 Hey guys, welcome to the WAN Show. It's our weekly show where we talk about things that hopefully matter very very much to all of you. And if they don't, then I apologize sincerely for that. We have an unusual show for you today. This is the first time in quite a while that we do not have a special guest. So I had actually reached out to a couple folks, but I mean it's the holiday season and people are all over the place. CES. And CES is we're going to be, I mean we're flying out tomorrow, so it's just not that surprising to me that no one was able to do it today. So it's just going to be you and me and him simultaneously. Alright, we've got some great topics for this week guys. So number one, and this is huge, is for the first time that I'm aware of, Valve has outright removed a game from Steam. And I'm not talking about like removed it from the store for purchase. I mean that's happened with all kinds of things. I'm talking about it is gone. People who bought it, it is completely gone from their libraries. We've also got some really exciting stuff with respect to eye tracking. So SteelSeries is going to be showing off a technology that is going to allow you to use eye tracking to interface with your computer. And then what else we got? Whoa, I was working on other things. We also have a NASA using a Oculus Rift and a Kinect to control a robotic arm, which is actually really cool. And we have USB 100 watt power or up to 100 watt power, 20 volts, 5 amps. So that's also really interesting. Being able to actually power something like a monitor. I mean we've seen USB monitors in the past, but they're like these slim, low power, like super not baller types of devices. You could easily power a pro-art off of this. Like a proper monitor off of a USB port, which is crazy. I mean I think that when you compare that to something like Thunderbolt, all of a sudden USB starts to look a lot more interesting. Anyway, so guys intro time and then we'll be back with the actual show that you actually want to watch presumably. Because you're here. So guys, our sponsors this week are Hotspot Shield as well as Intel with their Rome II Total War. Actually I've been informed that it's Total War Rome II or something like that. So whatever we're supposed to call it, their Rome II Total War giveaway that allows users who buy unlocked fourth generation Haswell processors. The 4670K as well as the 4770K to get a free copy of that particular game. Now I'm just putting up the announcement video on YouTube right now because I derped out and forgot to do that. So go ahead, come on, save, save. You can do it YouTube. There we go. Yes I want to leave this page. YouTube's been doing some really janky stuff on me lately. Like for example I just set that to public, did not detect, did not know. Also, also a really good one is I've had quite a few people asking me, hey Linus, why aren't your videos available on iPad and iPhone? What's the deal? What you just want all that money? You only want your videos on monetized platforms? No actually YouTube's got a pretty cool thing going on lately where what they've been doing is they changed the default. So you can't change it back unless you have a specific agreement with your partner network and ours isn't that sophisticated. So I haven't even asked them about it yet but I probably should at some point. No offense to anyone who might be watching. Anyway so you have to have a specific agreement with your partner network in order to change the default to syndicate the content everywhere. And when I'm uploading, if I set it to everywhere, as soon as I make it public it reverts to monetized platforms only. So then once it's public I can go back in and I can change it. I don't understand why mobile isn't a monetized platform. Some mobile platforms are, some of them aren't. I think it depends on the app implementations. I think that was part of the whole thing where Microsoft and Google were at each other's throats over the YouTube app on Windows Phone 8 because it enabled some functionality that wasn't enabled on other platforms like ad free viewing I believe was one of them. And then downloading videos was another one that Google wasn't particularly pleased with. But with that said I still don't think Microsoft was at fault there because Google was kind of acting like butt heads even once Microsoft removed the functionality that was supposedly offending them. Right. So let's move into our first topic and honestly this is one of those ones that, I don't know, is it tech news, is it not tech news? One thing's for certain and that is that it was posted on the Linus Tech Tips forum which means that it qualifies for consideration to be featured on the WAN show. And number two is that it is pretty darn adorable. So this was posted by Nice Hat on the forum. And this is Nightman. Is the game particularly good? The answer is no not really. I mean I played it a little bit. I know it isn't the point but is it the point? Because hold on a second. Okay so I played it a little bit and like the controls are just kind of frustrating and anything. Anyway so this was the original articles from Pixel Proposal I guess is the actual site where you can go to to play the game. But what 3D artist Robert Fink said was, I couldn't allow myself to do a normal proposal. It had to be specially explained. Something we would remember forever to remind us where we started. Simple times playing games together, growing up and learning that games can convey all sorts of emotion. I wanted her to see all the spikes I would jump over for her. And I think it's very charming. I think if you're going to publish the game then it doesn't necessarily matter. If it's up to a certain standard of quality. But if you're going to ask for donations for the game then it should probably be up to... I don't think the donations were for the game. I think the donations were in general. Right. But it's a donation button at the bottom of a game screen in a browser. Is it? Oh I only saw it on the whole website. Sorry but on the Pixel Proposal website. Yeah but it's like a while away from the game. I don't think the point is that you play the game. I think the point is that you watch the video. Okay. Well at any rate if you guys want to see the reaction video it's super cute. I think your favourite thing about it was sort of brutal but... My favourite thing about it was that it's not the most original thing ever. And the 86% at the end. If you pay a lot of attention and you watch through the whole video near the end it tracks how well you did in the game. It tracks how many coins you collected. So she gathered whatever 86% of the coins was. So at the end it fills up a heart with all the coins. It doesn't fully fill up the heart. And then even though it didn't fully... alongside of not fully filling up the heart it said 86% you could do better. Yeah it's funny because that's exactly what my parents said to my wife. What? It's like yeah he's an A but just barely. Why not A plus? I mean you're Asian. You should strive for the A plus. I tried to make it so that a few people wouldn't understand. You didn't have to make it super ridiculously. Anyways so that was super cute but actually this was one that Luke added to the document after the fact. One that I hadn't seen that I think I actually kind of like better. Okay it was less... they're different. Yeah they're quite different. It was less work to do this but I think that in terms of... Okay okay okay okay. In terms of qualifying a lady to be your partner forever. If she can beat Contra... Yep. Right? Yep yep. What this guy did is he modded a NES cartridge. Like badass mod. Like badass mod and check this out. Wires all over the place. And what I like about this guy is the other guy is a 3D artist already. And I'm not saying creating the game wasn't difficult and it wasn't a lot of work and it wasn't a labor of love and all that stuff. It's awesome. But this one is more like a regular dude who kind of did his best. He doesn't seem to be any kind of special programmer or anything like that. He did a really good job. Had to fight his way through just figuring out how to operate a hex editor. Didn't even get it quite working 100% right. But what he did manage to do was... This is like lab and stuff. Yeah so here's his... it's more like a general workshop. Like you can tell the guy doesn't necessarily do all the electronic stuff. But there's the NES console that he was presumably using for testing. Alright so here... yeah there are all the chips. Note how many chips I went through already up top. So not an expert. And then what he did was he edited the hex data here in order to change the names of the characters of the game to his and his wife's name. Which I think is super cute. So you can... your player select is Quinn and Amy. I mean I don't know if his wife's that butch looking in real life. But if she is then I'm not judging her. I'm kidding I know there's a picture of her. But I really liked this one. I thought it was super cute. So he made it so that at the end... what did it say at the end? There it is. Aww. That's pretty cool. And I think the biggest thing about this is just the fact that... you know what? Yeah. If she can beat Contra on the NES then she's a keeper. That's pretty epic. So yeah. And then that's them on Halloween that was taken earlier. It's not like the... he just wanted to show them. Yeah. And he left a very special note here. No that is not an upskirt. She has shorts on. So for those of you who were thinking, hey I need to see this in higher resolution just to double check and verify and relate what's going on in that picture. There is nothing going on in the picture. Grow up. So we are having problems. We are not dropping frames. We do not seem to be lagging on this network at all. But like a ton of people can't load the stream at all. What am I supposed to do? It's probably on Twitch's end. It's probably on Twitch's end. I'm just saying here so that people know that we're aware of it because I'm getting spammed on all mediums about it right now. So anyone that is watching, which is probably everyone that's not spamming me, yep we're having problems. Okay. Alright so moving on to our next topic here. This is actually one of our headliner topics. And I know you're an Oculus Rift dork and I get that. But interfaces are changing in general. And Oculus Rift is not like, VR is not the only way that interfaces are going to be changing. I'm a other ways to interface with things dork. I also bought Nia back in the day. I was looking into getting... That's just dumb. I was looking into getting a big motion. That's being a dumb gimmick dork. I like ways that I can interface with things that isn't normal. I find it very cool. I think this is really cool. Do you even listen to yourself? Anyway. So this is a collaborative project between Toby and SteelSeries. Well actually Toby is the one with the technology. SteelSeries presumably is investing in bringing it to market. So it's great to see guys that are forward thinking like Valve and now SteelSeries partnering up with these technology companies to bring it to gamers. So there are a couple of videos here that I would like to check out. This one isn't one of them. Let me just see if I can find the right one. Apparently it's a North American Twitch problem. It seems like most streams are kind of unwatchable right now. Okay. So there you go guys. If nothing else there will be the archive. What I would like to do is avoid spending too much time on the live show talking about the issues. So that the people who watch the archive, of whom there are actually more, don't have to sit through listening to us talk about the issues with the live stream because they're not even watching live. I was wondering why you were loading a video. Yeah. Well no no I know. I just mean in general. I'm explaining why I'm not. Because the chat is like Linus look at the chat. I'm aware of it. We're just not going to talk about it for 10 minutes. That's all. Alright. So let's go ahead and check out this video. Alright. This is the... Windows 8 has a start screen with large tiles. Okay we're not going to listen to this guy talk for two and a half minutes. I'm sorry. But basically he's like okay interfaces are changing. There's this natural swiping through stuff thing that's going on. But it's not great for the mouse because you have to move these huge distances to hit these huge icons. And it's just not very optimal. But what eye tracking will do is a couple of things. It will allow you to actually interface directly with a UI with your eyes. Or it could augment the experience that you're having with other things. Like something where I see this being really useful and he kind of hints at this in the video. But it's not directly said. Is if you are touching something and you kind of missed by a bit. But you're looking at this one but you kind of are on the border between this one and that one. It should be able to in theory track your eyes and go well no he probably meant this one. And then another way that they showed... And then another thing would be... Well actually it would be mostly touch. Mostly touch for fine details once this technology gets advanced enough. Instead of clicking on something and having a little magnifying. Which one did you mean I would love for it to be like oh well he was looking at this one. It's probably the one he meant to click on. So that's extremely exciting. And then one of the other demos that they do later on in the video. And this is more of a gaming relevant one. Where did that demo go? I think it was the StarCraft one? Yeah. I think that's in the other video. Is that in the other video? I think so. Oh that is in the other video. Because I like that one to you. Okay let's check out the other video. So the other video was a StarCraft video. And I guess that makes sense that that's the SteelSeries collaborative one. So navigating the minimap. Maybe you can explain this one a little bit better. So in the video it's kind of confusing if you can find it. Because what it shows in the video is it shows the minimap becoming like full screen temporarily. It's not really how it's going to work. I'm pretty sure. I think he was just trying to show how the minimap moved. So basically what you could do is... Okay well this part is kind of cool. Because it talks about just general interaction between the gamer and other characters in the world. Like when you walk into a bar someone might nod at you when they see you looking at them. But not before they see you looking at them. So when you walk in they might say like greetings or something. But then if you're looking around doing whatever it's okay. And then you look at the bartender finally and he'll like nod at you to be like... Ask you if you want a drink. Yeah. Something like that. But then he might delay until you look at him to ask something like that. And in something like an MMO that could actually be really cool. Because you're walking around and someone looks at you and you could kind of be like... You could be aggressive towards them. You could offer to trade with them. But you would know when you have people's attention. Even just in towns like a blacksmith could shout out that they're selling swords. Yes. But only once you kind of look at them. So I think that's incredibly cool. I mean the ability to tell if you have someone's attention digitally has been a problem that goes back to my earliest encounter with this would be the MSN days. It's like are you talking to me and just me right now? Or do you have 18 other chat windows open and are you doing a hundred other things? Using eye tracking you could actually make experiences more engaging. Whether it's in gaming or other ways as well. Not only this message has been read but this chat box is being looked at. Yeah! I mean isn't that cool? Alright so here let's talk about the minimap thing. So I'll have this playing while I walk you through it. So it's a little bit vague to be completely honest on how exactly it works. But it allows you to continue doing other things. Like he shows it taking up his whole screen. Yeah but that's just to zoom in you can see the aliasing. Yeah but no go back a little bit. Oh sorry. Okay. Wait for it. So what do you do instead? No it's when we can see his screen here. So when I hold that down. Wait no like let it go. Yeah. Boom. Mmm. I kind of have a weird feeling and hope that's not really how it works. Because that's not going to help you. No covering the whole screen with your minimap is not a good thing. And he said like it would be bound to a button. So it will only do that when you're looking at the minimap and press the button and stuff. But I still don't like that it takes up your whole screen because that's not going to help. I wonder if it could be faster than moving your mouse down and back up. I don't know. Maybe marginally. But every APM counts at a professional level. And then taking up your whole screen so you can't see other things is kind of not going to be super good. But then if you're wanting to move and look at something else anyway. Somewhere else on the map. Yes but part of the problem is going to be that having that much of a change might slow you down. It might be visually distracting. Yeah. But then I think that all of this is sort of a moot point when we consider that most RTSs these days are basically in the dark ages when it comes to minimap functionality. I mean Supreme Commander had this figured out like what five six years ago. And they're not going to. You could fully zoom in your minimap. You could fully zoom up your main map. You can have on another monitor and you could put it over there. Why does this not exist? Oh well you know some people might be like better than other people because they have like better stuff. You know what athletes with better training equipment are better than athletes that have crappy training equipment and an improper diet. I'm sorry but that's the way the world works. Anyway sorry I got distracted. So I don't think this would be allowed anyways in competitive play for one because it's a change now that you brought that up. Oh no change. Oh no things are getting better and we can interact with things better. You know what maybe Starcraft 3 will only run at 800 by 600 because anything higher than that would be too much detail. Three? Yeah. We're going to move backwards in technology as we move forwards in the franchise. Starcraft 3 announced. Yes confirmed. Confirmed. Anyway. Yeah so it's interesting my one thing with it which is probably why you brought up the Oculus fanboy thing but I'm not even coming from an Oculus fanboy. When are you ever not coming from an Oculus fanboy perspective? Rarely. But like games have to be developed with this in mind pretty heavily. Like interaction for everything that they're going to want is going to have to be made so that it supports this which is a lot of work. With Oculus if you develop under the right platform it's a button press and hopefully some tuning. Okay yes Oculus is easier but that doesn't mean that you would have to program an entire game just for eye tracking. Because if you went and maybe even retroactively applied to an existing game but if you develop the game with the intention of making things interactive. Like say for example if my crosshair was focused on you you might say hi. Then all you're doing is changing one parameter so that instead of the crosshair it's this. And like I'm hoping a lot of games do develop for it I'm just saying it might be struggling for the whole extra development side of things. And it would be cool if people like patch it into their games. I think that would be awesome and people would really appreciate that. Or whatever else I just think they might have. Like you noticed in their video developers developers developers the old Steve Ballmer thing essentially happened. Because almost the whole time they were asking for developers. The music was a little bit. The music was ridiculous. I was like are we starting a religion? Like what was going on here? Speaking of starting a religion I just for those of you who haven't seen this iconic video you must see it. I mean the guy is just. is just amazing them Oh, Stevie B. Amazing. I'm gonna miss him. All right. So yeah, it had a little bit of a developers developers developers angle to it. So I hope people do jump on but I'm just thinking like if you're an indie startup right now, where are you going? Oculus or this? Okay, guys, Twitter blitz. I'd love for you guys to let us know what you would like to see out of eye tracking technology from a from a gaming perspective, maybe as the main focus, but also, what would you like to see from just a general computer usage perspective? I mean, do you do you see the value more in the one video where they're talking about navigating the windows modern UI? Or do you see the value more in something like gaming and let's talk just gaining from a chair. So Oculus is okay. It was a good idea. Okay, so this is okay, because we're gonna we have some more topics for later on in the show that are going to be about gaming outside of a chair. But let's let's get to that later. So love to hear from you guys. But first, another topic. So the Samsung Galaxy camera two, I am actually very disappointed about this product. Yeah, I was hoping you might have gotten that from my notes. I'm not sure they know I didn't even know you were disappointed. Okay, let's start with why you're disappointed. Well, it's it's it's not phallic enough for you, I guess. Oh, wow. Luckily, most people won't get that word. Yeah, they will know because now they're looking up. Um, it's not that amazing. It doesn't seem super good. It doesn't seem like that big of an improvement. It seems behind in the terms of smartphones. Also, you can't call people, which is what we were asking for last time they came up with this. But it has NFC. It's not that fast. It's not that amazing. It's just like, there's too much meh going on. But why no one cares. No one cares. Has all the NFC. I mean, who knows someone who bought a galaxy camera. That's something that I can't figure out. Like when you see these products, and you're just like, okay, I have not yet seen a galaxy gear. I've never seen one. I've seen a few pebbles. You're not the only person I know that has a pebble. Right. I've also seen them out in the wild like people I don't know. Yeah, I've never seen a gear. So like, how much money did you lose on this project? And like, did you get the hint that it wasn't successful? I mean, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe galaxy cameras is a big hit in like, like Kazakhstan or something. In Korea they use a lot more Samsung devices than they use here. I noticed that even just walking around. But, I don't know. Maybe it is phallic enough. I think the biggest thing that I'm disappointed about here is just the fact that, and you already covered this. You already mentioned this. There's no phone calling. I don't see the value of a dedicated Android camera. I don't see the value of a dedicated camera anymore. Especially looking at the direction that companies like Nokia are going in where they're adding more and more advanced optics to phones. I think that's the convergence. That's the convergence that we're going to see. We're going to see bigger camera bumps on phones that are more optimized for professionals. I mean, this is the conversation we had with the whole modular phone concept is, do people care more about the gaming performance of a phone? Do people care more about this? Do people care more about that? But, we're already kind of there. The phone makers have the opportunity now to just create individual SKUs rather than modular SKUs that are more optimized for one thing or another. And we've seen that with camera. Samsung had an opportunity here to make a phone that is also a fantastic camera. And it's really not that much more to add to it when you consider that the Galaxy camera series already has mobile data connectivity. There's a SIM card in it. There's a SIM card. Put a microphone and a speaker on it for crying out loud. Give people the choice to say, look, I don't use my phone that much, but I'm a shutter bug. Yeah. That would have made this a compelling device. Because I know a lot of people that would have just bought that because they don't actually care about their phone that much. And they just had to replace their camera. Absolutely. So there you go. I mean, anyway, general specs. It's got two gigs of RAM now instead of one gig. It has 1.6 gigahertz quad core processor. We don't know exactly which one runs Android 4.3. It has a 4.8 inch super clear touch HD display, whatever that means. And eight gigs of storage, 2000 milliamp hour battery and an expandable micro SD card slot. I'm just so disappointed. They changed the lens a little bit. ISO is the same. Zoom is the same. Is the aperture better? F1.4 is aperture. Or 4.1 rather. 4.1. Yeah. The old one was 2.8. Wait, no, that would be worse then. 4.1 is worse than 2.8? Yes. Lower aperture is more better. Oh my god. Confusing things. Yeah. F4.1 squiggly line 86.1 millimeter. The other one was F2.8W squiggly line 5.9T. I know nothing about cameras. Yeah. I'm hoping you can translate this. No, I'm, I'm, I'm, well, the problem is that I'm having a hard time interpreting your numbers here is the problem. That's directly taken from their website. Okay. I went to Samsung's website. I went to Samsung's website. Because unless it has two lenses, because this looks like 23 millimeter wide angle. Oh, nevermind. This is the other side. My bad. Oh, so the side versus side. The right side is the old camera. So it has dramatically better optics then. I was reading the wrong way. Okay. Yeah. Cause you, okay. So it's a 2.8 aperture lens versus a 4.1. So that is a lot more light transmission. That will be better for both picture taking and video recording. That's in direct comparison to Galaxy camera one. And another thing I would have liked to see included. If you're going to call this thing a dedicated camera, where's the 4K recording? For the amount that you're charging for this thing and the fact that you still haven't even managed to put a phone in it. Galaxy Note 3 does 4K recording. I know it might not be anything super, super special. That's not as good as a proper 4K camera. I know. Oh, yes. But I mean, at least it's, it's a feature. It exists. Yeah. I just, I think there was a missed opportunity there. Yeah. Trying to say. It still does. It's maximum video recording is 1080p 30 FPS, just like Galaxy camera one. All right. So here is Twitter Blitz time. I think the eye tracking in games like battlefield would work to spot the enemy because you looked up at him. So you know what? That's interesting. That's really cool. What if? Cause the spot mechanic, you have to, I literally, if I'm playing battlefield, I just continuously press Q the entire game. Pointing at all the things. Anyway. You know what? I actually, okay. I probably interpreted his message wrong, but I think, oh crap. I had, yeah, no, I had a completely different direction. I was going with that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This maybe not for the hardcore keyboard mouse PC gamers, but the direction I kind of went with this was what if you could use eye tracking as sort of a smart auto aim? Right. Yeah. Like as a way to correct clumsy joystick movements a little bit without just making the game feel completely stupid. Because you aim here and it hits on his head. Yeah. If you're looking there and it actually moves it there, that could be nice. Like if auto aim helped you do what you intended to do, I think it would make gaming more accessible. It would be interesting though, because like if you like look at your friend, it would follow your eyes. It will have to. And then just like aim off the screen. We're talking a few generations before it's actually something usable. But if eye tracking could be used to make games accessible without dumbing them down, I think that's the challenge. I had this in here. I'm really stoked for this for disabled gamers. That's one of the big reasons why I was really stoked for OCC Nia as well. And I ended up testing it for someone. It was such a pile of poo. Well no, it actually was good enough that it helped someone. I knew a buddy that didn't have a hand. I used to play WoW with him and it helped him play WoW. Alright. Because he could control more of the game. And he was someone who was willing to spend the retarded amount of time it took to be able to learn how to use that thing in any way that made any amount of sense. Because it actually added something. Right. He needed it. It wasn't worth it for me. It was kind of fun, but like it wasn't worth using. Alright, someone says, would eye tracking be possible with the Oculus Rift? A future version perhaps? Certainly not the first one. It would help because the screens inside would be illuminating your eyes. Yeah. But I don't... yeah. It would be kind of difficult. I think I would prefer eye tracking, but of course suspicious people are going to say they're getting spied on. The way that eye tracking works is not something that the NSA could probably take advantage of. Isn't it? Yeah. Preston is expressing some doubt as to the viability of it in the long term. Could it be like Wiimote waggling in that it's entertaining for a few hours? Sorry. Entertaining for a few hours, but not necessarily that great in the long term. Perhaps? Although I think that the way that we envision eye tracking being implemented would be more like a natural tack on to other gameplay experiences. As opposed to just being like, here's an eye game. Pop the balloons by looking at things. Yeah, unless... I don't know. It has to be implemented really well. And that's the thing with Windows 8... I'm going to play that game for the rest of the show. Nice. With Windows 8, I see it augmenting your use a little bit. And in games, I see it augmenting your use unless you are someone who wants to increase the feature set because you are somehow physically disabled. Other than that, I see it just augmenting and helping in little ways, not being a mean thing. Chris's concerns pretty much echo yours about glitchiness. And I think the first couple generations are just going to be stupid and totally useless. Probably. So many things are like that. There was all that excitement about leap motion. Where has that excitement gone? I don't know how great it is. We're actually going to be getting one. I think they have some kind of a software update coming sometime next year. And we're going to arrange to do our review with the new software update. So like a fresh perspective review. Cool. That's cool. But yeah, I think it's going to have to be able to learn that like this, it should not eye track. It should not track your eyes coming in and out. Unless you have a surround screen. Two people would be awesome. Zach figures it would be great for smaller devices like phones. Totally agreed. What if you have to look at your mom who is offering pizza rolls? This is what I'm talking about. Looking at someone off screen. I think it's a good idea, but could be a nuisance like ads. What if ads could take over your eye tracking hardware on your notebook or your phone or whatever? And like you look at an ad and it's like, yo dog, I heard you like used cars. Unless you could program into your eye tracking thing to automatically close ads if you look at them. Ad block for eye tracker. Yeah, but we don't support ad block. We also try not to make ads particularly obnoxious. Like remember those old like Emotricon ones? Say something. How many times have you heard something say something? It's like, you know what? If I wanted to talk to my computer, I would go 10 years in the future. When that's actually voice recognition doesn't sound like, hello, thank you for talking to the computer. I only use this program to insult my sister because it's hilarious. Hopefully that's fixed 10 years in the future. Yeah. Computer voice has been kind of failed. Well, it's a lot better now than when I was a kid. Yeah. Like back when we were like entering like text to speech on like the Commodore. Like seriously, it was only useful for like trying to make it swear. That was the only thing you could do with it. In vent, I used to go I, T, and then a huge line of T's and Rafa Copter, I, and it would make the person sound like it was a helicopter. Apparently we're out of focus. Hey, Brandon, do you mind fixing us? I don't think I ever actually set focus. I think it just, I didn't notice that it wasn't quite right. Nice. Oh, no, I don't think that's what Alexander even means. I think he means that the show is unfocused and off topic. You know what, Alexander? I don't appreciate your attitude. Wow. Would love to see a game where you're presented with an image or video and the story progresses based on where you look. I think that would be so the storyline would have to be so branched that it wouldn't be able to be very deep. Really weird. How do you progress? That's my issue. Anytime we ask for more branches, we suffer when it comes to depth. I mean, you look at the even things like conversation trees in an RPG, for example, it's the same thing. The more options you have, the more moral choices you have, the less far you can go down each of the paths. I mean, I don't mind linear gameplay for that reason. I think some games do really well, but yeah. And now he's like just moving it all over the place willy nilly. It already looks better, though. Well, yeah. Now we can see my booties. OK, so let's go ahead and move into our next topic here. Back to the regular Wanshow thing that we supposedly do. Razer has new headphones coming. This is a news item because they are going to be launching them at CES, presumably. That's what we're guessing. You can preorder them now. Although if it was me, I would probably wait for the reviews to come in. This was posted by Tom picks on the forum. And Tom is apparently so excited that this font was necessary. It's probably the most like this looks like it was sponsored post I think I've ever seen. You know what's funny is what I was going to say about it is that it looks really well done. Like, look at this. Like Tom went and like put the little product features. It's really well done. It is. Nice little thing. And then he has the proper photos in the right spots. It's like it's one of the nicest tech news posts I've ever seen. All right. So they have four different pairs of headphones or headsets coming. I guess they're all headphones. These are more like consumer audio oriented as opposed to being purely gamer oriented, which normally I would have said is probably a positive indicator because generally speaking, a more audio oriented product is not going to be like crack and forged. For example, is a product that I would love to love because the idea of it is so beautiful. Like I would love to wear them and just look that cool all the time. But the base is very loose and uncontrolled and very overwhelming to the point where I don't enjoy them. So I hope that with the more audio centric products, they're heading in that direction. But unfortunately, the way that they're describing these is a little bit scary sounding. So which which one was it? So it says something, something, something. Where was it? I think it was the earphones, sleek, whatever. I'm looking for control bass. There we go. So about the analog headphones, the DJ ones, natural sounding acoustics and heavy bass. Scary. Heavy bass scares me. But if they do it well. OK, hold on. Here we go. Here we go. The new audio. This is from the press release. I think the new audio lineup will initially feature four models, bass, heavy earphones, analog stereo headphones, Bluetooth headphones and DJ style headphones. And then the DJ style headphones once say that they have heavy bass right in the description. So I'm going to reserve judgment until I can actually try them in terms of looks, though. They're beautiful. They look great. And I have to again bring up with home pics. One thing I notice is a lot of times I go to tech news. I love going there because everything I need is there. But I always have to go to the source to find everything. And this I actually did not have to go to the source to find everything, which was kind of cool. These look quite nice. It all looks really good, to be honest. And if the build quality of them is anything like the Kraken Forged, then I mean, are those the finest feeling headphones that you've ever held? The only thing I didn't like was the thing I told you about. Which one was that? If I moved and looked around, I could feel them shift. Right. But that's a weight issue. That's a weight issue. And like I could maybe see them fixing it with a type of headband or something. But like that was not a big deal. It's not like they slid off my head. I can just feel the weight shifting around. But the aluminum construction did make them particularly heavy. So I definitely noticed it. But it's not a big deal. It's just the only thing that happens. Man, they're gorgeous. I just wish they sounded more appealing to me. Yeah. All right. So let's move on to you know what? We should probably do our sponsor spot. We actually have quite a few sponsor messages these days. Hopefully you guys will bear with me here. So Intel's Rome 2, Total War Rome 2. Rome, Total War 2, Rome 2, Total War, Total War, Rome 2. We could turn this into a song. Rome 2, Total War 2. Anyway, if you buy a 4670K or a 4770K, you get a free copy of Rome 2, Total War. That game, this one right here. You get a free copy of that with your purchase. And the promotion is only while supplies last from qualifying retailers. So you can check out the link in the description on the archive. Or if you head over to Linus Tech Tips forums, in the Linus videos and ramblings or whatever section, there's a sticky there. It's definitely still available at NCIX for a while. I called them and verified. They still have tons of coupons. So there you go, guys. If you or anyone you know is getting that CPU, it might not be the best regarded game at the moment. They are still working on patches. They are still improving things. But free is free. So there you go. If you were going to buy a system anyway, you're probably going to buy one of those CPUs anyway. So you might as well get a game with it. And you can just wait for even more patches and just hope it doesn't get removed from the Steam store. Indeed. Okay, well, we'll talk about that later. That's not an issue from Creative Assembly. That's a whole other thing. Our next sponsor is Hotspot Shield. Hotspot Shield is the quick, easy and inexpensive way to get set up with a VPN solution. So Hotspot Shield is a proud sponsor of the WAN Show and happens to be a product that I have needed to use a number of times personally. So you can do things like buy stuff from retailers that just redirect you to a completely different page if you don't happen to be located in the U.S. You can do things like access U.S. Netflix and you can protect your privacy to a certain extent online. I'm not saying that a VPN is the be-all and end-all solution of, you know, go and search for how to make bombs and expect the police to not show up at your house. Like, don't do that. Don't make bombs. I mean, these are things that I shouldn't have to tell you on this show. You should watch a different show. I don't even want to talk about bombs on this show. We're not having bombs in the keywords. Hashtag make bombs? Hashtag make bombs. No! Please don't tweet that at me. Hashtags make bombs. Hashtag killed my wife. Why do we start these things? Anyway, Hotspot Field has some additional functionality on your mobile devices. So it actually works on multiple devices and on iOS devices, it allows you to use less of your mobile data when you're on the go by compressing the data on the fly as it goes through their servers. So there you go, guys. I don't necessarily recommend the free service because it's ad-supported and the ads are a little bit on the in-your-face side for me, but the elite version isn't expensive and it does have a one-week trial, so you can try that out and see how much you like it. Our last sponsor message is, of course, related to CES. CES is going to be a thing. We're going to be there very soon. Our sponsors are NCIX. They're our gold sponsor, as well as Corsair and Western Digital, and we are actually going to be attending the WD Fan Appreciation Night. So you guys can still sign up for that. It's at wdpromotion.com slash wdfannight. If you're going to be in Vegas on Tuesday, January the 7th from 7 p.m. to 9 m. I'm pretty sure they mean 9 p.m., but that's okay. And there will be food, drinks, live music, and, of course, giveaways. So sign up, guys, and anyone who says they're with me will be getting in. So I look forward to hopefully seeing you there. We're all going to that, I think, right? Yeah, we're all going to that. For the whole duration? I think we're going to be there the whole time. I might be a little bit late, but I'm going to try not to be. I mean, they are one of our show sponsors, and I did say that we would all be there. So if we're not there, then please suck. If I remember correctly, I'll be... Well, Brandon and I will probably be, like, cutting it fairly close. That's fine. But we should be able to make it. That's fine. If you're a little bit late, I think as long as I'm there, I'm the important one anyway, so... All right, we just won't go then. No, please go! I need your support. Screw you guys. Are you going to go home? Which happens to also be work. Way to go, Cartman. All right, guys. Next article is posted on the forum by TopWarGamer. And this one, I'm not sure how much credibility there is to it. And the original article is from NintendoEnthusiast.com. But Wii U allegedly outsold the Xbox One globally last week. I'll let you handle this one. There's linking to NintendoEnthusiast.com. Linking? No, no... Oh, wow. Did they smash the previous sales records? Did they make so much coin? Would you have to be on mushrooms to think that it could go any better than this? Keep going, keep going, keep going. That's all I had. Oh, I liked it so far. Yeah, no. So it was that Nintendo enthusiast linking to VG charts. But then VG charts itself is kind of like, I don't know. So even if it's not entirely true, we do know that Wii U sold really, really well. We do know it's doing better. Yeah, we know it's doing a lot better recently. We also know that 3DS is doing a lot better recently. Although 3DS sales, I believe, are also including other variations of the same generation, meaning 2DS and 3DS XL. So 2DS is probably a really large part of that in units terms, but it doesn't cost as much as 3DS and all that kind of stuff is in there as well. Also, other interesting things is they're saying Xbox 360 and PS3 also outsold Xbox One. And also outsold Wii U, for that matter. Yeah, so there's like other interesting things here, and we're not sure how exactly accurate it is. One funny thing is it breaks it down to certain regions if you go to the actual website. And Japan sold 40 original DSs. Forty. It's like, what? Where did they even find them? I don't know. And why do people even want them? I'm pretty sure those 40 are probably the only 40 left in existence that don't have broken shoulder buttons. I saw people commenting that it was possibly like accidental sales. Moms trying to buy like 2DSs and walk out of the store with an original one. The sales guy's like, sure. Yep, got one of those. Here you go, man. Please leave quickly, don't go back. Do you want a gift receipt with the... Oh, sorry, we don't do gift receipts because it's Leprechaun Day. And you never trust those Leprechauns. It's against my religion. They return everything. But there's pretty good reasons for it in my opinion. You got one. I'm getting one. Well, you're getting one. Actually, it's kind of his Christmas bonus. So, I mean, this is weird. You tell people it's like, okay, instead of cash bonuses, I was like, I want people to look around at the things in their lives and think of me. Rather than just like some cash that they're going to put as a payment on their car and it's going to be boring. I want people to do things fun. So this year, Christmas bonuses at Linus Media Group were not allowed to be cash. I was like, look, you've got a budget. You have to spend it or I'm just not going to give it to you. And you have to buy stuff that's cool. So Edzel picked himself up one of those awesome Wacom tablets that has the digitizer and is a full Windows 8 tablet. So that's pretty cool. It's like a thousand dollar tablet. So I was like, oh, yeah, okay. I guess I kind of underpaid you this year. So fine. Whatever. And then this guy ended up with what did you get? Well, I got a Wii U and a KitchenAid mixer. It's like really that's the but every time he drinks a smoothie, it'll be like, well, you can use other stuff. Linus got me this movie, which is good and creepy. Why Wii U though? Well, OK, I'm thinking if I'm going to play games by myself, I'm going to play PC games. That's how that's going to happen. If I'm going to play games when people come over and hang out at my house, it's like we have LAN parties. My group of friends have LAN parties. But sometimes people don't have the time or want to drag their computers over and we'll do other stuff. Mine's too heavy. Not that I've ever been invited to one of your LAN parties. You actually have been many times. You've never come because you're a jerk. And so like my brother has a giant computer, which is really frustrating to move because it's in a cosmos too and it's water cooled and it weighs a ton and stuff like that. So it's great when we're all separate. We all come together. We started playing tabletop games and mixing it up a little bit. So I was thinking Wii U. Makes sense. Because like a lot of the even Mario platformers work with multiple people now. Right. And I think with a Wii U on some games, you can get up to six people because four Wiimotes and two gamepads. Twitch chat hates you. They're saying you're a peasant now. Dirty console peasant. Yeah, that's OK. Oh, by the way, for those of you who are questioning Edsel's wisdom, picking up the Wacom tablet. I don't know why people buy tablets. I'm not talking about a tablet tablet. I'm talking about like a tablet tablet, that kind of tablet. So I mean, he's an artist. Hello. So having a tablet where you can actually draw directly on the screen and have a tablet that you can like watch movies on on the bus. He commutes by bus. That is a totally sensible purchase, and I think it's someone's like hashtag Linus is not funny. Hashtag Linus is not funny is better than hashtag whatever the. No, I don't want to talk about that anymore. Also, another thing is I foresee Xbox one and PS4 emulators coming soon so I can play those exclusives on PC if I'm not going to. Nope, totally not going to happen. And Wii U ones I don't really see going. Yeah, it looks like that's been more difficult. It's hard to say up to this point whether it hasn't happened because people don't care or whether it hasn't happened because it's hard. Yeah, no, it's true. There is more complications than there would be for PS4 and Xbox one. It's baffling to me. Sorry, I'm changing gears a little bit. You can finish that. But I just know it's just it's more complicated because of different hardware things that are inside of a Wii U compared to just x86, which is on the other clip. I mean, was Nintendo playing a poker game here? It's like, yeah, we're going to do like a hardware launch and we're just going to like not have Mario and Zelda games. Yeah, because they're like up on the horizon is Mario Kart 8 for Wii U. Why wasn't that out yet? Super Smash Brothers Wii U. What? Are you kidding me? That actually wasn't out yet. And then like another Donkey Kong game. Yeah, and then we just got Super Mario 3D World Land Country, whatever it's called, which is apparently awesome. And I'm super stoked you're going to let me play that. Yeah, and that's coming with it because that's a really highly rated game that I'm stoked for. But yeah, like there's stuff on the horizon that's like this wasn't a launch game like Mario Kart didn't come out almost immediately afterwards. Yeah. What? So that's that's baffling. But at any rate, Wii U might actually be a thing soon. So exciting. Speaking of exciting things, T-Mobile just seems determined to turn the entire wireless industry on its ear. And I love it. This is great because what happens in America eventually reaches their culturally handicapped cousin in the north. Seems to be taking a long time. I'm actually not super sure on the mobile side if that's happening here. It will have to eventually. Eventually, you can't lag behind every other country if you're going to want to be considered a developed country. But we seem to be able to do that with phones. Yeah, it's not as bad as it used to be. As someone who's had a cell phone since like the first cell phone with a keyboard came out, it's not as bad as it used to be. Not by a long shot. So at any rate, he this was posted on like Twitter or something. I think I don't remember where he posted it, but it was 2013 New Year's resolutions shake up the wireless industry. So I don't know if you guys remember, but personally for me, the big one other than ending to your contracts was making roaming. Making international roaming inexpensive. What a huge deal. What a way to capture the people who can afford the ball or phone plans because those are the people who are typically going to be traveling. How amazing is that? And of course, there's 4G, LTE and all that. For 2014, make waves at CES is one of the resolutions. Give AT&T a break or not is one of the other ones and unshackle the family from those other guys. So there's a lot of speculation right now that what is going to be announced is buying, helping people buy out their contracts. Yeah. And like special plans for families because he specifically calls out families. They're literally going to buy customers. That's awesome. I love it. I would, you know, I don't mind giving a whack ton of money to an Internet service provider or a phone provider if I can tell that they invested in me. And I'm like, yeah, this service is awesome. Yeah. I mean, our new fiber, our new fiber plan here where we're not dropping any frames anymore. I mean, OK, aside from Twitch's problems, our upstream is completely leg free and the quality is much better than before. OK, I feel OK about paying a bunch of money for that. But what I feel really OK about is the fact that it tell us on a few separate days, sent a few separate people to run fiber underground down the street for us, link it up to our house for us. And I know what I paid for. So for the first year of my service or whatever it is, I paid for them to invest in me as a customer as opposed to paying for them to kind of. Oh, well, OK, we've got like 12 people on this 10 person sort of spot now. We can probably squeeze a 13th one in if like we lower our global data caps a fair bit and re-conjure. I don't feel good about that, but I feel good when you're when you're investing in me. So I really wish like my contract is coming up with TELUS and I've been looking around at other options and like there's some that might be better. But none of them are like we are the glorious, awesome side. Come join us. There isn't a T-Mobile in Canada. I was like the ever so slightly lesser evil, but still evil ones. Yeah, I mean, I'm OK with Bell. I think I called them buttheads once on the live stream and they actually were really good. We they were really good for us. They got massively flamed for it and wanted that to stop. Well, OK. But but without calling them buttheads at other times since then, they've also dealt with stuff and in their defense that time it was something particularly complicated. And in this time, it's because you have a specific guy you're dealing with every single time, which is the same as you know. No, no, no, I've had to do stuff through regular customer service since then as well. So I count also might be flagged. So I don't like I'm I'm just saying I don't I don't hate them, but I'm not in love with them or anything like that. I just I just don't know if some of that is special consideration. Hard to say. Yeah, I don't know. But yeah. OK. Do we want to get into a Linus rant? Are you guys ready to prepare yourselves? We can have a funny one before we do that or we could cool down with the funny one. This is the funny one. All right. Let's do the rant. All right. All right. OK. I love Linus Tech Tips Forum, but I feel like we've gotten away from our core values a little bit, particularly in some of the sub forms. And I'm not going to call out any particular names in this case. But the audio sub forum I've been finding a little bit unfriendly to people. So this particular thread was someone who posted saying, hey, I just got a sound card and I really like it. I'm really happy with it. My my sound is better and louder. And there's about five or six pages of people crapping on the guy because he didn't have the almighty, you know, forethought to research the specific places on the Internet where the wisdom exists that something like a file E10 might have been a better option. So an external amp and DAC. And I didn't really find that acceptable because of a couple of things. Number one is that as much as people might be right and something like an objective to or a file E10 might be a better option than pretty much any sound card. In some cases, nobody even went to the trouble to ask a probing question. And this is where I feel like a lot of audio file people would do well to consider the old saying, you'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Rather than being rude and abrasive to people who are excited about the same thing that you're excited about. And rather than being helpful to them and really being welcoming to them, making fun of them is just going to perpetuate the myths and the misconceptions that you claim to be trying to help them with. So let that sink in for a minute. So the thing that bothered me is that after five pages of people telling him that his onboard sound was fine and that the solution he had used was terrible and that these were all the better solutions and he was basically an idiot for not realizing it. And that any perception that it sounded better was a placebo effect. Nobody actually recommended a comparable product to the sound card that the OP had purchased. It was a zone RGG, which is a $30 sound card. Remember, guys, $30 for an amp and a DAC and an upgraded microphone input. The problem people have with onboard sound is not always pure sound quality. Sometimes it's sound volume if they're using headphones that are more difficult to drive. Sometimes it's their mic input that is a big steamy pile of garbage. Sometimes it's a driver issue and the external solution might be better to resolve a driver issue because most of them are completely driverless. Or it might not be because the driver issue might also be related to the mic in and most external sound cards only have a headphone out. Also, nobody asked him what onboard sound he was using. What we all kind of agree on, what the audiophile elite seem to agree on, is that any sound card built into a motherboard for the last sort of few years at least is pretty darn good. No one even asked the guy if he was running a five-year-old board. And I had someone post that if they're running, I forget what it was, five-year-old hardware, then they should basically buy a new rig anyway. We're talking about a $30 sound card, not a new rig. And we're talking about a seven-year-old rig could potentially still have a Q6600 in it, which is perfectly fine for watching YouTube videos and playing indie games and even some AAA titles still. So the elitism and this assumption that a sound card is an invalid choice is not true. Whatever videos might be being released on TechSyndicates channel that are elevating products like the Objective 2 or the Fiio E10 or these external products to this deity-like status, are they better? Yeah, actually. I personally prefer them. I can subjectively tell that something like an Objective 2 amp has less of an audible noise floor than something like a sound card. I can tell. I can't tell on all my headphones. And it's not something that I would notice necessarily day to day, but I can tell. So are they better? Yes. But are they necessarily comparable? I mean, an E10 alone costs about $70 versus the $30 the OP spent, and an Objective 2 amp alone is I think over $150 or somewhere in that range. It's over $100 anyway, and the amp and DAC combo is over $200. It's around $250. So there you go, guys. I've been asked to weigh in on the whole sound cards versus external amps and DACs thing for a while. Consider that my weigh-in. Are they better? Sure. Are they always the obvious and only choice? No. That's all. There's even some people like, I don't want one because I don't want another external device at my computer. I like the fact that my sound card is in my computer. Now, there's someone that I've been interfacing with on the forum. We've been talking about how we could maybe possibly mount a DAC really far away from everything else in our computer and then route cables and all this kind of stuff so that you could actually have one inside your computer. But there's also that which people seem to completely ignore, which is like, oh, yeah, any setup ever can just have this external DAC. Don't worry about it. It's like, no, sometimes you want something inside your computer. Yep. I don't know. There's there's there's quite a few reasons. But yeah. So anyway, are we are we are we move on time now? You can talk about something else. I'm still cooling down anyway. OK, no, I have one more. Just basically, guys, look, the Linus Tech Tips dot com community was built on being friendly and welcoming to people. That's how we've grown so fast. That's how we've got almost 50,000 members in the first year of existence. We will not keep that up if we are unfriendly to people. It's fine to tell someone that something is a better option. But if they already bought it, think about what you're saying. Why would you just crap on them for something that they already bought? You can you can ask a gently probing question like, hey, are you still within your return window? Here's another option you may have considered. But the cold hard fact of the matter is that in that particular thread anyway, the OP wanted the sound to be louder. They bought a sound card with an amp. Mission accomplished. Is it as perfect as some other solution might have been? Maybe not. But that doesn't mean you need to be a jerk about it. It's also an international forum. Do you get shipped everywhere? I'm not sure. I know that there are builders in Europe, if nothing else, because it's just an open design. So there's lots of lots of guys that do it. Yeah. Are you good? No, I'm done now. You're done now? I'm just going to have some water. OK, I don't know how we're going to look at this one because I think he's done. But if you want to go to the massive iPod one, it's just the one right below. We first have to ignore the picture that's on the thread because as you can probably tell upon immediately seeing it, that's totally not what it's going to look like. But anyways, it's a 12 point. It's a massive, massive iPod and people are specular. Ipad. Sorry. People are speculating what it would be used to argue an iPad is a massive iPod. Yeah, it is. Is it? Yeah. I'm just saying you corrected yourself, but you weren't quite wrong. Not entirely. So it's huge. And part of the problem is that I can't see anyone holding it to use it. 12.9 inches. 12.9 inches, I believe. That's not that much smaller than this. Wait, hold on. I mean, is that even that big? This is 12. So just hold that for context for the people. It's still weird. I don't like it's this is still really weird to hold. No, that's going to be heavier than the iPad would be. But and people are speculating about possibly bigger ones, too, because it's supposed to be. And the problem with this is I think that a name may have leaked and then everything else was created around it, which is part of a problem. So I've been like I walked by a Mac store the other day. What was that for you? It was actually kind of weird. Did the light from the inside of the store burn your skin? It's so bright. Have you noticed that? And everything's white. I'm just like, oh, my God. Anyways, I the IMAX are super, super thin. So if anything, I kind of thought that maybe they're coming out with another IMAX style product that's running iOS. Like maybe it has a stand or maybe it has a stand and you can take it off the stand. Is that legitimately interesting to you? No. You've never really used iOS extensively, have you? No, extensively. I have used it, though. It's not a bad experience. I don't like the store. And I don't like the lack of some options. But like once once it's all once you're kind of done setting everything up and you're done downloading all your apps and you're done doing all that kind of stuff. I don't like the store at all. It's fine. And once you're in an app, it's the same. What's not to like about the store? It works basically the same way. In fact, I would say if I was going to I don't like the logging protection stuff. It seems like a waste of time. Oh, I think you can disable it now. Now? Yeah. OK. That wasn't a thing before when I used it, but it's been a while. I don't know. I've never done like I'm going to switch to iOS for a while. I've just been like, oh, I'm trying to use your device. Oh, I turn it down. Oh, you know what we should do? You know how I switch. No, no, no, no. You know how we've done I switched in the past. You and I should both switch to OS 10 at the same time. OS 10? For a month. Just on our work computers. That's going to make it worse. Actually, no, it won't. Yeah. Because it runs Excel. That's all I do on that computer. You don't have to use it all the time. I'm going to turn it on. I'm going to open Excel. And then I'm going to do everything else off of it. And I'll just type into Excel. That is not that is not the spirit of the experiment that we would be trying. I probably use iOS more than or OS X more than you have. I used to work in repair shops. I've hardly used it at all. I've worked in repair shops. Like every time. It's funny. Cameraman, the old like cameraman, cameraman back at NCIX used to be like he would just be in stitches every time he watched me try to use a Mac because I'd like sit down in front of his computer and like without realizing it exposes all over the screen. How do I get to the how do I get to the window? I'm trying to see. And then there was a grand opening of like an Apple Store type thing that had some IMAX. And I like sat down in front of it and I was like trying to launch a program. I couldn't figure out how to find I was like, honestly, I would have settled for any program. Couldn't launch a program. It's it's yeah, it's weird. The problem for me is it's supposed to be super intuitive. But because of everything else I've used, it's totally not. And I have no idea what's going on. Speaking of intuitive, I played around with SteamOS finally today. It doesn't do much, but it works sort of. The Xbox 360 wireless controller was easier to get running than on Windows. Were you using that box? The Raven one? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I took it to NCIX today. We still filmed an episode with it. But like the wireless controller just worked. Honestly, drivers for Linux haven't usually been that big of a problem. Lately, we're not talking about five years ago. But like even like I was talking to you the other day, every time I've installed Linux on something that had wireless or LAN, they both have worked immediately. It's remarkable how many network cards don't automatically install Intel network cards that don't automatically install on Windows 7 and Windows 8. Anyway, that's the biggest thing is as long as you get network working and like an input device, I can go manually do the rest of it. I don't care. I'm kind of stoked on SteamOS. I think what I'm going to do because I have a media center PC. Once they get things like Netflix streaming and a proper desktop experience that kind of works. The browser works. Yeah, browser based. But I want an app. Like if I'm going to use something, I would want to be able to control it completely with either Valve's controller or an Xbox 360 controller. And you know what? This is going to OK. This is going to sound super ignorant, but I just about like lost it. When I saw that Mozilla's browser on Linux is called Iceweasel, I was like, what is that a knockoff? No, it's made by Mozilla. Is it? I've used Firefox on Linux before. Yeah, you've never heard of Iceweasel? Iceweasel versus Firefox. Yeah, I was like, what? Because I was like, you look at the logo for it here. I'll pull up the logo for it. OK, so for those of you who are like me and have never heard of Iceweasel, I'll pull up the logo here. But it's like hilarious. Get iceweasel.org. So it's like exactly as it is. And it's like a weasel wrapped around an ice. Rebranded by the Debian project. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, no, there's tons of different browsers that are based off of. Yeah, I know. I just I'd never heard of this one. OK, OK. I was like, oh, that's hilarious. Yeah, I know. I'd never heard of it being a part of the Mozilla project. I knew I knew there was I've heard of it in general. I've also heard of Waterfox. Waterfox is a I don't know if it still is, but this is it when I used to use it was it was a further back version of Firefox, which is super performance optimized. And they would take Firefox versions, performance optimize them and then release them under Waterfox. I don't know if that's what they're still doing. I haven't used it for a long time because I've been running nightly forever. But yeah, there's a lot of different versions because it's open. So I'm not super surprised. And given how unstable the official one's been lately, I'm kind of tempted to try. Maybe I should switch to Iceweasel. Well, Iceweasel is Debian, so I don't know. Is it does it work? Maybe I'll just switch to Debian. I don't game much anymore anyway. You know what? When I tell you what, guys, I will commit this now. The reason that I haven't switched over to Linux, just even to do a 30 day I switched, is because I can't afford the productivity hit. Once I have SteamOS streaming working. Oh, because you're not used to it. Yeah, because I'm not used to it. I have too much work to do. I was like, what? No, no, no, no, no, no. Once game streaming works. And the other thing is when I do want to play a game, I don't want to mess around with which one's compatible with Linux and waste my time on that. So when game streaming is working in SteamOS, I will do a 30 day Linux I switched. I will put my Windows gaming box in my server room and I will only stream from it. So I will do that with you if you want. Although it might be boring. Yeah, I think yours will be very uninteresting. The entire series of videos will be me being like, whoa, this and you being like, yeah, we know that for. Oh, my God, you can make a cube desktop. I've seen that. I am aware of that. And you can get that for Windows as well. Yeah, you pants. All right. So this is post posted on the forum by top war gamer along with a comment by top war gamer that that probably isn't a thing. But so this was posted by OK, so we're posting from techno Buffalo and then they're reposting from bollocks. We sure it's in their micro axis, micro axis or something like that. Anyway, the point is these numbers suggest that Sony's possibility of bankruptcy. Is seventy eight point four nine percent in the next two years, which I find both. Plausible and very, very difficult to believe, because you look at Sony's business practices over the last 10 years, they are one of the least consumer friendly companies in existence. Like trying to see in how many places they can stab themselves. Yes. Except for PlayStation. Well, even even PlayStation, like they are not necessarily they're not pushing the industry forward. No. PS4 was maintaining the status quo. The only reason they got so much applause for it was that Microsoft was busy firing off like shotgun rounds into their own feet at the same time. Like that is really interesting to see a battle between these two. I mean, PlayStation 4, some of the things that were supposed to be forward thinking about PS4 aren't even implemented out of the gate. Like the like no DRM on the HDMI output. Why is HDCP still there for gameplay? So he's like, yeah, we support Twitch live streaming, but you don't you can't archive the footage. So just live streaming. Yeah. Yeah. Look at us. We're Sony. We're cool now. Right. It's like they think popping your color is still cool. That Sony. I mean, the kind of crap they pull, whether it's on the consumer grade products or on the professional grade products like the ones that we use make they put consumers in a frame of mind where it's like, I might have to buy this right now. But as soon as I have another option, I will never buy any of your stuff. I was two months out of warranty on a button. OK, on a button on a hand grip for an eight thousand dollar camera and they refuse to deal with it. That was when I was in the service shop paying four hundred dollars for a firmware upgrade. This is the kind of crap that people don't want to deal with. So when that open source camera thing that Brandon's all excited about rolls around or even guys like Blackmagic allowing you to do things like use any SSD you want as media for the camera as newer innovative companies that have a more forward thinking way of doing business come around. I do see Sony going out of business. But that's what that brings in the Google argument that we talked about. They rode in on the shoulders of being open and now they're closing everything down. What Sony Google. Oh, OK. Yeah. Yeah. Because Sony was never open. No. Oh, so you think that someone like Blackmagic might gain popularity by being accessible, cheap, accessible, open, all that kind of stuff. They're so welcoming to it's always cyclical. Yeah. No, I know. I mean, like, you know, it's always cyclical. And I mean, Sony still has time to stop being buttholes. Yeah, that was my thing is like if they don't react at all, that would be the weirdest thing ever. Either way, they own enough they own enough patents and they have enough assets that I really don't see them. Like if they sit on patents, liquidate a few things and just kind of like chill and just try to develop things that are making money, then they'll probably be fine. So there was some interesting discussion in the in the thread that I thought was that I thought was really, you know, actually kind of informative. So people were discussing some of the buildings Sony's had to sell over the last couple of years. And the fact that they are in quite dire straits, the fact that they are losing money on each PS4 on what I personally believe is a completely dead business model, the traditional console. So I guess we'll see. Maybe it's I don't think they're going to go bankrupt. No, I don't think crazy things might happen. I think crazy things could happen. All right. I will let you handle this one entirely because you are pretty stoked on this. I'm actually super stoked. So it's it's short to actually put the premise out there. What it is is they're adapting USB so they can do 20 volts, five amps, which is essentially 100 watts. And it's bidirectional power and can still transfer data and it can the power can be renegotiated as needed. Now, didn't the bidirectional power thing? Basically, you could power your laptop, you could power your monitors. Those are two very common things that you could power with this because they're within that wattage range. Now, with bidirectional power, you could use a USB battery pack to power your laptop or you could use your laptop to power a USB battery pack. Which is actually really cool. So if your laptop's full battery and you plug into a wall, say, and you don't need more power, you can plug in a USB battery pack and shove it towards the USB battery pack. If your laptop's dying and you have a USB battery pack in your bag, you can plug in USB battery pack and shove the power towards your laptop and power it back up or just keep it running. Or like even something like a phone. It's like, I'm desperate. I need to get that document off my laptop. Oh, yeah. Yes. Success. It's actually just like anything. You can just be like, nope, stop the power. Put it here. And I'm really excited about the new kinds of peripherals that this will enable. So things like being able to run a full performance monitor off of a USB port is like pretty cool. And then if that monitor has a USB hub, you could also run a keyboard and mouse full power and flash drives and everything. Because that's that's a worry is if a keyboard doesn't have two cables coming from it, you often don't use the USB hub that's built into it because your flash drive is going to run super slow or your mouse won't really work super great or whatever. So if you can do one nice cable that runs all the power you could need, that would be sweet. Yeah, I'm pretty excited. I think that this does a couple of things. So one is it improves the flexibility of the user experience. And number two is it positions USB three as a legitimate alternative to Thunderbolt. I mean, Thunderbolt's already seen a bump to 20 gigabit, but USB three is going to be coming at 10 gigabit. And when you consider that it can carry this massive amount of power as well, being being able to use USB. I mean, USB three 10 gigabit is going to be lots of data for your monitor, for your keyboard, mouse, card reader and all that stuff to the point where you could have a dock that's just USB three. And no extra power even if you use low power peripherals and the whole thing just works. So it's pretty sweet. It's renegotiable, which renegotiated it is able to be renegotiated. Now, I wasn't entirely sure if that was like you use some type of UI or something to tell it what way you want the power to go or how exactly that works. Yeah, but it just says I'm guessing maybe like this device is lower power and this one has a ton. Let's go that way. I don't know exactly what it's saying there. But I believe you can use less or more. So if you have a device that doesn't have battery in it but needs to draw power, say a monitor, it doesn't have to take 100 watts. You could take the like 25 point whatever that it's probably going to be, which is pretty cool. All right. So this is a pretty short one. But as someone who is playing through Wolf Among Us and will be starting Walking Dead season two very soon, I'm pretty stoked on this. Telltale spills details on Game of Thrones as well as tales from the Borderlands, which I am significantly less excited about. I think everyone's like, yeah, a game of Thrones and more stuff. Yeah, that other thing that I mean, how was story a strong point for Borderlands? I mean, maybe Telltale can turn it into something interesting. But really, Borderlands story? I didn't play Borderlands 2, but I did play Borderlands 1. And I think Yahtzee probably put it best and the entire plot of Borderlands seems to be go shoot Jason Voorhees in a scrap yard. I mean, that sometimes you're stealing something, sometimes you're avenging someone, sometimes you're stealing something and avenging someone. But that's the entire game. And so, yeah, I don't know. Anyway, I love how they came up with the story for Borderlands 2 as well. It's like there was Vaal Hunters and they got a vault and they opened the vault. What are we going to do? Another vault. We need more vaults. All the vaults. I didn't mind the storyline. It was actually nice and funny. And I like the characters and stuff like that. It's just like that's not the reason why I think too many people bought it. All right. This is this is like the most predictable news of the year. AMD announces Mantle. Well, the Mantle in itself isn't necessarily delayed, but the battlefield for patch supporting Mantle has been delayed. It was supposed to come out in December, but I think it was like around Christmas time and I was like looking at the watch and I was like, hmm. So the devs are probably at home with their families and we don't have a patch yet. And there's probably like time after Christmas where they're still going to be. Everyone's going to be hung over on the first and everyone's going to leave early on the 31st. So like realistically and then like two days later, I got the email. It's like, yep, we're not going to make it. So they're they're saying January sometime now. I don't think we have a clear indication as to why it was delayed or exactly when it's coming. But I think the general consensus on the Internet is that it's because Battlefield 4 is such a broken mess in other ways that adding a new API to it is a low priority. I hope that's the reason. I hope that's the reason. I hope that it's not it's not difficult to implementing Mantle because I'm pretty excited to test Mantle actually, like really excited to test Mantle. Yeah, exactly. I hope there's no real bugs with Mantle. What I'm hoping is that it's going to be this huge thing and EA is going to try to use it as a huge purchasing blitz so that people will buy the game, which I'm going to be OK with. Yeah. Hopefully they fix everything when they do that. So if they bug fix it and hit it with Mantle at the same time and do a campaign around that, they can be like, we have four revitalized. Come buy the game now. Twenty two ninety nine or lower because prices don't seem to mean anything. Yeah. Buying games at launch seems to be just crazy these days. So you can get triple A titles for half price, usually two, three weeks after lunch. All right. Speaking of Battlefield 4, this was actually posted last week by Altisice and Battlefield 4 is now officially banned in China, even talking about it on their largest social media network. I can never remember what that bloody thing is called because I never actually go there. But it's kind of relevant. Why is it why? Why? Why? I don't know. I can't remember. We're probably pronouncing it wrong. We both we both. OK, so no downloads, no patches, no demos, no promotional materials, no news reports about Battlefield 4. China's Ministry of Culture issued a notice prohibiting all materials related to the game in any form, including game downloads. OK, I apparently wrote that twice, calling it a threat to national security and a form of cultural aggression. I think they're specifically talking about the China rising DLC. But Battlefield 4, including and I'm going to pronounce this wrong, but it's like San-Yi-Fu or something like that, like whatever the Chinese translation of Battlefield 4 is like that term is just completely banned across the board. Apparently people are still trading it back and forth using P2P networks, which is actually kind of epic, which is unexpected and unusual. I don't know why anyone would think that was going to happen at all. What? You can't just erase things from the Internet? That was a meme a while ago. When was that? Who tried doing that? That was awesome. I think it was the US. No, I thought it was some actress. She ordered that her pictures be removed from the Internet. Yeah, that was, um, um, I don't remember who it was because I didn't care. But I thought it was funny that she thought she could just do that. Was it like Beyonce or something? Maybe. I'll see if it was Beyonce. Seems like the kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Beyonce's publicist asks the Internet to remove unflattering Beyonce pictures. Hello Internet, can you remove these photos for me please? It's like, you know what? The cold hard truth is that and Beyonce is no exception, most celebrities are not particularly attractive. My favorite thing is America's Next Top Model. Not attractive. Yeah. Not easy to put makeup on. Yeah, I mean the thing about it is just that I'm not saying that like, you know, ugly people aren't valuable or something like that. I'm just saying that this unrealistic standard of beauty isn't real and like what we think these people look like has nothing to do with anything. Actually, I think South Park probably did it best. That's probably the strongest episode of South Park that I've seen in probably a couple of years. Have you seen the one where Wendy? I can imagine. Wendy goes after all the girls for negative body image because there's one girl that's getting picked on or something. She photoshops her to look unrealistic and amazing and then all the boys are all of a sudden like, oh wow, and everyone wants to date her. Even though in person she still doesn't actually look any different. She's still a normal person. But then that girl gets an attitude about it and then all the other girls photoshop themselves and turns into a big, I mean it's like, it's South Park, right? So everything goes from bad to worse. But the point of it is unrealistic and it's dumb. Okay, Haswell ePricing has been leaked and there are absolutely no surprises to anyone who has seen an Intel high-end CPU pricing structure in the last decade. There was people freaking out about this and I was like, oh, those are numbers that make sense and have been here before. Okay, so the i7 whatever 60x will be a thousand dollars just like it's been since the 965x or the 925x or whatever the original one was. That was a long time ago guys. The i, the whatever 30k will be around 600. Yes, and it's an 8 core now which is awesome. Both of them are rumored to be 8 cores. And the whatever 20 will be unlocked again just like ive and it will be around 400. It's like, and it's a 6 core now instead of a quad core. So this positions Haswell e to actually in my mind, I'm not disappointed in any way by this. The pricing is exactly where we'd expect it to be and it will position Haswell e as a legitimate performance upgrade to the mainstream socket for the first time in a couple generations now. I think this is great. If you're going for high-end malachores. Well, yeah, but where else is there going to be more performance? No, I know, but that's, yeah. And the clock speeds should be similar. I don't see any reason why they wouldn't be. I think, what one was it? I think they're a little bit lower, are they not? They might be. But then there's more cores. Anyway, this was posted by ViruzeHun on the forum and the original article is from TechPowerUp. But at any rate, we're looking at a Haswell refresh sometime in Q4 2014. So we still have to wait about a year for it and we'll also get an x99 chipset. So after several long years, x79 will finally be replaced. But I'm pretty excited about it. It seems like it should actually matter. Unlike Ivy Bridgey, quite frankly. DDR4 will be interesting here. DDR4 will be uninteresting. Well, it's going to be interesting because everyone that wants to move to this is going to have to buy new RAM. And it's probably going to be crazy expensive. So instead of, like for the last while, where people have been able to go like, okay, new motherboard, new processor, you now have to get new RAM. And with the problems that that one factory had, which made a lot of RAM like double in price, and the fact that it's going to be new type of RAM, I think it's going to be actually a really significant part of the cost of moving to that platform. Yeah, we've seen that time and time again. I mean, that and the early growing pains with the new memory technology are terrible. I mean, I don't know if any of you guys watching remember 680i and DDR2. Holy balls. You couldn't get four sticks of RAM running in that reference board unless you were like blessed by the spirit of GabeN. Like it just wasn't going to work. And I mean, it wasn't like the other platforms were in any better shape. And back when DDR3 first launched, I remember like I was building enthusiast grade systems for people at the time. And I'd be like, please buy DDR2. Please buy DDR2 because, you know, it's cross. Oh, wait, no, I'm thinking of DDR1 to DDR2. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Back when that transition was happening, I was like, yeah, please buy DDR1 because the DDR2 version of that board doesn't perform any better. And it's a lot more expensive. And yeah, this is super dumb because it's not stable at all. DDR3 had a lot of problems at the beginning, too. So I'm worried about this. I'm worried about it for a few reasons. The price thing, it working at all availability, all that kind of stuff. It might be pretty mature by then. So that's the thing. Maybe it'll have been available for them to work on for like over a year by that point. It's just going to be it's going to be an interesting thing that because a lot of there's a lot of good coming with the processor. A lot of people are stoked for the processor. But then there's a lot of not necessarily good coming from something else that I think people are not looking at as much as they maybe should be. And I'm worried about people that are going to adopt like immediately and jump right on it before anything real information gets out there and any like actual good stability testing and then get screwed because it costs them a fair amount of money. And then maybe they have this super unstable platform. So NASA was using Oculus and a Kinect to control a robot arm. It's actually super cool. And it kind of totally makes sense. Like it's one of the few NASA things that I haven't been like, holy crap, how did you think of that? It's like, oh, yeah, people have been pretty much doing that. That makes sense. Now we're going to do it in space. Why is this not playing? Go. Thank you. So they have this like triple fingered robot arm. And it goes pretty one thing I noticed is it doesn't seem to be like there's a little bit of latency. Here, hold on. We're going to pause and let you guys look at that. Oh, we missed it. Go back. Oh, we missed it. There we go. So head mounted display. I think what they mean to say is Oculus. Motion tracker. Kinect. Robotic arm. And I think what they mean is a MF and robotic arm. So. What's going on? There we go. So you see it's moving with them, but there seems to be slight delay. Well, it's a Kinect. Yeah. It's a giant piece of. Yeah. So old technology. Xbox one connects for PC. Yeah, this is probably pretty stoked for that. Yeah, I love the NASA sticker. Look at that block. Man, that's cool. It seems to either it doesn't have a ton of strength in the fingers or it like doesn't apply too much pressure automatically, I hope, because when he grabs, he closes his fist. Right. But he's probably just trying to get it to manage to register in motion. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Very cool. So actually, I think this ties in pretty nicely with a couple of the other things. So why don't we just go ahead and run through all of these before we start to talk about them? Does that make sense? Or do you want to do them one by one? Run through all of these? Yeah, because there's the other ones with the camera mounted Oculus. I guess that's kind of different. OK, well, I don't know. I don't know what else there's to say about this other than Microsoft. Can you please, please stop treating platforms other than Xbox like second class citizens? Can we please have support on the PC for the Xbox one controller? Not that I particularly think it's that great or better than the Xbox 360 controller. And can we please have connect to? I don't even care about the Xbox one controller as long as they keep selling Xbox 360. I just think it should work. Yeah, I agree. I think that if you're going to come out and say, yeah, we value PC gamers and PC gaming, and then, yeah, you know, the latest sort of thing we spent like, you know, years and years and all this money developing only for our console customers. It's kind of really weird. Yeah. I don't like that. It's kind of ridiculous. Where did those other ones go? What are you talking about? Did we already talk about them? They're in the topic. That's why I was confused as you were scrolling around. You were highlighting them almost. No, no, no, not that one. OK, what are you talking about? I'm talking about the camera mounted thing. Yeah, that's there. That's that? Yes. I thought they were somewhere else in the dock. No, because I found those while I was researching this one. Oh, OK. Well, at any rate, here's some other cool videos. If I could find the thing. So the thing verse thingy verse is the way the idea got. Here we go. All right. Let's check this one out. So make MakerBot thingy verse has this whole thing so you can mount a camera on the front of an Oculus Rift. Yeah. And if you scroll down a little bit and change what pictures displaying, they actually show you like exactly how it kind of works. And it's not super complicated. And you're essentially able to 3D print this yourself, which is really cool. And the idea is that it can see outward. So there's a short video here where they demo it with. So you can use a camera to create a virtual environment around you that you can then interact with using the Oculus. So because of the front camera, you actually have much finer detail in terms of what your hands are doing. So you could use gestures. You can pick things up and move them around like we're seeing in the demo video. And that's pretty much all there is in this demo video. Things don't get like real crazy until the second one here. So this was a guy who is using that 3D printed thing for his own little experiment. 3D printed one and added a rubber band, which is pretty simple, pretty innovative, if you ask me. All right. So here he's showing the setup. So he got a USB battery pack to power the Oculus Rift box. Then he has a USB extension for it to go to the computer. And he has HDMI, I believe, as well. Yeah, something like that. OK, let's not worry too much about that. You guys can check out the video if you want. As always, we're going to post the Wensho doc in the forum thread. So this is with him just using a Kinect. It's important to see him here in the corner here. Actually, I'm going to make this full screen so you guys can check it out. So there we go. So he's crouching and able to look at and under and interact with objects because he's using the Kinect for full body tracking. Again, it's Kinect one, which is a steaming pile of poo. And I wish that we had better stuff than that. And then using Oculus and the camera in order to be able to interact with his hands as well as well. Mostly mostly the hands. And just look around and stuff. This is cool. And you could even in theory use it to build a full 3D environment. If you had like the right other setup to go with it. Just think about how something like Parade our drone works. It's kind of similar. So it's got a camera. It knows where it exists within space. And it can see other drones for like an augmented reality game. Can you imagine if we had a couple like battery powered oculuses and we could run around this house holding like plastic laser guns and like shoot at each other. And the augmented reality could do things like, OK, here, hold on, hold on. Picture this in your mind. If we could do things like, you know, peek around a corner and like blast something and like the shards of the wall would fall away. Because if like, OK, if you could walk around the house and create the map first, you could even have a destructible environment. Maybe if you could walk around with a 3D camera and then like load it into something that you have like, say you wore a backpack. Yes. Do some type of processing. And that's where the HDMI cable goes. And then you could load a map which is mapped out of your environment and just like don't move things like don't be an idiot and don't move things. We're not that far away from like really exciting augmented reality gaming anyway. Like Linus Media Group headquarters, Counter Strike Lab. I know. I know. Anyway, what he's doing right now is he's using hand gestures. You can see it's not perfect at the moment by any stretch. But he's using hand gestures to do things like change the sky box to a different setting here. I'm going to go ahead and try to exit full screen mode. Please register my keystrokes. Wow. Brutal. He hates the keyboard. Someone disliked this video. What's wrong with people? Yeah. Small interaction radius from the 3D camera. Where does he change the sky box? Is it here? It's his right hand. Yeah. I don't remember. Oh, bollocks. OK. Well, whatever. You guys can check out the video. It's really cool. It doesn't have a ton of views, but it's definitely worth a look. I think we're getting pretty close to the end. We have Asus talking about their ROG G-Sync monitor while making a video about. It's rough to say they released like any information at all posted by Assassin on the forum. This is pretty much it. It's 30 seconds of. OK, so hold on. Hold on. Two seconds of ROG logo. OK. So that was about eight seconds of there's a G-Sync chip or some Nvidia chip. Haven't really clarified that in the video itself. OK, more ROG logo. So that was about another two seconds of ROG logo. Yeah, there was about two seconds of idea of the monitor and then about another three or a half seconds of that. Then there's like a couple seconds of a random robot. Then about another six seconds of more Asus logo. Get excited. Get excited. I am not excited. Because the problem is that ROG is gaming. No compromise is gaming. And I'm willing to compromise some things about the gaming experience to make my overall experience with the product better. So the ultimate gaming keyboard might use Cherry MX Red keyswitches. I don't care because Cherry MX Reds are unpleasant for me to type on and I'd type. I'm not a professional gamer and changing from Reds from blues to Reds would not make me in any noticeable way better. Yeah. So there you go, guys. I am really excited to see what kind of two and a half K IPS monitors with G-Sync we might see. Because that will be on my Christmas wish list for next year. And we don't know. It's going to be expensive. We don't know what this is, but I'm guessing it's probably 1080p 144. Yeah, that would be my guess. That's probably what it is. I think competition is going to drive pricing down on G-Sync faster than most people do. I think that it's not going to sell well until it reaches reasonably close to price parity with other monitors. And then it'll take off. It can't be like $170 more than a $270. Which is ludicrous. It's way too expensive right now. But the thing about it being way too expensive right now is that it doesn't even really exist yet. Yeah. I mean, people are paying an early adopter tax. Especially like when there's one store that has it. Yes. And they have it early. Like you're paying extra because that store has it. You're paying everyone extra for that. Yeah. Alright. The big one? Yeah. I posted this on Facebook earlier this week and people seemed to be pretty upset. I mean, the fact of the matter is I never bought Order of War. So I don't care about it for that. This is a specific version. I think you can still get a different Order of War on Steam actually if I remember correctly. But this is Order of War something. Yeah. Sure. Anyway. It's like a different vendor. It doesn't exist anymore. So I guess it doesn't matter. Hello! Oh man. So Valve actually removed Order of War from users' Steam libraries. Order of War challenge. Order of War challenge. Thank you. Now there are a couple of reasons for it. Actually, here. Do you want to handle this one? Essentially, yeah. And it looks like you can still get actual just Order of War for eight bucks on Steam. I think that one's still available. But if you go to the Steam page for Order of War challenge, it's like gone. And there's just discussions of people going like, how do I get a refund? So essentially what happened is Square Enix shut down the public servers because there wasn't that many people playing the game. There were still people playing the game, just not a ton of traffic, and it was costing them more to run the server than it should have, I guess. Because there wasn't enough people playing the game. It's not a subscription game. I wouldn't think you'd need that many servers if there's nobody playing it. And hopefully virtualize it so it can change and use a certain percentage. Because that's what modern people do. But anyways, they closed down the servers because of that, and it was an online-only DRM-based game. So if you shut down the servers, there's nothing for your DRM game to connect to, and you can't play it. So it's unplayable and was therefore removed from Steam. What a problem. I mean, Valve has said about their own titles that if they ever delete Steam or something, they will make the games available in a DRM-free form to anyone who bought them. However, Valve doesn't control what the other game developers who list their games on Steam do. Exactly, and with Valve terms of service, and I don't like it, but... Anyways, with Valve terms of service, you're leasing things. You don't own them. When you buy software, whether it's a disc or whether it's a digital copy, in every EULA, you are buying a license to use it. You are not buying it. You do not own it. There are certain DRM-free games where you can launch it no matter what, but when you're leasing a game that has a DRM that doesn't make it so you can launch it no matter what... And I'm not talking about open source, obviously. Or there's a few other things. Yeah, there's a few other things. There's freeware and open source and shareware. There's a lot of different types of things, but when we're talking about games, typically none of that applies. So, you're buying a license to use it. Yeah, so... it's just kind of gross because there's actually a lot of games right now that have online-only DRM, meaning that this is going to actually happen quite a bit eventually because we've... And you can't be like, oh, well, my Steam library looks the same as it did seven years ago. Yeah, this whole online-only DRM thing hasn't really been a thing that whole time. It's more recent, so we're actually going to see the fallout of this in the future, not now. We're starting to see it. And the author of the Hexis article brought up a really interesting point. What is my Steam library going to look like in 10 years? Because Square Enix might not be the most customer-friendly company, but there are plenty of other not-that-customer-friendly companies out there that might go, eh, you know what, it's too much work to keep the server up. It's too much work to send out a new patch that makes it DRM-free, so whatever. And like, I believe wargaming is attached to this, and if you look at it, World of Tanks, if they shut down the servers, all of that money that you've poured into the game is gone. Whether it was on tanks or whether it was on whatever. Anything that's not expendable, like ammunition. You see it right now as a permanent thing, but if they shut down the servers at some point, it's gone. And that's how that's going to work. I mean, with the way that most mainstream gamers move from one game to the next game... It won't matter too much. It won't matter to too many people, and I think that's why they did this for this particular title. I think if it had been StarCraft 1, where Blizzard was like, okay, we're shutting down the Battle.net servers, so, you know, pack up your CDs and mail them to us. We're no longer licensing this software. That would have caused outrage, but since it's a game that very few people were actually playing, I suspect most of the people asking for refunds were probably people who weren't playing the game anyway. And they're just trying to get money back. And they're just trying to get some money out of it. Yep, I actually think that's probably the exact same thing. Although there is going to be that group of people that were probably a fairly hardcore community, because reading up on this game, I never bought it, apparently was not super noob-friendly. Apparently it was actually kind of hard. So a lot of people didn't really play the time because of that, because it's not a super popular game, and it's really difficult. Right. So there was a few, as far as I can tell, again, I never owned it, so I don't really know. As far as I can tell, there was a smaller community of hardcore. I don't know. It's interesting. And it's going to become more and more of a problem. So a lot of people have been blaming everyone and everything that they possibly can. But it brings up the question, whose fault is this? Square Enix. Yeah, Square Enix. A lot of people have been slapping Steam for this. What? A lot of people have been slapping Steam for this. Okay, you people, you're wrong. If you look at... I've got a few links in here, which we'll be publishing the doc later. If you look at the store page, you can see tons of people complaining. If you look elsewhere, even on the store page, there have been people complaining to Steam and getting refunds from Steam. And if you look at the community message that Steam pushed out, it says directly... where's the community message? That's the store news link that I posted in there. If you look there, it's orders product update by Valve, order of war challenge servers shut down. The first line, message from Square Enix. And then a huge link about how, oh, we're sorry, and it's unfortunate, and we know there's people that still play the game, but we're shutting it down because it's not profitable anymore, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's a link to complain. And people are complaining to Steam and trying to get refunds from Steam. So I kind of actually feel bad for Steam. I'm not defending them to the end of the earth because they are... Steam is DRM in itself, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I just kind of accept it because Steam's actually pretty good with their own stuff. Valve, Valve. Valve, sorry. Valve is actually pretty good with their own stuff, which is really cool. But if you're freaked out, there are other options that still interface with Steam because you can go to something like the Humble Bundle Store. And if you look on the Humble Bundle Store, I think literally everything is Steam compatible. And then if you look even closer, there's games that will have DRM free boxes on there. So if you buy it there, you get a Steam key and you get a DRM free download. Yeah. So things like... and not even just like crappy games, like Trying 2, for example. Trying 2, DRM free download. And then there's Legacy, which while I believe it's indie, I don't actually remember off the top of my head, but it's still a huge game, DRM free. Like there's... yeah. Lots of them are. So there's options out there and you can still use Steam if you still like that platform. Also, if you're going to use something like GOG Gaming or whatever, you can do that whole Steam add to game list thing, which works really, really well. And it's completely fine. And Steam's not going to take that away from you because that makes it a little bit bad. It's not going to take the LordGayBenzName and Dane or any of his trademarks that he owns. Yeah. So like, I don't know. I would stop the... stop the Steam hate because it's not their fault. Yeah. Their policies allowed it to happen, but it happened anyway. And it happened with a game that you probably knew was online only DRM. So it would have happened anyway, and you wouldn't have been able to use the game with Steam all this time. Well, you could have done the add to thing. Right. And that actually... that even works with Nvidia GameStream. I was playing Alice Madness Returns, and even though I have a disc copy that's not a Steam key, and I was like... I was installing it. And I was like, what is this? Stone Age technology. Ancient. It was the first time I'd used my optical drive like last calendar year. I don't have one. Basically an entire year. But I installed it and it took forever too. I was like, what? This is stupid. Anyway, so I installed the game and I just added it and then GameStream worked just like that. That's really cool actually. Even though it's not a GeForce Experience title and it wasn't properly fully integrated with Steam. Right. Anyway, I think that's pretty much it for the show, guys. Do you want to talk about changes to Build Logs of the Week? So last week in the after party we did a massive poll and tried to get everyone to get ideas together. And I posted a sticky in the Build Logs section which was basically asking like, what the heck do you guys want to do with Build Logs? Because it's not going to work this way and I really want to keep it going because you guys care and we care and all that kind of stuff. But it's become unfeasible with the size of the forum now and how fast everything goes for us to actually see every Build Log that's coming in. It's becoming really, really difficult to sort through the ones that have been actually finished this week. That's been really hard because we see people posting this week and I can see that timestamp. But it's really hard to and people are commenting on ones this week that have been done a long time ago. And it's been really hard to actually check which ones are specifically done this week. So we've come up with a conclusion which is going to take a bit of work from Mr. Wizard and myself, probably mainly Mr. Wizard because it's kind of crazy and confusing. But it is coming. It is not here yet, though. So, yeah, we don't have Build Logs of the Week this week. That's a really high number. But it's yeah, it's coming and it's going to be actually pretty cool. And the Build Logs forum is not going to work, is probably not going to work exactly the same as how the rest of the forum works. Because it's going to work on this interesting, we're trying to see how this will work, but it's going to work on an interesting sorting system where you can see what has been finished and what is in progress based on forced tags that everyone has to implement and use and change and stuff. And that will help us with some new forum features or site features that are potentially coming in the future as well. Yeah, there's like there's a bunch of changes coming to Build Logs, huge changes coming to Build Logs. So, yeah, the Build Logs of the Week changes thread, I guess I can just lock it now. I hadn't locked it yet because we knew we weren't going to be able to implement the ideas immediately. So I had an original end date of Wednesday. I just kind of let it spill forward. But we kind of we kind of know what we're doing now. If that idea doesn't work, there's a few other ideas that we're going to try. We've been in business for a year and that's the conclusion. We kind of know what we're doing now. Kind of. Not entirely sure if it'll work. But yeah, there's a bunch of ideas and there's a bunch of fallback ideas and we're good with that now. So thank you, everyone, for your contribution of ideas. And that's about it. No Build Logs for this week, but they will be coming as soon as possible. No confirmed date. I'm going to pull an EA on this one. Thank you guys. Thank you guys so much for watching the show today. I'm sorry we didn't have a special guest for you guys. But you know what? Hit me up on Twitter and let me know if you would like us to do maybe every other week with a guest as opposed to having a guest all the time. I mean, we we love taking your feedback and shows are something that we are going to be focusing on in 2014. I actually had some people asking me what the plan is for Linus Media Group for 2014. I still want to do a daily show. I'm not sure if it's going to stick anymore. So there's that. Developers, developers, developers. No, no, no, we're not hiring more developers. We are. We are going to try to hire one to two more people. So that's going to be one of the things for this year. We are going to continue to focus on improving our production values. So at some point I will get that that that thing going where I ask you guys to help me buy a bunch of equipment because we are going to need it, especially if we want to build better sets for our shows. Like, I hate this. This is stupid. It's the boxes behind this. A lot of them are on like angles and some of them are actually the side of the box. Not like this is this is the width of that box. I know we need like we need proper set pieces. We need to be able to like paint the wall. I mean, part of the reason there are boxes back there is because all the walls in this place are horrible colors. We need to do some painting. So so that's that's another thing that we're going to be doing. And I think there was one other thing that oh, yeah, and we are going to continue to develop the website as a community site as opposed to just a forum. But don't worry, the forum will still be awesome. So there you guys have it. Thank you for watching the WAN show today. We will see you guys in two weeks. No WAN show next week. We will be at CES. Last week you teased people saying that there might be a WAN show. If we can find a way to do it. I don't know. I don't think we'll be able to. I mean, if we could. Here, let me fire up. I have your calendar on my calendar, right? Yeah, if not, I can load up mine right now just in case. You should have mine. You should be able to just turn it on. Yeah, it's on. In theory, I don't have anything in that spot. We'll see. Maybe if we did a later one. OK, so stay tuned on Twitter. Atlinestech on Twitter. We don't know, but we'll try. Or follow on Facebook. I have more Facebook likes than Twitter followers now. Isn't that crazy? Is the forum getting close to your Twitter? Yes. Twitter has actually really slowed down in terms of growth. The community aspect of LinusTechTips.com, Facebook, and even Google Plus is closing in pretty fast. I think I have like 22,000 plus ones, whatever those are, on Google Plus. Likes. Are they likes? I don't know, man. Whatever it is. Twitter I like because it's really easy to interact with people one on one. Whereas even on Facebook, the way that conversations are handled is terrible. On YouTube, the way that comments are handled is still terrible. Half the people will ask me a question and there's no reply button because they don't have their accounts merged or whatever else. I'm just like, hey, man, I actually saw your comment. I was poised to reply to you. I couldn't because there's no reply button. I hate Twitter. Almost every single time if I'm going to respond to someone, there's no way that character count is enough. Yeah, that's the best. Unless I'm just like, go to the forum. Which usually I would like to actually answer someone. Because if I'm sitting at a computer, I'm not live in the show and I can take way longer to explain what I'm talking about. And I've had a few people where I'm just like, dude, just PM me. And he's ended up PMing me and then I can write my short essays about it. And you probably drove a forum sign up at the same time. All right. Peace out, guys. Bye.