The Great Odwalla Flavor Change of 2013
Casey:
oh is that what we missed son of a oh man excellent track excellent track yeah that was that was my it was one of my first uh cassettes that i ever bought was mc hammer yeah it was please hammer don't hurt him did you end up having him sign that cassette when you met him many years later
Marco:
No, I did not have it with me in Manhattan.
Marco:
It's poor planning.
Marco:
When he was promoting Dance Jam, I did not.
Marco:
And I was promoting Tumblr.
Casey:
Is that still a thing?
Casey:
Is Dance Jam still a thing?
Marco:
I have no clue.
Marco:
Even that day, I didn't even look it up.
Casey:
Dance Jam has come to an end.
Casey:
Thank you all for the participation over the years, but Dance Jam has come to an end.
Marco:
I guess they sunset their brand.
Marco:
They're aligning their visions with their platform umbrella.
Casey:
Oh, just stop.
Casey:
Just stop.
Casey:
You're hurting my ears.
Casey:
John, let's talk about how you can sell tickets quickly.
John:
Yeah, last show we talked about how they would sell WWC tickets this year.
John:
Of course, in the grand tradition of our Wednesday recording of our Friday show, Apple announced how they were going to sell tickets after we had recorded the episode.
John:
So that was fun.
John:
So one of the options was a lottery.
John:
That's what Apple ended up doing.
John:
And...
John:
some feedback on twitter someone saying that they didn't think uh that that it was really difficult to do a system uh that won't crash due to the onslaught of people wanting to buy tickets and on the previous show i had said that you know it this is a bounded problem it's not like facebook where in theory everyone on the earth with an internet connection could get an account there is limited interest in wwdc how we were trying to think how many people could there possibly be maybe one million as an upper bound a crazy upper bound for this conference of five thousand people and i said surely
John:
Someone could design a system that can handle the onslaught of 1,000 people and basically serve them on a first-come, first-served basis.
John:
No guarantees.
John:
You may still get blocked out, but it's a way of potentially increasing your odds versus a lottery, a truly random lottery, where there's no way of increasing your odds.
John:
It doesn't matter when you enter.
John:
It doesn't matter what you do.
John:
You're just one of another...
John:
whole pile of people.
John:
And so someone said, well, that's what Google did, too, because apparently even the mighty Google couldn't put up a service for their I.O.
John:
conference that would withstand that.
John:
So they did a lottery instead.
John:
I don't think Google did a lottery because they couldn't provide a service that withstood the onslaught.
John:
It's conceivable that
John:
Google did the same mistake that Apple has made where underestimating what the demand would be and put a wimpy system out there and the wimpy system fell down.
John:
But I think it is entirely within Google's technical expertise to make a system that would allow a million or so people to try to sign up for a conference all at the same time.
John:
And as evidence of this, someone on Twitter pointed me to ShmooCon.
John:
I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly.
John:
I guess it could be ShmooCon, right?
John:
That's in short for schmooze.
John:
uh yeah it's it's uh this is from the description on their website it's an annual east coast hacker convention hellbent on offering three days of an interesting atmosphere for demonstrating technology technology exploitation blah blah blah blah anyway it's it's you know by tech nerds for tech nerds presumably it's a small conference but they did pretty much what i described on the preview show which is like well just make something simple and straightforward without anything fancy in it and have a system whereby everyone just floods it all at once and everyone uh
John:
You know first come first serve and that's all there is to it And it's not a guarantee and you could still be the very first person to click the button and still not get a ticket because of the vagaries of the way servers work But at least you're increasing your odds and their servers don't fall down And this shmukhan obviously is small and that what they did is they did a series of rounds where they would release 650 tickets at once like you know and I don't know how long the rounds were separated by maybe an hour or whatever and
John:
And then if you reserve your spot, then you have like five minutes to check out or something like that.
John:
And if you decide not to buy the ticket, it goes back into the pool.
John:
And everyone who didn't get a reservation gets put in a queue for anything that's coming, any tickets that people don't buy, and they do a series of rounds or whatever.
John:
So anyway, the person who was haranguing me about this on Twitter was telling me that, you know, in a slightly condescending tone that I didn't know what I was talking about.
John:
I'm pretty sure after, what, 20 years of doing web development, I know what is and isn't possible in web development on this scale.
John:
It is possible to make a system that gives you slightly increased odds of getting a ticket if you are one of the first people waiting to click the button.
John:
Again, no guarantees, and it's not going to be perfect, but you can make a server that doesn't crash under this kind of load, and apparently these people have done it.
John:
And they were going back and forth on Twitter about this, and there was a lot of goalposts moving and hemming and hawing, but the bottom line is that I think Apple and Google both have slightly more financial and technical resources than ShmooCon.
John:
And Shmookon is doing 650 ticket rounds.
John:
So Apple could just use the Shmookon technology, which is probably like one Linux server and one programmer.
John:
They could use that technology to do like seven or eight rounds and fill up WWDC.
John:
Or, you know, they could use a little bit of the bazillions of dollars they have and do something similar.
John:
Anyway, regardless of...
John:
you know as i said in the preview show and a lottery is is by far the best system for apple and apple tends to do what's best for apple and they did what was best for apple so this is all kind of a moot point but i wanted to bring it up again because there is an actual example right down to the sort of very simple text only not very fancy looking stuff written i think by one one or two people who they were sending me messages on twitter so it can be done
Marco:
Honestly, I would love the chance to try to write something like that.
Marco:
Just like whenever there's a big keynote that is not live streamed and everybody clogs the hell out of the various blogs that have live chat transcripts of what's going on.
John:
i always thought it would be cool to attempt to design one of those things and see like how how much it stood up to yeah you remember all those things crashing uh ars technica had the same problem because they kept trying different vendors and then they hired someone named lee uh who was a pro programmer and he by himself wrote the new ars technica system for handling live blogs and they've been using it ever since with no problems one person probably a couple months of development
John:
So there you go.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, if you custom tailor it to exactly your needs and no more, and you do it right, taking advantage of things like S3 and CDNs to alleviate a lot of the load and spreading out the load and stuff like that, you can do it.
Marco:
It'd be really cool.
Marco:
Anyway, so I think this kind of thing... I would love the chance to design this kind of system and see how...
Marco:
How, like, could it handle the rush from a 5,000-ticket conference of, you know, 50,000 people trying to get into it or whatever the number might be?
John:
If you were in a class, like a college course, about this topic, that this would be one of, like, your homework assignments or one of, like, your midterm project or whatever.
John:
You know, design a system that could withstand XY and they would have, like, a test harness that would subject your system to these stresses and you'd have some given amount of hardware that you had to use efficiently or whatever.
John:
Like, it's...
John:
It doesn't get much more straightforward than this.
John:
Say you don't even have to do the purchase part.
John:
Just do the reservation part.
John:
That is almost the simplest possible problem you could have.
John:
And it would be a great idea to, like, let me try using Node.js.
John:
Let me try using a NoSQL database.
John:
Let me use a relations database.
John:
Let me try it with flat files.
John:
Let me try it with shared memory.
Marco:
I think if you're using a database at all, you already lost.
Marco:
I mean, my solution would be Memcache and using the atomic operations within Memcache cleverly to make it basically an all-Memcache solution.
John:
but that's that that would be the exercise would be like within a given set of hardware all these different technologies and how how do how well do they take advantage of the hardware or don't they you know and you'd probably be given like more hardware than you need but like you would have to have something that's scaled out horizontally like it's a good object lesson because it's it's a very simple thing that you're trying to do uh we should actually talk about i think i have scaling way down the notes anyway but anyway continuing the follow-up that'll be a quick topic
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then do you want to talk about anything else regarding the sign-up process, specifically the follow-up area?
John:
Oh, no.
John:
We have to say how we all did in the WWDC lottery, but I don't have any more follow-up on this sign-up thing.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we should probably talk about WWDC tickets and what came of that.
Casey:
So, all three of us registered for tickets.
Casey:
We were registered for the opportunity to spend $1,600.
Casey:
Marco, did you get a ticket?
Marco:
I won the chance to spend $1,600, and I took that chance.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
I, too, won a chance to spend $1,600, and thankfully, since I'm gainfully employed, unlike you, I used works money to spend $1,600.
Casey:
John, how did you fare?
John:
I did not get a golden ticket.
John:
I got a sad email an hour and a half after the supposed deadline that said, unfortunately, you did not win a chance to spend $1,600.
John:
Try again next year.
Casey:
This genuinely makes me extremely sad.
Casey:
And I know this probably doesn't come across as genuine because I am very excited to have gotten a ticket.
Casey:
But I almost, not quite, but almost wish that of the three of us, you were the one to get the ticket because I think it takes the most encouragement for you to get out there, justifiably, I should add.
Casey:
And so I feel like the universe has kind of wronged all of us by not allowing you to win the lottery.
John:
I wish your work was paying for my ticket and that I could buy one.
Marco:
Yeah, I also, you know, because, I mean, you look around at the rates of people you hear from on Twitter, people you follow, at the rates of how many of them got rejected.
Marco:
I would say, roughly speaking, I would guess maybe one in ten got in of people that I follow or heard about or from.
Casey:
Yeah, I would say the same thing.
Casey:
And it's funny, because before the tickets went on, or before the lottery ended, I had plucked out of thin air, you know, I bet you it's about 50,000 people, because I knew a lot of, and I shouldn't say a lot, but I knew a handful of people that I didn't think, or they didn't think that they would go if they got a ticket.
Casey:
But what harm is it in throwing your name in the hat?
Casey:
You know, there's no penalty for that, really.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
I would agree that of the people I saw, it was about one in 10.
Casey:
And given that it's about a 5,000 person conference, even I can handle that.
Casey:
That math says it's about 50,000 people.
Casey:
What did you think, John?
John:
Right after the announcement, it seemed to me like it was you had the 50-50 shot because I was seeing roughly half the people in the Twitter stream were saying I got one and didn't.
John:
But then later on, I started hearing about like whole blocks of people who like, oh, yeah, everybody in our 10 person company.
John:
applied and none of us got tickets so that starts to bounce it out beforehand if you were to ask me I would say like 10 to 1 or 20 to 1 but then afterwards I was thinking maybe it's only like 2 or 3 to 1 but it's so hard to tell because I don't think we have a good sample size because you don't know everybody who's maybe only the winners are saying yay they got them instead of
John:
Being sad that they didn't, I'm not even sure Apple will give us numbers.
John:
I suppose in the WWDC keynote in the beginning, in their big part where they talk about all their numbers that they're proud of, they'll be like, welcome to WWDC.
John:
It's so popular, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Maybe they'll throw something out there, but
John:
In the end, it doesn't matter too much, I think.
John:
It wasn't like 100 or 1,000 to 1.
John:
I think we can ballpark it.
John:
It's somewhere between 2 to 1, 10 to 1, 21, but I would be really surprised if it's 100 to 1.
John:
It seems like it's much lower than that.
Marco:
I feel kind of sad for everyone who didn't get one.
Marco:
That's why I didn't say anything on Twitter about whether I got one or not.
Marco:
Really, the only reason that I even agreed to talk about it here is that everyone's asking us.
Marco:
I feel guilty that I got one.
Marco:
Not guilty enough to not take it.
John:
Survivor's guilt.
John:
You two both asked me before the show that if I wanted to talk about whether I got one or not, because there's two things at play.
John:
One is that some people who got the chance to buy a ticket chose not to.
John:
And I know people who did that.
John:
Because I was asking them if they could somehow transfer their ticket to me.
John:
I don't think there's a way to do that.
John:
I think if you got the chance to buy a ticket and you choose not to buy it, well, then you choose not to buy.
John:
Those tickets go back into a pool somewhere, and presumably Apple will disperse them to people who didn't win the lottery the first time.
John:
So there's that glimmer of hope for me.
John:
And the second part is the glimmer of hope that someone inside Apple knows who I am and says, oh, we should get that guy a ticket.
John:
Some people might give me a hard time about that, or some people think that I should feel bad that somehow because I have this amount of fame from writing these reviews or whatever, that someone inside Apple would recognize my name and say, oh, give him one of our pool of tickets that we reserve or whatever.
John:
But I think that's perfectly valid because, for example, why do certain journalists get tickets and other ones don't?
John:
depending on your publication is it because of your readership is it because of your fame is it because apple likes you apple just chooses which people from the press that they like and gives them press passes to the keynote i'm not going to get a press pass to the keynote of course but for many years lots of other people didn't get press passes to the keynote and then they did get them and then they didn't get them and it's like it's whoever apple picks if apple likes you and people inside apple like you you get nice things from apple if they don't like you or don't know you don't get nice things
John:
I have limited control over that.
John:
Hopefully, you know, for writing reviews that people in Apple might read, they might know who I am or whatever.
John:
But, you know, it's not, I don't feel guilty if I get special treatment because of that.
John:
For the same reason that, you know, John Gruber shouldn't feel guilty that he gets a press pass.
John:
It's like, oh, you just got a press pass because you run Daring Fireball.
John:
Yeah, that's why he got a press pass.
John:
Like, you know.
John:
It makes perfect sense to me.
Marco:
Well, also, to point out what the press pass is, which is important, when Gruber gets a press pass, those press passes are only good for the keynote.
Marco:
After the keynote, that's it.
Marco:
They kick you out.
Marco:
So even if you got a press pass, it wouldn't really help for your purposes, because your purposes are you actually go to the sessions the whole week to learn stuff for your review.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
If you got a press pass via ours or via any other means for the keynote, that really wouldn't help you at all because it would only be for that morning, which you can watch anytime, anywhere, anyway.
Marco:
And most of the stuff that you would talk about or go into the labs, asking questions, talking to the engineers, a press pass wouldn't allow you to do any of that stuff.
John:
Yeah, if I had to choose, like, you know, I'm not going to get a press pass anyway, because I'm not being pressed at the keynote, but, you know, I talked to ours about it, and I told ours, like, if you get a press pass, use it for people who are going to report on the keynote, because I'm not going to report on the keynote, and that's what you should use the press pass to.
John:
The press pass is useless to me.
John:
I need the pass to the entire conference, because I go to sessions every single day for the entire week.
John:
So...
John:
while it would be fun to go to the keynote and be in the room or whatever, I would never take a press pass away from someone who's actually going there to report it.
John:
Whereas people are like, oh, you're taking a pass away from a real developer.
John:
I feel like I'm going to just as many sessions as a quote-unquote real developer, and I'm paying attention, and I'm taking notes, and I'm using that information to do something.
John:
What I'm doing is not writing a program, but I don't think it's any less of a practical, useful thing for me to go to all those sessions and take all those notes and
John:
synthesize all the data.
John:
So I feel no guilt in sort of, oh, you're taking a pass from someone who's a developer.
John:
If somehow I managed to get a pass to WC, you can be sure that I'm going to WC and taking that pass and going to all those sessions like I usually do.
John:
If I don't, oh, well, what can you do?
Marco:
Yeah, I think, you know, there's always every year, we even talked about this last year, every year you look around and you talk to people there and there's always people who get in who you can pretty much...
Marco:
After five minutes of talking to them, you can pretty much tell, yeah, they didn't really need to be here.
Marco:
People who just really aren't into Mac or iOS development and also don't want to be into it, and they're just there because their company was willing to send them and they happened to get a ticket or something.
Marco:
You shouldn't feel bad about...
Marco:
If you're at all interested in this world of these ecosystems, if you're at all interested, you should not feel bad taking a ticket for it.
Marco:
Yeah, there are a lot of people who are interested who don't get tickets, but you're not the one person keeping all those people out.
John:
Yeah, and honestly, the videos really do help.
John:
If I don't get a ticket, why it's not so bad this year and not calamitous to my review, hopefully, is that assuming they don't announce the release date of OS X is like a week after WWDC, in which case we're all screwed.
John:
They release the videos in a timely manner now, so it's not so bad for me to not be there to sit through the sessions.
John:
Now, it depends on what they announce in the year.
John:
So, for example, in certain past years, they've announced technologies and stuff that I've spent multiple hours talking to
John:
Let's just say people about at WWDC that really heavily informed my review and helped me make it better.
John:
And those are some of the, you know, like from the outside, if you look at my reviews, like maybe it looks like all just one sort of one undifferentiated soup of information.
John:
But I know the parts of information that I never would have known had I not been physically at WWDC.
John:
But if I'm not physically there, the sessions have tons of information too.
John:
So it's not the end of the world for my review.
John:
The end of the world for my review is always what they announce for the release date.
John:
Because that tells me how much time I have to write the thing.
John:
But, you know, it's fun to go out there for a week.
John:
It's fun to see people.
John:
And I like being in the sessions.
John:
Like, there's something about being in the room.
John:
Even for things like the State of the Unions and the keynote, being in that room gives you a better idea of, like, what the vibe is than watching the videos.
John:
Because the videos are so...
John:
Not that they're manipulated, but they're post-processed in a way that, like, it doesn't feel like it does in the room.
John:
And in the room, you can get a sense of what people really think of what's going on for good or bad in any of these announcements.
John:
And plus just whispering to the people next to you or whatever.
John:
Like, it's a whole thing.
John:
I'll really be sad if I don't manage to get a ticket.
John:
But, again, what can you do?
Marco:
Yeah, in the videos, first of all, they don't show the presenter.
Marco:
It's just the picture is only of the slides.
Marco:
But they also cut out, like if there's any periods of applause or laughter, they'll actually cut that out.
John:
For time, because they try to make them faster, right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But being there live gets you all that stuff, no question, and that's great.
Marco:
And if there is Q&A, which there really rarely is these days, but if there is Q&A, that's almost always cut out of the video as well.
Marco:
but the videos have the advantage of being able to skim through, being able to rewind and being able to play it faster than one X speed, because the, the actual pace of the presenter speaking is very slow.
Marco:
So everyone can get it.
Marco:
And, you know, even if, even if your English isn't that great, or even if you're, even if you're a slow note taker, you can still follow along, um, which is very nice and accommodating of them.
Marco:
But, uh,
Marco:
It really is nice once you get home and you can download the videos to be able to skim through and play them at like 1.5x or 1.6x and get through a lot more, a lot faster.
Marco:
Or you can skip over sections that you already know about or sections that aren't relevant to you, stuff like that.
John:
Timely release of the videos is so much more important than getting a ticket in terms of getting the information out to me for reviews.
John:
Because when they weren't timely, I had to be in there taking notes like a demon.
John:
Because as soon as they changed that slide, I was never going to see those words again for God knows how many months.
John:
And so I was like, this is my only chance to type that.
John:
I'm literally transcribing the slides.
John:
And many times I took pictures of the slides.
John:
Like, I can't copy this all.
John:
I just got to take a picture.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It was a bad situation.
John:
Now, like for the past two years when they've been so good with the video, it's like, just relax.
John:
You don't need to copy down what's in the slides.
John:
You're going to be able to look at those slides in a couple days anyway.
John:
You'll be fine.
John:
And it's just so much nicer.
John:
And then you can write down what you really should be writing down is like your thoughts, your synthesis of the information you're receiving or points that occur to you or questions that you want to ask.
John:
And even if there's no Q&A, there's always the bunch of nerds gather around the presenter at the end of the thing.
John:
And if you really have a pressing question, you can take note of that presenter and hunt them down later in the week, or just go up there and stand and try to ask them your question after the session is over.
Marco:
Okay, that's actually one of my tips for WWDC that I started doing myself, is even if I don't have a question, I'll just go up there and stand there and listen to everyone else's questions and the answers that they get.
Marco:
Because a lot of times, like the mob presenter at the end answering questions from crazy people...
Marco:
you can get a lot of information out of that that is useful.
Marco:
Maybe they're asking questions you didn't think to ask, but it actually is useful information.
Marco:
So I always stand up there and just listen, even if I have nothing to say.
Casey:
So what do you guys think will happen this coming Monday at 5 p.m.
Casey:
?
Casey:
uh pacific which is when the deadline is for those who won the lottery to actually commit and reward apple for their winning the lottery with sixteen hundred dollars you know what do they do with those excess tickets do they start doling them out to john syracuse like we all hope do they do a second run lottery like they've never said anything about a waiting list what do you suspect is going to happen let's start with john
John:
I assume they're going to do another random disbursement.
John:
And if you're one of the lucky few, you will get an email that says, I know we told you before you couldn't get a ticket, but one is available.
John:
If you'd like to buy it, you have until X date.
John:
But I don't think they'll send out more negative emails like that.
John:
I won't get a second email telling me a bunch of new tickets were released from people who didn't buy them.
John:
But you didn't get one of those either, loser.
Casey:
That would be so cruel.
John:
That would be amazing.
John:
That's what I suspect, that the lucky people, kind of like what happened the year when everyone had like half purchased things in their cart.
John:
Like they just went to those people and said, hey, it looks like you tried to buy a ticket and didn't get it if you still want it.
John:
And I think that makes sense for the way they would do this.
Marco:
Well, so last year and the year before, when they've sold out rapidly, and probably before that too, but Apple's developer relations people have always had some tickets to give away.
Marco:
If somebody really important or really deserving didn't get a ticket, they could email their friends at Apple and be like, hey, would you consider me?
Marco:
And sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn't.
Marco:
So there has always been this pool of tickets that, that might be given away, you know, at, as the developer relations people, you know, at their discretion or to like important corporate clients or whatever the case may be, or, you know, you know, good, you know, good stories from students or young people or whatever else.
Marco:
So that my guess is when, when the number of tickets that are unclaimed becomes, you know, established and,
Marco:
if that number is really, really high, we estimate there's about 5,000 tickets.
Marco:
Let's say that number is over 1,000.
Marco:
If over 1,000 of them are unclaimed that weren't already reserved to be given away at their discretion, maybe they might do it in the random drawing.
Marco:
But honestly, I would assume that whatever pool is not...
John:
claim through the random lottery that just gets added to their pool of discretionary tickets that they can give away see i figured they had their discretionary pool was already pretty big and i that's why i thought they would do this as a second random thing is that i thought they already had a discretionary pool that was never even put up for possibility and they're just saving those like we i mean again this is why the system is great for apple we have no idea how they distributed tickets was it truly random did they pin down like okay we got to make sure at least x number of people from the microsoft office team
John:
get in there and these people from adobe and like you know the people who who have business relationships these people from ea have to go like can you imagine if everyone from ea got shut out like i don't see that happening right so surely they're you know and like it could be that the entire thing was like that like the as i said like a large portion of the pool could have been discretionary so they pinned down all their discretionaries first and then do everybody else random and that's why i think if these people don't buy again they will have already made sure that the people they care about got them and then just do a second random thing
John:
But none of us know.
John:
That's the beauty of this system.
John:
Apple can do whatever they want, and from the outside, we just all have to assume it is entirely random and fair.
John:
And from what I've seen, you can always do pattern matching and come up with conspiracy theories like, oh, nobody from Rogamiba got one.
John:
Apple doesn't like Rogamiba, therefore they're being shunned.
John:
But...
John:
Until we know what the total number of people trying to buy tickets was, like, what are the odds that all seven people from Rogue Unimu didn't get it?
John:
Probably pretty good.
John:
I mean, you know, like, no matter what the odds are, I think we're probably lucky in this show that two of the three of us got tickets.
John:
And I don't think that was because someone was trying to give people from ATP tickets, just that's the luck of the draw.
John:
So someone who's better at probability than I am can calculate the odds that any specific group of people all didn't get tickets.
John:
But I have a feeling that it's impossible to tell from the outside whether it was truly random.
Marco:
I mean, I think that at least some part – I think the part that's been given away so far was random because not only looking around and just seeing anecdotally what we see around us, but they used the word random everywhere.
Marco:
They used it on the site.
Marco:
They used it in both emails, confirm and reject.
Marco:
They used the word random so many times.
Marco:
It would be really weird to –
Marco:
say random so much if that portion of the tickets was not given away randomly.
Marco:
Apple's way is not to lie, it's just to withhold and not specify.
Marco:
So I would imagine this was actually random.
Marco:
Now, they could have randomly given away $3,500 and kept $1,500 for themselves for discretionary use.
Marco:
Who knows?
Casey:
Yeah, and I feel like at least some portion has to be random because how else do you explain away me getting a ticket and not John?
Casey:
As much as I'm excited about it, I think there's a pretty simple argument that the community at large would be better seeing a better OS X review than if I am able to go and talk about it on ATP.
Casey:
So it seems clear to me at least a portion was random.
John:
Well, like, there's other weightings they could use, for example.
John:
Like, here's the things that I'd imagine if they were going to do a non-random, because first of all, any random is like, you know, pseudo-random.
John:
Like, maybe they used the built-in rand and put a defined seed in or something.
John:
But anyway, like...
John:
There's many things that could weigh in there, which could be like, have you been to WWDC before?
John:
If you have, your odds go down.
John:
If you haven't, your odds go up.
John:
Because they want some portion of the people to be new people.
John:
Do you have an app in the App Store?
John:
Casey does.
John:
I don't.
John:
How long have you had a developer account?
John:
How many bugs have you filed?
John:
all sorts of criteria you can imagine coming up with this crazy algorithm to try to weight it to try to like we want some percentage of new people some percentage of people who are long-time developers we don't but if you just went to wbc give someone else a chance and like you can imagine trying to come up with this algorithm and then just feeding that into the engine and letting it spin and saying it's you know it's not deterministic it's just weighting your chances based on these criteria or it could be entirely random like again we don't know but like it seems like it's pretty fair like
John:
I don't see any rhyme or reason to the people who got them who didn't got them.
John:
And I think anything that I am seeing or can try to convince myself of, it's because like, you know, we're just pattern matching machines and we'll try to apply whatever, you know, we'll try to apply a narrative to anything that's random because there'll always be some patterns that we see in the noise.
John:
But yeah.
John:
Yeah, I'm pretty darn certain that they have a reasonably large pool of discretionary ones that they are sort of pinning down on the people they definitely want to come.
John:
And I am obviously not in that group, nor do I expect to be, nor should I be.
John:
Like, I'm just hoping that I can, you know, eke out one of the dregs when people choose not to buy tickets.
Yeah.
Marco:
Also, I haven't heard of anybody getting a discretionary ticket offered to them yet.
Marco:
They're probably at least waiting until this timeout period ends so they know how many they have, which is one of the reasons why I think these aren't going to be re-randomized.
Marco:
That's just going to be added to the discretionary pool.
John:
Wow.
John:
I mean, you used to be able to transfer them.
John:
There wasn't a reservation and a purchase.
John:
It used to be that you could buy them, but then you could transfer it as an asset within your ADC thing.
John:
So in past years, there was lots of horse trading going on of transferring these things around from one person to the other.
John:
But that's not possible this year as far as I know.
Marco:
Overall, are you guys... Obviously, because we had different results, our opinion of this is probably biased.
Marco:
But overall, how happy are you with this system that they did?
Casey:
I don't love it, but I can't conceive of a better system that isn't me selecting all my friends and giving them tickets.
Casey:
I wish there were something that worked out better selfishly in the sense that I'm very happy I got a ticket and I'm happy you did, but I wish John did.
Casey:
But if you look at the bigger picture, I can't conceive of a system wherein I think it's more fair than
Casey:
and also more agreeable to Apple, as John has said many, many, many times.
Casey:
I think a lottery, or even a lottery with some allotment on the side, is about as fair as you're going to get.
Marco:
Yeah, I also, I mean, again, I was picked this time, so it's kind of, I don't know how valid this opinion is, but that's why I said last week, when we were speculating about what they would do, I said this would be my preferred system, even if I didn't win.
Marco:
Because
Marco:
I think this is, again, it's like, you know, you can think of all these different ways to try to alleviate the problem of way too many people wanting to be in a conference that really can't and probably shouldn't grow larger.
Marco:
But I really do think this is the best way that they could have done it.
Marco:
And it worked flawlessly.
Marco:
I got to give them credit.
Marco:
The web service was perfectly fine, possibly as a result of the email process.
Marco:
delivery pace the checkout process was lightning fast and fine like everything the whole thing worked fine it worked exactly as they designed it it seems and I don't know I really think they did the best they could and it worked it worked as well as it could have
John:
Well, I gave my opinion last show and it's unchanged.
John:
I like the idea that people who are more enthusiastic about going can somehow increase their odds, not guarantee themselves a spot, not block out other people, but just like increase their odds slightly.
John:
That whole thing of everyone sitting around waiting for a clock to go and clicking on a button.
John:
Maybe that's not the best way to allow people to increase their odds, but it's a reasonable way because you are expressing your maniacal enthusiasm for wanting to go by doing that.
John:
And you are slightly increasing your odds by doing it.
John:
And so a system that Apple controls entirely, you don't have a good way at the time of purchase to increase your odds.
John:
The only way you can increase your odds is by, you know, doing something over the course of two decades to put you into the good graces of Apple, which is much harder to do a day before.
John:
So, you know.
John:
I would have said it even if I got a ticket this time because it's sort of the powerlessness of like, all I can do is put my little ticket into this hat and then just wait.
John:
And like I said, there's no way for me to express that I want to go to this more than somebody else.
John:
And surely I want to go to this more than at least one or two other people.
John:
But there's no way for me to increase my odds.
John:
I find that lack of control upsetting.
John:
And Apple, I'm sure, finds that lack of control delicious and lovely.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So really quickly, before Marco tells us about something cool.
Casey:
So, John, what I think you're saying is, in a perfect John Syracuse, WWDC ticket distribution world, Apple would do what they did in the first few years of me going anyway, where...
Casey:
They randomly out of the blue, I guess so that wasn't last year was the years prior out of the blue.
Casey:
They just let the tickets go and everyone has to jump on and stomp on their servers and try to get in before the servers crumble.
John:
So no, no, that was that that was no good because of the people who live in time zones and stuff like you're no matter how enthusiastic you are.
John:
If it's 2 a.m.
John:
where you are, that's not fair.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
So what would you say then?
Casey:
So what I was going to say was, let's assume the servers can handle that kind of impact, which I know is laughable to begin with.
Casey:
Assuming the servers can handle it, you would still do like 2013 where they pre-announce what the time is?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yep, pre-announce the time and date.
John:
I mean, someone's going to get screwed anyway because it's going to be 3 in the morning and somewhere on Earth when the thing goes off, right?
John:
But, like, you have to pick a time.
John:
I mean, they could even do it by region by time if they wanted to be fair, like this hemisphere, this time zone, release tickets in blocks.
John:
Like, they have ways to control, but basically, you'd know what time it was going to be, and you express your desire to go by being there, hovering over that button at the exact moment.
John:
And even if they all saw it in five seconds...
John:
if you're one of the people who click that button within that five seconds and you got lucky, because again, it's not a guarantee, you know, due to the magic of concurrency and everything at the very least you increased your odds versus someone who just strolled in 30 seconds later or forgot about it or set a reminder, but didn't get a chance to do it.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like it's not a great, it's not a great way to express your enthusiasm.
John:
It's not a perfect system, uh, but it is a way to increase your odds.
John:
Uh,
John:
And the only thing you need is, like, say you've never been.
John:
Like, boy, I've never been to WWDC.
John:
I keep hearing about it.
John:
Sounds really great.
John:
I really, really want to go.
John:
All you got to do is make that decision sometime before the date that they announced and sit there with your mouse button and click your little thing.
Casey:
I see your point, and that does make sense.
Casey:
So why don't you tell us, Marco, about something that's cool, but I'd also like to get you guys thinking, is WWDC the way it is today the right way to accomplish what they're trying to accomplish?
Casey:
But before that...
Marco:
New Relic is an all in one web app performance management tool.
Marco:
It lets you see performance from the end user experience through your servers and down to each line of your server side code.
Marco:
So our friends at New Relic asked us to take a minute and say a big thank you to all you data nerds out there building all this great stuff that we all know and love.
Marco:
They're sending a shout out to the developers, software geeks, the code jockeys, to those brave few who see things differently.
Marco:
High fives to all you rule breakers and disruptors.
Marco:
Here's to working nights, to wearing oversized concentration enhancing headphones.
Marco:
Hey, they got me there.
Marco:
Upon your furrowed brows.
Marco:
I don't know if I'm furrowed.
Marco:
That's like when you're tense and angry looking, right?
Marco:
When your brows are all tense in the middle.
Marco:
No, I'm not usually furrowed, but...
Marco:
I do always wear giant headphones.
Marco:
New Relic thanks you.
Marco:
The entire internet thanks you.
Marco:
Nowadays, if you're in any business, you're in the software business.
Marco:
Software powers our apps, runs our databases, manages our accounts, and runs e-commerce sites and email programs.
Marco:
When software breaks, everyone loses.
Marco:
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Marco:
That's a win-win, right?
Marco:
So New Relic monitors every move your application makes across the entire stack.
Marco:
They can show you what's happening right now.
Marco:
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Marco:
I don't even know half those things are, but they sound really cool.
Marco:
Just sign up at newrelic.com slash ATP for a 30-day free trial.
Marco:
So here's what you do.
Marco:
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Marco:
Now, their agent has native support right built in for Ruby, PHP, Java, .NET, Python, and even Node.
Marco:
I mean, come on.
Marco:
They're on the ball here.
Marco:
That's all the cool stuff.
Marco:
All the cool kids using one of those languages except PHP.
Marco:
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Marco:
You can start fixing issues and optimizing your performance.
Marco:
Once again, newrelic.com slash ATP for a free 30-day trial.
Marco:
Check it out.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to New Relic for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So at work, I am not involved with our application performance management group, but we do have one.
Casey:
And we use several different tools, but I can tell you with my hand on my heart that New Relic is one of our favorites.
Casey:
And although I've not used it personally, I know that my guys and girls at work who have used it really do like it.
Casey:
So you should check it out.
Casey:
So before the break, I had asked you guys or cued you guys up to ask, is WWDC the right answer for accomplishing what Apple is setting out to accomplish with the conference?
Casey:
And if not, what should we do?
Casey:
And I bring this up because I got into a couple of Twitter discussions about how, oh, WWDC is fundamentally broken and, oh, this shouldn't go on.
Casey:
They should make it so much bigger.
Casey:
Other Moscone's have much more space.
Casey:
This is terrible.
Casey:
Oh, my God, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And I just don't see how WWDC would be the same anymore if almost anything changed about it.
Casey:
So I don't love the system the way it is, but I don't begrudge it either.
Casey:
Marco, do you feel like it's okay the way it is?
Casey:
And if not, what would you do?
Marco:
There are ways they could improve it, certainly.
Marco:
But I think overall, there's a reason why it pretty much hasn't changed in years.
Marco:
It's in many years.
Marco:
I've been going since 2009.
Marco:
And I know it was different at various points in the past before then.
Marco:
But since I've gone from 2009 forward, it's been pretty much the exact same the entire time.
Marco:
They've had minor improvements to certain things.
Marco:
Like last year, the Odwalla flavors changed.
Marco:
And that threw me for a loop because I can't have the ones that have banana in them.
Marco:
And so every year there's like one flavor I can have.
Marco:
And so, yeah, that sucked because they removed the good one last year.
Casey:
Besides that – Oh, but they also patrolled it a lot more.
Casey:
Did you notice that?
Casey:
They didn't release the odd wall of refrigerators as often.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Which was too bad.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
But, you know, besides the Odwalla flavor change, the great Odwalla flavor change of 2013, for the worse, I might add, at least for those with banana allergies.
Marco:
But besides that, you know, they're trying to alleviate this with things like releasing the videos really, really quickly and making them available to everyone, not just attendees, which they changed, I think, a few years back.
Marco:
And
Marco:
And having the tech talks all around the country for free that are like, you know, like one day mini WBDCs.
Marco:
And what's interesting, the tech talks, they split up into game and non-game tracks.
Marco:
And so that's one thing you could do maybe is... People always say this, you know, have basically two parallel conferences or two sequential conferences.
Marco:
One focused for game developers and technologies they use, and one focused on app developers.
Marco:
Because that actually is a pretty...
Marco:
pretty effective bisection of the market not just because you know so many apps are games and so many apps aren't games and like there's enough people on both sides to pack those conferences full and it's a pretty good division but also because there's there's good subject matter division there that there's a whole lot of stuff like almost all of the interface ui stuff widget stuff like game developers almost never use those things so you know it's so much of that like so much of the um
Marco:
Like if iOS 8 – we should actually have an iOS 8 prediction slash wish list segment at some point, but probably before WWDC would be nice.
Marco:
But if they add something like better inter-app communication and sharing features like the Windows contract or the Android Intense or vice versa, whatever the match is up there.
Marco:
If they add something like that, then that's something that, again, game developers probably wouldn't use that.
Marco:
Game developers need a lot more stuff about media and GL.
Marco:
And there's some things that are common, like networking frameworks.
Marco:
That's common.
Marco:
Memory management, profiling tools, stuff like that.
Marco:
Most of that is common between the two worlds, but there's so much stuff that isn't.
Marco:
Whereas if you took pretty much any other division, like Mac versus iOS even is a pretty bad division these days because there's not that much stuff exclusive to one or the other anymore.
Marco:
At least that's worth talking about at WBDC.
Marco:
So there's all that.
Marco:
But then what if they do something like what if they announce an iWatch or some kind of new platform?
Marco:
Do they do that at the app conference or the game conference?
Marco:
And which one covers which?
Marco:
You can see there are problems with that approach as well.
Marco:
So I don't really know what else they could do.
Marco:
I think they're already doing what they can, which is...
Marco:
Sell as many tickets as they can and try to reduce demand in slightly meaningful ways.
Marco:
I know a lot of people, and this began a little bit last year, but this year I'm seeing it more.
Marco:
A lot of the people I know in the iOS community didn't even try to get tickets.
Marco:
that they just are like, all right, well, you know what?
Marco:
I'll save the $1,600.
Marco:
I'll go out there anyway.
Marco:
I'll have all the social aspects and all the business meetings and networking, most of it that I can do.
Marco:
And I'll just hang out with some friends every day and watch the videos that come out every day.
Marco:
And I think by having the videos come out like right then rather than, you know, only a couple of years ago, the videos coming out a week after the conference was revolutionary.
Marco:
Because it used to be months after the conference they would come out.
Marco:
And then a couple of years ago, it was a week.
Marco:
And then last year, it was like half a day.
Marco:
And that changed everything, I think, because now it is totally plausible to go out there and watch the videos during the week, in the week of the conference, while you're out there without actually attending it.
Marco:
And I know a lot of people who chose to do that even before they knew whether they got a ticket.
Marco:
They didn't even try.
Marco:
So I think they're doing an okay job of managing it.
Casey:
So I have one problem with what you just said, which is how do you acquire these videos if you're not sitting in the cafeteria area at Moscone?
Casey:
Because they're pretty big and hotel Wi-Fi sucks and you don't want to be downloading gigabytes of video over an LTE connection unless you're somehow rich enough to afford a 90 gig connection.
Yeah.
Marco:
That, I don't know what people do with that.
Marco:
I assume, I mean, I sure wouldn't do it.
Marco:
In the past, I've never downloaded stuff until I've gotten to that cafeteria for that exact reason.
Casey:
Because I was contemplating going even without a ticket before I knew whether or not I would get a ticket.
Casey:
And the one problem I had with my grand master plan, not grand master, with my master plan was
Casey:
I could spend the day watching the videos, and thus it wouldn't really be lost time, but I didn't know how to get the videos because hotel Wi-Fi sucks, always.
Casey:
Even in a place like San Francisco, where you would assume that half the internet runs through it some way, somehow, hotel Wi-Fi is still terrible.
Casey:
So I...
Casey:
I would wonder if there was a way to do that.
Casey:
Or maybe one of the answers to make WWDC more livable is to allow people into the cafeteria area during not eating times.
Casey:
I know there's a million logistical issues there, but my point is give the John Syracusis of the world, not to pick on you, John, but give you a way to get these videos with a quickness without having to download them over crummy hotel Wi-Fi.
John:
Well, they just need to extend their Wi-Fi network outside of the thing.
John:
Like, I think you can, can you kind of Wi-Fi mooch?
John:
I mean, I know they have Wi-Fi in the big giant lobby, but it seems like the sort of the exterior walls of the building stop it.
John:
I don't know if you're, if I was like in line with my iPod touch, could I get the Wi-Fi that's in there?
John:
Because the password is always, you know, you get the password from someone who you know is a WWDC and then get on the WWDC Wi-Fi network.
John:
And presumably that will suffice for you to download a bunch of videos and go.
John:
And I don't think Apple...
Marco:
cares that you did that but well they they often will block big download files like always they always block like the betas that they make available they always block those from being downloaded over wi-fi because they don't want the wi-fi clogged up with everyone downloading these like two gig files so they i think they might block the videos as well but i mean if you know someone who's going to be in there the easiest solution is to just have them download everything onto a usb stick and hand it to you
Casey:
Oh, that's a really good point.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, I feel like there are ways to do it.
John:
And there's always someplace where you can find Wi-Fi just because we don't live there and hotel Wi-Fi still doesn't mean there's no Wi-Fi in San Francisco.
John:
Like some someplace there.
John:
I mean, the worst case, I mean, like for us, again, it's like, who do you know?
John:
Like, could we go to the Macworld offices and mooch off their connection?
John:
You know, there's always something you can do, especially with all these alternative conferences popping up or whatever.
John:
I don't think it's that bad and I was gonna say the same thing Marco said that I know a lot of people who have gone in many past years both this year and last year who just chose not to even try to buy a ticket because They figured that the value they're gonna get for it.
John:
They're going to get from you know, the socializing and the videos And a lot of them already know a lot of people inside Apple and they're like well, I'll see that person outside the conference I don't need to be in the conference to go talk to that guy because I talk to that guy all the time and
John:
and i'm going to talk to him in person and it doesn't have to be at wwdc uh but i the videos uh being moved up is is a big win and the tech talks are also a big win because what you get out of wwc is like the information distributing that to everybody who's a registered developer in a timely manner covers that interaction with apple people tech talks kind of cover that and i think that's the part that's most difficult to scale because for every moment those apple people are talking to developers
John:
they're not doing whatever it is that they're supposed to be doing in their job.
John:
Because a lot of times people who give these presentations are like, you know, the lead architect for the whatever system is going to go up there and give a presentation about it.
John:
It's not like a, you know, custom trained PR guy who just tangentially knows about the topic.
John:
Like these are subject matter experts.
John:
So you can't have that guy touring the country for a year telling you about core data because someone needs to go and work on core data.
John:
Like they really need to work on core data.
John:
So...
John:
So that tension is always going to be there, and there's probably always going to be more demand for that face-to-face time with Apple employees, because who wouldn't want to?
John:
Like, every single person who... Think of any platform.
John:
Like, I write PlayStation games, and I would really love to talk to the person who works on the disc subsystem for the PlayStation 4.
John:
Can I get some face time with him if I give you $1,600?
John:
Well...
John:
Every PlayStation developer can't have FaceTime with that guy.
John:
He's a busy guy.
John:
He's got stuff to do, you know?
John:
So that tension will always be there, and there's nothing about having a better conference or better conference schedule or more conferences that will ever solve that tension.
John:
It just doesn't scale that way.
John:
There are too many developers for any popular platform
John:
for each one of those people to have personal contact with the the engineer or engineers who work on whatever subsystem they're most interested in or what's most vexing them and that's life you got to figure it out yourself you know in some way having as much contact as we do is especially precious in the apple community because apple is so closed and tight-lipped and like this may be your only chance to talk to these people in an official capacity uh and and we all know it's true people inside apple
John:
are more forthcoming in the environment of wwc you know talking about topics that they would probably never even email you about but they'll talk to you in person about it at wwc they're not revealing super secrets and telling you what the next holographic i watch levitation device is going to be but they'll tell you like you know well that api is the way it is because of x y and z story and that will give you some insight into how it works and let you work it better but maybe they wouldn't have sent that over an email because unlike eric schmidt they understand that emails leave a paper trail quote unquote and
John:
And they should probably not do that.
John:
Like they're just more open.
John:
So I think Apple is doing not the best it can, but it has made tremendous strides in the past several years with the tech talks and the time they release a video.
John:
So I give them full marks for that because they used to drive me nuts that I wouldn't I wouldn't be able to.
John:
I couldn't go to WWDC because, well, I couldn't go.
John:
I didn't want to go to WWDC because you didn't go.
John:
I hate traveling this.
John:
I didn't go, but I did get the videos.
John:
I mean, like to my right here, I have a big metal tin that says WWDC 2003 on it, and it's filled with DVDs.
John:
That used to be the way I went to WWDC, and they used to come out months later, and it was terrible.
John:
So we're so far from that.
John:
I still think there are things they should improve, but...
John:
Uh, I would not scale this conference up anymore.
John:
The way I would try to scale up the, how do developers get FaceTime with Apple engineers is I would just have more concerts spread, like more concerts, more conferences spread around like tech talks or maybe two WWDCs.
John:
Because the third thing I didn't talk about is Apple also has chosen this time to announce their, a lot of their big products.
John:
Uh,
John:
But I think you could have another WWDC, like maybe two of these a year, in a different location, maybe a different continent, where you say there's not going to be any announcements.
John:
There's no keynote.
John:
No pressure for Apple to come out with something big.
John:
It's just like, this is the rerun of WWDC.
John:
It's the same sessions, but if you couldn't attend there, you can attend this one.
John:
It's a little bit bigger than a tech talk.
John:
It's longer than a tech talk.
John:
That's probably the limit of how they could scale this up.
John:
I would rather see them do that than to double the size of this one.
Marco:
Hey, here's an idea.
Marco:
What if they did a second one in China every year?
John:
I was going to say for the games and whatever track and the games one, they should have the slides go really slowly.
John:
But if you pay more money, they'll go to the next slide faster.
John:
And you can't go to another session right after the session you've gone to.
John:
But again, if you pay more money, you can go to two sessions directly in a row without having a meal between.
John:
They should do stuff like that because game developers would love it.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
Oh, that's great.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else about WWDC?
Marco:
No, I think that's it.
Marco:
I really do think that, you know, they've reached what's basically an equilibrium here where, you know, the event changes very little year to year.
Marco:
The ticketing, I think, will probably change very little year to year from now on.
Marco:
I think it's just going to be like, you know, they've figured out what works as best as it can for them and, you know, for the world, but mostly for them.
Marco:
Because, you know, like as John mentioned, like, you know, if you like these, you know,
Marco:
Libraries like Core Data and Auto Layout, stuff like that, these are written by two or three people usually.
Marco:
These are very small teams at Apple.
Marco:
And so they can't really afford to have all these engineers taking weeks and weeks and weeks beforehand to make and practice and refine these presentations.
Marco:
And then a week, not even being at the Apple campus, but a week staying up in San Francisco...
Marco:
putting on the event and answering questions, going to labs and everything.
Marco:
It's a pretty big drain on Apple to put this conference on.
Marco:
I just don't think there's a better way that they can really do this.
Marco:
There are some small things they can improve here and there, but overall, big picture, I don't think we're going to see big changes here because I don't really think they reasonably can, or rather, I don't think it would be worth it for them.
Casey:
I should also mention really quickly that last year, I believe it was, somebody, I don't know who was in charge, came up with Alt WWDC, which was happening right around Moscone during WWDC.
Casey:
And this year they're doing it again.
Casey:
It's called Alt Conf.
Casey:
And I believe it's free donations accepted.
Casey:
And if I didn't have a ticket, I would very strongly investigate that because I suspect it's going to be pretty good.
Casey:
And I heard very good things about it last year.
Casey:
And so that's a nice way for the community to kind of come together and fill in a gap.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, like I saw Will French tweeted during the ticket giveaway day an idea to just have WWDC run a parallel conference one day behind the real one in Vegas at some giant thing that holds like 30,000 people and just play the videos from WWDC.
Marco:
And obviously, you know, Apple would shut that down pretty quickly.
Marco:
But I think this is... You know, now that Apple's making these videos available, I think...
Marco:
Organizing probably a large number of small conference alternatives, that might be the way to go.
Marco:
If you get too big, Apple will probably have a problem with it, but if you just have a bunch of small gatherings and they're informal and non-commercial and everything, I don't think Apple's really going to go try to police all of them.
Marco:
So that's probably the way to go.
Marco:
Anyway, our final sponsor this week is our friends at Backblaze once again.
Marco:
And I'm pretty sure all three of us use Backblaze, right?
Marco:
That's true.
Casey:
I do not.
Casey:
Oh, Casey.
Casey:
I know, I know.
Marco:
Give your ticket to John.
Casey:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
I'm pretty sure my dad had ended up on Backblaze, actually.
Casey:
So I sort of do my association.
Marco:
Okay, close enough.
Marco:
Well, most of us use Backblaze.
Marco:
Backblaze is unlimited, unthrottled, simple online backup.
Marco:
So it's $5 a month, and...
Marco:
There's not a lot... They gave me this really short script here because they knew I would just talk forever about my own stuff with it.
Marco:
If you don't have online backup, Casey, you really need to get on this.
Marco:
Online backup is an amazing...
Marco:
uh insurance policy and compliment to or replacement for local backup although for me it's it's a compliment too like my my favorite kind of backup is i have time machine locally and that's for fast restores and historic uh you know pulling files that i might have deleted an hour ago and then realized oh crap i actually still need that let me get that back that time machine is great for that um but time machine you know i've had some issues with in the past a lot of people have it's it's not incredibly reliable it works most of the time but it's not incredibly reliable so
Marco:
It's good to have something else.
Marco:
And Backblaze is great because the files are not stored in your house.
Marco:
There's a whole class of problems like fires, floods, electrical issues, power surges, lightning strikes, theft, all sorts of issues where...
Marco:
If you just have your computer with an internal or an external time machine drive or a time machine drive plugged in that's always plugged in next to it or in the same outlet as it or whatever else or in the same house as it, there's all sorts of environmental and people problems that can happen there that will take out your computer and your backups at the same time.
Marco:
That's no good.
Marco:
Online backups solves that problem and gives you a few other little niceties.
Marco:
So, for instance...
Marco:
Backblaze has a pretty slick iOS app that lets you access and share your backed-up files from anywhere that you are.
Marco:
You can just log into your Backblaze account from your iPhone or your iPad, and you can access your files right there.
Marco:
You can restore your files selectively.
Marco:
So if you just need to pull one file off the backup, you can do that.
Marco:
And Backblaze keeps it very, very simple.
Marco:
There's no add-ons, no gimmicks, no extra charges for different services.
Marco:
It's $5 per computer per month.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
It could even be less, actually, if you buy the annual or biannual plans.
Marco:
But $5 per month per computer gets you unlimited, unthrottled online backup with Backblaze.
Marco:
It's simple to use.
Marco:
The app is nice.
Marco:
It's developed by ex-Apple engineers.
Marco:
It's very Apple-friendly.
Marco:
It's always updated for the latest OS.
Marco:
I've been running it for, I think, three years now.
Marco:
I've never had a problem running on any version of OS X. It's fantastic.
Marco:
Go to backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Once again, Backblaze unlimited, unthrottled online backup for just $5 per month.
Marco:
Backblaze.com slash ATP.
Casey:
So we should probably talk about this heart bleed thing.
Casey:
This is pretty uncool.
Marco:
This is probably the biggest security story of the year.
Marco:
And I don't think it has yet grown to what will be its final size.
Marco:
I think we're going to be having fallout from this and realizing the problem might have been even bigger than we thought or that important stuff might have been taken during this window that this was open.
Marco:
I think we're going to be seeing fallout from this for a long time.
Marco:
It's a big, big problem.
Marco:
In brief, what this bug is, is...
Marco:
It's a bug in OpenSSL, which is the SSL-powering layer for lots of different software, usually stuff that runs on Linux.
Marco:
On Linux servers, usually, are what we're hearing about.
Marco:
And, for instance, if you have a website with HTTPS enabled and you're running Apache or Nginx as your web server, those use OpenSSL on their backends to power the SSL component.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
It affects a lot of things, and the bug was actually introduced into the software in 2011.
Marco:
I run CentOS on my servers, which is a free distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, basically.
Marco:
I know that's not technically correct.
Marco:
Please email Casey.
Marco:
It's close enough.
Marco:
The reason I use CentOS is because it's extremely conservative and generally very secure by default.
Marco:
You don't really have to be a security expert to make CentOS reasonably secure.
Marco:
You can pretty much leave everything at the default and be pretty good.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
CentOS in its latest distribution, 6.5, and a few other Linuxes that have roughly similar release schedules, the bug was so old that it was actually in the versions that were shipping with the latest Linux distributions from a few of these things.
Marco:
So that was Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, one of the Ubuntu servers, and a couple others.
Marco:
So it was on very widely used things.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
That's how long this bug was there, and it was only very recently discovered, and then it was basically patched immediately.
Marco:
But what the bug allowed is for a maliciously formed TLS request, you were able to have the server respond back to you with 64K of arbitrary memory from its process space.
Marco:
And if you kept making requests, you could get a different 64K of memory.
Marco:
And I'm not sure of the details beyond that level of exactly how you requested or exactly what memory you were given or why, but it was a balance check problem and blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
It would read the wrong memory and output it back to you.
Marco:
Now, the problem is what is in the memory space of the OpenSSL process is the entire web server that's running it.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
anything process local the web server traffic the like the the the biggest problem is the ssl keys like the private key that the web server is using on its end to encrypt and decrypt the traffic the private key could have been sent back in the response to the to the uh to the attacker to say hey here's the private key so the attacker could query a bunch of servers basically um get all these random memory contents back and
Marco:
And just try a bunch of them, try a bunch of the segments from within that as a key and see if it decrypts the traffic.
Marco:
Because you already have the public key from when you make the connection.
Marco:
So it's pretty bad.
Marco:
It's a pretty bad thing.
Marco:
Now...
Marco:
People are saying you'd only be likely to get the private key if the server had recently been restarted or something.
Marco:
Again, I don't know the details of all that, but the part that matters is that you could get the private key back, plus anything else that was going through the web server process at the time, including the traffic.
Marco:
And if your application ran in the web server process, I think Apache, when it runs ModPHP, I think it does that.
Marco:
Fast CGI should be immune because it's a different process.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
All of that was potentially exposed.
Marco:
And because it was in these conservative distributions that are often run on servers because they're conservative, because the bug was so old, this was on so many sites.
Marco:
I mean, they released tools that you could test for.
Marco:
And I ran on a bunch of well-known sites, my own and other people's and well-known sites.
Marco:
And I would say about...
Marco:
about a quarter of them were actually vulnerable the morning after it was discovered.
Marco:
We had most of a day to fix things, and the patches for all the Linuxes were already out the day before.
Marco:
And the next day, there were still major sites that were still vulnerable.
Marco:
And it isn't just servers.
Marco:
It might be appliances.
Marco:
It might be if you have a load balancer or if you have a router that runs embedded Linux.
Marco:
And that version of embedded Linux has...
Marco:
has this flaw in it.
Marco:
There's all sorts of places this could be.
Marco:
It could be on your home router.
Marco:
It could be on your home NAS.
Marco:
Anything that runs embedded Linux and embedded OpenSSL could have this.
Marco:
It's a pretty big deal.
Marco:
I don't think – it's really hard to know how bad this will be so far, but the potential – we know that the potential was really bad.
Marco:
What we don't know is how much it was exploited before these holes are being closed and how long it will be before these holes are really all closed.
John:
So the government angle on this is actually pretty bad too because –
John:
The usefulness of getting a private key, like at this point, is not that useful unless you have a big gigantic catalog of intercepts of encrypted traffic from the past.
John:
Because if you have that, in theory, if you get the private key and that private key was the one that was used, previously you had these encrypted intercepts of sort of data going flying by that was useless to you.
John:
But suddenly it potentially becomes useful to you because they're like, oh, I've got the private keys.
John:
Now I can go back and decrypt stuff from the past.
John:
I mean, again, this...
John:
This exploit has been out there for a long time, so maybe they were decrypting it in real time during that.
John:
But the only kind of party that's likely to have historical encrypted intercepts is like, well, that sounds like something the government would do, right?
John:
Like an individual is not going to do that.
John:
But the other angle on this is that the other thing that's likely to be in memory...
John:
is post data from the last post, you know, whatever, like unencrypted, you know, data from form submissions, like passwords.
John:
And so a lot of people did like, let me just run this against yahoo.com, like their mail thing for a couple minutes.
John:
And you just see people's passwords like crazy because they're, you know, this query strings, like it's in,
John:
in-memory query string clearly identifiable as like password equals plain text password because that was sent in the post data as part of an SSL form submission when someone entered their password to log into Yahoo Mail and although the private key may move away from the memory that's easily accessible people are constantly logging in and so that's constantly in the memory there and what this basically means is that
John:
Everyone should change every password in every single service they've ever used.
John:
Like if you wanted to be safe, that's the only way to do it.
John:
It would basically be catalog every service that you have a login for.
John:
Hopefully they all have unique passwords.
John:
Check each one with the vulnerability site to see if it's still vulnerable.
John:
Once it's not vulnerable, go to it and change your password.
John:
And make sure, by the way, that the place they send you to change your password is the same URL as you checked before, but sometimes they send you to a different site.
John:
to change your password bottom line is all the passwords and every one of our services could now be compromised like that is not that's not an exaggeration of like that is a plausible worst case scenario that every single website that was vulnerable someone has your password now on it so you should probably change your password and you know for example like this site arstechnica you know was vulnerable to this for a short period of time as well every single person in arstechnica has changed all their passwords
John:
I mean, it's like, you know, you just have to, like, we should all change all our passwords, basically.
Marco:
Well, and not just that, you don't actually know whether a site that has closed the vulnerability, whether they're still using the same private key or not, because you can regenerate a certificate with, I mean, well, I guess you could, yeah, you could, if you were a real nerd, you could figure it out based on looking at the cert, you know, details, but
Marco:
um, what you really have to do as a site operator, a server operator to, to fix this is you have to not only close the vulnerability, but then you have to, you have to revoke and regenerate your SSL certificate from a brand new private key.
Marco:
You can't even use the same, uh, signing request and renew it.
Marco:
Like, you know, the usual way people usually renew these things.
Marco:
You have to do a completely new private key because that could have been compromised.
Marco:
And, um,
Marco:
I bet a lot of sites just close the vulnerability and haven't replaced their certs.
Marco:
And they might never replace their certs, or they might do it the wrong way and reuse the key, you know, because it's easier.
Marco:
So there's actually, this could, the repercussions from this could go on for a while.
John:
The worst angle from that is that there's a question still out there I don't know the answer to as to which software and which platforms honors checks for revoked certificates.
John:
I think the defaults on a lot of Mac browsers and even in the keychain, people are checking, like, what is my default?
John:
Is Chrome configured to check for a certificate revocation?
John:
Go to your preferences now and check.
John:
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
John:
If it isn't, is it because you changed it that way or is it because that was the default?
John:
Same thing with an Apple's keychain.
John:
There's a thing about checking for certificate revocation.
John:
the client software doesn't check to see if a certificate has been revoked then you are basically open to man in the middle attacks by someone who exploited you know got the private key for a certificate that you know and that website did all the right things and got a totally new certificate with a totally new key and everything is brand new but that old certificate is still out there and your client software doesn't check whether the certificate you're dealing with has been revoked they can still man in the middle you
Marco:
Yeah, and there's so many ramifications of this.
Marco:
This is why I'm saying I don't think that we have fully seen or realized what this is going to cause yet.
Marco:
Because, okay, so, yeah, so far, people who are on the ball have almost all patched by now, and hopefully they're reissuing their certificates and keys, but...
Marco:
There's going to be people who are vulnerable to this for a long time.
Marco:
And suppose the NSA or other creepy government agencies, suppose they didn't know about this.
Marco:
Now, there's a very high possibility they did.
Marco:
And this is one of the reasons why what they do is so destructive to society.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
Security works best when everyone shares their research.
Marco:
If you have these little fiefdoms of secrecy, like the NSA, which has tons and tons of really advanced people working on really advanced things, basically trying to find holes like this...
Marco:
It obviously benefits all of society if when they find a vulnerability, they get it fixed.
Marco:
They publish it, and they work to make a patch, or they at least publish their findings, for God's sake, in the accepted ways in the security community.
Marco:
But they don't do that.
Marco:
They have all this talent, all of this potential to help the world, and they're instead using it to hurt the world for their own personal gain.
Marco:
That's probably illegal and certainly immoral.
Marco:
I mean, that's why what the NSA does is so offensive to, especially to me as a nerd, um...
Marco:
But also me as a citizen and me as a programmer and me as a human being.
Marco:
I mean, it's so destructive for them to have those resources at their disposal and not help the rest of the technical community to work together to make more secure systems.
Marco:
Because more secure systems actually hurt their efforts to spy on us illegally.
Marco:
So that, you know, pardon the rant, but that annoys the crap out of me that...
Marco:
They might have known about this, but we have no way to know, and they could have been exploiting it forever.
Marco:
Now, regardless of whether they knew about it already, they sure as hell know about it now.
Marco:
So anything that – anything the NSA wants to hack that was previously encrypted with SSL or anything else –
Marco:
They now have a very good chance of being able to intercept that traffic because we know they're able to intercept traffic through various points along the internet, various data centers, ISPs, etc.
Marco:
that they have partnered with or whatever or hacked into.
Marco:
So we know that they have access to the traffic, the raw traffic.
Marco:
now they can man-in-the-middle attack everybody without us even knowing.
Marco:
And that's pretty bad.
Marco:
I mean, before they could do it through other weaknesses, now they can do it with the private key.
Marco:
As long as they can get it now through this vulnerability, or they already have gotten it.
Marco:
So that, I think, is one of the reasons why this is so bad, is because now...
Marco:
It's fine that most of the big sites patched already and are going to do their keys correctly, but there's going to be so many smaller sites, hardware vendors, embedded systems developers, so many people who aren't going to patch for a while that are now just wide open for being spied on.
John:
yeah and i looked into this bug a little bit and it's not as super obscure as you might think it is like it's not some kind of exploit where some carefully crafted machine code that only executes on a certain cpu and chipset causes something to trigger some bug in the it's not like that type of thing it is entirely straightforward from what i saw on this the site that was explaining it it's the old story of uh you know you've got some kind of packet that has its length encoded in in the packet and uh
John:
that the program was taking that length and using it as an argument to the mem copy command to say, okay, well, they sent me a packet and it said, you know, my information is in the next, it's a 16 bit value.
John:
My information is in the next bytes and bytes and, you know, do a mem copy from the thing into those areas.
John:
Basically you're taking, you're letting user supply data like,
John:
Over HTTP, they send you a number and you read that many bytes into a buffer.
John:
And of course, it's easy to overflow because they can just make that number all ones.
John:
And then you read 65K of information when in reality, there's not that much information there.
John:
And you've got your typical buffer overrun.
John:
Like it's straightforward.
John:
You can look at the code and say, you're taking a number that came from the Internet and using it as an argument to mem copy.
John:
Don't do that.
John:
That's very bad.
John:
It's basically the opposite of buffer overflow.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But it's like, it's not obfuscated in any kind of way.
John:
You can look at the variable and say, wait, that just came from the network.
John:
And here you're using that number to tell you how much memory you're going to read.
John:
That seems ill-advised.
John:
Like, there's nothing, you know, there's no sanity checking on that or anything like that.
John:
This gets me, of course, back to my, you know, Copeland 2010 thing is if you had a memory safe language, like a lot of people are ranting about this.
John:
It's like, look, humans are never going to be able to write secure software if
John:
you have arbitrary access to memory even if it's arbitrary just arbitrary access to your own memory space because like it doesn't make any sense it's not it's not a buffer kind of it's not like if you had done it in a memory safe language you wouldn't be able to just run off the end of whatever variable or data structure you had like there's no mem copy command that just says you just give me a starting address and a length and i will just read or write that memory and i don't care what's in it or what's there i'll just go run right over it uh that doesn't exist in memory safe languages
John:
So a lot of the people in the security community are like, we need to get the base infrastructure that we do our security stuff in off of languages that give you arbitrary access to process memory because we're never gonna be perfect.
John:
Like it's impossible to just say, oh, just don't do that.
John:
Like it's a simple bug.
John:
We all know not to do that.
John:
Well, how long did this sit in code?
John:
Open source code, how long has this been there?
John:
And who knows how many of these things are in the closed source code that's out there.
John:
It's like, we are just not capable of writing programs that are secure in languages that have this feature.
John:
on the long haul i think we're just proving it to ourselves and what do we need to you know we can we can get rid of an entire class of problems not all problems but we know this is definitely a big class of problems that have a lot of security exploits we can get rid of that class of problems with technology that we have now and i guess move on to the next class of terrible security exploits but you know like we would hope we should make some progress there
Marco:
One other thing, too, is that this was a bug in the heartbeat feature of TLS or protocol or method or whatever, which apparently is very rarely used.
Marco:
And many of the servers were not vulnerable because they just didn't support it.
Marco:
And many of the patches, to initially fix it quickly while everyone figured out what would eventually be the final fix, most of the very early patches just turned it off.
Marco:
and nothing happened like nothing bad happened because nothing uses it and so it's worth asking why that was enabled at all obviously this rarely used feature was going to get a lot less attention from researchers because you know it didn't really come up a lot uh so it obviously had less attention on it for a long time and this is why this bug was existed for like three years before anyone figured it out um
Marco:
This should inform decisions about why should Apache or Nginx even enable this by default?
Marco:
Why should OpenSSL even support this if it's been around for a while and nothing uses it?
Marco:
This should really impact the default choices that library and application and server vendors make.
Marco:
And maybe it's time...
Marco:
One of the ways that you can make an SSL server more secure is by requiring better ciphers and better settings from connecting clients.
Marco:
And one of the ways you can do that would be if you cut off support for IE6 and some ancient...
Marco:
client libraries that no one uses anymore, if you cut off support by default, you can make security better for everyone, basically, by requiring higher standards for everyone.
Marco:
You can close off a lot of avenues for attack that way.
Marco:
But it requires cutting off support for really, really old things, which I guess we can talk about XP if we want to.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
that's been a culture in the Apple world for a while of, yeah, you know what, we'll just cut off support for something that's three years old because that's old enough, doesn't matter.
Marco:
I think there's some of that that the server world can take as well.
Marco:
And obviously they have to be more conservative because the value system is completely different, the requirements are completely different, the environments are completely different, but I think they can take some value out of that.
Marco:
It's probably not worth...
Marco:
enabling something at all that is used by almost nobody anymore, that could be an avenue for attack.
John:
There's an easier solution for this in that we just need to revisit the specs or the RFCs or the RIS protocols that we use on a regular basis to trim out the features that aren't used.
John:
Because there's tons of features at HTTP, but if the common browsers and server software don't support them...
John:
they just like or half-heartedly support them they just don't get used and after a couple of years of that or a decade of that it's like look nobody uses this feature of this protocol make the next revision of this protocol remove that feature because people keep the feature they're like oh i have to be compliant with whatever the rfc is i support all the features but if nobody ever used that feature it just sits over there festering
John:
And that's like the perfect place to look for exploits because it's like it's not used in every request.
John:
In fact, it's almost never used.
John:
So we support it because it's technically part of the protocol.
John:
And if we want to be compliant and get our certification and say we fully support the blah, blah, blah protocol, we have to do it.
John:
So revise the protocol.
John:
Cut out the part so we decide, oh, people don't use that.
John:
People just don't use that anymore.
John:
Even HTTP spec, there's all sorts of little turds in there that just don't get used in common practice that you could cut out.
John:
Headers, formats for stuff, old HTTP 1.0 features.
John:
You could make, I mean, they already are working on other versions of HTTP, but it's like you drop the features that nobody uses, and that hopefully lets people finally drop that code that wasn't being run that was possibly riddled with bugs.
Casey:
So also in the news, Dropbox did some stuff today.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
John:
I totally missed the Dropbox story.
John:
I saw the carousel thing.
John:
Is that it?
John:
Is that what you're talking about?
Casey:
That is part of what I'm talking about.
Casey:
So they announced a few things.
Casey:
Firstly, they announced that Condoleezza Rice is now on the board.
Casey:
I'm not joking.
John:
I saw that on Twitter and I thought it was a joke.
Casey:
The first thing I asked myself was, what?
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
And I guess I read this somewhere.
Casey:
I don't recall where.
Casey:
It might have been on TechCrunch thanks to Panzer.
Casey:
But anyways, somebody theorized, well, it's to get them better international relations, which I guess because I don't know in what other way she could possibly be qualified to do anything useful for Dropbox.
Casey:
But I mean, she's a smart lady, so maybe I'm underestimating her.
Marco:
Well, I mean, first of all, keep in mind Al Gore was on Apple's board for a while.
Marco:
I don't know if he still is, but he was.
Marco:
And second of all, so obviously there's some precedent for, like, well-owned politicians to be on tech companies' boards for some reason.
Marco:
That's a good point.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
And all of us are probably the worst people in the world to talk about this, but Dropbox's biggest competition is Box.net, which has a very, very strong position in the enterprise, but not a very strong position in the consumer world.
Marco:
That, I think, is... And that's obviously the inverse of Dropbox, where Dropbox has huge presence among consumers.
Marco:
In the business world, Dropbox is often used, but often blocked and not supported because it's not... It's actually pretty funny.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
In the business world, they use Dropbox constantly, which usually is violating their IT policies because it has the file stored somewhere else, and it's not enterprise, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, certified, encrypted, friendly to enterprise, whatever the case may be.
Marco:
Half of that's probably BS, but...
Marco:
That's the perception.
Marco:
And so Dropbox, it solves so many common problems so well that, similar to how the iPhone kind of broke into the enterprise from the ground up, that's what Dropbox has been doing.
Marco:
Box.net has been kind of tackling the opposite problem, which is trying to be enterprise-friendly as much as possible and trying to get in from the top side.
Marco:
And they've been doing a pretty good job of that.
Marco:
And so Dropbox, I think, with...
Marco:
with a lot of their moves towards business stuff, and maybe Condoleezza Rice is more about reaching that community a little bit better, the world of big business and enterprise.
Marco:
That would be my guess as to her importance there.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Dropbox probably is reaching for that world as much as they can, first of all, to defend against Box.net becoming so big that they start encroaching their consumer business.
Marco:
And second of all, because the enterprise business is just so profitable, if you can get into it.
John:
I don't think Dropbox has anything to fear from Box.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Reaching into the consumer space, let me just say that as a user of both.
John:
Fair enough.
John:
Because it is definitely enterprise-y.
John:
And I saw a couple stories recently about Box.
John:
I think they're having some IPO or some sort of thing where financial statements came out about the company.
John:
And Box spends a tremendous amount of money on getting into the enterprise on sales and marketing.
John:
Huge amounts.
John:
Some people say unsustainable amounts and that's not always a good sign It's never a good sign when you're spending just tremendous amounts of money to try to grow rapidly and get it I guess it's working and they get enterprise contracts We use it to work and everything but the product itself is not as good as Dropbox My question about Condi Rice is who came who came to whom Casey?
John:
uh like did did she approach the company because you know she's out of her you know government job and she's just looking like you know beyond boards or like getting invest in something or you know what i mean like people do that when they leave one career where there was her high profile like i'm going to become a venture capitalist or i'm going to get into technology or whatever and they just got together that way or did they seek her out and saying we need someone with government ties uh because you know people with those kind of connections in government are extremely useful for all sorts of things i'm sure you know al gore
John:
her or whatever it's like we're it would be great to have you on the board you have these connections we think it could help us in our business everyone's wigged out about like uh well she's a back she defends the nsa and her whole role in the bush administration and the iraq war and now our data is going to be snooped by the nsa and it's like i don't think her being there makes your data any more or less likely to be snooped by the nsa i think the bottom line is that the nsa wants the data on dropbox they probably already have all of it
John:
I don't know if that makes you feel any better or worse, but I don't think it affects things one way or the other.
John:
I don't think she is personally giving the NSA any keys to any kingdom.
John:
I don't think she has that kind of access.
John:
I think she's merely there to provide the connections that she has in the government world.
John:
And I think that's mostly a non-story.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
And plus, if the NSA really wanted some sort of into Dropbox, do you think they would use as obvious a route as Condoleezza Rice joining the board?
Casey:
I feel like they would be a little smarter than that.
John:
No, they just have to go to S3 because that's where Dropbox puts all its data and they have everything.
John:
And I'm sure they already have access to every byte of data in S3 if they want it.
Casey:
Fair point.
Casey:
The other thing they did was they announced a new app.
Casey:
I guess it's an app called Carousel.
Casey:
Firstly, it's not a good name.
Casey:
Some folks here in Richmond that, Marco, you know, Mobilux, they already had an Instagram app for OS X called Carousel.
Casey:
And a trademark for it.
Casey:
Do they?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Yep.
John:
Sounds like it's a great name then.
John:
Someone else already had that great name.
Casey:
Funny how that is.
Casey:
I did not realize they also trademarked it.
Casey:
Well, that's exciting.
Casey:
They might be really wealthy soon.
Casey:
Anyway, but be that as it may, so it's sort of, kind of, but not really at all, an EverPixie sort of thing for Dropbox.
Casey:
And I did install it, and...
Casey:
It was funny because the first run experience for me went from really, really cool to kind of terrible immediately.
Casey:
The really, really cool part was they have, you know, an opening screen and you're supposed to slide from bottom to top to get to the next page.
Casey:
And the way they had done this was there were a series of photos on the bottom of the screen kind of just strewn all over the place.
Casey:
And as you swipe upwards, those photos align themselves into an Everpix style, or Flickr style for that matter, a varying size grid.
Casey:
So it's kind of implying, oh, we're going to organize all your photos.
Casey:
I just thought it was really well done.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
After they did that, my options were a checkbox.
Casey:
And I should have written down what it read, but it was something like backup all my photos to Dropbox.
Casey:
And it was a checkbox and a button that said get started or sign in or something like that.
Casey:
So I don't necessarily want all of my iPhone pictures going to my Dropbox, and thus I did not.
Casey:
Scandalous.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
I wish.
Casey:
It's just, I don't know.
Casey:
That's not the way I organize my photos.
Casey:
So cue Bradley Chambers.
Casey:
So anyway, so I did want to check the checkbox, and I hit the tap the sign in button.
Casey:
And then it did a little expand contract to the checkbox, basically implying the only way that I can carry on is to go ahead and say, all right, back up on my pictures to Dropbox.
John:
I did the exact same thing as you.
John:
I unchecked the checkbox.
John:
I tried to continue and realized, nope, I can't use this application unless I let it do that thing that it wants to do.
Casey:
Which already kind of turns me off.
Casey:
They're not asking, they're telling.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the reason, by the way, that I unchecked the checkbox and didn't want to do it is because I know what my Dropbox situation is like.
John:
And the camera upload feature I had enabled for a little while when I was playing with it, but it's like...
John:
I know if I did that, I know how many pictures are on my phone, and I know how many of those pictures are not in my Dropbox, pretty much all of them.
John:
Checking that box was going to add gigabytes of data to my Dropbox, and I'm almost full.
John:
Yep.
Casey:
So I did indeed click the checkbox, and it either is or was or will be uploading all my photos to my Dropbox.
Casey:
So you're presented with what looks sort of like the camera roll in iOS, including with the grouping that I believe they introduced iOS 7, whenever they introduced it, so by location and date.
Casey:
which I like.
Casey:
And on the bottom, they have like a old school radio dot.
Casey:
Actually, you know what it looks like?
Casey:
It looks like the speedometer from an old Oldsmobile where you have like all the tick marks across the bottom and then like a little needle.
Casey:
So it's like a horizontal speedometer.
Casey:
You know what I'm talking about?
Casey:
Totally.
Casey:
Anyways, so that's like your date picker thing.
Casey:
And what you can do is you can select an entire event or series of photos and you can share them.
Casey:
And it shares them or they imply that they're going to share them in this really nifty like
Casey:
ever picks looking kind of way.
Casey:
So I thought, well, let me test this out.
Casey:
I want to test this out with myself.
Casey:
So I shared from my Dropbox account, which is associated to my personal email address, to my work account.
Casey:
And they send this really lovely picture or email to my work account.
Casey:
And it says, Casey Liss has shared 17 photos and videos with you on Carousel.
Casey:
And, you know, you're allowed to put in a little message.
Casey:
And it shows some of them.
Casey:
What is this?
Casey:
Nine of them.
Casey:
And I go on my computer to, you know, click on these pictures.
Casey:
And basically it says, tough noogies, get the app.
Casey:
So there's no web component whatsoever.
John:
And I bet if you had the app, those pictures would be added to your Dropbox, counting towards your quota, despite the fact that a Dropbox uses content addressable storage and those photos are not stored more than once, which drives me nuts.
Casey:
I believe that's right.
Casey:
So my initial impression went from great to what?
Casey:
And so now I'm probably going to delete it as soon as we're done talking about it.
John:
i don't know who has so few pictures that they can afford to host them on dropbox because as we point out many times in the transporter ads dropbox mass storage is very expensive like it's not meant to hold terabytes of your data because that's just that's a tremendous amount of money forget about the free account free account is enough pictures for you to like take pictures for a month and then you're full if you want to live your life and take pictures of your children as they grow over the years you're going to be spending like a year
John:
huge amount of money per month in dropbox fees if if this is your solution to cameras like people presenting it as an everpix like solution it's just not financially feasible or smart to pay that much money to start your stuff i mean my photo library you know if we say i got my first digital camera when my son was born he's nine years old so i have nine years of digital photos they're currently at a 500 gig drive right i
John:
How much would it cost for me to get 500 gigs of storage on Dropbox and pay that month after month?
John:
And it's just going to grow.
John:
I'm not deleting their baby pictures as they get older.
John:
It's just going to grow.
John:
And I keep getting cameras that take larger images.
John:
I'm not even shooting raw.
John:
This is just JPEGs, right?
John:
I don't see this as a tenable solution for photo storage.
John:
And it works so nicely and easily that it's almost like a trap.
John:
Like, I mean, I can see why Dropbox likes it.
John:
Like, oh, people will get a free account and they'll draw this app.
John:
Like, it's great.
John:
Every picture I take on my phone is here.
John:
I can share it with my friends.
John:
And then everyone hits their storage limits.
John:
And then you're like, oh.
John:
Well, I guess I could go to the paid account.
John:
And then you hit your next storage limit.
John:
Oh, I guess I'll pay for the next tier.
John:
And at a certain point, you just start getting angry at Bitter Dropbox.
John:
It's like Apple with the free iCloud stuff that's just not enough storage to back up your entire device.
John:
Like, it's worse.
John:
It's worse than if they just charge you a fair price up front for what they want to do.
John:
And I don't think Dropbox is economical for any mass storage like this.
John:
Like, if you ask people, what do you keep in your Dropbox?
John:
You keep, like, small sets of your important files or your current working set.
John:
No one uses Dropbox.
John:
It's like they're...
John:
long-term archive of all my anything it's not all your it's not all your anything i mean it's probably not even all most people's text documents are on dropbox i mean maybe maybe a few people are doing that but uh i think this is not a good solution for the photo problem i think it's a great way to get more people to hit their dropbox storage limits and switch to paid accounts which is probably why dropbox likes it yeah so so it's basically yet another uh photo sharing and syncing solution that is almost but not useful
Casey:
Pretty much.
Casey:
And the other thing is, the one place that I think it could potentially shine is, you know, John, you have your family over for your son's birthday, and everyone has their camera phones or cameras, and everyone wants to share pictures with each other.
Casey:
So potentially you could use Carousel in order to do that.
Casey:
But in my experience, I've been happy, although not overjoyed, with iCloud photo album sharing, whatever it's called.
Casey:
And that works sufficiently well as long as you're not sharing a gajillion pictures.
Casey:
And I think Carousel would do better with sharing a gajillion pictures, but...
Casey:
For just a handful of really good ones that everyone in the family took, you can make a shared photo stream album thing.
Casey:
Again, I'm getting the terminology wrong.
Casey:
That will get the point across and accomplish what I need.
John:
Yeah, for sharing, what you always want is you don't want to impose on the people that you want to share the pictures with, which basically means that no matter what other cool features you're sharing has, there has to be some way with some person with a web browser
John:
to see your things no matter what else is like maybe it looks cooler in the app maybe it's if you have photo stream you see it pushed or whatever there has to be a web way to do it which is you know you have to be able to send someone a url they have to be able to tap that url or click that url wherever they are and see pictures not install an app not change their os to ios not sign up for icloud they need to see pictures but just you know the magic of facebook it's like all right the bottom line is there's a website called facebook you can go there and you can see pictures
John:
That's how people share pictures with each other.
John:
We just want to see pictures.
John:
We don't want to do any of that other stuff.
John:
So I think it's great that we have this integration.
John:
In fact, photo stream works really well for my family because of the push notifications.
John:
And if they're on their iOS device, a little notification comes in and they swipe it and they're looking at pictures two seconds later.
John:
But if I want to send those pictures to someone who doesn't have an iOS device, I'm not going to, okay, first step, go to the Apple store.
John:
Like it's not going to happen.
John:
You need to have a web interface to this stuff.
John:
And the fact that as far as Casey was able to determine that's not the case for Dropbox seems especially terrible because like you can make public links from like things in your public folder on Dropbox.
John:
And those are web accessible.
John:
And that is just a way to see a thing in S3.
John:
But that seems like an obvious gap in their functionality, even if we ignore the storage limits.
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Casey:
So basically, all of these announcements today, I give it one tremendous meh.
Marco:
There was one other relevant thing yesterday, I believe, that Adobe announced Lightroom for the iPad.
Marco:
And I should disclose that I was on the beta of this about a month ago, so obviously I'm a little bit biased because they think I'm special enough to put me on the beta.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
um you know adobe's had an interesting set of attempts you know their first attempt uh which was originally called carousel uh was um adobe revel and revel was like a like a syncing sharing kind of collaboration editing kind of service for photos um i think they're still running it but it seems like they've kind of given up on it um
Marco:
Lightroom now has an iPad app and a sync service.
Marco:
So now you can use Lightroom to sync between your computer and an iPad, sort of.
Marco:
But the reason why I didn't use it for very long...
Marco:
is because it's pretty limited.
Marco:
It's obviously designed much more to be more like working on a project in Lightroom on the go that you've started on the desktop.
Marco:
You manually move things over and then you might work on your iPad a little bit and then you come back to your computer and your edits are there or whatever.
Marco:
It's not really about your whole library because one of the biggest limitations of it is that...
Marco:
First of all, the interfaces and the infrastructure to the app are clearly not designed to have tons and tons, you know, thousands and thousands of photos being synced.
Marco:
But the biggest problem is you can't sync a smart collection, which is like their version of a smart playlist.
Marco:
And you can't sync your whole collection.
Marco:
You can only sync, like, basically, you know, folders that you have to manually move photos into.
Marco:
So it's not particularly useful because you have to manually select every photo that you want to be available for syncing in Lightroom before it shows up on your iPad, which is kind of a fatal deal killer for me.
Marco:
So again, it's like yet another option for photos syncing and sharing.
Marco:
Well, not really sharing, but photos syncing between your devices.
Marco:
Yet another option that kind of but doesn't work the way that most people want and need it to.
John:
Every time we talk about this, people write in to tell us the things that we should have talked about so we can mention a few of them because someone just emailed before the show and someone just tweeted.
John:
Flickr, in case anyone still doesn't know, Flickr offers you apparently one terabyte of photo storage for free, and you get unlimited photo storage if you were grandfathered in with a Flickr Pro account, which I think I should have been because I'm pretty sure I had a Flickr Pro account, but who knows.
John:
Anyway, Flickr offers that.
John:
GDrive from Google gives you also one terabyte of storage for $10 a month, and the person who tweeted this says that's
John:
The same money on Dropbox gives you one-tenth the storage.
John:
So there are many other more economical options to try to store sort of all your photos.
John:
And I think at this point, one terabyte is probably enough, if you're not a professional photographer, for anybody who has a kid who's not a teenager yet.
John:
you know, you just start from like when you're, if you start from when your kids are born or if you start with, from when digital cameras were popularized, but that's just, again, that's just going to go up.
John:
People will just accumulate photos.
John:
I mean, not everyone's as much of a pack rat as I am, but like we don't even talk with people last in the chat room.
John:
Like, how am I filling up all that spot place with JPEGs?
John:
Like there's videos in there too.
John:
And it's not that I have a lot of videos, but one or two videos in 10 ADP that adds up really fast, even though they're compressed and everything.
John:
So, uh,
John:
Yeah, I mean, the people who are sort of selling premium price storage, like, you know, Dropbox and Apple, I guess, where how much does it cost per gigabyte of stored data on their servers?
John:
They're just going to have to adjust their prices.
John:
Storage will keep going up, and companies will try to not lower their prices in proportion to that to make their margins grow over time.
John:
But this all needs to readjust because we all have lots of digital data, and the amount of digital data we drag around behind us and don't want to lose, specifically pictures and videos, I would imagine, just keeps going up over time.
John:
So we really need better solutions to this.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I think we're good.
Marco:
All right, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Backblaze, New Relic, and Transporter.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
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.
John:
i have two pieces of follow-up one for each of you already these are not follow-up for our podcasts so that's why it didn't go in the follow-up section these are follow-ups for other for other podcasts
John:
So the first one is from Marco.
John:
I saw you tweeting that you were saying that most of your errors in your programs are from exceptions and bad API calls and not from segfaults.
John:
Oh, no, we're going to get into this.
John:
I'm not going to get into it.
John:
I was just like, I don't know.
John:
I mean, that's your experience.
John:
I was telling you what my experience was.
John:
But what I wanted to do was double check my experience because it sure seems like all my crashes are due to bad memory accesses.
John:
So I just went through my crash logs, which is, you know, which I don't think I've deleted since like 10.0.
John:
Like they've just been carrying through.
John:
Anyway, I went through...
John:
Let's see what it is.
John:
3,365 crash logs, and 75.96% of those are due to bad memory accesses.
Marco:
How many of that was within the last year?
John:
I didn't look at the dates on them.
Marco:
My theory is that over time, the percentage of these things that are bad access or segfault, the percentage of these things is going down over time because... It could be.
John:
I have to do a regression analysis.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, well, because my theory is that a lot more code that's in applications that people are using and writing today.
Marco:
And when you're talking about new languages and the need for a new language or a new API, that's specifically talking about the benefits, really, for developing new software.
Marco:
So I think you might want to rule out something like...
Marco:
Photoshop or Microsoft Office, where there's probably a lot of old codes around there.
Marco:
I would say look at recent applications, things that have been written with modern APIs, modern stuff, and recent crashes to any application.
John:
The reason I was looking at all of it, though, is because if you make a change now...
John:
eventually if you fast forward 10 years after that change the steady state will be like this you know what i mean like eventually you will pass through this portal and you will be into the like we are now with memory protection like now pretty much previously all very few things had memory protection now pretty much everything does your phone has memory protection your your iWatch is gonna have it you know what i mean like and so you eventually get into that same steady state and i think but this my crash logs for the x number of past years are a reflection of the current steady state you know
John:
even if it's getting better now.
John:
And I'd have to see it like a graph of like, Oh, did the frequency go down?
John:
Like it's hard to tell with just one person, but I was just basically checking my own things.
John:
Like maybe is it 10%?
John:
Is it 50%?
John:
75 makes me feel like my gut feeling of every time I see a crash log and that feeling hasn't changed over time, but like I can, I can check and see if I sort them by date, does the frequency decrease, but it could, but with a single person's date, it could just be like, I finally stopped using that program that was crashing all the time and you know, it doesn't show up anymore.
John:
Or like how many, yeah.
John:
What was the, what was the, that recent encoding bug in the max text frameworks that someone could like send you an IM with a badly encoded character and it would take out your app.
John:
Like I probably have like a dozen of those in the recent things screwing up the average as well.
John:
And I don't think that, but what, is that a bad memory access?
John:
I'm not sure.
John:
Probably was because it was probably like overflowing some stupid buffer somewhere.
John:
Probably.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, but my theory is basically that over time, even within the same language, as libraries and as hardware get better, people generally tend to move up a little bit in their abstractions.
Marco:
When I wrote the very first version of the Instapaper for iOS app, I wrote all the SQLite calls directly against the SQLite C API.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I know I'm not pronouncing that correctly, and I don't care.
Marco:
And then within a year, I had rewritten it to use more Objective-C stuff, where it stayed for the whole time I owned it.
Marco:
And then when I started the magazine, I used Core Data.
Marco:
And when I started Overcast, I used FMDB and FC Models.
Marco:
So I've been moving up the stack as time went on because...
Marco:
the benefit of writing directly against the C API was so small on modern hardware, and it was so much more code and so much more low-level C code that had things like worrying about length of buffers and everything, which I don't think... Overcast does some audio stuff that has to do that, but the vast majority of its code...
Marco:
It doesn't have to deal with buffer lengths at all.
Marco:
There's nowhere where I'm calling memcopy.
Marco:
There's nowhere where I'm calling anything where that would even matter.
Marco:
And I think that applies to so much software, especially in the world that we're in with the Apple world and all this cool mobile stuff and all these great frameworks and libraries that are building up over time.
Marco:
I think there's so much...
Marco:
Even though we can do these things in C, and maybe an app might have one or two C calls, or I had to add keychain support so I could store the login token securely.
Marco:
And rather than writing against the keychain API...
Marco:
I just got a really nice CocoaPod called Lockbox that just does it for me and wraps it all in this widely used, well-tested, and honestly pretty small and simple API.
Marco:
So that's like, here's a chance where I had to use a C API, but instead I just used this already well-developed, already proven wrapper for it.
Marco:
So that's yet more C buffer checking code I didn't have to write.
John:
Well, but see, someone had to write it, though.
John:
Like, you're just kind of moving the problem down.
John:
Like, looking at second-order effects, it was like, are these crashes due to something bad that someone wrote dealing with memory?
John:
Or do they merely trigger a bug?
John:
Because, you know, who wrote FMDB?
John:
FMDB is written in a language that has full access to memory.
John:
Like, at a certain point, you could down, yes, you need direct access to memory to write, like, the GPU drivers and the kernel and all that good stuff.
John:
But, like, framework code that deals with, like...
John:
putting up views and stuff like you would you would want at a certain point you'd want not only you not to have to deal with that stuff but also the framework you're calling because it's easy to to trigger a bug in the framework by you know doing something silly with an API and you didn't mess up anything with pointers and you weren't doing anything with range checking or whatever you're just using objective c apis and passing messages but it just so happens that the combination of perfectly benign information that you fed into this API
John:
triggered a memory location error inside it, because it is written in objective C. And you know, again, you keep going down, eventually you have to get down to low level code.
John:
But what you want to do is have everybody using safe code.
John:
So not only can you not screw up, but all the frameworks are calling can't screw up until you go down to like, okay, well, this point, it is now appropriate that you need direct access to memory.
John:
And what we were saying earlier in the show is that like,
John:
Even OpenSSL is like, well, that's got to be fast.
John:
It's encryption.
John:
We have to write that in C. Some part of that probably has to be written in C. But the entire thing, like, you know, that's where we're looking at languages like Rust and everything that they're trying to say, like, we will or go, you know, trying to be memory safe or C like languages.
John:
even if you're not going to jump all the way up to something where you have complete memory safety.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I just did the check.
John:
I figured it was worth bringing up on the show.
John:
It doesn't mean anything.
John:
It's just one person's thing.
John:
Everyone can go look through their crash logs and try to figure it out for themselves if they want.
Marco:
I think it's also worth...
Marco:
honoring arc a little bit here uh you in your in your debug episode that we're talking about which i don't even think we mentioned that we're talking about it but we're talking about your episode on debug that we'll link to um in that episode you you kind of glossed over arc saying it wasn't a big deal i i disagree i think it was a very big deal
John:
It's a big deal.
John:
I wrote all about it.
John:
I think it was a good thing.
John:
But for this particular issue, like, again, getting back to second order effects, a lot of those bad memory accesses, I bet a lot of them are attempting to do something on an object that has been either wholly or partially deallocated.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Right, exactly.
John:
ARC helps with that, but it's still possible in an ARC system to screw that up because of all the like, oh, well, you're calling it to CF.
John:
It's different.
John:
And you got to annotate things correctly.
John:
And you're writing a block and you forgot to weaken that thing.
John:
And all this, you know, like, or you didn't realize you had a copy of that in the block and you forgot to retain it.
John:
But the block implicitly retains that.
John:
So you thought you didn't have to retain it here, but you do like.
John:
It makes it way, way better, but it is still possible.
John:
And it's like, in some respects, it's more complicated where it's like when I was doing manual retain release, you could always see where everything was.
John:
Now Arc is doing tons of retains and releases for me and blocks that a complication.
John:
And if you think you don't have to worry about it, you will get bitten and you will inevitably end up sending a message to a half deallocated object and you will have a memory access error again.
Marco:
Well, but in ARK, the failure mode is much more likely to be a leak, usually through a retain cycle through not doing the weak self dance, which I love your thing of calling it wealth, by the way.
Casey:
Me too.
John:
I don't know.
John:
What is everyone else calling it?
John:
It's just right there.
John:
It's right in front of you.
John:
It's wealth.
Yeah.
John:
The S is right next to the W. All these things do help.
John:
ARC does help and everything, but ARC is a great example of both how much benefit we can get from automating some of this and also how you're never going to get all the way there because anyone who does lots of ARC code, it's like...
John:
In many ways, it's so much simpler, but it's not the type of thing where you can tell a beginner you don't have to worry about it anymore.
John:
It's like, in reality, in fact, you have to have a complete understanding of retain release because when the time comes for you to debug this weird arc situation, you're not going to know what the hell is going on unless you understand what arc is doing for you.
John:
And then once you have that foundational knowledge, we can explain to you this obscure edge case and what's really going on.
John:
Because without that, then it just becomes like voodoo and you're like a Visual Basic programmer, no offense to Visual Basic programmers, just flailing wildly and going like,
John:
when i type this it works but now it doesn't and i don't have a foundation to understand why you still have to understand retain release and auto release arc just saves you tremendous amount of typing and makes it so much easier to not you know takes away a lot of drudgery and makes things way safer for most people but you're never going to get all the way there you're never going to get to if it's a seg fault it's not your fault and that's that's what i'm trying to get to
Marco:
Oh, totally.
Marco:
My assertion in the tweet, which I don't think we actually even said at the beginning of this diatribe, your assertion basically is that the vast majority, or the majority at least, of crashes are bad memory accesses or through corruption or...
Marco:
things like that, and my assertion is that, in my experience, I'm seeing that that's not really a problem.
Marco:
Language has to have to solve as much as you seem to think they do, because the vast majority of the crashes that I see in my apps and other apps that run on my stuff are things like assertion failures and uncaught exceptions, things that, like,
Marco:
Every language has exceptions.
Marco:
Every language has error conditions.
Marco:
And if you make a new language instead of having a C-based one, make a new language that succeeds it, you're still going to have exceptions that are uncaught that have problems in apps.
Marco:
It's just like a different type of error.
John:
Well, but humans have to write those assertions.
John:
And the reason humans write those assertions in languages with free reign of memory is because if they didn't put that assertion there, they'd know that six lines later, you're going to be scribbling all over memory.
John:
So that's why they put the assertions there.
John:
But if you forgot to put the assertions there, guess what?
John:
You're scribbling all over memory.
John:
And yes, and even in a high level language with memory protection, you put assertions to make sure you're sanity checking your stuff.
John:
But there's no danger that it's like, oh, I forgot to check that assertion to make sure this value is greater than or equal to zero.
John:
So I don't end up with a negative number.
John:
There's no chance that in subsequent lines, that negative number will cause you to scribble all over memory or send the contents of your web service process out as the HTTP response revealing your SSL private key or anything like that.
Casey:
Now, before you skewer me on whatever you're about to skewer me on, probably vinyl, where would one go to check one's crash logs if one was so inclined?
John:
I went to the console app, and along the left side where on the console app, you can find all the different directories that have the word crash in them.
John:
There's a whole bunch of this.
John:
They're in slash library.
John:
They're in tilde slash library.
John:
Some of them are in application-specific log directories.
John:
I just found a bunch of directories and recursively grep through them for the
John:
various current access failure.
John:
Just look through them and you'll find one of them and you'll know what to grab for.
John:
You can find it.
John:
Marco should look through his too.
John:
I would imagine that the errors that you encounter while developing app may be different than the errors I encounter when using apps.
John:
And so there may be something to that distinction as well.
John:
But it's worth checking.
John:
That's just why I did the grab.
Marco:
That distinction is important.
Marco:
However, when you're talking about the need to make a new language, I would say helping developers during development avoid things like weird memory errors, which are often very hard to find and fix.
Marco:
Helping avoid that
John:
might be more important develop an app once more or less millions of people use it all over the place would you rather the open ssl people had something to help them during the development or there's something to help the people who had deployed the program i mean obviously you want both and they're probably like they're tied to each other in various ways but i would much rather have the developers suffer and have the end users not experience crashes than the reverse
John:
All right, what's Casey's follow-up?
John:
He got it.
John:
He knows what he did.
John:
The vinyl?
John:
He knows what he did.
John:
I just listened to that episode today, and I could not believe it.
John:
You just kept digging yourself in deeper and deeper.
John:
Let's provide context, which we didn't do last time, apparently.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So I was on IRL Talk with Faith and Jason for a second time, which I am not at all going to gloat about how I was invited back before you were invited back because I'm too much of an adult for that.
Casey:
In any case, I was invited on.
Casey:
And the comedy of this is I didn't actually hear the episode until after I was on, wherein Faith and Jason kind of got into a tiff about vinyl.
Casey:
And Faith had asserted, and she is correct, that vinyl does indeed sound better on an appropriate stereo than a CD does.
John:
Stop digging yourself in.
John:
That's already wrong.
Yeah.
John:
It's already scientifically wrong.
John:
All right, go ahead.
John:
Finish your summary.
Casey:
So she had said to Jason, no, it sounds better.
Casey:
And they went back and forth.
Casey:
Although at the time, I didn't know this when I recorded with them.
Casey:
They went back and forth.
Casey:
And Jason actually summarized it really well after Faith was so far into the rage deep end that I was surprised she didn't lop it.
Casey:
In any case, what Jason said was, oh, you just feel like it's more full and complete sound.
Casey:
And Faith said, yeah, that's pretty much it.
Casey:
Obviously, I'm heavily paraphrasing.
Marco:
Oh, God, this hurts so much.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, hold on.
Casey:
So, what I had said was, hey, Jason, I didn't hear the background story.
Casey:
All I saw was a few tweets fly by between like you and Faith or you, Faith, and Jason.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I wanted to weigh in, somewhat ignorantly given the context, but weigh in and say that having grown up with a really, really, really good stereo in the house, with a father who has just a shed load of vinyl –
Casey:
I would completely agree, science be damned, that vinyl legitimately does sound better.
Casey:
And maybe it's a placebo.
Casey:
Maybe it's all in my darn head.
Casey:
But I don't care because I believe it in my heart that it sounds way better.
Casey:
And faith is right.
John:
I have some cables to sell you.
John:
I'm going to try to give a reasonable summary of this that you guys can understand.
John:
First of all, let me start by saying I'm not an audio expert, but I don't think you need to be an audio expert to get a handle on this topic.
John:
I think the main problem on the original episode between Faith and Jason, which we'll put in the show notes, was that, as usual, they didn't define the boundaries of their discussion and their terms well enough.
John:
They were just talking past each other.
John:
Here's how it started.
John:
They were talking about the stupid Pono thing that we talked about, the high-quality music from, what is it, Neil Young or whoever.
John:
And Jason asked her if she'd be interested in something like that.
John:
And she said, if I was after that, it's like, oh, wouldn't you want this to listen to higher-quality audio?
John:
He's like, oh, if I want a higher-quality audio, I'll just listen to vinyl.
John:
And that's how it started.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think there's sort of a foundation as you can see how through the game of telephone you end up with that type of opinion.
John:
It devolved into like, oh, you think vinyl is better than this, that, the other thing.
John:
There's many, many factors to play here, but I can start from like, again, I'm not going to get, like, I can't get specifically technical about this.
John:
You can look up all the stuff that you want, and Marco can add later, but here's how I think I'm going to bottom line it, and I think this bottom line is reasonably accurate.
John:
When instruments make sound, like when people play music live, right?
Right.
John:
And you capture that sound and you try to take the sound that was in the air when people playing the instruments and put it somewhere such that you can get the most back from what you heard in that room from like the actual sound that was produced.
John:
CD, even just plain CD is more able to capture and reproduce accurately the sounds that were in that room.
John:
than vinyl.
John:
I'm pretty sure, and Marco can confirm if he wants, that it's just a more or less undisputable fact due to the limitations of the medium.
John:
Confirm.
John:
So that's the problem where they got into it.
John:
They were talking about vinyl, CD, all this other stuff.
John:
Like...
John:
Just ignore everything else and just say, like, there's sound in a room.
John:
You want to capture that sound and put that sound back out into the world somehow.
John:
Like, you want to capture that information.
John:
Vinyl has limitations in terms of frequencies that it can accurately reproduce and how well it can, you know, capture what was in that room that CD doesn't have, right?
John:
Right.
John:
So that, I think, and you can Google that and do all the stuff you want to see.
John:
What kind of frequencies can vinyl reproduce?
John:
And what are the limitations?
John:
And what is the top end and the bottom end?
John:
And how well can it produce high frequency sounds versus low frequency sounds?
John:
And distortion.
John:
And this is even before you get into, like, every time you play a vinyl record, you're damaging it and all these other things, you know, making little grooves and whacks and all this crazy stuff.
John:
Like...
John:
that fact sits there and flies in the face of all the discussion of like a vinyl versus cd cd versus vinyl because when you're talking about medium that's different now why why could normal good reasonable thinking people come to the conclusion that you know why does faith think that vinyl is the highest quality you know if i want to listen to music that's higher quality than mp3s or cds i'll just go listen to vinyl why why could she come to that conclusion
John:
Because there is much more to what music sounds like than just how well is the medium able to capture sound, right?
John:
And we've talked about this on past shows.
John:
There's a stupid loudness more where they mastered everything for CD and kept cranking up the, you know, the whatever, I don't know the term for it, but like if you look at the waveform, the waveform slowly fills the entire thing.
John:
The dynamic range between the quiet section and the loud section disappears and the whole song is loud.
John:
That sounds like crap.
John:
They didn't do that in the era when most vinyl was made.
John:
So vinyl sounds quote-unquote better.
John:
So if you hear the...
John:
same album on vinyl and CD and the CD one is over compressed and cranked up and the vinyl one is not, of course the vinyl one's gonna sound better, but that's not even the same song anymore.
John:
It's different audio.
John:
So that's one reason that vinyl could sound better, like legitimately really sound better because it was mastered differently.
John:
In the early days when they were making vinyl, from what I've read, since vinyl has a different frequency response than CDs, they would master it as if they were sending it to vinyl, like they would overboost the treble or whatever, the frequencies that vinyl would have trouble reproducing.
John:
They would have to crank those up because they know a lot of those would get muffled by the vinyl, and they'd just take that same master and put it on CD, and it would sound terrible because CD doesn't have those limitations.
John:
It can reproduce those sounds accurately, and it's a more linear range between them.
John:
You don't have to say, well...
John:
This treble's gonna, I don't even know if it's treble, whatever, this treble's gonna get swallowed, so we really need to crank it up, but don't worry, when you carve those little grooves into the vinyl disc, it will all sound good.
John:
Again, if you take the same album from the same master, oh, the CD sounds terrible, the vinyl sounds good, it's because vinyl is swallowing up half of the things that are there, and it's, you know, the master was made for vinyl.
John:
All these things can contribute to the idea that vinyl sounds better, because in a particular album or a particular song, the vinyl recording may be better mastered, or you may simply prefer that those frequencies be attenuated the way they are on vinyl.
John:
And what happens is if you don't have all this background and all these nitty-gritty details,
John:
Your experience, your lived experience will be, when I hear the song on MP3s, it sounds like crap.
John:
When I play it on my fancy vinyl things, it sounds awesome.
John:
Therefore, vinyl sounds better.
John:
And just Game of Telephone, that over and over again.
John:
And Austin and the hipster community has just accepted the fact that vinyl is higher quality than CD.
Casey:
Well, let's see.
John:
You've jumped from, like, you've jumped from...
John:
something that has a basis in reality, all the way to a conclusion that has no basis in reality, in fact.
John:
And you can't say vinyl is better than CD because it is not.
Casey:
Well, OK, I understand where you're coming.
Casey:
Well, it's not even where you're coming from.
Casey:
I understand what you're saying.
Casey:
And by and large, I do agree with it.
Casey:
But it's more than just I think playing it off as a game of telephone for for both Faith and I is not really being fair because both of us have legitimately experienced really good setups.
Casey:
in the homes in which we lived at some point or another.
Casey:
And I don't know if I can speak for faith, but I know I have listened to a CD and then the exact same song from the exact same album.
John:
But you don't know it was the exact, that's what I'm saying, you don't know it was the same song.
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
It could have been mastered differently.
Casey:
And there's nothing I can say to refute or dispute what you had said about different mastering.
Casey:
You absolutely could be right about that.
Casey:
But one way or another, I can tell you that I've listened to CDs and I've listened to vinyl and be it the mastering or be it the medium.
Casey:
And yes, the medium is kind of inherently flawed in the cracks and the hisses and the pops and whatnot.
Casey:
Kind of?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
And in the frequency response and in the things that it can reproduce.
John:
There was sound in the room when people played that music.
John:
How many of those sounds can be recorded and played back by vinyl?
John:
It is a smaller subset of sounds than CD.
Casey:
And I haven't looked at any of the research because Marco wouldn't let me.
Casey:
That very well could be true.
Casey:
I find that a little hard.
John:
You got into this on the show as well, because you're trying to think of things that sound reasonable.
John:
Like, oh, well, it's inherently analog.
John:
Didn't you take signals and systems in school?
John:
Yes, but that was so... You know the analog versus discrete signals?
John:
Marco has a good video that you should see about... I watched it.
John:
The sampling... If you still subscribe to it, even after seeing the math and taking signals and systems or whatever...
John:
If you don't find that approach convincing, although you should because it's true, an alternative approach is think of it this way.
John:
When you take sound and you translate it to carving a little valley in plastic...
John:
You are inherently taking an analog, you know, a signal of like, you know, the music.
John:
Say you're recording directly into the grooves in the vinyl.
John:
You're taking something and you're encoding that signal in a groove in plastic.
John:
What do you think has better resolution?
John:
Those samples and bits that you're taking or the variations you can make precisely in grooves in plastic?
John:
Like, talk about quantizing and, like, you know, if you subscribe to that theory, like, oh, it's inherently a continuous function in your sampling, how can you ever reproduce the original single?
John:
Which is BS, you totally can.
John:
But, like, think of what you're doing when you're making a groove in vinyl.
John:
Do you think, oh, that can completely accurately encode this information?
John:
Because we can so precisely control how we wedge these atoms out of the way in this vinyl to make this little valley.
John:
I mean, look at it under the microscope.
John:
Is that a precise trail that's being drawn there?
John:
Do you think that's more precise than 16-bit samples at 44 GHz?
John:
No, it is not.
John:
And it's borne out by what kind of frequencies you can get out of that, let alone the variations in an individual stamping or carving of vinyl.
John:
It's insanity to think that vinyl as a medium is better than digital things.
John:
Mastering is what it's all about.
John:
Here's how you make things sound good.
Marco:
You listen on a really, really good system, which is usually systems that are really good and expensive are usually owned by upper middle class men in their 50s and up.
Casey:
Like my dad.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And these upper middle class men in their 50s and up probably listened to music from the 60s and 70s.
Marco:
And music from the 60s and 70s, if you have a CD version of the same thing, was probably one of the old crappy CDs that was mastered back when CDs were too young, as John was discussing, and a lot of the masters were really bad, and a lot of the translations to CD were really badly done.
Marco:
It's also possible that you were comparing it to things like MP3s that were encoded in the late 90s when MP3s were new.
Marco:
And MP3 encoders used to be really, really bad, and now they're really, really good.
Marco:
So there's all these other factors.
Marco:
Now, the way you make things sound good is you listen to well-recorded music,
Marco:
And there's a good chance that old 50-year-old men with a lot of money with big stereos, they're probably listening to pretty good music, honestly.
Marco:
Music that was probably recorded better was probably... Well, maybe not recorded better, but music that was played with more real instruments and less artificial tweaks to the sound and less electronic instruments, if any...
Marco:
There was a lot more there of substance that you could detect on a good stereo compared to the very artificial, clean sound of modern stuff.
Marco:
They're listening to stuff that sounds better at higher resolution, at higher detail.
Marco:
They're listening on really good stereos, and they're making an event out of listening.
Marco:
This is the most important part by far.
Marco:
They're paying attention.
Marco:
When you are told... This is why ABX testing is so important.
Marco:
When you are told...
Marco:
listen to this, this is going to sound amazing.
Marco:
And it's played on a great stereo, and you are expecting it to sound amazing because you've just been told it will sound amazing, and you want it to sound amazing because it's an attractive idea of the old, the romantic, the analog being superior to the new crazy things that the kids are doing these days.
Marco:
That's a very nice, attractive idea to people.
Marco:
They want that to be true.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
You're being told it's going to sound better.
Marco:
You're in an environment where it looks impressive.
Marco:
You're probably in front of an impressive-looking stereo, and maybe it has some old, crazy things like tubes, or at least, I mean, hell, record players themselves are pretty crazy analog things, especially the really advanced ones that are probably in these advanced stereos that have the electrically moving arm and all this other stuff.
Marco:
So you're told to expect it.
Marco:
It looks impressive.
Marco:
The system looks impressive.
Marco:
It looks exotic and old and romantic.
Marco:
and then the music starts playing and you pay attention to it this is critical you are you're not just putting music on you are listening to the music and you're trying to hear you're you're paying attention to what it sounds like you're listening for details you're trying to hear details you've never heard before and then you say oh my god i'm hearing details i've never heard before
Marco:
Which is probably true, but it's not because there's anything inherently awesome about any individual component of that necessarily to the exclusion of its alternatives.
Marco:
It's because you're paying attention, you're romanticizing the event, you're making, you are telling yourself to enjoy the event.
Marco:
So you are enjoying the event.
Marco:
You're telling yourself it sounds good, and the inputs you're getting from other factors like its appearance or the setting or what other people are telling you about it, all these inputs are telling you this will sound great.
Marco:
So then when you listen, it sounds great.
John:
And that's not to invalidate the experience, because who cares if you're enjoying it and it sounds great, then it worked like the system worked basically all the money you spent, like if it's making you happy, right, then then everything worked.
John:
And another possibility is that people who have grown up with or even even you haven't grown up with like, you may simply prefer.
John:
the sound of inaccurate reproduction of live music.
John:
Like, you may prefer those frequencies to be tamped off.
John:
You may prefer that there's sort of an underlying noise to be underneath all things.
John:
That may sound better to you, because better is subjective.
John:
Like, that may sound better to you.
John:
Like, that's fine to say, I like the sound of vinyl better than CD, because I like those things.
John:
Like, it may be inaccurate, because again, you'd have to say, okay, fine, we'll get you the same stereo, we'll take the same song, master the same way, and we'll do this controlled experiment and play one-off CD and one-off vinyl.
John:
a see if you can tell which one is which and b if you can tell then just say which one you prefer because once you can tell you may say oh i prefer the vinyl one or whatever but it doesn't matter whatever you prefer is whatever you prefer where this goes wrong is when you say higher quality because i guess that you could say that's subjective too but like higher quality we're talking about audio it's like it's a definition i gave at the beginning when this music was played there was sound in the air
John:
We want to take that sound, put it somewhere, and bring it back.
John:
Which way can we do that so we lose the least amount of information?
John:
And CD wins over vinyl.
John:
I mean, that's it.
John:
Like, that's the foundation of this entire thing.
John:
Everything else you can say is, you may say you prefer one thing over the other, or one thing makes you happier.
John:
If something makes you happier, fine.
John:
You prefer one thing over the other,
John:
Oh, the other you could still be challenged to say, OK, we'll give you a double blind test or an ABX test.
John:
Let's see if you can even tell which is which you probably can't.
John:
And if you can tell, maybe you're not sure which is which.
John:
So then you've sort of punched a hole in your own kind of, well, I prefer that over the other because maybe you really don't prefer it, but whatever.
John:
You wouldn't subject yourself to that test unless you're trying to ruin your fun.
John:
If it makes you happy to listen to vinyl, fine.
John:
But where people go crazy about this and where you start to get into audiophile territory is where you start really truly believing that vinyl is the highest quality reproduction of music available.
John:
It may be the best mastered version of that song available.
John:
That may be true.
John:
And that's why I said like Pono might be better because it'll get better mastered versions of that.
John:
And you can say that if you think that's true.
John:
But that's why everyone's going nuts over this thing is when you get into like, oh, it sounds fuller and richer and it's analog and all that other stuff.
John:
That's what drives nerds, let's face it.
John:
Nerds only nuts.
John:
Everyone else just enjoys their music.
John:
So maybe you should just listen to the music you like in the way you want, enjoy it and not worry about it.
John:
But I guess don't go on podcast with geek in the title and talk about how vinyl is better than CD.
Casey:
May I have the floor, please?
John:
You may.
Casey:
Are you two done?
John:
Probably not, but go ahead.
Casey:
I doubt it.
Casey:
I'm stone sober and I'm so angry right now.
Casey:
Okay, there's a few things.
Casey:
Firstly, I should make it plain that when I came to the conclusion that vinyl was better, and I cannot speak for faith, but when I came to the conclusion that vinyl was better in the limited experience that I have –
Casey:
It was because I was playing modern recordings.
Casey:
One was Dave Matthews, which Marco, snicker all you want, but they are well recorded.
Casey:
And the other was Soundgarden.
Casey:
I forget the name of the album, but it was the one with...
Casey:
I played or my dad played either the vinyl or the CD and picked one of the songs and immediately played the other immediately after.
Casey:
Yes, I know.
Casey:
I knew which one was which.
Casey:
Yes, I was predisposed or arguably predisposed to like one better than the other.
Casey:
So yes, from a purely scientific point of view, you could say that this test was flawed.
Casey:
Yes, you could say that the dramatic difference that I heard, which is exactly how I would describe it,
Casey:
was all in my head.
Casey:
It very, very well could be.
John:
Or could have been volume.
Marco:
Yeah, in fact, it's been shown that in blind tests, people overwhelmingly prefer an input that's like 0.1 decibel turned up more than the other one, even if the hardware's identical.
John:
Yep, it just has to be slightly louder and you'll sound better.
John:
Anyway, continue.
Casey:
So regardless of whether or not
Casey:
It's based in science.
Casey:
I can tell you that I definitely heard a difference, and I definitely preferred vinyl.
Casey:
I will be the first to tell you that, yes, the medium is inherently flawed.
Casey:
You're screwing it up every time you use it.
Casey:
You're going to have to get over hisses and pops and crackles and whatnots.
Casey:
Yes, most of my father's record collection was bought in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
Casey:
But yes, he does have a record cleaner specifically designed to clean LPs that he uses regularly
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, in many communities, that's still the case, by the way.
Casey:
removing it, this humongous disc that's like a foot wide or whatever it is, removing it, placing it on the cleaner, putting the little solution on it, having the little turntable cleaner thing spin and vacuum up the solution as you shimmy it across the record.
Casey:
This sounds like it sucks.
Casey:
Don't you f***ing get me started about coffee.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So anyway, so you move the record over to the turntable.
Casey:
You guess, you freaking guess where it is the song you want to play starts.
Casey:
And you're probably going to be wrong.
Marco:
Well, you can look at the little smooth rings.
Marco:
Look, you can just see.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
i know and dad who has done this for 30 years is much better at it than i am all of this adds to the experience oh and i forgot to mention all the album art when that was still a thing and still freaking mattered all of that picking picking the record out of the out of the sleeve gingerly all of this adds to the experience and makes it more enjoyable for me don't forget chucking the discs at zombies
Casey:
The what?
Casey:
Is that some reference?
John:
We didn't have a reference you guys didn't get.
John:
I had to throw one in.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I'm glad we hit the quota.
Casey:
For you, Marco, to sit here and tell me I need to ABX test and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
When's the last time you ABX your coffee versus Starbucks?
John:
He didn't tell you you needed to ABX test.
John:
Like all that stuff you said is fine.
John:
No one is arguing against like the tea ceremony sort of thing you have going to that.
John:
Like, again, I said, whatever makes you happy, then go for it.
John:
Like there's no reason to subject yourself to these scientific tests if they're just going to make you enjoy life less.
John:
Like don't do it.
John:
But you also then can't make claims like vinyl is the highest quality source of music available.
John:
Because in that sentence, you didn't say, what I really mean is that when they master things for vinyl, they have more dynamic range.
John:
You didn't say that.
John:
You said vinyl.
John:
And you end up talking about the mediums.
John:
And then when you stray off into, well, digital can't capture all the nuances because it's discrete instead of continuous, you're just off into the weeds.
John:
And that's where people yell at you.
John:
And it's like, stick to your actual...
John:
No one will argue with you when you say you really enjoy the ceremony of dealing with vinyl.
John:
No one will argue with you when you say... Well, come on.
John:
This is the internet.
John:
Somebody will argue.
John:
Well, I know.
John:
But they don't have a leg to stand on if you say, I played this song on vinyl and this song on CD.
John:
Specific songs.
John:
And I liked it better on vinyl.
John:
Fine.
John:
You like what you like.
John:
You get into trouble when you go into categorical scientific statements about...
John:
capturing audio waveforms and reproducing them and that's where it all goes off the rails and that's where i think like if you're in that kind of community long enough where everyone reveres vinyl as the sort of thing to do eventually it just becomes like well everybody knows vinyl sounds better and it just becomes accepted wisdom and that's where not you so much more faith like it just becomes like in your circle of course vinyl sounds better than cd everybody knows that it's an obvious fact i can't even believe you're arguing with me about it
John:
and that's what infuriates people that that inside that community this stuff just wraps around on itself again and again until eventually it becomes accepted wisdom that vinyl is better than cd which is not a true statement in and of itself and the nuances are now lost and then it just becomes like that's why i was talking about like the game of teleformer it's like a generation of people who don't know or care about the technical details and know they like the sound of vinyl better for but they don't know why and their conclusion they come to is is false
Casey:
See, and you can take issue with the entire city of Austin believing the vinyl's better, as long as you put an asterisk at the end and say, accept faith.
Casey:
And the same thing with me, because we have come to this conclusion from personal experience.
Casey:
There's no game of telephone for us.
Casey:
Now, every other person on the planet that claims vinyl's better, fine, telephone.
John:
No, no, because because in her initial reaction was like, well, I would just listen to it on CD or on vinyl.
John:
She just threw it out there.
John:
Like, well, of course, everybody knows that like it wasn't a controversial statement when she first made it.
John:
And I think that's why she was taken by surprise by like and she's, you know, she backpedaled and tried to more narrowly divine or whatever.
John:
But like, that's what I'm I listen to the listen to the episode.
Casey:
If you haven't already, I have I have since since I recorded.
John:
She threw it out there as if it's like, well, everybody knows that in my circle.
John:
So it's like, well, that wasn't the topic.
John:
The topic wasn't vinyl versus anything.
John:
She's like, well, I would never buy this stupid triangular player, because if I actually really cared about high-quality music, I'd just listen to it on vinyl.
John:
And then Jason was like, what?
John:
Because he's not coming from that same environment.
John:
And then she had to think about, what do I mean by that?
John:
If it's accepted wisdom in your circle of friends, you don't think about, what do I mean by that?
John:
Does it have to do with the mastering?
John:
Is vinyl actually better able to?
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
And maybe that hasn't been thought through.
Casey:
But I don't think that she was intending to make a declaration about the world as much as I probably was.
Casey:
I think she was more trying to say, hey, this is what I feel and this is what I think.
Casey:
I don't think she was trying to be the representative for Austin, Texas slash Hipsterville, USA.
Casey:
I can't speak for her, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't the intention.
Casey:
For me, I was more going for a global, but...
John:
You were and you should listen back to yourself and watch that video that Marco sent over and over again and do exercises in your signals and systems books until you convince yourself that it's BS.
John:
But anyway, like the reason I brought it up on this show and in the after show is because I don't want to bring it up on IRL talk because I already had an episode where I harangued them and faith does not need to be harangued.
John:
But I figured you could take some haranguing.
Casey:
Well, thank you.
Casey:
And I still want to go back to, I do not understand how a man that spends an unbelievable amount of time fussing over a drink that's inherently disgusting and not helpful can throw stones at me because I want to enjoy music in my own little way.
Casey:
When's the last time you ABX tested your f***ing coffee?
John:
I would love the opportunity to.
John:
Well, the problem with coffee and stuff like that is that there's no, like, it's not like capturing audio waveforms.
John:
There is no original and a reproduction.
John:
So there is no sort of objective criteria by which you can judge it at all.
John:
It's all like, how does this taste to you?
John:
And then you could test it to say, well, does this really taste better?
John:
It was made with these special beans or whatever.
John:
But, like, it's all subjective.
John:
So, you know, like, we could secretly replace his specially made coffee with K-Cups for a week and see if he notices.
John:
I bet he would notice.
John:
i mean hey if you want to if you want to orchestrate that i will gladly participate no because i don't i don't like coffee i don't want to be around it well but see marco because marco was trying to find like he's although he does all these fussy things i think what he's like if there was some way that he could like snap his fingers and instantly have a cup of coffee with no mess and no muss i think that tasted good to him i think he would do it like he's not he's like going out of you're not going out of your way to find the most complicated way to make coffee
Marco:
no in fact making making coffee my way i don't think actually takes more overall effort than using like a regular drip pot like everyone used for years it is a little more effort than using a k-cup machine but it's like i use an aero press and i don't even do a super fussy aero press you roast your own beans though so that kind of that cranks up the fussiness meter like
John:
You want to buy a roaster and vent it outside so your house doesn't fill with smoke and figure out how to use the roaster.
John:
It takes 15 minutes every 10 days.
John:
I'm just saying, the point is, the reason you're doing that is because you're trying to find a coffee that tastes good to you, but that also doesn't absorb your entire life in making it.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And the reason why I've been doing all this audio research recently is because I also am an audiophile.
Marco:
But I'm not a ridiculous one.
Marco:
Like, I'm really, really super into good headphones.
Marco:
And speakers I care a lot less about because I just don't have a lot of opportunities to listen on speakers right now in my life.
Marco:
But I'm really into really good headphones.
Marco:
And I have now what I would consider pretty ridiculous equipment.
Marco:
But getting here...
Marco:
involved a lot of research and finding out, like, what mattered to me and what didn't, and what matters to science and what stands up to ABX tests and what doesn't.
Marco:
And it's all about striking a balance between practicality and cost and quality.
Marco:
and your vinyl crazy tea ceremony is the exact same way.
Marco:
You're looking to get something out of that, and you get it out of that.
Marco:
If it's worth it to you, fine.
Marco:
I agree with John, though, that you can't just go and say, oh, well, X is better than Y, if you're not saying, well, I enjoy the procedure of X more than I enjoy the procedure and experience of Y. But the reason why I pick on this sort of stuff in the audio world and in the coffee world even...
Marco:
is because people do a lot of wasteful, stupid things that actually don't have any effect.
Marco:
And again, if they enjoy them, that's fine.
Marco:
But the problem comes in when they start telling other people, if you do this, it will be better.
Marco:
Or if you buy this, it will be better.
Marco:
That actually gets destructive.
Casey:
But that's what you do with coffee.
Casey:
That's exactly what you do with coffee.
Casey:
Sure, I could Google a post where you told us about how roasting your own beans is the only way to do it.
Marco:
Actually, every time I've mentioned roasting my own beans on my site, I say, you shouldn't do this.
John:
Well, like I said, it's going back to taste being subjective.
John:
It's not like audio where we have a way, here is the original, and let's see what we can reproduce in that.
John:
The generally accepted level for quality in audio is we want to reproduce the original as accurately as possible.
John:
And I don't even think that necessarily makes people feel as good, because...
John:
The original is not just the waveform.
John:
It's like where you're sitting in the room and vibrations coming through your seat and like there's so many things about live music that are different than normal.
John:
So again, you could be the type of person to say, I prefer when the original single is reproduced inaccurately in these ways.
John:
In fact, in particular, the ways that vinyl tends to inaccurately reproduce it.
John:
That's what I like better.
John:
Fine, you can like it, but our standard for audio is compared to the original.
John:
There's no standard for coffee.
John:
If you like McDonald's coffee, Dunkin' Donuts coffee, K-Cups, like, whatever you like is what you like.
John:
You can't say, well, that's not how coffee's supposed to take, because then it's just all subjective.
John:
Marco has particular tastes in coffee, and to his taste, Starbucks is gross, and what he makes is good.
John:
Someone may love Starbucks and hate his coffee or whatever, but there's no easy yardstick, except for, like, I guess something that damages your body by drinking it.
John:
We can all agree that you probably shouldn't.
John:
have that.
John:
Although maybe that's a bad choice for coffee.
Casey:
Well, no, I, but I think coffee does damage your body.
Casey:
And before Marco interrupts me, what I mean by that is what I mean by that is I, I, part of the reason I don't ever want to learn to like coffee is because I don't ever want to rely on having something in order to get my day going.
Casey:
I,
Casey:
I can go a week without a Diet Coke.
Casey:
Would I like to?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
But I don't run my life based on whether or not I've had my lunchtime Diet Coke.
Casey:
And maybe, Marco, isn't this way, although I feel like you are.
Casey:
But most people I know that I work with, for example, they go in and they don't want to be talked to until they've stuck a K-cup in the Keurig.
Casey:
And they feel like they can't function until they've completed that stage of their morning.
Casey:
And that just sounds positively freaking terrible to me.
Casey:
It really does.
John:
Well, Marco's already said he doesn't like that aspect of coffee.
John:
I mean, he's a caffeine addict, you know.
Marco:
I am a caffeine addict in that if I don't have coffee, I will get a headache by about 4 p.m.
Marco:
or so.
Marco:
But Casey, when do you think I have my first cup of coffee today?
Casey:
Oh, well, you probably woke up at noon, right?
Marco:
I woke up at about 8.30.
Casey:
That I was totally giving you a hard time.
Marco:
I woke up at about 8.30.
Marco:
I worked all morning.
Marco:
I had my first cup of coffee at about 2.30.
Marco:
How are you waking up at 8.30?
Marco:
Your wife is a saint.
John:
My kid wakes up at 8 or 8.30.
John:
8.30?
John:
Your child is a saint.
John:
That's insane.
John:
You should not share that widely.
Casey:
people will hate you the point i'm driving at is less about the time but more about if you do not consume a cup of coffee during the day or equivalent caffeine something is amiss in your world could you live with it perhaps but something is amiss and i just don't want that in my life oh agreed so then instead you listen to vinyl which involves washing things and sleeving them and wiping the wash off the sleeve he doesn't he doesn't even have a record player right
Casey:
I never do.
Casey:
The only time I listen to vinyl is when I met my mom and dad's, which up until two months from now, they lived in Connecticut.
Casey:
So I listen to vinyl two or three times a year.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
Maybe that's why I romanticize it so damn much.
Casey:
Maybe it's because I grew up with it.
Casey:
There's a million reasons why.
Casey:
And I will concede that...
Casey:
I should not have said that it is the be-all-end-all better mechanism for listening to music, but I will not concede that in any experience I've ever had, I prefer it, be it placebo or otherwise.
Casey:
I still love you guys, even though I want to kill you both.
John:
Hey, Marco got a follow-up too.