 Okay, WAN Show time again, so I've got a terrific story for you guys if you're not tired of my excuses for why this show is always late. 25 minutes. My favorite thing ever is that like every time you're gone we're always five minutes early. Well, I was fixing a problem that maybe had you been more on the ball and proactive, we wouldn't have had. You're the one that insisted on having the computer streaming that had a zap strap around the heatsink so that it could keep running. That zap strap is incredibly reliable technology. Plastic never fails. Plastic holds together. Plastic never fails? Unless UV. Then plastic fails very quickly. So guys, basically what happened is last week we had Paul and Kyle, formerly of New Egg TV, on and we were dropping frames like mad. It was no good. It was terrible during the stream. So I realized about half an hour before today's stream was supposed to start that we had a guest skyping in this week. We hadn't built the computer yet. We hadn't actually swapped out the CPU. We had done nothing to make the computer actually work and not drop frames all over the freaking place. So I actually did a motherboard CPU RAM swap, reinstalled all the capture cards, reconfigured XSplit because all the capture settings are messed up because they're all in different slots. They've got different IDs now because when you have multiple capture cards, it'll arbitrarily... Well, this is number one and this is two and this is three. So if that changes, XSplit doesn't remember anything. We had to redo the color. We've actually... This room has someone's chair in it and desk now because we've added another body here at Linus Media Group. So we had to move the entire thing. It's a miracle we're live at all. But of course, what I really meant to say is... I'm sorry. And thank you for tuning in and we're going to get on with the show now. So we've got a lot of great topics today. Windows 10. There's a technical preview. You can go ahead and download it. We'll talk a little bit about what's new in Windows 10 or more specifically, what is old and not the new thing that we hated anymore. Also, Tesla is pretty sure that when they show you the D, you are going to want it. I do. I want the D. From what I can see so far, just like the head peeking out, I want the D. Wow. That's the picture they've lodged. Okay, why don't you just go ahead and talk about our other topics? Scott Wasson will be live with us very soon, so we'll have him on the show. From the tech report? Yeah, man. Samsung will be... Reporting on the tech?...creating 14 nanometer chips for AMD, which Scott Wasson will probably talk about. Yeah, I would think so. In fact, I think... On the tech report. That's going to be a great topic for us to pick his brain about. Project Aura will have hotswap modules with a Google Play-like store where you'll be able to buy all their stuff super easily, and you'll even be able to probably swap out their battery with hopefully turning off your phone. Think of Project Aura kind of like a multi-bit screwdriver. You see, I could have kept using the screwdriver while I swapped component. Well, okay, not quite. Okay, Project Aura, better than a screwdriver. Better than a multi-bit screwdriver. Except when you need a screwdriver. Let's roll the stupid intro. Alright, so we had no audio for the first part of this, and I'm supposed to be introducing our sponsors for today, so... No intro audio at all. No intro audio. Oh, what? No, I had it. Apparently, they didn't. Oh. I could hear them. That's weird. Well, at any rate, Dollar Shave Club! Save time, shave money with Dollar Shave Club! You get high-quality razors delivered directly to your door, and later on in the show, I'll tell you more about it if you don't already know how amazing it is. Also, Squarespace, the fast, easy, cost-effective, and... I guess easy is really the big one. Way to make your own beautiful website, whether it's a blog, or a portfolio, or a store. They're adding more functionality all the time, always making it easier to use, and you can get 10% off with offer code Linus. So big thanks to Dollar Shave Club and Squarespace for sponsoring today's show. Look at this, look how fast I can move them around. Oh my god. I can dance all day, I can dance all day, look at my sponsors, sponsors! Anyway, let's go back to... So apparently they did have audio and people were just being trolls. Twitch chat! Horrible. Alright, so guys, we're not going to waste too much time, because we told Scott he was going to be joining us at around 5 o'clock, and it is now 5 o'clock. That was supposed to be half an hour into the show, but the show just started. So, Scott, you're live! Welcome to the show! Want to do a quick introduction to who exactly this Scott guy is and why he's on their screens? So am I giving the introduction, or are you giving the introduction? I will introduce you. Okay, so Scott is basically like a gray hair of the industry, you know? I would have called him a gray beard, but I don't think he can grow a beard any more than I can, so... It's not good. Yeah, so guys, Scott is one of the most respected tech reviewers, tech writers in the industry. He's been doing it a long time, like a really long time. Sorry, Scott, I'll stop with the old stuff. But he's been doing it a long time. You're not wrong. He's extremely experienced, and basically if you wanted to get on a video call with someone and kind of, you know, hey, can you talk technical to me? That kind of thing. You would want Scott on your Skype. So we're going to hit some pretty hard tech topics, and you guys can find him over at thetechreport.com. They have lots of great articles about, I think, Furbies. See, right when you said it, Fur, I thought you were going with Fur Me, and I was like, that's a little old. So I thought you were going in with the old jokes again. I was like, that's not that old, though. I was like, I don't know. Nope, Furby. 3DFX SLI coverage. I can get a GeForce 4 review if you want to read it. There you go. See, GeForce 4, to give you some idea, so back in the GeForce 4 days, I was still looking at like the local computer paper and trying to figure out what an AGP was. And you were reviewing graphics cards. So, Scott, why don't we kick things off with actually something that we didn't really put in your guest section, as far as I know. Have you heard the rumor? Have you heard the news? Sort of news. We're not sure. Rumor right now about AMD potentially partnering with Samsung to produce 14 nanometer chips. Yes. Yeah, and you know, we wrote a story about this, and we asked AMD to comment, and I don't think they got back to us. So I'm not sure it's confirmed, but it makes sense for a couple reasons. You know, AMD gets a lot of chips made at its own former fabs by a company called, run now by a company called Global Foundries. And GloFo, as I like to call them, and they don't like that, but they've had some trouble getting to the next process node, shrinking their chips down. And they are part of a common platform alliance. They share technology with IBM and Samsung. And so these guys kind of work together to make things go. And an unusual thing happened earlier this year. GloFo licensed Samsung's 14 nanometer process from them. And we think that probably I think probably AMD was kind of behind that. They didn't like GloFo's progress toward getting to that node. And Samsung had made it or gotten close. And so there was a sort of a technology transfer. But now it sounds like maybe Samsung's going to just make chips directly for AMD. So here's here's kind of an interesting thing. This would be the first time in even as long as you've been covering tech that that someone that someone might potentially be at the same level as Intel for an extended period of time. I mean, Intel's they're not that close to our way. Excuse me. So they're on 14 now, but they're not that close to 10, are they? Like we just heard about them announcing a 10 nanometer fab that they're building in. Yeah, in Israel. But that means that AMD, Apple, Samsung could all be on the same process node as Intel for a little while here. Well, it's yeah. The hard part about that is that the other guys are still talking about 14 and Intel has been shipping 14 in volume for a couple of months. And so that talking about it and getting there are different things. I think Samsung has done some test chips and things like that. I'm not completely up on the status of that. But my sense is they're not yet shipping 14 nanometer stuff in volume, at least not the types of chips that we're talking about them building for AMD. So yeah, it would be nice to think that everybody could catch up with Intel. But I don't know. It hasn't happened for a long time. And everybody's roadmap always says they're going to and then they never do it. When was the last time you might you might remember this? Wow, I don't know. Like somewhere around 90 nanometers, maybe. Oh, so that was back in what Prescott days? Yeah, I mean, you remember the Intel opinion for stuff wasn't great. And their 90 nanometer process was somewhat leaky. So it consumed a lot of power. They had a chip architecture problem, too, but they had a lot of problems at the same time. And manufacturing was one of them. AMD had some goodness going on with copper interconnects and silicon on insulator and things like that. And so there was there there was a time there when it wasn't entirely clear, like it has been for the past four or five years, that Intel was in the league compared to everybody else. So speaking of the kinds of chips that AMD would want someone like Samsung to build at 14 nanometer, there's rumors afoot of a new FX replacement. Finally, a legitimate high performance chip from AMD to replace the aging FX lineup. So is that what we're looking at here? And if so, any idea when? What do you think? Well, I think the rumors are about APUs or SOCs. And if you look at the time frame involved, it's got to be 2015. Right. So if it's 2015, I'm not sure if that's soon enough for AMD to have a new core out. But we know they have one in development. The ARM version of it is called the K-12 and X86 is I think called Zen. And that's a new big core that my sense is that AMD is going to try to build something that will compete with the Haswells and Skylakes and whatever Intel has out by the time it's you know, it ships a product. I think we may be looking at 2016 for that core. But I expect that when that core is ready, it will go into APUs and SOCs. And so Samsung's making them then you could have assuming that Samsung does a good job at 14 nanometers, you could have a nice convergence of Samsung's process tech with the new CPU architecture from AMD. So tell me something. I mean, we've seen so just a just a brief explanation for the viewers of how the cost structure of a CPU actually works. It's all about how much how many dies you're going to get out of a wafer. So wafers are pretty much an industry standard size. And if you build a CPU that maybe you put mountain loads of cash on and you put a ton of cores in it and you make one that's really big, ultimately, you have to buy a lot of these wafers in order to end up with X number of dies out of that wafer out of which some of them will be good and some of them will be corrupted and won't be usable. Some of them will be partially usable. So maybe they'll have less cash or they'll be clocked lower or whatever else the case may be. So the way that processor manufacturers optimize for cost is they try to shrink all aspects of the chip so that they can fit more chips onto a wafer. So AMD, by being a process node or even two behind Intel, is at a huge disadvantage because they get far fewer chips out of these wafers. So their costs are inherently much higher if they reached process node parity and AMD was willing to take the kinds of margins that they've been taking on their CPUs for quite some time. Scott, do you think they could build a CPU? Let's say not an APU. Let's say an FX CPU because we've seen Intel spending so much of their die space on graphics. If AMD built a CPU at the same process node as Intel and crammed that much more logic into it, could we see a legitimate leap forward in CPU performance, the likes of which we haven't seen in four or five years? That would be nice. It would be nice if there were more value delivered by AMD, right? But I think the reality is that if you look at the way that the chip manufacturing stuff works, none of what you said is wrong. But if you look at like Intel's margins on their financial reports, it's like 62% or some crazy number. AMD's cost structure doesn't have to be as awesome as Intel's for them to be very profitable. They can be a node or two behind and they can have a relatively larger chip that they're manufacturing. But if it costs them $60 to make a chip and they sell it for $200 and it costs Intel $40 to make the same chip they sell for $200, it's still not bad business to be in. And the thing is that and that goes up too, right? With opterons and things like that can be thousands of dollars. And I remember one time I was talking with quizzing a guy with AMD about this about, you know, but you're behind on process node and you know, those are really big chips. And one time they were taking two opterons and putting them in the same socket on one substrate, you know, and I said, that's, you know, that's really costly, isn't it? And he said, yes, maybe. But every one of those opterons that we sell for $1200 is good business for AMD. And so I think the key for AMD is to be able to offer a product that is a credible alternative to Intel that has attractive performance and power consumption. And they don't have to win to be winning people's business and making money. And I think that's the hope with the new core. Go ahead. AMD hasn't been doing exactly amazing with those profit margins there. Not even that long ago they were doing seriously not great. And then with the new console launch, things have been turning up a little bit. So I do agree with you. That is probably true, but it couldn't help getting onto a lower node and having more. You mean it couldn't hurt? Couldn't hurt. Couldn't hurt. There we go. Couldn't possibly help them. Right. It's always good if you can get to a new process node. And one thing that the AMD kind of had to take a hit when they made their last transition because they went to from a 32 nanometer process node designed for CPUs on the last generation. When they brought out Kaveri, they went to a 28 nanometer process node that's really more tuned for low power, high density GPU type applications. And as a result, they got less clock speed on the CPU portion of their APU than they had in the prior generation. And really what you want is you want a process tech that will give you all the benefits that you can get out of better process tech, including faster switching speeds so you can get to higher clocks. And I think with Samsung going to 14 nanometers and going to FinFETs or Intel calls them Tri-Gate transistors, that there's a good possibility that there could be a nice increase in switching speed at higher power levels, which could translate into performance as well. But honestly, I think architecture is their biggest need right now. I don't think it's process tech. Process tech is always something you have to be on top of, but there are multiple options, different foundries they can go to. And they're exercising that by going to Samsung. But what they need is a good architecture to go along with it. Well, I hope we see that. I would love to see someone build a balls to the wall CPU again. The 5960X isn't enough for you? Okay, the 5960X is pretty cool. Okay, yes, the 5960X is pretty cool. I'd like to see two of them fighting it out though, right? Yes, I'd like to see it not $1,000 there. Right. You'd like to see that on the consumer platform and have something even more badass on the enthusiast platform as well. Right. Well, like Intel did, it's the EDRAMP external cache, L4 cache, on some chips that it sells. And it's faster for graphics that way, but you can't buy that in a desktop chip that's socketed. That's the type of thing that it's not a huge performance win on the desktop, but it's really cool. And Intel doesn't bring it to the desktop because they don't have any competition there. That's the type of thing that gets pulled into the desktop because it's cool technology. And if they're fighting it out with the strong competitor. Yeah, and I mean, I love Intel and Nvidia as much as anyone, but I think that we've seen enough times throughout history, even as long as I've been paying attention to this stuff, they're pretty content to sit and wait for AMD to make a move before they drop price or before they release something more competitive or whatever the case may be. Yeah. Yeah. Well, like Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge has well, you know, for like a year after they were released, they kept the exact same price. And it used to be like every three months you've got a price cut. Yeah. That was cool. There was always something to talk about, you know? Yeah. It's a lot more exciting when there's two competitors instead of one. Pricing has been a little bit nuts since Maxwell dropped. I've seen 780 Ti's like a hundred or two hundred dollars below 980s just because so many people are glomming on 980s. Speaking of people glomming on to 980s, I had a chat with someone at an undisclosed retailer. And they let me know that the GTX 970 Strix, the ASUS card, you reviewed that one, right, Scott? Yeah. Yeah. So they have 300 back orders on that one SKU. Wow. Yeah. They were telling me they've never seen anything like this since 8800 GT. Wow. I believe it. I mean, it makes sense. We haven't had this type of combination of there's a lot more performance at a really nice price for a long time. You know what's funny is, again, undisclosed, not going to say who it was, but I talked to someone at Nvidia prior to the launch when I was when I was having the prices given to me so that I could so I could make my video very last minute, that whole thing. But that's neither here nor there. So they told me the prices and I kind of went, wow, well, GTX 970 is the disruptive one. And he's kind of like, what do you mean? The 980 is going to have the performance crown. And I kind of went, well, yeah, but the 970 is only cut down by what? 20 percent. And it's going to overclock like a bat out of hell. Yeah. And it's like almost two hundred dollars cheaper. What a fantastic card. And he kind of goes, oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I guess you mean disruptive in that way. Yeah, it's amazing. They focus on the performance crown at these companies a lot. And that's not always what people want to buy. You know, they want to. Because you can get certain cars that are better than 980, but 980 is at a really good price for what it is. So people are buying it and then 970 is an even better price for what it is. So more people are buying that. Pretty interesting. Yeah. So go ahead. But everyone's way too polite. I know. I'm just going to talk over everyone from now on. OK, so 980 and 970, you had uncovered a little while ago. We thought that the only real difference between 980 and 970 was how many how many SM's that they had. But you had found a bit of a disparity in their performance that you couldn't really explain up till now. So can you maybe talk about what people should choose for 4K gaming? Because I've gotten a lot of questions about this in the comments on our 980 performance overview, in PM's on the forum and threads I've seen posted on the forum. Is 970 OK for 4K? You know, that's a tough question because is 980 OK for 4K? I was going to say is it OK for 4K is kind of an interesting question right now. I mean, I kind of think you want to. For running everything like the high end games that we use for testing at high quality settings, one of anything that's out there right now isn't entirely adequate. You can play some games and you can tweak things to where a 970 or a 980 will run in 4K, but it's not always a great experience. So it's weird because there is this architectural difference that we didn't understand before between the 970 and the 980. The 980 has both of them have the same number of ROPs, which determines pixel throughput. And that's really important for 4K because you've got a lot of pixels. But it turns out that when you cut the number of SM's like they do on the 970, you actually lower the pixel throughput of the card effectively because the SM's help determine the pixel throughput in a way that we didn't understand until after our 980 review when a fellow reviewer, Damian Hardware.fr, sent me a little note and said, hey, see that benchmark you result you got where it was a lot lower fill rate on the 970? Yeah, here's the explanation. I did a little post about it, but it's totally his work. He figured out by asking very specific questions of Nvidia, you know, why there was actually less capacity for pixel throughput on the 970. That said, I've been playing around with overclocking 980s and 970s a little bit. And you can get back a lot of what you lose by taking your SM's away by turning up clock speeds. And what else I've got right over here is a 4K monitor from Acer that is G-Sync capable. And I'm finding out that even though in a lot of cases frame rates seem a little bit marginal on a 970 or a 980 with a single card, that when you have G-Sync and you're in those situations where it's like, you know, 40 some FPS, sometimes that's good enough when the monitor is updating right when a frame was ready. So I'll tell you this. I actually did my Acer 4K G-Sync video really differently from how I've typically looked at either monitors or video cards from a performance perspective before. I did it no numbers because we lack the high speed camera equipment that we would need to properly quantify G-Sync in a way that would be meaningful to viewers. And F-Cat's not working for it. And basically the thing about G-Sync is it's more of a feel than a number right now in terms of the equipment that we have to test it on our side anyway. So the way I did it was instead of having Fraps on and tuning my game settings so that it was running at solid FPS, and I knew that, I sat down and I cranked the detail on my games without any FPS counter and then I reduced it until it felt like I was playing at 60 FPS smooth. Then I all tabbed out, fired up Fraps and had a look at my frame rates and I discovered the exact same thing that you did. I was getting dips down to 42, 43 and that felt butter smooth to me. Yeah, and G-Sync is great for that. So I don't know, that's kind of a tough decision in terms of pricing because those 4K G-Sync monitors are not cheap, right? Yeah, well there's one model. So speaking of two competitors being better for excitement and pricing, Yeah. Acer is the only show in town. Yeah, I think Acer is supposed to have a 4K G-Sync monitor out before the end of the year though. Okay, so sometime in the next three months, so we'll see. But even not 4K G-Sync monitors can be extremely expensive still. Yep. We do need to see a little bit more market flooding until it's going to be consumable for a lot of different people. Okay, so Scott, sorry go ahead. G-Sync is awesome technology but it's not a good deal right now. So speaking of not a good deal right now, there's so much confusion right now about AMD's project FreeSync. Maybe you can clarify this because honestly I've even found myself getting a little bit lost in the misinformation about it. So there's a lot of people saying, okay, it's built into DisplayPort now, we're just going to see it built into the next generation scalers, and we're going to have support for FreeSync across the board. There's a lot of other information out there, some of which is coming from AMD themselves saying, well actually hold on a second, it's only a small subset of our graphics cards that are actually going to support the tech, and it's not necessarily just going to be part of DisplayPort, and Nvidia is coming out saying, yeah, we're not going to support it, it's not just part of DisplayPort. What the hell is FreeSync? Well, FreeSync is AMD's project to create a variable refresh monitor. There's a VASIS spec called AdaptiveSync, AdaptiveDashSync, I think, that is something that AMD kind of shepherded through as an extension to DisplayPort in order to enable project FreeSync. I don't think it's a mandatory part of the spec, but it's an extension. It may be mandatory eventually, but that doesn't mean that a monitor needs to have all of the capabilities to support variable refresh. AMD is working with monitor makers and with the scaler manufacturers to enable a variable refresh capable set of hardware, set of displays, multiple products from different companies. And what we really haven't seen yet is a functioning prototype or anything like that. So if you remember, G-Sync was demoed in September 2013. I think we talked at that event, right? And then Nvidia said, oh, it'll be out in March and then summer and fall, and it didn't come out until really the end of summer or fall. Yeah, I mean, I had plans with Nvidia to potentially do like a wine tasting style event in Q1 where they wanted monitors to be available. And we were going to have members of our community come and do like a blind taste test type thing. That was going to be cool. And that was going to be like a super cool idea. And then it didn't really work. Yeah. Nothing ever happened because there was nothing. Yeah. So I think the first step or probably the next step, I hope, is that we get to see a working prototype. But AMD is saying that those are on the way. And then they're saying early next year for the first products. And, you know, these are product schedules. That's the best case, I think, when you hear that. But it could happen. And, you know, the other question is how much cost will add to a monitor to support this feature and do it correctly? And, you know, the path that Nvidia has taken, they developed their own scaler completely from scratch, as far as I can tell, instead of working with the scaler manufacturer. AMD is much more collaborative here. So presumably, you know, those scaler guys already have built all the things that you find in a normal monitor's scaler, and they only have to add variable refresh capability. Right. And presumably, they might be able to do things, you know, reasonably well, reasonably quickly without too much trouble. The other thing is Nvidia's hardware is built off of what's called a FPGA, field programmable gate array, which is an expensive chip that you can program to do almost anything. And that's usually what you use in development. But then you make the custom chip or an ASIC that actually, like, does this function and it's much lower cost. And I think that probably the products that come to market from the scaler manufacturers are, I don't know for sure, but I'd expect them to be ASICs. And if they're not in the first generation, eventually they should be. Because I think what everybody wants is for the cost premium to go down. And that needs to happen because of more competition. It needs to happen because they use cheaper hardware. And it needs to happen because there are more suppliers. Fifty bucks is in my mind for a 24 inch monitor, what the adder needs to be in order for me to really tell people, guys, it officially doesn't make sense to buy a monitor without some kind of adaptive refresh rate. And I think people aren't going to mind waiting for FreeSync to come in because it's not 50 bucks right now. So it is a very hard decision to make. And a lot of people are going to keep monitors for a very long time. So making a monitor decision sometimes isn't that, oh, sweet, a new graphics card came out. Let me upgrade. It's more of a, OK, it's been six years, seven years. Maybe I should reset all my monitors. Yes. And, you know, I think what you want to see is for AMD to succeed and for their stuff to get out there in the market. And then at some point for this to become ubiquitous. And what I mean by that is Nvidia has to cave and say, OK, we're going to support it. If you buy this monitor, you can you can do it, but adaptive refresh with the Radeon on the G force. But I don't think Nvidia has any interest in making that easy for AMD. So they're going to wait and take advantage of the fact that they're first because they they built G sync and they they did it first and they invested. And they're going to wait and see. And the other thing that I'm not really clear on is if you look at that G sync module that Nvidia built, it has a bunch of RAM on it as well as an FPGA. Yeah. And I think it's like a look aside buffer and they need it every once in a while when they don't get another frame from the GPU in time. They've got to refresh the display because it's time. So they have to store a frame in the buffer. And I don't know whether AMD will be able to come up with an approach where that memory is not required, but the same functionality is available. It might be because they did they did show variable refresh on a laptop display, which is a little bit of a different type of setup at CES and the little demo they showed me. But whether or not they can pull that off is going to determine the cost, too. And I'm still waiting to hear details. So do you think Nvidia went with such an expensive solution just because they were in a hurry? Yeah, definitely. And in fact, if I would talk to Tom Peterson, who's the engineer at Nvidia who sort of spearheaded G sync and said something interesting to me between the time in in March or so when they were supposed to launch G sync and the time in the summer when it was really imminent. I spoke with him and he said, you know, we really had some problems we had to work out, which is why we had the delay. And thank goodness it was an FPGA because they had to change the way that it worked fundamentally. And if it had been a custom chip, they would have had to build another spin on the chip. Right. I think it also like of course they wanted to hurry, but I think it also comes into Nvidia seems to like doing things by themselves in a fairly locked down ecosystem and AMD is that whole. Let's all come together and help everyone and we'll do it as one big unit. And those are two extremely different styles. And I fully understand the style that Nvidia went with because it's their style. Makes sense. Yeah, they do tend to do that, don't they? I was actually, you know, they also tend to make money every quarter. Yeah. You know, it's hard to it's hard to I want openness. I prefer openness and I like sometimes like AMD's approach. We're a hardware maker and we're not a software maker and we're going to be open. But they are not invest. They didn't come up with G sync. They didn't. They're just sort of doing the me too thing with FreeSync. Nvidia give them credit. They invested in this and they want to get money back. And I understand that I'm sympathetic to that even though I think ultimately I hope everybody in the industry wants the final destination for this to be that you can plug any monitor into any graphics card and get variable refresh. That is exactly what we want. I mean, actually, I should clarify something. Last week on the show, speaking of Nvidia being closed, I did a super pissed off rant for about five minutes about how the shield controller only works on GeForce PCs right now. Did you know about this, Scott? Yeah, you know, I, they're fixing that. They're fixing it. I got an email at the end of the show last week. Yeah. Yo dog, sorry. I was driving. I couldn't reply. We're fixing it. It's coming. It'll work on any PC. Please stop talking about this. Please stop talking about this. But you know, you got to call them out on stuff like that because you don't want the standard to become that we're all just kind of in our different silos and GeForce is its own thing and Radeon is its own thing. Can you imagine a controller that only worked on PCs with a certain brand of graphics cards? I mean, we'd be, never mind consoles going away and converging with PCs. PCs would be converging into consoles at that point. New Intel compatible keyboards. Oh no. Oh no. That would be bad. That's terrifying. Yeah. But you know, if it happened to one thing, it would leak into all the things. I know. It's horrible. All right. The Samsung plant. Sorry? The same or not Samsung plant, but Samsung was starting AMD development. I guess we did. We kind of talked about that already. Why don't we just, hey Scott, which of our topics under the guest topics are you, are you most down to talk about? Do you remember? Did you even look? I am, I am easy. Whatever you guys want to talk about. If you want to talk more graphics, if you want to talk any of the other stuff out there, then I'm happy to do it. I want to talk about that 17,000 Mac botnet that got discovered. Oh, wait, that's impossible. Macs don't get viruses. No, no, no. Surely Steve Jobs said they don't get viruses. This isn't a virus. They're just all be trying to be friends. Right. Macs are more, it's a more friendly operating system. This is the new social network. It's joining a botnet. You're being social with other computers and trying to help everyone to one goal just might not necessarily be your goal. Or really anyone who's not sort of the one dude who set it up. Don't worry about it. It's cool. It's not a virus. So, okay. Do you want to do a quick, do you want to do a quick rundown of what the heck happened here? So this was a post from gizmodo.com. I'm just going to check this up on my screen while Luke gives us a rundown and then we'll, we'll move into the back door is called Mac dot back door dot I worm because it has to be stealthy and use back door in the name. Awesome. Essentially they have gained access to Macs and they use Reddit to connect them all together. So basically when the Mac calls out, it goes on to Reddit and finds a post which links it to a server on under a Minecraft subreddit, which is hilarious. And then they all link together. So this guy's used a worm to grab all these botnet computers and have them link all together through Reddit's Minecraft community. Okay, so maybe you can explain what's the problem with a botnet. What exactly is a botnet and what does it mean to be part of botnets for a lot of different things. A lot of the laws around like you can't sue someone for their computer necessarily doing something happens because of botnets so you can use a botnet to essentially a lot of a lot of people refer them to them as zombies as well. You can utilize all these computers to do things for you. You can use them to do things like having a gigantic external cluster. So you can use these to like DDoS a target, or just do do other things like essentially look like users. So if you want to get a whole bunch of hits on something that's a less aggressive way to use a botnet. Do we actually have 4400 viewers. Maybe we have one who owns a lot of iMacs. And Scott. He's not viewing he's just looking through our video conferencing software. Right. He wouldn't even count. Yeah. Sorry Scott you don't count as a viewer. You can use them for large variants of things but a lot of times it's just DDoS, DDoS that kind of stuff, bringing down websites being a jerk. In this case though I wonder if he's actually using it to look like users on Minecraft servers. I haven't read into it into that much but it would be pretty funny actually. Because if you can make your Minecraft server look popular and then get people to come to it and then actually do real micro transactions, then you might make some money. So Scott, is Apple imploding. There's a lot of bad PR. A lot. You know it is weird like the the bin gate stuff. That just was one of those tech stories that you could see it taking on a life of its own like the iPhone 6 had happened. It was a big deal. And then there wasn't another story. And so that one kind of came out on the weekend and it was like the news hit the news cycle perfectly. Everyone wanted more iPhone news and that was the more iPhone news. Well did you watch the bin videos because I got up that morning and I went and I watched one of those and I watched this guy's thumb just strain against this phone to bend it and I thought that I'm not worried about that at all. It's just it's way too much force for me to ever care. You know I'm not going to do that accidentally. Well you need to gain about 100 pounds then. Come on go to the gym. I'm going to go to those pecs or something. But it didn't matter because that story filled a void. Right. And it was like it was everybody who's like a Samsung fan like loved it. It didn't matter that it was true. It just was there. Right. But honestly I don't think that that story happens and gets that big. If it isn't for the fact that everybody in the media who is reporting on that making it a big deal knows that when they report on Apple there's a lot of response. Yeah. Right. And a lot of people will chime in no matter what. Right. Yeah. Apple's in trouble when people don't care about what they do. And they're a long way from that place right now. Yeah. Fair enough. I mean there's been other bad news too. So there was the report that came out that Apple reportedly punished a German magazine for doing an iPhone 6 Ben test saying they would no longer be invited to any of their events. And they were basically cut off. I mean how do you how do you feel as an objective journalist in the IT industry about that kind of behavior from a manufacturer because that well I want the D which we'll talk about later. But I'm so I don't necessarily care about like a like a paper style screen or not. But I do want the round shape of a watch. And that being said pebble prices are dropping. So they're reducing their price on the standard pebble which is not what Linus has anymore. You have the pebble steel I believe. They're reducing the price on the standard pebble to around 90 USD. This is only in the States as far as I know to 90 USD. And they're bringing the prices down on their steel to 199 USD. It's a pretty big difference. Do you think it's worth it from the standard to the steel. You know what I I it depends on it depends on what you want out of your watch. If you just want the functionality the functionality of them is literally exactly the same. They actually have the same hardware in them. I mean they didn't even bother to upgrade the battery on the steel which in my mind is is a little bit frustrating. I don't see any reason why they couldn't have made the steel you know a nine day battery or something like that. Give me some kind of extra functionality. The steel is all about the look. So if you wear your watch as a purely functional piece because you would like to know what time it is and read text messages and all those other cool pebble apps get a regular pebble. Right. If your watch is part of Amazon. If your watch is part of the look of you that you're trying to achieve if it's a fashion statement then maybe the steel in my opinion the steel is a great value. I mean you can easily spend two hundred dollars on a watch. You can easily spend five ten fifteen times that on a watch. Watches are insane. That doesn't have that functionality. There I think that's what the steel is is it's a great marriage of functionality and at least a little bit of style. It will work two thousand meters underwater. Sorry what? Some of those super high end watches are like oh yeah but it'll work two thousand meters underwater. I'm like wow cool for when I'm in a submarine next. What? For when I'm completely underwater and dead and out of oxygen. Awesome. So Swift tech launches their 240x H240x. I believe this was fairly stealthy. I saw a bunch of the comments on the forum thread about this posted by WorldWin. Oh I should jump up. So the new patch from the Mod360 was posted on the forum by Ren. The Pebble price drops was posted on the forum by Raf Banan. There's two A's there. I don't know how to probably do that other than A. He wins the literally entire world. Yeah win the world. The whole thing. Everything that you can possibly win is won by him. Anyways I believe it was fairly stealthy because a whole bunch of posters on the forum were talking about how they were actually looking to buy a 240x and then just randomly saw on Swift tech's website that there was a sorry they were looking to buy a 220x and then they saw on the website that there was a 240x. I don't think there's any massive changes other than the fact that it is a dual 140mm copper radiator. Other than that I believe it's the same type of idea. So they have a full pump, a full radiator, reservoir attached to the radiator and then a full standard water block. So I think this is essentially as close as you can get to standard water cooling with an AIO style unit out of anything. Would you agree with that probably? Yeah pretty much. I think it's cool how they hide the pump up behind the flow rate monitor in the top which makes it look extremely compact but then still uses full size components which is awesome. Something that I appreciate a lot. I don't see a lot of AIOs failing but it's still nice to know that I have this full size pump which I could honestly swap out if I really needed to. I like AIOs that are after the concept of being more like an actual liquid cooling setup. I think that's a great direction for them to go. Swift tech's done an okay job of making their AIOs drop in. I think that their last generation one actually did a better job of this, of making it drop in because it did have the pump integrated with the CPU block. So you could mount the radiator in different places much more easily whereas these ones really have to go on the top of your case. But the newer ones, so the H220X and the H240X, the fact that they are mounted in the top of the case but they're much more expandable and much more reliable from what Swift tech's saying about them is also great too. Maybe there's room for Swift tech to have both options. A less powerful central CPU block based pump unit where you have more radiator flexibility and then these X series ones to take care of people who are okay having it in the top and only the top and that is it. That is going to be very applicable in a couple days. Yeah I won't be doing that accent when we're over there. No, not so much. Probably not a terrible idea. So for those of you who don't know this already, Luke and I are doing a German road trip. German excursion. Yeah we're going to be touring the Sennheiser factory, which is going to be pretty cool. That's going to be sweet. We're going to meet the dude who designs the headphones. That's awesome. Which is going to be cool. I'm actually so stoked. But more stoked for... Cherry MX! So we're going to see Cherry Corp's manufacturing facility as well. So next week is going to be all about the German engineering and the German manufacturing. So both for keyboard switches and for headphones. Both Luke and I, I guess if you were going to pick like half a dozen companies that we think are pretty cool and we tend to really like what they do, I think Cherry would be on the list and Sennheiser would be on the list as well. So we're pretty stoked to check that out. Definitely stoked on that. That was posted. No, that was not posted by him. Yeah right, World of Win. Speaking of things that we should probably check out, Windows 10, not Windows 9. It's funny because we made that joke. Windows 9! Windows, Windows no! And we were right! Yup, actually that is kind of true. And the reason they did it was because they wanted to separate the next Windows from Windows 8.1 as much as possible basically. They didn't want people to feel like it was an iterative improvement on Windows 8. Which honestly, I don't think Windows 9 would have sounded like. If they called it Windows 8.2, that probably would have sounded like an iteration. They're super drunk to be completely honest. That's all I really have to say about that. That's super dumb. It's funny because they made the joke about, we're going to call it Windows 1. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they weren't even self-aware enough, as far as I can tell, to realize that just because they didn't call it 1 doesn't mean that what they did was any less stupid. It's still not how you count. Vista 7, 8, 10. Come on, they can't even hold it together for three releases in a row. Actually, yes they can. 95, 98, 2000. There you go. Okay, so they can't even hold it together for four releases in a row. Oh wait, well hold on a second. ME came first. But it's... Oh... But ME is millenia... They're still referencing a year. Oh, come on now. No, I know, I agree with you. But they like, sort of tried. At least they didn't just completely skip a number. They went like, 2014. But it's... 2000. But we're gonna release 2014 because it sounds much better. One of my favorite quotes was, I don't remember exactly what he said, but essentially it was along the lines of, once you fire up Windows 10 and you see how awesome it is, you won't question why we jumped a number. It's like, actually that has nothing to do with anything ever at any point in time. That makes no sense at all. Because even if it was a massive change, like XP to Vista, it wasn't like, you didn't go like, XP to XP3. Because what? That didn't make any sense. Anyways, I've seen quite a few people that have tried it so far and it seems kind of generally broken, to be completely honest. The GUI is apparently far from complete. There's a lot of problems. It seems very unpolished. There's tons of missing animations, all that kind of stuff. And their biggest feature that they're toting is the return of the start menu, which is fantastic. But also a little frustrating because when they first showed off this hybrid start menu, start screen thing, it was being pitched as a feature that we were gonna see in the next update to Windows 8.1. And, oh, hold on, we're not doing that. Okay, hold on a second. Hold off for a couple months. Now we're gonna throw you guys this Windows 10 preview. Which isn't gonna come out until late 2015. Yeah, we're months away. We're almost a year away from Windows 10 actually being something you can install on your system and run as a production OS. Production OS, yeah, okay. Because you can get the technical preview right now, but it is totally broken balls. And it has some cool stuff. Like now instead of just being able to snap Windows to the sides for side-by-side reading, you can snap to corners. So you can actually have four things on screen. Something folks with large monitors are gonna be pretty impressed with. And then another really cool thing about it is you can actually have virtual desktops. It's funny because I've seen virtual desktops working as far back as third-party UI modifiers for Windows XP. Yeah, I was gonna say like as far back as super far back and yesterday because they could work now. Yes, they're not new. So it's not a new idea, but basically a virtual desktop would be different desktops depending on what you want to do. So you could have a different set of applications open and have them spread out a different way depending on what kind of thing you want to do. So for example, you could have like Steam and Uplay and Origin and you said Warner Brothers is working on one too. Oh, Warner Brothers is one that they're working on. Anyway, you could have one virtual desktop that has all those pop-ups. So all your game libraries are right there in front of you. You could have another one that has Chrome up here and then Word over here and something else like a video over here. So you can sit and watch streams while you research and do homework for example. And then you are supposed to, it's a little glitchy right now, especially for multi-monitor users, you're supposed to be able to switch between them. That's pretty friggin' cool. Yes, it is. But it's also been a previous feature of Windows, kind of been a feature of Linux for an extremely long time. Yes. And is able to be done by third party applications already. One thing that I know that's definitely going to come up with a whole bunch of search results. I just hope they at least divide it in a very good way and they don't put web search results at the top or it's extremely configurable. Either one I'll be happy about. One thing that we were talking about was we were questioning whether or not those tiles were going to be extremely configurable. Because I talked about how it could be pretty cool if you wanted to put like certain websites that you go to a lot and then a whole bunch of games and stuff. Right. But I didn't want it to like just be an auto population or something like that. It is a configurable space. Right. And one thing that could be really interesting actually is if they made it so that those switching desktops were able to have their own unique start menus. Maybe you could have a production desktop where you have like Excel, Word, all that junk and like work websites in the nice kind of like I'm going to say Metro. That's not the right word. Modern UI style tiles on the right hand side. And then you switch to like your gaming one. It's like gaming websites, Linux Tech Tips dot com, Steam, all that crap. Yeah, I'd love that. That would be pretty cool. I don't know if that's a thing, but that would be cool. Yeah, we'll have to look into it. I mean, honestly, I've been gearing up for the trip to Germany, making sure that we're going to have some videos while we're gone. We've actually got some great videos queued up. We're going to be taking a look at the 5820K. So that's Intel's lower cost 6 core on LGA 2011 versus the 5930K. And because the main difference between these chips is like a 6% difference in clock speed. And that's it, except that the 5820K has quite a few fewer. It's actually got 12 fewer PCI Express lanes. So multi GPU support is limited in terms of how much bandwidth it can deliver to each card. So we take a really close look at how that affects performance. Then we've got another really great one where we're going to be looking at SLI scaling with GTX 980 from one GPU to two to three to four at 4K. How it scales and how the gameplay experience is affected by adding more graphics cards. So I'm pretty stoked on that. Those will be pretty cool videos. And then I even have my ultimate key cap replacement guide. Yes. I've been working on a lot lately. I think that's scheduled for next Tuesday night. It's an ultimate guide. So remember, guys, our ultimate guides are the best videos we can make. So our build guides, things like that. Graphics card water block installation guide, although that's a bit of an older ultimate guide. We're better now. But Luke's is looking like it's shaping up to be pretty darn cool. The only thing I'm worried about is while it's being edited, I will not be in the country. Yes. And it's very long. So I don't know. I hope that works out quite well, but we're not entirely sure. And then one of the most exciting things of my week, because any time any news comes from Mr. Elon Musk at all ever, I get super excited. There's more information about the Tesla Model D. So all he released was a picture of like a garage door that was partially open. And you could just kind of see the headlights and a little bit of the front of the car. But people are not entirely sure what it is. It could be that cheap, well, cheap, quote unquote, car that Tesla has been talking about for a little while. Or that might not be the reveal. It could be something else completely different because they've already been talking about that a little bit. And I'm not sure. I personally think it's probably going to be the cheap one that they've been talking about, especially because the front of the car looked like a car and not a different type of thing like an SUV. Yeah, I saw some speculation. Oh, maybe they'll unveil a truck. But it looked too low. It didn't look like a truck. Yeah, it looked like a car. So it's probably the cheaper version of a Tesla that they've been talking about for a little while. And they've also said that there's other information coming soon, which is probably talking about, by the way, that was posted on the forum by Heisenblurg. Heisenblurg. Thank you, Heisenblurg. And then this next topic, which is Elon Musk saying that Teslas will be able to self-drive 90% of the time, was posted on the forum by Sherman Tanker. That's incredible. That is incredible. OK, sorry, he hasn't said the date yet. That's the incredible part. Which, what is it? By 2015. By next year. Oh, wait, no. Model X is coming early 2015. So yeah, sometime next year, which is pretty insane. And I love how smug he is about everything. And then he just manages to do it. That's my favorite part about Elon Musk. We're a Silicon Valley company. So if we're not leading the way, then all is not right in the universe, basically. Because, I mean, it's not like other car manufacturers aren't talking about self-driving or, excuse me, as Musk calls it, autopilot. Which I personally think is way cooler. Oh yeah. Like a hundred... self-driving car or car with autopilot. Badass. Yeah, that's right. I want a car with autopilot. It's not like other guys aren't talking about it. GM's promised a hands-free mode for some 2017 models. And most are speculating 2020 as a reasonable year for the release of self-driving cars. I want autopilot cars. Musk claims it's months away from retail for his 90% autopilot. And some of the things that he's talking about that would be in the 10% are stuff like difficult to manage, like, terrain. Right. And like debris on the road. It's not like they can't just kind of cruise around right now. It's the bad situations that you want your car to be able to handle, can't necessarily handle yet. And you know, the funny thing about it is these things that self-driving or autopiloted cars have to overcome now are mostly to do with other drivers being hazardous. So they have to overcome this just to gain enough acceptance to eventually make it to a future where it doesn't matter because every other car on the road will behave in a predictable manner. Yeah, but then there is other things. Isn't that bizarre? That is bizarre, and you are completely correct, but there is other reasons why they might have to be careful too. If a house falls over and there's debris in the road, or if there's some sort of rockfall. Adverse weather effects that are somehow unpredictable in some way. All these kinds of things. A telephone pole that gets knocked over. But those are much less frequent than some drunk dude crashing into a wall and making debris go all over the road. So that is more what they have to take care of. I know Elon Musk. I tweeted him a hilarious thing about wanting the D, and I think half of the entire internet did as well. And he replied the next day saying, like, oh the internet is hilarious, that wasn't my intention. I don't believe you at all. That is such full cap. Because we should have a synchronized snow! No! No! No! Because, okay, he wanted to release cars in the order of SE and X because he thought that would be funny. And then announcing, like, asking people if they want to know more about the D. Are you kidding me? So much UNO. There's no way that's not intentional. So intentional. Oh my goodness. I love it, and that's hilarious. And it's cool to see someone running one of these massive, very important companies, being able to, like, have a joke about these things. Have a sense of humor about this stuff. I mean, why does product naming have to be so stuffy? You know, have some fun with it. I mean, I'm sure that at least a handful of you have noticed that our secondary channel is called TechQuickie, and that our primary format is called Fast As Possible. Come on! Now more people have noticed. You know, the number of people who have pointed that out to me, as if I didn't know. By the way, your channel is very, like, innuendo. Not sure if you knew. Yeah, I thought- There's actually jokes on the WAN show sometimes. I thought perhaps you didn't notice that. Did you know that Fast As Possible is an acronym for something else? No. Whoa. Really? You know how long it took us to come up with that name? Eventually we found one that fit, and it was like, wow, that's awesome. And we went with that. Yeah, even TechQuickie, even TechQuickie, we couldn't even find a channel name that was available that we were happy with. We actually bought TechQuickie for a GTX 670 and a 3 terabyte hard drive. I shipped it to some guy in Singapore, and he transferred the channel to me. That's hilarious. Yeah, it actually had a bunch of videos on it. So he transferred the channel to me. I nuked them all. We started over. Nice. He wasn't going to do the deal with me until he saw our primary channel. And he was like, oh, yeah, you guys are pretty cool. You guys do cool stuff. You need this more than I do. Oh. But I would definitely like some hardware for it. I was like, okay, man. Sure, dude. We got this. That's kind of cool. I didn't actually know that story. I knew we acquired it through some way, and I knew we traded hardware, but I didn't know the whole thing. Yeah, no, he didn't even want to do it because it was actually tied to an email address that he used. Oh. So he was like, yeah, I'm not using the YouTube channel, but I'd really rather keep this. And I kind of went, dude, please. We've got big plans. We've got stuff we want to do. This is important. Yeah. And he went, yeah, okay. I wonder if every once in a while he like, he checks back and goes like, oh, cool. I don't know, maybe. Have you heard from him at all? No, not at all. That's interesting. Yeah, funny, hey? Anyways, I guess we can move on to like real show news. Yeah, I want to thank Scott for coming on the show. Yeah. Great guest, lots of great information. I know that some of it might have been a little bit sort of higher level than some of the stuff that we normally talk about. But guys, Scott knows a ton and everything he said there was really great information. He's one of the most trustworthy voices in the entire tech industry. He's a true journalist. He cares so much about the truth and the real information. So you guys should definitely check out the tech report. Definitely pay attention to what Scott's doing, especially if you were captivated by his presence here on our show. He does have a podcast. So you guys should check that out as well. Normally, I would like for him to be able to out for himself. But unfortunately, our Skype connection was lost and we can't bring him back on. So there you go, guys. Big thanks to Scott for coming on the show today. And we thought that was great. Yep. That was actually absolutely fantastic. Was the PCI Express 4.0 conversation? No. On the mainstream? No, it wasn't on the mainstream. That was actually like my favorite part of the whole thing. I know. You just knowledge bombs in the middle of nowhere. I know. I wanted to bring him back. I wanted to come back to that while we were actually live on the show. So Scott was talking about PCI Express 4.0, which is basically we've reached the limit of what can be achieved by connecting graphics cards to other things in the system via copper. And PCI Express 4.0 is going to be probably server only technology, at least for quite some time, because of how expensive it's going to be to implement with like repeaters and signal repeaters built into a motherboard just to get the signal far enough. Yeah, because they have to make it so ridiculously tight because to get bandwidth that fast over copper, it has to be pretty short. Really, really cool. So he was talking about how they're going to have to get into other technologies outside of copper. And apparently they're working on this and it's kind of maybe working. It's kind of working. Yeah. Oh, man. That was actually a really interesting conversation. That was my yeah, my favorite part about him having him on the show was that. And that's not on the main show. Unfortunate. Yeah, don't worry. We'll have him back at some point. Nexus 6 specs have been leaked. So the original article here is from Android Police. And this was posted on the forum by Top War Gamer. Thank you, Top War Gamer, for posting that. Let's go ahead and pop this up on the screen. This is the Motorola Nexus 6, a 5.9 inch quad HD display with a 3200 milliamp hour plus battery, dual front facing speakers and more. And I hate it. Why? It's a phablet. Oh, yeah. It's almost six inches. Yeah. I mean, I understand that. No, I don't understand this. Well, how big is it? I know it's not like I. OK. I understand having a phablet in your product lineup. Yeah, I get that. But Google's Nexus line is the one phone that pardon the pun is supposed to be one size fits all and a phablet does not fit all. Like the D. Period. Oh, no, there's lots of different sizes of these that are needed. Yeah, anyway, yeah, so the the Note 4 is kind of a huge phone and this is point two larger because the Note 4 is five point seven inches. This is five point nine. So this is extremely frustrating to me because I already find a five inch phone to be pretty much the limit. OK. And I always used to play devil's advocate and say that I liked bigger phones like bigger hands or whatever. But I actually really like this phone. You've been using the Moto X. And whenever I use bigger phones now, I'm like, you know what? I can reach the other corner. I don't want to have to reach for the other corner. It's easier when I can just click on it. And I know some people are going to like destroy me for that. But like it doesn't it doesn't matter. I use my phone more for like production style stuff. So I'm like like emails. That's content. Utility stuff. Yeah, I'm not watching videos on it. Really. I'll listen to music. Doesn't matter having a huge screen for music because it just sits in my pocket. So like I listen to music, I read emails, I read documents, I type things up, I reply to emails, text messages, phone calls, that kind of stuff. So I don't actually necessarily care about a huge screen anymore. I used to because I used to game on my phone a little bit. Right. But I'm so over gaming on my phone. Yeah. And like especially with Smash Bros, which is awesome. I can actually talk about it now because it released this morning. Oh, yeah. You've been playing it for how long? Like two weeks. So good. The only unfortunate part was now that I actually had to go get my own copy because they get the review copy back, it's all saved on the card. Oh. So I lost all my progress. Go Nintendo. But the... Stop. That was a weird noise. The Hyrule Warriors one, it saves locally to your Wii U. Oh, nice. So I had to get another copy of that, but then I still have my save. Nice. I would like to play it further in that game and Smash is more about just fighting, so it's not that big of a deal. But yeah, tons of fun. And I would way rather play that than something on my phone. Right. So I just hold my 2DS with me. And then everyone knows what a shield lover I am. Yeah. So then you have the shield. And like if I didn't have a 2DS, I would go with the shield. I would not go with a phone. With shield at 200 bucks, that's a no brainer for me. Yeah. For a proper controller. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not really into phone gaming, so I don't see the point. I don't know. I was happy when I first saw this before I saw the size, because I was looking at stuff like, oh, okay. So they brought forward facing speakers. That's cool. They fixed the battery problem. That's cool. And then they have a lot of the other features that the other Moto X would have. Yeah. Which is, that's also cool. Yeah, it's very similar to the new Moto X. Yes. So it's got the same aluminum frame around the outside. Looks very similar other than being larger. Yeah, ring flash. A lot of the innovations here aren't really that meaningful to me, especially things like a Quad HD display. I reviewed the G3. There's a lot more to a display than resolution. So much more. There's a whole world of contrast and color reproduction out there that has nothing to do with how many pixels you can cram into a space. And that's one thing I brought up in my Note 4 video from CTIA, was that they had an extremely high resolution display on the Note 4, but they didn't sacrifice what it looked like. Right. So the color still looks really good, which was not a thing on the G3. Well that and because Samsung's going to be using AMOLED, they're not going to lose contrast the way that a typical LCD will. Like the HTC One M8 is an LCD screen, but it's got great contrast, which makes it easier to use outside than the G3 in spite of all the pixels because it's contrast ratio. So the difference between the darkest darks and the whitest whites is not as high, whereas AMOLED is able to turn the pixels right off when they're not being used. So you'll typically have excellent contrast. So that's why something like that is going to work a little bit better. And while you might not necessarily care about the high resolution on a Note 4, because you're probably not going to be able to know the difference, if you get something like a Gear VR, you'll be able to tell the difference when it's right there in front of your face. I'm kind of curious to try Gear VR. It's surprisingly good, but there is also drawbacks. Have we talked about it on the show before? Yeah, we have. Yeah, okay. So I'm not going to dive into it much, but I think it's going to be retail available in not way too long. So we might be able to try one out if we get a Note 4. It's one phone compatible right now. Right. They're hoping to open it up at some point, but as of right now, it's one phone compatible. Right. All right. So let's move into our sponsor spots here really quickly. Squarespace is our first sponsor today, guys. Visit squarespace.com slash Linus for a free trial and for 10% off, use offer code LINUS. What is Squarespace, you might ask? Squarespace is a great way to build your own website that other people can actually access and that doesn't look like. But this is our first spot for them this month, so we're announcing another Squarespace site giveaway, guys. Tweet your Squarespace site to hashtag Linus Squarespace for a chance to win your site for a year. What kind of site will you win? Great question. Any kind of site you want because you build your own site with your two week free trial and then we go ahead and send your site to Squarespace and boom, they activate it for a year. Their hosting options are scalable. Their templates look fantastic and they work on desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, whatever else the case may be. And the sites are just smooth and they work and best of all, it's much easier to use than more traditional website creation tools. And because the cost is so low, you may actually find it just flat out more cost effective, especially once your site starts to scale up and get more traffic to just host it through Squarespace versus trying to admit it yourself. Even if you paid yourself minimum wage to admit a website, there's a lot that can go wrong with a website. And our Squarespace site has been completely maintenance free for over a year. Mostly because we've decided not to update it. Yeah, we need to update it. I think it has three employees under our team. I actually know, maybe we added Brandon to it. I think, no, I'm pretty sure Brandon's on here. I think even Nick. Nick's on there. But Nick's little disclaimer thing. Or his description is like two lines. A new member of the team currently serving as a sales representative. He's been with us for over six months now. Nick coordinates pre-rolls. Wow. It's like the worst description ever. I think Ed must have written that. I think he did. And then it doesn't have all the other new people. Yeah, so it doesn't have Taron. It doesn't have new Nick. We have another Nick. We should just put him under here as new Nick. New Nick. Alright, so guys, squarespace.com slash Linus for a free trial and 10% off. Use offer code Linus, try it out, and hashtag Linus Squarespace for a chance to win your Squarespace site. Also, sponsoring the show today, dollarshaveclub.com. Why do we like Dollar Shave Club? Well, because shaving is good. He doesn't necessarily shave his face, but man, that doesn't mean he doesn't use razors. I do. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I definitely use razors. There's lots of things you can need to shave with Dollar Shave Club. And our new... I didn't even get that right away. That's pathetic. And our new sort of innovative thing that Dollar Shave Club never told us to say is even though they market to men, pretty much exclusively. Like you look at their silly humor in their advertisements and you look at the kinds of podcasts that they're sponsoring, they look to be going after men. Is there any reason why ladies might not want a high quality razor delivered straight to their door once a month so that... We actually had a viewer chime in after that stream when we brought up the lady thing. Bring up that his girlfriend prefers his Dollar Shave Club razors and now uses them as well. So we weren't even that far off base. Looking for a gift idea for the lady and looking for a way to not so subtly hint that she might need to do some trimming? DollarShaveClub.com slash Linus, head over there and give the gift of getting yourself slapped in the face, but then potentially turning into something worthwhile later on down the road. Yes. Wow. Wow. Yeah, I went there. Wow. Alright, so this is really cool news. Most Project Aura modules will be hot-swappable thanks to modified Android L. This was posted on Technobuffalo. We should have John back. His baby must be quite a bit older now. Yeah, John Retinger from Technobuffalo. He was one of the best guests we've ever had. We've got to bring him back. Maybe when Nexus 6 drops or something like that, we'll bring him on to talk about it. I haven't checked with him, so obviously no promises, but he did say he'd come on the show again at some point. But the coolest thing about this, besides being able to swap cameras, let's say for example, you can swap... The batteries. Whoa! While it's running. Whoa! It's like, what are they, Tesla? Okay, you can't do it while it's running, but you can do it very quickly on a Tesla. Yes, faster than you can fill up your car with gas. But how cool is that? It's actually pretty awesome. So Project Aura, I've gone from being extremely skeptical to being extremely hopeful to being extremely not interested because I was sure it was going to be very, very low-end stuff to being pretty interested again all of a sudden. It's got a little bit of onboard power, so you will actually be able to potentially, mid-call, swap battery packs for true continuous use. And I've had people that I've worked with in the past carry around multiple batteries with them with their phone. They never actually plugged it. This was one specific guy that I worked with. He would always have two spare batteries with him at all points in time and the battery in his phone, and he would never plug in his phone to charge. If it was getting low, he'd turn it off, swap the battery out, turn it back on, and keep going. Just like that, eh? And he would just always charge his batteries. So this phone will be perfect for him. I know he won't get it because he works for a very specific company, but this phone would have been perfect for him. And I do know people that would like doing that as well because when there's that commercial going on right now where the guy, his boss calls him and he's on a golf course, and his boss is yelling at him for something and the phone only has 4% battery left and it just dies during the call. And he's like, now I don't have a job anymore. If we had one of these, we could swap the battery out. Yeah, I'm sure that's going to be the ad for it. No, no, no. There is an ad right now where the guy loses his job while he's on a golf course because his phone dies. No, I just mean I'm sure that's going to be the ad for Project Aura. I'm sure that's going to be exactly what they're going for. I think it's probably going to be more about the Google Play type store that they currently envision for parts where you'll be able to shop lenses or shop processors or whatever else and just quickly and easily order new swappable parts for your Project Aura phone. I think it's incredibly cool and I'm now getting pretty excited. That would be cool because one thing I'm worried about is taking my Moto X with me to Germany. Sorry. It's not your mom, is it? No, new employees leaving. Bye, thank you. Thank you, bye. My pictures are going to suck. Right. Freaking camera's terrible. It's not good. Specifically not good. Here, you can borrow mine. Are you going to be using this? I don't know. If you look at the lens, you might know why I was going to lend it to you. Oh yeah, that's not good. I cracked the lens on my one and made it. I contacted HTC support so maybe I'll tweet my results but I'm contacting them just as a regular guy through the regular support channels and I'm going to see how they treat me. Interesting. So far, I... Maybe give them a warning though. I had one lady tell me that for sure it was going to be covered and then she wanted me to check with my carrier to see if they would deal with the RMA for me first before calling them back and they'd escalate me. And I kind of went, well, I didn't get the phone through my carrier so probably not. My carrier wasn't interested. So I called back and the second lady said, we can't guarantee that it's going to be covered and you're going to have to pay to send the phone. And I'm okay with paying to send the phone to their RMA center. That's pretty standard in the tech industry. But if they don't cover this cracked lens, I'm going to be pretty not impressed because the only way that that lens could be cracked is if there's something bloody well wrong with it because the rest of it all around it, absolutely perfect, immaculate. And this lens is fine. It's a bit of a known issue that that main camera lens cover is not that great. There are things you can do. If you use a very mild abrasive like toothpaste, you can get the coating off of it that has been causing it to appear kind of scratchy and then it's fine. And but but with it cracked, obviously, that ain't going to help me much. So let's see. It's kind of fun being a normal customer every once in a while for me and just seeing how people treat me. But yeah, I was even thinking about possibly maybe getting that camera that Austin will never stop talking about. Really? But I'm not going to because I don't want to spend that much money. How much is it? 800 bucks. Oh, wow. Yeah. You don't seem like the kind of person who I don't think you've spent 800 dollars on anything since I met you other than your car. No. Definitely not. Yeah. So he wants new computer hardware. He just steals it. People ask me if I get stuff from work and I'm like, no. I take stuff from work. Anyways, yeah. All right. Facebook is doing an about face on their real name policy. So the this was posted by mega zero on the forum and the original source is the Wall Street Journal. So let's go ahead and pop that on there. There we go. Hopefully that'll load at some point. Which like, OK, I find this slightly hilarious because while I feel bad for the people that had their names forcibly revealed, I may or may not and people that I know may or may not have Facebook accounts under their gamer tags that have existed for a very long time that have never been changed. Which last names with like first and last names that are definitely not real. Right. But like not even real names. Well, the issue here was that it seems to be a person or group of people targeting drag queens and drag kings and reporting them. OK. So Facebook, because the tools are mostly automated, just kind of went through and and forced all these people to submit library cards or gym memberships or whatever else to to validate their names. And of course, they couldn't because they go by, let's say, for example, a stage name that is not their real name legally. And so basically it was a targeted attack on these people forcing them to reveal their legal names. And that is why Facebook is kind of going, well, hold on a second. That's not really what we meant to do here. And they're reevaluating the policy saying, well, hold on a second. What we were really trying to achieve is to have people use a name that they use in real life, not necessarily that we wanted everyone to force forcibly reveal their legal name. Because honestly, they want they want a name that they can target advertising to. Yes, that's what they want. Yeah. That's all they care about. Yes, they don't care about getting your real like government issued name, but they want the name that you're using online so they can target ads to you. That's right. So they're not really trying to be oppressive in that way. They just want to do it. It just happened. Yeah, because automated tools. Yeah. Reasons why people are scared about automated driving. Speaking of automated and Facebook and scary, Facebook's developing giant unmanned planes that are designed to fly for months at a time. This was posted by FNOD on the forum. Thank you for that. And the original article here is from the BBC. So they're planning to have them fly above the weather, which I believe is 60,000 to 90,000 feet, which is huge. It's supposed to be about six or seven Priuses in length. I love how they're using this as a measurement. Six or seven Priuses in length, which I believe is about two line. So we're looking at about 12 to 14 line. And then and then like about or about two school buses. Yeah, there you go. And where is it about the weight of four tires of a Prius? So ways basically. Wow, that's incredible. I think that's why like they're supposed to be solar powered for one, which is insane. That's that's incredible. That is so I'm assuming if they're solar powered, they're going to have to be some type of propeller base. Because you're going to have to move something instead of having a jet. So that's interesting. Not entirely sure how they're going to do that. I don't think there's a ton of information about that yet. But it could be interesting. They're planning on getting Wi-Fi to a whole bunch of different places in the world with the intent of totally not just advertising to even more people, but getting more people online to help with just spread of information so you can get people out of poverty and help with child mortality and stuff like that. Yeah, all all the stuff, a lot of the stuff that's going to be achieved thanks to this initiative is going to be extremely positive. Oh, yeah, definitely. I was just kind of poking fun. But I mean, I think, you know, if we look at why Facebook invests in anything, are they ultimately after themselves and their own interests? Of course, they're going to do that publicly traded company load, no less. They have to justify everything they do to shareholders. So wait till the shareholders meeting and then you'll figure out why they're actually doing it. Exactly. But it will be overwhelmingly positive for a lot of people unless the Internet access is only to Facebook. But I doubt that'll be a thing. All right. Dayo28 posted this on the forum and Kano has evidently shipped their learn to code computer kits to the first batch of backers. We actually got one. Yeah. So we did back it and I'm actually going to have Luke probably do the review on this when he gets back. But do you want to tell people a little bit about the Kano? Either way, before I get people into it, I'm going to have you as part of the video because part of the idea is that it's supposed to take hacking around with code and learning computational thinking child's play. That's just kind of. So I'm a child. No, it's supposed to make it easier and it's supposed to make it easier to understand and just having instead of just having it be raw code all over the place. There'll be examples and it'll build you up. You'll learn as you as you play with it. And I want you to try it. Sure. Someone who hasn't programmed just to see how the how the barrier of entry is. So we'll get both perspectives. Yeah, because the barrier of entry to coding can be brutal for a lot of people. And then once you start rolling, it's a lot easier. But the barrier of entry sucks and a big part of this project is to lower or lessen that barrier of entry. So it should be pretty interesting. But it's essentially a little Raspberry Pi single board Linux based computer that has some of their software on it, which helps teach you how to code. It's not the most super complicated thing, but it is a very cheap way to get into programming and it can essentially build you up a whole computer. You just have to add like a screen stuff. Yep, they're going to get into modular components at some point in the future here. Screens, batteries, sensors, lights, robotics and all kinds of stuff like that. So the future looks pretty bright for these guys. They actually just brought in the former CEO of Match.com as their chief operating officer. Yeah, I think right now it comes with a keyboard, right? Keyboard, a little touchpad on it, I think. So all you need to do is hook it up to a screen. So if you walk around with this thing, you could have the power brick and a little keyboard and the mini Raspberry Pi unit. You just have to hook it up to a screen. You're good to go anywhere, which is actually pretty cool. All right, so I think we've got probably a couple more topics here and then we might just have to wrap things up. Sure. What do you think is next? EA finally fixed Battlefield 4. And apparently they're releasing some stuff to Sims like pools, which probably should have been there in the beginning, but they're not charging people for it, which a lot of people were expecting. So you're getting swimming pools, ghosts and Star Wars themed content along with some new careers paths and all of that should be free. Cool. Which I don't necessarily care about, but we did hammer them for that, so we should have that positive news. So we should be nice when they do good things. We should. All right, EA, we'll be nice. But Ubisoft, we're still mad at you. Yeah. You didn't make Shadows of Mordor. Yeah, I know, right? I'm really excited to play it. I've seen some complaints about the combat still being kind of simplistic, but I want to really play it for myself before I judge it here. There's a good post on the forum comparing it to the Batman series, especially the combat, saying it's just not as deep. And it's very frustrating to play without telegraph attack indicators because the telegraphs are not as clear. And it ends up a lot of the time just being a cluster hump of bad dudes around you, and it's kind of hard to manage. And then playing with telegraphs on pretty easy. Yeah, that makes sense. You played the Batman series a lot more thoroughly than I did, so you'll probably have more input on that side. I barely touched the Batman series, so I won't really even know. I know when I play, I'm going to try and play with the little telegraph things, but I'm probably going to get murdered. But I don't necessarily mind dying in games as long as it's possible for me to keep progressing. Yeah, I'm OK as long as it's fair. Yeah. Make it fair. I mean, not like Warcraft 2, where you would play a 1v1 against a computer on an eight player map. And then if you watch the replay or just turn off Fog of War with a cheat, you could watch their first soldier or grunt walk straight to your base. It's like, come on! At least search, like at least try to search. At least pretend to like hard code it in so they look in one place that you're not before. So you always knew you had to build one guard tower before anything else so that you could deal with that stupid first and second attack. Kind of brutal. Yeah. So I don't know. I'll probably try it the hard way just because it sounds kind of fun and the combat does seem pretty simplistic so far. And removing that will make the combat not simplistic at all. So I don't know. We'll see. All right. Well, I think that's pretty much it for the show here today, guys. Thank you for watching. Again, big thanks to Scott for being our guest. Big thanks to Squarespace for being our sponsor and Dollar Shave Club for being our other sponsor. And we'll see you guys again next week. Don't worry. We know what's causing the connectivity problems and we will get that resolved before the show next week. So stay tuned for that. Thanks for watching. And if you missed any of the show today, the whole thing uninterrupted will be up in the archive on YouTube. Oh, whoops. Oh, there's a lot of people asking about the one million subscriber giveaway. That's already been announced and the winners are linked under last week's WAN show. That's that's done. I've actually got the the gaming notebook sitting at NCIX ready to ship out to the winner. So, yeah, good stuff. All right. See you guys.