought they would have at least announced it like when reviewers had hands-on. So they're saying each of its eight processors has been tailored to handle HDR plus duties, resulting in HDR plus performance that is five times faster at one tenth of the energy of the current implementation. Now when they say current implementation there, do you think they mean what your Pixel can currently do before this is turned on? That's smooth, baby. So they say they'll enable it as a developer option in the preview of Android Oreo 8.1. Wow. And third-party apps will have the ability to handle HDR photos. So we'll see more imaging and machine learning enhancements added to the Pixel 2. So the Pixel 2 is already getting a pretty good review. That went up on Floatplane last night and will be added to YouTube I think on Sunday is when we're gonna see that video go live. So right now, Floatplane has got Scrapyard Wars parts two and three. Then tomorrow it's gonna get Scrapyard Wars part four when YouTube gets part two. And it's also got... And you're in Scrapyard Wars. Yeah. So am I. You're in Scrapyard Wars? Kinda. You're in Scrapyard Wars? What are you talking about? No, just the voiceover. Oh, you're the voiceover. Oh, that's nice. Yes, listen. Oh, that's nice. I like doing that. Listen up. Keep your ears peeled if you can peel an ear for this whimsical voice. So also over there, we've got the MSI Vortex G25 review. We've got the Massdrop Vast 35 inch curved gaming monitor. You worked on that one. We've got our video of the... Let's have a look here. What else have we got over there? Oh, LG Wallpaper TV part two. Oh wait, that's up on YouTube now. Oh, first ever SLI setup still isn't on YouTube. So with our Voodoo SLI, that's over there right now. And I think that pretty much covers it. There's some tech quickies as well. All right. What else we got for topics here? Oh, right. If you guys wanna know how to join Floatplane, you should probably go check out this link that I'm about to post in the chat. Do you wanna move on to our next topic? I guess so. Sorry, I was just talking to A' about an upcoming build guide. Oh yeah, is that the value gaming build guide with Ryzen? The Ryzen 5 best bang for your buck build guide. Cool. I just want an extra B in there. Yeah, so I may have almost screwed up this build guide, but fortunately, James had the foresight to listen to what I was saying and carefully ignore it. Beginner's mind. Beginner's, yeah. You familiar with the concept? No, is it like beginner's luck? No, beginner's mind is when you're like, because you don't know all the minutia, you kinda don't take things at face value, you question stuff. Anyway, this is actually next topic is total full circle for us because it's a kind of part two of a topic that you and I discussed a couple of weeks ago. So what we had discussed was that Senator Al Franken submitted like a letter, a bunch of questions to Apple about their Face ID technology, and now Apple has responded and has answers direct to his questions. One of them I put in bold because you didn't know how the heck Apple did this, and now we get to know. So here's just a bunch of bold points. I don't wanna say Al Franken's questions because his question will become obvious when you just hear the answer. Answer number one. Face ID data, including mathematical representations of your face is encrypted and only available to the secure enclave. This data never leaves the device. It is not sent to Apple, nor is it included in device backups. Cool. The face images captured or discarded once the representation is calculated for comparison. Meaning? They can never surrender it to the authorities. The FBI can't ask for it because Apple just never has it. Oh, this is cool. So IR and depth images were collected in studies conducted with participants informed consent. So we had talked about how exactly did they train the bloody thing. Because they said they used billions of images, and Linus was asking, well, where the heck did they get these billions of images and it turns out they actually just took them themselves. It's not, they haven't said that they've taken photos of a billion different people. That seems silly. They probably took thousands of photos of hundreds of people. I mean, they're Apple. They could conceivably pay every single person on earth like 60 bucks. Or like they could pay a billion people like 60 bucks to take a picture of them. Send us a selfie. Yeah. So they took multiple pictures with multiple different types of sensing technology, including IR. Cool. Like 360 views. So there you go. They are taking security for it pretty darn seriously. Next topic posted by numlock21 on the forum. This, oh boy, someone at ASUS, actually we know specifically who, Andrew Wu, the ROG motherboard product manager, someone at ASUS, Andrew Wu, is in a fair bit of trouble right now. This is some serious under bus throwing. Yeah, this is some foot in mouth being run over by the wheel of the bus with the foot in the mouth. So the head gets run over too. And the foot just gets further in there. Yeah, like the heel's up and the wheel rolls over the heel and jams it through the back of the skull. You can't even gag because there's too much foot. Yeah. So in an interview with BitTech, BitTech basically, well, we'll give you kind of the rundown. They basically go, can you explain in technical detail why Coffee Lake won't work with Z270 motherboards? And the PM goes, oh, it's Intel's decision. BitTech says, so it's not a physical limitation? Intel said it was to do with the power delivery. PM goes, not really. It, power delivery, makes a little bit of difference, but not much. So BitTech goes, so what are they referring to, the 20 or so unused pins from before? He goes, yes. So if you wanted and Intel let you, you could make Z270 compatible. PM goes, yes, but you would also require an upgrade from the management engine, a BIOS update. Intel somehow has locked the compatibility. Whoa. Okay. It basically just comes down to stability then. Intel just did this for stability? So this is one of those situations where I run into trouble because I know things that were told to me off the record. Well, no, it's not about that. I'm just messing with you. I know things off the record that, they're not, they don't conflict with any of this information because what he said was that, here, maybe I can help the audience infer based on what he said, because all the information is really in there if you read between the lines. So Intel said it was to do with the power delivery. And he says, not really. It makes a little bit of difference. They did change something. Why did they do it? Surely Intel would have saved themselves some cost and changed nothing if they didn't feel like they had to change something for some reason. Because if we're going to attack this problem from the tinfoil hat mindset of these money-grubbing companies don't wanna spend any money and they wanna take ours, surely we can all agree that Intel would have done absolutely nothing if there wasn't some reason that they perceived that they had to do something. So they did something. It, according to this interview, had to do with the power delivery. Also, according to this interview, Asus could make it compatible if Intel wasn't locking it out for some reason, maybe related to why they did something. It's all in the interview. I haven't said anything that I wasn't supposed to pass along. Is there any possible way that we could hack it and make it work? No. Okay. Even Asus can't do it because Intel would have to update ME. Okay. Second question. And you need a BIOS update. Do you think that Andrew Wu here kinda backpedals at the end where he says, it's not that big of a deal anyway because people who bought Z270 just 10 months ago when it came out, they're probably not likely to be the type of consumer who's gonna upgrade anyway. It's people with older systems who are gonna upgrade. So to me, it really has nothing to do with that because when Kabylite came out, you know, for a long time, when once Intel launches a new CPU, for a long time, sometimes like right through the entire time it's available, you can buy the last generation chipset, which actually usually has the same features because they don't change much if they don't have to. You can buy those old ones for a little bit cheaper. So if you wanted a Z170 board with a 7700K, you would get overclocking unlocked for your K series chip. You'd get just as many SATA ports. You'd get this, you'd get that. And overall performance would in most cases be very similar. And someone's car alarm just go off. Oh no, someone set off the actual alarm. Is that in 101 or is that here? Do you mind investigating? Thank you, sir. The alarms are going off in here. Yeah, so sorry about that guys. We get installed. This is a job for Laser James. Ha ha, they laughed at me. They're still laughing at you. That's why I'm here. Thank you. Oh, it looks like my work here is done. Good work, Laser James. I have an unblockable stoyle. So anyway, from this interview, reading between the lines of this interview, they probably could have made it compatible. There is some reason related to the power delivery that they decided not to, and not only decided not to, but also decided to do actual work on Z370 to make it better. At great expense. Now, do I necessarily think then that this makes Intel some kind of a white knight? No, because what they have also done is they've released only a single 300 series chipset, Z370, the highest priced one in their stack. So you don't even have the option to buy, you know, like an 8400 for example, and pair it with a cheapo board, because it's not unlocked for overclocking anyway. So. Yeah, that's a pretty greasy move. Are they clearly trying to extract more value from the customer? Yeah, if they felt bad about it, they would have done like the bare minimum, like almost at cost. Okay. Like eating it. If they had no margin on the mobo's, then. All right. So they're clearly trying to, you know, do corporate things, you know, rise your average cart price or whatever those metrics that e-tailers look for, drive attach, you know, that kind of stuff. They're clearly doing that. But I'm also not necessarily one of the people holding a torch going, you should be able to plug a coffee lake into Z270, because there does appear to be an actual physical change that they made that they felt was necessary for the most stable and optimal operation. Honestly, I think one of the big reasons that we only got Z370 is Intel was fully aware that coffee lake supply was gonna be extraordinarily limited. And they figured, well, if people, like if we can't keep them on shelves anyway, then we might as well sell them to the people that were gonna go out there and spend the most on the best chipset and the top of the line TPU, etc. Well, that's not what he's saying. He's saying that people who are just ready to upgrade, who didn't upgrade to Z270, can upgrade now. But they're gonna have to do that to great expense. Yeah, I mean, that's his whole thing. And I'm drawing my own conclusions here about what exactly Intel was doing with their strategy. So I'll leave it to you guys to sort of come up with your own answers here. But I do wanna show you your own answers to something we discussed earlier. Let's go ahead and pull up our microtransactions poll from earlier in the show. $50 game, how much is it acceptable to spend per year on microtransactions? So first, Alex, how much per year is it acceptable to spend? On a $50 game, nothing. Nothing, okay, so you are actually the second most popular answer. Okay. 38% of our voters think it's okay to spend up to $10 on a $50 game. So like a little treat, just a little something for yourself. You know, some horse armor, you know? Yeah. I think I'd do that in like a $30 game. Sorry? I'd do that in a $30 game. You'd do that in a $30 game. $30 is Canadian. $30 is Canadian. That's like, how many rubles is that? Okay, 31% of you are saying $0, period. 22% of you, 50 bucks. And 10% of you must be like some kind of mega ballers because you think it's okay to spend between 50 to over $100 on microtransactions in your game. Are you for real? I can't even imagine spending that kind of money on microtransactions. MLG, baby. You're not hardcore. Yeah, that much is, that much is. I mean, I didn't even spend that much on my car. Like look at my car. It's not even worth $100. Seriously, I took it down. I tried to trade it in from a mini van. New straw pool. New straw pool. How much would you pay for Linus' car? I bet you could get more than 100 bucks. Okay, so that's, okay. That's a bit of, there's an issue with that though. You're taking all those phones? What's that one on the bottom? Oh, the pixel. Oh, okay. So hey guys, this is another cool teaser. So those of you who aren't subscribed over on Float Plane won't actually know this yet, but Brandon here is gonna be working on a first for our channel, a smartphone camera roundup that, why are you, why are you doing this? This is how I'm going to be on the show now. You're behind the mic. Yeah, that's good. Stay there, stay there because those are so ridiculous. So anyway, I've never really done in-depth phone camera testing because frankly, I mean, you're not a camera person. I'm not qualified. Thank you, Brandon. So with the Pixel 2 and the iPhone 8, and to a lesser extent the S8, but definitely the Note 8, the camera was like the thing they wanted to talk about. So Brandon's gonna be doing a dedicated video, sometime probably next week on Float Plane. Hopefully. Hopefully, maybe the following week, really picking these phones apart and figuring out which one is more camera for your dollar attached to a phone. And you're throwing a DSLR into the mix, aren't you? Yes. Oh boy. Well, we'll see. Oh boy. I'm not, I'm not, many, many use cases. Is that almost a separate video? I don't know. The whole like, should you still buy, you know, a $600, $700 DSLR? I wanna talk about that. You wanna talk about it? Maybe we should just bring you on for like a WAN show segment or something. I don't know. That's possible. The only thing I'm not really prepared about this whole thing is, Brandon hates smartphone camera commentary. He hates when people talk about it. He hates when there's videos about the iPhone camera. He hates it. Now he has to do it. To clarify, I do not hate the iPhone and smartphone cameras being good. I do however hate the thousands of articles I've seen over the years about things that are shot on the iPhone being, making it seem like the iPhone was the best tool for, I get it. It's good enough for this use case and it can work. Perfect. I'm a little riled up. But there is no one who can sit there and tell me that the iPhone is a better camera in most use cases for a professional situation. Brandon, your pills. I can tell you that. I won't have any credibility, but I can tell you that. Just to get his blood pressure up. I know, right? He's not even gonna make it into work on Monday. He'll have had like four heart attacks. Also, I just realized, why aren't we calling the Pixel XL, the Pixicle? The Pixicle. I like that. The Pixel. The Pixicle. Double XLs. All right. So thanks for watching guys. We will see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. And yes, I'm really ending the show on that terrible joke. Deal with it. Oh man. Ha ha. I got the end of show on an even worse joke. Worse joke. Worse joke. That's the baddest grammar. Oh, I just remembered, there's actually multiplayer servers for Halo that are free. I know. Yeah, Halo, you can just host a dedicated server. We should totally set one up. But I mean, like, you don't need to have to hold them to base game. You just can't play the campaign. We don't really discuss that. We're still live, you know. Oh really? I didn't know that. I know. And if we set up a server, it will be a legit game server. So no, bad, bad Alex.