00:00SPEAKER- Are there any classical quantum mechanics
00:01SPEAKERin quantum computing that you know about
00:04SPEAKERor is it all just sort of computational concepts?
00:07SPEAKERAre you strange or charmed?
00:10SPEAKER- Sometimes you can be both strange and charmed
00:12SPEAKERat the same time.
00:13SPEAKER- Are you up or down right now?
00:15SPEAKER- I'm more of a top.
00:16SPEAKER- I've heard that about you.
00:18SPEAKER- Brad, I have read so much about quantum computers
00:21SPEAKERover the last, let's say three days.
00:23SPEAKER- Yeah, we had an episode planned here.
00:25SPEAKER- Ask me what my relative comprehension level is.
00:29SPEAKER- Give me a percentage.
00:30SPEAKER- 0.0001%.
00:34SPEAKER- Man, and you're like pretty good
00:35SPEAKERat integrating information once you track it down.
00:38SPEAKER- The more I get into it, like honestly,
00:41SPEAKERthe best thing that I read about it was a cartoon
00:44SPEAKERthat somebody sent me on Twitter today
00:46SPEAKERwhen I asked if people had Goodreads on quantum computing
00:49SPEAKERand they were like, you know, I'm kind of joking,
00:51SPEAKERbut this is the best thing I've read so far
00:53SPEAKERin explaining why this is so confusing.
00:56SPEAKERAnd it's not like everything you know about superpositions
00:59SPEAKERis a lie.
01:00SPEAKERIt's all just amplitudes, man.
01:02SPEAKERIt's amplitudes all the way down.
01:04SPEAKER- Everything is just a wave form.
01:05SPEAKER- No, well, it depends on what kind of space
01:07SPEAKERyou're talking about.
01:08SPEAKERIt's not a Euclidean space wave form.
01:09SPEAKERIt's like-- - Oh my God.
01:10SPEAKER- Yeah, it's-- - Okay, nope, I can't.
01:14SPEAKER(laughs)
01:16SPEAKERIt's too late at night for this.
01:17SPEAKER- Have you ever seen scanners?
01:18SPEAKERThat's what I felt like all the last three days.
01:21SPEAKERI was sitting in the dark on Saturday
01:23SPEAKERwhen the power was out, reading about quantum mechanics
01:26SPEAKERand quantum computing.
01:27SPEAKERI was like, I don't think I can understand this, man.
01:29SPEAKER- It's a good way to break your head clean open.
01:32SPEAKER- Yeah.
01:33SPEAKER(upbeat music)
01:56SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)
02:04SPEAKER- Hey everybody, it's Sunday and it's time.
02:06SPEAKERWait, that's the way you guys, it's...
02:07SPEAKERNo, let me just do it the other way, I listen.
02:09SPEAKER- No, no, you already started.
02:10SPEAKERJust keep going.
02:11SPEAKER- Damn it, it's time for Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
02:13SPEAKERI'm Will.
02:14SPEAKER- I'm Brad, it's Sunday, wherever you are.
02:16SPEAKER- Yeah, wait, look, it's Sunday somewhere.
02:18SPEAKERIt's like Jimmy Buffett says.
02:20SPEAKER- Yep, always.
02:21SPEAKER- Well, so legitimately we were gonna do
02:23SPEAKERthe quantum computing thing and then it turns out
02:25SPEAKERit is a really complicated, confusing topic.
02:28SPEAKER- Hang on, I'm gonna like put my hands
02:30SPEAKERaround my mouth here.
02:31SPEAKER- Yeah.
02:32SPEAKER- Quantum supremacy.
02:34SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, it's all about amplitudes, man.
02:36SPEAKERThat's all I know.
02:37SPEAKERAnd I think that might be the first time
02:40SPEAKERwe need to consult an expert and bring somebody in here
02:43SPEAKERwho really knows what they're doing
02:45SPEAKERand understands multi-positional plane space
02:47SPEAKERand Neiman Marcus and let's see, what else?
02:53SPEAKERMultiple factor quantum, like, I don't know, man.
02:58SPEAKERIt was confusing.
02:59SPEAKERI'll post a link to the comic
03:00SPEAKERthat I found very informative in the show notes
03:04SPEAKER'cause that was the best thing I read
03:06SPEAKERand maybe a couple of blog posts
03:08SPEAKERand we'll come back to quantum computing at some point
03:11SPEAKERin the not too distant future, I hope.
03:13SPEAKER- Yeah, like I've only done the barest amount of reading
03:15SPEAKERabout quantum mechanics in general
03:17SPEAKERand it is already the most mind-bending subject
03:19SPEAKERI think I've ever tried to tackle, so.
03:21SPEAKER- Yeah.
03:22SPEAKER- Applying that practically to computing
03:23SPEAKERsounds like a nightmare.
03:24SPEAKER- I did a bunch of that stuff when I was in college.
03:26SPEAKERLike I did quantum computing.
03:28SPEAKERLike quantum mechanics stuff is stuff
03:30SPEAKERthat I had quantum mechanics classes in college
03:33SPEAKER20 years ago.
03:34SPEAKERSo I like understand a little tiny bit about it,
03:36SPEAKERbut the fundamental idea, like the thing that,
03:39SPEAKERthe thing that in a Michael Crichton book
03:41SPEAKERwould be explained as, well, the quantum computer
03:44SPEAKERjust solves all of the equations at once
03:45SPEAKERand then the state collapses and the answer comes out.
03:48SPEAKEROr if it was a Neal Stephenson book,
03:51SPEAKERit would be that the only universe you're in
03:53SPEAKERis the one where the quantum computer
03:55SPEAKERsolves the answer correctly
03:57SPEAKERand all the other universes just poof, poof,
03:59SPEAKERstopped existing, which is really dark.
04:02SPEAKERNeither of those are right.
04:04SPEAKERThe answer is that you have to set up a problem
04:07SPEAKERin a way that the two competing negative
04:10SPEAKERand positive probabilities collapse in on each other
04:13SPEAKERand counteract each other and only the right answer
04:16SPEAKERwill give you, will reinforce rather than collapsing.
04:19SPEAKER- I'm just smiling and nodding right now.
04:20SPEAKERAnd I don't really know what that means.
04:22SPEAKERYeah, no, that's the right answer.
04:23SPEAKERIt's really terrible.
04:24SPEAKERLike it is, like I can, in order to get to this point,
04:28SPEAKERI had to spend two days reading about what turning machines
04:31SPEAKERwere and how they work.
04:32SPEAKERAnd I don't know how we make that 45 minutes.
04:34SPEAKERSo yeah, we're punting.
04:36SPEAKERAnd today instead, we're gonna do emails.
04:40SPEAKER- Emails.
04:41SPEAKERI mean, it's also extra life week.
04:42SPEAKERWe've got a lot going on.
04:43SPEAKERThere's a--
04:44SPEAKER- Oh yeah, shit.
04:45SPEAKERA lot of time, a lot of time commitments
04:46SPEAKERhave been made this week.
04:47SPEAKER- No, it's Sunday, dude, we're done.
04:49SPEAKERExtra life is done, we finished it.
04:50SPEAKER- Oh, right.
04:51SPEAKER- Yeah.
04:52SPEAKER- How do you feel?
04:53SPEAKERYou've been streaming for 25 straight hours.
04:54SPEAKERHow are you going to Disney World?
04:56SPEAKER- I feel like maybe starting this podcast record
04:58SPEAKERat nine o'clock on Sunday morning,
04:59SPEAKERright after I got done with extra life was not the best idea.
05:02SPEAKERI'm real sleepy, Brad.
05:04SPEAKER- I'm impressed you're soldiering through.
05:06SPEAKER- I couldn't believe that we made it through 18 hours
05:08SPEAKERof Garfield Kart, though.
05:09SPEAKERThat was really amazing to me.
05:10SPEAKER- Things you do for the kids.
05:11SPEAKER- Hell of a game.
05:12SPEAKERWhat's our, this is the podcast equivalent of a clip show,
05:16SPEAKERbut let's--
05:17SPEAKER- I can't, this is new material.
05:20SPEAKER- A clip show is the thing you do
05:22SPEAKERwhen the writers are on strike
05:23SPEAKERand you can't produce new material.
05:25SPEAKER- That's true.
05:26SPEAKER- And you have to go back into the archives.
05:27SPEAKERI mean, you know, these questions have,
05:29SPEAKERare yet unasked and unanswered.
05:32SPEAKER- I love a clip show, I love a capsule episode
05:34SPEAKERwhere it's just like--
05:35SPEAKER- Wait, do you actually like clip shows?
05:37SPEAKERDoes anybody on the planet like a clip show?
05:39SPEAKER- The 138th episode spectacular done by the Simpsons
05:42SPEAKERin what, like the eighth season hosted by Troy McClure,
05:46SPEAKERone of the greatest clip show episodes of all time.
05:49SPEAKER- But you need, you need a really good frame
05:51SPEAKERfor the clips to land properly.
05:54SPEAKERAnd Troy McClure, you know, I mean.
05:55SPEAKER- Yeah, the great Phil Hartman.
05:57SPEAKER- God rest his soul.
05:58SPEAKER- Rest in peace.
05:59SPEAKERWhat's our first question, Brad?
06:00SPEAKER- Okay.
06:01SPEAKER- What you got?
06:02SPEAKER- What's our email address again?
06:03SPEAKER- Oh, it is techpod@content.town.
06:06SPEAKER- Right.
06:06SPEAKER- It's the same as the URL,
06:07SPEAKERbut with an at instead of a period.
06:09SPEAKER- Wow.
06:10SPEAKER- Yeah.
06:11SPEAKER- It's very efficient.
06:12SPEAKER- Yeah.
06:12SPEAKER- That's where these emails came into.
06:14SPEAKERHere's the first one I have.
06:15SPEAKERJackson wrote in,
06:17SPEAKER"Can y'all talk about Y2K?
06:19SPEAKER"I was in college and I wasn't paying much attention,
06:21SPEAKER"but there seemed to be a sense of hysteria in the air
06:24SPEAKER"that the world would end once the year rolled over
06:26SPEAKER"from 1999 to 2000.
06:28SPEAKER"Where were you when all this happened
06:29SPEAKER"and did it affect you in any way?
06:32SPEAKER"Will there be the same hype when 2038 rolls around?"
06:36SPEAKER- I was, I had a job.
06:38SPEAKERMy first job out of college really was,
06:41SPEAKERa large portion of it was updating computers
06:43SPEAKERand all of the weird shit that you find in a university,
06:46SPEAKERa university biology department for Y2K.
06:50SPEAKERIt was Windows NT machines and Windows 95 machines
06:54SPEAKERand then a bunch of network connected printers.
06:57SPEAKERThe thing you don't realize
06:58SPEAKERis everything connected to the network has a clock,
07:00SPEAKERso all of that stuff has to be updated
07:03SPEAKERand there were a few thousand of those devices at the time.
07:06SPEAKERIt would be a nightmare now,
07:07SPEAKERbut it was one of those things that wasn't a problem
07:10SPEAKERbecause people worked really hard for three or four years
07:13SPEAKERaround the world to make sure
07:15SPEAKERthat it wasn't a problem, right?
07:16SPEAKER- Okay, so you've kind of answered the question
07:18SPEAKERthat I wanted to bring to this email,
07:20SPEAKERwhich 'cause I've, for whatever reason,
07:21SPEAKERI've been thinking about Y2K again recently
07:23SPEAKERand I've seen it said, or let me back up.
07:25SPEAKERThe conventional wisdom I feel like about Y2K
07:27SPEAKERis that it was a big to-do about nothing,
07:30SPEAKERthat everybody is just, everybody's of the mind
07:32SPEAKERthat like, "Oh, nothing happened,
07:33SPEAKER"so it can't have been a big deal."
07:35SPEAKERWhereas my suspicion started to be maybe it's not a big deal
07:38SPEAKERbecause people did all the legwork to make it not a big deal.
07:41SPEAKERLike, is that the case?
07:42SPEAKERLike, did it really take that much elbow grease
07:44SPEAKERand ingenuity to prevent it from creating a calamity,
07:47SPEAKERor was it not a big deal in the first place?
07:49SPEAKER- So yeah, if you think about this,
07:50SPEAKERlike, computers were just beginning
07:52SPEAKERto get mainstream in 2000, right?
07:54SPEAKERSo, or in 90, the late 90s.
07:56SPEAKERSo like, Windows 95 came out,
07:58SPEAKERand Windows 95 was a really big deal.
08:00SPEAKERLike, they sold a ton of copies of Windows 95,
08:03SPEAKERbut they also sold a shitload of computers
08:05SPEAKERthat had Windows 95 installed,
08:07SPEAKERand most of them were like static desktop machines
08:09SPEAKERand they were only loosely connected to the internet.
08:11SPEAKERLike, they had a dial-up modem or something like that.
08:15SPEAKERSo, like, downloading updates for Windows was challenging.
08:18SPEAKERThey were very small.
08:19SPEAKERThey were like tiny, tiny diff patches to upgrade stuff,
08:23SPEAKERand you didn't make, like, you wouldn't have
08:26SPEAKERWindows 10 style, twice a year,
08:29SPEAKERhuge multi-gigabyte download
08:32SPEAKERthat completely changed the OS in key ways.
08:35SPEAKERSo like, updating computers was hard.
08:37SPEAKERUsually you would go and get a disk,
08:39SPEAKERlike, you would go to Best Buy
08:40SPEAKERand they'd have free disks there
08:41SPEAKERwith whatever the latest big security patch was,
08:44SPEAKERand you could put those on.
08:45SPEAKEROr AOL would put them on their disks,
08:46SPEAKERor magazines would put them on their disks.
08:49SPEAKERAnd, like, a lot of it was just,
08:51SPEAKERand also worth mentioning,
08:54SPEAKERI don't think, I don't remember for sure,
08:56SPEAKERbut I don't think Windows 95
08:58SPEAKERhad, like, a built-in Windows update tool.
09:00SPEAKERI think you downloaded Windows Update and installed it.
09:02SPEAKER- Oh, I definitely don't think it did.
09:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't think that that became standard
09:05SPEAKERuntil, like, Windows 2000, or maybe even later than that.
09:08SPEAKER- Yeah, I would believe that.
09:09SPEAKERSo yeah, like, it was a nascent IT industry.
09:12SPEAKERLike, IT was a relatively new,
09:13SPEAKERlike, the idea that you needed somebody in your office
09:15SPEAKERto make the computers run was a kind of new idea.
09:19SPEAKERI mean, big companies had that,
09:21SPEAKERbut small businesses absolutely didn't have an IT,
09:24SPEAKERlike, an IT team.
09:25SPEAKERThey would maybe pay a guy that came in
09:27SPEAKERa couple of days a month,
09:28SPEAKERand change the toner in the printer,
09:30SPEAKERand hooked up whatever new computers you had,
09:32SPEAKERand took old ones away.
09:33SPEAKERBut it wasn't, like, a dedicated position for most people.
09:37SPEAKERAnd so, yeah, a lot of it was on people's heads.
09:40SPEAKERSo it was, like, two things.
09:41SPEAKERThe computers didn't update themselves.
09:43SPEAKERThere was nobody there to do it.
09:44SPEAKERSo there was a big push.
09:46SPEAKERAnd also, like, quantum computing.
09:48SPEAKERThe people selling news, like, the people on TV news,
09:52SPEAKERand local news, and newspapers, and magazines
09:54SPEAKERthat weren't, like, computer magazines,
09:56SPEAKERhad no fucking clue.
09:58SPEAKERLike, they were just like,
09:59SPEAKER"Oh, new apocalypse, time to move some copies."
10:02SPEAKERSo yeah, like, financial industry about to collapse.
10:05SPEAKERYou won't be able to get money out of the ATM.
10:06SPEAKER- Stuff it in your mayonnaise jar.
10:08SPEAKER- Yeah, the transformers are gonna explode, yeah.
10:12SPEAKERSo yes, it was definitely over-hyped.
10:14SPEAKERHowever, the people that were in charge
10:16SPEAKERof the important stuff,
10:17SPEAKERlike the command and control systems for power grid,
10:20SPEAKERand for air traffic control, and for train routing,
10:23SPEAKERand for, you know, all of the things
10:25SPEAKERthat make civilization work, were on top of it.
10:28SPEAKERAnd then everybody else had Windows updates,
10:30SPEAKERand people like me running around with floppy disks,
10:34SPEAKERjamming them to computers, and installing the BIOS patches,
10:37SPEAKERand stuff like that.
10:38SPEAKER- Well, thank you for your service.
10:39SPEAKERHey, you saved the world.
10:41SPEAKER- You know, and the best thing about Y2K,
10:43SPEAKERis that without, I mean, without Y2K,
10:44SPEAKERwe would have never had office space.
10:46SPEAKER(laughing)
10:47SPEAKER- It made up a valid contribution to pop culture.
10:49SPEAKER- Yeah.
10:50SPEAKER- Do you know what he's talking about in 2038?
10:53SPEAKERI feel like I've heard that year referenced before,
10:55SPEAKERbut I can't remember what it is.
10:57SPEAKERWhat's the new impending doom?
10:58SPEAKER- I think 2038 is when the Unix clock rolls over.
11:01SPEAKERSo the reason Y2K was a big deal,
11:03SPEAKERis we started out with, like people only,
11:06SPEAKERif you don't know what Y2K was,
11:08SPEAKER'cause you're like eight years old.
11:10SPEAKERGod help me.
11:11SPEAKERY2K was a thing that happened because,
11:13SPEAKERin the early days when memory was expensive,
11:15SPEAKERwe only used two numbers to represent the year.
11:19SPEAKERSo when the year went from 1999 to 2000,
11:22SPEAKERa lot of computers were theoretically gonna think
11:24SPEAKERthat it was 1900.
11:25SPEAKERAnd that's bad for a whole multitude of reasons.
11:29SPEAKERBecause then, you know, if you've ever tried to like,
11:32SPEAKERyou know, log into a Windows computer,
11:34SPEAKERwith a computer where the date's not set right,
11:38SPEAKERit can't, it doesn't generate the right hashes,
11:40SPEAKERand the login process doesn't work,
11:42SPEAKER'cause the cryptography doesn't work.
11:44SPEAKERSo the concern was that like,
11:46SPEAKERthe power grid would stop talking to others.
11:48SPEAKERSome parts of the power grid would stop talking
11:49SPEAKERto other parts of the power grid.
11:50SPEAKERAnd since that thing's all held together
11:52SPEAKERwith bowling, bailing, twine, and spit,
11:56SPEAKERthe lights would turn off on major portions of the country.
11:59SPEAKERNow, it turns out all you need to turn off the lights
12:01SPEAKERon major portions of the country is really high winds,
12:03SPEAKERand 20 or 30 years of neglect.
12:06SPEAKERBut we didn't know that at the time.
12:07SPEAKERSo it seemed like a really big deal.
12:09SPEAKER- You can burn a whole state down.
12:10SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, it's great.
12:12SPEAKEREverybody's moved to California, it's terrific out here.
12:13SPEAKER- So you're right, I just checked to make sure.
12:16SPEAKERAnd Tuesday, January the 19th, 2038,
12:20SPEAKERat 3.14 and seven seconds is the last time
12:25SPEAKERthat the current Unix time format can function.
12:29SPEAKER- And that's 'cause Unix time formats
12:30SPEAKERare seconds from the origin of the Unix inception,
12:34SPEAKERthe first inception of Unix,
12:35SPEAKERand that's how many bits the number has, right?
12:38SPEAKERI think.
12:39SPEAKER- I'm gonna say, sure.
12:40SPEAKERIt's assigned 32-bit integer time format,
12:43SPEAKERI can tell you that.
12:43SPEAKER- Yeah, so it's like, yeah, anyway.
12:45SPEAKERYeah, look, computers update themselves now.
12:49SPEAKERThat'll be a problem.
12:50SPEAKERThat's not a problem that normal people
12:51SPEAKERare gonna worry about.
12:52SPEAKER- Probably not.
12:53SPEAKERAlso, I can't even imagine what the world looks like
12:55SPEAKERin 2038, so.
12:56SPEAKER- I'd look, drive up north about an hour
12:58SPEAKERand you'll get a bad idea.
12:59SPEAKER(laughing)
13:01SPEAKER- That is definitely the darkest thing
13:03SPEAKERthat's ever been said on this podcast.
13:05SPEAKER- Hey, I mean, it's the eighth episode.
13:07SPEAKERThis is when we go dark.
13:09SPEAKER- Oh man, the one where we go dark.
13:11SPEAKER(laughing)
13:12SPEAKER- I literally spent all weekend without power, Brad.
13:15SPEAKERI've been dark.
13:15SPEAKER- Yeah, okay, you've been there.
13:17SPEAKER- My life has been dark.
13:18SPEAKER- I get it, no, you've earned it.
13:20SPEAKERYou've come by it honestly, for sure.
13:21SPEAKER- I wanted to play "Modern Warfare" and "The Outer Worlds"
13:24SPEAKERand I sat instead on my phone hoarding
13:28SPEAKERevery percentage of battery.
13:30SPEAKER- Every purchase drop.
13:31SPEAKER- Yeah, and then the cell towers went off
13:33SPEAKERand I was just like, well, fuck it.
13:34SPEAKERLet's just go eat raccoons or something.
13:36SPEAKER- What is your power outage fallback plan?
13:40SPEAKERLike, do you have stuff stashed around the house?
13:42SPEAKERLike, what kind of light?
13:43SPEAKERLike, I assume you have something more high tech
13:45SPEAKERthan candles for lighting.
13:47SPEAKERI mean, what's going on over there?
13:48SPEAKER- Well, so we have a bunch of those LED candles.
13:51SPEAKERIs this from Brad in San Francisco, by the way?
13:52SPEAKER- Yes, that's me, yep.
13:53SPEAKER- Okay, we have a bunch of those LED candles
13:56SPEAKERthat you get at Target that use a CR 2032 watch battery
14:01SPEAKERand they do 100 hours.
14:03SPEAKERSo those are like our nighttime around the house lights.
14:06SPEAKERWe have a couple of like $15 emergency/camping
14:11SPEAKERsolar lanterns that have like a little solar panel
14:14SPEAKERon the top and they'll do 14,
14:17SPEAKERanywhere from eight to 14 hours of light
14:20SPEAKERon a single day on like seven hours of charge.
14:23SPEAKERSo they're awesome for like survival kit
14:26SPEAKERand camping.
14:28SPEAKERI have, you know, for a while you'd go to conferences
14:31SPEAKERand get those battery backups for your phone.
14:33SPEAKERSo I have a bunch of those around
14:34SPEAKERthat I charged up beforehand.
14:37SPEAKERAnd I have a solar, like a four-pane solar panel
14:40SPEAKERthat'll do 28 watts of charging
14:43SPEAKERin a normal day at our latitude.
14:46SPEAKERSo they'll, like between all of those things
14:49SPEAKERand low power mode on your phone,
14:52SPEAKERlike we kept the tech going the whole time
14:54SPEAKERthe power was off.
14:54SPEAKER- Okay, that's not so bad.
14:56SPEAKER- Yeah, but then the cell towers went out.
14:57SPEAKERIt didn't matter 'cause a phone without a cell tower,
14:59SPEAKERit turns out is just,
15:00SPEAKERit's basically there to play Sayonara,
15:03SPEAKERyou know, the Sayonara, what do you call it?
15:06SPEAKER- Sayonara Wild Hearts.
15:08SPEAKER- Yeah, Sayonara Wild Hearts.
15:09SPEAKER- Well, that game's about 45 minutes or an hour long.
15:11SPEAKERSo I'm sure that ate up a whole,
15:13SPEAKERhow many days were you out actually?
15:15SPEAKER- We were out for a little bit over two days.
15:17SPEAKERSo it wasn't that bad.
15:19SPEAKERIt was the problem.
15:21SPEAKERThe challenge was that PG&E, our power company here,
15:23SPEAKERkept saying that it was gonna go back down again
15:25SPEAKERthe day after it came back up.
15:26SPEAKERSo like for us, the bigger problem was keeping
15:29SPEAKERlike the freezer cold and the fridge cold
15:31SPEAKERand stuff like that so that we wouldn't have to either eat
15:34SPEAKERor throw out all of our food.
15:35SPEAKER- Great, fun times in California.
15:37SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, it's great, highly recommended.
15:39SPEAKER- It's a good time.
15:41SPEAKERI have another email here from Trevor.
15:43SPEAKER- Okay.
15:44SPEAKER- Trevor says, why is Microsoft backwards with slashes?
15:47SPEAKERWindows file paths use backslash to separate directories,
15:49SPEAKERbut no one else does.
15:51SPEAKERWebsites, Unix and Mac systems all use forward slash.
15:54SPEAKERWhy did Microsoft decide to be so contrarian
15:57SPEAKERand to go backwards?
15:58SPEAKER- So according to howtogeek.com,
16:02SPEAKERthere's an article called why Windows uses backslashes
16:06SPEAKERand everything else uses forward slashes.
16:08SPEAKERIt is because with DOS 1.0, there were no directories at all.
16:12SPEAKERSo there was no file system, it was all just flat.
16:14SPEAKER'Cause basically you're writing everything on a floppy, so.
16:17SPEAKER- Oh sure, yeah.
16:17SPEAKER- Yeah, you didn't do folders or directories or whatever.
16:21SPEAKERSo they used the forward slash as a switch character
16:24SPEAKERfor commands, so you could do directory slash W
16:27SPEAKERand it would show you everything,
16:29SPEAKERlike the big format with permissions
16:31SPEAKERand all that stuff in it.
16:33SPEAKERWhen they added directory structure
16:35SPEAKERin a later version of DOS,
16:37SPEAKERthey couldn't use that slash for the file system,
16:40SPEAKERthe forward slash for the file system
16:42SPEAKERbecause it would mess up all the backwards compatibility
16:44SPEAKERwith the old stuff.
16:45SPEAKERSo they just did a backslash
16:47SPEAKERand they didn't think it was gonna be a problem
16:49SPEAKER'cause who would think that 30 years in the future,
16:51SPEAKERWindows computers and Linux computers
16:54SPEAKERwould all be using, connected to each other
16:57SPEAKERover a massive worldwide computer network.
16:59SPEAKER- They did not expect to become the dominant player
17:01SPEAKERin computing for the next 30 years.
17:04SPEAKER- They did not.
17:05SPEAKERThis was surprisingly difficult to Google also
17:07SPEAKER'cause there were a bazillion Stack Overflow things
17:10SPEAKERtalking about URIs, which is the solve for this thing.
17:13SPEAKERURI, Universal Resource something or other
17:18SPEAKERis basically set standards for how you access files
17:22SPEAKERon the hard drive, how you access files on across HTTP,
17:26SPEAKERhow you access files on FTP and FTPS
17:28SPEAKERand all the different specs that you might use.
17:30SPEAKERAnd they use the proper forward slash for file structure.
17:33SPEAKER- Yeah, but I mean, this makes perfect sense to me
17:36SPEAKER'cause to this day felt plenty of,
17:38SPEAKERin fact, basically all of the built-in
17:40SPEAKERWindows command line utilities
17:41SPEAKERstill use a forward slash for their switches.
17:43SPEAKER- Yep, well, and the interesting thing is
17:46SPEAKERon more recent version of Windows,
17:48SPEAKERit doesn't matter when you're doing file commands,
17:50SPEAKERwhich direction you make the slash, it works either way.
17:53SPEAKER- Oh, I did not know that.
17:55SPEAKER- For flags it does, for switches it does,
17:58SPEAKERbut if you type like cd and you do the wrong slash,
18:01SPEAKERit'll be fine, it works either way.
18:02SPEAKER- Okay, sure, that's good to know.
18:05SPEAKER- I should check that right now
18:06SPEAKER'cause I haven't done that in a long time, but.
18:09SPEAKER- Do you spend much time
18:10SPEAKERin the Windows command line these days?
18:11SPEAKER- Not if I can help it.
18:12SPEAKER- Ah, I've become reacquainted with it.
18:15SPEAKERI've gotten a little into Robocopy here and there.
18:18SPEAKER- Ooh, yeah, it works, nope, nope, nope, it fails now.
18:21SPEAKEROkay, nevermind, what I just said was a lie, it's wrong.
18:25SPEAKER- Yes, disregard that and all other advice
18:27SPEAKERdistributed on this podcast.
18:29SPEAKER- Podcast of lies.
18:30SPEAKER- Yeah, here is a question from,
18:33SPEAKERkind of a couple questions from Jim in Minnesota.
18:35SPEAKER- Hi, Jim.
18:36SPEAKER- A few years ago, I read a story about Amazon
18:38SPEAKERhaving problems with fake reviews
18:40SPEAKERand a couple of people doing some data analysis
18:42SPEAKERto help determine which reviews are valid and which are fake.
18:45SPEAKERSince the Wirecutter can't possibly cover
18:47SPEAKEReverything on Amazon, most of us rely on user reviews
18:49SPEAKERas a way to determine if a product is worth it or not.
18:52SPEAKERCan you help me understand the problem of fake reviews
18:56SPEAKERand what might be being done about it?
18:59SPEAKER- Well, we know that Republicans hate fake reviews and,
19:03SPEAKERwait, no, that's something else that rhymes with reviews.
19:06SPEAKERSo the fake reviews is a real thing.
19:08SPEAKERApparently, you can go on dark websites
19:11SPEAKERor wherever you go to buy fake reviews of apps
19:13SPEAKERand stuff like that and just buy Amazon reviews
19:16SPEAKERfor your product by the dozen.
19:18SPEAKER- Oh, in bulk?
19:19SPEAKER- Yeah.
19:20SPEAKER- Wow, I did not realize it had been commoditized
19:21SPEAKERto that extent.
19:22SPEAKERIt's basically buying Twitter followers at this point.
19:24SPEAKER- Yeah, it's Amazon, I have a real hard relationship
19:27SPEAKERwith Amazon in general because I'm sure
19:30SPEAKERthat they have people there that care about that stuff.
19:32SPEAKERIt isn't visible at all to the outside,
19:34SPEAKERpartly because I think they don't want to hurt
19:36SPEAKERconsumer confidence in their product.
19:39SPEAKERBut between that and counterfeit products on Amazon,
19:42SPEAKERit's challenging, I mean, there's the message board stories
19:46SPEAKERthat you used to hear about a guy that bought
19:47SPEAKERan expensive video card, got a cheap video card in the box,
19:51SPEAKERand then they wouldn't take it back because they were like,
19:53SPEAKERyou probably, you know, it's a--
19:55SPEAKER- Who's to say you didn't swap it yourself?
19:56SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly, and since a lot of how they verify
20:00SPEAKERwhether things are the thing in the boxes by weight,
20:02SPEAKERlike if you find something that's exactly the same weight
20:04SPEAKERand you ship it back, they're never gonna know
20:06SPEAKERuntil they send it out to some poor schmuck
20:08SPEAKERwho gets the 10-year-old video card by accident.
20:12SPEAKERSo I tend not to trust user reviews on big sites.
20:15SPEAKERI really like user reviews on small sites,
20:18SPEAKERlike on small stores, like an Etsy review,
20:20SPEAKERI feel is very trustworthy.
20:22SPEAKER- Okay, yeah, like that's a pretty passionate community,
20:24SPEAKERpretty devoted to the service and the platform.
20:26SPEAKER- Yeah, I think finding quality reviews is hard, right?
20:32SPEAKERLike it used to be that there were three or four sites
20:34SPEAKERthat were really good that reviewed PC hardware
20:36SPEAKERand you could trust them, and now all the people
20:39SPEAKERthat started those sites work at other places now,
20:41SPEAKEReither the manufacturers or whatever,
20:44SPEAKERand the people that remain are good,
20:47SPEAKERbut I don't know that there's any clearinghouse
20:49SPEAKERof a place that reviews even stuff in a specific niche.
20:52SPEAKERSo on one hand you think, oh you should trust the niche sites
20:55SPEAKERbecause those guys know what they're talking about,
20:57SPEAKERbut then keyword farm niche sites,
21:00SPEAKERlike if you look for camera lenses for DSLRs,
21:04SPEAKERthose keywords are so effectively farmed
21:07SPEAKERby what are essentially content farm blogs
21:11SPEAKERto just generate keyword pages with the right keywords
21:14SPEAKERto generate Amazon affiliate links
21:17SPEAKERto sell those lenses to you.
21:19SPEAKERI don't trust those people.
21:20SPEAKERThose people clearly don't know
21:21SPEAKERwhat the hell they're talking about, so yeah.
21:24SPEAKERI just find a friend who writes for one of those sites
21:26SPEAKERand then asks them.
21:27SPEAKER(laughing)
21:28SPEAKER- It's good to know people.
21:29SPEAKER- Yeah, it's not actionable information at all.
21:31SPEAKER- That's not helpful on a broad scale,
21:33SPEAKERbut if you can get there, then it helps.
21:36SPEAKER- Message boards are great, is what I will say.
21:38SPEAKER- Yeah, communities of real people, for sure.
21:40SPEAKER- Yeah, Amazon definitely has reached a scale
21:42SPEAKERwhere I feel like the overall quality
21:45SPEAKERof the user experience is being impacted,
21:46SPEAKERand that's on top of their foul labor standards
21:49SPEAKERin a lot of cases as well.
21:50SPEAKERLike it's becoming harder and harder
21:52SPEAKERto feel good about doing any kind of commerce with them.
21:54SPEAKER- On the other hand, when the power was out
21:56SPEAKERand we ordered a solar panel charger from them,
21:58SPEAKERit was there later that day, so.
22:00SPEAKER- Yeah, that's the thing.
22:01SPEAKERI mean, in some cases they are so indispensable
22:03SPEAKERthat it's hard not to use them, you know?
22:05SPEAKER- Yeah.
22:06SPEAKER- Which is, I'm sure, exactly the position
22:07SPEAKERthey wanted to get everybody in.
22:09SPEAKER- Yeah, 21st century Sears.
22:11SPEAKER- Yeah, it is surprisingly hard to find good information
22:13SPEAKERon tech products that you would think
22:15SPEAKERwould be fairly well covered.
22:16SPEAKERLike I'm trying to buy some, I'm kind of interested
22:18SPEAKERin getting some true wireless earbuds at this point,
22:20SPEAKERyou know, like--
22:21SPEAKER- Like no dangling cable between them?
22:22SPEAKER- Actual Lucy's, just, you know, yes, no wire whatsoever.
22:26SPEAKER- Okay.
22:27SPEAKER- And I don't wanna spring for AirPods
22:28SPEAKERor Beats Pros right now.
22:29SPEAKER- Yeah.
22:30SPEAKER- For, I mean, I've got a soapbox right here
22:32SPEAKERif you want me to get up on it for a second
22:33SPEAKERand understand why I'm picky about my Bluetooth headphones.
22:36SPEAKER- Yeah, why?
22:37SPEAKERI'm curious.
22:38SPEAKER- I don't really wanna sink a lot of money
22:39SPEAKERinto Bluetooth headphones while, you know,
22:42SPEAKERI'm an iPhone person for a very long time.
22:44SPEAKERI'm in that ecosystem, but the iPhone still
22:46SPEAKERdoes not support high-end Bluetooth codecs,
22:48SPEAKERso I don't really understand the point
22:49SPEAKERin buying nice headphones until that comes online.
22:52SPEAKER- Is there stuff better than,
22:53SPEAKERI didn't know there was stuff better than A2DP.
22:55SPEAKER- Yeah.
22:56SPEAKER- Oh, that's interesting.
22:56SPEAKER- Yeah, there are, I'll have to look.
22:57SPEAKERI think one of them is by Qualcomm.
22:59SPEAKERI should have looked into this before we did this,
23:01SPEAKERbut there are Bluetooth audio standards
23:03SPEAKERthat'll do quality that's basically CD level at this point.
23:06SPEAKER- Oh.
23:07SPEAKER- Bit rates like way up, like five, five.
23:10SPEAKERYou know, they vary based on signal quality,
23:12SPEAKERbut I think the highest quality standard
23:14SPEAKERis like five to 900 kilobits at this point.
23:17SPEAKER- Oh, that's good.
23:18SPEAKERSo if you're doing lossless, yeah.
23:20SPEAKER- It's enough, yeah, it's enough for lossless.
23:21SPEAKERIt's enough for flack, basically,
23:23SPEAKERwithout compressing further.
23:24SPEAKER- Yeah, the knock against Bluetooth is what,
23:26SPEAKERthat you rely on the, instead of like,
23:29SPEAKERinstead of using the,
23:30SPEAKERyou're basically just sending a bit stream across,
23:32SPEAKERbut you're making it analog and then making it digital again
23:35SPEAKERwith probably a bad, like bad codec or something
23:39SPEAKERacross the Bluetooth is the idea.
23:40SPEAKER- I mean, the iPhone uses AAC,
23:42SPEAKERwhich tops out at 256 kilobit, which is not terrible.
23:45SPEAKERAnd you're using, you're listening on like,
23:47SPEAKERnot the highest quality headphones to begin with.
23:49SPEAKERSo I'm sure you could argue that I'm being obsessive,
23:51SPEAKERbut I just, anyway, whatever.
23:53SPEAKERI'm off on a huge tangent here,
23:55SPEAKERbut the point is I was looking into like,
23:56SPEAKERthere's a lot of kind of semi no name,
24:01SPEAKERtrue wireless earbuds coming out of like Shenzhen
24:03SPEAKERat this point.
24:04SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a boatload of them, yeah.
24:05SPEAKER- Right, like they're everywhere.
24:06SPEAKERAnd there are like some that have enough
24:08SPEAKERof a name recognition now that people even like,
24:10SPEAKERare getting interested in reviewing them here and there.
24:12SPEAKER- Well, so I bought a pair of those Anker,
24:14SPEAKERthe Anker Liberty ones, the first ones that they did,
24:17SPEAKERI think they did a Kickstarter for them.
24:19SPEAKERAnd they were like, I bought them before I bought my AirPods
24:22SPEAKERand they're great.
24:22SPEAKERThey sound really good.
24:23SPEAKERThey're comfortable.
24:24SPEAKERThe battery lasts a long time.
24:25SPEAKERThe case is unwieldy and not ideal,
24:28SPEAKERbut like I was really happy with them.
24:30SPEAKERAnd the only reason I switched to the Apple to the AirPods
24:33SPEAKERis 'cause I got, I left the Ankers at home
24:37SPEAKERwhen I was on a trip by accident.
24:39SPEAKERAnd I was like,
24:40SPEAKERI was at one of those Best Buy kiosks in the airport.
24:42SPEAKERAnd I was like, I need to buy the headphones
24:44SPEAKERbefore I got on this airplane.
24:46SPEAKERSo here we are.
24:47SPEAKER- Understandable.
24:49SPEAKER- Yeah.
24:49SPEAKER- These are about a hundred bucks it looks like.
24:50SPEAKER- I think they're,
24:51SPEAKERI think they just released a second gen version of them.
24:53SPEAKERI'm not sure.
24:54SPEAKERI mean, they don't,
24:55SPEAKERI don't know what audio codecs they support.
24:57SPEAKERI literally, I just,
24:58SPEAKERI made an impulse purchase on Kickstarter
25:01SPEAKERbecause I was curious to see,
25:02SPEAKERI was still at Tested when I ordered them
25:05SPEAKERand I thought, oh, this will be a weird thing to cover.
25:07SPEAKERAnd then I quit between then and when they came out, so.
25:11SPEAKER- I mean, you're starting to see a bunch of,
25:13SPEAKERagain, just sticking with the wireless earbuds,
25:15SPEAKERlike you're starting to see a bunch
25:16SPEAKERin the $40 to $50 price range at this point
25:18SPEAKERthat looked decent.
25:19SPEAKERIt's really hard to find the good
25:20SPEAKERnon-user review driven coverage of those,
25:23SPEAKERbut maybe that's because they're so cheap
25:24SPEAKERnobody cares enough to produce it.
25:26SPEAKER- Well, it's, I mean,
25:28SPEAKERone of the,
25:29SPEAKERthis is one of those places where word of mouth
25:30SPEAKERis really good.
25:31SPEAKERI remember probably in the late '90s or early 2000s,
25:34SPEAKERone of the first things I bought because of the internet
25:37SPEAKERwere these Radio Shack indoor, outdoor,
25:39SPEAKERlike bookshelf speakers.
25:40SPEAKERAnd they were the speakers I took to college with me
25:43SPEAKERwhen I, and I had them probably in my bedroom
25:45SPEAKERwhen I was in high school,
25:46SPEAKERbut I think they were college mostly.
25:48SPEAKERAnd they were like 25 bucks each at Radio Shack
25:50SPEAKERand they had just accidentally made
25:52SPEAKERsome really fucking awesome little tiny speakers.
25:56SPEAKERYeah, it's like the, what was it?
25:58SPEAKERThe Altec Lansing ACS, the Altec Lansing bookshelf speakers
26:02SPEAKERthat had the wood cabinets
26:04SPEAKERor those Cambridge soundworks cubes
26:06SPEAKERthat everybody loved in the early 2000s.
26:07SPEAKER- Yes, I've, dude, I've got a pair of those
26:09SPEAKERon my desk right now.
26:10SPEAKER- Yeah, like word of mouth is good for that stuff.
26:11SPEAKERSo find a message board where people are like,
26:15SPEAKERthe trick is you don't want to go to like,
26:16SPEAKERI love the head five people 'cause they're bananas
26:18SPEAKERand they really get into stuff,
26:20SPEAKERbut like they're too far.
26:22SPEAKERLike they're more information than I need.
26:25SPEAKERI just want something that's really good
26:27SPEAKERand the right price.
26:28SPEAKERAnd I don't need to be like the optimal best ever.
26:32SPEAKERI just need to like the word of mouth on the good thing.
26:36SPEAKER- Yes, I live for discovering that product.
26:39SPEAKERLike the thing that is good enough and a good price
26:41SPEAKERand like well-made and is going to last.
26:43SPEAKERLike I don't, like again,
26:44SPEAKERI don't want to buy the $250 Beats Pros.
26:46SPEAKERI want to find the thing that is like quietly said to be,
26:50SPEAKERhey, this is the actual best bang for the buck.
26:51SPEAKERLike it's not, it's half the price,
26:53SPEAKERbut way better than half the quality.
26:54SPEAKER- So there's another option.
26:56SPEAKERThere's a third way, Rad.
26:57SPEAKER- Okay.
26:58SPEAKER- You could go to Banggood.
27:00SPEAKER- So, oh dude, I have gone down that road.
27:02SPEAKERLike replica electronics is a whole other category
27:05SPEAKERof insanity to get into.
27:08SPEAKER- Yeah.
27:09SPEAKER- I mean, like if you want no name earbuds
27:12SPEAKERthat look exactly like AirPods,
27:14SPEAKERyou can absolutely have them, but.
27:15SPEAKER- For like $15.
27:17SPEAKER- Like, but yeah, totally.
27:18SPEAKERBut you're maybe going to deal with a guy
27:20SPEAKERwho is only known by his first name.
27:22SPEAKER- Perfect.
27:23SPEAKER- To try to get them shipped to you
27:24SPEAKERand like they might have to go through customs.
27:25SPEAKERLike that scene is really bizarre.
27:27SPEAKER- No, no, no, Banggood.
27:29SPEAKERSee, this is why I like Banggood.
27:30SPEAKER- Oh, I know they're a middleman.
27:31SPEAKERI know that they ease that process a little bit.
27:33SPEAKER- Everything ships from there.
27:35SPEAKEROkay, they tell you whether it's going to ship
27:36SPEAKERfrom the US or from China.
27:38SPEAKER- Right.
27:38SPEAKER- So you know how much of a customs hassle
27:40SPEAKERyou're going to have and the likelihood
27:41SPEAKERof your stuff getting stuck there.
27:43SPEAKERThe thing about buying stuff from those sites
27:45SPEAKERis that they, let's say on occasion,
27:50SPEAKERI have bought say tiny quadcopters or something.
27:52SPEAKERAnd the works to doesn't work ratio
27:57SPEAKERis usually like, I don't know, three to one.
28:00SPEAKER- Yeah.
28:01SPEAKER- So, yeah.
28:02SPEAKER- Yeah, I had to realize finally
28:03SPEAKERthat the sticker price was not necessarily
28:06SPEAKERall of the risk that I was taking on.
28:08SPEAKER- Yeah, if you buy two, usually you get one that works.
28:10SPEAKERThat's pretty much, you're pretty safe there.
28:13SPEAKER- Maybe I'll at least get one good left one
28:14SPEAKERand one good right one out of both packages.
28:16SPEAKERAnd then I can.
28:17SPEAKER- Exactly, they'll look just like AirPods.
28:20SPEAKERProbably even have the same shell.
28:22SPEAKER- Yeah, man, that replica stuff.
28:23SPEAKERAnd you can get AirPods that are black,
28:26SPEAKERyou know, Apple doesn't even make that.
28:27SPEAKERIt's like, oh man, I can get this thing.
28:28SPEAKERI can make people think that I have
28:30SPEAKERsome super top secret Apple prototype or something.
28:32SPEAKER- I'm ready to go, put me in coach.
28:35SPEAKER- Yeah, we should just order a bunch of that stuff
28:37SPEAKERand mess around with it sometime.
28:39SPEAKER- Oh my God, yeah, that's a live stream.
28:42SPEAKER- Yeah, all right, let's go do a few more emails here.
28:45SPEAKERHere's one from Aaron.
28:46SPEAKERI keep seeing ads from every major network about 5G.
28:49SPEAKERHe means cell networks, obviously.
28:51SPEAKER- Yeah, but I don't really have a grasp
28:53SPEAKERon what that means in practical terms over 4G LTE.
28:56SPEAKERI also can't get a good sense
28:58SPEAKERof when it will be readily available.
29:00SPEAKERWhat is it?
29:00SPEAKERHow do you think it will impact phones?
29:03SPEAKERDo you think it will do anything
29:04SPEAKERto provide an alternative to the abysmal internet speeds
29:06SPEAKERthat people in more rural parts of the country
29:09SPEAKERare forced to have?
29:10SPEAKER- So 5G is the next wireless cell phone standard.
29:15SPEAKERIt's in a limited number of areas right now
29:19SPEAKERin the United States and around the world.
29:20SPEAKERI didn't know it had been rolled out in any capacity.
29:22SPEAKER- Yeah, so there's, let's see,
29:23SPEAKERI'm on the Wikipedia looking at the page
29:26SPEAKER'cause it turns out Wikipedia is the best place for this.
29:29SPEAKERSo Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis,
29:35SPEAKERJacksonville, it looks like it's like
29:37SPEAKERtop 15 markets now maybe.
29:38SPEAKER- Okay, and I also didn't realize there were phones out there
29:40SPEAKERthat really supported it,
29:41SPEAKERbut I guess there are so many Android phones
29:43SPEAKERcoming out all the time now that it's not super surprising.
29:45SPEAKER- That's it, there's a handful of Android phones
29:47SPEAKERthat support it.
29:48SPEAKERThe first rev, so here's the thing about like
29:52SPEAKERthe jump from 3G to LTE was really huge if you remember.
29:55SPEAKERLike we went from like having just spent a weekend
29:58SPEAKERwith 3G service, we went from like bad, bad DSL
30:02SPEAKERto like a pretty good broadband, right?
30:05SPEAKERLike mid 2000s broadband with the jump from 3G to LTE.
30:09SPEAKERThe jump from 4G to 5G is not as big.
30:13SPEAKERAnd that's because we're at a thing called the Shannon limit
30:17SPEAKERfor 4G already, for LTE.
30:21SPEAKERThe Shannon limit, this is one of my favorite,
30:23SPEAKERthis is an amazing concept.
30:25SPEAKERThe Shannon limit is the theoretical maximum
30:28SPEAKERinformation transfer rate of the channel
30:30SPEAKERfor a particular noise level.
30:32SPEAKERSo that looks at like the radio equipment,
30:34SPEAKERit looks at the width of your channel,
30:37SPEAKERlike how many megahertz wide your channel is
30:39SPEAKERand it says, okay, this is as much information
30:42SPEAKERas we can jam into this radio pipe.
30:46SPEAKERTheoretically, including the amount of data we need
30:51SPEAKERfor error correction and resends and stuff like that.
30:55SPEAKERAnd 4G is very, very efficient when it comes
30:58SPEAKERto the Shannon limit is my understanding.
31:00SPEAKERSo at least in the existing spectrum.
31:03SPEAKERSo 5G works at different spectrums up to millimeter wave,
31:07SPEAKERwhich is like 14 gigahertz, I think.
31:11SPEAKERThe millimeter wave means that it's the wavelength
31:14SPEAKERof the radio is millimeters rather
31:17SPEAKERthan micrometers or nanometers, or I guess that's right.
31:21SPEAKER- Is that why line of sight is such a problem
31:23SPEAKERfor 5G and penetration through physical objects?
31:26SPEAKER- That's exactly it, yeah.
31:27SPEAKERSo the millimeter wave doesn't penetrate walls
31:32SPEAKERand it doesn't penetrate metal at all,
31:35SPEAKERbut at most solid surfaces, it doesn't penetrate
31:38SPEAKERif there's water in them.
31:39SPEAKERSo you end up having to have a lot more cells
31:43SPEAKERto get the full speed.
31:45SPEAKERThe thing that's gonna happen with 5G,
31:48SPEAKERit seems like is it's fast enough.
31:51SPEAKERIt is significantly faster 'cause they're doing,
31:53SPEAKERthey're doing a bunch of other stuff with the radios
31:55SPEAKERthat we'll talk about when we do the Wi-Fi 6 episode,
31:57SPEAKER'cause it's a lot of the same stuff.
32:00SPEAKERBut they're doing like multiple,
32:01SPEAKERthey're letting you do antenna bonding and stuff like that
32:03SPEAKERthat you can't really do on 4G
32:05SPEAKERor isn't part of the spec on 4G,
32:06SPEAKERso that it can combine multiple 5G channels
32:12SPEAKERinto really, really big pipes for like a home install,
32:17SPEAKERfor 5G home install internet.
32:20SPEAKERThe other thing is that the latency is supposed to be lower
32:23SPEAKERthan they're getting on this first gen hardware.
32:25SPEAKERSo it's supposed to be like four milliseconds air latency,
32:29SPEAKERwhich is the latency from the device to the tower.
32:34SPEAKERAnd that'll add on top of your normal network lag,
32:36SPEAKERlike when you, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago,
32:38SPEAKERbut like the latency it takes to go from your router
32:41SPEAKERto the end point and back, that four seconds will add on.
32:45SPEAKERAnd they're actually seeing like 10 or 15,
32:47SPEAKERwhich is order of magnitude worse than they were hoping for.
32:50SPEAKERSo there's a lot to figure out.
32:54SPEAKERI think it's early,
32:57SPEAKERit also is dramatically impacting battery life.
33:00SPEAKERSo I think that's probably why Apple didn't roll it
33:02SPEAKERin this gen, in the 11 hardware
33:06SPEAKERthat rolled out a couple of months ago.
33:08SPEAKER- Yeah, they always tend to wait until things,
33:09SPEAKERstandards are a little more mature.
33:11SPEAKER- Yeah.
33:12SPEAKER- But I would assume like the radios are,
33:13SPEAKERI mean, there aren't even discrete radio chips anymore.
33:16SPEAKERI mean, it's all SSE phones, but I would assume
33:19SPEAKERthat will get a lot more power efficient over time, right?
33:21SPEAKER- It always does, yeah.
33:22SPEAKERIf you think back to like the first 4G phones,
33:24SPEAKERthe LTE phones, it's bad.
33:26SPEAKERSo the other thing is AT&T is using
33:28SPEAKERsome bullshit marketing stuff and they're calling
33:30SPEAKERtheir fast LTE 5G, which it is not.
33:33SPEAKERSo if you're seeing somebody advertising,
33:36SPEAKERI think I saw it during the World Series earlier tonight,
33:39SPEAKERnot to just throw back the curtain and show it,
33:41SPEAKERwe're really recording this.
33:43SPEAKERThey had some, T-Mobile had some 5G ads
33:47SPEAKERthat I don't even think I saw them call them 5G.
33:49SPEAKERI think they were just talking
33:50SPEAKERabout them being higher frequency, so.
33:53SPEAKER- Do you think 5G or, I mean, maybe we're getting ahead
33:55SPEAKERof our Wi-Fi 6 conversation, which probably will happen
33:57SPEAKERin the fairly near future, but does,
33:59SPEAKERdo either of these technologies seem like a good candidate
34:02SPEAKERfor maybe like a municipal internet rollout?
34:06SPEAKERLike a city-wide wireless type thing?
34:08SPEAKERLike something that's a little more localized
34:10SPEAKERand not trying to cover such a wide area
34:11SPEAKERas like a typical cell tower?
34:13SPEAKER- Well, so there's a lot of people,
34:16SPEAKERespecially in rural areas, doing 4G to the home deployments,
34:20SPEAKERwhich are really robust and good.
34:22SPEAKERMy parents have one of those in Virginia
34:24SPEAKERand it's like, it is, I haven't used it in person,
34:27SPEAKERI'm gonna use it next month, so I'll let you know.
34:29SPEAKER- And that's just internet for the entire house,
34:32SPEAKERfor the whole home network?
34:33SPEAKER- Yeah, it's internet for the entire house,
34:34SPEAKERbut instead of using like a little MiFi or something,
34:36SPEAKERlike a pocket hotspot, you have a fixed antenna
34:40SPEAKERthat aims directly at the tower
34:42SPEAKERand then they just dedicate a cell to you.
34:44SPEAKERSo like, if the providers, I mean,
34:47SPEAKERit depends on the region, how they're setting it up.
34:49SPEAKERI've seen some providers that are setting it up
34:51SPEAKERwith like unlimited bandwidth, 'cause they just say,
34:53SPEAKERlook, you can have, you have this cell and this is all you.
34:56SPEAKERSo, you know, the problem with all cell networks
34:58SPEAKERis that you're shared with everybody else
35:00SPEAKERthat's connected to that cell at that moment.
35:03SPEAKERBut in terms of a cell network, a cell,
35:05SPEAKERa tower can have 50 or 100 cells on it in some cases.
35:08SPEAKERSo like, it, as always, it depends on how they implement,
35:12SPEAKERbut it seems like, yes, it will be better
35:14SPEAKERfor things like that, both in terms of the throughput,
35:18SPEAKERthe reliability, and a bunch of other things.
35:22SPEAKER- How about this one from Bobby in Texas?
35:25SPEAKER- Hi, Bobby.
35:26SPEAKER- This is-- - Oh, you gotta,
35:27SPEAKERyou gotta do the voice.
35:28SPEAKERIf it's Bobby, you gotta do the King of the Hill voice.
35:30SPEAKER- Howdy, Bobby. - Yeah, exactly.
35:32SPEAKER- This is a two-parter.
35:33SPEAKERFirst part, if each of you could sit down with one person
35:36SPEAKERfor a lengthy podcast or video interview,
35:38SPEAKERwho would you want to chat with?
35:40SPEAKERSecond part, if you could shadow one person
35:42SPEAKERor a group of people for a day to pick their brain
35:45SPEAKERand get hands-on with their job
35:46SPEAKERwithout worrying about turning it into content,
35:48SPEAKERwho would that be?
35:49SPEAKER- Oh, man.
35:50SPEAKEROkay, second part first, I've done the thing
35:53SPEAKERthat I would wanna do and I would do it again
35:55SPEAKERin a heartbeat, but I, a couple times it tested,
35:58SPEAKERwe got to spend like days with astronauts
36:03SPEAKERand just sitting down and like asking,
36:07SPEAKERI literally, you know how like when you're talking
36:09SPEAKERto a little kid and they find out
36:10SPEAKERthat you play video games for a living?
36:13SPEAKERThey're like, they have a million questions
36:15SPEAKERand they just don't ever stop.
36:16SPEAKERI did that to Chris Hadfield for maybe three hours
36:18SPEAKERone afternoon when we were on a shoot.
36:19SPEAKER- Wow.
36:20SPEAKER- And we were just talking about flying airplanes and space
36:23SPEAKERand I was just like, is it okay if I just ask you
36:27SPEAKERa bunch of questions?
36:28SPEAKERLike, yeah, sure, go for it.
36:29SPEAKERAnd it was like, I learned so much about the reality
36:33SPEAKERof space travel, like there's other people
36:35SPEAKERthat tell this story too and I've seen it
36:37SPEAKERon like TED Talks and stuff, but like the calluses
36:41SPEAKERon the bottom of your feet, when you stop walking on them,
36:43SPEAKERwhen you're in microgravity, fall off.
36:46SPEAKERAnd he told me, like he showed me the way
36:48SPEAKERthat they take socks off so that like the sloughing off skin
36:51SPEAKERdoesn't just float around the space station and get inhaled.
36:54SPEAKERThere's a process, there's a process for everything
36:57SPEAKERon the space station.
36:57SPEAKER- That's incredible.
36:59SPEAKERAnd we talked about the, I think it's like 13 core
37:03SPEAKERfunctionality emergencies that every single person
37:05SPEAKERthat goes to the station for an extended period of time
37:07SPEAKERis trained to repair, including like spacewalks
37:10SPEAKERand the whole thing, like they all do,
37:12SPEAKERif the ammonia, when the ammonia system leaked
37:14SPEAKERa few years ago, that was one of them.
37:17SPEAKERThat was like one of the only times it's actually come up
37:19SPEAKERin the day to day.
37:21SPEAKERBut yeah, it was fascinating.
37:23SPEAKERAnd when you have access to like an expert at that level,
37:26SPEAKERto talk about like, whether it's flying one of the hundreds
37:29SPEAKERof planes that he's checked out to fly,
37:31SPEAKERor like what the difference between riding a Soyuz
37:34SPEAKERand riding in a space shuttle is or whatever,
37:37SPEAKERit's astounding, it's really fun.
37:39SPEAKER- That's really cool.
37:40SPEAKERIf I were to do like a, you know,
37:41SPEAKERfor a for public consumption interview or podcast
37:44SPEAKERor something, I would love to talk to the lead engineer
37:47SPEAKERon kind of name just about any video game console.
37:51SPEAKER- Oh man.
37:52SPEAKER- Like you see, like, I feel like Mark Cerny
37:54SPEAKERis the big contemporary example around the PlayStation 4
37:58SPEAKERand the forthcoming PS5.
37:59SPEAKERLike I've seen the name Boyd Molterer at Microsoft.
38:02SPEAKERHe was the lead engineer on the Xbox One
38:04SPEAKERand maybe also the 360.
38:05SPEAKER- Okay.
38:06SPEAKER- Or he was up there on the 360.
38:07SPEAKERLike the person whose job it is to architect that thing
38:10SPEAKERand steer that ship from, you know, kind of inception
38:14SPEAKERand early R&D right up to production and launch,
38:16SPEAKERbecause it seems like such a moving target.
38:18SPEAKERI've heard enough stories behind the scenes over time
38:21SPEAKERabout like changes in supply chain coming online
38:24SPEAKERat the last minute, changing how the thing got built
38:26SPEAKERor like how much memory it had and, you know,
38:28SPEAKERbets that were placed years before the hardware even existed.
38:31SPEAKERYou know what I mean?
38:32SPEAKER- Yeah.
38:33SPEAKER- It just, it seems like such a tricky,
38:34SPEAKERlike a tight rope to walk to get one of those things
38:36SPEAKERdesigned and like predict trends ahead of time
38:39SPEAKERand get it all done.
38:40SPEAKERAnd I would love to dig into that with somebody
38:42SPEAKERwho had kind of controlled that whole process.
38:44SPEAKER- Well, then like the manufacturing process,
38:46SPEAKERwhich is part of that too, is like, it's,
38:48SPEAKERI know how hard it is to make a simple hardware product.
38:51SPEAKERI can't imagine how hard it is to get the manufacturing
38:54SPEAKERright. I mean, we know how hard it is.
38:56SPEAKERCause like of the, what we're on the,
38:58SPEAKERlike the ninth console generation or something now.
39:00SPEAKERIs that right?
39:01SPEAKER- Yeah. I mean, like I have to imagine like the,
39:03SPEAKERthe known knowns of a game console design,
39:05SPEAKERlike heat dissipation and stuff, and, you know,
39:07SPEAKERlike you're trying to come in at a certain price point,
39:09SPEAKERlike basically making a powerful computer in a tiny box
39:12SPEAKERfor not much money is already really hard.
39:14SPEAKER- Yeah.
39:15SPEAKER- But then like, I guess what you would call the known
39:17SPEAKERunknowns of trying to predict like user habits years
39:19SPEAKERin advance and like what kinds of,
39:21SPEAKERI'm trying to think of an example, you know,
39:23SPEAKERlike the PS4 records what you're doing all the time.
39:25SPEAKERAnd they had to build hardware in years before that thing
39:27SPEAKERlaunched to handle the like encoding and writing of that
39:30SPEAKERvideo, you know, around the clock.
39:32SPEAKERAs long as you're using that thing, it's,
39:34SPEAKERit's writing video to some kind of cache somewhere. Right.
39:36SPEAKER- Yeah.
39:37SPEAKER- And like they had to conceive of subsystems to,
39:39SPEAKERto handle all that stuff before they,
39:40SPEAKERbefore they really knew that it was going to be something
39:42SPEAKERpeople even wanted.
39:43SPEAKER- Or was that a thing that came free?
39:45SPEAKERCause it was just built into the Nvidia chip set.
39:47SPEAKERCause H264 encode was built into all the Nvidia chip set.
39:49SPEAKERRight. Or ATI chip sets.
39:51SPEAKER- Right. And those are the exact,
39:52SPEAKERexact kind of scenarios that I would love to hear about.
39:54SPEAKERYou know, like this, this thing with like the hyper fast
39:56SPEAKERSSDs may be the same thing, right.
39:58SPEAKEROf like, Oh, whatever SOC they're getting just happens to be
40:01SPEAKERable to handle like a, you know, PCIE 4.0.
40:03SPEAKER- Yeah. It has an NVME slot, right?
40:05SPEAKERYeah. Or NBA driver.
40:07SPEAKER- Some of that stuff is just coming from free. Who knows?
40:08SPEAKERBut that's the type of stuff I would love to pick somebody's
40:10SPEAKERbrain about that had the kind of bird's eye view on that
40:13SPEAKERwhole project from start to finish.
40:15SPEAKER- I love, I love, love, love those books
40:18SPEAKERand the podcast series and articles and stuff like the,
40:21SPEAKERlike the, anything that goes through the,
40:23SPEAKERor like the big decisions that were made at a big podcast,
40:27SPEAKERat a, at a big product, like over the course of that
40:30SPEAKERlifespan, like the stuff team Takahashi has done over the
40:32SPEAKERyears.
40:33SPEAKER- Yeah. I've, I've, I've,
40:34SPEAKERI feel like an idiot for not having read Takahashi's books
40:36SPEAKERon the two X-Boxes.
40:38SPEAKER- He only, he did them on the first one in the 360, right?
40:40SPEAKERNot on the one.
40:41SPEAKER- Right. Yeah. Yeah. Not, yeah. I believe that's right.
40:43SPEAKER- I feel like I read the 360 one and it's like,
40:46SPEAKERit's just such an exercise in compromise. All of that stuff.
40:48SPEAKERI can't even imagine.
40:51SPEAKERI would love to talk to the people who made Windows Vista.
40:54SPEAKER- Oh man, geez. Wow.
40:57SPEAKERYou're just talking about one,
40:57SPEAKERone nightmare scenario after another,
40:59SPEAKERthe 360 and Vista are probably two of the most catastrophic
41:03SPEAKERlaunches at that scale in history.
41:05SPEAKER- Well, but what, but like Vista was bad because it was bad
41:08SPEAKERand the X-Box 360 had failure problems,
41:11SPEAKERbut at least it was selling and people liked it.
41:13SPEAKER- Oh yeah. The 360 was a quality product that just was not.
41:16SPEAKER- They had a fatal flaw.
41:17SPEAKER- They rushed it. Oh, it was a good,
41:19SPEAKERit was a good platform that was rushed to market and,
41:21SPEAKERand compromised on the reliability end.
41:23SPEAKERWhereas Vista, Vista is just broadly hated by everybody.
41:27SPEAKER- Well, but, but like they made like Vista and Windows 8
41:29SPEAKERare kind of similar, right?
41:30SPEAKERThey both, like they made forward-looking decisions
41:33SPEAKERthat had some sort of fundamental flaw that probably the
41:36SPEAKERpeople who are actually making the product were aware of.
41:39SPEAKERLike I know that Sinofsky and his team,
41:41SPEAKERwhen they were making Windows 8 were like,
41:44SPEAKERnobody's going to want this shitty start screen, right?
41:46SPEAKERLike they, they built a really good core underpinning.
41:49SPEAKERAnd then they were hampered by what I assume was a political
41:52SPEAKERdecision from, from the top of the company.
41:55SPEAKERAnd like that has like, so now I assume,
41:58SPEAKERI can only assume that Sinofsky has a book in him when he
42:01SPEAKERgets to the point that his NDA's don't matter anymore.
42:04SPEAKERCause I would,
42:05SPEAKERI would love to hear about both of those products in a big
42:07SPEAKERway. Cause it's like Windows 10,
42:09SPEAKERWindows 8 basically the same underpinnings that at the
42:11SPEAKERlaunch of Windows 10, they just fixed the UI problems and,
42:15SPEAKERand fixed a couple of core,
42:16SPEAKERlike low end stuff that nobody knows about.
42:18SPEAKER- So I'm sure everybody remembers the,
42:21SPEAKERthe core theme or kind of philosophy of Windows 8 was,
42:23SPEAKERyou know, merger of desktop and mobile or tablet.
42:26SPEAKER- Yeah, it's the thing that literally no one asked for.
42:28SPEAKER- Right. But so is, do you remember,
42:30SPEAKERwas there a similar design philosophy around Windows Vista?
42:34SPEAKERLike, like that was the successor to XP, right?
42:36SPEAKERBut like, I don't remember at the time,
42:38SPEAKERthem giving a strong pitch about like,
42:40SPEAKERhere is what the future of Windows is and here's what we're
42:42SPEAKERbuilding it around.
42:43SPEAKER- So the,
42:44SPEAKERthe setup was that they were going to fix all of the
42:46SPEAKERsecurity,
42:47SPEAKERlike the fundamental security underpinning flaws of pre
42:52SPEAKERWindows Vista, frankly, Windows, like,
42:55SPEAKERlike there was no user mode.
42:57SPEAKERLike the,
42:58SPEAKERthe problem was that everything ran as admin on XP,
43:02SPEAKERwhich meant that when you,
43:03SPEAKERyour system was infected with a worm that got through the
43:06SPEAKERfirewall, because there was a bug in the firewall,
43:09SPEAKERthen every single thing on your computer was immediately
43:11SPEAKERowned.
43:12SPEAKER- Right. And that's the problem that was fixed in Unix
43:14SPEAKERsystems decades ago, right?
43:16SPEAKER- I mean, for the beginning with Unix systems,
43:17SPEAKERcause they were always designed to be shared.
43:19SPEAKERLike Unix was designed to be shared and Windows was designed
43:22SPEAKERto be personal. So.
43:23SPEAKER- Yeah. They, they always had,
43:24SPEAKERthey always had a discreet user space, right?
43:26SPEAKER- Exactly.
43:27SPEAKERSo midway through Windows XP's life cycle,
43:31SPEAKERthey had to completely stop everything they were doing on
43:34SPEAKERthe next OS is my understanding. I don't know if this is true.
43:36SPEAKERNo, this is what I've always been told. And,
43:39SPEAKERand dedicate massive resources to SP2,
43:42SPEAKERwhich was the one that fixed all of like the worm stuff.
43:45SPEAKERAnd it, I can't remember the specifics.
43:47SPEAKERI don't think it added UAC yet.
43:49SPEAKERThe thing that pops up and says, Hey,
43:50SPEAKERare you sure you want to do this?
43:52SPEAKERBut it, it,
43:53SPEAKERit solved a lot of those problems and prevented the worms and
43:57SPEAKERall of the self propagating viruses and stuff that were
43:59SPEAKERspreading on Windows from, from getting worse.
44:02SPEAKERAnd then, then like they originally,
44:04SPEAKERthe original plan with Longhorn, what became Vista,
44:07SPEAKERwas that it was supposed to include like next gen file
44:10SPEAKERsystems and all sorts of other stuff.
44:13SPEAKERAnd then either the computers couldn't,
44:14SPEAKERweren't fast enough to run it.
44:16SPEAKERThey didn't have much memory or it just didn't work.
44:18SPEAKERSo they pulled all that stuff out.
44:19SPEAKERAnd I think they rewrote Vista twice, maybe like,
44:22SPEAKERlike they literally started it over post SP2 and then started
44:25SPEAKERover again when the file system stuff was going to be broken
44:27SPEAKERor did, did significant two offers.
44:29SPEAKER- Just a very troubled project.
44:31SPEAKER- It like, it was in a lot of ways,
44:33SPEAKERit was the victim of the success of XP.
44:36SPEAKERI don't, I knew that they were expecting like,
44:38SPEAKERthe other thing to remember is that XP is when the hockey
44:40SPEAKERpuck on PC adoption, when it got to the, that,
44:43SPEAKERthat horizontal to vertical shift on the PC adoption hockey
44:47SPEAKERpuck, it's when laptops became popular.
44:49SPEAKERIt's when everybody got wifi,
44:50SPEAKERall of that stuff happened at the same time and it,
44:52SPEAKERand PCs got cheap and it caused a massive,
44:55SPEAKERmassive uptick in adoption. So like, you know,
44:58SPEAKERthe target was bigger and they hadn't really paid attention
45:01SPEAKERto security cause they hadn't had to,
45:03SPEAKERand there were a bunch of other problems,
45:04SPEAKERbut like, I don't,
45:05SPEAKERa lot of it is on Microsoft making bad short-term decisions
45:09SPEAKERor bad long-term decisions for short-term products,
45:11SPEAKERbut I don't, I don't think it's all on them.
45:13SPEAKER- It's a storied history of Windows projects.
45:16SPEAKER- Yeah, that's who I would,
45:18SPEAKERI would love to do a story about like,
45:20SPEAKERlike get in deep with people who are on those teams and find
45:23SPEAKERout what was really happening and what they were screaming
45:25SPEAKERabout, what they were upset about, what they,
45:27SPEAKERwhat they thought was going well and didn't,
45:29SPEAKERwhat they thought went well and did.
45:31SPEAKER- I could talk about Windows of the past all day long,
45:33SPEAKERjust because we've all spent so much time with those things
45:36SPEAKERin those things and they're, you know,
45:38SPEAKERit's such a love to hate them kind of a situation.
45:41SPEAKER- If only we had a venue for that.
45:42SPEAKER- Yeah, if only.
45:43SPEAKER- If only.
45:44SPEAKER- Maybe someday we'll figure it out.
45:47SPEAKERI have one more quick question.
45:48SPEAKERI mean a quick answer to the other part.
45:50SPEAKERAlthough, I mean, these are interchangeable really.
45:52SPEAKERLike these could be public, like podcast discussions
45:54SPEAKERor just something I would pick somebody's brain
45:56SPEAKERabout behind the scenes.
45:58SPEAKERI would love to talk to somebody at a visual effects house,
46:02SPEAKERideally one of the biggest ones, let's say ILM.
46:05SPEAKER- Okay.
46:05SPEAKER- Because I could basically walk to them right now.
46:07SPEAKER- We can arrange that.
46:08SPEAKER- In 20 minutes or so.
46:10SPEAKERI would love to talk to whoever like runs their render farm
46:13SPEAKERand their render pipeline and talk to them about how
46:15SPEAKERthat has changed over the years.
46:16SPEAKERBecause I mean, they've been doing this stuff.
46:18SPEAKERWell, they have been doing this stuff
46:19SPEAKERsince the beginning of it.
46:20SPEAKERYou know, I guess the Pixar's of the world are a little bit
46:22SPEAKERnewer on the scene, but even they've been around
46:24SPEAKERfor 20 plus years at this point.
46:26SPEAKERLike I would love to know what they were rendering on back
46:28SPEAKERin the day and how that has changed as compute has gotten
46:32SPEAKERa lot more democratized.
46:33SPEAKERAnd especially now that GPUs are so powerful,
46:36SPEAKERlike if that has, cause you know, you heard the stories
46:38SPEAKERback in the day of like, oh, one frame of so-and-so took,
46:41SPEAKERyou know, three days to render
46:43SPEAKERor whatever the insane figures were.
46:45SPEAKER- It was three hours per frame was always the target.
46:48SPEAKER- Like, I would love to hear how that stuff has changed
46:50SPEAKERand how like the changes, the rapid changes
46:52SPEAKERin consumer hardware might have affected that stuff.
46:55SPEAKER- Have you ever seen, have you ever heard the story
46:56SPEAKERabout Toy Story, how they almost lost Toy Story 2?
46:59SPEAKER- Oh, it sounds vaguely familiar, but what was the deal?
47:02SPEAKER- It's an extra from, I think the Toy Story 2 DVD.
47:05SPEAKERSomebody made like a hand-drawn animated short of it.
47:08SPEAKERAnd the long story short is that somebody was on maternity
47:12SPEAKERleave and took a copy of Toy Story 2 home on a hard drive
47:17SPEAKERto, so that she continued working on it.
47:20SPEAKERAnd the server crashed and they'd never tested
47:24SPEAKERthe backup restore and it didn't work
47:27SPEAKERwhen they went to restore the backups.
47:30SPEAKERAnd so they were like, you know, doing data recovery
47:34SPEAKERin this whole thing and they have a proprietary file system.
47:36SPEAKERSo like that was going to be impossible
47:38SPEAKERto incredibly expensive and time consuming.
47:40SPEAKERAnd they were looking at having to start the movie all over.
47:43SPEAKERAnd finally somebody was like, oh, so-and-so took this home
47:46SPEAKERand there's a copy on her workstation at home.
47:50SPEAKERSo they sent people over to her house in like
47:54SPEAKERthe biggest car that they had with like, you know,
47:57SPEAKERpadded cases and the whole thing to pick up the hard drives.
48:00SPEAKERAnd they took it home, took it back to the shop
48:02SPEAKERand they plugged it in and they copied it back over.
48:04SPEAKERAnd like they said, that's how they saved the movie.
48:08SPEAKERBut that's not the story that's relevant here.
48:09SPEAKERThe story that's relevant here is that when they re-released
48:11SPEAKERall of those, I thought that was,
48:12SPEAKERI couldn't remember which story that was.
48:14SPEAKERThe story that's relevant is when they re-released
48:16SPEAKERall of the old Pixar movies as 3D Blu-rays,
48:19SPEAKERthey had to re-render the alternate viewing angles.
48:22SPEAKERAnd on the older movies that are rendered
48:25SPEAKERon old Erix boxes, SGI boxes, farms of SGI boxes,
48:29SPEAKERthey didn't have an architecture that could run the code.
48:32SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
48:33SPEAKER- Like essentially a Pixar movie is like a program
48:35SPEAKERthat just runs and generates the frames.
48:36SPEAKER- Right, it's all custom.
48:37SPEAKERIt's, you know, they're not just like spitting stuff
48:39SPEAKERout of 3DS Max or Maya or something like that, right?
48:42SPEAKER- No, yeah, so it's all, like they spit stuff out of Max
48:45SPEAKERand then it goes into Maya and then it goes
48:47SPEAKERinto this render farm and then the magic happens
48:50SPEAKERand the children's movies come out.
48:52SPEAKERAnd they had to bring back the people who'd worked
48:54SPEAKERon that old stuff to figure out how to spin it back up again
48:58SPEAKERlong enough to make the movie the same.
49:00SPEAKEROr in some cases, they just re-rendered it on modern stuff
49:03SPEAKERand it, like the 3D versions look a little,
49:06SPEAKERlike they're essentially the same
49:08SPEAKERbut there's still some randomness
49:09SPEAKERin like the light patterns and stuff like that.
49:11SPEAKERSo the light patterns on Nemo are different
49:13SPEAKERon the old DVD version and the new 4K version.
49:16SPEAKER- Huh, that's really fascinating.
49:18SPEAKERCan you imagine how afraid the people at Pixar were
49:21SPEAKERof Steve Jobs in that interim
49:23SPEAKERbetween losing the movie and recovering it?
49:26SPEAKER- I, you know, I think knowing the people I know
49:29SPEAKERthat worked there, I think they'd have been more upset
49:31SPEAKERabout like the amount of their,
49:33SPEAKERall of their time that had been wasted.
49:35SPEAKER- Oh yeah, and like letting their colleagues down, I'm sure.
49:37SPEAKER- Yeah, like the worst Jobs is gonna do is yell at you some
49:40SPEAKERand then fire you, but like the people who spent two years
49:42SPEAKERof their life making that thing, man,
49:44SPEAKERyou just stole two years of their life.
49:46SPEAKER- That sucks.
49:47SPEAKER- Boy, that does not reflect well
49:49SPEAKERon whoever was running that backup solution, I guess.
49:52SPEAKER- I'll see if I can find,
49:53SPEAKERthe short used to be on YouTube
49:53SPEAKERbut I'm sure it's Disney material
49:55SPEAKERso it may not be there anymore.
49:56SPEAKERIf I can find it, I'll put that in the show notes too.
49:58SPEAKER- I have to look that up or hear that
50:00SPEAKERbecause I absolutely live for making
50:02SPEAKERof behind the scenes stuff with that kind of detail.
50:05SPEAKER- It's a very good story.
50:06SPEAKER- I think that might do it for emails unless you wanna.
50:09SPEAKER- I think I'm good.
50:10SPEAKERI mean, I think we have, the emails have been answered.
50:13SPEAKER- Yeah, some of them have, a few.
50:14SPEAKERI've still got a good handful here though.
50:16SPEAKERMaybe we'll just tuck these away for next time.
50:18SPEAKER- We can have a rainy day.
50:19SPEAKERYou promised another episode, so on wifi.
50:23SPEAKERSo if that doesn't go well
50:24SPEAKERthen next week some more emails.
50:27SPEAKERKeep those emails coming folks.
50:28SPEAKER- Let's hope we don't have to make another game time decision
50:31SPEAKER- techpod@content.town.
50:34SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, there aren't a lot
50:35SPEAKERof other 24 hour charity streams coming up for a while.
50:38SPEAKERSo I think we should have a little more time.
50:39SPEAKER- Why do we do this every year, Brad?
50:41SPEAKERIs it for the kids?
50:42SPEAKER- It's for the kids, man.
50:43SPEAKER- I love kids.
50:44SPEAKER- It's for the kids. - Legitimately a good cause.
50:46SPEAKERLike nobody could argue with that.
50:47SPEAKER- It is, it's not like Doctors Without Borders
50:50SPEAKERor something that you're like,
50:50SPEAKER"Ah, maybe these people are running heroin
50:52SPEAKERor something on the side."
50:54SPEAKER- Yikes, sure they do what they have to do to get by.
50:56SPEAKER- Don't make that the show title for the love of God.
50:58SPEAKERNo, Doctors Without Borders is great, we love them too.
51:00SPEAKER- Yes, yes.
51:02SPEAKER- But yeah, Extra Life is really good.
51:03SPEAKERThey do good stuff and it's worth staying up all night
51:05SPEAKERplaying video games.
51:06SPEAKER- Indeed, yeah.
51:06SPEAKER- Well, I guess that does it for us this week.
51:08SPEAKERThe email address is techpod@content.town.
51:12SPEAKER- Yep, that's right.
51:12SPEAKER- You can find us at Sweatpants Tech on the Twitter.
51:16SPEAKERI'm Will Smith.
51:17SPEAKER- I'm Brad Shoemaker.
51:18SPEAKER- If you liked the show, mash the review button on iTunes.
51:21SPEAKER'Cause that is, it turns out the way that you can let people
51:23SPEAKERknow about a podcast in the future.
51:25SPEAKER- Yes, give us likes on things.
51:28SPEAKERThat's definitely, I'm not gonna get into that.
51:30SPEAKERThat's a whole other topic.
51:31SPEAKER- No, yeah, that's a different problem.
51:33SPEAKERBut also I bitched about the power being out this weekend.
51:36SPEAKERI had the easiest of Northern California,
51:39SPEAKERwell, California in general, wildfire-related problems
51:43SPEAKERthis week in that it was dark at my house a little bit
51:45SPEAKERand I had to use a match to light the stove
51:48SPEAKERinstead of the clicker.
51:49SPEAKERThe people who, like, they evacuated a couple hundred
51:51SPEAKERthousand people in Northern California because of fires.
51:54SPEAKERThere are people in the Getty Fire and the Easy Fire
51:57SPEAKERand all the others right now that are,
51:58SPEAKERhouses are being destroyed.
52:00SPEAKERThey're losing everything.
52:01SPEAKERSo get your disaster kits ready, folks.
52:05SPEAKERAnd I'd love to hear what you put in your,
52:07SPEAKERif you were affected, what you did to,
52:11SPEAKERsend us a note if you have a moment.
52:13SPEAKERI'd love to hear how you dealt with blackouts,
52:15SPEAKERhow you dealt with evacuations, all of that stuff,
52:19SPEAKERbecause I think it's important that we talk about that
52:22SPEAKERso that we're all ready when the disasters strike.
52:24SPEAKER- It's unfortunate that we have to,
52:25SPEAKERbut it is definitely something that should be discussed.
52:28SPEAKER- Well, I mean, look, climate change is real.
52:30SPEAKERWe all agree, but, you know, disasters, tornadoes,
52:34SPEAKERyou and I grew up in tornado-y parts of the country.
52:37SPEAKERHurricanes, tornadoes, natural disasters happen all the time
52:40SPEAKERand it's good to be ready for them.
52:42SPEAKERAnd it's easy to do before and almost impossible during.
52:45SPEAKERSo anyway, on that cheery note, see you all next week.
52:48SPEAKER- Yeah.
52:49SPEAKER- Hooray, let's go live life.
52:50SPEAKER- See you next time.
52:51SPEAKER- Bye everybody.
52:52SPEAKER(upbeat music)
53:04SPEAKER(upbeat music)