NVIDIA Allegedly Screwing Everyone - WAN Show Mar. 16 2018
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
10,378 words · ~51 min read
WAN Show Topics
4:36
- Sony removed headphone jack from Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact
12:50
- GeForce Partner Program
43:52
- Sponsor: Spektrum Glasses
45:45
- Sponsor: Freshbooks
48:05
- Floatplane
50:10
- Security flaw discovered in Zen processors
55:27
- EA turning Star Wars Battlefront II into a real game
56:08
- Free games from Twitch Prime
57:10
- Broadcom not buying Qualcomm
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okay
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it's when show time again or that is to say it was when show time about 20
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minutes about 20 minutes ago thank you for your patience um those of you who
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are watching on youtube in a certain way not very meaningful to
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you we were on time today in some time zone we were on time
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it's five o'clock somewhere
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which is irrelevant because we don't start at five yeah wait yes we do oh
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crap but not in that time zone no not my uh
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um can we blame uh daylight saving time uh
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oh yeah that was last week
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yep so actually no one's gonna be watching this week anyway like i go look
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at the viewership statistics probably everyone was like um
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everyone everywhere else in the world probably thinks that it doesn't start
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for an hour it doesn't start for another hour yeah so no we're for we're 40
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minutes early whoa
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oh my goodness we are early for like most of the world that's fantastic
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we are so good at this yes like online content creators yeah um all right so
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we've got a great show for you guys today yeah we specifically
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went out of our way to avoid talking about it last week
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and the reason was that honestly i just needed a little bit more
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time to figure out what the heck was going on here
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the g-force partner program yeah on the
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surface this looks like some pretty jank pretty scummy stuff
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and um below the surface
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um well we'll talk about it later
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um but yeah i mean realistically if i was gonna say it's all good i would have
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said that before yes um there was another
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big news item this week security flaws
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found in AMD zen processors uh from cts
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Labs wow that's been a drama and a half so i
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think that even technically started last week too but especially this one
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super muddy waters last week and it's a little bit a little bit more clear now
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like still kind of confusing did you ever play the game at the beach where
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you would like you would like stomp and then you'd get like the like the kind of
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godzilla looking cloud that comes out around your foot and you'd be like oh
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that was fun stomp and then you would get to the point
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where you couldn't really see the cloud anymore because it's because you just
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mucked up everything so that was last week
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now we've left it for a few hours and like we can go sort of stomp around a
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bit again but it's not it's not clear either what else we got
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okay um apparently another NVIDIA thing they're
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both just slamming it this week apparently they're going to announce rtx
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or ray tracing technology which is pretty interesting
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and another company's removing another
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headphone jack well it's the same headphone jack yeah
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that's fair well i guess it's a different headphone jack you know what well it's the same kind that's just
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really interesting yeah
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this video brought to you by spectra
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and fresh books
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can you eat either of those things no that's a real bummer because i'm
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super hungry
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i was like i thought i thought you were like spilling into a spot for the other
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guys no oh no okay no no not really i'm
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sure you could have these oh i'm not going to eat reaper jerky
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savage jerky's not sponsoring like they're right there yeah they're
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right there and i'd feel better well first i'd feel worse
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then i'd feel better and then i feel much worse
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all right why don't we jump into the news um this is going to be like not
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very many topics but a very long time yeah i'm not ready for the GeForce partner
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program are we jumping to that not yet yeah yeah let's talk about let's talk
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about something kind of trivial wow you and i are gonna have to play uh
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what's going on we're gonna have to play share the power adapter over the next
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little bit here because i've only gotten ten percent but that's okay i'm gonna oh i'm on
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battery saver already well okay then i'm gonna turn down my screen brightness
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a bit okay sony removed the headphone jack from the
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xperia xz2 and xz2 compact uh they
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outlined the details of why they did this in their blog this was originally
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posted on the forum by die hard live uh would you what do
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you mind doing die hard to live die hard to live yeah i can do a straw pool heck
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yeah do you even consider
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sony phones when buying a phone that is a fantastic straw poll
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would you consider a sony phone now yeah
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here in north america sony's market share is like
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this is one of the reasons why i want to do this poll though because we don't
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necessarily have just a north american audience exactly it'll be a little
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skewed because we're live right now yeah if this was the if we were able to
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get these results from the youtube audience i think it would be different
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than what it's going to be now someday when we're streaming on Floatplane
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and that stream we can then go we could have like perpetual pulling that like
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sits right under the video and that would be super cool that would totally work um i mean yeah it's all sort of
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theoretical at this point because Floatplane is not
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particularly fully featured at the moment
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um last week i'm not trying to be a jerk or
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anything last week hit a little deep that that comments fair though yeah
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uh okay so i've gone ahead and i've dropped the straw poll in there but this
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was originally posted on the forum by die hard to live
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and they basically outlined the two reasons
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for removing the headphone jack that subjectively um
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are probably about the worst reasons that you could do anything
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and contribute to um in my opinion oh my god was that
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actually okay i hadn't read their two reasons before was that actually it or
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did we just like come up with that contribute to probably why i think
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probably why the straw poll results will be what i think they will be
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so it's not good go ahead and pull up the results here would you consider a
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sony phone remember we didn't say would you buy a sony phone yeah we said would
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you even consider would you even think about it at all uh we've got 26 percent
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of you saying yes 74 percent of you saying no and only 500
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of you even bothering to vote which is some pretty low numbers for these when
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show struggles which i'm going to put that category as a wow i really don't
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care and no one is even no one is even still voting like the results aren't
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even rolling in anymore oh wait yes that yes they are oh oh and it died off
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pretty hard at 6 35. it died off pretty hard it's like still kind of going it's
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not okay so here are the reasons that sony outlined
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for making this decision and you got to remember the the strong opinion on this
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would be a yes anyone thinking no like it's kind of effort for them to be like
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yeah no so like there's probably a way higher
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percentage of people that actually wouldn't consider but anyway reason number one
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it looks more sleek without it so by that logic a human would probably
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look more sleek without an anus but you probably shouldn't remove it
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reason number two
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i thought you were gonna hold it together on that one but you couldn't no
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not quite reason number two
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other companies are doing it oh
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so painful now in fairness is that actually what they
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said in fairness to sony in fairness to sony hold on a second
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um here okay look do you want me to read
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the whole thing this is part of the shift to our new
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ambient flow design language in order to
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create the beautiful seamless design our designers needed to remove the headphone
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jack plus we were aware of the major market trend towards wireless headphones
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over wired headphones so yes they literally did they literally did
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say that um so okay
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in fairness to sony in defense of sony something that i'm not a hundred percent
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sure if they deserve right now um
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no one cares about their phones anyways no that is not what i was going to say
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be clear there i was also kidding in fairness to sony i never oh i never said
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the announcement video live i was trying to figure out why so few people i used to like their phones until we had so
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many of them just bend in half yeah uh well two i think
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three burkles mine yours burkles did too yeah
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oh i didn't even know that yeah how do you manage to do that it was a compact
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oh the compacts have the same issue as just less likely it was just burkle
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he's an action man um probably more action in his pants wow i meant like wow
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okay actually my defense of sony is actually worse than anything you've said
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in defensive in sony's defense the last time they tried to do something really
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innovative that was probably really expensive from
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an r d perspective because remember sony was the one that made waterproof
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mainstream that was cool that was very cool that's why i used to really like
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their phone and then they still didn't manage to sell more phones because of it
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but that's a whole other issue the last time they tried to do something they
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were the first to have a 4k display now creating a 4k mobile display you
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guys got to understand when you have a feature on your phone
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let's say oneplus uh launches a 2560 by
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1080 mobile display oneplus did not go and get that freaking
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panel created they are a relatively small player
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and when you're a relatively small player doing relatively small volume you
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don't get to walk up to samsung's display division or lg
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or uh auo or phillips or whoever it is
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you don't get to walk up and be like yo we need a custom sku it needs to have
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this color gamut uh this uh response
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time it needs to be this size at this resolution they're gonna laugh you out
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of their office you get to do that when you're apple
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when you're samsung believe it or not apple's notch display was custom created
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just for them because until apple did it of course
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after apple does it which ties into sony's other reasons yeah of course
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other people want it but until apple did it nobody else was gonna want that okay
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um so so sony would have had to actually
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create a 4k mobile display in that form factor
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for that phone that quite honestly they
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probably didn't sell a ton of based on our straw poll results and also you can
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just google it and just see like the people around you
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what phones they're using so they didn't yeah when's the last time you saw one so
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so sony didn't probably get a great roi
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on that particular you know breaking the mold kind of investment although even
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then giving them credit for breaking the mold in that way is
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not entirely fair because they were just following an overall market trend they
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were just trying to get out ahead of it in a way that was totally meaningless and stupid yes and almost never even
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worked anyways the phone ran in default 1080p almost all the time and then you'd
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like view a picture that was in 4k and you'd have to wait a second and then it
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would just like and then change resolution it was really
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weird it was very odd almost everything ran at 1080p
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but anyways so i can see how they don't want to take
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any risks because you have to move a lot of devices to
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make up for any kind of r d investment
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beyond just even the basics
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um but i'm just i'm disappointed i i was
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thrilled to see that samsung still had the headphone jack on the s9 and s9 plus
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um i think that you know what yeah the mainstream is moving to wireless but
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samsung is going to sell some handsets just for that and i really hope that
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they do get rewarded for it yeah all right
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what do we got for our next topic here
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oh should we get into the invasion these are all big deep ones i just have such
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this thing if you want to go pretty light and easy no no let's just let's
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just get this out of the way okay so the g-force partner program this was
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originally posted on the forum this is actually an 11-page topic over on our
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forum and it was posted by wm groom ak
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and this lady or gentleman whichever it is um okay let's go ahead and get screen
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share going on here uh basically read an article over on
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hard ocp from kyle bennett and
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said this found all of this interesting
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if his reporting checks out because
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basically and and this is sort of the problem
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this came to light from AMD bringing some of the details of what's called the
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g-force partners program or gpp
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to his attention and you gotta look at that's yeah you gotta look at no matter
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who it is like i i get that whoever you're a fanboy of whether it's
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AMD or Intel or NVIDIA i get that there's this like tribalism
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thing that's that's wired into us as human beings and
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when someone else does it it's the worst and when we do it it's just us getting
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back at them for being bad people
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but you got to understand that any time any any company brings something to your
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attention oh hey um have you noticed them doing this
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there's an agenda at play there's room for spin almost every action is selfish
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whether it's helpful to other people or not there's some amount of element that is usually selfish which is okay in a
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lot of cases but it's just something to be aware of yes it's you got to live your life sort
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of thinking about that in everything that you do
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so the basic summary is that the story
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began when several sites including heart ocp were alerted to the goings-on by a
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uh by AMD in a blog post from march 1st NVIDIA
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outlined their new GeForce partner program which ostensibly
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helps consumers identify brands
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that deliver the g-force promise
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of delivering the best pc gaming
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platform bar none so let's go ahead and pull up NVIDIA's blog post
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that NVIDIA is very good at this oops there we go
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uh let's pull up NVIDIA's blog post that
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NVIDIA is so good at this um sort of
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puts it in the shiniest possible terms what they're doing here
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this is the headline the GeForce partner program helps gamers know what they're
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buying oh boy
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i was having trouble figuring out what i was buying before i'm sure glad that i
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know now like last stream we talked about how confusing Intel skus are yeah
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graphics card skews are not a huge problem on the NVIDIA side
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yeah actually and even on the AMD side yeah it's pretty straightforward they're
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not that bad higher number is more better there was a little bit of confusingness for a section there but
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it's kind of the first number is the generation and then beyond that higher
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is more better i think it got a little bit confusing on
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the AMD side when we had like fury and nano and actually no NVIDIA does have
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some stupid bs going on right now where the three gig and the six gig version of
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the 1060 are actually different cards yeah yeah uh okay that's fair so hold on
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a second well wait a minute is NVIDIA rescuing us from themselves
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is that what's happening right now we also had that stuff where the titan xp
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and the titan xp that that was okay that was really
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annoying that was really so um especially when the whole community
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nicknamed the first one the xp yeah and then they called their next one the xp
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okay okay so fine okay fine you know what then let's play let's play NVIDIA
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advocate uh go wait let's play NVIDIA advocate and say they did need to do
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something about this confusing industry so let's have a look at what they said
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the oh man wow this starts off horrible like right within the first two lines
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the GPU and software of a gaming pc make all the difference in a gamer's
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experience and together with our add-in card and system partners we're dedicated
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to building the best pc gaming platform bar none this is the GeForce promise
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partner program is designed to ensure that gamers have full transparency into
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the GPU platform and software they're being sold now i'm a
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i'm a let you finish but do you ever read stuff that just makes
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you like tired i'm doing it right now
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because i'm sure where you were going with yeah
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i'mma let you finish but there was no ambiguity here
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there there's already marketing incentives and in some cases
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like basically an ARM twisted behind the back like this
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where NVIDIA really has a lot of control
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over the the badges that are put on for example a product box or in the case of
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add-in cards even the overall design like you could take a picture from the
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side of an entire shelf of cards made by MSI ASUS Gigabyte evga
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and all the NVIDIA ones would be basically the same yeah they're really
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because NVIDIA has mandated and they have lots of levers they can pull to
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control their partners but NVIDIA has mandated that they need to kind of look
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like this and the levers that they can pull include pricing
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um allocation of the hot parts that
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actually sell um partner support so things like providing
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engineering support for your custom boards um access early access to the
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parts so you can begin development ahead of other guys and if all this kind
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of stuff has existed forever and it's like totally kind of fine kind of kind
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of there's there's some issues in some realms but most of it is fairly standard
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practice okay fine is a relative term most of this is fairly standard practice
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for a lot of different industries yeah depending on how it's done so the thing
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is that we we get a lot of uh we we get a lot of sort of feedback from our
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community that the perception is that we're sort of like friends of NVIDIA
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but the reality of it is we're not friends with anybody um we are a
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business and we have business partnerships
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and from a product perspective we like
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NVIDIA products just fine from a um sort of
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how we perceive their reputation within the industry
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we have some misgivings ones that we have brought to light in the past
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uh particularly actually i think probably the most recent example is the 1066 gig and three gig that's an
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extremely recent example we didn't like the way they did that well i mean like
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we mentioned at this show but there's also the recent change to GeForce
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experience yes we've also mentioned that which was like we put them on blasts for that and
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i still don't install it and i still don't recommend it and while i am
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not always at liberty to talk about especially the sources of the the the um
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the frustration with NVIDIA that takes place behind the scenes
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there's a lot of it that we're aware of and there's a lot of ARM twisting and uh
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you know it's you know think about it think NVIDIA is like the
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partner that stands there posing for a picture with you
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and has their foot on your toe yeah
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being like smile properly man that's the perception that
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i get a lot of the time please come say hi
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so let's continue reading about the g-force promise here
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this transparency into what you're buying is only possible when NVIDIA
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brands and partner brands are consistent
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so the new program means that we'll be promoting our gpp partner brands across
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the web on social media events and more so this sounds like oh NVIDIA's is doing
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great things for their partners gpp partners will also get early access
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to our latest innovations and work closely with our engineering team to bring the newest technologies to gamers
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partners are signing up fast they see the benefit of keeping brands and
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communication consistent and transparent does this not have like a um
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uh which which harry potter movie is it where uh uh umbridge takes over the
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school as the the professor the the the the prim and proper yeah you know
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lady who turns out to be like an absolute monster i don't know the name
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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
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yeah the point is does this not have like yeah kind of a rules for you know
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proper behavior as students kind of vibe to it the program isn't exclusive partners
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continue to have the ability to sell and promote products from anyone partners
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choose to sign up for the program and they can stop participating at any time
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there's no commitment to make any monetary payments
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or product discounts for being part of the program
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gpp ensures our engineering and marketing efforts support brands
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consumers associate with g-force that transparency will give gamers the
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confidence needed to make their purchase whichever products they choose
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now i don't often feel the need to read out an entire press release from a
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company because a lot of the time frankly i feel like companies should pay
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me to read their stupid press release like honestly press releases that's not
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journalism that's not object that's not objective that's advertising they
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literally pay someone to write it and then they pay like market wire to
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distribute it that that's what it is um
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okay so on the surface this sounds like everything about this
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is voluntary and terrific but let's look at the state of the GPU market right now
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if you if you can get gpus you are making bank because of the whole
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cryptocurrency mining thing and pent up demand from gamers who haven't been able
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to get gpus because of the cryptocurrency mining thing
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if you can't get gpus you are basically plum out of luck and
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NVIDIA without doing anything
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that could open them up to a lawsuit can plausibly say
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we just didn't have enough for you you were on the list
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sorry and if you're let's say someone like
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evga for example you have
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other businesses you sell motherboards you sell
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crazy ridiculously high wattage power supplies yeah you sell power supplies
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you sell cases even but let's be honest
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when's the last time you saw an evga motherboard out in the wild
23:55
so they sell they sell motherboards but do they sell a lot of them compared to
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someone like an ASUS or a Gigabyte no not really and that isn't to say that
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they're bad boards that's just to say that they aren't as popular and that
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evga's business is very reliant on gpus
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so if evga couldn't get
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allocation of gpus to say that their business would suffer
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would be a gross understatement so NVIDIA's blog post outlining how
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this is all very voluntary it just ensures that they
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get the benefits of being part of the partner program
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it comes across a little bit disingenuous because
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that's not what's going on here what's going on is that if you don't join the partner program
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you're not going to get allocation and your business is going to suffer and
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you're going to have to lay off real people with real families
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who won't have a job anymore and won't be
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able to support them and that's something that if i'm a company like
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evga that for the most part my experience
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with them has actually been very positive i would like to believe that they care
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about um so you're pretty much joining the
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GeForce partner program so
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let's go to the heart ocp article huge shout out to kyle for for doing what he
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was doing here so hard ocp began interviewing aibs and oems
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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
25:29
important um so they began interviewing aibs and oems who communicated a few
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things one that the GeForce partner program
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has terms in it that are likely illegal
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number two that the GeForce partner program is
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going to likely tremendously hurt consumer choice and number three that
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the GeForce partner program will disrupt business with companies
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that are currently doing business with AMD in particular AMD and Intel
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the other thing that he gleaned and we
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haven't been able to verify this because here's what you guys
26:10
got to understand i don't i've never seen the agreement
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and i know for a fact i will never see the agreement
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it would shock me if anyone ever saw this agreement out in the public but
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what i know about agreements like this is that let's say for example that uh
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uh um a gag order was done in an illegal
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fashion let's say i made you sign some kind of an agreement that says this is a
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very spicy agreement yeah spicy agreement okay if you talk about this
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agreement i will kill you and you will authorize me to kill you oh okay
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obviously illegal
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but let's say it wasn't murder let's say it was something slightly less black and
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white than that like i'll kill your company yeah like that
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which to a lot of people is kind of close
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yeah i mean people have committed suicide over their companies
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yeah so let's say that it was something like that
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you could you could you could you could break the agreement at some point but
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until you fight me in court and prove
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that depending on the way it's wording because expensive lawyers can do expensive
27:29
lawyer things depending on the way it's worded the onus could be on you
27:34
to prove that you don't owe me whatever it was
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so your business could effectively be destroyed in the years and after the
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money that it costs you to fight me
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so even though i have an illegal term and i have a potentially illegal
27:51
punishment for it you don't want to be the one who steps
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out of line because i can punish you in the meantime in ways that would destroy
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you to the point where it would never matter
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if what i did was illegal because you wouldn't even exist to take a payout
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anymore five years ten years down the road when you would be in a position to
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finally get your payout now that
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is a real possibility and i'm not saying that i know that that's what's happening
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but what i do know is that nobody is coughing up this agreement and
28:25
i do know that agreements like this do exist
28:30
okay so with all of that in mind
28:35
further information that hart ocp is publishing
28:39
alleges that the GeForce partner program and i think okay to to
28:44
i'm not disagreeing with anything that you're saying okay but to play a little
28:48
bit both sides oh i know i know but to play a little bit of both sides yeah
28:51
alleges is a pretty important word here
28:55
like there's a lot of as well according to
29:00
kyle bennett's article on heart ocp and a lot of it makes sense
29:05
and i'm explaining how it could make sense but it lines up pretty okay but like
29:12
okay yeah so thank you yeah are you at our legal department
29:17
i was sort of at one point long time ago um but okay i don't want to talk about
29:21
this
29:26
but like yeah i just want to make sure that's clear because while this might
29:29
make sense and all that kind of stuff it's not technically
29:33
complete it's it's all alleges okay
29:36
so kyle's article further alleges that
29:39
in order to have access to the GeForce partner program
29:44
partners must have their own gaming
29:47
brand aligned exclusively with g-force
29:52
now think about that for a minute because that's been a huge trend over
29:56
the last 10 years or so i think rog
30:00
just celebrated its 10-year anniversary with the rampage five
30:04
extreme they had a 10-year anniversary edition of that port and rog was one of
30:08
the to ASUS credit this was ASUS doesn't
30:11
always get marketing right but to ASUS's credit
30:15
they built the rog brand when i called it a stupid idea way back in the day so
30:21
kudos to them and uh the rest of the industry basically was playing follow
30:25
the leader and that's yeah i would also say they they have nailed it a few times
30:29
ASUS's rog um
30:32
gigabytes aorus um lenovo's legion
30:36
uh who else do we have dell's xps or alienware to a greater extent xps is
30:41
less gaming these days it used to be different engine has been having more of an issue getting its
30:45
well they just launched that's fair like ces 15 months ago or something like that
30:49
so give them some time but it also alleges that all of these brands
30:54
will have to be exclusively aligned with g-force
31:03
so even though NVIDIA's blog post says partners continue to have the ability to
31:07
sell and promote products from anyone the gpp documentation allegedly says
31:12
that those who do not participate will lose
31:16
benefits like high effort engineering engagements early tech engagement launch
31:21
partner status game bundling
31:24
sales rebate programs i'll get back to that one social media and pr support
31:29
marketing reports and marketing development funds so let's get back to
31:33
sales rebate programs and marketing development funds for a minute here
31:37
the way the tech industry works and there's a reason for it because if you
31:41
gave every mom and pop computer shop a one dollar discount they would take it
31:45
straight to price and sell the product for cheaper which as a consumer you
31:49
might go wow that's great but it isn't necessarily because we
31:53
talked about this previously when Intel wasn't providing the support
31:58
that we feel like they should on their previous generation chipsets um
32:04
in terms of patching for spectre and meltdown but the problem with just charging the
32:09
bear amount is that it doesn't give you the the
32:12
business um war chest that you need to well to go to
32:17
war in the event that you have to and it's one of those things where
32:22
it kind of relies on a business to behave in a manner that is in good faith
32:26
acting in the consumer's best interest but a business that is making a healthy
32:30
profit is in a better position to as an extreme example still exist
32:36
a year later when you come back for warranty support you actually need the
32:40
companies that you buy things from to make a profit
32:43
yeah does that make sense okay so anyway
32:46
the problem with the it industry is that it tends to be and it's kind of a
32:50
cultural thing i'm not going to get any deeper into it than that but it tends to
32:54
be a race to zero industry volume volume volume
32:58
take down as much margin as you can so you can take the volume that your
33:02
competitor would have been doing force them under
33:05
and then someday we'll raise the prices yeah and you do eventually see that like
33:09
the hard drive industry enjoyed a short period of great margins when basically
33:13
everyone was gone and then they were supplanted by the SSD industry in the
33:16
mainstream and to be clear hard drives are still doing fine in the cloud
33:19
they're not going away or anything but that business is a b2b business which
33:24
tends to be lower margins so there was like a there was like a golden hour
33:27
there for the hard drive industry uh here do you need this yeah go for it
33:31
um right so the way that the tech industry
33:35
works is that the pricing is fixed you just say okay look
33:40
a core i5 8600k that's 200 u.s
33:46
and then the way that you actually provide promotions or the way that you
33:51
make someone like formerly so when i worked at ncix the way that ncix was
33:56
able to differentiate from mom and pop shops was not the sticker price it was
34:00
the back end support because every CPU we sold we got a couple percentage
34:06
kickback at the end of a quarter and every CPU we sold well you know
34:11
during black friday we might get five bucks or 10 bucks off now all of a
34:15
sudden mom and pop in order to compete with us have to sell below cost
34:19
giving us an advantage that's the way that you actually stay
34:23
competitive and to be clear this isn't some kind of like subversive cloak and
34:27
dagger nonsense because within sort of the the mainstream stores
34:31
that you shop at best buy new egg i mean okay some of these are kind of dated
34:34
references tiger direct memory express canada computers um uh micro center
34:40
uh amazon the programs are basically across the
34:43
board pretty similar and whenever someone finds out that they get a god
34:47
approach that someone else got a program that they didn't there's outrage and
34:51
usually the brand ends up kind of doing something to make it up to you and then
34:54
the other guy complains about that it's all negotiations it's business as usual
34:58
now the problem here is that with gpus in particular
35:03
NVIDIA maintains a lot of control
35:07
over the pricing at every level to the partners and to the end users through
35:13
tools like these kinds of rebates so they sell the chipset to the vendor
35:18
at some price x but then NVIDIA could
35:21
decide a week later to go well you know what here's a sell-through rebate
35:24
effectively lowering the price without actually lowering the sticker price
35:28
meaning that someone who has a multi-week in some cases lead time
35:33
between acquiring chips and then turning them into boards
35:37
delivering them to retailers and eventually selling through them might
35:41
effectively have a bunch of stock that's overpriced now and no real recourse for
35:45
getting rid of it and so it's at NVIDIA's discretion to support you to
35:50
get rid of it which is a fairly direct way a fairly
35:54
strong but indirect way to sort of choke
35:57
out a company that's right so game bundling
36:00
mdf and sales rebate programs are basically like saying
36:05
you'll never make money on graphics cards again if you were to remove all that stuff
36:12
yeah okay
36:15
um i forget where we were going with this but partner brand aligned
36:18
exclusively with NVIDIA partners have the ability to sell and promote products
36:22
from anyone but the allegedly this behind-the-scenes
36:26
documentation says they'll get all of this support cut and to be clear the
36:30
public documentation doesn't say any of that
36:33
okay heart ocp has been told that if a company does not participate in gpp
36:38
they feel not by NVIDIA yeah as if NVIDIA would hold back allocation
36:44
of gpus from their inventories this has not been spelled out contractually but
36:48
the feeling is that it's done on a wink and a nod
36:52
to be fair they said that the stuff we just
36:57
mentioned losing all these different things was in the documentation this is
37:01
a feeling yeah the allocation bit is a feeling and then the next part that
37:06
we're going to talk about is also a like
37:09
feeling yeah so it was expressed to heart ocp that publishing that article
37:14
could damage heart ocps relationship with NVIDIA
37:18
which well we've gotten to the end of it now i guess i guess we're in the same boat
37:23
look at that but knowing uh and like
37:26
okay to jump all the way back to the beginning of this conversation in terms
37:30
of uh like there's always there's very extremely massively often
37:35
i'm not going to say always because someone's going to call me on that in some weird way but there there's
37:39
basically always a selfish reason for everything whether it's all
37:43
this region is tiny or huge whatever um saying
37:47
hey if you release this NVIDIA is going to be mad well
37:51
saying that to heart ocp was probably pushing them to release it
37:55
um because then again maybe not kyle's been in the industry a long time and he's
38:00
deeply connected they may have actually had his best interest at heart
38:04
possibly but from articles that i've read from him before too
38:07
no issue but pushing that kind of stuff but let's go let's go let's let's take
38:11
the helicopter up another thousand feet and let's go why were they talking to
38:14
him at all yeah yeah seriously so so the particular
38:19
warning might have been in kyle's best interest but the fact that they're
38:22
talking to him at all is probably in their own best interest and i'm sure
38:26
they know that he likes juicy articles and also for the consumer's best
38:30
interest potentially like because remember there there could be a selfish
38:34
kernel but that doesn't mean that it doesn't benefit a whole bunch of people
38:38
and that you couldn't don't know how much rationalize the benefit you're
38:41
providing to yourself by saying well it also helps out all these other guys
38:45
which is great in a lot of situations that's honestly mostly how charity works
38:48
but yeah like you just don't know how much
38:52
how much of this is helping other people how much of this is selling and for kyle
38:55
to talk about how this article could damage the relationship with NVIDIA
39:00
you can find a selfish colonel there too by saying that he's adding credibility
39:04
to his own publication by saying you know what i'm willing to
39:08
risk damaging my relationship with NVIDIA in order to bring you guys the
39:12
facts and in this case this actually does look to me and i do i
39:16
haven't seen the partner agreement and i won't admit to having talked to anyone
39:21
about this behind the scenes but this looks to me like it actually
39:25
does have the potential to damage a relationship with NVIDIA NVIDIA is
39:31
um well it comes back to the portrait
39:35
NVIDIA smiles a lot and they they talk about partnership a
39:39
lot and what they mean is
39:45
they have expectations of their partners and if their partners don't meet them
39:51
well hmm
39:57
that's my perception and a lot of people think that we're like super super chummy
40:02
with NVIDIA but i've said before in the past and i'll say it again now
40:07
we have done a grand total of three
40:10
sponsored engagements with NVIDIA we did some uh pre-rolls way back when
40:16
we first started and those were actually that was a complicated thing because
40:21
probably none of you even remember them it was 10 spots and they were all for a
40:25
particular evga graphics card but the funding was being passed through
40:30
via mdf from NVIDIA
40:33
so that one hardly even registers number
40:36
two we went down to california and hosted
40:40
mod 24 their modding event we were paid what i consider to be a very modest fee
40:46
for that kind of an engagement yeah and the number three
40:50
this was the first time they had actually done flat out a sponsored video
40:54
with us ever they did something with us in q4 talking
40:58
about how to game at 4k they were actually pretty easy to work with which
41:04
was kind of refreshing um because we were able to talk about game consoles as
41:08
well we kept it very objective and we told them up front we were like look
41:12
we never actually work with you guys on sponsored stuff but there's this
41:15
perception that we're in your pocket so you gotta understand we're gonna have to
41:19
approach this very carefully yeah
41:22
um and they were actually pretty cool about it but that's the extent of it we
41:25
have worked far more extensively with AMD Intel ASUS
41:30
uh i think we've done more stuff with MSI
41:34
i mean certainly more stuff with the regular partners like um like uh
41:38
squarespace uh zotac we haven't really done much big stuff with more than but
41:42
we've done but we've done actually yeah we've done a fair bit with zotek yeah
41:45
okay yeah yeah like most people
41:49
so there you go so
41:52
are we putting ourselves at risk given that the relationship was finally
41:56
starting to warm up and we were really getting some stuff done like us a
42:00
dedicated sponsored video with us is one of the one of the biggest things that a
42:03
partner can do with us um and we finally did one with them given things we're
42:08
starting to warm up yes we're putting ourselves at risk but given that our
42:11
business survived just fine for the five years prior to that no it's not a ton so
42:15
we're not going to act like white knights here or anything like that but i
42:19
also said allegedly a lot we said allegedly a lot because perception and
42:23
that i'm not going to admit to having talked to anyone i'm just i'm going to
42:27
say this i haven't talked to anyone and i'm also going to say this i'm not
42:31
always a hundred percent honest with you guys
42:34
so you can read into that whatever you feel like speaking of honor there's a few there's
42:38
a i want to add one thing before we jump into
42:41
sponsor spots um but uh one thing i want
42:44
to add to is some of this stuff is future traceable
42:49
so you'll be able to tell yep just
42:52
keep that in mind like one of the smart things you can do um if you're trying to
42:57
keep uh an agreement under wraps is you could give everyone slightly different
43:01
terms that's fair yeah and that way if
43:06
it came to light you could kind of go okay
43:09
it was one of them them or them and then something else came to light you could
43:12
go it was them so
43:16
even if i knew anything and i am being honest this is honest
43:20
answers episode whatever this is haslin has seen the agreement
43:24
the answer is no i have not seen it and
43:27
i have been told by the people that i would
43:31
never admit that i have talked to
43:35
that i will never see it and that they will never tell me any details about it
43:39
okay that actually did happen as well okay anyone that i won't admit that i talked
43:43
to told me they would never show it to me and they would never tell me the details of it so that happened okay
43:49
so there you go um
43:54
yeah let's talk about let's talk about something like
43:58
not horrible here's spectrum glasses hey
44:02
like my my life is far less complicated right
44:06
now talking about spectrum glasses
44:09
instead of like stuff because this is just it's simple okay
44:13
if you stare at a monitor all day the blue light a lot of blue light can
44:17
be bad for your eyes yeah this filters it without having a huge
44:21
impact on the color accuracy of the world around you
44:25
um and compared to a software solution like flux or twilight
44:28
um it's more effective there it's also kind
44:32
of weird like i i've got a flux equivalent on my phone i
44:36
don't know what it's called yeah um and it's kind of jarring yeah no it doesn't
44:39
it doesn't work that way um they're stylish they've got tons of different styles to
44:43
choose from including ones for kids um they're high quality like they feel
44:48
good they feel good in the hand they got a one year warranty not just in the hand
44:51
on your face too it's like spectrum it works great in
44:55
your hand and on your face spectrum you'll want them in your hand
44:59
you'll want it on your face that would actually be an interesting commercial for them to run it's just
45:04
they like hand people glasses and they're like wow these feel
45:07
these feel great and then they just like they won't put them on now try putting
45:10
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
45:14
amazing so they're primarily focused on the
45:17
canadian and u.s markets but they're expanding to europe and they offer shipping internationally check them out
45:21
at spectrumglasses.com collections slash prospect or at the
45:26
link right there i still think it's prospect
45:29
prospects yeah yeah yeah i'm an idiot uh use offer
45:33
code Linus to save 10 if i have a spectrum i would change our
45:37
offer code to use offer code idiot i would read it i would read anything
45:41
for money that's what people think of me so i
45:45
might as well just do it just embrace it speaking of anything for money if you're
45:50
a freelancer or a small business owner doing whatever it is that you do for
45:53
money freshbooks is here to help freshbooks is
45:57
the super simple to use invoicing tool that actually does a lot more than help
46:01
you create and send slick looking invoices it helps you track your time
46:04
with their time cheap function manage your expenses and keep track of who owes
46:08
you what they've also got a feature that tells you when your client has looked at
46:11
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trial and enter when in the how did you hear
46:36
about us section all right
46:40
one thing we did a one topic lan show today people are running super hard with
46:43
the allegedly thing everything's allegedly i love it
46:47
um and then the other thing is people are saying that the offer code should
46:50
just be id20 oh yeah that could work
46:54
it's not a bad offer code you're pretty good i'm hungry enough to eat reaper
46:58
jerky that's and i'm not being paid by savage that's pretty epic okay ask them
47:03
for a sweater i don't think i've ever done that from a company before i liked
47:06
their shirt i like the logo on their shirts i was like you guys should make a sweater
47:10
and they replied they're like what kind
47:14
because a high quality one maybe some of the freshest ingredients
47:19
it tastes great and isn't bad for you turkey sweater
47:25
oh my god that would be really gross actually but like your girlfriend be
47:29
like i can't wait to get that off of you and she's just like
47:36
that's probably not a good idea he well he asked if i wanted a hockey
47:40
sweater or like a more american-style sweater i was like that was a good point
47:45
it'd be kind of interesting to have a like oh hockey style savage jerky
47:50
sweater that doesn't help the hiccups yeah
47:53
water doesn't make it better oh no oh
47:57
full plane under your Floatplane while you're all screwed up no do the AMD
48:00
don't do do Floatplane do full play no do flip
48:04
okay fine
48:10
i hate you so much
48:23
that was a big bite
48:26
i haven't eaten in a while like you have to build up a you have to build up a
48:30
tolerance i'm like straight up crying right now
48:36
okay i thought i did bad last week videos on
48:40
videos on Floatplane what are oems original equipment manufacturers i think
48:45
everyone's heard this term yeah what is it
48:48
we explain cool scraping thermal paste oh by the way you're looking at the new layout of
48:53
the Floatplane site yeah in order scraping thermal paste is Intel's
48:57
thermal paste actually that bad we get a bag full of processors delid them
49:02
harvest the thermal paste and then use it on a liquid metal CPU
49:07
against normal thermal paste cool
49:11
all right ah NVIDIA's first sli gaming setup
49:16
reconstructed okay 6 800 gts on an
49:19
enforce board we've been working on that for a long time yep
49:23
two thousand thousand two million dollar clean room drive savers data recovery
49:28
tour you should watch this you like want to yeah i haven't seen it yet but i'm
49:31
really excited Techquickie how does eye tracking work
49:34
i saw that thumbnail i was like whoa testing the 56 core system holy sh
49:41
we don't have bleeping on the lan lanchow this was a simultaneous or no this was a
49:45
short window the laptop to buy right now the lg gram
49:49
2018 the added Thunderbolt great laptop um
49:54
Intel CPU letters explained i don't think that's actually on youtube yet and
49:58
then we do do some exclusive content not a ton but i tested the NVIDIA shield
50:02
from the ncix auction so no spoilers but that's over there as well and i think
50:06
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
50:11
recovered quite a bit no i i have i have recovered okay
50:15
so let's talk about the next completely aids topic posted by coaxial gamer on
50:19
the forum security flaws discovered in AMD zen
50:23
processors so this sounds on the surface like
50:28
oh um either
50:31
yeah you know what depending on what kind of a tinfoil hat you wear this could sound like a lot of things
50:35
this could sound like Intel trying to make AMD look bad this could sound like
50:39
um AMD actually having security flaws and like them being all like
50:45
being up on their high horse when Intel was dealing with their flaws wow they're
50:49
a bunch of jerks or it looks like it may even be possible
50:53
that this was an independent group looking to make AMD stock perform poorly
50:57
so they could short it
51:00
so cts a security company based in israel
51:04
announced tuesday that its researchers had found 13 critical security
51:08
vulnerabilities that would let attackers access data stored
51:11
on AMD's zen family processors including ryzen and even their epic server
51:15
processors as well as install malware on them the vulnerabilities have been put
51:19
into four groups called master key rise and fall
51:26
fallout and camara thankfully nearly all of these
51:30
vulnerabilities require root access in order to be exploited but it does get
51:35
sketchy the researchers gave AMD less than 24 hours to look at the
51:39
vulnerabilities and respond before publishing the report now that's not
51:43
illegal but that is not considered to be industry
51:47
not being a douche practices yeah um
51:51
what else we got here standard vulnerability disclosure calls
51:55
for at least 90 days so that the companies have time to address flaws properly google gave Intel six months to
52:00
fix issues related to spectre and meltdown so
52:05
if it's less than 90 days that could be like rivals like google and facebook
52:10
being like i've got your thing
52:14
yeah oh well you know we gave you enough time to fix it we're going public with
52:18
this because it makes them look bad right it doesn't make you look that bad
52:22
when a vulnerability goes public because everyone has issues when a vulnerability
52:25
goes public but it's like already fixed so if you're trying to cause pr damage
52:29
to someone you might go live in 30 days
52:32
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
52:37
not even enough time to check your email in some cases uh the researchers
52:41
pre-briefed media and a company that makes money by shorting the stock market
52:47
before going live with it viceroy research published an obituary
52:52
for AMD just 30 minutes after cts Labs publicized the vulnerabilities
52:57
so this is some sketchy stuff now
53:00
i'm not saying that these researchers aren't qualified to do CPU research i
53:05
don't know there's been a lot of weird stuff too like people tried to deep dive
53:08
this and one of the ones that i saw was like someone figured out that the
53:12
backgrounds and all the videos were stock photos
53:16
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
53:20
office but it doesn't look like super pro like that yeah but at the same time
53:23
if you pay attention to the backgrounds throughout the videos at one point in
53:27
time they're like middle frame on a photo that was taken mostly at the floor
53:32
so like the person would have to be standing on like a 70 degree angle off
53:35
the ground this way yeah for it to be realistic like i don't think they're
53:39
actually trying to fool people yeah it was also like a super over
53:43
produced kind of video too like it had kind of a sleazy vibe to me but
53:48
that's actually not surprising from a company that's probably not released a video like a kickstarter yeah except
53:53
that the production values were pretty good so for some reason they spent money
53:57
to make a good looking video but
54:01
um here i think this is this is it
54:05
there's a great article from uh reborn.com i'm gonna go ahead i'll post
54:08
this for you guys banner but check this out like this is actually done
54:13
well so they put money into looking like they
54:16
had an office okay sort of but hold on but then look at this one
54:21
like that's that's the floor those servers are reflecting on this photo is
54:24
taken from the floor it's a reflective floor i think no no no oh i got that wrong
54:30
yeah it's halfway down the server rack yeah never mind so all right um i thought that was the
54:35
floor right here oh wait hold on are you great but no i i i don't know
54:40
i'm not sure i don't i thought it was really
54:44
reflective polished floor but now i i kind of think that's just halfway
54:47
through this yeah so
54:50
um does it does it look really really
54:54
janky yes i guess that's basically all we have to say about that
55:00
yeah so there may actually be security issues but um
55:06
yeah there also might not be or they also might just be like giant jerks
55:12
all right um NVIDIA's ray tracing thing we're like
55:15
out of time is there anything else that's like absolutely critical that we have to talk
55:20
about this week i feel so bad james spent all day on this dock and we ended
55:23
up talking about the NVIDIA thing the whole time uh famous people play video
55:26
games that's a thing that happens uh that's probably all we really need to
55:30
say about that uh yeah ea is turning star wars battlefront 2 into a real game
55:34
apparently i'm a real game no no one cares the progression is now linear
55:40
um star cards or any other item impacting gameplay can only be earned
55:43
through gameplay will not be available for purchase
55:46
so basically they made their money i guess or people stopped playing i guess one of
55:50
the two starting in april you'll be able to get appearances directly through in-game credits or crystals all they
55:54
need to do is make it star wars battlefront 2 battlegrounds
55:58
or battle royale or battle extravaganza and then they'll make all their money
56:02
back yeah they're going to be rolling out a bunch of new mods over the coming months
56:07
cool so there you go make it that and you'll do great
56:10
um twitch prime now offers free games every
56:14
month amazon just like spending that money hey
56:18
pretty nuts apparently um
56:22
games for march 6 to april 3rd will be super hot which is actually amazing if
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you haven't played it yet great game oxen free shadow tactics mr shifty and
56:30
tales from candle keep tomb of annihilation
56:34
next month will be tales from the borderlands steam world dig 2 kingsway
56:38
tokyo 42 and dub wars much like humble bundles i would be surprised if these
56:43
stay awesome and it will okay it also looks kind of
56:46
like they've got one more headliner game
56:49
in each one and then some
56:53
other ones which may or may not be cool but i'm not super familiar with them
56:56
twitch prime is included with amazon prime by the way
56:59
so i mean i already would have recommended an amazon prime membership
57:03
so i guess i recommend it a little tiny bit more yeah
57:08
um at the same time if you don't want the entire world to be taken over
57:13
maybe consider not buying from broadcom is not buying qualcomm anymore
57:17
because the us government blocked it it's official
57:21
and spacex is trying to reach mars in 2019 go spacex cool thanks for watching
57:25
the lan show see you again next week same bad time same bad channel bye
57:32
the WAN Show like 40 minutes of one thing and then like
57:36
oh by the way some other stuff
57:40
like the the time stamps this week are going to be like four things
57:44
giant gap yeah wow we had a lot of viewership this week
57:51
we should like do more expose on NVIDIA
57:55
i mean i can't really think of anything at the moment but are you guys super all
57:59
the twitch viewers are you guys super excited for the super clickbaity
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thumbnail and title on youtube go to ltx
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yeah oh we didn't do that