 But I'm going to stick around because I'm coming back for that one thing. Okay. Hangout Live is on the air. Hello, YouTube. Hello, YouTube. Hi, YouTube. How's it going? And so the chicken said to the car dealer, I will not buy this giant four by four because I'm something funny. Thank you. We did not rehearse this. Bryce, too much. Too much. Let's take it down a little bit. All right. What the hey? Let's get this show on the road. Let's. I was born ready. All right. Doing this. That's good to go. All right. Going in three, two, oh wait, no, I'm sorry. Oh my God. You just messed up. Okay. Three, two, three, two, three. Australians, have you ever wondered what a nickel is? Apparently it's five cents. So give it to Tom at patreon.com slash a detect. This is a show for Tuesday, August 18th. I am Patrick Born Ready, Beja, filling in for Tom Merritt, who is out on assignment. Thankfully, I'm not alone to entertain and inform you. I am joined by the wonderful Alison Sheridan of Potfeet. How's it going, Alison? It's going great, Patrick. What fun to be back together again. Yes. We had a few wonderful episodes in the summer. So my head is all like in the cloud and in the sun, even though the summer is waning. So thank you for joining. Oh, I'm excited to be here. We got a lot going on, huh? Yep. We're going to be talking about Facebook Notes being resurrected later in the show. But first, let's get into the headlines. Mark Gurman of 9to5Mac has lots and lots of details about the upcoming next-gen Apple TV. According to his sources, the new Apple TV will be the first model to run a full iOS Core, essentially an optimized version of iOS 9. Some other likely updates, a slimmer, wider plastic body, a new remote control with new, more tactile keys with touch-based input and gesture support. According to Gurman, support for Siri is also a strong bet, as is system-wide search. The new Apple TV will include a new processor, a dual-core A8 variant, a big leap in storage space and, of course, a refreshed user interface. So there are many more details in the article, so please make sure to check it out if you want to learn more. Well, I know the only person disappointed will be my friend, Katie Floyd, who says the best thing about that little Apple remote is she cleans out her couch all the time because she can't find it. Well, it might be just as small. We'll see. Yeah, that looks like some really fun improvements. It's about time. Well, TechCrunch reports that Google has partnered with TP-Link to launch OnHub, its own wireless router. OnHub is designed for easy setup with auto-updates and support for 802.11, A, B, G, N, A, C, Bluetooth, Smart Ready, Weave, and 802.15.4. The router features speeds up to 1,900 megabits per second in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequencies via 12 antennas with one congestion-sensing antenna. OnHub comes with 4 gigabytes of storage and uses a dimmable light ring with four color indicators in place of the typical array of blinking lights that's so much easier to have rings than blinking. Anyway, the router is controlled via an iOS or Android app and will sell for about $200 on the Google Play Store. Amazon, Walmart.com, and real retail stores in the U.S. and Canada. Google also plans on launching a similar device with a SUSE. That is a strange thing to get into for Google. I mean, routers, sure, they want the Internet to be faster everywhere, but they don't do a lot of hardware. It seems like a specific area to get into, but it's a partnership, I suppose. Yeah, and I thought it was interesting because they do show a bunch of problems to be solved. One of them was writing down a long complex password and trying to remember what it was, but are they saying that this isn't going to have a long complex password? That would be a bad thing, right? There are ways to share those to friends, you know? But yeah, we should look into that more for another episode. Looks like fun. NBC Universal will partner with and invest $200 million into BuzzFeed. CEO Jonah Peretti wrote a blog post saying the partnership will extend to the site's reach to TV and film. BuzzFeed has also signed an agreement with Yahoo Japan to launch BuzzFeed Japan as a joint venture and formed a series of partnerships with Facebook's instant articles. That's where they went. No one knew where they were, who was using it. Snapchat's Discover and Apple's forthcoming news app. BuzzFeed believes these ventures and partnerships will extend its audience and NBC was like, oh, MFG, LOL, win. All I can say is this one's a lot of buzz. Yeah, I mean, are they actually going to extend the site's reach into TV and film and we're going to start seeing an empire of BuzzFeed in every possible? That site is pretty amazing the way it's grown. Definitely. Well, the Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. Commerce Department has delayed its plans to give up oversight of Internet administrator ICANN. The department said it would renew its contract with ICANN for one more year with an option to extend for another three years. Critics of the original plan expressed concerns that it would allow influence by foreign governments with less tolerance for free expression. I don't know whether the other countries in the world really want the U.S. running things, but at least we do have free expression going on for us. We're allowed to jump up and down and say we're government idiots, right? Yeah, I mean, that's the big question that we always ask when we discuss the decoupling of ICANN from the American government. It seems that they're approaching it the right way, though, to make sure that it doesn't have, it doesn't replace or actually there's arguably not a lot of government influence in ICANN, even in the U.S., but seems they're doing it the right way so that the government influence is minimized. Yes, we'll see what happens. Then carefully, anyway. A new study by research firm MusicWatch shows that 48% of Apple Music users have stopped using the service, and only 11% of iOS users have tried the streaming service so far. The Verge reports that the 11% is on par with iTunes music purchases by iOS users. 61% of Apple Music users have already turned off auto renewal for the service. The study does show that 64% of current users said they were extremely or very likely to pay for an Apple Music subscription following the free trial period, which concludes on September 30th for those who signed up on launch day. You know, I believe everything in this article except one thing. 61% of the people fought to go in and uncheck the auto renew. I did, but I don't listen to music. I was just playing with it for the fun of it. But 61% thought to do that. I mean, I just remember to turn off my HBO subscription that I turned on and off for Game of Thrones every year. I know it's it's definitely a big number. I'm guessing that a lot of people, I don't know, either their music savvy already, I mean, they're used to the Apple services and they wanted to check it out and they were aware that it was just going to be three months free and they had to turn it off. The Venn diagram, the Venn diagram of the 11% that signed up for it is probably pretty high overlapping with the 61% that turned it off, right? Exactly. Hey, Jenny, it's producer Jenny. Yeah, I think Venn diagrams who doesn't. I think the least surprising thing for me is the fact that you know, 48% of the users have stopped using the service because, of course, it's a free trial for a service that was very buzzy when it's first launched. So, of course, everyone's going to try it and a very small number of those people are actually going to be interested in it. And a smaller number is going to subscribe. So I'm not part of the people who go, oh, my God, 48% of the people have stopped using it. It means it's a failure, right? It's just it was free initially, so. Yeah, well, it is still free right now, though. Obviously, yeah. People are stopping. Yeah. They subscribed and started using it because it was free, not because they were actually interested in it. Right, because we all like free stuff. Push the button, it's free. Some news out of the Intel Developers Conference today. Intel and Google announced that they're working together on Project Tango Developer Kit using Intel's RealSense 3D camera. And Gadget reports that the kit looks like a six inch screen size smartphone with a slew of cameras on the rear. The RealSense-powered kit should give developers a better idea of how to create 3D mapping apps. Intel RealSense is a platform for implementing gesture-based human-computer interaction techniques. And Project Tango is an Android smartphone-based device which tracks the 3D motion of the device and creates a 3D model of the environment around it. Pretty impressive stuff. The demo came out a while ago for the initial prototypes of Project Tango. If you haven't seen those videos, go look them up. They're a little bit old, but already it was impressive technology. So Google has launched Android One in Africa one year after its launch in India. Android One is a standard created for mobile services in developing countries. The Hot 2 smartphone from Infinix runs Android One and has dual SIM slots. A quad-core, a quad-core MediaTek processor, an FM radio tuner and 16 gigabits of internal memory. It will be available in retail outlets in Nigeria today and through online retailer Jumia, which will also sell the phone in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Kenya and Morocco. Google plans to launch an offline feature for YouTube in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Egypt later this year. I was kind of surprised that they moved out on this. The article says they finally got to Africa and that that was a big miss. But the Economic Times from India reports that Android One is not actually in development by the hardware manufacturers that they made the deal with. Like they're not actually making the phone. So I was kind of curious that it's expanded to Africa already since it doesn't seem like it's a giant hit there. I'm wondering if it's not an initiative that is intended to... Well, initially it was supposed to standardize the very low-cost androids. But it might be that that is no longer necessary in India. They arrived a little bit late and they might have markets where those very low-cost, unified systems are more useful in Africa now. Well, in addition to that, though, in India or in all these countries, the idea was to give them kind of a reference platform so that the companies in country could build these phones. But if they're not doing it, maybe they're not just not doing it yet, I don't know. Venture Beat reports that Britain will officially implement an age ratings program for online music videos. The program was piloted last year by the British Board of Film Classification, Vivo, YouTube and the UK branches of Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music. The age ratings program will be voluntary and only applies to music videos produced in the UK. But the government is now working on a program to involve other music companies, including independents. And finally, TechRadar reports that Google Hangouts has its own website at hangouts.google.com. So you no longer have to start a Hangout through Google Plus or your Gmail account. The site features three large buttons for video calls, phone calls and sending messages. I was curious about this because Google Hangouts on Air is still over in Google Plus. Hangouts on Air, I believe, is. But this is one more way that Google is sort of not really killing off Google Plus, I wouldn't say, but at least decoupling a lot of the services that were initially associated with it. This is really a messaging app, primarily messaging and voice call and video call. Hangout on Air, really, it doesn't share a lot with the Hangouts on the functionality level, just the name. It's more of a broadcasting platform. Yeah, that's a good point. Those two things have two similar names to actually be the same. I'm wondering, are they gonna also decouple Hangouts from within Gmail? Because I know you've got that little Hangout thing in the bottom left corner there, right? You do. I don't think that, I wouldn't suspect they would do that because it is an integral part of the communication tools that Google offers to their users. It's similar to what Microsoft is doing with Skype, the web version of Skype that's become available recently. I think it's part of the toolkit. It's sort of a different story between Hangouts and Google. So they decoupled it from here, but left it connected over here, but named it the same as... Well, yes, that has kind of an issue with Google's products, especially when they relate to Google Plus. It's just that it's a way to access it outside of their other services. It's become an important part of the Google toolkit, and it didn't make sense that it didn't have its own location, basically. Right, right. Let's move on to news from you. You know that we have a subreddit at dailytechnewsshow.reddit.com. You can get in there, vote, submit stories, and it helps us inform what stories we're gonna be talking about. Of course, it informs the main lineup, but it also informs some things we want to display and put on the pedestal, really, for the users that use Reddit, and these are the news from you. One was submitted by TM204 and Star FuryZeta, who sent us the troubling news that the Internal Revenue Service said hackers gained access to as many as 330,000 accounts and attempted to break into an additional 280,000. That's more than twice as many as initially reported in May. The Wall Street Journal reports that the attacks resulted in stolen social security and other data acquired elsewhere being used to gain access to prior year tax returns for about 225,000 households. The IRS has previously said that to obtain taxpayer information through the systems, hackers had to navigate a multi-step authentication process requiring personal knowledge about the taxpayers, which the IRS officials believe came from aggregating personal data from multiple sources. The IRS said it would notify affected taxpayers and take other steps, including offering free tax credit protection and special identification numbers to reduce instances of tax refund fraud. So I've decided why all this is okay. So you're gonna get scooped up in one of these hacks, right? I was in, my information is in the OPM hack. In the OPM hack, they're gonna give us three years of fraud protection. And the reason that's okay, even though they're gonna have my social security number for the rest of my life, it's gonna be okay because somebody else is gonna hack me and then they're gonna give me three years of protection then somebody else, I'm gonna get another three. So I'm just gonna stop worrying about it. It's all gonna be fine. It's all gonna be fine. The thing that hit me in this story was the aggregating personal data from different sources to defeat the multi-step authentication process. That is kind of scary because sometimes you think, well, I'll give a little bit of information here, a little bit of information there. It's different services, right? But if everyone starts getting hacked, apparently there might have been ways of putting all of this together to do some serious damage. Actually, now they think about it. I wonder whether the OPM data is one of the things they use since that's social security numbers of millions and millions of people. Probably is. Well, SP Sheridan submitted a very reasonably titled item to our subreddit which read, Boston Dynamics Continuing to Make Progress with Human-Like Robot Balancing in Movements. Then we clicked through and saw the real headline in Colta Mac. Google robots can now chase you like a terminator. It's not the robotics company released video footage of its upgraded Atlas Bot, which is currently focused on balancing and dynamics and certainly not chasing you through the woods in super terrifying slow motion. So if you've ever seen those videos of the Boston Dynamics robots, which were like a weird mirror dog that had no head and things like that, you can imagine how terrifying those were. Well, apply this to a humanoid robot now. And it's about as- That's so headless. And headless, yes. And the thing is it's pretty mind-blowing because it manages to walk on any surface pretty much. So it would be able to move around without special, special preparations for anything. And obviously it would mean that it would be able to chase us in the same manner. I love that video, because they showed him just kind of on a walking thing but and he was walking along but they swung a 20 pound weight at it and him and smashed into it. And it just kind of goes whoa on one foot and comes right back up. So the balancing is that's crazy. Think about how cool that could be. I mean, other than you chasing through the woods, you know, Terminator style, think about search and rescue, being able to climb through the forest to get to a plane wreck or something like that. This could be amazing. Don't they also make the one that throws big, heavy things? I don't remember the one that throws things, but I remember the one that you can shove around and it never falls down. It's magical and terrifying too. All right, and finally, CapKipper has some concerns about the updated Terms of Service for Windows 10. The language in question reads, we may automatically check your version of the software and download software updates or configuration changes, including those that prevent you from accessing the quote services, playing counterfeit games or using unauthorized hardware peripheral devices, which is, you know, a little concerning, but we did a little research because some of the articles that were reporting this felt very heated, and we found a Verge article that sort of breaks it down and thinks that it applies specifically to Xbox or Skype services, those quote services referenced above, on Windows 10, similar to what Microsoft has been making you agree to for years on your actual Xbox and that it doesn't technically apply to Windows 10 itself and therefore it's probably unlikely that there will be such like draconian software search within the actual operating system. But just to be sure, Daily Tech News Show reached out to noted technology analyst Tom Merritt in Detroit who said, quote, it sounds like a TOS issue targeted at Xbox and sloppily written, Q revised Terms of Service in three, two, one. That definitely sounds like a lawyer was overly enthusiastic, let's say. All right, that is it for the headlines. All right, discussion story today is, well, that old shoe, Facebook, you remember there was a time when Facebook status updates were really the core of the service and then they were very short. I don't know if you remember, the status updates on Facebook were limited to almost a tweet and then they expanded, they expanded and there wasn't really a use for the Facebook update specifically, but then they created something called the notes which were, hmm, I don't know. Actually the notes were available initially, I apologize. They created this notes expansion that allowed you to basically create a blog post within Facebook. That also went away as the status update expanded and they removed the character limits in the status updates and then the notes was revived, I think in 2009 or 2011 as an attempt to get you to blog a lot more and to bring in your content on Facebook and then, you know, blogging came out of fashion and it wasn't really that much of a big deal on the internet anymore. Q 2013 and the arrival of Medium. Medium was really a strange beast when it first arrived on the internet. It was initially a platform for publishing that didn't have a central point, it was difficult to access, but for some reason it became more and more popular and it's now a place where people go to publish articles that they wanted to have some measure of legitimacy, of seriousness. It's a place that when you see an article that's been published on Medium, it's almost like it's more valid than something that's been published somewhere else. We might think of Tumblr, of Blogspot, of all of these publishing platforms that have gone away and now Facebook is apparently bringing notes back with an eye on Medium. Is that a fair analysis of the reason why they're bringing Facebook notes back out of the closet, out of the, what's the thing? It's still in there, buried in there. You're right, you're right. They're experimenting, they're testing the feature with a few users, but they've commented, what they've said is we're testing an update to notes to make it easier for people to create and read longer form stories on Facebook. That's the quote they gave to the Verge and the test is only appearing to a small group of people at the moment. Allison, why is Facebook bringing back notes? What is their goal here? Well, I've started to notice something interesting is it seems to be an important part of a statement of when you read something to say where you read it, not necessarily who wrote it. So instead of saying I read something that Patrick Beja wrote, you say I saw something on Medium. Oh, by the way, this guy, Patrick Beja wrote it. And so somehow the location of that information seems to be gaining in importance at least as much as who said it. And I've been really confused by the way people say, oh, over on Medium. I mean, you don't say over on WordPress, right? You just say, oh, you know, so and so said this or on their blog, they said this. And it seems like we're divorcing the person who wrote it as an authority as the location being the authority in some way. And that's what it seems that Medium has been doing. And I'm not quite sure how they accomplished that. It just sort of happened magically from what I can see. But Facebook doing it feels a little more like making Facebook more and more the entire internet. But now it'll be more important to post in Facebook so that people will say, oh, I read on Facebook that blah, blah, blah. So can I just jump in real quick, because you mentioned Medium. And I was writing on Medium since the very beginning. And I'll tell you why it accomplished what it accomplished is because it makes writing a pleasure. I mean, it's as simple as that. They made a beautiful interface. It's gorgeous to put images on. And it's very physically satisfying to write within it and how it ends up coming out unlike what Facebook Notes was and unlike writing on Tumblr, which feels like automatically like LOL on 12. It's true that not only is Medium very pleasant to use as a creator, but also as a reader. When you get to Medium, you get an immediate sense of almost serenity. And it feels like you're there to actually read something and not to be assaulted by not just ads. It's not just the ads I'm talking about, but by messy CSS and titles everywhere. So that is certainly one of the strengths of Medium. And to what you were saying, Alison, the fact that Facebook wants to be the entire internet, I would certainly agree. I mean, it's pretty obvious that they are trying to integrate an equivalent to all of the other services or all of the other uses of the internet in their own service. And one of the very big strengths that Facebook has had since its inception is that they have been able to react very quickly to the internet trends and the publishing trends and the social networking trends that they've seen come and go in the past. And obviously there was a time when it was just status updates. There was a time when it was impossible to have an asymmetrical relationship with someone in the sense that Twitter invented the I follow you, but you don't follow me. It wasn't like that on Facebook initially. Now we have pages and all of those, they're getting big into video. We keep talking about that. So notes are a way to what integrate, get people to go to Facebook to publish their articles on their company that they don't like or that they do like if we reference the Facebook discussion from yesterday. Yeah, I keep thinking back to, I hear what Jenny said about it being a serene place to create content. But as a content creator, I wanna be identified with that it's mine, not that it's Facebook's, not that it's Medium's. And I saw the screenshot in the Wired article that we have linked in the show notes shows that it is this very serene, pretty non-sidebar, credit up looking place. And so maybe it'll achieve that. It'll make people wanna post there. But the vast majority of people who are in Facebook only friend their friends. I mean, I didn't do it that way, but most people I thought did. But I guess famous people don't. So maybe those are the people who are doing the blogging but why would you blog there when so many people hate Facebook? I don't know, the whole thing is weird to me. The exact same reason that you would post a video on Facebook. And so first of all, it doesn't have to be only on Facebook, but the reason you would do it is access and visibility embedded into Facebook pretty obviously is the wall and the sharing functionalities. So if you have an article that is going to be interesting, hopefully it's gonna be shared. And you don't have to link from outside of Facebook to get it to people. It does strike me as something a little bit strange when you think about the instant articles that we referenced a little bit earlier in the show because that was supposed to be their way of getting serious publications to put their content on Facebook for it to be more accessible and maybe for them to have easier ways of monetizing it. Maybe this is in the same philosophy, a way to get people who are not big publications to also get their content on Facebook. So one thing I would say to agree with you is that have you ever seen someone on Facebook write a really long post on Facebook? It always looks like a screed. It always looks like like they were just tight, and it's almost in one long thing of texting. If I were Facebook and I wanted to get, say a celebrity wants to address their fans on their Facebook page about something vaguely controversial, like when those actors were saying doofy things during their show junket about Black Widow, maybe Facebook is trying to give them a way to do that that looks a little less like, I'm just typing out my keyboard, blah, blah, blah, blah, that looks a little more professional. That's because nobody knows how to make a hard line break. I think that's absolutely true, and I think that might be what they're trying to address. You know, it is definitely something that is an issue for those, but when you put it like that, Jenny, I think the answer becomes pretty obvious. There's simply no way of putting on Facebook and something that looks like a well-written article at the moment. And that doesn't seem right. You can share videos, pictures, your thoughts, emojis, everything, but you can't write a proper article. It's insane. Maybe that gets back to the medium thing where they have managed to turn into a place where thought pieces are, not just crud, right? It's thought pieces, and maybe since we can't easily do that, because nobody but me apparently knows it's option to enter, by the way, to do a hard-cured return, maybe they're creating this environment so that you can have thought pieces inside. I sort of feel like we gotta post everywhere now, though. Yes. Probably have to. I think the interesting thing, and the thing that you guys were talking about is that when it comes down to it, Twitter is for your short snark or your short thought. Medium is for, you are the person on Medium who is going to be responsible for promoting whatever you've written on Medium, and maybe that's why it feels more independent, because it really is just a writing platform. It's very unlikely that the content curators at Medium are gonna be able to get to your stuff because so many people are using it. I remember using it in the beginning and having Kate Lee, who actually runs a lot of Medium's content stuff, find one of my articles and promote it on the front page, and then two months later, that was an impossibility because they had grown so exponentially. So it's really up to you to promote that out to your social media. But maybe Facebook is looking for a way to professionally connect their pages, which are very popular for brands and celebrities and whatever, to a more professional Medium-esque output. So, I don't know. And then, of course, there's Tumblr. LOL, LOL, LOL. Yeah. Yeah. So basically, thoughtful, well-written articles on Facebook, I think that does mean the world is coming to an end. LOL, LOL, LOL. That's more on right there. All right, let's move on to our pick of the day sent to us by Scott, who writes, my pick is multi-cloud. I recently had an error where OneDrive ever irreversibly lost a couple gigs of my photos and documents. And already there, I'm so sorry for you, Scott. He continues, I decided to buy an external backup drive and also to grab my remaining files and move them to Google Drive. Multi-cloud made this process incredibly simple. I simply logged into my old OneDrive account and my new Google Drive account on the site and the remaining 80 gigs of files were transferred over easily over their servers. While the service is free, there is a two terabyte limit, but you can get unlimited transfers by making a Facebook or Google Plus post. I'm not sure what that Google Plus platform he's talking about is, but Facebook, who knows. Hey, hey. No, I love Google Plus. So this is a transfer service. So yeah, I think what they're talking about here, it's basically a free perk of a service that allows you to combine all of your cloud storage into one giant drive. And there are a few different services that do this, but I haven't really used them. I'm guessing that Multi-Cloud is probably a good one if Scott is recommending it to us. But yeah, you can use free tiers for lots of different services and make them into a bigger drive. So that's probably useful for some of you. And that's our, yeah, Multi-Cloud without an I. It's not Multi-Cloud, it's Multi-Cloud. So go check that out and you can send your pics to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and you can find Tom's pics at dailytechnewshows.com slash pics. There we go. Well, our message of the day starts with, good morning from insert weather slash location here. I wish to remain anonymous for this one, please. In reference to yesterday's discussion on Amazon and the treatment of employees, I'll state the obvious by stating that topic simply made the show because it was Amazon. Nothing really tech about it. As was stated several times, there are crappy to work for companies all over the place. I've worked for a global US-based bank and it's the exact same philosophy for one reason, profits. In the instance of the bank, each year we laid off the bottom 10%. If I had 10 outstanding employees, one of them had to go. Then the company would reorganize which allowed them to reopen the headcount. If a bank that makes several billion dollars in profits per quarter does this, imagine what a retailer with no margins has to do in order to make profits. I wholeheartedly disagree with the approach, but there's nothing illegal about it. As American citizens, we have the right to stay or go. One interesting fact, the bank I'm referencing and Amazon both have the exact same employer rating on Glassdoor, so the news article is not surprising. I had a word of Glassdoor, by the way. Oh, well, it's fairly used, a very well-known service, I would say. Currently I'm slow there, but yeah, a great point. So I have a tiny bit of an issue with this message, not with the content, but really with this practice, not because it seems like a human-wise terrible practice for any human to implement, but although in most cases it seems that it is, but because it seems like it's a management practice that allows you to renew the workforce or to cull out the bad apples, when you have a serious problem with your company and the way your employees are behaving or maybe there's been a sudden change in the management and you want to make sure that things are renewed. So for a short period of time, it would seem like a good idea, but implementing this on the long run as a permanent thing as it relates to profits, for example, you need to have employees, well, maybe it's separated from profits, but you need to have employees happy to be doing their job. If they're constantly in fear that they're gonna be in the bottom 10% and laid off, I'm not sure what that does to motivation and ultimately to the company's bottom line. This was actually brought up by Jack Welch, who was the CEO of GE and he swore by this, this was his thing and he wrote a book about it and how was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I worked for a company that was briefly owned by General Motors and I think it was during that timeframe where they started doing that to us, it was just hideous. But back to the Amazon thing, I really liked the coverage yesterday on DTNS because it was exactly what I was thinking was, I worked for this giant corporation, I am positive you could find the exact same list of grievances from some people, some of the time. They might be a horrible company to work for, they might be awesome, but I don't think you can tell from what is the quote they keep saying that the plural of anecdote is not data. So those anecdotes don't necessarily tell the story. Yeah, that's a wider discussion that was had yesterday, by the way, if you wanna hear more, you can go back and listen to that episode. And I'm certainly hoping that CEO Tom Merritt doesn't implement that management method at DTNS. You're not looking good, Patrick. Look at your competition, right? All right, thank you so much for being on the show, Alison. Can you tell us where people can find you on the internet if they want more? Oh gosh, I'd hate to do that. I've run the NocellaCast podcast, hosted over at podfeed.com and its tagline is a technology geek podcast with an ever so slight Macintosh bias, just a little tiny bias. Tiny, tiny, super small. All right, thank you for being on the show, Alison. I am Patrick Beja, I am not Patrick on Twitter and I have a bunch of shows, well, a couple, at Frenchspin.com. If you want to hear about the gaming convention Gamescom, you can go listen to Pixels, which I did with Scott Johnson last week and we had a giant recap of everything important that was said there. Again, that's available at Frenchspin.com. Hey, we have patrons. If you want to support the show, you can do that. You can go to dailytechnewshow.com slash support and that will give you all the ways in which you can help DTNS be made. Patreon is one of them but there are many more which you can discover at dailytechnewshow.com slash support. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com Call us 512-59-DAILY, 593-2459 and listen to the show live at 430 PM Eastern at alphageedradio.com. Visit our website at dailytechnewshow.com and tune in tomorrow. Scott Johnson and John Strickland host the program. Great job, everyone. The show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. I was born ready. Ah! I didn't drink enough during the show. Nailed it, Bryce. Nailed it. It worked. It was awesome. Hey, guys, that was an amazing show. Thank you. In chat room, here's your chance right now since I was trying but failing to see your titles. You've got three minutes to throw in every title in the chat room. There is a show bot. Did you see it? You didn't see it come out. No, Todd put one up. I'm getting a bunch of them. There's a... But I think people maybe didn't know about it. I thought it was yesterday. No, this is yesterday. This is for court. No, this is about Facebook and Medium, the one I've seen. Show bot. It's here. Where? In the chat or in the Google plus. Oh, there's another show bot. Amazing. Todd got it up there so we could... Yeah, this is what AlphaGeek Radio uses. I'll link it in the... Oh, well, there you go. dctv.link slash ag show bot. Okay, let's go check it out. I'll still accept titles in the chat room, though. Suggestion bot, I like that. Okay, Professional Medium. Oh, I like that, Professional Medium or Amateur Facebook. Boston Dynamics does it, Terminator style. Nice, good job, SP Sheridan. Can't we find a good Medium? I like that. IRS, internal rating the system. Facebook notes... I like Tumblr, lolololololol, but I don't think that's gonna fly. I really like that old shoe Facebook. That was one of my favorite things that may have ever been said on this show. I really love it. It so entirely sums up what Facebook is. Oh, that old shoe and also a giant company that's gonna take over our lives. Is that the same? Because I've never heard that before. No, it's just great. It's just a great poetic expression. We can go with that. I kind of really want to go with that, but I'll give the chat room a little time to decide. Sometimes I don't understand the words that come out of my mouth. And you know, I'll just say, as someone who has actually let go from a company that adopted stack ranking, I have some... Is that a fan? Well, all right, so no. In the immediate... Here's the interesting thing. It was both unjust and incredibly just. And it was such an interesting thing, like in the company that I worked for, basically an entire org collapsed. And I was just one of the things that collapsed within the entire org. And so that was a failure because I actually was doing, in some small way, a very good job that didn't deserve to be let go, but there was no way to fix it because there was no org in it just back. No org left. But in the macro sense, it worked perfectly because I was very clearly not destined to be a very... I didn't do well as a very small cog in a giant organization that moved incrementally. I clearly work much better in the wild, wild west of two-person media companies. So in some sense, is it got it exactly right and I'm much happier being for it. So it's interesting. But was it a temporary thing or was it an ongoing? Was the stack ranking the way that the company works? No, it's still there at this mythical company that I work for. It's very much still alive. And it does... It's interesting. The worst case I saw of it was this company I was in, our engineering organization was 8,000 people. And the vice president of engineering decided that we were gonna stack rank all 8,000 in a list together segmented by their level. So level seven separate from level six, five, four, three, two, one. So we ranked 8,000 people. It took us two months of every single manager in engineering doing nothing but working on ranking the people. And there's your productivity improvement. Maybe we got out of everybody's hair though. All the managers were out of the way. Well, but it didn't work enough. It was a nightmare, went for three years that way. Yeah, it's just like, it's so interesting because there's always gonna be examples of people for whom it is a disaster that they got stack ranked because of like, if you can sit down with the person ultimately making the decisions and do the thing that resonated most with me about the Amazon thing yesterday was having to go into like a big conference room with your superiors and argue to keep and litigate and have charts and things up on the wall about your underlings and why they're valuable, why they should be kept. And that happened, that happened to me. It was, I was one of the people on the wall being fought for. And you know what, it did rid the company of people whose destinies were elsewhere because really everybody who got let go ended up with a lovely destiny. I, you know, the thing with Amazon, I still stand by this what I said yesterday is that I still think it's just a failure of proper hiring practices. You essentially do kind of like a filter feed effect where you grab as many people who match all the dots that you want and then you just kind of like, okay, we'll shake them out and see what's left. And I don't know, I don't think that's the most effective use of resources because you essentially waste time and energy training staff up and trying to integrate people who if you used an HR system that wasn't an automated system and that's what they use, right? It's good they go through and they say, okay, the computer says this person qualifies, we'll just bring him in and interview him because for the five spots that we have left or something. I don't know, it just seems kind of a back end way to kind of do something that should have been done right the first time. Yeah, and the other thing that I would say about it is that the one thing that stack ranking fails to do is calculate the intangible benefit of people which is oftentimes I have found in many companies the people who are, I don't wanna say good people but who don't politic, the people who don't politic, who don't climb the ladder, who wanna do a good job the right way are often the first to go because they're not politicking and they're not fighting for themselves. I know of this firsthand and I won't say where but it is especially with large organizations, it is not uncommon to find a kind of a weird, I hate to use this term because it's so used so often. It's a very Game of Thrones-y, everyone has their own fiefdom carved out and even within a large organization, it's sometimes impossible to get anything done reasonably without oiling the right gears to get what you want and unfortunately that also affects your employee motivation. If people are working at a job and they see no future, they see no chance for advancement or it doesn't have to be like the next level up, it could just be laterally. You're not gonna get the best out of them so you could have a very bright capable individual who is performing a 10% of their capacity due to, it's a very high school thing of personality disagreements. Yeah, I did learn however, the one good thing about going through that system is that I did learn too late for the company that I was at but not too late for the rest of my life that you have to sell yourself everywhere you go. You have to make sure people know and as basically like a, I don't wanna say like an introvert because I'm obviously not but I'm one of those dumb people who thinks like, oh I'm doing a good job, people will see that and like you know what, that ain't true because the people who are in charge of you are doing a lot and the term managing up was never so true as it was when I worked in a stack ranking system, like you can't rely on the person who's trying to save their job to know to save your job. Oh and by the way, I have a message for Tom. I do a really good job at hosting shows. I think I'm funny and also considerate which is a rare quality, so yeah. I think we should do a fake show title. Yeah, you know what we should do? I know what we should do and Tom will hate this so we're probably not really gonna do it but we should do a mock stack rank on a hangout. That is a terrible idea. Just use showbots to do it. I would get fired immediately but like I love the idea of just really doing it in public so people can see how horrible it is. Let's ask all the patrons. Do it in showbots, let the fans. Yeah, the patrons. Oh my God, that would actually be an out of control terrible idea because then everybody's feelings would get hurt and I hate that. I like to live in a world where people's feelings don't get hurt doing their job. Wasn't that the exact ranking, the number one reason why people hated working at Microsoft? Yeah. I was amazed by that because I lived with it for 35 years. I've never been anywhere where they didn't do that. I didn't even know it was possible not to have stack ranking. Yeah, I've never been in a company that's had that and I think I'm fortunate in that respect. I can, no, there's a level of kind of poison that I think it introduces into kind of an environment. Excuse me. The worst thing for, oh sorry, go ahead. Sorry, just to cut in, did we pick a title, Jenny? No. I don't know if you wanted to wait a minute. I think it's got to be that old shoe Facebook. Okay. Just because it's so great, it's so poetic. But I think the worst thing about stack ranking is if you're in a position where God forbid, actually everyone's doing a good job, what happens? You're actually gonna get rid of someone who is doing their, you know, we're joking about the thing at DTNS, but as a thought experiment, if we had that kind of management ranking, you would have to get someone, try to think of who you would have to push out and you're like, well, everyone's cool. Everyone's good. That's the thing that stack ranking absolutely does not account for in the micro, which is I worked at this mythical company that certainly nobody knows who I'm talking about. I worked on a very small team and everybody did their job very well and that's what was so brutal is that then what your manager was doing was going into their superior and arguing that my team is the best, your team sucks and has more fat to cut and it's a terrible thing. Like there is nobody, nobody on this DTNS team who if we were a team in a corporate environment should be cut. Everybody has fantastic value, except Ellie I think, because all she does is go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the day long. Look at her adorable little face right now. We might be getting- I think she was saying LOLOLOL. Yeah, basically. Yeah. Well, she is the target, you know, age group for Tumblr, so. Look at her face. We're getting some feedback from OneAceDetect on Slack, which is one letter away from Stack, by the way. And, you know, he reminds the patrons that for the Stack ranking for DTNS, really, employees, it's Tom Merritt. Yeah. It's one person. It's one person. He's there, so. But he did have another good idea, which is let's Stack rank tech CEOs. Ooh. If we did a Stack ranking where we were forced all the tech CEOs to, I guess that's called Wall Street, but. And it is ruthless, but it does create lots of wealth. So, pros and cons. Yeah, pros and cons. All right, well, I think we've sort of covered it. Guys, thank you so much. We've run this into the ground. A fantastic episode, again, and thank you, Bryce, for making it actually go and be hearable and watchable, that is so awesome. And thank you, Roger and Ellie, because you guys are the future. Thanks, everyone. Goodbye, YouTube. Bye-bye. Bye, YouTube.