A Typo On Your Brake Pads
Every single person on Twitter is telling me about the Bernie Sanders fish thing.
Didn't that happen like a day or two ago?
I don't know.
Well, you can lump them in with all the people telling me about the latest aftermarket for Ferrari with my name on it.
We got to talk about that.
This could be our pre-show neutral.
There is a Ferrari.
Now, how do they say it?
Is it Syracuse or do they say it a different way?
This is not a new thing.
This company has done this to every mid-engine V8 Ferrari for like the past three generations.
They always look yellow and black.
They're always kind of gaudy.
They always have that same name.
They always have the name Syracusa?
Yeah, well, what's the first part?
It's supposed to have an M or something?
Masonry.
It's like an aftermarket tuner, like... Like Ruff.
Yeah, or what's the BMW?
I don't know how it's said.
Dinan is how I've always pronounced it.
It's pronounced Syracusa.
Saline for Mustangs, and, you know.
Anyway, they do this all the time.
But, you know, every time it comes out, someone sees it for the first time and they tell me.
I've never seen this before.
You have.
I have sent you the picture of, like, the 458 version.
I've never seen it either.
I'm telling you.
I don't think you've said this to us before.
I think I also sent you maybe the one I didn't know you before that, but you've seen it before.
Mm-hmm.
All right.
So it's just like an aftermarket modder that mods and resells messed up Ferraris with your name on them?
Yep.
Cool.
All right.
And there is yellow and black, which some people find gaudy.
So do I. Like, I would never pick those colors.
But I don't think they're as hideous as a lot of people do.
I mean, it's like, if you're going to go yellow and black, it's sure as hell is yellow and black, isn't it?
I mean, it's like the, you know, lime green Lamborghinis or whatever.
Like, some people like that for their exotic cars.
out of curiosity so kind of like to pass the john test here if you were given one of these would you sell it for a different one yeah or would you keep this one sell sell sell sell okay because like i mean you get good money for it it would have no miles on it it would be brand new and these specially modified ones like they do for people who want this you know they're all lightened and have extra carbon fiber in them and also this stuff you you'd get good money for it you could buy a standard i would rather have a box stock boring red one than this
You know, I like to think in my peaceful, happy place in my mind that people who would have the means to buy a Ferrari like this would have better taste than to choose this one.
But I don't think it's that bad.
I don't think it's untasteful.
For example, I think the baby food metallic orange weird mustardy kind of yellow BMWs are unpleasing.
This looks like a Matchbox car.
Yeah, I'll give you that.
If you're going for that look, it's like, don't go halfway.
If you want to have fins and flares and extreme contrasting colors, this is that.
And it is a reasonable execution of that.
I think it is a valid aesthetic.
It's like the old difference between
uh lamborghini and ferrari lamborghini was always how many intakes and ducks and sharp angles and fins and wedges and stuff we put on there and ferrari was a little bit smoother and this is kind of like taking a ferrari and going in the lamborghini direction so i don't think it's actually ugly i just think it's you know it's too loud for my taste but um i think it is a competent execution of that style
so if you were given one immediately sell yep i think i would too oh i absolutely would but my i mean it's worth good money like you would get more money than selling a regular one because it is more rare and it's it has desirable characteristics for people who want to race them or whatever you want to do with this thing
sometimes mods make something less valuable i would venture to say that most mods make cars less valuable for aftermarket things like again if you got a bmw with a bunch of aftermarket modifications that is desirable for anyone who wants an aftermarket modified bmw they will give you more money than a fresh off the lot stock bmw
Well, when I did buy a used BMW, I specifically sought one out that was unmodified.
And then when I went, I had to drive to Maryland to see the one I found.
And the windows were all tinted.
And I'm like, oh, I didn't want that.
But I figured that's easy to undo.
So I bought that one, brought it home, and immediately brought it to a tint place to remove all the tint.
I didn't know that.
Is that right?
Yeah, yeah.
That was the one – well, it was chipped also.
It was like ECU modded.
So I don't know.
I'm not a modder, so I don't really understand the whole deal with it or the whole culture behind it.
So I just assume that it's just not for me.
Well, you know, it depends on what you're after, right?
Like, I agree with you that I would never, ever, ever buy a car that I've known to be modified.
But that being said, I put a chip in my car, which is to say, I mean, I say put a chip in it.
It's all software.
You know, there's no physical bits to it.
But I did that to my car.
I have a Cobb on it.
And I like it.
A what?
A Cobb.
It's C-O-B-B.
It's the company that has a box that lets you reprogram the computer.
And so that's what I've done to my car.
And it's better, for sure.
It's faster, and I like it.
But I wouldn't say that it's night and day better.
And this is the first car I can remember that I've done any sort of real modification to.
I've never tinted a car, even though I kind of would like to, but it's not worth it.
I've never put aftermarket wheels on a car.
Not worth that.
You should have seen how ridiculous I looked getting out of a car with black tinted windows.
I actually kind of am sad that I didn't.
It lasted less than a week.
That was literally the first thing I did when I brought her home.
I drove it home, and I think that same day I called a tent place to schedule an appointment to get it taken off.
That's not surprising.
John, have you ever done any sort of mods to your car?
No, but if I did, I would do the ones, like, the ones of those, the aftermarket tuners that I described before, like, where they do things that try to make the car better.
Like, so lightweight parts.
Take some part that's heavy and put in a part that is equally strong but lighter.
Like, that's always good, right?
Or, you know, inside the engine, if you could change, like, titanium connecting rods to get, you know, to increase the red line or whatever.
Like, those type of modifications seem to me more... Exactly the same things that the M Division does that AMG does or whatever.
You know, like...
changes that actually make the car better in whatever way you want to make the car better less window tinting and custom paint and ground effects and more more of the things that the manufacturer would do to make the car better
Indeed.
All right.
Well, I'm sad that you would not be a fan of the Ferrari Syracuse.
I don't know what, I mean, if the roles were reversed and that was the Ferrari list, I mean, how could you not?
Although that would be a terrible name.
It's nice that it has your name all over the thing, but it just, I don't, that's not what I want to have a Ferrari.
I want it to be red.
Call me crazy.
What would a Ferrari list be?
I don't even know.
Oh, of course.
It'd be white.
That's it.
We're done.
Same as it ever was.
You'd get the four-wheel drive one, right?
The ugly four-wheel drive one.
Oh, would you two stop?
That's what you want.
Yeah, that's it.
All right, can we move on to follow-up?
Okay.
I probably should have done some research about the mono Xamarin confusion, and we got a handful of emails about this, and I promptly looked at them and said, yeah, it's whatever.
And then I archived them.
Do you want to take a stab, John, to explain?
I was going to stop you when you were saying it during the show, but I figured just let it slide and no one really cares.
But apparently a lot of people care.
I don't know all the details of this, but I at least know that Mono was the name.
It was not interchangeable with Xamarin.
Xamarin was a company name.
Mono was the name of the open source implementation of .NET, and they're related to each other, but it's not as if Mono became Xamarin.
uh some people wrote us tell us things that we talked about on previous shows that what xamarin was doing is making a way for you to write ios applications by writing in c sharp to use their framework and you could deploy to ios and other platforms and stuff and microsoft buying them gives them a company that lets you write applications in c sharp and have them run on more than just windows phone um you know you know we didn't have a whole show we talked about that like what it would be like to write to write an ios app in c sharp
We talked about it a long time ago, so long ago that it's not likely I'm going to bother putting it in the show notes.
Anyway, I think the only people who care are people who already know the intricacies better than we do.
And the people who don't, we can just leave it at.
If you want to know more details about it, look it up.
What we said on the last show was a little bit muddled.
But then again, this whole thing, I feel like, is a little bit muddled, like trying to figure out what they're doing with this technology.
What products does Amarin have now versus what is Microsoft buying?
They're buying the people, the expertise.
Do they care?
How much do they care about the products that the company has now versus the company that Microsoft wants them to build or maybe take what they've already built and modified in one way or another?
And there was this flurry of stories about it.
You mentioned something, too, Casey, like the past few weeks about it.
And Microsoft's various projects to let people run applications from other mobile platforms on Windows Mobile.
So, like, you know, take your iOS app and run it on Windows Phone or on Windows 10 or whatever.
Yeah.
will run android apps or you'll be able to recompile your android apps for a windows phone i forget what they were called weren't they all the kinds of like woods island wood something like that wood anyway um obviously we're not keeping up on the all these various projects a couple of them were canned recently a couple of them live on
it's all part of microsoft's ongoing struggle to figure out how to take what is by all accounts a reasonable mobile platform at least as reasonable as android certainly better than android was in android's early days and try to find a way to make it viable in the market because at this point android and ios have so much momentum that they're just trying to you know
trying to get customers trying to get developers uh it's the it's the really tough chicken egg situation that apple founded itself in with the mac where the pc just came to dominate and no matter how much better the mac was it was just difficult to get people to develop for it and one of the one of the strategies people suggested is oh mac should run windows programs or it should be easy to write a program for windows and port that program to the mac and apple steadfastly held against that saying no we don't want like
We don't want people to we know that might get people to port their applications, but those would be crappy Windows ports.
We want people to write real Mac applications and be real Mac developers and do everything the right way.
Was that a mistake?
Would it have made no difference?
I don't know.
It's what Apple did.
It's certainly kind of the high road.
uh microsoft is kind of trying everything at this point what if we make it easier for you to take your ios application and use some of that some or all of that work to get that same application running on windows would that help get developers what if we will run android apps period just we'll take the binaries and run them somehow magically like all sorts of ideas to try to get some traction in the market
to my eyes as someone who supported apple's decisions not to uh license mac os and everything back in the days i think those efforts are not going to help them but uh you know at least they're trying right yeah i mean i guess so yeah so i'm sorry to the uh to the people who are really into mono and samarin and this whole uh ecosystem uh i like john said it's it's fairly confusing for me since i don't live and breathe it to keep it all apart i'm sorry i uh
Got that a little bit screwed up.
I'm sorry to both Windows Phone users for saying something wrong about your platform.
Please email Marco.
Our first sponsor this week is Audible.com, who has more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken word audio products.
Get a free 30-day trial at audible.com.
If you want to listen to it, Audible has it.
You can listen to audiobooks from virtually every genre, anytime, anywhere.
You can play Audible's audiobooks on phones, tablets, computers, even iPods.
Audio books are great for flights, long road trips, or even your daily commute.
You might think you don't have time to read books, but you'd be surprised how many audio books you can hear each year, even if you only listen to and from work every day, because all that time adds up.
Audio books bring books to life.
Many of them are read by the authors themselves, which adds an extra dimension to the text.
And you can take risks and try new authors and dramas without regret because Audible offers their great listen guarantee.
If you start an audiobook and don't like it, you can exchange it for another one for free.
So see and listen for yourself.
When you begin your free 30-day trial, you get your first audiobook for free, and there's no stress or obligation because you can cancel your membership at any time.
Now with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken word audio products, you will find what you're looking for.
Get a free 30-day trial today by signing up at audible.com slash ATP.
That's audible.com slash ATP.
Thanks to Audible for sponsoring our show.
So Apple made an oops in the last week.
Oh, geez, this is bad.
This is so bad.
It's not that bad.
It's funny.
It's bad.
The fix was really easy.
All right.
So what are we talking about here?
Casey, you're the summarizer.
I am the summarizer in chief.
Am I not?
So my understanding of the situation was Apple has a mechanism by way they can blacklist kernel extensions.
And I can't think of any particular examples offhand, but there are times when a kernel extension will go bad and they can blacklist it.
And it's usually used for malware.
Like if they discover some kind of kernel extension malware, I think the intention of this system is for them to be able to very quickly disable it on all Macs globally within a very short amount of time.
And the other example I can think of is the one from this thing, which is...
if they have a new version of an extension because they all know the old one now they can exploit or something like their own like their own kernel extensions they want to blacklist the old one so that you know so that people's macs aren't exploitable because they'll give you a new one here use this new one and then by the way make sure the old one isn't ever loaded again because we know there's a problem with that one
yep right and this this extends like we're having clarification from tips from the chat room this extends also to binaries to apps like if they can blacklist any binary that is deemed malware and so it really is a very good feature for malware uh for the you know to prevent the spread of it to disable stuff that gets out there so it's a good feature that that i'm glad it's there uh however they messed something up this time
Yeah, so it's important to note that these blacklist entries can ride without doing a formal software update.
Of course, it's still some sort of software update that's happening behind the scenes, but the key is that it's happening behind the scenes.
And so without any user intervention, you can just have this blacklist update happen to you, and things that are blacklisted will just magically go away.
Well, I didn't really think much of this, or maybe I didn't even know about it.
But then a few days ago, I could swear I saw Jason Snell saying, all of a sudden, my iMacs Ethernet port isn't working anymore.
Is anyone else seeing this?
What's going on here?
And mine was working on my iMacs.
I didn't think much of it.
And then fast forward about 24 hours, and it turns out that Apple blacklisted their own Ethernet driver.
whoops without shipping a replacement because that that's that's my understanding is that's where this went wrong they had a new version of this driver it's coming with like 10 11 4 or whatever which is not out yet i think still um uh and uh so they blacklisted the old one and they're you know you're supposed to get the blacklist at the same time you get the upgrade to the new one but instead the blacklist for the old one went out but the upgrade to the new one did not so if you're jason snell all of a sudden your mac appears not to have an ethernet port or however this manifested like basically
the ethernet is not going to go because the kernel extension will not be loaded and you have no replacement yeah and and the and they they did within i don't know a few hours maybe like they did fairly quickly fix that with like the next definition the next version of the definitions that it downloads and
But that didn't do you any good if you rebooted in the meantime there and then you had no Ethernet with which to download that update.
And not to mention the fact that I think it's not like it comes up and tells you error dialogue.
Hey, your Ethernet kernel extension is no longer working because we deemed it insecure.
They don't tell you anything.
It just fails silently.
Your Ethernet just disappears if you reboot.
Yeah.
these software updates like they happened facelessly behind the scenes you don't see them they don't go through like you don't there's no spinner there's no dialogue there's no thing popping up there's no like oh i see the mac app store launching none of that happens it just magically gets updated yeah and as far as you can't disable it right you probably
can you can disable i mean you could like firewall it but like like you know if like there's no setting to not do those right probably just rename the the binary that it uses if it uses if it doesn't use like software update d or whatever you can there's always ways to stop this stuff but yeah in general for the regular person there is no way there's no button or checkbox or preference pane for you to not do that
Right.
And I mean, so, you know, the good thing is, like, at least it didn't also affect Wi-Fi.
So that probably cut down substantially on the number of computers that were affected by this.
Because who uses the SNN, right?
Yeah, well, geeks like us.
And a lot of people, it turns out.
But, you know, I think what's most concerning about this, like, look, no one's perfect, but it just seems like...
This, to me, feels a lot like the same kind of problem as the whole Mac App Store certificate expiration problem that happened twice in the last few months.
Just the latter one seemed to only happen to developers.
It just seems like there's this really critical function of the system that something seemingly just rushed out there without being tested or with some degree of carelessness.
And
It doesn't bode well for the Mac when Apple seems to not be devoting the resources to what should be their most stable, secure platform.
The Mac should be a rock.
It should be rock stable because it is mature.
It's not changing that quickly anymore.
It isn't like iOS where things are moving really fast and there's constantly new stuff.
It's the rock.
It should be stable.
And the fact that they're doing things like this...
With some kind of failure in the process where things are getting out that break things pretty badly like this, it really makes me concerned for the process they have in place to validate these things and to test for these things and for the overall amount of resources that they're giving the Mac.
Because everything we keep hearing from people inside the company is that basically whenever there's a new hot project, engineers get moved around like crazy.
Like there's constantly like engineers getting pulled off of certain projects or going to work at a more interesting group or whatever else.
It seems like there's lots of internal moving of people around and that often leaves things effectively staffless.
And it feels to me from the outside like most of the Mac is effectively staffless.
And that's concerning to me.
And because what happens then when things are staffless like this inside Apple, what tends to happen is at some point, a year later, somebody dictates, hey, we need to have a new version of OS X with 10 new features or 100 new features or whatever.
And then people kind of get temporarily brought in and they do this kind of like drive by work and then they go back to other stuff.
And again, I don't know if this is how it works, but this is how it feels.
And this kind of matches up with a little bit of things we've heard.
And so it just seems like it seems like Apple does not dedicate resources full time to things that I think need full time resources.
And that to me is very concerning.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know if it's fair for us to try to assume what happened.
I mean, I don't know if this is somebody dropped the ball.
I don't know if this is somebody hit a button a little too early accidentally.
It doesn't really matter.
But certainly a lot of what we've talked about in a couple of different subjects over the last few episodes of the show is perception.
And when we're already of the perception that Apple doesn't have the attention to detail that they used to,
Things like this don't doesn't really help.
Similarly, you know, another similar example is Stephen Hackett noticing just the other day, and I don't know how I never noticed this, that there's a really kind of crummy and semi egregious typo in disk utility.
Yeah.
And he says at the bottom of this post, while this may seem silly, because it's such a typo, it's not like functionally broken.
While this may seem silly, it's this attention to detail stuff that worries me about Apple software.
And that's, I think, why we're harping on this, is because...
Apple, companies of this size, and companies that tout how much they pay attention to detail, they shouldn't really make mistakes like these.
And if they do, they shouldn't be often.
And granted, blacklisting an Ethernet driver is very, very different than transposing a couple of words in disk utility, but...
Well, but you know what?
Like, disk utility, like, first of all, like, that was part of a big disk utility update and redesign that probably didn't need to happen.
I don't know.
I'm not familiar with the logic that went in behind it.
But it was like, it's a system utility that got like a basically a redesign that removed a bunch of features and made it look nicer.
And it's like, only geeks were ever using this.
Like, this doesn't, this didn't need to be made nicer in a way that negatively affected it.
And it's it's like you don't want disk utility of all things to have a drive by sloppily done update like a typo in disk utility is like a typo on your brake pads like you really don't want any signs of carelessness in that.
And so it just it worries me that it just seems like nothing is off limits for carelessness with with the Mac and with what Apple's working on.
And again, like so many people, us included, depend on this platform to be stable and to be our rock where we get our work done.
Yeah.
at least the mac should be stable it should be the rock it should not be getting careless updates or careless actions and it should not be short-staffed i don't know i think the ethernet driver i don't consider that a big deal because like think of how long this mechanism has existed and think of how many times they've messed it up like this is the only time i can think of that they've messed it up and it's existed for a long time and it was fixed very easily and it's very simple so i i totally give them a pass now when i'm
I'm reminded of, like, you guys don't remember this, but Mac OS 7.5.4 or System 7.5.4.
Sorry, it was not Mac OS 7.5.4.
I blame the internet for that.
That they had basically two versions of, like, that it reached Golden Master back in the days when that actually meant something because they would print floppy disks and stuff.
And then they had to stop and say, oh, no, actually...
we made a mistake and here's the new new version but some of the old version got out so for a certain period of time there were multiple official binaries uh of system 7.5.4 and floppy disks floating around or you couldn't be sure exactly which one you have is they all just said 7.5.4 and they didn't have build numbers visible to users at times anyway
stuff like that happens it's not a big deal the mac app store certificate signing thing i think that is emblematic of like well this is supposed to be a major feature and you have the ios app store and it's the type of thing that is really complicated and hard to get right and requires forethought and care and like it's not so simple as like oops well just we'll just wait you know and another silent update will fix this lots of people were left in situations where their apps wouldn't launch and all that other stuff and that i think shows a a lack of investment in the mac of like not
not being prepared for that eventuality because like because if you can think of something like that happened on the iphone and then for the same period of time the same percentage of iphone users would tap icons on their phones and nothing would launch that would be just a disaster of epic proportions i mean and in some degree it's like well the iphone sells more that's why it gets more attention or whatever but yeah we all think there should be a little bit more uh care on the mac and the disc utility one
disk utility is the least of disk systems problems i think it did it did need a gui refresh this gui refresh is not a great gui refresh but i don't think anyone would care that much if it wasn't for the two things that marco mentioned removing features which is like i was using that like you know you haven't replaced it with anything
there's no promise of being replaced for anything the old thing worked uh why is it gone with no explanation so removing features is bad and then having i i should put a link to the show notes but someone a link to something uh i think it was uh mj sai again uh linking to the the story casey was just talking about about the typo but just saying like
uh super duper leverages some of the same command line utilities and frameworks that are underneath disk utility and super duper has a mode where it will clone your drive and you can tell it erase the destination drive first and then clone onto it and he was getting like out of disk space warnings and it's because the
the system code that erases the volume would tell super duper yep totally just erase that volume for you it's totally erased go ahead and fill it and super duper would go to try to fill it and eventually fill the disk because the disk wasn't erased like that the underlying disk utility functionality of please erase this volume for me would report success but have actually failed and that type of failure is like forget about cosmetics right you know so it's like missing features and features that work worse now
Basic features like, please erase this volume for me.
That's kind of untenable.
So that's why I think this utility update is bad.
Not because the GUI is weird and the windows aren't resizable and it's hard to see the messages or whatever.
It did need a GUI refresh.
Feel free to do that anytime you want.
But when the underlying functionality is either removed or doesn't work right, that's a real bummer.
This was not a utility that was very customer-facing.
Again, this was a really technical utility that only geeks really ever used.
If you don't have the resources or if you're not willing to devote the resources to do it right, then just leave it be for another release because no one is pressuring you to redesign something like that that already works.
And if the best you can do is to replace it with a version that doesn't work as well, then don't do that redesign.
It's just like with Discovery D. Yeah, you redesign this whole thing, you rewrote this whole thing, but the new one works worse.
And eventually they came around to the right decision, which was, okay, we'll go back to the old one with disc utility.
I feel like they should do the same thing is like either fix the new one in which I think is probably a big job.
And it seems to probably not have a lot of resources devoted to it that I'm guessing that was, that was one of those drive-by updates.
Um,
Or just put the old one back because it was fine.
It didn't not work.
Like, it was fine.
It just was a little bit ugly.
But who cares?
It's a utility.
You got to think that, like, I mean, so there's the GUI part of it, which, like, is not most of the application.
And then there's the underlying frameworks and command line utilities.
And the fact that some of those either disappear or stop working.
Those must have changed.
It's not just that they put a bad GUI on top of it, in which case, fine, put back the old GUI.
There must have been underlying changes to the parts of the system that deal with disks, all those frameworks, or the command line utilities or whatever.
So it might not be just as simple as...
put in the old version of the disk utility application it's it's a like many of the things apple makes it's a series of frameworks and there's a gui front end and there's a command line front end and and you know the it goes always down through the system and trying to think why they got rid of those features maybe they're just trying to reduce the surface area of bugs like i think they got rid of like software raid or something
um and i don't think it's uh you know a bad idea to say so few of our customers use this supporting it is really difficult it should go away it's not going to be supported from now on like it's disappointing to people um but if you can do that in a good way and basically i would say give everyone a warning tell them software rate is going away give them alternatives instead of just let you wake up and you're like oh a new version disk is silly wait where does that command go like it wasn't
it wasn't sort of communicated out in any way or there wasn't like one year where every time you select software raid it would tell you software will be unsupported in the next version you should stop you know like you know what i mean like there's there's good and bad transitions but then having the thing that says that erases discs fail to erase a disc but report success uh that's just this is bad and i don't know what the fix for that is i i like to imagine of course that they're redoing this because
they're ripping out all this stuff in anticipation of the new file system that's going to come in 2017 um but uh who knows if that's even related so anyway i'm like they redid activity monitor a couple years ago too i think all those applications that sit like in the utilities folder they should get updates like every five years or so like they should have complete guru refreshes or whatever uh but like marco said there's no rush if you don't have time to do it this year wait till next year it's not like people are like oh i was gonna upgrade the new os but they didn't upgrade activity monitor this year no one cares it's fine
Yeah, I would rather have just the old one that still works than a new one that doesn't.
Yeah, and to the credit for all the people who do the underlying file system stuff, like core storage and everything, and all the stuff that enables, like the new version of FileVault, I don't know how many years that was in Gestation, but when it came, it worked.
The new version of FileVault was, you know, the old version was terrifying.
It was crazy.
And the new version sadly had the same name, but it's like everyone who tried it, it's like...
You do it and it just works, right?
And they had to do so much plumbing changes to make that happen.
All of core storage and all that stuff, that's a significant change, but they waited until it was basically ready.
I mean, it's not like there weren't bugs and not like they didn't fix them and everything, but it was clearly production caliber when it was released, right?
And even though they improved the next year and the next year and the next year after that, I think everyone was shocked by how much of a non-issue it was.
Is your disk encrypted?
Yeah, I checked the checkbox and I entered some passwords.
Now my disk is encrypted.
I don't even notice.
It doesn't affect my life.
It's like magic.
That's the way things should be.
That's the way the new file system will be in 2017.
Right, guys?
Honestly, I'm a little scared because I question whether today's Apple, with what they're showing us by their actions here,
Can they deliver a really big, really important, stable, new generation of something that large?
Like, can Apple deliver a new file system for the Mac today without massive bugs?
Well, they've been working on it for like 20 years now, right?
Yeah.
It's got to be so good now.
But where are those people?
In how many directions are those resources being pulled right now?
We don't know if there's any resources.
We don't know if there's even a project.
We know nothing.
That's true.
But whatever this is, if there is a new file system here,
Apple from five years ago might have been able to ship it and it might have worked.
But I really, honestly, I'm worried about Apple today about whether they can do this kind of very large new project on a platform, on the Mac, on a platform that they don't really seem to be devoting substantial resources to anymore.
Yeah.
I think they're totally capable.
It's just a question of making the call and when to pull the trigger.
That's all it comes down to.
Is it ready?
The go no to go decision.
Is it ready this year or is it not ready this year?
You just make the right call on that and it's like the whole Mac is like disk utility.
No one's in a big hurry.
If it's not ready, don't ship it.
If it's ready, ship it.
That's it.
Because I totally believe the capabilities are all there.
Even resource starved, even with people getting pulled off to work on the mystical car or whatever they're doing, all that does is push your dates back.
That's all that should happen.
Well, except that I think we see now that today's Apple would much rather hit a ship date than ship something perfect.
I think you're taking this way too far when it comes to the file system example, because the file system is one of the bases of the entire Mac pyramid.
I mean, if you screw that up, that's a big damn deal.
And I think that Apple is smart enough to realize that if they're really going to...
pull pull the trigger on a new file system if this is really going to happen kind of like what john was saying a minute ago they're going to make sure that they are ready and they are going to test the snot out of that it's not the sort of thing that you can just say we why not you know and fire from the hip pew pew pew let's give it a shot let's see what happens they did that with hrs plus though
oh you guys don't you guys don't remember that let me tell you a little bit about what that was like please do like so gather around the fire kids yeah oh here we go let grandpa tell you about the file system so there was uh you know there was mfs we're not going to talk about that there was hfs which was fine for a while and then uh you know matt was it mac os 8.1 i think came out uh and that had a new file system they're calling the hfs plus uh and if you had if you were installing it onto uh an empty volume you could format as hfs plus and install your operating system and you'd be in this brave new world right
they also had a feature this is my recollection people can correct me if i'm wrong i could be mixing up third-party stuff but i'm pretty sure first party had a feature where you could say i've got an hfs disk and in those days like disks were tiny and they were always full because they were tiny you could say i want to upgrade to mac os 8.1 um
And I would also like you to change my volume from HFS to HFS Plus in place.
Change the format of the file system without deleting my data.
Leave the data there, but convert the thing from HFS to HFS Plus.
That sounds like a bad idea.
That process, as you might imagine, because these were not days of log-structured file systems where it's like write-only file systems.
You can do this with BTRFS and lots of other things because of the way they're laid out in a reasonably safe way.
but this was like a literal like in place if you unplug your computer in the middle of this or if anything goes wrong kiss your stuff goodbye all right and it was terrifying and we didn't have any place that we couldn't do online backups because for me anyway and for most people there was no online right and we didn't have enough hard disk space to actually make a real like no one had backups because there was no way to back up like i had
one hard drive or it had multiple hard drives but they were all filled with stuff like where and so yeah it spun uphill both ways right and so what was your choice like if you wanted hfs plus then who didn't right wow 255 character file names i don't you know anyway um most of the good stuff in hfs also didn't even expose but the bottom line is you could at least have a block size that made it so you know a text file with one byte in it it didn't take up this then obscene amount of uh space because that was the problem with hfs is that as the volumes got bigger the block size had to grow proportionally
uh and so no matter how small you made your file your your minimum file size kept going up and up to a size that we wouldn't care about today i think it was like we were all upset because it was like 4k for you know a single character file like or more than 4k and that was too big anyway the benefits weren't even all that great and the risks were tremendous and if you wanted to upgrade you had to either erase your disk in which case you needed to have a backup or do this in place backup and
it was not it was touch and go there for a year or two and uh i mean we we probably didn't hear as much about it because people weren't online as much back then and talking to each other about the all the problems that are inherent in that but it was really scary these days though i was going to say to casey's thing i like all the faucets and they're going to make sure it's super safe remember hfs plus runs on the phone too
So you're pretty much guaranteed that if they're replacing it with anything, it's going to... That's bet the company kind of stuff.
There's no way in hell they would replace HFS Plus with anything else on the phone if they weren't damn sure that it fulfilled the requirements of it.
So I have some faith that...
We will not see a file system until that happens.
Do I have faith that that means a file system will be out in 2017?
I don't know.
But, like, you know, just take your time.
Get it right.
You know, we waited this long.
Whatever.
We'll be right back.
Igloo is an intranet that you will actually like designed by people who have like modern sensibilities and who recognize that mobile exists and there are different screen sizes and you need to do things in browsers a lot of times.
And you know what?
Decent, easy to use design might actually be something you should consider for your intranet.
All these things seem obvious to people like us who live in the real world, but for some reason, intranets usually lack these things.
Igloo actually pays attention to what people want and what is good in the universe, and they implement it on their intranets for you, for your benefit, for your company.
This is an easy-to-use collaboration tool that will help you do your best work.
You can share files and updates with your team.
You can coordinate calendars.
You can manage department projects and more.
Whether you're a large enterprise stuck using SharePoint or a fast-growing business overwhelmed by file sharing and calendar apps,
That sound is called the SharePoint Psy.
They can run with that.
That is the SharePoint Psy.
But if you use Igloo, you will not have the SharePoint Psy.
You will just rejoice in everything just working and being nice, which is something that intranet users have never had before.
So check it out today.
Go to igloosoftware.com slash ATP for a really, really great, secure, nice, easy-to-use corporate intranet.
And if you have 10 or fewer people, it's free forever.
Bigger teams, you still get a free trial.
So check it out today at igloosoftware.com slash ATP.
Start your free trial.
Thanks a lot to Igloo for sponsoring our show.
So, John, since you're already a little bit fired up, tell me how it is you kind of just have disc-free Blu-rays.
How is that even possible?
Oh, we're going to do that topic next?
All right.
Before we jump to that, though, the chat room wants to...
wants us to say this, and it's another story for the youngins, although you guys have probably heard it, and I'll do it quickly.
Back to the fire.
Yeah.
The other fun thing about the HOS to HOS Plus conversion... I don't know if this is still true.
Probably not, but I don't remember.
There were some recent articles.
It came up again on the modern internet a couple years ago, so maybe you could find those blog posts.
Anyway, when it converted your disk, it would do this clever thing where it would...
if this hfs plus disc was read by a system that predates hfs plus rather than saying this disc is unreadable would you like to initialize uh as in like i have no idea what the hell this disc is if the disc would appear to older discs as an hfs disc that had like this little miniature hfs disc volume entry in it in the place where old uh in a place where a pre-hfs plus system would look for it and the only thing on that disc was a little tiny readme file that explained what the hell hfs plus is and where all your crap went
And it was just, like, the ideal, like, cute little Mac thing where instead of just, you know, telling you everything is initialized and, you know, telling you your disk is unreadable and scaring people and tricking them into, like, accidentally hitting the erase button because they don't know what else to do, your disk would mount, and you'd be like, where the hell's all my stuff?
And you would see this one little text file, this one little readme file sitting there, and, you know, what else can you do there?
But, like, I guess I'll read this file.
Maybe it'll tell... I forget what it was called.
It was, like...
it was something about like where did my files go or please read me or whatever like it was it was trying to help you say look here and we'll tell you what the heck's going on and it would say oh this this has been formed with hfs plus position a new format and you're booted into an old system and blah blah blah that was like that's that's the uh that's the good stuff that's the good apple mac way kind of whimsical kind of fun technically super clever um because they control everything from top to bottom they can do this they can say
We're going to define a new volume format, but we're going to leave a spot for this little funny little wrapper.
And I don't remember when the wrapper went away or if it's still there.
It's probably gone now.
But I always like that.
And that is, I think, the example of Apple at its best.
So tell me, John, how do you handle Blu-rays these days?
oh this topic this topic i try to handle them uh not at all so we've talked about blu-rays a little bit as in like you know where did you get this movie do you you know uh did you get an itunes how do you watch movies all our different plex things uh streaming things from netflix from hbo go
uh, all sorts of ways that we watch, uh, television movies these days.
And I would always chime in at a certain point to say, Oh, I buy the movies that I care about on Blu-ray because despite the fact that Blu-ray is awful, everybody knows Blu-ray is awful.
Um, for all the reasons that anyone who's ever used a Blu-ray knows they can million years to load and,
you're waiting for the menus to load they show you previews that sometimes you can't skip um you just want to watch the movie there's a spinning disc in there that probably makes noise or more noise than a digital file anyway um you have to get the disc out of its case you got to stick it into a little thing you know like it's all do they still run java yeah very often they will run java try to download something or you have compatibility problems my favorite one is like i have lots of fancy equipment that can in theory play blu-rays and every once in a while one of them will be like get me on a menu screen
where it won't let me select the play button or where it will freeze on a menu screen and it's just like and this is after you've sat through previews or tried to skip them or figure out which button you have to hit to get past the previews can i advance track can i hit top menu can i pop up menu you know like and you get through that and then the menu freezes and you can't hit play i love blu-rays like it's like you know it's like this committee looked at the dvd format and they were like you know what this needs more prohibited user operations software updates and java
Yeah, and software, like running software.
So it's an incredibly misguided customer hostile format.
And really, you just want to watch the movie.
That's all you want.
You want the movie to start playing now.
So why do I keep buying Blu-rays?
I keep buying them because it continues to be...
the highest quality version of the of a movie that you can get and i not all movies i care about i get a lot of movies especially like kids movies on itunes or whatever like you know they're fine but for the movies i really care about i want the highest quality version that i can buy that a regular consumer can buy and blu-ray is that blu-ray discs are huge you can get a blu-ray movie that's like tens of gigabytes yes they're still compressed it's not like it's uncompressed but they're compressed at a higher bit rate with better algorithms and like
they are you know they have uh some of them have uncompressed audio on them or you know multiple uh higher resolution audio tracks and all sorts of good things about you know so it is it is the best copy of a movie you can get so all the movies i care about i get on blu-ray uh all the movies that i really really you know appreciate and
uh and i have a setup that can play them correctly on my fancy tv and everything's good except of course i hate blu-ray so what i'm always looking for not like really actively but just like be on the lookout for this is the point where i can take my blu-rays and get the bits off of them and put them onto a hard drive somewhere and
And then watch them from that hard drive.
Now all the menus are gone because I'm just taking the movie.
All the stupid menus, all the FBI warnings, all the Java applets, all the previews, all that is gone.
Are you confessing to a felony?
I don't know.
I just want the bits off of the disc.
And then I want to be able to play those bits and have it be exactly the same as it would be if I put the Blu-ray into the drive, except without all the bad parts.
and i have all these boxes connected to my television and i've got my big sinology down there that's got a lot of room on it and like i said i've not been actively seeking this out but i figured at a certain point just for my normal churn of the various boxes that are attached to my tv i will probably eventually get to the point where this is the thing that can happen
and i thought i might have been at that point because as we've discussed on past shows i've been running plex on my new apple tv and i finally got my plex library kind of in order um and uh lots of things have plex clients my tivo has a plex client my television can read things directly off the synology off the server that it runs my apple tv box can do it like i have so many different choices i can i can run the server on off my computer which uh by the way i don't know if it occurs to people to do this and maybe it's not recommended but
If you have a NAS, you can mount your NAS on your Mac and then run Plex on your Mac with the NAS mounted where all your like video is.
That's exactly what I do.
Right.
But you can also have like Synology has a Plex server on it.
So I have a Plex server on my NAS and I have another Plex server on my Mac, both of which are pointing to the exact same video files.
And they more or less stay in sync with each other.
Like they don't fight each other and everything.
And so why would you do that?
Why would you choose between them?
I don't like to have the Mac on all the time, but if there's something that needs some kind of heavy transcoding to be able to play at all, the Mac can handle it and the Synology might not be able to.
So, and really just, I don't know, I'm just playing with things.
But anyway, so that's the situation I'm in and I figured, I think I'm at the point where I can do this now.
So I bought myself like a $50, you know, Blu-ray drive.
That's how cheap they are these days for your computer.
You know, just like a little thing you put in a little Blu-ray that connects up to USB.
Yep.
Bag of hurt.
Yep.
And then, uh, and then get, you know, make MKV or some other program, uh, that you're going to ask to, you know, people might say, I'm going to rip my Blu-rays, but I'm not re-encoding them.
I am not, uh, running them through compression algorithms.
I just want the bits off the disc exactly as they are, not changed in any possible way.
Right.
Because isn't that exactly what, what make MKV does?
yeah i think people have workflows where like it goes through this whole big process and actually re-rip we can talk to don melton about uh how what his what his workflows he's always he's always re-encoding all his movies and i'm like so do you have the original uncompressed thing somewhere you just that's your input or do you do you feed discs in forever i don't know what it does but anyway yeah make mkv will let you select which tracks you want off the thing and it will just pull them off exactly as they are bit for bit
which is exactly what I want.
Not for all my movies.
Again, like, I have most of the things, like, that I don't care that much about I'll buy on iTunes or I'll watch on Netflix.
I don't have to store them at all.
But for the, you know, the handful of, like, my very, very favorite movies, right?
And I did this.
Seemed to go okay.
Like, I just did it for, like, two or three experimental movies off of Blu-ray.
And, you know, again, they're huge, like, 20 or 30 gigabytes.
Like, you know, you're going to run a disc space real fast if you take your, you know, movie library of 300 movies and just do the math.
You will see that it will take a lot of room.
But I was just doing a couple of them.
um and i thought it was home free because i'm like great got the bits off the disc i've got a million places i can put these bits that i can play them i can put them on plex and have it served for my mac i put them on plex and have them serve my synology i can put them on my synology haven't served from dlna server on my television i can play them from my playstation 3 i could play them from my playstation 4 if it was hooked up to my television but it's not um i could play them from my apple tv i can play them from the television itself like
you know i probably can play them from the the wii u if i wanted to who knows what they have out you know i have so many options so i'm like surely one of these will work to do what i want and they almost do they're really close they're really close but i had forgotten about two things
One, I had, I mean, I didn't really forget about this, but I figured something I had would have worked.
I'd forgotten about 24 frames per second cadence.
Movies, most movies that we know of that people like these days are shot at 24 frames per second for a variety of historical reasons.
Um, and most televisions for a different variety of historical reasons, most flat screen televisions, uh, show a new frame, uh, at some multiple that 24 does not go into evenly.
So they may be, uh, well, they're not 60 Hertz these days, but like, uh,
well aren't there 120 ones yeah there's 120 and and 240 and stuff like that right so if you have one of those televisions and you can get 24 into it evenly you're fine but if you're like me and you have a plasma television that doesn't have it doesn't display at you know or if you have a device that doesn't output an even multiple 24 that's usually what it is not so much the television set
So the best example is the Apple TV, which I believe outputs at 60 hertz, which is what all our Macs output at, like, you know, 60 refreshes of your screen each second.
Right.
And if you've got 24 frames of video and you're trying to put it out over a connection that's going to show 60 frames every second.
the math doesn't work out for you there so you have to because you can't show like say you have frame number one frame number two frame number three you what they end up doing is they show frame number one three times they show frame number two two times they show frame number three three times and it's like three two three two three two three two um and
And that's not what you want because you're showing the frames an uneven number of times.
It's supposed to be one frame for 1 24th of a second, then the next frame for 1 24th of a second.
Every frame should be shown for exactly the same amount of time.
But if you're sending 60 updates a second, you just can't do that with 24 frames per second, right?
And it doesn't matter what your television does.
if the output device is like that now very clever modern televisions have a thing where they will do they will do three to two cadence detection well they will figure out seems like this device is sending me like one frame three times that never changes and the next frame it sends me two times and that one is the same for the two things and then it sends me the next frame three times the next one too oh i see what's going on there
And it fixes it for you.
It re-expands the frame rate and displays them because it has a refresh rate that's a multiple of 24 and you're fine.
And then when you actually look at it on the television, it shows you each frame for exactly the same amount of time.
Every frame comes on for 1 24th of a second.
That's awesome.
I didn't know TVs were that smart.
yeah mine doesn't do that because it's a not that smart and be like that process as you can imagine is kind of like detecting that and handling it correctly is potentially problematic so what you really want is for the device that you're playing the movie on to say look i'm going to send it at not at 24 frames per second but at 24 frame per second cadence so i'm going to send you some multiple of 24 right whether i can't do the math in my head or is 96 a multiple or 120 or 240 or whatever yes anyway
i'm going to send you some multiples 24 and and then you television realize that i'm sending to you at this frame rate and display television decide to update exactly this thing so if i send you 96 hertz television please display 96 hertz
And everyone's fine.
And so frame number one is shown three or four times.
When they say it's 24 frames per second, they don't mean that your television is updating 24 times a second.
That would look terrible for most television technologies.
All they mean is that the cadence is correct.
That the first frame is shown for 1 24th of a second exactly, and the second frame is shown for 1 24th of a second exactly.
um that's what you want to happen and when i put a blu-ray player in my playstation 3 it does exactly that it sends it out 24 frames per second cadence my television realizes that the playstation wants to talk to it that way they negotiate over hdmi hdmi my television changes to be at exactly a 24 frame per second cadence that is the only way you see a blu-ray the way it's supposed to look without what they call judder judder is what what they call it when you see the three two three two three two type thing
um especially when they have like a pan or some quick motion where it seems herky jerky because it because it is jerky because it's not smooth motion they're not showing each frame for 1 24th of a second um i thought surely i have some box that can take this 24 frame per second blu-ray and show it like that uh but it turns out
For the most part, I don't.
The Apple TV won't do it because the Apple TV has a fixed refresh rate and for whatever reason, my television does not detect that it's getting 3.2 and it can't reverse the process.
I don't think there's anything I can do on my Apple TV to convince it to output at 96 or 48 or something like that.
uh the the last forum entry i saw from some apple person answering they basically said applications in the apple tv have no power to affect that what's going out over the hdmi cable like the refresh rate they can't change that that's just it's fixed and it's part of the os it's possible future os update could change to either let applications control that or let let users control it with some setting or something but right now it doesn't and how do i know that my television isn't correctly detecting the 3.2 cadence and fixing it for me
you can kind of tell by looking at like scenes and movies and pans or whatever but there's a much easier way to tell there's a lot of little test movies that you can download that show for example a white box marching across the screen and for you know for the first frame the white box is on the left and for the next frame the white boxes move one unit over the next frame so you see 24 boxes which light up one after the other what each frame one of the boxes is lit up
All you do is take your fancy Marco Arment expensive camera and figure out how to change the shutter speed to exactly one second.
You play that movie on your television.
You take a picture of your television with an exposure time of one second.
Then you look at the picture.
If your television is doing the right thing, you should see 24 grayish boxes that look exactly the same brightness.
Because every single one of those squares was on screen for exactly 1 24th of a second.
And 1 24th of a second is the same exposure on your camera sensor.
So that's what you should see.
if it's doing it wrong what you will see is bright square dim square bright square dim square bright square dim square the bright ones were the ones that were shown for three frames and the dim ones are the ones that were shown from two frames so just to be double extra sure i experimented determined that yes no combination of apple tv plus flex you did will produce anything except for the one i had had like a clock dial too which also made the hands go around a clock in 24 not a clock but like a thing in 24 increments and you would see bright hand dark hand bright hand dark hand
um it was such a pain in the ass to figure out how to get my camera to do exposure for one second because i don't know any of like the terminology in camera land i was like s shutter shutter speed exposure like once and the the correct setting i don't even remember what the hell it was called but the correct setting said one and then like the inch sign like a quote one inch two inch i'm like that's seconds that's not i mean i guess minutes is a single prime and seconds is
Well, because normally it's showing you a fraction of a second in most other cases.
So it might just say like 500, which is one 500th of a second.
So they do that little quote thing.
Yeah, I think it is like a degree of minute seconds kind of reference there.
But I think it's more just to be very different from what it was showing before.
So you don't have like five and think it's one fifth of a second.
yeah very very confusing people don't know photography but anyway apple tv no go which is a shame because that's what i wanted to do apple tv has no fan it's got plex on it i could put my my blue you know that's where i put my blue herbs right into plex plex will play them just fine i can you know it'll play the movie but won't get the right cadence did your family see you doing this test
No, they weren't around at this time.
Or maybe they were asleep.
It's a silent test.
And so I asked about it on Twitter.
I got some suggestions like, oh, you should try on your TiVo.
I'd forgotten my TiVo even had a Plex client.
But guess what?
TiVo has a Plex client.
Is it HD?
Is it slow?
It's slow.
But it will output 24 hertz.
And it will negotiate with my television and convince my television to display...
i mean it says 24 hertz but again it's not really 24 it will output at 24 frame per second cadence but everything else about it is awful i think it's only 720p so i think it's like reconverting the video um
At the very least, the menus appear to be 720p.
And it downmixes all the audio to stereo.
It doesn't do multi-channel at all.
I think the closest I got was I had managed to... I forget which one it was that did this.
I think I had managed through the PlayStation 3, which is my good Blu-ray player that does the correct cadence.
I think I got everything except for it wouldn't do uncompressed linear PCM audio, which the Kill Bill Blu-ray has on it.
It would only do the AC3 one.
um and i wasn't entirely convinced that it had gotten the cadence right either i don't remember if i redid the test on that but bottom line is none of the devices i had fulfilled this requirement and i don't really blame them because this is not a mainstream use nobody cares about this they just want like if you just if i just rip these movies and just play them like regular people can't tell that the cadence is wrong cadence is wrong they don't care that they've been recompressed nobody can hear the difference between compressed and uncompressed audio i certainly can't on my crappy speakers but it's the principle of the matter as you can imagine and
and i really do think that i would notice the cadence in the same way you can notice like soap opera effect or whatever i really do want the frame rate to be right and the whole point of this experiment is if i can't get it all the way then like i'll just go back to watching because i do have compressed strips of all these things it's not like i can't see the movie and i can put in the blu-ray when i really care about it right
um but but i'm so close so close so many devices are capable of doing everything they just haven't got the last little bit which is please pass through the audio in whatever format it is directly to my receiver which can understand all these formats and can play all of them please don't try to down mix please don't refuse to use linear linear pcm and only send ac3 please don't do anything like that please don't change the video please don't try to change the 720p
um and get the get the the display cadence right between the television which totally supports this if you talk to it in a reasonable way um talk to television the right way um and i got a lot of suggestions for alternatives that will do this obviously if i was to get a home theater pc i can do it like lots of mac and pc solutions do this
Obviously, I'm not going to do that, even a fanless one.
I'm not going to build myself a home theater PC.
I'm not signing up for that.
You won't even build yourself a gaming PC, even though you really probably should.
You won't even do that, so there's no way you're building an HT PC.
Firewatch is pretty smooth on the 5K iMac, let me tell you.
it's pretty nice i'm not that's a very demanding game but yeah i'm not signing up to uh that guy i don't i know i could do that i definitely could a lot of people suggested raspberry pi which actually i actually kind of consider because i'm like you know what that is that seems simpler than a home theater pc can they do that yeah like are they powerful enough to do that kind of
yeah people who are people who are using it for that say it might be borderline but it is i was like is there something i can buy like can i buy a package thing that is really a raspberry pi all packaged together already like i don't want to do any of the crap is there like a raspberry pi guts in a box that i can buy and mostly like no you kind of got to do a little bit of stuff yourself so it's like no not quite for me there's the android shield uh you know the nvidia shield tv thing which runs android tv and
that very recently and fire tv both um now i believe have options to mess with the refresh rate so you can force it to output in in the right format but there were some questions about whether they supported the uh the the pastor of the audio and everything and the nvidia shield is like 200 bucks i mean it's a gaming thing it's not just for a television box and it does have a fan although people assure me that the fan basically never turns on or is in audible or whatever
um you would find when it turns on it is it's big it's like i mean it's for it's it's practically like a little miniature game console so that i think that's the closest thing i came to considering buying but i really i don't want to have i think i'm almost out of inputs and i don't want to blow one more input on something like this and have one more remote and one more controller and thing or whatever so right now i'm holding pattern on this i haven't ripped any more my blu-rays because it does take a
i think uh i'm pinning my hopes basically on the apple tv because i feel like they're really close to getting it right and people have complained to apple about uh not supporting this i think we even talked about it like the reason they might not do it is well if you change to a 24 frame per second cadence the gooey looks gross like on the actual device when you're going through the menus and they don't want to change it when you hit play because it's not a good experience to have that like flicker hdmi refresh rate change thingy
I can see their solution being that they would just offer 120, and they would say, I'm sending you 120 for everything, and then the whole UI would run in 120.
That's what I mean.
But 24 frames per second cadence doesn't mean 24.
It just means that you're at that cadence.
But I don't know if the portions of the GUI system, like when you're running the Mac part of it, I don't know if the Mac operating system can operate at that point.
kind of refresh it like does it i understand they could do it for video output like negotiating over hdmi and everything but for the gui part of it have you does the mac do anything at like 240 frames per second or 120 well atp tips just as it can i guess that we've never encountered it because obviously every lcd is 60 hertz right so it never it doesn't come up it's not like the old crt days where you had a fancy crt you could refresh at 120 hertz and everything would be so smooth and awesome and a little bit dim because it's kind of flickery but
Well, the iPad Pro has dynamic refresh rate, and it samples the digitizer at $120, and the pencil, I think, at $240.
So it can sample things faster.
But it's only displaying $60, yeah.
Yeah, I think the UI, even on the iPad Pro, even in those movies, I think the UI is still fixed to $60.
But I'm sure they could, if they wanted to, I'm sure they could push for that for something like the Apple TV, where like...
The Apple TV is kind of special because it's the only device that runs iOS that doesn't need to be concerned at all about power efficiency.
So if something just needs a higher wattage GPU or more power draw, on the Apple TV you can do that within obviously the thermal bounds of the enclosure.
But you have much more headroom there than you do in something like an iPad or an iPhone where power efficiency is more important to conserve.
i'm a little bit afraid they might not consider an issue because from the other people who are like me trying to do similar things with apple tv boxes a lot of them ran the experiment with the camera exposure and they saw even evenly colored boxes across their screen which means they're these are all people with lcds tell which means their modern lcds are figuring out the three two coming off of the the i assume 60 hertz coming out of the apple tv and they're fixing it right and so if that's the case maybe that's apple solution is like oh it's just always going to be 60 hertz house you have to deal with it but
if there's any hope it's going to be the thing connected to a tv like its whole point is to show television and movies and movies are all 24 frames per second except for like the hobbit and stuff and all the high frame rate stuff right which everybody hated right i didn't hate it like it looked a little bit weird um but i'm i would be pretty much on board if everyone wanted to make their movies like that they just got to figure out how to make movies like that in the in the right way
it's like hd like all of a sudden all your sets look really crappy in hd because the sets were made for standard def and now you realize it's like a cardboard box and a fake television in the background um so i did not hate high frame rate but i think those examples of a high frame rate were did not do the format of any justice i feel like it could be done well but
But anyway, that's like, you know, the movies I love and so many of the movies that I have, they're all 24.
So I want some way to display them in that way.
And so I guess like the file system, I will just be patiently waiting.
At a certain point, I will probably just give up and buy like, you know, the Nvidia Shield or something, some box that can do that.
I don't think it'll ever do a home theater PC.
because if i wanted to do that i would have done that long ago like i could have done that ages ago uh i just i just i'm just so close just so close to getting what i want uh just you just need a little bit more and for those clients out there that are like like the the t-bone that you're down mixing everything to steroids like why even bother like i know most people don't have surround but
fine you can have that be the default like because it takes more work to down mix like just pass it through like have an option to say hey if they're sending me multi-channel audio do you want me to just pass that through because you have a receiver check this checkbox it's easier to pass it through than it is to down mix it so there's some silliness going on in the tv box market as always uh but
Anyway, I was impressed.
I've still remained impressed with Plex and Apple TV combination for television shows and other things that don't have this frame rate issue.
But I still can't quite get rid of my Blu-rays and my relatively noisy Blu-ray player quite yet.
You know, if there's anything I've learned from listening to you talk about this, John, and Marco talking about headphones constantly...
It's that I am so frigging glad that I don't have the crazy discerning eyes slash ears that you guys have.
Because I have never noticed this jankiness that you're discussing.
I love my $20 crappy Bluetooth headphones that I use every day that I've talked about ad nauseum on this show.
I mean, not to say I don't appreciate a good set of headphones and not to say I'm sure I that I wouldn't appreciate a perfectly 24 frame per second movie as shown on a TV.
That's very, very nice like yours is.
But this stuff just doesn't bother me.
And oh, man, I'm so thankful for that.
Do you notice the soap opera effect?
I don't even know what that is.
I've heard of it, but I don't even know what it is.
Just don't even learn about it.
I don't want to know.
I don't want to know.
I think everybody can notice that once they become aware of it.
That's the problem.
It's like the FedEx arrow.
Everyone can see it, but before you have seen it, your mind isn't ruined.
Exactly.
Or you don't know what it is that you're seeing.
There could be something off about it, but it looks a little better.
Even for me, the first time I saw it, when I got my first television that supported that feature...
I was like, what the hell?
And then I remember half a second, oh, it must come like that out of the box.
But if I hadn't read about it beforehand, I would have thought, this new TV is weird.
And people just get used to it.
Casey, I feel like making you go over your television right now and adjusting it to make sure that it is...
Showing the full 1080 picture instead of chopping it off the side.
Oh, it's not.
Oh, it's not.
And it drives me berserk because occasionally on the Apple TV, I can tell where it's getting clipped.
And I keep telling the TV, no, show me everything pixel for pixel.
And then it keeps forgetting every time I turn it off that I've told it that.
It keeps forgetting?
No, Casey, you finally found a way to get John to drive to your house.
That's true.
Yeah.
So you tell me, John, how to get my, I think it's a Toshiba TV, to remember that I want full frame and not chop off the edges.
I understand why it wouldn't.
Well, the only trick I know that if it's not remembering, can you name your input PC?
It is.
Can you rename your inputs?
Yes, and it is named PC.
I don't know.
Maybe you have like a bum battery somewhere and there's not keeping the...
Like, how does it forget?
Like, what's the point of that feature?
Who's going to change it every time they turn on the television?
So to be clear, what I'm doing is I'm hitting, I think it's pick size or picture size on the remote.
And it will let me adjust.
It will let me adjust, you know, through several different options.
I don't remember what they are right now.
But one of them is like full res or dot for dot.
I forget exactly what it's called, but it will let me adjust to that.
However, every time I turn the TV off and then turn the TV back on, it goes back to whatever the default mode is.
You got to Google for like your television model manual PDF or like there's always some like, you know, service, hidden service menu where you type in some numeric code and some crazy menu comes up on the screen.
There may be a way to do it.
And if you can't, you should get rid of that television because honestly, that's that's obscene where or.
Or you just live with it.
Or just resign yourself to A, missing a whole bunch of the picture and B, having the rest of the picture stretched out.
Yep.
That's gross.
And to the soap opera effect, if you have any settings on the television.
I don't want to know.
I'm going to tell you now.
Just listen.
If you don't notice, you don't notice.
Our final sponsor this week is Casper.
Go to casper.com slash ATP and use code ATP.
Terms and conditions do apply to get $50 towards any mattress purchase.
Casper is an online retailer of premium mattresses for a fraction of the price.
The mattress industry has inherently forced customers into paying notoriously high markups.
Casper is revolutionizing it by cutting the cost of dealing with resellers and showrooms and passing that savings directly onto the consumer.
Casper mattresses provide resilience and long-lasting supportive comfort with a one-of-a-kind hybrid mattress that combines premium latex foam with memory foam.
It's an obsessively engineered mattress at a shockingly fair price.
Now, the latex foam and memory foam come together for better nights and brighter days with just the right sink and just the right bounce.
Now, it sounds crazy to buy a mattress from the internet.
We all know that.
Now, of course, lying on one in a store for two seconds and then deciding, I'm going to sleep on this for eight hours a night for the rest, you know, the next 10 years, that is pretty crazy too.
Casper recognizes that really the best way to try out a mattress is to actually sleep on it for a while in your house, like for real.
And so what they have, they have really easy shipping.
They ship it to you in a really compact box.
They kind of like vacuum pack it in there.
And then it expands once you open it up.
So shipping it to you is not a problem.
Getting it into your house, getting it up stairwells, not a problem.
If you live like in a big walk-up apartment and you have some weird stairwell to get around, the Casper will probably work for you where other mattresses might not.
So it's no problem to get it to you.
And then you get to try it out for 100 nights risk-free.
So you buy it from them and you just sleep on it for up to 100 nights.
And if you don't like it after that, you can return it for free.
They will arrange for it.
You don't even have to worry about how the heck do I ship this mattress back to them.
They arrange it for you.
They arrange a pickup for you.
And it's all risk-free for 100 nights.
So you can try out a mattress for three months and then decide whether it's worth it for you, which is better than anything you could ever get by going to a mattress store.
Check it out today.
These mattresses are made in America.
Once again, combination of latex foam and memory foam for just the right sink, just the right bounce.
And the best thing about this, the value is incredible.
Only $500 for a twin size mattress, going up to only $950 for a king and all the sizes in between, of course.
You try to find a good king mattress for $9.50, that's incredible.
Usually you're paying at least double that for a mattress of this quality.
So check it out today.
Get $50 towards any mattress purchase by visiting casper.com slash ATP and using code ATP.
Terms and conditions apply.
Thank you very much to Casper for sponsoring our show once again.
Also check out their pillows.
Very nice.
Yep.
Casey, on your television, have there any settings?
So I love how like, so a long time ago, and I think like 2003-ish, I had one of the very first DVD burners, and I stupidly picked the wrong side of a format war, and I got DVD plus R instead of DVD dash R, but before they were universal, it doesn't matter.
Anyway,
At the time, the DVDs only held single layer, so they were only 4.7 gigs.
And most movie DVDs at the time were dual-layer, 8.5 gigs.
So I had to, at that time, in order to pirate movies, which was the only reason you would need a DVD burner in 2002 or 2003...
um i wanted or excuse me to back up my movies um i had to transcode it and and i had to basically break apart the dvd structure transcode the video to fit on the single layer discs from the commercial double layer discs and i and that that's that's the time of my life when i really discovered just how incredibly messy and complicated video is uh you know things like all these different frame rates whether it was interlaced interlacing is the worst thing in the universe
And then you have all the – if the aspect ratio was wrong, and then you have audio sync issues possibly.
And the tools – there was no handbrake at the time.
The tools were like six different tools.
This one would demux the file.
This one would remux the file.
This one would transcode.
And you had to – it was a huge mess.
And I remember thinking in just a few years, video will be simple.
That was 13 years ago.
And it sounds like video still isn't simple.
It's just the complications now are a little bit different.
Like, you still have some of the same ones.
We solved some of the old ones.
We introduced new ones as time went on.
And then added Java and software updates.
I mean, just this whole world, it just seems like it is so unnecessarily complex, but yet just never gets simplified.
we're on the right track with like digital downloads and everything uh it's just that like it's like the last mile the last mile equivalent is is all right so we we all agree on a set of formats that are reasonable interlacing is gone audio sync shouldn't be an issue anymore because you get like the package of files you have ways to distribute uh reasonably sized digital files that look really good that have multi-channel audio
um even the pirating formats are all pretty nice now like it's it's there's a lot of there's a lot of uniformity i mean you know the magic of mkv and all that other stuff right um but it's the last mile it's like okay how do i take these digital bits which are nice and uniform and i can play almost anywhere how do i show them on my television
listen to them through my television speakers or whatever speakers I have hooked on my television in a way that doesn't subtly change or some would say ruin the the content because the video file has a certain frame rate and if you don't show it at some multiple of that frame rate it's gonna look weird and if you have multi-channel audio and
and you down mix it all to stereo, it's going to be weird.
Or if you just drop the back channels, and there's a piece of dialogue or a sound effect that only happens in the back channels, it's going to be weird.
And that's before you even get into how many times it's compressed and how many times is it recompressed.
Recompressing a double-sided, double-layer DVD down to single-layer, that's gross, because MPEG-2 looked gross to begin with, and now you're just making it worse, so I would never bother with that.
It was 2003.
No, yeah, that's not good, though.
You've got to play the pure MPEG-2 because that's as good as it's going to get.
yeah but back then like you were lucky if you had like a 10 gig hard drive yeah well i guess by that time we had like 60 but still like that was still not a lot when you have eight gig dvds and you have a 60 gig hard drive yeah and the final part of the final mile was what i was just telling casey which is televisions uh for a variety of good and bad reasons try to do stuff with the picture to make it look quote unquote better or more correct or whatever and a lot of the things they do to the picture
make it look crazy like for example the high refresh rate lcds that that refresh at uh 240 hertz decide you know what we're refreshing at 240 hertz if i'm showing a 24 frame per second movie what the hell is the point of me showing frame number one 10 times can we do something clever and basically say instead of showing frame number one 10 times and then frame number two 10 times
We know what frame number one and frame number two are going to be like.
Can we show 20 pictures where frame number one slowly morphs into frame number two?
All right, thanks.
That's our three sponsors this week.
Don't try to... I'm just going to continue into the after show, so it's your choice.
Audible.com, Igloo, and Casper, and we will see you next week.
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental.
Accidental.
They didn't mean to.
Accidental.
Accidental.
Tech Podcast so long.
So anyway, that effect where it takes 10 of frame number one and 10 of frame number two and tries to make 20 frames, each of which starts at one and ends at two, but each one has a little thing in between.
That's like called by a million different names by a million different manufacturers.
Motion smoothing, picture interpolation, magic shadow.
I totally blanked.
Try that one more time because I don't think I understand it all.
All right.
So you've got...
I couldn't resist.
I'm sorry.
Casey just hung up the call.
Did I hang up everything?
Sorry.
Yes.
I'm sorry.
Oh, I initiated tonight, didn't I?
I couldn't tell what hung up on where because I'm like, well, if he had hung up, he would have gone away.
But then why is Marco gone too?
Yeah, sorry.
I forgot that I kicked off the call today.
That's even more and less comedic than I intended.
This new chick that you have of hanging up on podcasts, this needs to stop.
We need to sit down, Casey.
We need to have a talk to you about hanging up on podcasts.
You can do it once.
It might be funny.
But if it becomes a thing, now we have an issue.
And now we have to talk about how you're hanging up on podcasts.
Now we need an intervention.
It is affecting other people, mostly me.
Oh, goodness.
Anyway, I hope you do understand the motion smoothing thing.
And here's the thing about it.
If you don't notice it,
turn it off on your television never think about it again of course casey's television will probably just turn it back on every time you turn the television back on but um if you turn if you don't notice when it's on you also won't notice when it's off and it will make everyone feel better so just turn it off um i think if you watch your television with it off for a long time and then you turn it back on you will notice you'll be like what the hell is this it will look different and weird to you even things like sports will look different and weird
if your television has any features about like super brightness enhancer magical sparkly make better just turn all of those off if you don't know what they are just turn them off off off off not low not medium like how much noise reduction do i want off off off off off and then you turn everything off and if you don't like how your television looks with everything off you probably have a crappy tv um maybe consider turning one or two things back on
to make your your crappy tv look better but realistically if you have a reasonable television turn all that stuff off i will put a link in the show notes to my uh fill your tv article which was just the most basic plea to get people to show the full hd picture on their television which i don't think is unreasonable
like is that is that crazy that you know they send a 1080 picture and you decide you know what i don't need to see the inch around the whole make stretch it out so i don't see that part of the screen um don't do that that is the easiest setting that everyone can fix in a television everything else is much more complicated you can calibrate your television you get these calibration apps all blah blah blah um so i i would just say start by having your picture for your television i'm glad that casey figured out how to do it on his television i'm sad that his television apparently is not
listening to him when he does it well that may or may not be true it very well could be user error and there might be some not even like um or the menus or something instead of doing it on the fly sure and that and i have looked but i have i've only spent a moment looking at it and it very well could be that i'm just either not realizing what the setting is called or not looking in the right place like i feel like i'm a reasonably bright guy but i wouldn't completely put it past me
You got it.
It's always like one for one or dot for dot or like you said all the things of like the various names that they call them.
It's not always straightforward.
I think I mentioned this in the article about like sometimes it's called size one.
On my television, it's called size one and size two, which makes no freaking sense.
And I would never remember which one is which.
but I just never change it and my television remembers, so I don't have to worry about that.
Although, actually, it's not true.
I changed it recently because the stupid Wii U, I've complained about this before, in Wii mode, when you play Wii games in the Wii U, because the Wii U will play old Wii games, Wii games were standard def, right?
So when the Wii U plays them, it outputs into the title safe area, like it outputs the shrunken image on your HD screen.
So if you have your television calibrated correctly and you play a Wii game, there's a black border around the entire Wii game.
and the only way to fix it because nintendo is stupid is to change the size of your television and say all right while you're playing this game go into the stupid over scan mode where you stretch everything just so you'll get the image to fill the screen and not have weird burn in around the edges or whatever so i have changed that a couple times for my kids to play wii games but uh in general i leave it on the correct mode as everybody should because why would you know you're paying for the whole picture why not see it all
It does drive me nuts on the Apple TV.
I forget specifically what it is, but there's something like a menu or maybe it's the music app, something that is clearly cut off on the bottom and it drives me berserk, but not enough that I've spent the time spelunking through the owner's manual and the menu system and all that trying to find the right switch to flip.
Now I'm rooting for Declan to destroy your television accidentally.
Thanks, man.
Smear some peanut butter into some very important part of it.
He's going to have to get a lot taller because it's up on the wall.
Oh, you would hate where my TV is, come to think of it, because it's above our fireplace on the wall.
It's the wrong place for it.
Yeah, I know.
It's way higher than it should be.
But there's no other good spot for it.
I see that.
You ever see a house magazine, interior decorating magazine or some sort of home-proofing magazine?
Every single freaking house they show has television above the fireplace.
And I'm like, who are these people?
Yeah, but the House magazine, they also have, like, white couches.
And, like, even Casey is... You don't have a white couch, do you?
No, Brown.
Yeah, like, even Casey, who gets white everything, like, you wouldn't get a white couch.
He wouldn't have a white couch for long.
Now the Declan's on the move.
Yeah, well, just life exists.
Like, nobody can have a white couch for more than, like, ten minutes before it's not white anymore.
But if you look at all those magazines, all their furniture is all white because it doesn't need to be functional.
It just needs to look good in a picture.
new england you see a lot of it because new england houses were made before televisions existed so there's no place to put a television because there's just there's either windows on the wall like there's no place to put a television where you can have a couch on you know you have a television here and couch on the opposite side so the only place to do it is like a lot of the rooms are arranged so you can have a couch facing your fireplace because that's what they gathered around before they had television right um and so the only place you have for your flat tv
Like, that's why people are excited by flat pound tellers.
Now we can finally hang it over our fireplace.
But then, I don't know, doesn't your neck hurt from, like, looking up towards the ceiling all the time?
It's the wrong place for a TV.
Oh, it's unequivocally the wrong place for the TV.
But the problem is we have, if you're sitting on the couch, the way we have the room arranged, it's a very, very wide but very short room, if that makes sense.
And so the couch is facing the fireplace, just like you said.
And above the fireplace is the TV because it's really the only decent place for it in the room.
I mean, Marco's been there a handful of times.
in terms of the room that's the best place for the tv and to me the room is the priority not the tv and so we've put it in what is unequivocally inarguably the wrong place because i'd rather the room look good or well be reasonably arranged over the tv be in the most perfect viewing position well you and tiff should get together with your little society if we don't care where the television is or what it
Marcos television is too high and the historical society demands that he have a sound bar and those are two kind of things that are absolutely in opposition to my value system that I don't care about anything in the room except the TV and I even I don't have a good place for my I don't have a good place for my TV either like I have the same problem I have a you know a New England house that's centered around the fireplace I have almost no place to put my TV almost I just found one place to wedge it and I did the best I can but at the very least it's at the right height
Well, the funny thing is my house was built in like 98 or something like that.
So I don't know why the family room was tradition.
Like it is a certain style of home and a certain style of home is made that way.
Now, rich people homes and modern homes always have a room like, you know, a home theater room or like a room for like the room is that is absolutely 100 percent designed to say.
this entire wall is for you to put all your expensive av equipment and directly opposite that entire wall is seating for a bunch of people who are facing it exactly like there's a thing and you are facing it and there's always like one perfect seat exactly in the middle of the room exactly in the middle of the surround speakers where you're looking at the screen head on at exactly the right height every rich person house has that but unless you're doing new construction or buying a house from a rich person you don't have that you just have a house that's made in a handful of styles most of which
all the styles that were invented before televisions were around a flat panel or otherwise and so they just don't have a place for a tv i'm just impressed that like that at the resolve of people like casey who can who wall mount a tv because like i like we've have we've lived in this house now for about five or six years the tv has been in the same spot the entire time i cannot think of a different place that we would put a tv than where the tv is
Yeah, you've got challenges, too, because it's a big open room.
Right, but still, we've never placed the TV anywhere else.
We never wanted it to be anywhere else.
We put the TV there the day we moved in, and we've never moved it because it works great.
And I still wouldn't wall mount it, because to me, that feels like such a big commitment, and it makes everything so much less flexible.
I still would not wall mount it.
The cool wall mounts have a swing arm where you can face it in different directions.
Wall mount's not a big deal.
You don't realize because you have an older television, but modern televisions are so thin and light that it's basically like a big monitor on an arm.
It's actually pretty cool, and it's just a couple of bolts into the wall.
It's not that big of a deal.
not that i'm saying you should do it i think your tv is fine where it is but you have the same problem where else could you put your television i can't like unless you decide to make an artificial wall out of your television which i have to admit is probably something i would consider in your house obviously not if tiff had any say in it but uh because that's the real dream here's here's the real dream of people who are i would love to have you come over and suggest this to tiff
have people have tv obsessions here's what you want obviously you want like a dedicated room although i'm not that big about like a dedicated home theater room like down in the basement because i feel like you're always going to use like whatever the upstairs room is near the kitchen so i would make that my television room and you know the television is there and it's facing me and the speakers are all arranged in the right way and all that other stuff but here's the here's the the important part
The whole wall that has a television and the speakers in it or in front of it or whatever, there has to be a room behind that wall.
That can't be, like, the end.
Because getting to the crap behind all your AV equipment is a nightmare.
So all the fancy rich people houses have essentially...
all your av equipment and then you can walk behind it either because the rest of the house continues behind it or because it's just like a a crawl space or an alcove or a cubby for both ventilation and because it is that is the ultimate luxury being able to walk behind your av equipment see all the wires have them all arranged like you're in a data center like they're all perfectly routed like ethernet cables going from racks and just
that is just amazing for me i can't get at my stuff without like contorting my body like a you know a yoga master getting behind there and bending down having a little flashlight and trying it's just impossible because who the hell has enough room to have a room behind their television stuff the only purpose of which is to get at the back of all your television stuff rich people that's why the entire rest of the country that's who no no everyone else except people who live on the coasts
No, they have big giant houses in McMansions, but unless you have a dedicated home theater room, even the people who wall mount, it's like, well, you got one shot at this and the HDMI cable is going down through the wall and it's going to poke out over here and this is where you need to put your stuff.
And if you ever need to mess around behind there, you're basically going to have to unplug it or slide your whole thing out or it has to be on wheels.
It's a big pain.
So I've only ever seen people who have dedicated rooms to also be able to have a room behind the room to get your AV stuff.
And that is where it's at.
Your next house, John.
Yeah, right now.
My never house.