okay
it's when show time again or that is to say it was when show time about 20
minutes about 20 minutes ago thank you for your patience um those of you who
are watching on youtube in a certain way not very meaningful to
you we were on time today in some time zone we were on time
it's five o'clock somewhere
which is irrelevant because we don't start at five yeah wait yes we do oh
crap but not in that time zone no not my uh
um can we blame uh daylight saving time uh
oh yeah that was last week
yep so actually no one's gonna be watching this week anyway like i go look
at the viewership statistics probably everyone was like um
everyone everywhere else in the world probably thinks that it doesn't start
for an hour it doesn't start for another hour yeah so no we're for we're 40
minutes early whoa
oh my goodness we are early for like most of the world that's fantastic
we are so good at this yes like online content creators yeah um all right so
we've got a great show for you guys today yeah we specifically
went out of our way to avoid talking about it last week
and the reason was that honestly i just needed a little bit more
time to figure out what the heck was going on here
the g-force partner program yeah on the
surface this looks like some pretty jank pretty scummy stuff
and um below the surface
um well we'll talk about it later
um but yeah i mean realistically if i was gonna say it's all good i would have
said that before yes um there was another
big news item this week security flaws
found in AMD zen processors uh from cts
Labs wow that's been a drama and a half so i
think that even technically started last week too but especially this one
super muddy waters last week and it's a little bit a little bit more clear now
like still kind of confusing did you ever play the game at the beach where
you would like you would like stomp and then you'd get like the like the kind of
godzilla looking cloud that comes out around your foot and you'd be like oh
that was fun stomp and then you would get to the point
where you couldn't really see the cloud anymore because it's because you just
mucked up everything so that was last week
now we've left it for a few hours and like we can go sort of stomp around a
bit again but it's not it's not clear either what else we got
okay um apparently another NVIDIA thing they're
both just slamming it this week apparently they're going to announce rtx
or ray tracing technology which is pretty interesting
and another company's removing another
headphone jack well it's the same headphone jack yeah
that's fair well i guess it's a different headphone jack you know what well it's the same kind that's just
really interesting yeah
this video brought to you by spectra
and fresh books
can you eat either of those things no that's a real bummer because i'm
super hungry
i was like i thought i thought you were like spilling into a spot for the other
guys no oh no okay no no not really i'm
sure you could have these oh i'm not going to eat reaper jerky
savage jerky's not sponsoring like they're right there yeah they're
right there and i'd feel better well first i'd feel worse
then i'd feel better and then i feel much worse
all right why don't we jump into the news um this is going to be like not
very many topics but a very long time yeah i'm not ready for the GeForce partner
program are we jumping to that not yet yeah yeah let's talk about let's talk
about something kind of trivial wow you and i are gonna have to play uh
what's going on we're gonna have to play share the power adapter over the next
little bit here because i've only gotten ten percent but that's okay i'm gonna oh i'm on
battery saver already well okay then i'm gonna turn down my screen brightness
a bit okay sony removed the headphone jack from the
xperia xz2 and xz2 compact uh they
outlined the details of why they did this in their blog this was originally
posted on the forum by die hard live uh would you what do
you mind doing die hard to live die hard to live yeah i can do a straw pool heck
yeah do you even consider
sony phones when buying a phone that is a fantastic straw poll
would you consider a sony phone now yeah
here in north america sony's market share is like
this is one of the reasons why i want to do this poll though because we don't
necessarily have just a north american audience exactly it'll be a little
skewed because we're live right now yeah if this was the if we were able to
get these results from the youtube audience i think it would be different
than what it's going to be now someday when we're streaming on Floatplane
and that stream we can then go we could have like perpetual pulling that like
sits right under the video and that would be super cool that would totally work um i mean yeah it's all sort of
theoretical at this point because Floatplane is not
particularly fully featured at the moment
um last week i'm not trying to be a jerk or
anything last week hit a little deep that that comments fair though yeah
uh okay so i've gone ahead and i've dropped the straw poll in there but this
was originally posted on the forum by die hard to live
and they basically outlined the two reasons
for removing the headphone jack that subjectively um
are probably about the worst reasons that you could do anything
and contribute to um in my opinion oh my god was that
actually okay i hadn't read their two reasons before was that actually it or
did we just like come up with that contribute to probably why i think
probably why the straw poll results will be what i think they will be
so it's not good go ahead and pull up the results here would you consider a
sony phone remember we didn't say would you buy a sony phone yeah we said would
you even consider would you even think about it at all uh we've got 26 percent
of you saying yes 74 percent of you saying no and only 500
of you even bothering to vote which is some pretty low numbers for these when
show struggles which i'm going to put that category as a wow i really don't
care and no one is even no one is even still voting like the results aren't
even rolling in anymore oh wait yes that yes they are oh oh and it died off
pretty hard at 6 35. it died off pretty hard it's like still kind of going it's
not okay so here are the reasons that sony outlined
for making this decision and you got to remember the the strong opinion on this
would be a yes anyone thinking no like it's kind of effort for them to be like
yeah no so like there's probably a way higher
percentage of people that actually wouldn't consider but anyway reason number one
it looks more sleek without it so by that logic a human would probably
look more sleek without an anus but you probably shouldn't remove it
reason number two
i thought you were gonna hold it together on that one but you couldn't no
not quite reason number two
other companies are doing it oh
so painful now in fairness is that actually what they
said in fairness to sony in fairness to sony hold on a second
um here okay look do you want me to read
the whole thing this is part of the shift to our new
ambient flow design language in order to
create the beautiful seamless design our designers needed to remove the headphone
jack plus we were aware of the major market trend towards wireless headphones
over wired headphones so yes they literally did they literally did
say that um so okay
in fairness to sony in defense of sony something that i'm not a hundred percent
sure if they deserve right now um
no one cares about their phones anyways no that is not what i was going to say
be clear there i was also kidding in fairness to sony i never oh i never said
the announcement video live i was trying to figure out why so few people i used to like their phones until we had so
many of them just bend in half yeah uh well two i think
three burkles mine yours burkles did too yeah
oh i didn't even know that yeah how do you manage to do that it was a compact
oh the compacts have the same issue as just less likely it was just burkle
he's an action man um probably more action in his pants wow i meant like wow
okay actually my defense of sony is actually worse than anything you've said
in defensive in sony's defense the last time they tried to do something really
innovative that was probably really expensive from
an r d perspective because remember sony was the one that made waterproof
mainstream that was cool that was very cool that's why i used to really like
their phone and then they still didn't manage to sell more phones because of it
but that's a whole other issue the last time they tried to do something they
were the first to have a 4k display now creating a 4k mobile display you
guys got to understand when you have a feature on your phone
let's say oneplus uh launches a 2560 by
1080 mobile display oneplus did not go and get that freaking
panel created they are a relatively small player
and when you're a relatively small player doing relatively small volume you
don't get to walk up to samsung's display division or lg
or uh auo or phillips or whoever it is
you don't get to walk up and be like yo we need a custom sku it needs to have
this color gamut uh this uh response
time it needs to be this size at this resolution they're gonna laugh you out
of their office you get to do that when you're apple
when you're samsung believe it or not apple's notch display was custom created
just for them because until apple did it of course
after apple does it which ties into sony's other reasons yeah of course
other people want it but until apple did it nobody else was gonna want that okay
um so so sony would have had to actually
create a 4k mobile display in that form factor
for that phone that quite honestly they
probably didn't sell a ton of based on our straw poll results and also you can
just google it and just see like the people around you
what phones they're using so they didn't yeah when's the last time you saw one so
so sony didn't probably get a great roi
on that particular you know breaking the mold kind of investment although even
then giving them credit for breaking the mold in that way is
not entirely fair because they were just following an overall market trend they
were just trying to get out ahead of it in a way that was totally meaningless and stupid yes and almost never even
worked anyways the phone ran in default 1080p almost all the time and then you'd
like view a picture that was in 4k and you'd have to wait a second and then it
would just like and then change resolution it was really
weird it was very odd almost everything ran at 1080p
but anyways so i can see how they don't want to take
any risks because you have to move a lot of devices to
make up for any kind of r d investment
beyond just even the basics
um but i'm just i'm disappointed i i was
thrilled to see that samsung still had the headphone jack on the s9 and s9 plus
um i think that you know what yeah the mainstream is moving to wireless but
samsung is going to sell some handsets just for that and i really hope that
they do get rewarded for it yeah all right
what do we got for our next topic here
oh should we get into the invasion these are all big deep ones i just have such
this thing if you want to go pretty light and easy no no let's just let's
just get this out of the way okay so the g-force partner program this was
originally posted on the forum this is actually an 11-page topic over on our
forum and it was posted by wm groom ak
and this lady or gentleman whichever it is um okay let's go ahead and get screen
share going on here uh basically read an article over on
hard ocp from kyle bennett and
said this found all of this interesting
if his reporting checks out because
basically and and this is sort of the problem
this came to light from AMD bringing some of the details of what's called the
g-force partners program or gpp
to his attention and you gotta look at that's yeah you gotta look at no matter
who it is like i i get that whoever you're a fanboy of whether it's
AMD or Intel or NVIDIA i get that there's this like tribalism
thing that's that's wired into us as human beings and
when someone else does it it's the worst and when we do it it's just us getting
back at them for being bad people
but you got to understand that any time any any company brings something to your
attention oh hey um have you noticed them doing this
there's an agenda at play there's room for spin almost every action is selfish
whether it's helpful to other people or not there's some amount of element that is usually selfish which is okay in a
lot of cases but it's just something to be aware of yes it's you got to live your life sort
of thinking about that in everything that you do
so the basic summary is that the story
began when several sites including heart ocp were alerted to the goings-on by a
uh by AMD in a blog post from march 1st NVIDIA
outlined their new GeForce partner program which ostensibly
helps consumers identify brands
that deliver the g-force promise
of delivering the best pc gaming
platform bar none so let's go ahead and pull up NVIDIA's blog post
that NVIDIA is very good at this oops there we go
uh let's pull up NVIDIA's blog post that
NVIDIA is so good at this um sort of
puts it in the shiniest possible terms what they're doing here
this is the headline the GeForce partner program helps gamers know what they're
buying oh boy
i was having trouble figuring out what i was buying before i'm sure glad that i
know now like last stream we talked about how confusing Intel skus are yeah
graphics card skews are not a huge problem on the NVIDIA side
yeah actually and even on the AMD side yeah it's pretty straightforward they're
not that bad higher number is more better there was a little bit of confusingness for a section there but
it's kind of the first number is the generation and then beyond that higher
is more better i think it got a little bit confusing on
the AMD side when we had like fury and nano and actually no NVIDIA does have
some stupid bs going on right now where the three gig and the six gig version of
the 1060 are actually different cards yeah yeah uh okay that's fair so hold on
a second well wait a minute is NVIDIA rescuing us from themselves
is that what's happening right now we also had that stuff where the titan xp
and the titan xp that that was okay that was really
annoying that was really so um especially when the whole community
nicknamed the first one the xp yeah and then they called their next one the xp
okay okay so fine okay fine you know what then let's play let's play NVIDIA
advocate uh go wait let's play NVIDIA advocate and say they did need to do
something about this confusing industry so let's have a look at what they said
the oh man wow this starts off horrible like right within the first two lines
the GPU and software of a gaming pc make all the difference in a gamer's
experience and together with our add-in card and system partners we're dedicated
to building the best pc gaming platform bar none this is the GeForce promise
partner program is designed to ensure that gamers have full transparency into
the GPU platform and software they're being sold now i'm a
i'm a let you finish but do you ever read stuff that just makes
you like tired i'm doing it right now
because i'm sure where you were going with yeah
i'mma let you finish but there was no ambiguity here
there there's already marketing incentives and in some cases
like basically an ARM twisted behind the back like this
where NVIDIA really has a lot of control
over the the badges that are put on for example a product box or in the case of
add-in cards even the overall design like you could take a picture from the
side of an entire shelf of cards made by MSI ASUS Gigabyte evga
and all the NVIDIA ones would be basically the same yeah they're really
because NVIDIA has mandated and they have lots of levers they can pull to
control their partners but NVIDIA has mandated that they need to kind of look
like this and the levers that they can pull include pricing
um allocation of the hot parts that
actually sell um partner support so things like providing
engineering support for your custom boards um access early access to the
parts so you can begin development ahead of other guys and if all this kind
of stuff has existed forever and it's like totally kind of fine kind of kind
of there's there's some issues in some realms but most of it is fairly standard
practice okay fine is a relative term most of this is fairly standard practice
for a lot of different industries yeah depending on how it's done so the thing
is that we we get a lot of uh we we get a lot of sort of feedback from our
community that the perception is that we're sort of like friends of NVIDIA
but the reality of it is we're not friends with anybody um we are a
business and we have business partnerships
and from a product perspective we like
NVIDIA products just fine from a um sort of
how we perceive their reputation within the industry
we have some misgivings ones that we have brought to light in the past
uh particularly actually i think probably the most recent example is the 1066 gig and three gig that's an
extremely recent example we didn't like the way they did that well i mean like
we mentioned at this show but there's also the recent change to GeForce
experience yes we've also mentioned that which was like we put them on blasts for that and
i still don't install it and i still don't recommend it and while i am
not always at liberty to talk about especially the sources of the the the um
the frustration with NVIDIA that takes place behind the scenes
there's a lot of it that we're aware of and there's a lot of ARM twisting and uh
you know it's you know think about it think NVIDIA is like the
partner that stands there posing for a picture with you
and has their foot on your toe yeah
being like smile properly man that's the perception that
i get a lot of the time please come say hi
so let's continue reading about the g-force promise here
this transparency into what you're buying is only possible when NVIDIA
brands and partner brands are consistent
so the new program means that we'll be promoting our gpp partner brands across
the web on social media events and more so this sounds like oh NVIDIA's is doing
great things for their partners gpp partners will also get early access
to our latest innovations and work closely with our engineering team to bring the newest technologies to gamers
partners are signing up fast they see the benefit of keeping brands and
communication consistent and transparent does this not have like a um
uh which which harry potter movie is it where uh uh umbridge takes over the
school as the the professor the the the the prim and proper yeah you know
lady who turns out to be like an absolute monster i don't know the name
of it but i think it's the second last one yeah i don't know i don't remember anyway it's like not really important
yeah the point is does this not have like yeah kind of a rules for you know
proper behavior as students kind of vibe to it the program isn't exclusive partners
continue to have the ability to sell and promote products from anyone partners
choose to sign up for the program and they can stop participating at any time
there's no commitment to make any monetary payments
or product discounts for being part of the program
gpp ensures our engineering and marketing efforts support brands
consumers associate with g-force that transparency will give gamers the
confidence needed to make their purchase whichever products they choose
now i don't often feel the need to read out an entire press release from a
company because a lot of the time frankly i feel like companies should pay
me to read their stupid press release like honestly press releases that's not
journalism that's not object that's not objective that's advertising they
literally pay someone to write it and then they pay like market wire to
distribute it that that's what it is um
okay so on the surface this sounds like everything about this
is voluntary and terrific but let's look at the state of the GPU market right now
if you if you can get gpus you are making bank because of the whole
cryptocurrency mining thing and pent up demand from gamers who haven't been able
to get gpus because of the cryptocurrency mining thing
if you can't get gpus you are basically plum out of luck and
NVIDIA without doing anything
that could open them up to a lawsuit can plausibly say
we just didn't have enough for you you were on the list
sorry and if you're let's say someone like
evga for example you have
other businesses you sell motherboards you sell
crazy ridiculously high wattage power supplies yeah you sell power supplies
you sell cases even but let's be honest
when's the last time you saw an evga motherboard out in the wild
so they sell they sell motherboards but do they sell a lot of them compared to
someone like an ASUS or a Gigabyte no not really and that isn't to say that
they're bad boards that's just to say that they aren't as popular and that
evga's business is very reliant on gpus
so if evga couldn't get
allocation of gpus to say that their business would suffer
would be a gross understatement so NVIDIA's blog post outlining how
this is all very voluntary it just ensures that they
get the benefits of being part of the partner program
it comes across a little bit disingenuous because
that's not what's going on here what's going on is that if you don't join the partner program
you're not going to get allocation and your business is going to suffer and
you're going to have to lay off real people with real families
who won't have a job anymore and won't be
able to support them and that's something that if i'm a company like
evga that for the most part my experience
with them has actually been very positive i would like to believe that they care
about um so you're pretty much joining the
GeForce partner program so
let's go to the heart ocp article huge shout out to kyle for for doing what he
was doing here so hard ocp began interviewing aibs and oems
i'm going to re-share this in twitch checks i showed it wow yeah go ahead hit twitch chat with that it's really
important um so they began interviewing aibs and oems who communicated a few
things one that the GeForce partner program
has terms in it that are likely illegal
number two that the GeForce partner program is
going to likely tremendously hurt consumer choice and number three that
the GeForce partner program will disrupt business with companies
that are currently doing business with AMD in particular AMD and Intel
the other thing that he gleaned and we
haven't been able to verify this because here's what you guys
got to understand i don't i've never seen the agreement
and i know for a fact i will never see the agreement
it would shock me if anyone ever saw this agreement out in the public but
what i know about agreements like this is that let's say for example that uh
uh um a gag order was done in an illegal
fashion let's say i made you sign some kind of an agreement that says this is a
very spicy agreement yeah spicy agreement okay if you talk about this
agreement i will kill you and you will authorize me to kill you oh okay
obviously illegal
but let's say it wasn't murder let's say it was something slightly less black and
white than that like i'll kill your company yeah like that
which to a lot of people is kind of close
yeah i mean people have committed suicide over their companies
yeah so let's say that it was something like that
you could you could you could you could break the agreement at some point but
until you fight me in court and prove
that depending on the way it's wording because expensive lawyers can do expensive
lawyer things depending on the way it's worded the onus could be on you
to prove that you don't owe me whatever it was
so your business could effectively be destroyed in the years and after the
money that it costs you to fight me
so even though i have an illegal term and i have a potentially illegal
punishment for it you don't want to be the one who steps
out of line because i can punish you in the meantime in ways that would destroy
you to the point where it would never matter
if what i did was illegal because you wouldn't even exist to take a payout
anymore five years ten years down the road when you would be in a position to
finally get your payout now that
is a real possibility and i'm not saying that i know that that's what's happening
but what i do know is that nobody is coughing up this agreement and
i do know that agreements like this do exist
okay so with all of that in mind
further information that hart ocp is publishing
alleges that the GeForce partner program and i think okay to to
i'm not disagreeing with anything that you're saying okay but to play a little
bit both sides oh i know i know but to play a little bit of both sides yeah
alleges is a pretty important word here
like there's a lot of as well according to
kyle bennett's article on heart ocp and a lot of it makes sense
and i'm explaining how it could make sense but it lines up pretty okay but like
okay yeah so thank you yeah are you at our legal department
i was sort of at one point long time ago um but okay i don't want to talk about
this
but like yeah i just want to make sure that's clear because while this might
make sense and all that kind of stuff it's not technically
complete it's it's all alleges okay
so kyle's article further alleges that
in order to have access to the GeForce partner program
partners must have their own gaming
brand aligned exclusively with g-force
now think about that for a minute because that's been a huge trend over
the last 10 years or so i think rog
just celebrated its 10-year anniversary with the rampage five
extreme they had a 10-year anniversary edition of that port and rog was one of
the to ASUS credit this was ASUS doesn't
always get marketing right but to ASUS's credit
they built the rog brand when i called it a stupid idea way back in the day so
kudos to them and uh the rest of the industry basically was playing follow
the leader and that's yeah i would also say they they have nailed it a few times
ASUS's rog um
gigabytes aorus um lenovo's legion
uh who else do we have dell's xps or alienware to a greater extent xps is
less gaming these days it used to be different engine has been having more of an issue getting its
well they just launched that's fair like ces 15 months ago or something like that
so give them some time but it also alleges that all of these brands
will have to be exclusively aligned with g-force
so even though NVIDIA's blog post says partners continue to have the ability to
sell and promote products from anyone the gpp documentation allegedly says
that those who do not participate will lose
benefits like high effort engineering engagements early tech engagement launch
partner status game bundling
sales rebate programs i'll get back to that one social media and pr support
marketing reports and marketing development funds so let's get back to
sales rebate programs and marketing development funds for a minute here
the way the tech industry works and there's a reason for it because if you
gave every mom and pop computer shop a one dollar discount they would take it
straight to price and sell the product for cheaper which as a consumer you
might go wow that's great but it isn't necessarily because we
talked about this previously when Intel wasn't providing the support
that we feel like they should on their previous generation chipsets um
in terms of patching for spectre and meltdown but the problem with just charging the
bear amount is that it doesn't give you the the
business um war chest that you need to well to go to
war in the event that you have to and it's one of those things where
it kind of relies on a business to behave in a manner that is in good faith
acting in the consumer's best interest but a business that is making a healthy
profit is in a better position to as an extreme example still exist
a year later when you come back for warranty support you actually need the
companies that you buy things from to make a profit
yeah does that make sense okay so anyway
the problem with the it industry is that it tends to be and it's kind of a
cultural thing i'm not going to get any deeper into it than that but it tends to
be a race to zero industry volume volume volume
take down as much margin as you can so you can take the volume that your
competitor would have been doing force them under
and then someday we'll raise the prices yeah and you do eventually see that like
the hard drive industry enjoyed a short period of great margins when basically
everyone was gone and then they were supplanted by the SSD industry in the
mainstream and to be clear hard drives are still doing fine in the cloud
they're not going away or anything but that business is a b2b business which
tends to be lower margins so there was like a there was like a golden hour
there for the hard drive industry uh here do you need this yeah go for it
um right so the way that the tech industry
works is that the pricing is fixed you just say okay look
a core i5 8600k that's 200 u.s
and then the way that you actually provide promotions or the way that you
make someone like formerly so when i worked at ncix the way that ncix was
able to differentiate from mom and pop shops was not the sticker price it was
the back end support because every CPU we sold we got a couple percentage
kickback at the end of a quarter and every CPU we sold well you know
during black friday we might get five bucks or 10 bucks off now all of a
sudden mom and pop in order to compete with us have to sell below cost
giving us an advantage that's the way that you actually stay
competitive and to be clear this isn't some kind of like subversive cloak and
dagger nonsense because within sort of the the mainstream stores
that you shop at best buy new egg i mean okay some of these are kind of dated
references tiger direct memory express canada computers um uh micro center
uh amazon the programs are basically across the
board pretty similar and whenever someone finds out that they get a god
approach that someone else got a program that they didn't there's outrage and
usually the brand ends up kind of doing something to make it up to you and then
the other guy complains about that it's all negotiations it's business as usual
now the problem here is that with gpus in particular
NVIDIA maintains a lot of control
over the pricing at every level to the partners and to the end users through
tools like these kinds of rebates so they sell the chipset to the vendor
at some price x but then NVIDIA could
decide a week later to go well you know what here's a sell-through rebate
effectively lowering the price without actually lowering the sticker price
meaning that someone who has a multi-week in some cases lead time
between acquiring chips and then turning them into boards
delivering them to retailers and eventually selling through them might
effectively have a bunch of stock that's overpriced now and no real recourse for
getting rid of it and so it's at NVIDIA's discretion to support you to
get rid of it which is a fairly direct way a fairly
strong but indirect way to sort of choke
out a company that's right so game bundling
mdf and sales rebate programs are basically like saying
you'll never make money on graphics cards again if you were to remove all that stuff
yeah okay
um i forget where we were going with this but partner brand aligned
exclusively with NVIDIA partners have the ability to sell and promote products
from anyone but the allegedly this behind-the-scenes
documentation says they'll get all of this support cut and to be clear the
public documentation doesn't say any of that
okay heart ocp has been told that if a company does not participate in gpp
they feel not by NVIDIA yeah as if NVIDIA would hold back allocation
of gpus from their inventories this has not been spelled out contractually but
the feeling is that it's done on a wink and a nod
to be fair they said that the stuff we just
mentioned losing all these different things was in the documentation this is
a feeling yeah the allocation bit is a feeling and then the next part that
we're going to talk about is also a like
feeling yeah so it was expressed to heart ocp that publishing that article
could damage heart ocps relationship with NVIDIA
which well we've gotten to the end of it now i guess i guess we're in the same boat
look at that but knowing uh and like
okay to jump all the way back to the beginning of this conversation in terms
of uh like there's always there's very extremely massively often
i'm not going to say always because someone's going to call me on that in some weird way but there there's
basically always a selfish reason for everything whether it's all
this region is tiny or huge whatever um saying
hey if you release this NVIDIA is going to be mad well
saying that to heart ocp was probably pushing them to release it
um because then again maybe not kyle's been in the industry a long time and he's
deeply connected they may have actually had his best interest at heart
possibly but from articles that i've read from him before too
no issue but pushing that kind of stuff but let's go let's go let's let's take
the helicopter up another thousand feet and let's go why were they talking to
him at all yeah yeah seriously so so the particular
warning might have been in kyle's best interest but the fact that they're
talking to him at all is probably in their own best interest and i'm sure
they know that he likes juicy articles and also for the consumer's best
interest potentially like because remember there there could be a selfish
kernel but that doesn't mean that it doesn't benefit a whole bunch of people
and that you couldn't don't know how much rationalize the benefit you're
providing to yourself by saying well it also helps out all these other guys
which is great in a lot of situations that's honestly mostly how charity works
but yeah like you just don't know how much
how much of this is helping other people how much of this is selling and for kyle
to talk about how this article could damage the relationship with NVIDIA
you can find a selfish colonel there too by saying that he's adding credibility
to his own publication by saying you know what i'm willing to
risk damaging my relationship with NVIDIA in order to bring you guys the
facts and in this case this actually does look to me and i do i
haven't seen the partner agreement and i won't admit to having talked to anyone
about this behind the scenes but this looks to me like it actually
does have the potential to damage a relationship with NVIDIA NVIDIA is
um well it comes back to the portrait
NVIDIA smiles a lot and they they talk about partnership a
lot and what they mean is
they have expectations of their partners and if their partners don't meet them
well hmm
that's my perception and a lot of people think that we're like super super chummy
with NVIDIA but i've said before in the past and i'll say it again now
we have done a grand total of three
sponsored engagements with NVIDIA we did some uh pre-rolls way back when
we first started and those were actually that was a complicated thing because
probably none of you even remember them it was 10 spots and they were all for a
particular evga graphics card but the funding was being passed through
via mdf from NVIDIA
so that one hardly even registers number
two we went down to california and hosted
mod 24 their modding event we were paid what i consider to be a very modest fee
for that kind of an engagement yeah and the number three
this was the first time they had actually done flat out a sponsored video
with us ever they did something with us in q4 talking
about how to game at 4k they were actually pretty easy to work with which
was kind of refreshing um because we were able to talk about game consoles as
well we kept it very objective and we told them up front we were like look
we never actually work with you guys on sponsored stuff but there's this
perception that we're in your pocket so you gotta understand we're gonna have to
approach this very carefully yeah
um and they were actually pretty cool about it but that's the extent of it we
have worked far more extensively with AMD Intel ASUS
uh i think we've done more stuff with MSI
i mean certainly more stuff with the regular partners like um like uh
squarespace uh zotac we haven't really done much big stuff with more than but
we've done but we've done actually yeah we've done a fair bit with zotek yeah
okay yeah yeah like most people
so there you go so
are we putting ourselves at risk given that the relationship was finally
starting to warm up and we were really getting some stuff done like us a
dedicated sponsored video with us is one of the one of the biggest things that a
partner can do with us um and we finally did one with them given things we're
starting to warm up yes we're putting ourselves at risk but given that our
business survived just fine for the five years prior to that no it's not a ton so
we're not going to act like white knights here or anything like that but i
also said allegedly a lot we said allegedly a lot because perception and
that i'm not going to admit to having talked to anyone i'm just i'm going to
say this i haven't talked to anyone and i'm also going to say this i'm not
always a hundred percent honest with you guys
so you can read into that whatever you feel like speaking of honor there's a few there's
a i want to add one thing before we jump into
sponsor spots um but uh one thing i want
to add to is some of this stuff is future traceable
so you'll be able to tell yep just
keep that in mind like one of the smart things you can do um if you're trying to
keep uh an agreement under wraps is you could give everyone slightly different
terms that's fair yeah and that way if
it came to light you could kind of go okay
it was one of them them or them and then something else came to light you could
go it was them so
even if i knew anything and i am being honest this is honest
answers episode whatever this is haslin has seen the agreement
the answer is no i have not seen it and
i have been told by the people that i would
never admit that i have talked to
that i will never see it and that they will never tell me any details about it
okay that actually did happen as well okay anyone that i won't admit that i talked
to told me they would never show it to me and they would never tell me the details of it so that happened okay
so there you go um
yeah let's talk about let's talk about something like
not horrible here's spectrum glasses hey
like my my life is far less complicated right
now talking about spectrum glasses
instead of like stuff because this is just it's simple okay
if you stare at a monitor all day the blue light a lot of blue light can
be bad for your eyes yeah this filters it without having a huge
impact on the color accuracy of the world around you
um and compared to a software solution like flux or twilight
um it's more effective there it's also kind
of weird like i i've got a flux equivalent on my phone i
don't know what it's called yeah um and it's kind of jarring yeah no it doesn't
it doesn't work that way um they're stylish they've got tons of different styles to
choose from including ones for kids um they're high quality like they feel
good they feel good in the hand they got a one year warranty not just in the hand
on your face too it's like spectrum it works great in
your hand and on your face spectrum you'll want them in your hand
you'll want it on your face that would actually be an interesting commercial for them to run it's just
they like hand people glasses and they're like wow these feel
these feel great and then they just like they won't put them on now try putting
it on your face and the person's like you know you should you should try it on and they're like no it just it feels
amazing so they're primarily focused on the
canadian and u.s markets but they're expanding to europe and they offer shipping internationally check them out
at spectrumglasses.com collections slash prospect or at the
link right there i still think it's prospect
prospects yeah yeah yeah i'm an idiot uh use offer
code Linus to save 10 if i have a spectrum i would change our
offer code to use offer code idiot i would read it i would read anything
for money that's what people think of me so i
might as well just do it just embrace it speaking of anything for money if you're
a freelancer or a small business owner doing whatever it is that you do for
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about us section all right
one thing we did a one topic lan show today people are running super hard with
the allegedly thing everything's allegedly i love it
um and then the other thing is people are saying that the offer code should
just be id20 oh yeah that could work
it's not a bad offer code you're pretty good i'm hungry enough to eat reaper
jerky that's and i'm not being paid by savage that's pretty epic okay ask them
for a sweater i don't think i've ever done that from a company before i liked
their shirt i like the logo on their shirts i was like you guys should make a sweater
and they replied they're like what kind
because a high quality one maybe some of the freshest ingredients
it tastes great and isn't bad for you turkey sweater
oh my god that would be really gross actually but like your girlfriend be
like i can't wait to get that off of you and she's just like
that's probably not a good idea he well he asked if i wanted a hockey
sweater or like a more american-style sweater i was like that was a good point
it'd be kind of interesting to have a like oh hockey style savage jerky
sweater that doesn't help the hiccups yeah
water doesn't make it better oh no oh
full plane under your Floatplane while you're all screwed up no do the AMD
don't do do Floatplane do full play no do flip
okay fine
i hate you so much
that was a big bite
i haven't eaten in a while like you have to build up a you have to build up a
tolerance i'm like straight up crying right now
okay i thought i did bad last week videos on
videos on Floatplane what are oems original equipment manufacturers i think
everyone's heard this term yeah what is it
we explain cool scraping thermal paste oh by the way you're looking at the new layout of
the Floatplane site yeah in order scraping thermal paste is Intel's
thermal paste actually that bad we get a bag full of processors delid them
harvest the thermal paste and then use it on a liquid metal CPU
against normal thermal paste cool
all right ah NVIDIA's first sli gaming setup
reconstructed okay 6 800 gts on an
enforce board we've been working on that for a long time yep
two thousand thousand two million dollar clean room drive savers data recovery
tour you should watch this you like want to yeah i haven't seen it yet but i'm
really excited Techquickie how does eye tracking work
i saw that thumbnail i was like whoa testing the 56 core system holy sh
we don't have bleeping on the lan lanchow this was a simultaneous or no this was a
short window the laptop to buy right now the lg gram
2018 the added Thunderbolt great laptop um
Intel CPU letters explained i don't think that's actually on youtube yet and
then we do do some exclusive content not a ton but i tested the NVIDIA shield
from the ncix auction so no spoilers but that's over there as well and i think
that's pretty much it for us yeah i think that's all we got on there right now you're doing pretty good yeah you
recovered quite a bit no i i have i have recovered okay
so let's talk about the next completely aids topic posted by coaxial gamer on
the forum security flaws discovered in AMD zen
processors so this sounds on the surface like
oh um either
yeah you know what depending on what kind of a tinfoil hat you wear this could sound like a lot of things
this could sound like Intel trying to make AMD look bad this could sound like
um AMD actually having security flaws and like them being all like
being up on their high horse when Intel was dealing with their flaws wow they're
a bunch of jerks or it looks like it may even be possible
that this was an independent group looking to make AMD stock perform poorly
so they could short it
so cts a security company based in israel
announced tuesday that its researchers had found 13 critical security
vulnerabilities that would let attackers access data stored
on AMD's zen family processors including ryzen and even their epic server
processors as well as install malware on them the vulnerabilities have been put
into four groups called master key rise and fall
fallout and camara thankfully nearly all of these
vulnerabilities require root access in order to be exploited but it does get
sketchy the researchers gave AMD less than 24 hours to look at the
vulnerabilities and respond before publishing the report now that's not
illegal but that is not considered to be industry
not being a douche practices yeah um
what else we got here standard vulnerability disclosure calls
for at least 90 days so that the companies have time to address flaws properly google gave Intel six months to
fix issues related to spectre and meltdown so
if it's less than 90 days that could be like rivals like google and facebook
being like i've got your thing
yeah oh well you know we gave you enough time to fix it we're going public with
this because it makes them look bad right it doesn't make you look that bad
when a vulnerability goes public because everyone has issues when a vulnerability
goes public but it's like already fixed so if you're trying to cause pr damage
to someone you might go live in 30 days
so that you could be like well they had a whole month to fix this yeah and kind of plausibly say that 24 hours that's
not even enough time to check your email in some cases uh the researchers
pre-briefed media and a company that makes money by shorting the stock market
before going live with it viceroy research published an obituary
for AMD just 30 minutes after cts Labs publicized the vulnerabilities
so this is some sketchy stuff now
i'm not saying that these researchers aren't qualified to do CPU research i
don't know there's been a lot of weird stuff too like people tried to deep dive
this and one of the ones that i saw was like someone figured out that the
backgrounds and all the videos were stock photos
so they're like they don't have real one on reddit they might not even have a real office or they may have a real
office but it doesn't look like super pro like that yeah but at the same time
if you pay attention to the backgrounds throughout the videos at one point in
time they're like middle frame on a photo that was taken mostly at the floor
so like the person would have to be standing on like a 70 degree angle off
the ground this way yeah for it to be realistic like i don't think they're
actually trying to fool people yeah it was also like a super over
produced kind of video too like it had kind of a sleazy vibe to me but
that's actually not surprising from a company that's probably not released a video like a kickstarter yeah except
that the production values were pretty good so for some reason they spent money
to make a good looking video but
um here i think this is this is it
there's a great article from uh reborn.com i'm gonna go ahead i'll post
this for you guys banner but check this out like this is actually done
well so they put money into looking like they
had an office okay sort of but hold on but then look at this one
like that's that's the floor those servers are reflecting on this photo is
taken from the floor it's a reflective floor i think no no no oh i got that wrong
yeah it's halfway down the server rack yeah never mind so all right um i thought that was the
floor right here oh wait hold on are you great but no i i i don't know
i'm not sure i don't i thought it was really
reflective polished floor but now i i kind of think that's just halfway
through this yeah so
um does it does it look really really
janky yes i guess that's basically all we have to say about that
yeah so there may actually be security issues but um
yeah there also might not be or they also might just be like giant jerks
all right um NVIDIA's ray tracing thing we're like
out of time is there anything else that's like absolutely critical that we have to talk
about this week i feel so bad james spent all day on this dock and we ended
up talking about the NVIDIA thing the whole time uh famous people play video
games that's a thing that happens uh that's probably all we really need to
say about that uh yeah ea is turning star wars battlefront 2 into a real game
apparently i'm a real game no no one cares the progression is now linear
um star cards or any other item impacting gameplay can only be earned
through gameplay will not be available for purchase
so basically they made their money i guess or people stopped playing i guess one of
the two starting in april you'll be able to get appearances directly through in-game credits or crystals all they
need to do is make it star wars battlefront 2 battlegrounds
or battle royale or battle extravaganza and then they'll make all their money
back yeah they're going to be rolling out a bunch of new mods over the coming months
cool so there you go make it that and you'll do great
um twitch prime now offers free games every
month amazon just like spending that money hey
pretty nuts apparently um
games for march 6 to april 3rd will be super hot which is actually amazing if
you haven't played it yet great game oxen free shadow tactics mr shifty and
tales from candle keep tomb of annihilation
next month will be tales from the borderlands steam world dig 2 kingsway
tokyo 42 and dub wars much like humble bundles i would be surprised if these
stay awesome and it will okay it also looks kind of
like they've got one more headliner game
in each one and then some
other ones which may or may not be cool but i'm not super familiar with them
twitch prime is included with amazon prime by the way
so i mean i already would have recommended an amazon prime membership
so i guess i recommend it a little tiny bit more yeah
um at the same time if you don't want the entire world to be taken over
maybe consider not buying from broadcom is not buying qualcomm anymore
because the us government blocked it it's official
and spacex is trying to reach mars in 2019 go spacex cool thanks for watching
the lan show see you again next week same bad time same bad channel bye
the WAN Show like 40 minutes of one thing and then like
oh by the way some other stuff
like the the time stamps this week are going to be like four things
giant gap yeah wow we had a lot of viewership this week
we should like do more expose on NVIDIA
i mean i can't really think of anything at the moment but are you guys super all
the twitch viewers are you guys super excited for the super clickbaity
thumbnail and title on youtube go to ltx
yeah oh we didn't do that