Better Pixels
John:
It's not as exciting as it sounds because you made me stop before I explain, but now I'll explain and you'll see that it's not exciting.
John:
So I've been looking at getting a different video card for my Mac to sort of tide me over and looking into getting an SSD and doing all sorts of other things.
John:
since it doesn't look like I'm getting a Mac Pro anytime soon.
John:
And a lot of people have been emailing me with suggestions of things to get, and one person emailed me with an offer of an old video card they had out of their 2008 Mac Pro.
John:
I don't remember if it was through the feedback form, so I don't know if this person wants me to give out
John:
So I won't.
John:
It's twice as fast as the one I have in there now.
John:
And it's an Apple-supplied card, so it's not like a weird flash PC card or anything like that.
John:
So I think it should work.
John:
And if it works, I just doubled my video card speed.
John:
Wow.
John:
Told you it's not very exciting, but, you know.
Marco:
I also have a boring update to mine, which nobody will care about.
Marco:
Basically, I changed my order.
Marco:
I previously said on the show that I ordered the 8-core D700 because, what the hell, it's not, you know, the 8-core is a big jump, but the D700, once you're at that level, relatively speaking, really isn't.
Marco:
I stepped back to the 6-core and D500 because after evaluating what was going on in the actual press, I realized, you know, I don't really want to have spent $2,100 total extra
Marco:
just for those two upgrades, and that my actual usage of the thing, I'm probably not going to see that much of the benefit going from the 6-core to the 8-core to be worth so much more money.
Marco:
If it was only a few hundred dollars, I would have gone for it, but for $1,500 just for that, and for $600 for the D700, which I'll probably never use to its full capacity, I realized I'd be happier having spent a lot less on the computer...
Marco:
And then if I want to upgrade it in two or three years instead of five, I'll feel less bad about selling a two or three old one that was only just under $5,000 instead of one that was just over $7,000.
Marco:
So it's a pretty big price difference.
Marco:
I didn't think it was worth the other ones for me.
John:
Well, when the Retina displays come out and you ditch this trash can for a newer trash can, it would have been better if you had the 700 in there.
John:
So it would be more attractive to me to buy your old one off you.
Marco:
Yeah, but – so I wrote a big blog post about an hour ago, mostly so we wouldn't have to go into this in too much depth on the show.
Marco:
I love you.
Marco:
Mostly to save Casey.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
This is entirely a favor to Casey.
Marco:
I wrote this up in a blog post instead.
Marco:
Basically, the gist of it is I think that the way they're going to do Retina is –
Marco:
Not, you know, two years off doing 5120 by 2880.
Marco:
I think what they're actually going to do is using 4K and just using software scaling, as we actually talked about, like, two months ago.
Marco:
I think that's what they're going to do, and I think that's probably coming up soon.
Marco:
Like, that could easily happen this year.
Marco:
I mean, they could release the display today if they wanted to.
Marco:
You know, other manufacturers are releasing very similar displays at very good price points, so...
Marco:
I think that's how they're going to do Retina, and therefore I think it will be compatible with the current Mac Pro.
Casey:
All right, so follow-up time?
Marco:
Let's do it.
Marco:
We need a sound effect for that.
Marco:
The prompt has a sound effect, and I kind of wish... I don't know if we could pull it off.
Marco:
They could pull it off, because those guys are cool, but I don't know if we can.
John:
follow-up has no sound effect that is the sound effect all right good oh yeah so the top item uh a couple weeks ago maybe i don't remember when maybe it was even last week uh we talked about how i talked about one of my pet peeves about software development and that's having a group of people make a product and then having all those people leave and just having
John:
like a skeleton crew there to deal with the product.
John:
And we were talking about this in the context of Apple's iLife apps and their iWork apps and all the other apps that have seemed to sort of languish as years have gone by and we're speculating maybe because most of the people who are on that product were taken off to go someplace else.
John:
And I said, you got to leave the development team on a product.
John:
Like once you make a product, you can't take those people off.
John:
And one person wrote in to disagree with me that it wasn't a good idea to make people get stuck on a product like that because what if they want to go off and do something else?
John:
that they shouldn't have to stay with the product they created, so on and so forth.
John:
And I tried to clarify this in the program, but apparently it wasn't clear enough, so I just want to say it again.
John:
It's not that the people who make the product have to stay with their product.
John:
It's that the company has to dedicate manpower to that product as long as it exists.
John:
So you can't – like a similar level of effort and manpower has to be applied to a product.
John:
You're like, well, what are all those people doing?
John:
I don't want to have a full-size team on a product that's just going through minor revisions year after year.
John:
as as any single developer knows, even just keeping up with OS revisions is almost as big a job as writing the app in the first place.
John:
In some ways, it's worse, in some ways, it's easier.
John:
But presumably, you're also going to improve the product as time goes on.
John:
And if you don't put a team similar in size and capability to the team that made the product on the product, you know, permanently, more or less, it will slowly get worse in relation to the competition in relation to other applications.
John:
And that seems to be what's happening with a lot of Apple's applications.
John:
So
John:
Just to clarify, it's not saying that if you're a developer and you make an image editing app, you are doomed forever in that company to work on an image editing app forever.
John:
You are not, but you have to leave a team behind, more or less, and not a tiny little maintenance team or a team of B&C players or any other way where you think you're going to save money or time.
John:
You're doing your company and your customers a disservice.
Casey:
That's hard.
Casey:
And it's also interesting with consulting, because in my experience, what happens is a company will either not have the manpower or perhaps the expertise to do some sort of project.
Casey:
And so in my day job, they'll call in some of our people.
Casey:
And we don't do staff log, despite the way I just described it.
Casey:
What we really do is that we get a team of our own people together and
Casey:
And we'll work on this project for usually a few months.
Casey:
And then at the end of that project, typically what happens is we'll have a very small crew that stays behind, figuratively speaking, in order to do some final maintenance and warranty work.
Casey:
But then after that, we usually punt it back to the client and their internal team in order to maintain.
Casey:
And
Casey:
Sometimes that goes really well when clients have really good internal teams and kind of know what's up.
Casey:
But sometimes that does not go well at all.
Casey:
And we hear later on through the grapevine that the client doesn't have the appropriate expertise even when they think they do.
Casey:
And that creates some real problems.
Casey:
But, I mean, there's not much we can do about that because it sounds extremely self-serving.
Casey:
And it is kind of self-serving for us to say, oh, well, why don't you keep us on retainer forever?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And we'll be around just in case.
Casey:
It's just not the way it works.
Casey:
And especially when you work for a fairly progressive firm like I do.
Casey:
Well, granted, we do the Microsoft stack, which some of you probably don't think is progressive.
Casey:
But within our Microsoft world, we're very progressive.
Casey:
And in a lot of our code, a novice or even intermediate level programmer would probably have a hard time
Casey:
And doubly so if it's a programmer that's never seen the code until the time in which we throw it over the wall and walk away.
John:
That happens even inside a single company.
John:
Forget about outside consultants or anything.
John:
Very often, and maybe this even happens at Apple, I don't know, but you'll have a team that will make a product, and it's not like the team that made the product is necessarily more experienced or better programmers or anything than any other people, but they understand the product.
John:
They understand why it's designed the way it was designed.
John:
They understand the design itself, and if those people go off without transitioning, it's like, oh, you work on the product, and then it goes into whatever maintenance mode or...
John:
into general purpose release where anyone in the company is allowed to address bugs in it or whatever if if it's sort of like okay now anyone now any developer in the company can fix a bug those developers don't like likely don't understand the design of the application how it puts together what the invariants are supposed to be and you know you're like well it should be documented and there should be design documents and it should be good comments and it should be yeah all should should should but the reality is you know programmers are not interchangeable parts and there's a core team of people who understand the product
John:
unless you transition them away from the product if they assuming they want to go away from it by socializing the new developers about like you know bringing the new guy on board teaching them how everything works have that person improve the documentation so you can't just sort of like throw it out into the wild because then you get people doing things in the code where it looks perfectly fine and it's simple enough and they understand it and it works but they've violated some unspoken invariant that everybody who was on the original team understands has to be true but there were no assertions for it or there was no design document specifying or maybe there was and they didn't see it and
John:
The accumulation of those just eats away at the quality of the code and makes it more difficult to change down the line.
John:
There's no such thing as like, except for like a government software, defense department software, there's no such thing as maintenance mode.
John:
If you have a product and you're selling it to customers, you need developers who understand it actively working on it.
John:
Another follow-up item, we were talking about where computers are going in the future in the last show, I think.
John:
And I was talking about unification of the memory and storage hierarchies.
John:
So the hierarchy would still be there, but from a software perspective, everything is addressable as an address in memory, even if it's backed by Flash or...
John:
regular RAM or caches on a chip or registers, you know, the whole hierarchy, but addressable in the same way, sort of, you know, homogenous view of heterogeneous hardware.
John:
And a lot of people wrote in with examples of systems that do that.
John:
This time, no one last time I brought this up, a lot of people wrote in talking about memory mapping files and stuff like that.
John:
And of course, there are many, many examples on the computers that we're all sitting in front of right now, and even on our iPods or whatever you're listening to this on.
John:
of miniature versions those memory mapping files is the most common example where you instead of doing io on a file you just pretend hey now the entire contents of that file is mapped into memory it's not really but that's how you address it and when you address those pieces of memory it just says okay well i don't actually have that information it's still on disk so i'm going to go get it from disk pull it in for you and then make it look like it was in that memory all along
John:
and virtual you know virtual memory and uh it works in a similar manner with the memory mapping and uh we talked about the playstation the game consoles where they don't have separate pools of ram and vram and of course there's the good version of that where it's one big giant pool of fast ram and there's the crappy version of that which pc used to do in the bad old days where they didn't want to give you dedicated vram they would use your main memory as video ram and it was really bad performance because video memory could be tuned to video tasks better and you know this on the older computers
John:
There used to be regions of memory that corresponded to, you know, IO interfaces, regions of memory that correspond to the screen.
John:
So when you wrote to that region of memory, you're really writing to, you know, video memory that would show up on the screen directly and all sorts of other things.
John:
The big one that most people wrote about was the AS400, which I had completely forgotten about.
John:
And I'm sure most people don't work on it.
John:
I've completely forgotten about it.
John:
In fact, they renamed AS400 to...
John:
i5 or system i or some i don't know ibm's always changing their names stuff i haven't kept up with this stuff but anyway this is a very old system based on an even older system from the 60s that does what they call a single level store which is exactly what i was talking about uh just addressing everything as if it was a memory address even when it's not uh we should put these links in the show notes if people want to read about it but a lot of the technology that you know you've heard this before of like uh in other realms where things appear on supercars
John:
or Mercedes or whatever, like anti-lock brakes and airbags, and gradually trickle their way down until your Ford Festiva has all those features a decade later.
John:
The trickle-down happens similarly in computers.
John:
We're going from mainframes and supercomputers down to your phone.
John:
But it happens unevenly, and it seems like sometimes a little bit slower.
John:
And there are still things that mainframes, or what you would call mainframes today, or whatever, still things those systems can do that our systems can't do, and we're still waiting for them to trickle down.
John:
Things like...
John:
you know, being able to hot swap CPUs and, you know, hardware redundancy and sort of self healing type features.
John:
And it's like, well, you don't need that on my PC or it's only for things that have to run 24 seven.
John:
There's lots of excuses for why these things haven't trickled down and they make sense.
John:
But I would think that inevitably anything that's a good idea up there is eventually going to find its way down.
John:
So single level store, I think is a reasonably good idea and will eventually find its way down into your wristwatch, pinky ring, contact lens computer in the decades to come.
John:
Uh,
John:
And the other features like hardware redundancy and the ability to heal and stuff, I think that's a whole other topic for another day that maybe I'll throw in there.
John:
But I have some other interesting ideas about the future of computing, but I don't think the follow-up is the place for them.
Marco:
If it ends up being pinky rings, I think I'm out.
John:
We'll be so old by then, it probably won't be safe for us to put on pinky rings.
John:
Our fingers will swell and they'll get stuck on.
John:
We'll have to go to the ER to get them cut off.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So do we want to talk about PlayStation 4s now?
John:
Yeah, that's one little item I threw in.
John:
I'm trying not to pay too much attention to CES.
John:
I mean, CES is just so gross.
John:
Like, I've never been interested in it.
John:
It's disappointing to me even when I had an interest.
John:
Like, I would like to see what the new TVs coming out are.
John:
But that's the worst possible venue.
John:
I would like to know about new TVs.
Yeah.
John:
You know, read aside the tales, but the spectacle of CES adds nothing to that.
John:
In fact, it subtracts from it.
John:
I wish all the companies making announcements that I'm interested at CES made those same announcements with like a YouTube video or a press release.
John:
Anything other than a stage presentation at CES.
Marco:
It seems like CES represents the worst of the hardware industry.
Marco:
It's so much tone deafness, sexism, weird products.
John:
It's not the worst of the hardware industry.
John:
It's the worst of humanity.
Yeah.
Marco:
And the products that are announced there, and people are now doing the best of CES and stuff like that, the products that are announced there so rarely make it into production.
Marco:
Or when they do make it into production, they have a lot of problems that the CES version glossed over or didn't have, or a lot of limitations or something like that.
Marco:
It's basically like it's a way for the industry to celebrate itself.
Marco:
It seems like the press has a real hard time covering CES.
John:
And the problem with CES seems to be that...
John:
No one, including the people presenting and the people covering it, can differentiate, seems to be able to differentiate between the stuff that is obviously ridiculous crap and that in the light of day when you wake up when it's all over, you go, why the hell were we ever paying attention to that?
John:
And things that are, you know, interesting news.
John:
Because it all starts to look the same in this big funhouse atmosphere.
John:
Whereas if you had just looked at those things individually, there's no way you would cover that.
John:
If someone put out a press release on their site and put up this information about some crazy thing that no one's ever going to use...
John:
you would skip it.
John:
But because it's at CES, everything sort of gets equal treatment.
John:
So, I don't know.
John:
Like, I'm interested in what Valve is saying there.
John:
I'm interested in the new television technology.
John:
I'm interested in some of the new, you know, the Steambox stuff and the camera tech and stuff.
John:
But all that stuff doesn't need that surrounding dazzle and ridiculousness.
John:
If you just have interesting products to announce them, I don't know.
John:
Anyway, this isn't really CES related.
John:
I don't know why I went off on that tangent, but that's...
John:
Maybe they announced it in CS.
John:
I don't know.
John:
There's a story that Sony announced how many PlayStation 4s they've sold, and they said it's 4.2 million.
John:
and Microsoft announced about a week ago that they had sold 3 million Xbox One consoles.
John:
So we talked when the PlayStation 4 launched, they sold a million in 24 hours, and the Xbox did similar numbers.
John:
I'm like, oh, that's fine.
John:
That's the early adopters.
John:
Let's see if they can sustain that.
John:
It looks like both consoles are doing pretty well.
John:
More or less neck and neck, PlayStation 4 may be a little bit ahead, but I think...
John:
I think the PlayStation 4 is still supply-constrained, and it seems like, from pictures I see of people on Twitter, that if you wanted an Xbox One, you could go into a store and see a big stack of green boxes and pick one.
John:
I'm not sure if that's entirely true, but I know from experience that you cannot just stroll into a store and pick up a PS4 at this point, because I've looked online, I've looked, not hard, but, you know, I'm just curious, like, if I'm in a store that sells, I'll just look and see if they have any, and they don't.
John:
And occasionally I'll look online and see, oh, do any of these things have it available for order?
John:
And they don't.
John:
So I think it's still harder to get a PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 is selling more.
John:
So maybe they're farther ahead than we think.
John:
But either way, both of them doing very, very well.
John:
I would say that this new console generation is off to a strong start.
John:
Are there any games that people actually want yet?
John:
That's the thing.
John:
Like, I don't think there's... There's some good games coming out.
John:
Like, I mean, Sony was showing... Not Sony.
John:
Microsoft was showing off Titanfall and Sony has a couple of good titles in the works, but there's no big system seller games.
John:
It's, you know, the typical franchise games that are on all the platforms that you could also play on a PC, but who cares?
John:
It's...
John:
It's not like either one of these platforms is being propelled by some must-have exclusive game like Halo or something.
John:
People just want new consoles.
Marco:
Now, I wonder, so in previous launches, there's usually been maybe one system out of the bunch that didn't have any must-have games on launch.
Marco:
Has there ever been a generation before this where none of them had any must-have games on launch?
John:
Oh, yeah, sure.
John:
I mean, well, like, a lot of times they would launch with a couple of, like, I mean, let's think of the GameCube did not have must-have games at launch.
John:
Like, the Xbox One, you say, oh, it had a must-have game, it had Halo.
John:
Well, people didn't know if Halo was going to be any good.
John:
It was the first Halo game.
John:
Like, I don't think that that was making people go out and buy an original Xbox.
John:
because it was kind of an unknown quantity.
John:
Maybe a few Mac users who had followed Bungie thought it was awesome, but everyone else was like, Halo, what?
John:
I don't know about that.
John:
I mean, I don't remember the PS2 had, like I said, like Ridge Racer or something, but consoles settle in, and the reason I thought these two...
John:
new consoles would do well as as i said i think on a previous show that for many people of the of the age to be having enough disposable income to buy their own consoles or to get their parents to buy them this is their first new console generation their whole life they've been using like their playstation 3s and xbox 360s and maybe the previous generation from their older siblings or whatever this is the first console generation they're living through after seven or eight long years of using all the past tech so
Marco:
i think the market was ripe for tons and tons of people who want a shiny new thing people who aren't like grizzled veterans of many console generations and uh it seems like that was the case i have to imagine this must be building um like a lifelong disappointment in game systems for some of these people though you know like if the very first awesome thing they're looking forward to getting this game system the very first new game system comes out for like you
Marco:
And they get it, and there's only like four games for it, and they're all kind of mediocre.
Marco:
Like, is that a great experience?
John:
That's part of the experience.
John:
Having been through many console generations, part of the experience is getting super excited about the console.
John:
And then even if you're lucky, even if you get it, and you're like, I'm getting a Nintendo 64, and it's going to have Mario 64, it's going to blow my brains out.
John:
And it totally does.
John:
It's an amazing game.
John:
Everybody loves it.
John:
And then you play it, and you're like, okay, what else can I get?
John:
And it's like, and Pilotwings.
John:
You know, it's like nothing.
John:
you know and then you're like well i guess there was like wave race that wasn't bad but like great launch the launch games are usually not the best games like and even if there's one that's really great maybe if you're lucky you get one that's really great you have to consoles have a life cycle and for kids who don't know this they're going to learn the hard lesson also the hard lesson of like
John:
the software in the modern age the software that comes at launch day sucks it needs to be patched a million times it doesn't have half the features you want and it's buggy as hell and like just wait like there's a life cycle this is the beginning part it has good parts exciting to get it on launch day exciting to be the first one to have it and bad because the games are just like ports or multi-platform titles and the few exclusives you play through or aren't interested in and then you just wait like it's it's all part of the process i think it's it's making a new generation of gamers
Marco:
And now we even have, like, a lot of hardware problems, too.
Marco:
Like, have you been following Matthew Panzarino's saga of trying to get an Xbox One?
Marco:
Yes!
Marco:
He's gotten, like, five of them broken so far.
John:
You would think all the companies in the entire world that should be wary of carefully designing the hardware, but it would be Microsoft.
John:
And this is probably just a fluke, because I haven't heard any.
John:
You know, he's just getting unlucky.
John:
But after the Red Ring of Death, then...
Marco:
billions of dollars and write downs for hardware replacements and people being on their sixth and seventh xbox 360 surely microsoft got it right this time apparently not well the funny thing is too apparently like the biggest source of their problems is the disk drive like you would think i mean is it that new of a thing like you would think we would know how to make reliable optical disk drives in 2014
John:
Every time I think about this, I just keep thinking back to the PlayStation 3, and, like, that machine should have fallen apart in people's hands.
John:
Like, the crazy cell processor, and the first thing with the Blu-ray drive, and waiting for the stupid blue lasers, and all this, like, I don't understand.
John:
And then, like, the Playstations have just, they're just, you know...
John:
been fine and it doesn't make any sense that microsoft screwed it up with the much more conservative approach they're going to be more conservative now and they're having these hard drive problems i don't i don't understand maybe i mean there's something to be said for sony's decades and decades of of experience building consumer electronics and microsoft's considerably smaller amount of experience
Marco:
Yeah, I guess the real Xbox One was just a fluke because it was fine.
Marco:
The very first Xbox, it was a PC crammed into a not-that-small box, and it was fine.
Marco:
You would think it would have overheated somewhat or had other problems.
Marco:
Nope, it was fine.
Marco:
I never heard of widespread problems, although I guess it didn't sell that well either.
John:
Well, I mean, they're cursed by the 360.
John:
Like, the reason it shaped the way it was is because Xbox is huge, LOL, right?
John:
And so they made the successor.
John:
It's pronounced lol.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, anyway, they made the successor.
John:
It's skinny.
John:
See, it's practically like an hourglass.
John:
Look how skinny it is.
John:
And maybe you shouldn't have quite made it so skinny because you could have more room for cooling.
John:
And, yeah.
John:
It wasn't even that skinny.
John:
Well, I know, but you saw what they were going for.
John:
We don't want to make a gigantic box, and they should have made it.
John:
The Xbox One is pretty big, and so is the PlayStation 4 for that matter, but we'll see.
John:
I still think Panzer's thing could just be bad luck.
John:
If we start seeing stories, and if this gets a name like Red Ring of Death, then we'll know it's an issue.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do we want to answer the question, who needs a Mac Pro?
John:
Yeah, I threw this in there because, you know, again, with me whining about what kind of computer I'm going to get and whether I'm going to buy a new Mac Pro, lots of people, this is one common strain of feedback, which is, what do you need a Mac Pro for?
Yeah.
John:
And for Marco, too, what does Marco need a Mac for?
John:
You guys don't need this computer.
John:
And this kind of logic and argument and questioning, like, what is it that you're doing that you need a Mac for?
John:
I was getting even for my current computer.
John:
What games are you playing specifically that you need a fancy video card?
John:
And there's a snarky answer like I just gave on Twitter, which is, well, for future games, for games I don't have now.
John:
That's why you buy – that's why – one of the reasons I buy a big fancy computer is not for the games that are out now, but for the games that are going to be out two, three, four years from now.
John:
I want to be able to play those two without getting a new computer.
John:
But anyway, that's besides the point.
John:
This line of reasoning of like –
John:
You need to have a practical reason for this thing that you're getting, otherwise you shouldn't get it.
John:
Only seems to apply in certain situations.
John:
Certainly it applies in the situation where we're talking about big expensive computers, but I was trying to think of other situations where people are comfortable with it not applying.
John:
having trouble coming up with good examples i guess i thought of like if you get a bigger tv occasionally i guess someone might ask what do you need a tv that big for but for the most part people understand you're not getting a big tv because like well i watch golf a lot and i was having trouble seeing the ball so i need a bigger television so the ball is bigger people kind of intuitively understand that it's more sort of immersive and exciting to look at a bigger screen than a smaller one so when you say you've got a bigger tv people don't say
John:
why did you get a bigger one?
John:
What is it that you want?
John:
Like, literally asking, like, is there some kind of program that you watched that was not working correctly with your smaller television and now will work with a bigger one?
John:
Or, why do you need granite countertops?
John:
What was wrong with your other... Do you do something?
John:
Do you do a certain kind of cooking that only works on granite?
John:
Do you do, like, pastry dough where you need to suck away the heat?
John:
And it's like, sometimes you just want to have countertops that look like nice, shiny granite.
John:
Like, that's the answer.
John:
And the same thing, like, with the computer, I feel like saying there are reasons why I might want to get it, but...
John:
Not everything has to be a need.
John:
There's such an idea of a luxury item and everyone chooses what their luxury items are.
John:
Maybe your luxury item is very fancy furniture or a nice house or jewelry or a really expensive watch or lots of vacations or whatever.
Casey:
Or maybe a 335 instead of a 328.
Casey:
Used, yeah.
John:
But it's like certain things people accept as indulgences or as a hobby interest or whatever.
John:
And other things people don't accept as an indulgence and demand justification.
John:
You must have an actual need.
John:
Are you running Maya?
John:
Maybe you just want to have a fast computer because you're into technology and fast computers are fun to have.
John:
I think that's a perfectly valid reason.
John:
It's a large part of my reason and I assume a large part of Marco's reason.
John:
I don't think anyone should ever get caught in the idea where they have to justify through like work related examples or like even like leisure related examples.
John:
Like, well, show me the game that needs this video card.
John:
Like, that's a ridiculous example.
John:
You don't need to play games, period.
John:
If I gave you one, like, all right, well, now I see why you need one.
John:
Why?
John:
Because I need to play this first-person shooter?
John:
Why do you need to play the first-person shooter?
John:
That we accept as fun.
John:
You're allowed to play a game just because it's fun, but you're not allowed to have a fast computer just because it's fun.
John:
So the only way you can justify the computer is to point to the game you're going to play, which I accept that you're allowed to use because it's fun.
Marco:
Yeah, I think part of it is... It's a combination of a few factors.
Marco:
Part of that, like, why do you need this, is that...
Marco:
These are very expensive items, and so it's alienating to say, like buying expensive cars, it's alienating to say, like, oh, I got this car that's really, really expensive that you can't afford.
Marco:
People don't like hearing that.
Marco:
It's not a great thing to spread around.
Marco:
And computers are not as expensive as cars, but they're still very expensive, and computers like the Mac Pro are...
Marco:
Unaffordable to many people.
Marco:
And so there's that aspect.
Marco:
The other aspect is that computers do have this weird blend of some people need it for work.
Marco:
Nobody needs a TV for work except J.D.
Marco:
Harmeyer.
Marco:
Nobody else needs a TV for work.
Marco:
And we all use computers for work nowadays.
Marco:
Not everybody, but everyone talking on this show and probably a lot of the listeners.
Marco:
We all use computers for work.
Marco:
And we also use computers for hobbies and for leisure and for entertainment.
Marco:
And so there are people who do need the Mac Pro for work.
Marco:
If you're a professional video editor that's working with 4K content, you are probably going to need it.
Marco:
If you're doing certain other things, you probably need it too, but the number of people who need the Mac Pro or who need an all-the-way decked-out laptop or iMac is a pretty small number, really.
Marco:
But you're right.
Marco:
I think it's just distorted because some people do need them for work, but for most of us, it's just we want things to be nicer and a little bit faster.
Yeah.
John:
I mean, the granite countertop is an example, too.
John:
Some people need a granite countertop if they're pastry chefs or – what is it?
John:
Because it doesn't take the heat out of the dough as fast or something?
John:
I don't remember.
John:
There's a reason why you need granite countertop.
John:
It doesn't melt the butter.
John:
You could conceivably – yeah.
John:
You could conceivably need one.
John:
But then most people don't get them for that reason.
John:
In the chat room, one person pointed out that like, well, the difference between –
John:
not needing to play a game, is that games are less expensive than a Mac Pro.
John:
Well, super high-end games, like if you want to play Crysis 3, the game may not be expensive, but the computer that you need to run it decently certainly is.
John:
But at any rate, prices are relative.
John:
This Mac Pro may seem like a super expensive thing where I had to buy it, but compare it to the cost of living in a nicer neighborhood, going on more vacations, or all the other things that people can spend their money on.
John:
If we all wanted to live as cheaply as possible, we would not have half of the things that we have.
John:
I mean, we would get into a career that doesn't involve computers and we'd all be farmers or something.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And, you know, it's all about, like, you know, how you spend your time.
Marco:
Like, you know, for me, like, I spend so much time in front of a computer every day.
Marco:
Like, you know, there's a thing I tweeted forever ago that has gotten the most retweets of anything I've ever tweeted.
Marco:
And it's something on the lines of...
Marco:
If you sit on, look at, or touch something for more than two hours a day, spend whatever it takes to get the best.
Marco:
And so that includes keyboards, mice, your chair.
Marco:
If you sit at a desk all day, you better have a nice chair, a nice keyboard, a nice mouse, and a nice monitor.
Marco:
The things that you use all the time, you should get nice things.
Marco:
It's always good to get a good mattress to sleep on.
Marco:
For lots of reasons, including comfort, but also your back and stuff like that.
Marco:
If you have the ability to spend...
Marco:
to get a premium version of something.
Marco:
The wisest things to spend that on are the things that will have the most impact to your everyday life, generally speaking.
Marco:
And so the difference between a good monitor and a horrible monitor, you'll notice that every single day for hours.
Marco:
The difference between a good bed and a crappy bed, you're going to be lying on it for eight hours a day, you hope.
Marco:
That's going to catch up with you.
Marco:
And so the computer for people like us is one of those things.
Marco:
If you actually will...
Marco:
even notice the difference ever it's probably worth it like it's probably worth it to get a really nice computer if you do anything at all uh for any reasonable amount of time during the day that might stretch your computer it's worth it to get to get the best one that you can get that fits your needs by bringing it by bringing in the time spent in front of device uh metric you're trying to drag this back to pragmatism and i'm trying to take it away
John:
I'm trying to say there's no reason to justify it in a pragmatic, rational manner for things like this.
John:
Some people just want a really fancy table saw.
John:
And what do they do with that fancy table saw?
John:
They make little wooden things that they never give to anyone, don't sell, and aren't useful in any way.
John:
That's their hobby.
John:
That's what they want to do.
John:
Oh, you don't need a $10,000 table saw.
John:
No, he does not need a $10,000 table saw because he's not making money from it.
John:
In fact, it's a money sink.
John:
He just makes little wooden things and puts them in his house and it makes him happy.
John:
And that's what he wants to spend his money on.
John:
$10,000 table saw.
Marco:
I'm not saying that you should justify what you spend extra money on by how much it will make you money-wise.
Marco:
I'm saying just by how much you will enjoy it.
Marco:
That example fits my rationale perfectly.
Marco:
If you're going to actually use a table saw more than once a year, get a great one.
Marco:
Why not?
Marco:
If you can, if you have the ability to...
Marco:
and that will make you that happy, then that's worth doing for you.
Marco:
If you don't care, that's fine.
Marco:
If you can't afford it, do your best.
Marco:
If you want to spend the money elsewhere, fine.
Marco:
I get zero enjoyment out of wearing fancy clothes.
Marco:
So every day I wear a $7 t-shirt and a very worn out pair of jeans that I bought from Amazon.
Marco:
Everything I wear, I can buy from Amazon when it wears out, which I love.
Marco:
I've worked for years to get to this point.
Marco:
It's amazing because I hate shopping.
Marco:
All that stuff, like I drive a really nice car, I have a really nice computer, but I wear crap clothes.
Marco:
There's a lot of things I don't care about because this is where I spend my time.
Marco:
This is where I get my enjoyment.
Marco:
So it is a combination of luxury and treating yourself to the things you like and being kind of analytical about where you spend that extra money to give you the maximum fun or happiness benefit.
John:
Okay, KJ Healy posted...
John:
two four line posts in the chat room so that means he demands to be heard so i'll address his point here yeah the problem is that the mac pro for hobbyists who could afford it is that it's still not the premium thing they wanted it's like you wanted the best granite countertops to cook on but apple gave you decent countertops but also two huge fridges you don't have much use for uh
John:
That may be true of some people.
John:
For me, specifically, it's like Apple gave me the granite countertops I wanted, but they cost 10 times more than I thought they would.
John:
Because underneath of them are two GPUs that I'm not going to use most of.
John:
Again, there are...
John:
As I said before, there are parts of the Mac Pro that appeal to me way more than if I had gotten exactly the computer that I wanted with internal storage and everything.
John:
I like that it's super small.
John:
I like that there's only one fan.
John:
I never dreamed of those things when I was thinking like, oh boy, Apple revises the Mac Pros, and it has to have internal storage.
John:
storage and it has to have card slots but maybe you could be smaller and nicer and of course they'll get rid of the obstacles that's what i was envisioning and they were like hey that's exactly the machine to you instead they gave me this other machine that has things that i didn't even dream i could ask for only one fan as quiet as a mac mini you better bet that appeals to me tremendously
John:
But it costs so darn much money.
John:
It's getting into like, oh, if you can afford it.
John:
Do you want a really fancy computer just because you like a fancy computer?
John:
Yes, but I have a budget too, and it costs so much money.
John:
So that, for me specifically, is the problem.
John:
Me railing against all the people who are saying, what do you need that computer for?
John:
Or what do you need a high-end GPU for?
John:
Or anything like that.
John:
I'm just saying, you don't need to need it.
John:
You just need to want it.
John:
And I certainly do want a Mac Pro, but you always have to balance what you want with what you can afford and so on and so forth.
John:
So I think these are two separate issues.
Marco:
I think also, and with all due, apologies to Casey to talk more about the Mac Pro just for a minute.
Marco:
I swear it'll be fast.
Marco:
He's already left.
Marco:
He's lopped it.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
The new Mac Pro, it's kind of like when the first MacBook Air came out, in that we're looking at it now and we're saying there's no drive bays, there's no card slots, the RAM ceiling is actually lower than the previous one.
Marco:
And so you look at all that and you say, well, this isn't really what we wanted and it's kind of limited.
Marco:
Everyone said the same things about the first MacBook Air when it came out, although it had the additional problem that it was incredibly slow.
Marco:
But the Mac Pro won't have that problem.
Marco:
Now...
Marco:
With the MacBook Air, we have eventually... When it first came out, we were like, you know, I still use DVD drives every so often.
Marco:
And maybe I want that port that it doesn't have or whatever.
Marco:
But over the next year and a half, those things basically vanished.
Marco:
And then two years after the first one came out, the next one came out, it was awesome and everybody bought it.
Marco:
And it became the new Mac to have.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
And I think the new Mac Pro, which is humorously called the 2013 one, even though nobody actually got it in 2013, the new Mac Pro is a similar kind of jump as the first MacBook Air, although with a lot fewer downsides, I think.
Marco:
My current Mac Pro, the big cheese grater one, it has four internal drive bays that you can put hard drives in.
Marco:
You can put two optical drives in it.
Marco:
Well, I even use both optical drives.
Marco:
I put a Blu-ray burner in the bottom one.
Marco:
I use it approximately never.
Marco:
I have four internal drive bays.
Marco:
One of them is full.
Marco:
And over time, I'm finding...
Marco:
Oh, and the card slots.
Marco:
I've never put an expansion card in a Mac Pro.
Marco:
I've owned two for myself, one for my wife, never put an expansion card in it.
Marco:
And what a lot of people put in the expansion slots are more GPUs.
Marco:
And so the new one addresses that even.
Marco:
So there's a lot of Mac Pro users who, even having the expandability of the previous generations, didn't use it that much.
Marco:
Oh, actually, Sam the Geek just corrected me.
Marco:
Apparently, my SSD is a PCI Express card that I forgot about.
Marco:
Oops.
Marco:
Once, I have used one card that... By the way, the new Mac Pro has that exact same thing, a 1TB SSD built in, and it's faster and cheaper.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
The point is, I've had all this expandability, but over time, I've used less and less and less of it.
Marco:
And I think Apple, looking at their customers, I believe they've found similar things among other Mac Pro buyers, saying things like how, yeah, it's true that a lot of video editors don't use local storage.
Marco:
They'll use a SAN or something like that.
Marco:
There's...
Marco:
The need for the internal bays has shrunk over time.
Marco:
And so the compromises the new machine makes, the compromises that are about hardware, you know, there's compromises about pricing and requiring two GPUs that increases the pricing.
Marco:
That's a separate issue that's perfectly valid.
Marco:
But the compromises about internal expendability and space and ports and things, I think they're actually doing the right thing.
Marco:
I don't think that's going to really be a problem that anyone cares about in six months.
Casey:
Yeah, perhaps not.
Casey:
Firstly, I have to apologize.
Casey:
I was trying to interject and say it was fine for you to continue talking about Mac Pro stuff, but I left myself muted like a moron.
Marco:
Well, because you didn't object, I just kept going.
Casey:
Well, I noticed, and that's fine.
Casey:
No, it's not a problem.
Casey:
But I would really, really love for you to tell me about something that's awesome.
Marco:
I completely agree because it's 40 minutes in.
Marco:
That's all right.
Marco:
We'll have a short show.
Marco:
So our first sponsor, I'm going to paste the link in the chat.
Marco:
You guys can see I'll put this in the show notes too.
Marco:
Our first sponsor is Fracture.
Marco:
Go to FractureMe.com.
Marco:
Fracture prints your photo in vivid color directly onto glass.
Marco:
It's the thinnest, lightest, and most elegant way to display your favorite photo.
Marco:
Now, Fracture sponsored my site forever ago, and they gave me a free one.
Marco:
And I was very impressed with it.
Marco:
I hung it on the wall.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
And what I recently did, I put the link here in the show notes and the chat room.
Marco:
I recently realized that they have this little one.
Marco:
It's a five-by-five square.
Marco:
And it's just $12.
Marco:
And they have all sorts of sizes above that for good prices.
Marco:
But this little one is 5x5, $12.
Marco:
And I realized, you know, I've always wanted to have a little row of the icons of the apps I've made on my wall somehow.
Marco:
Because we work in this business of virtual everything.
Marco:
There's no trophies or physical evidence of actual, like, here's something I accomplished in the past or present.
John:
But you didn't even make the icons.
John:
You should have put the source code up there.
Yeah.
Marco:
that's true well i i chose the icons they were made slightly under my direction um so thanks uh so i i did this and it's it's a really great use for this thing you know that you can you can use the small size if you want like for instagram pictures because it's square and it's small and it's really inexpensive um but i think this is really cool to just make like the icons of the apps that you've worked on hang those up there you know they're 12 bucks each that's nothing um
Marco:
So what's cool about this, they mention in their copy it's the thinnest, lightest, and most elegant.
Marco:
What's nice about these fracture prints, it's printed on glass, and it's a nice thin piece of glass with the photo on it that wraps around the corners, but then on the backing is a nice sturdy piece of foam board kind of thing.
Marco:
So it's not as heavy as you would expect this giant print of glass to be.
Marco:
So you don't have to worry about it ripping out of your wall or falling off and crashing down and exploding.
Marco:
I'm always a little nervous to hang really giant, heavy things.
Marco:
These don't have that problem.
Marco:
They're nice and lightweight, but it's still this perfect flat piece of glass on top.
Marco:
It's packaged extremely well.
Marco:
I've never heard of any of them breaking for anybody.
Marco:
The packaging is awesome.
Marco:
It's even instructional how to open it, where to open it.
Marco:
And they include in the box everything you need to hang it up.
Marco:
They include like a little wall anchor.
Marco:
If you get the wall kit or if you got the desk kit, they have like a little prop up thing.
Marco:
You don't need a frame for these because it's really nice and also a big money saver right there because they are so nice.
Marco:
You can just hand them directly on the wall.
Marco:
They are their own frame.
Marco:
You don't need to buy a different one.
Marco:
Really great.
Marco:
Every Fracture is handmade and checked for quality by their small team in Gainesville, Florida.
Marco:
So go to fractureme.com to learn more and try them out.
Marco:
At checkout, you can use our coupon code ATP to get 20% off.
Marco:
That's a big number.
Marco:
20% off with coupon code ATP at fractureme.com.
Marco:
That'll also let them know that you came from here, which will help support us.
Marco:
So thanks a lot to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Thank you, Fracture.
Casey:
Now, did you – this is not a loaded question.
Casey:
Did you have anything more on the Mac Pro because I sort of kind of cut you off there?
Marco:
Me?
Marco:
I actually – I think for now I'm done.
Marco:
I mean I'm sure by next episode I'll come up with more, maybe even in 10 minutes.
Marco:
But I think for now I'm done.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
John, anything about the Mac Pro specifically?
John:
No.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Tell me about Panasonic LCD TVs if you don't mind.
John:
Oh, we're back to CES.
John:
This is worse than the Mac Pro.
Yeah.
John:
I threw this in there because it's a story that I saw in the CES news, and I was interested with TV tech and particularly what Panasonic was going to do.
John:
We all knew Panasonic was leaving the plasma business, and, of course, they were going to make LCD TVs, and they have.
John:
And the most interesting thing about this, I think, is...
John:
Well, I mean, of course, they're touting 4K.
John:
Everyone's touting 4K.
John:
Last year, everyone was touting 4K as well.
John:
But it was interesting to me to see how they're going to pitch these new televisions and the way they pitched it.
John:
They kind of did a little bit of marketing judo.
John:
On the one hand, you could say, well, they went right up and they hit right to their opponent's forehand.
John:
They knew that everyone was going to say...
John:
these TVs aren't as good as your old TVs.
John:
So they addressed that immediately.
John:
Their marketing message was, we're making 4K LED televisions, you know, LCD with an LED backlight.
John:
That sucks crap.
John:
I hate that so much.
John:
I know.
John:
It can be in shorthand, but anyway.
John:
And what we're going to say about them is they're as good as or better than our plasma TVs.
John:
But they said it in a kind of marketing weasel-wordy way.
John:
They said basically they were showing a color chart saying,
John:
the color reproduction is better than even our best previous plasma, the ZT60.
John:
The thing about that is that color reproduction for televisions, for like plasmas and everything, like plasmas that Panasonic has been selling for years can already show colors outside the range that you're quote unquote supposed to show when reproducing like Blu-rays and television signals.
John:
Like,
John:
The color range in the content is not as wide as the can be displayed by TVs.
John:
In fact, most TVs have a setting that lets you say, do you want me to show the colors as intended by the author according to this narrow range of colors that they expected to be able to reproduce on output?
John:
Or do you want me to use the entire color range of the set and just kind of smear the source colors across that?
John:
and you could choose whichever you want.
John:
You want accuracy or sort of like a wider color band.
John:
So the fact that there are LCD television has an ever so slightly even wider range of colors than the plasma doesn't really make that much of a difference with current content.
John:
Maybe it'll make a difference down the line with different content, but for now it doesn't really make that much.
John:
And they didn't, as far as I know, say anything about black levels and motion interpolation and all the other areas where we know LCDs have problems compared to plasma.
John:
So I'm kind of disappointed that
John:
They pulled that, but it seems to have worked on everyone because everyone just keeps parroting the line and says, oh, Panasonic says they're as good as or better than their previous plasmas.
John:
In some respects, I'm sure they are as good.
John:
In some respects, they're probably better.
John:
They probably use way less power.
John:
They're thinner and so on and so forth.
John:
But in some respects, I fully expect that they are worse.
John:
I guess the jury's still out until, you know, independent...
John:
Third parties get their hands on these TVs and start testing them, and we'll see.
John:
But this is not the first time this has happened.
John:
Way back in the day, Pioneer used to make plasmas, and they made a line of plasmas that was widely acknowledged to be the best TV you could buy for any price.
John:
That wasn't a projection TV, and it was the...
John:
panasonic the panasonic the pioneer kuro elite line of televisions and then pioneer stopped making plasms and for many many years after that every new television from every manufacturer that was reviewed they would say oh this is a great new tv it's the best one you can buy right now but it's still not as good as the kuro elite and that would happen year after year and that's kind of very strange in technology where it would be like
John:
If the new Mac Pro came out and they said, well, this Mac Pro is great, but it's not as good as the Mac Pro that was out four years ago.
John:
That never happens.
John:
Like, that doesn't happen in computers.
John:
And happening in television is also very strange.
John:
So for a long, long time, the Kuro Elite was the king.
John:
And it could be for a long time that the Panasonic Plasmas will be the king.
John:
But I suspect that the 4K difference will be a factor here.
John:
And it's like, well, you know, all those Plasmas weren't 4K, so who cares about them?
John:
And all that matters is 4K.
Casey:
So serious question.
Casey:
Do you suspect that you will, I'm going to use the word regret, but I think that's too strong, that you'll regret the purchase of your TV from just a month or so ago sooner because some newer, better TV will come out or because there will be a proliferation of 4K TV shows and movies, thus actually making a 4K display worth it?
John:
How do you – not to avoid that question because I think I'll get to it eventually, but how do you guys feel about 4K?
Marco:
Well, it's one of those things.
Marco:
It's a lot like Super Audio CD and DVD audio, which is – and I don't mean to predict its sales, although I think – well, screw it.
Marco:
I do.
Marco:
I don't need to be diplomatic here.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
When you look at various consumer electronics AV formats over time, the audio world is a great way to look at this, although it applies to video as well.
Marco:
Every time there's been a major quality increase that has been successful in the market,
Marco:
it has also come with other benefits besides the quality that have made people want to buy it.
Marco:
So when going from cassettes to CDs, there was a major increase in so many other factors besides the audio quality.
Marco:
It was more convenient.
Marco:
It was more reliable.
Marco:
It was faster to seek around, no rewinding.
Marco:
Similar thing going from VHS to DVD.
Marco:
Everything is faster, easier, better, more versatile.
Marco:
You can put it in more places.
Marco:
Computers can read it.
Marco:
You can play it in the car, all that stuff.
Marco:
And so then you look at then going from DVD to Blu-ray.
Marco:
And DVD to Blu-ray was a much slower transition.
Marco:
I would still say it's not really complete.
Marco:
Because the only difference between DVD and Blu-ray...
Marco:
is Blu-ray is better quality and is more annoying.
Marco:
In all of the ways that DVDs are annoying, Blu-rays are worse.
Marco:
That's the only major difference.
Marco:
There's no, like, they aren't all of a sudden more versatile or easier to use or available in more places or cheaper or smaller or anything like that.
Marco:
So looking at all that, look at TVs.
Marco:
When we moved from SD to HD, we also were moving from CRTs, the giant, heavy, horrible things, to nice, thin LCDs and plasmas that were much bigger, much thinner, much lighter, much cooler looking, and much better looking.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
There were a lot of other reasons for people to move from SD to HD.
John:
Also, the widescreen aspect ratio was another big factor.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
So there's all these other factors that went along with it that made it a success in the market and that made people want to have it besides just picture quality.
Marco:
In fact, as most people know...
Marco:
Almost everyone who cares about TV picture quality has probably gone to a relative's or parent's house and seen that they are running their cable box or something into the TV that supports high def, but they have it hooked up with the wrong cables using the wrong input or the wrong settings, and they are not even watching HD content, and they don't care, and it drives you nuts.
Marco:
So, obviously, the picture quality alone...
Marco:
is not enough to drive major adoption very quickly of anything.
Marco:
Same thing.
Marco:
So in the audio world, when SACD and DVD audio came out, they both flopped.
Marco:
First of all, because of the format war, but mostly because nobody cared that much.
Marco:
It was the exact same as CDs, but less things were supported.
Marco:
You had to get new players.
Marco:
You couldn't do it in your computer or your car or anything.
Marco:
So it flopped.
Marco:
4K is, at least you have backwards compatibility with newer types of TV sets.
Marco:
That's less of a problem.
Marco:
But you look at 4K, and it's like, well, we already have HD 1080p.
Marco:
It's very mature by now.
Marco:
We have tons of great HD source material and source devices, tons of HD broadcast cable.
Marco:
Everything is HD now, basically, which was not the case even five years ago.
Marco:
You have very good HD support in the industry.
Marco:
And the move to 4K, what is that really going to bring us?
Marco:
You know, it's going to bring a new type of disc format, probably.
Marco:
I don't think Blu-ray can do it, right?
Marco:
So probably a new kind of disc format, new kinds of TVs, new disc players, if we're still using discs.
Marco:
God, I hope we're not, but we probably still will for a little while.
Marco:
Much larger file sizes for internet-streamed media.
Marco:
A whole other round of everybody, cable companies, TV companies, everybody being able to screw everything up again.
Marco:
So it's like this big disruption.
Marco:
It's going to make everything that was mature, it's going to become immature again.
Marco:
Why go through all that?
Marco:
And the reason is
Marco:
an increase in picture quality that you probably won't notice ever, but the people who do notice it will only notice it on, like, an 80-inch TV.
Marco:
I mean, that's... How compelling is that, really?
Marco:
And I think it's going to take off similarly to Blu-ray in that...
Marco:
It will be the high end, so people will buy it, but it's not going to be explosively growing very quickly the way DVDs and CDs did, because to most people, it doesn't bring any noticeable benefit except saying you have the high end thing.
John:
Well, the audio CDs and Blu-ray and stuff had two things going against them that 4K at least doesn't have.
John:
And both of those were physical media being introduced right around the time when physical media was going away for their respective mediums, like DVD audio and super audio CDs.
John:
Yes, the old thing said, you know, the format war was stupid.
John:
Nobody cared.
John:
But also MP3s came along.
John:
And so they were just wiped out.
John:
And Blu-ray, it's amazing that it has been as successful as it has been.
John:
But it came out around the time that streaming video became a thing.
John:
And now only crazy people buy Blu-rays and everyone else just, you know, streams it if they can.
John:
Right.
John:
So those were all like media distribution formats that were coming up against a, hey, we don't need physical media anymore.
John:
Right.
John:
Television is luckily have the advantage of there's no downloadable TV.
John:
You need to you need to have an actual TV set.
John:
You can't make a TV set appear in your house over a wire.
John:
So that still at least has a place in the ecosystem.
John:
It's not being wiped out by like, I mean, I guess the equivalent would be like head mounted displays or something or something else that's not wiping it out.
John:
People still want to look at a screen.
John:
So they have that going for them.
John:
The 4K thing, sometimes I think it's kind of like Retina where it's like, yeah, nobody will care and only nerds will be able to tell, but it'll happen anyway just because it's cheap enough to double the resolution of LCDs at that size.
John:
That could happen.
John:
I can totally envision a world where every TV you buy is 4K and almost all content is still 1080p because the content and everything else didn't catch up with it.
John:
But mostly what I think about 4K is...
John:
that kind of like super audio cd and dvd audio they enhance the wrong thing they enhance the thing that the fewest number of people are able to detect as even being different let alone better because if you play an audio cd for someone and play a dvd audio or super audio cd normal people can't tell even audiophiles could probably be fooled it depends on the mastering it depends on everything else and all those excuses you're going to make for not being able to tell between
John:
a cd and super audio cd all those same excuses apply to television well it depends on how the content is mastered well it depends on how it's distributed well it depends on the authorship yes that's true of video as well and that's why i think like doubling the resolution may not be better in enough ways that people can tell now 4k has a couple saving graces everyone concentrates on the resolution but that also has support for different frame rates and that i think people probably could notice it based on you know people's impression of seeing the hobbit in 48 frames per second and how they said it looked crazy
John:
At least people noticed, at least people could tell, hey, this is 48 frames per second, and I could tell it's different.
John:
You know, or as someone in the chat room points out, sports at 120 frames per second.
John:
Those are things that maybe people will be able to tell, and that may be able to drag along the content producers to say,
John:
who's motivated to make 4k content well maybe the nfl is motivated to make 4k content and if the nfl is motivated to make 4k content and people will buy the tvs and like that will kind of go along together and it may just be kind of an inevitable thing but the other people making noise at ces this year were trying to say hey we're over here and we're trying to improve the other stuff that needs to be improved about tv like i just mentioned the color gamut like
John:
What is the maximum dynamic range between the brightest and the darkest spot on a television set?
John:
What are the range of colors that you can display?
John:
All those things are areas that desperately need to be improved in television.
John:
But, you know, the television color standards, even HD standards are way behind what the current technology can display.
John:
And those people will notice way more than 4K.
John:
If you showed someone that Dolby demo with like the...
John:
the huge dynamic range and everything, and then showed somebody 4K TV, everyone won't be able to tell the Dolby thing is different, even if it was running at 1080p.
John:
And if you just show 4K versus non-4K from a certain distance, you can't tell anymore.
John:
Because if resolution is the only thing, that's not going to save you.
John:
So I think this is interesting, but I really wish, kind of like the cameras with the...
John:
megapixel wars i really wish that the side that was going for not more pixels but better pixels basically was a little bit stronger in this fight but it seems to me that 4k will probably happen kind of inevitably but not nearly in enough time for me to regret my plasma purchase to finally answer casey's question because i'm gonna be enjoying 1080p content with fewer of the compromises that bother me about lcds
John:
For many years to come.
John:
The only thing that could possibly annoy me, I think, is that if game consoles start putting out 4K and it's noticeable for frame rate reasons, if that happens, maybe I'll regret it in a couple years.
John:
But I would feel much, much worse if I had my old TV, which was not nearly as good a quality as any Plasma in the past couple of years.
John:
I would have really regretted keeping that and knowing...
John:
Now I'm stuck.
John:
Now if this TV breaks or if I just get sick of looking at bad black levels, there's nothing out there for me to buy.
John:
I just have to sit here and wait.
John:
Now at least I know I'm set as long as this thing keeps working for many, many years and I can sort of do what I like to do, which is bide my time and look for that one perfect time to buy the cool new thing.
Casey:
That's fair.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think you have a long time before any 4K TV is so good and so compelling and so supported by the surrounding ecosystem that it would be really compelling for you to upgrade.
Marco:
I mean, HDTV came out when?
Marco:
Like 2001 or something?
Marco:
It's pretty old.
Marco:
But most people didn't get them that year.
Marco:
They got them like five years later or more.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And it was a few years after that before they were actually very good.
Marco:
And I think we're going to see a lot of the same things.
Marco:
I mean, granted, that was also, again, that was changing over a lot of legacy old stuff, making LCDs get better, making plasmas get better, modernizing lots of the signals, digitizing lots of stuff.
Marco:
So there was more to do during that transition.
John:
The HD content is terrible, though.
John:
Like the compression artifacts on like your cable provider or Netflix streaming, like they can't even they they can't even put a signal that doesn't look like crap on 1080 sometimes.
John:
And, you know, 1080i they're sending it as they're not even sending full 1080p.
John:
So it's going to be a long time for the, you know, sort of non if you don't have a good reason, if you're not like the Discovery Channel, the NFL or something, you have some.
John:
compelling reason to go to 4k high frame rate as soon as you possibly can we're still in for a long long road of supposedly 4k content supposedly hd content that technically fulfills the requirements but mostly is gross
Casey:
Well, a couple of things to consider.
Casey:
Firstly, the NFL already films in 4K, or at least I think it was Fox does.
Casey:
Somebody, it may have been in Gadget.
Casey:
I don't recall who it was, but they had talked to, and I believe it was Fox, about how they were going to film a Patriots game.
Casey:
And one of the things they said was, we actually film in 4K so that when you Zoom, and Slade 4-1 in the chat is saying it was The Verge, whatever it was.
Casey:
So when you Zoom on a instant replay,
Casey:
you'll get a full 1080 image out of the source, which was 4K.
Casey:
And so to some degree, this is already happening, even though it's not making it all the way to the consumer.
Casey:
And the other thing I wanted to point out was part of the reason that Aaron and I didn't upgrade to an HD setup initially was because not only did we need a new TV, but we also needed...
Casey:
a different cable box.
Casey:
And to get the different cable box, we needed to pay, at the time, Comcast more money.
Casey:
And I can't speak for everyone else, but I know, similar to the retina discussion we had last week, I didn't really, at the time, know what I was missing.
Casey:
And so I didn't really see an urgent need to upgrade.
Casey:
And Erin doesn't really care for 99% of all TV.
Casey:
And so she didn't see a terribly strong reason to upgrade.
Casey:
And so we had an HDTV in 2007.
Casey:
And I don't think we actually had HD pumping into the house until we moved a year later and we're getting Fios anyway.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I can't speak for everyone, but that makes it a little different.
Casey:
And another thing it made me think of was, I wonder if adoption of LTE bands would have been a lot slower if it cost more money from the carriers to get LTE service.
Casey:
And I can only speak for AT&T, but on AT&T, there's no difference in price.
Casey:
And I believe that's the same for Verizon.
Casey:
I am not sure that's the same for T-Mobile.
Casey:
And nobody uses Sprint.
Casey:
So I'm not saying there's an answer and it's a rhetorical question, but I wonder if LTE adoption would have been slower if it was more expensive.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I think the way most people go to new technologies is when they have to buy a new one anyway, they get a decent one at the time.
Marco:
And so with phones, we move very quickly because so many people are on subsidized phone plans where you're pretty much encouraged to get a new phone every one to three years.
Marco:
So that's why the phone market moves so quickly.
Marco:
TVs move very slowly.
Marco:
You said the cable box thing.
Marco:
A lot of people don't have to pay for their cable box, but
Marco:
You might have to go through a hassle for an upgrade, like bringing it to some place in the middle of nowhere next to the UPS depot or whatever.
Marco:
I've done that so many times.
Marco:
But even if you do have to pay for it, yeah, you're right.
Marco:
Usually there's a premium.
Marco:
Well, if TiVo is still alive and you have a TiVo, then you've got to pay extra for the new HD or 4K one, and then John's going to complain about that for the next 10 years because it's going to suck.
John:
You think that will have HD menus everywhere?
Yeah.
John:
Don't be complaining.
John:
These menus are only 1080p.
John:
Exactly.
John:
I would be glad if we ever get to that point.
John:
It seems like this, that may never even happen.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But like, you know, the rate at which people normally upgrade TV equipment is pretty slow because TVs are large and they at least used to be pretty expensive.
Marco:
They're getting pretty cheap now, but there's still like these large kind of fixtures, like furniture pieces that you tend, like no one gets a new TV every year except John.
John:
I waited four years.
John:
Give me a break.
John:
It's four years I went.
John:
The TiVo menus, by the way, they're not even 1080p now.
John:
They're 720p.
John:
Not that that makes a big difference, but you know.
Marco:
Well, and by the way, lots of TVs are still sold at 720p.
John:
I don't think that.
John:
Do they still make 720?
John:
I think every TV is 1080 now.
Marco:
No!
Marco:
The last year when I bought that small 37-inch LCD for the back room, I had to look pretty hard to get a 1080p one.
Marco:
So many of them were 720p.
John:
I think you need to re-research that.
John:
I think they're almost all.
John:
I'm sure you can still find a 720 somewhere, especially if you start going to the no-name brands.
John:
But I think any name brand probably has zero 720p television sets.
Casey:
No, I don't think that's the case.
Casey:
I don't think that's the case.
Marco:
You are wrong.
Marco:
Once you go to the smaller sizes like in the 30s.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
You go to the 30s and you go to those LCDs in the 30s and there's a lot of 720p.
John:
Who's buying a 30-inch TV that's the size of your monitor?
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, actually, I had to fit it into one area within an existing built-in bookshelf.
Marco:
And so I had a size cap.
Marco:
So this 37-inch Panasonic was like the biggest that would fit into this little spot.
Marco:
Was this a bat cave?
Marco:
You can say.
Marco:
It's all right.
Marco:
I'm not allowed to say.
All right.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
No, it's true, though.
Casey:
I think I said on a previous show, our biggest TV in the house is 40 inches.
Casey:
And there is no part of me that wants a bigger one.
Casey:
And that one is 1080.
Casey:
But the one we have in our bedroom, and the only reason it's in our bedroom is because we got the 40-incher to replace it.
Casey:
That one's 32 inches.
Casey:
And granted, it's a bit older, but it's 720 only.
Casey:
And I have no desire to upgrade it to a 1080 TV.
Casey:
Now, granted...
Casey:
I'm either very weird or very normal depending on how you look at it.
Casey:
But as soon as you go to lower sizes, I think Marco's dead on.
Casey:
It's a little bit challenging to find a 1080 TV.
John:
I don't look at small televisions.
John:
I was –
John:
I was disappointed that I couldn't find a plasma that was small because, you know, the plasmas.
John:
Speaking of the sizes of the televisions, these Panasonic LCDs, you know, the new 4K televisions, the smallest size it comes in is now 58.
John:
I mean, you were surprised that the smallest size my TV came in was 55.
John:
Now the smallest size is 58.
John:
Soon the smallest size is going to be 100 inches.
Marco:
yeah and and and the problem is like all these like really nice ones like the vt60 they only come in larger sizes and those keep going up so like like when my tv like i have a really nice tv for when i bought it when it dies i'm gonna have to either get a giant wall of tv which i don't want in which tiff would kill me if i got but it would look awesome or get a crappy one
John:
Yeah, I think they have to.
John:
Well, part of it is it's more expensive to mix.
John:
I mean, with the plasmas in particular, like the reason you couldn't make a 4K plasma is because then the little tiny pits where the little, you know, particles are emitted and hit against the phosphorescent material.
John:
It would have to be super-duper small, and that's like a technical limitation.
John:
They probably could have done it if they wanted to invest tons and tons more money, but they didn't, so they didn't.
John:
But, yeah, as your resolution goes up, it's actually cheaper to make – that's why, like, the 28-inch Dell 4K monitor that people want us to talk about, it's actually cheaper to make a high-resolution monitor bigger because then you don't have to make the pixels so darn small, and it's, you know, there's fewer errors, and it's easier to manufacture and all that stuff.
John:
So I think – I'm hoping that will take care of itself.
John:
But, yeah, when I'm shopping for a television, I'm always shopping at –
John:
The high end, and they're all big, and they're all 1080, I guess, as you get smaller.
John:
I mean, at a certain point, you get a certain size.
John:
It becomes like you can't tell the difference between 720 and 1080.
John:
And as I'm surprised no one has said in the chat room yet, or maybe I missed it, I think if you do the math, 720p has more pixels per second than 1080i.
John:
But with all the processing that goes on, who knows?
John:
And, yeah, most broadcast television is still 1080i, not 1080p.
John:
Yeah, but getting back to what Casey said about the source material, like NFL games filmed in 4K, I mean, they're doing the same thing with the movies with the digital cameras.
John:
Even for TV, they would record TV on video at a much higher quality than you'll ever be able to broadcast.
John:
That's par for the course.
John:
Those are the people out there.
John:
testing out the new format and everything by the time 4k makes its way down and there's some story on the evening news assuming the evening news still exists that says oh the 4k transition is coming uh cable companies are turning off their old hd signal and now you can only get four remember that you know the whole transition from analog and all that stuff with the like when we see that story in 10 20 years by that point everyone will be recording everything in like 8k or whatever the next standard is so the content producers are always uh
John:
I hope someone did the math and said 1080i has slightly more pixels per second than 720p.
Marco:
I hope that... Somebody please tell me, and I hope this is the case.
Marco:
In the entire 4K standard, is there any allowance anywhere for interlaced anything?
Marco:
Because I hate interlacing so much in so many ways.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
The artifacts it makes are horrible when you de-interlace, when you watch on something progressive.
Marco:
I hate getting interlaced DVDs, and when I rip them, they look bad.
Marco:
And interlaced TV, it's like, oh, God, interlacing is the devil.
Marco:
Sam the Geek in the chat says, nope, it is not in the spec.
Marco:
I really hope that is true.
Marco:
God, interlacing needs to die.
Marco:
I hate interlacing so much.
Marco:
But what I don't hate so much is our second sponsor for this week.
Marco:
It is Ting.
Marco:
Ting is a return sponsor.
Marco:
Ting is mobile that makes sense.
Marco:
There are no BS, simple to use mobile service provider from the people at Two Cows, the company behind Hover.
Marco:
Ting is a reseller of the Sprint network in the US.
Marco:
So go to atp.ting.com to learn more.
Marco:
They have great rates.
Marco:
There's no contracts, no early termination fees.
Marco:
You own your device outright from the start.
Marco:
And what's great about Ting, this is really interesting.
Marco:
You've got to take a look at this.
Marco:
They have a true pay-for-what-you-use pricing model.
Marco:
So you pay this base price of $6 per month per device.
Marco:
And then above that, you just pay for whatever actual amount of data or minutes or megabytes or messages or whatever.
Marco:
You just pay for whatever you use, and it's bucketed nicely.
Marco:
So if one month you use 10 megs or nothing, you pay nothing, or you pay like $1 or $2.
Marco:
And then if the next month you use 2 gigs, you just pay the bucket for that.
Marco:
It's really very, very nice.
Marco:
There's so many uses for this thing.
Marco:
You can go to atp.ting.com, check out their savings calculator.
Marco:
And this will tell you, you can input your current average minutes usage or average data usage.
Marco:
You can even, if you're a Verizon Wireless customer in the US, you can even give them your credentials, and they will log into Verizon and scrape your stats off of it and tell you, here's what you used over the last X months, and here's how much you would have saved if you switched to Ting.
Marco:
So really great.
Marco:
They even had this deal where if you're stuck in a contract, you have to pay an early termination fee to get out of it.
Marco:
They will give you 25% of that fee back in service credit up to $75.
Marco:
So like Hover, Ting has a great customer support with a no hold, no wait phone number.
Marco:
You just call them 8am to 8pm Eastern and a human being picks up the phone immediately who's there and ready to help you.
Marco:
Anybody who's ever had to call AT&T or Verizon Wireless will think that's
Marco:
Just voodoo magic.
Marco:
It's impossible, but Ting made it possible.
Marco:
So go to atp.ting.com.
Marco:
Check out the great deals they have.
Marco:
They have tethering included, no charge.
Marco:
You can bring your own phone.
Marco:
You can buy a used phone.
Marco:
You can buy a new phone.
Marco:
So many more things than I have time to tell you about right now.
Marco:
If you even have a Sprint iPhone 4 or 4S, you can bring that to Ting.
Marco:
So check them out, atp.ting.com.
Marco:
Thanks a lot for sponsoring the show.
John:
So the helpful chat room has put in a link to an article showing the color spaces, showing that the Rec.
John:
709, which is the current HD color space, and most TVs already go bigger than that.
John:
And they were, you know, Panasonic was showing how its TV goes even ever so slightly bigger.
John:
But there's also Rec.
John:
2020, which is part of the 4K UHD standard, which is way bigger, has a much larger range.
John:
It's not as big as like the, you know,
John:
the dynamic range of brightness that dolby was showing off with their crazy experimental water cooled thing or whatever uh but it does show that this is what i was getting at before that 4k brings more than just resolution it brings for marco you know progressive scan mode only and and for me and a lot of other people much higher frame rates well someone was mentioning rectangular pixels i have no idea if 4k still has rectangular pixels but or has rectangular pixels at all maybe they're dead too
Marco:
Yeah, because my old HDTV that was a 4x3 CRT that you didn't think existed, which did exist, that was possible because of all these weirdnesses in the HD spec to allow for all this old stuff.
Marco:
But yeah, 4K is, at least I hope, it is taking its opportunity of dropping tons of legacy crap like that and just going for now and future looking good technology that's, you know...
John:
relatively simple and as for the 720p versus 1080i again it depends on the frame rate if you do 720p it's 60 frames versus 1080i over 30 you can all do the math yourself but as someone pointed out in the chat room and now i can't scroll back to find where it is but uh 720p i want to get right so i don't want to it was saying that 720p has more temporal resolution as in motion over time because it's not interlaced obviously and 1080i has more spatial resolution
John:
So it depends on what you want.
John:
But that whole distinction with the I and P and stuff will hopefully be a relic of history.
John:
I mean, this is kind of one of the reasons in favor of 4K, you know, in 4K's corner is a lot of the legacy crap left over from the bad old non-HD days still infects the HD standards.
John:
Yes, dude, X, I know it was you in the chat room.
John:
I just couldn't find your line.
John:
I couldn't find it.
John:
I was going to read it.
John:
Anyway...
John:
making making 4k like what makes 4k inevitable is that it actually does get rid of a lot of the annoying crap and a lot of the details that people didn't need to care about they didn't care about interlaced versus progressive they don't you know they don't care about all these details of color spaces and stuff but if they can make it so that it looks better to people and so that they have a reason to view it like if you go over your friend's house and you watch nfl and 4k at higher frame rate
John:
and you notice that's different, you're going to want that because now there's content that you're interested in.
John:
And if panel makers, you know, 4K just becomes, well, like it's actually cheaper now to make a 4K panel since all the factories are ramped up on it or whatever.
John:
It may be inevitable, but I still think it'll take a long time before cable companies start broadcasting 4K for anything except for a few special.
John:
you know like the content is still going to be 1080 on all the cheap shows for a long long long time and even on the 4k channels if the first person says everyone every piece of our broadcast is 4k uh some of those channels are going to look awful because they're like some of the channels look awful today at 1080i because they're just super over compressed and gross so do we have anything else to talk about
Casey:
I saw a lot of feedback fly through regarding Steam boxes.
Casey:
And when John was lamenting having to buy a PC just for games, I saw a few people say, well, why not get a Steam box?
Casey:
So, John, why not?
Marco:
Well, first, so let's just assume that somebody, not me, but that a friend of mine has no clue what a Steam box is and hasn't been following this.
Marco:
Could you maybe explain what it is first?
Casey:
I could, but I'll do a terrible job of it because I don't really believe in games.
Casey:
John?
John:
They exist whether you believe in them or not.
John:
By explaining Steambox, it's hard to explain it without revealing my views on it.
John:
But anyway, Valve is a company that started off making games.
John:
And like many other good companies, they realized that there's more to their...
John:
the market that they were in than just making games they also made a digital distribution platform which sounds like outside of their core competency hey you just make great games what are you making a digital distribution platform for well they were making it because that's the future of gaming and they saw it before everyone else and they spent a long time working on their their digital distribution thing called steam which if you're not familiar with this type of thing it's it's like the app store for games you don't have to go to a store and buy a disc you just log on to something and download it and the game goes right onto your computer
John:
Steam is available for the Mac, but even though it started out on the PC, and it's a great way to buy games for all the same reasons that the app stores are a great way for consumers to buy apps, because who wants to go to the store and get a stupid disc?
John:
So the Steam box is Valve's next step in this process.
John:
Which is, all right, why don't we make hardware as well?
John:
Because not everyone has or wants to make a PC that can play games.
John:
We will, I guess they're setting some kind of standard or whatever and saying you want to make a Steam box.
John:
It's basically like a little PC that comes pre-configured to connect to Steam and it comes with a little controller if you want or you can use like an Xbox 360 controller or whatever.
John:
And it's sort of a turnkey way for you to get a gaming PC to play games from Steam.
John:
And people were suggesting Steambox to me.
John:
I'm not quite sure why they were suggesting it or they were just asking what I thought of it.
John:
But I think a lot of the coverage pinpoints the reasons to be skeptical about it, although those reasons may not end up mattering in the end.
John:
The reasons I'm not all that interested in a Steambox is because, as many of the stories have said,
John:
it does less than a PC for a similar price.
John:
I mean, it's just a PC.
John:
It's PC hardware, PC video cards, and a PC box.
John:
That's all it is.
John:
It's just sort of pre-configured and certified to work in this sort of thing.
John:
And they vary widely.
John:
You can get super cheap ones that are like a super cheap PC.
John:
You can get super expensive ones that are like a super expensive PC.
John:
And I imagine, as many people pointed out, the most useful thing you can do with this is just reboot it into Windows because the Steam Box runs Linux, by the way, which helps keep the cost down.
John:
reboot it into Windows, and then you have a gaming PC.
John:
Why don't you just buy a gaming PC?
John:
If you want a gaming PC, buy a gaming PC.
John:
Well, non-nerds don't want to buy a gaming PC and don't know anything about them.
John:
So, this feature that people think is silly, so what?
John:
It comes pre-configured to connect to Steam and runs this free OS so you don't have to play Windows licensing.
John:
Who cares?
John:
Like, I don't care about that.
John:
I know how to install software.
John:
I know how to do this.
John:
Like, just the mere fact that you can buy something called a Steam Box and have some sort of guarantees about the experience.
John:
Not guarantees, like, because they do vary wildly, but...
John:
so if valve can manage the expectations when you know i don't want to get into pc gaming but my friend got a steam box that seems to be fewer problems i'll get one of those it's kind of like i don't know anything about digital music uh but my friend got one of those ipod things and he's able to listen to music digitally so i'm going to try that there is i'm not going to say steam has steam box has no chance uh
John:
They're trying to thread the needle here between the world of game consoles, which is fixed hardware, doesn't change over time, easy to develop against because developers know what everybody has, plus or minus a couple of accessories, and on the other side of the spectrum, full-fledged gaming PCs.
John:
They're thinking there's something in the middle there where...
John:
We can get you something that's better than a console because you can spend more money and get a faster experience and upgrade it over time in part or in whole and, you know, have access to all these games we have available on Steam.
John:
But it's not as complicated as a gaming PC.
John:
I'm not sure if that little narrow valley between those two things is going to work for them, but it could very, very well be that...
John:
The people who make gaming PCs will slowly become smaller and smaller and smaller and sort of dwindle and die out.
John:
And it will turn out that most of the people playing PC games actually weren't interested in building gaming PCs, actually weren't interested in maintaining gaming PCs.
John:
And this could really be a sort of a backdoor way to remake the PC industry for people who play games anyway, to be more like, you know, the iOS device industry where people aren't interested in tinkering them.
John:
They just want to get them, sit down in front of them and use them.
John:
So, I'm not quite sure how this is going to turn out, but for me, as someone who
John:
not that I'd be interested in tinkering with things, but I would be able to if I wanted to.
John:
If I wanted to get a gaming PC, I would build a gaming PC.
John:
I don't want one, but if I did, the things stopping me wouldn't be like, oh, I wish someone did all this work for me.
John:
Because people do it.
John:
You can just go to Alienware and click a bunch of buttons and get a super expensive gaming PC, and you could build a better one for half the money if you wanted to, but if you don't want to, it's the same as anything else.
John:
So we'll see.
John:
I enjoy playing games from Steam on my Mac.
John:
I enjoy playing them
John:
games from steam on my mac when it's booted into windows when it's when it pretends that it's a gaming pc i like having one computer that does both of those things uh i also really like game consoles so i'm probably not the target market for the steam box but uh
John:
There's a lot of noise about them, and we'll wait a year and see how well all those different vendors who are fielding Steam boxes feel about their contribution to Valve's platform.
Marco:
I'm kind of surprised that anybody thinks there's going to be a market for more than one of these things.
Marco:
Like, why is it a category and not just one box?
John:
If it was one box, it would be a game console.
Marco:
Well, it kind of is.
Marco:
It's kind of a game console for Steam PC games.
John:
But they wanted to have some of the advantages of gaming PCs, and one of those advantages is it's not the same hardware for everybody.
John:
Every year you can get a new, faster, better one that makes the games prettier, and that's not true of consoles.
Marco:
That's true.
John:
Like I said, you know, they're threading a needle.
John:
I don't know how much room there is between a gaming PC and a game console.
John:
It could be they get squished from above or below, depending on how you drill this diagram, by the consoles and just the entire world of PC gaming gets squished away.
John:
Or it could be that they get squished by real PC gaming and it turns out the only people left who aren't just exclusively playing consoles really want a full-fledged gaming PC and they don't want the Steam box.
John:
I don't think it's entirely crazy and I think it is smart for Valve to get into hardware because they've shown that they understand that, like,
John:
There's more to the world than what they're currently doing.
John:
And Steam was a great idea and a smashing success.
John:
And they continue to also make great games on top of that.
John:
If they can also make great hardware that's popular, more power to them.
John:
But having third parties do it for you, it kind of looks like the Windows Phone strategy where we're going to encourage this ecosystem of compatible hardware.
John:
And I don't know.
John:
We'll see.
Marco:
Do you think it's a problem?
Marco:
Am I correct that the Steam boxes all have gamepad controller types and not keyboard-mouse kind of schemes?
John:
That's another problem.
John:
The controller that they have is interesting, and it's trying to make up for the fact that you don't have a keyboard and a mouse.
John:
And again, a lot of the people who play PC games may be...
John:
They like mouse and keyboard.
John:
And if you take that away, maybe they're not interested anymore.
John:
But maybe they weren't really wed to mouse and keyboard.
John:
Maybe they just wanted something that lets them play first-person shooters.
John:
And if we can give them a better first-person shooter control, I don't know.
John:
This is all a big experiment with, you know.
John:
And that's kind of why Valve must like the fact that they're not the ones sort of doing the experiment.
John:
You guys make the hardware.
John:
You might sell some.
John:
I mean, yeah.
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, the software is not easy either.
Marco:
I mean, I think the input and monitor class, like how far you sit and the input devices you use, I think that will sink this thing because I think if you want to play a first-person shooter using a gamepad on a TV, you'll buy a game console.
Marco:
They're probably going to be better at it and they're cheaper and they're better managed and they're more popular and everything else.
John:
They're mapping their control scheme to keyboard and mouse.
John:
Have you seen the controller?
John:
It looks like two big flat sort of touchpad areas.
John:
One of them is the mouse, and one of them is WASD, basically.
John:
For legacy games, because you have to be able to play Half-Life 2, Portal, and all that stuff.
John:
You have to be able to make the legacy games work, otherwise how can you get a Steam box that have access to zero games?
John:
In theory, in the future, games can come out with that controller in mind if it becomes popular, but they have to be able to support the old games, and that's what they're trying to do.
John:
Supposedly, it works better than using an Xbox 360 controller if you're playing first-person shooters.
John:
It's more like a keyboard and a mouse, but...
John:
I don't know if it's going to be worthwhile.
John:
Who is the customer for these Steam boxes?
John:
There sure are a lot of them.
John:
They sure come in a lot of different sizes and shapes and price points, and PC gamers really do love Steam, but I'm not sure what their prospects are.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, looking at this controller, I just looked it up, and first of all, it looks ridiculous, but
Marco:
I mean, and I'm really out of touch with this stuff because I haven't been heavily into games in a while.
Marco:
But when I was heavily into games, I loved PC games.
Marco:
And I really didn't get that much enjoyment out of console games because I loved... Not only did I love the kind of games that just work a lot better with keyboard, mouse, and big high-res monitor in front of your face like RTSs and builders like SimCity and stuff like that.
Marco:
Not only did I love that kind of game more...
Marco:
But even for the kind of games that work on both, I just liked having a mouse better than a gamepad.
Marco:
And maybe because I was just used to it, I was better at it with the mouse.
Marco:
I was more precise with the mouse.
Marco:
And even playing shooters on gamepads, it always felt like, yeah, I'm glad I didn't have to set up a LAN to play this with my friends or anything, but I'm not enjoying it as much.
Marco:
And by the way, I did love building my own PCs.
Marco:
And if I was going to go back to being a PC gamer...
Marco:
Being a PC gamer takes a lot of time and investment just to manage all the software crap you have to deal with.
Marco:
The Steam Box will, of course, solve a lot of that in theory, but...
Marco:
If you're already going to devote a bunch of time into this hobby because you love it so much, you probably are very likely to also want to build your own computer.
Marco:
I think the market for people who are going to want to buy a pre-made gaming PC that they had no part in building and that they might not be able to upgrade very easily, if at all, to play games on a TV that aren't console games on a kind of console controller that is not a keyboard or mouse...
Marco:
There's so many big leaps here that I think are just leaping right out of the market.
John:
Well, there's another strategic reason that Valve kind of has to do this to sort of protect itself and it's that Microsoft has been less and less interested in making Windows a hospitable environment for gaming.
John:
And if you look at, you know, Valve's business, I'm sure they sell a lot of Mac games, too, but they're mostly selling, quote unquote, PC games.
John:
And so the part of Steam Box that's maybe the least interesting to consumers, maybe the most interesting from Valve's perspective, which is we need to sell our games on Linux or an OS that we have some control over to get away from Windows, because like.
John:
they've you know valves has whined about windows 8 not being particularly hospitable for games in the early going and like just in general to be fair windows 8 is particularly inhospitable for everybody so so like if if all that comes out of this is the steam box is a total flop but a huge portion of games available on steam run on like it maybe they don't call it a steam box anymore but like if you mostly use your pc for gaming uh
John:
uh if valve can say oh when you play our games you should play them like in the steam os or whatever they call the linux thing that they're going to use there it's kind of a hedge against like our future shouldn't depend on microsoft because microsoft cares about xbox one you know with gaming they care slightly less about windows and who knows with microsoft's new ceo search what kind of direction the company will be taken in so this is probably a smart hedge you
John:
Just to say, we should really look into, if we're going to be a platform, we should really look into having more control and not being beholden to Microsoft for so much of our business.
John:
Because certainly Sony is not beholden to Microsoft for its gaming business, right?
John:
And Microsoft doesn't beholden to anyone else and so on.
John:
So I think it's a wise strategic move for Valve to be doing this.
John:
And I think it matters less whether the Steam boxes competes with game consoles or anything.
John:
It's kind of like Steam itself.
John:
The payoff will be many, many years now, and it may not be the same payoff that they expected, but it's worth doing, I think.
Casey:
Marco, I'd like to ask you guys about some of your past game experiences, but before we do that, would you... It's all Moonbase Commander.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Would you tell me about anything else that's awesome?
Marco:
I would love to.
Marco:
It is our good friends at Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio.
Marco:
For a free trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com and use offer code MARCO.
Marco:
Once again, I apologize to my co-hosts.
Marco:
They will get their time, I'm sure.
Marco:
Squarespace is always improving their platform.
Marco:
They're always adding new features, new designs, and even better support.
Marco:
Their designs are beautiful to start with, and you can customize whatever you want about them from high-level customization using their nice, easy tools all the way down to code customization, JavaScript injection, whatever you want to do.
Marco:
You can do all that stuff with Squarespace.
Marco:
All the designs are also responsive.
Marco:
So your site looks like its own theme everywhere on any device.
Marco:
It doesn't look like some generic mobile theme or anything.
Marco:
You have your style at any size on every device.
Marco:
They have an incredible support team at Squarespace.
Marco:
They have over 70 employees working right here in New York City in a place nicknamed the Care Bear Lair because they are so good at customer support.
Marco:
They've even won customer support awards.
Marco:
uh squarespace is awesome it starts at just eight dollars a month this includes a free domain name if you sign up for a whole year up front uh so you can start a free trial today now this is a real free trial no credit card required you don't have to like enter in your stuff and then remember to cancel it later on nope no credit card required a real free trial start today start building your website if you like it sign up if you don't no pressure
Marco:
Squarespace.com.
Marco:
Use offer code Marco for 10% off.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
It's a great platform.
Marco:
We use it for our site, and we really appreciate all their support of our show and of every other show in the universe.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Squarespace for sponsoring.
Casey:
So I wanted to ask you, you had said something a minute ago about how you didn't have to set up your own network.
Casey:
And it just made me remember.
Casey:
So when I was a kid, I used to play quite a lot of games and both all of the Nintendo consoles and many, many, many PC games.
Casey:
And I was just curious if you guys had the hilarious experiences of having your friends over where they would bring their mini towers and their CRT monitors that weighed a thousand pounds and you're in like sixth or seventh grade at the time.
Casey:
So you can barely lift them on your own.
Casey:
And you would get like these 40 foot null modem cables and string them together and play Wolf 3D or Doom against each other or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
Like I just, God, I have such fond memories of that.
Casey:
And I was curious if I was, if I was the only one.
Marco:
Yeah, it was a nightmare.
Marco:
I mean, part of the fun of being a high school kid and trying to hang out with my geek friends and set up some kind of land at somebody's house to play Total Annihilation, which is all I did in high school, which actually turned out to be a pretty good experience.
Marco:
It was funny because – and I think this is kind of a motto for a lot of PC gaming – or not a motto.
Marco:
It's a common result of all PC gaming is like you have to deal with so much crap to set it up.
Marco:
And ours, this was like a lot of physical moving stuff around, physical plugging stuff in, figuring out, oh, God, why does this network cable that we just made yesterday and we've never made a network cable before, why does this all of a sudden not work?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Or, you know, why can your computer see the other three, but then one of them can't see you?
Marco:
And, oh god, you didn't install the map.
Marco:
Or, like, you start, you get all into the game and you realize one guy doesn't have the newest patch, and so half the units are disabled.
Marco:
You know, there's
Marco:
It was a whole bunch of crap.
Marco:
It was a whole bunch of time-wasting crap, system administration stuff, rebooting, installing patches, installing new versions of the game, installing new maps, getting everything.
Marco:
It was such a nightmare that we would start bringing... And all of these computers were like...
Marco:
computers or our family's computers so that we couldn't really leave them there for the next week or anything like so we would like every weekend me and a couple of friends would bring all of our computers over to one of the two houses that had network switches uh because like two of the houses had two computers because the parents like had two computers so you know we'd go to we'd congregate on those houses plug in try to figure everything out we wouldn't even start playing until 12 or one in the morning
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
By the time the game actually launches and you're actually in it, it would be 1 a.m.
Marco:
because we would have started setting up at 8 and been installing patches and crap until then.
Marco:
And this is like the view of PC gaming that I still have because I didn't play a lot of games after mid-college or so because I just kind of ran out of time.
Marco:
And then after college, I got a job and didn't have time then, and all my friends were in different places.
Marco:
So I kind of fell out of gaming, but...
Marco:
Obviously, nowadays, you could bring over LCDs or a laptop, which would be amazing.
Marco:
We all had home-built desktops with 19-inch CRT monitors, so it was quite an ordeal.
Marco:
These days, I imagine it's a lot better, but I bet you still have a lot of that software crap to deal with.
Marco:
Is that still the case?
John:
it's not as bad as the as certainly not as bad as it used to be and for the most part if you're lucky and you have some minimum amount of knowledge you can get a similar experience to that as what people are getting these days on their pcs you get a headset mic you get the internet for your networking problems everyone has their own screen you're not all physically in the same place but it's close-ish people still have LAN parties like at the PAX you know uh
John:
conference they have a giant LAN room where you can bring your own PC or use the ones that you have there and they still do that but when I see people in the giant LAN rooms at conventions and stuff it's just you know row after row of people sitting at PCs looking at their screens wearing headset mics I think how important is it that these people are all in the same room and it's not as important as it was when you and your friends were all in the same room because the technology like it's now just you the screen the mouse the keyboard and the headset mic and the fact that the guy you're yelling at is four seats away means nothing because you never even look at him
John:
Maybe in smaller atmospheres it would be more important, but I think for the most part that the internet and technology has come to make most of that unimportant.
John:
One thing that the younger people might remember is that the original Xbox, you could bring that over to someone's house, hook it up, and play Halo, sort of a multi-room, multiplayer Halo experience.
John:
And that, I think, was maybe the last thing to be lugged from house to house for original Xboxes.
John:
But nowadays, no one lugs their consoles.
John:
I think they basically keep them in their house and use...
John:
The magic of the internet to do that stuff.
Casey:
It's funny to me because channeling my inner bitter old man, like we were talking about last episode, I just remember so vividly the pain of finding a null modem cable, which looked in many ways like a serial cable, but it was different.
Casey:
And then you had to string them together.
Casey:
And then you had to set up everyone in the same really, really hot room because no matter...
Casey:
How big the room was and how good the air conditioning was when you put all of these humongous machines with these CRTs that weren't exactly cool either, and you put them all in this little room with all these teenage dudes that probably don't have the best hygiene anyway, and then you sit there and eat Doritos and Mountain Dew for hours.
Casey:
And just playing these games like Doom and whatnot, when you can scream and yell at each other and you're right next to each other.
Casey:
And then I remember, somebody mentioned in the chat, and one of my all-time favorites was playing Descent, the first Descent.
Casey:
And playing that not only against your friends locally, but also playing it via modem directly between two friends.
Casey:
And then eventually when Kali or Kali or whatever it was called came out and it would let the internet masquerade as an IPX network, which was all that most of these games supported at the time.
Casey:
And oh my God, it was so much fun.
Casey:
And it was...
Casey:
so it was such a defining part of my childhood like between that and uh all of the nintendo consoles i know i i jokingly begrudged it as recently as earlier this episode uh the whole game thing but god it was such a big part of my my upbringing in my childhood and i spent so much time playing these games and it's just so weird to me like not to get all i what happened to you i don't know i just i grew out i don't mean this to be uh dismissive but i guess i just grew out of it like it just wasn't a priority to me anymore and
Casey:
I can't even remember the last game that I played that I was really, really into.
Casey:
I guess maybe Metal Gear Solid on the original PlayStation.
Casey:
And it was probably not the first Metal Gear Solid either.
John:
Well, when PlayStation 3s are $99 in a couple of years, I'll send you one and you can play Journey.
Ha ha ha ha.
Casey:
you're not gonna leave me alone until i play journey are you i'm gonna leave anybody alone marco you're still on your schedule too yep wait what was marco's schedule it's the whenever the hell marco gets around to his schedule like most things in his life it's very different these days um that you know networking is ubiquitous or if not ubiquitous darn near ubiquitous and
Casey:
And it's such a far cry from what we had to deal with.
Casey:
And I'm not saying that to make it sound like I walked uphill both ways.
Casey:
That's not at all the point.
Casey:
It's surprising to me how much technology has changed in so little time where our children will not have any of these woes that we had.
Casey:
I remember to connect to the internet originally, my dad and I spent literally a couple of weeks
Casey:
trying to figure out, I believe, not only the modem initialization string or whatever you called it, the AT, whatever, whatever, whatever string, but then also the correct – what was it?
Casey:
Was it slip, S-L-I-P?
Casey:
Yeah, P-P-P and all that.
Casey:
Yeah, to figure out the correct slip script to write.
Casey:
And I've probably told the story before, and I'm sorry, but –
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
It was such pain.
Casey:
And when we finally got it, it was such a sense of accomplishment.
Casey:
And it's just it's not the same anymore.
Casey:
Kids these days have different issues that they have to overcome like windows.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it's just it's so funny to me how different things are today.
Marco:
I mean, ultimately, it's better today.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Well, hold on.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Fracture, Ting, and Squarespace.
Marco:
And we'll see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean it.
Marco:
I disagree with something that John said a few minutes back, which is about how network play kind of replaced in-person play.
Marco:
I don't think it's anywhere near the same thing.
Marco:
And the headset and the constant voice chat does improve things a lot, but I don't know.
Marco:
There's something about...
Marco:
Just being in the same room or being in the next room over from the people who you're playing against.
Marco:
And when you start marching into their base and you can hear them swear and get all upset about it.
Marco:
Or we had a rule during our LAN games for Total Annihilation.
Marco:
We had a rule that you were not allowed to mute the sound or to wear headphones.
Marco:
You had to use audible sound.
Marco:
You can turn it down, but it had to be audible.
Marco:
And so you could like, there was even strategy in that, like be careful what you click because the other person might hear you click on a big unit that makes a certain sound and they'll know you have one or something like, there's all these like little factors you could, you could add in or that, or that just kind of happened that made it a more interesting, more rich experience to like be in the same room as people and be playing with people as opposed to just everyone meet on the same server together, you know?
Marco:
And, and I think, I think looking at that,
Marco:
What probably really killed the LAN party as being a thing, besides how incredibly expensive and complicated and time-consuming it was, was the N64 getting four players.
Marco:
Because the N64 came out at roughly the same time that we were doing all this stuff, or a little before, but it really came into its own by that time.
Marco:
So we were faced with, all right, well, what do you want to do tonight?
Marco:
Do you want to all bring your computers over and dick around with Windows for two hours?
No.
Marco:
Or do you want to just come over and play Goldeneye?
Marco:
And it's already here.
Casey:
And Mario Kart.
Casey:
Right.
Marco:
Hey, you two guys bring controllers because I only have two.
Marco:
Otherwise, we're fine.
Marco:
I feel like in-person playing of four-player good N64 and forward games, I think that really did more to kill the LAN party.
John:
Well, I didn't say that it was the same, but it did replace it in the same way that when you went from what replaced your LAN parties, what replaced it was four player script screen.
John:
Four player split screen is not the same because everybody can see everybody else's screen, but it did replace it.
John:
So like I said, if you look at how are people doing most of their multiplayer gaming, it used to be that the super hardcore gamers were having LAN parties.
John:
Nowadays, the super hardcore LAN gamers are sitting in front of a screen with a headset on.
John:
So it replaced it.
John:
And I was thinking of the in-person thing, like the places where LAN parties still exist, like at conventions.
John:
Often, when I see people playing at giant LAN parties at conventions, they're playing at the LAN party the same way they play at home, which is headphones on, headset on, staring at the screen in front of them.
John:
Which is not, you know, it's not the same, you're right.
John:
But that is what has replaced, like, those other aspects that were different were deemed not as important as the aspects that they liked.
John:
Just like when you went to four-player split-screen GoldenEye, the aspects that you were missing having private screens were significant but were not the most important thing.
John:
The most important thing is you were having fun with your friends.
John:
And for most people, like, the inconvenience of traveling to be the same place, like, a lot of that has to do with, like, scheduling, you know.
John:
getting everybody when they're all free at the same time and can travel to someone's house to sit on their couch together to play a game even when you've eliminated all land party stuff it's harder to do that than it is to hey when dinner is done and the kids are in bed let me just wander into my computer room and everyone get online the same way we do our podcast everyone just get online at nine o'clock and that works out you know so it is definitely different and there are aspects that are not as good and you're missing things but convenience wins out eventually
Casey:
And that's true.
Casey:
But to me, some of my favorite memories of doing these quote unquote land parties or null modem parties or whatever you want to call them was if not the hooping and hollering that happened during the games like Marco was describing.
Casey:
But man, the trash talk afterwards, like after a session or a game or a round or whatever was over.
Casey:
when you would just happily, fun, get in each other's faces and start screaming and yelling about, oh, I can't believe you did that, you wuss, and oh, I totally slaughtered you on that level, and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Maybe it's just because I'm obnoxious, but oh, that was the most fun in the world.
Casey:
And that just, I don't see, and it's hard for me to say because I don't really play games that much anymore, but I don't see that happening at a LAN party, or especially if you're not co-located.
John:
Well, I'm pretty sure trash talk still works over headset mics.
John:
Someone who plays PC games can confirm to me that perhaps trash talk still is a thing on the internet.
Marco:
You know what I mean.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure trash talk is the only thing that goes over headset mics.
John:
That's true.
John:
You know what I'm saying?
John:
I was trying to do like verbal sarcasm tags because sometimes people don't catch it.
John:
Like when I said the Mac Mini has a Core 2 Duo and people corrected me as if I was serious.
John:
That was sarcasm, folks.
John:
uh we invented it in new york i think well everything comes from new york is for the best oh god we we mr ohio i'm sorry accepting this well i you left so i'm at least here now it's more important to be from there than to be there hey hey john where where were you born what does your birth certificate say what state new york and would you ask me
John:
i don't know virginia right connecticut i don't know some crazy state new york john new york yeah how long were you in new york at least a few minutes right you have to have your formative years there the thing that the thing that molds you into the man that you are your formative years are called formative for a reason where did you spend those years casey so well not in new york so i was zero through like two in uh fort montgomery new york then we
Casey:
bounced around for a little bit when i was a really young kid and from like kindergarten through second grade i believe it was i was in uh carmel new york and carmel new york's not new york come on it's upstate up it's not that upstate my god it's basically canada
Marco:
Marco is practically upstate.
Casey:
Oh my god, Carmel is like an hour and a half from New York City.
Casey:
It is not that upstate.
Marco:
You can get pretty out there in an hour and a half from New York City.
John:
The only way you can get an hour and a half from New York City and not be upstate is by going east.
Marco:
So into the ocean?
Marco:
Oh, Long Island, I guess.
John:
Yeah.
John:
There's bridges and tunnels.
Marco:
You can get there.
Marco:
It's traffic and wine.
Marco:
Oh, goodness.
Marco:
One thing, actually, that I wanted to mention here, only because we were talking about this LAN party and PC gaming crap, is that...
Marco:
So one of the four core guys that I had these LAN parties with is getting married this spring.
Marco:
And as part of the bachelor party, we're renting a beach house somewhere for a weekend, and we want to play LAN games again.
Marco:
So I think what I'm going to do to have this done is... And we don't want to play new games.
Marco:
We want to play Total Annihilation and maybe Supreme Commander at the newest, which came out in late 2004 or something.
Marco:
So not new games by any stretch.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
So what I'm thinking is I'm thinking of configuring because I don't want to have to spend this whole weekend downloading stuff over God knows what connection and configuring stuff there.
Marco:
That's not a good use of a weekend in a beach house.
Marco:
So I was thinking TechServe will rent you MacBook Pros like by the day or by the week and for a pretty reasonable price.
Marco:
So I was thinking I could just like rent like six MacBook Pros and have like a pre-configured Parallels VM and
Marco:
that I would set up beforehand and just copy all of them and play that way.
Marco:
Is that plausible, you think?
Marco:
You could try Boxer.
John:
It's a DOS game, right?
Marco:
You could try Boxer.
Marco:
No, unfortunately, these are Windows games.
Marco:
Total Annihilation is like a Windows 98 era game, but it still works on modern Windows.
John:
It doesn't run in DOS?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
And Superman Commander is like a DirectX 9 game.
Marco:
It's relatively recent.
Marco:
It's 10 years old, but relatively recent.
John:
Why don't you just boot the MacBook Pros into Windows to play the game?
Marco:
Because I don't know how... I think that that might take too long to get a real boot camp partition.
Marco:
I guess I could image it somehow.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't know how to do that, though.
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
There's imaging products for this piece.
John:
Anyway, either of those things should probably work.
John:
For total annihilation, any one of those things should work.
John:
It should run reasonably in a VM.
John:
Just try it once on your Mac Pro to see if it does fine in VMware.
Marco:
Oh, and to answer the chat people, the reason I don't just get Windows machines is because I want to have all this set up before I rent the computers and before I get there.
Marco:
Have a VM set up so I can just copy it over and be done with it and not spend hours and hours and hours making this work.
John:
I predict that no matter what you do to prepare for this, part of the LAN party experience will be preserved, and that will be the part of you dicking around with the computers.
John:
Almost definitely.
John:
So be glad.
John:
That shouldn't be a failure.
John:
That should be considered part of the success.
Marco:
I've tried to get back into games so many times.
Marco:
There's this great other podcast called Three Moves Ahead.
Marco:
It's a strategy gaming podcast.
Marco:
It's also a lot of good stuff just about people.
Marco:
They have good chemistry there, so it's an interesting show.
Marco:
I tried to get into that.
Marco:
I listened to the episodes that were about ancient games that I'm aware of, but all the ones about new games...
Marco:
I don't know what the heck they're talking about.
Marco:
And it's like this whole world that's had has moved on for like 10 years since I stopped paying attention to it.
Marco:
And I feel like I can't get back into it now.
Marco:
Like I'm excited to play ancient games with my ancient friends on this one occasion.
Marco:
I'm excited about that.
Marco:
But like I don't want to play Total Annihilation Against Strangers on the Internet today.
John:
Well, you can look at the good way and the bad way.
John:
The bad way is that you're missing out on all these great games and you are missing out on them.
John:
But the good way is that by being ignorant for so long, in your future somewhere lies a time when you're going to somehow stumble upon or find yourself playing a modern game.
John:
And you're going to be like, oh, my God, I didn't know.
John:
When did this happen to games?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It happened to me with console games because I never owned game consoles because my parents didn't let me have one.
John:
And I stopped kind of playing them over my friend's house once I really got into computers because that sort of dominated my life.
John:
And around the SNES era, I kind of faded away from consoles.
John:
And the next time I paid any attention at all to consoles was when I saw...
John:
my cousin's nintendo 64 mario 64 i'm like oh my god when did this happen it's not like i hadn't seen 3d graphics before like we were all playing quake with voodoo cards or whatever or a friend's house but seeing a game console with an analog stick and seeing mario 64 was just like a shock to my system and totally brought me back to console gaming and it also helped at that point i was old enough to buy my own so
John:
In your future somewhere, you will have your Mario 64 a moment and you will probably get back into it.
John:
But in the meantime, you should have used my strategy with cars, which is I'll never drive or, you know, with the exception of seeing your M5, see any of these cars in real life or have anything to do with them.
John:
But I've been reading car magazines since I was like 10 years old, like continuously.
John:
So despite the fact that I...
John:
didn't own any cars until many many years and then now i've only had a couple of cars in my entire life i still feel like i'm in the car scene just by reading car magazines every month for my entire adult and half of child life so you could have been doing that if you really cared uh i mean i kind of do it too i read all the game i read the gaming news i read the game console magazines and granted i have like five consoles like those on my tv but i don't have all of them and i don't play all the pc games but i'm aware of them so it's kind of like a you know
John:
What point is there reading car magazines about cars you're never going to own?
John:
What point is there reading game magazines about games you're never going to play?
John:
It's both kind of the same thing.
John:
I do both of them.
Casey:
You know, hearing you say voodoo card, it made me remember, as I'm getting on this nostalgic kick, that one 3D card that we had, I think it was the first one we got, where...
Casey:
You would take this short little stubby cable and plug it into the VGA out of your actual video card and then plug it into a VGA in on the 3D daughter card.
Casey:
And then the VGA out that goes to your monitor was on that 3D daughter card.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
It was so terrible.
Marco:
Yeah, that was the crappy old days.
Marco:
The Voodoo 2, I think, did that.
Marco:
My first good 3D card was the Voodoo 3 because the first one I think that was all integrated and didn't have that stupid hack.
Casey:
I remember back in the day when I was excited to get a sound blaster so I could listen to the sound effects on Carmen Sandiego as a 10-year-old or whatever I was.
John:
Those were the good old days of baiting PC users when their computers couldn't do basic things like have an auto-switching 10-100 Ethernet cable, like you mentioned the Xbox, or...
John:
A sound card?
John:
What do you need a sound card for?
John:
My computer can make sounds.
Marco:
Except our computers can play games and my very first mouse game with two buttons.
John:
That's not a feature.