 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Johnny Hernandez, Hi Tech Oki, and Jim Hart. Also a special thanks to lifetime supporter, Chap. We see you, Chap. We raise you a chap. On this episode of DTNS, Dropbox says no more unlimited cloud storage. Some people are very upset about that. Apple VR patent timelines are curious, and Charlotte Henry is here to tell us why CNN Max is better than CNN Plus. Where is it? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, August 24, 2023, from Studio Revolver, Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dundley. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us today is Charlotte Henry of the edition news letter and frequent guest on the show. Charlotte, so glad to have you back. I'm so pleased to be back, and I'm always blown away when you introduce the show as being in the 10th year, because I'm like, oh yeah, it's Tom and Sarah's new show. And it's like, no, I've been doing this bad boy for a decade. We've been smirking for a decade. Weirdly enough, I sometimes feel the same way. I'm proud of you guys. I love it. I love it. It's what we need. Yeah. Well, we'd love to have you. You're going to make the show better. And speaking of shows, let's get right into it, starting with the Quickets. Due to the artificial intelligence boom, NVIDIA has more than doubled its current quarter revenue of $13.51 billion over the same period last year of $6.7 billion. Wow, that is absolutely crushing market estimates. Gaming products rose 22% with the release of the RTX 4060 GPU avatar cloud engine and the increase of games using DLSS. But NVIDIA's AI and data center segment skyrocketed up 171% on the year. That includes its H100 GPUs and the HGX box that combines eight of those into one single computer. NVIDIA is showing no signs of slowing down, feeling pretty good about its next quarter projecting another rise to $16 billion in revenue. In a surprise move, Apple sent a letter to California State Senator Susan Calimenta's Eggman in support of SB 244, a right to repair bill being considered in California. The bill is similar to the one that went into effect in Minnesota in May and requires manufacturers to offer a means to diagnose, maintain, and repair products. And the letter Apple expresses its support on the grounds of offering consumers the ability to repair their devices safely without risking privacy or data issues. Boy, a lot of people very excited about this Apple news today. Not the first company to do it, but certainly it's a big company to do it. It's been moving in that direction, but it's interesting, it's embracing it in other places. Indeed. Speaking of big companies, Meta released code generation tool called CodeLama, built on its Llama2 large language model, which will generate new code and debug human written work. CodeLama uses the same license as Llama2, which makes it free for research and commercial use by small to medium sized companies. So, you know, a Microsoft, not no, but you know, maybe Sarah and Rob and Charlotte's company. Sure. CodeLama comes in three sizes, the smallest, a smallest of which can run on a single GPU. So, pretty small. It appears that hardware maker MSI inadvertently leaked details on Intel's yet to be announced 14th generation desktop processors in a now taken down video on MSI's website. The video said the 14th gen processors will be 3% faster than the 13th gen with a 17% rise for multi-thread workloads. It also showed info indicating the Core i7 14700K would increase performance cores from 8 to 12. The video said the 14th gen chips will work on existing Z690 and Z790 motherboard, Intel is expected to officially announce the 14th gen processors during innovation 2023 next month. Walmart is adding drone deliveries to two Texas area superstores later this year. Wing, which is the alphabet-owned drone firm, says the two offerings will cover a combined 60,000 homes in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Customers within a six mile radius of a Walmart in Frisco, Texas and a second location nearby will be able to have small items delivered by Wing drones starting in a couple of weeks. Those are the quick hits. Alright, so you might not have ever gotten that data limit email from Dropbox saying that your Dropbox account is about to hit its limit. And that might have been because the online data storage company has always had an unlimited option, which you pay for, and then you never have to deal with these sorts of things until now. Dropbox announced on Thursday that a small amount of users were using so much data that the company had potential, or they had potential, to degrade the company's cloud service for other Dropbox clients. Dropbox has a highest tier all the space you need storage plan that will now be capped at around five terabytes per user for new customers. That's per month. Now for many people, not an issue. Oh my gosh, like how are we using all this stuff? Some users say, oh, actually it is, because I'm backing up all sorts of things on Dropbox. The plan was designed for businesses. However, some clients were using that fire hose for things like cryptocurrency mining, sharing storage, even reselling that storage. So here's what's going on now. Dropbox has 8 million paying users, some of whom need a lot of storage. Back in May, Google removed its as much storage as you need product branding for its highest tier workspace plan, very similar to what Dropbox currently offers. And Google at the time sent some people to Dropbox as a result. Customers have posted on forums about being told that they've exceeded storage limits, need to pay for additional capacity. Some discussed moving to Dropbox after receiving such warnings. But Dropbox says a new surge of this activity in the wake of other services making similar policy changes change their tune, right, Rob? Yeah, so Dropbox's new plan knows that every new terabyte will cost $8 per month compared to the previous as much space as you need to plan at $24 per month. Current users with less than 35 terabytes, which is almost everyone on that plan will be able to keep their current storage at the same price for five years. Those exceeding 35 terabytes will be contacted to discuss a range of options. If I were a 35, if I was a person at 35 terabytes, I would be really, really upset about this because I was paying for unlimited and unlimited used to actually being unlimited. Guess it doesn't mean that anymore. Exactly. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. It's like, if you're in the 30, you're moving 35 TBs per month type thing, then okay, maybe it's not unlimited, but you're not expecting to be capped. And the company being like, you know what, hold on a second, there's a few of you who are really going a little rogue on this whole situation. And because of that, everyone else now has to pay more. I mean, it's sort of a company thing. What do you think, Charlotte? I mean, I'm sitting here thinking how I could possibly use 35 terabytes of data and probably most of the answers we shouldn't say on this show. I can totally imagine why there's a backlash to this because on the face of it, you are no longer getting the thing you thought you were paying for. I'd be fascinated to know how many users this actually affects my guess is it's a very, very small number. A very small number. Well, I guess also most normals don't need anywhere near five terabytes. I think I have two terabytes of storage and I'm not really a normal user by any stretch of imagination. I'm creating media, I'm storing stuff on Dropbox, and I don't think I'm anywhere near my two terabyte limit. I'm just struggling to see how many people this is affecting and whether it's a really legitimate complaint. It's a small amount of people and I don't know exactly, you know, the crypto stuff I understand that that's probably a situation. I don't know that much about that. What I can tell you is that I know somebody who went from somebody, it's not me, okay? It's not me. I can go from Google to Dropbox because of the unlimited thing that Google capped somewhat recently just a couple of months ago. This is somebody who's running a Plex server. This is a Plex server that is dealing with many terabytes of data per month. This is not necessarily anything illegal. It just happens to be a lot of data that's being moved around. I sent this person the story this morning saying, is this an issue? And they were like, oh no. There's a couple of things to pick up on though, right? So Rob said that you can't still get as much data as you want. You just have to pay for it. That's what we were doing before. That's what we were doing before. That's how I look at it because I can see legitimate reasons and legitimate ways of how you could use that much data if you were going into it with the thought that I have unlimited data. So I get that people are going to have to pay for it now. But as I said, I'm not near that, but I can easily get the five terabytes for some of the things that I do. So I would fill some kind of way about no longer having that unlimited option as an option. I'm looking forward to the startup that offers a new unlimited plan because someone's on their way. I recently moved on my Verizon mobile plan from something that was supposedly unlimited to less unlimited, but it actually made more sense for me price-wise. So yeah, I'm with you Rob. Sometimes these things don't, okay, tell me what my new option is. But yes, I think what's going on here, a lot of crypto mining, a lot of behind the scenes stuff, and Dropbox has gone the way of Google saying we're not going to pay for this anymore because some of you are just using that many terabytes. So let's talk about everybody's favorite things, Apple patents. Apple recently granted a few new patents. Curiously, even though Apple only announced its Vision Pro Augmented Reality headset this year for release in 2024, the company has been working on a product of this kind since well before the first iPhone, a newly published patent for virtual reality headset was granted to Apple and the application date is May 7th, 2007. That's before the first iPhone, the original iPhone, the one that was just called the iPhone. So could Apple's VR concept really have been in the works for 16 years? Oh my gosh. I mean, let's talk about this, but wait. First, there's more. A second patent of note was for a digital stone. Hard to know exactly what a digital stone is supposed to be in the minds of Apple, but it is described in the patent as a small portable physical object for use in an extended reality system. The system may include a device that allows a user or wearer to interact with the virtual representations of content such as stored data and other applications overlaid on the user's physical environment. Okay. So basically that sounds like something to make virtual objects physical while wearing the headset and then move them around in the real world, but we don't really know. So is it a hard drive? Is that where data is coming from? Is it a pet rock, Charlotte? What do you think a digital stone is? I mean, yes, maybe it's all those things. The pattern doesn't exactly make it clear as patterns I want to do sometimes. Obviously, this was Apple thinking back, you know, back in the day before we really know what AR, the Metaverse, the phrase didn't exist at that time. I think it's a kind of interesting example of Apple being quite a forward thinking and innovative company. You know, the fact that as Rob said, this VR headset, whatever that was at the time, was before even the iPhone existed. Obviously, Apple had seen other kind of smart and smartphone devices at that time and was maybe looking ahead. I'd be fascinated to know as well what competitor companies were looking at and doing in this space. I'm sure it wasn't only Apple, but we all take more interest in Apple patterns than lots of other companies. So now I don't think it's a pet rock. I'm sort of imagining a device when we go back to that digital stone that kind of laid out the kind of boundaries of a digital virtual reality area. Maybe it was something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, Rob. I mean, I could see almost the way that I would, you know, consider like a Yubiqui or something like here is a representation of something that is physical and I have, but then wearing the VR headset, it can represent something else. But I need it in order for the rest of it to work. What do you think? I don't know. I'm kind of thinking of like you're playing virtual chess and you just want to have the tactile feel of moving your chess piece. So there's something, something you can pick up in the real world. But as you're looking at it through your virtual headset, it looks like the thing that you're interacting with in the virtual world and you're literally able to physically move that thing back and forth. That's kind of what thought, you know, popped into my head. But honestly, we really don't have any clue as to what this is going to be. But I'm sure people are going to speculate over the coming weeks until something actually comes out. I also, as you two are talking about this, I'm also thinking what a fuss Apple made when it announced the Vision Pro of that there was nothing you held on to compared to lots of other VR products. So it's kind of interesting that this, there's a pattern for something that clearly is physical and can be held or moved in some way because that was a really big deal in the Vision Pro, wasn't it, that you didn't have to touch and hold something. As a quest user of, you know, every quest that has been offered up until now, I mean, I'm used to using my controllers. Sometimes they look like lightsabers, you know, but like you need them in order to do things. You can do sort of pinch and touch with the hands. I don't think it's ever worked very well, at least not for me. But, but yeah, that whole idea of like, okay, so you don't have a controller, but there is maybe a place, a rock, as, as it's described in, in the, yes, as stone to, you know, unlock all sorts of things. I, I don't know, I, I, I'm not in the market for Vision Pro because it's a, because you saw the price. Yeah, and the price. And you know, it's not even happening until next year. But I am, I'm, I'm excited to see if something comes from this at the same time. Apple had a patent for a VR headset in 2007. So, you know, you can imagine the company being like, listen, let's just get the patent. The hardware needs to catch way up. But let's do this. And 16 years later, we'll have a working model. Yeah. And that's not such a weird thing for patents. Like, that is often how these things work. Indeed. Well, we'd like to think of our patrons as patents, you know, once we have you, we hope you stay forever. Thanks to everybody who became patrons and increased their pledges recently because of your support. We can bring Molly Wood on the show one Friday every other month. Molly is the best. We would like to see Molly Moore to reach our goal of having Molly on one Friday every month. We need a bit more help. If you haven't already, consider supporting the show by visiting patreon.com slash DTNS. All right. So CNN announced today it's going to launch a 24 seven all all live all the time streaming news service called CNN max on September 27. CNN's press release adds that it'll be part of an open beta for news experimentation that will take input from the max community. CNN max will be available across all of max subscription tiers. Listeners might remember that Warner Brothers discovery killed CNN plus 16 months ago, less than a month after it launched. CNN plus was an online only subscription streaming service that focused on CNN person and personality driven shows. CNN max will not be a streaming version of the CNN channel, but we'll feature some of the tentpole shows from the network like Anderson Cooper 360, the lead with Jake Tapper and poor and the situation room with Wolf Blitzer. So Charlotte, what is it this time? What is CNN max this time? How's it different than CNN plus? Well, obviously max is bigger than CNN plus isn't it Rob? You know, you can tell it's bigger and better because of the name. I think this is a much more compelling offering actually, isn't it? Because I think what people want is access to news and information. And that was like CNN plus was a bit of a weird mismatch of like Anderson Cooper talking about his family and then somewhat like it was a bit weird when people think of CNN, they think of hard news, right? Mostly and some documentaries. And it was kind of a bit of a weird mismatch and it didn't really make sense. The fact that they cut it off, I think was not very good. If you read Sarah Fisher's story in Axios who broke this before CNN actually announced it, that was she points out it was very bad for morale. The dropping of CNN plus so quickly and obviously it cost people their jobs and so on and so forth. But it is trying to compete with the streaming offers from others. MSNBC, obviously now, well, NBC now Fox News does streaming stuff as well, doesn't it? So he's obviously trying to compete with those clear rivals. I was kind of thinking how different this is also to what streaming news is like in the UK. So like the BBC, you just go to the BBC iPod and you can watch the BBC News channel. It's just there for free. Sky News actually puts loads of has a stream of its news as well. It's embedded in the app. It's embedded on its website. Pretty easy to access for free. So it seems more complicated than the US. I guess that's because of cable bundles and stuff. And obviously one of the things Warner Brothers discovered the people that now run CNN are keen to have is younger viewers watching CNN because we know that young people just do not watch cable news, do they? They're too busy watching DTNS. But what that means is that they're not buying cable bundles. So you've got to get some value and money out of them some way. So there's obviously going to be advertising on CNN, Max, they might look at some kind of abtec solutions to do better targeted adding as time goes on. I think that idea of an open beta is really interesting as well. They're not pretending that this is the final finished product and what's perfect for their viewers straight off the bat. They're not pretending that anymore. We should say it's a section within the Max app now. I think you make a really good point, Charlotte, that CNN Max is at least front facing saying, you know what? Give us some feedback. Let us know how we're doing. We're all just about news for you, even though CNN Plus was supposedly more of that, but it was more, I think, I never actually watched it. A lot of people didn't because it came and went within a month, but it was more of the sort of like the CNN personalities and more of that less breaking news and more of the CNN stuff that most people some people at least would care about. When we're in the situation where we have so many ways to get streaming content, whether it be part of a cable package or all a cart kind of thing, I wonder how much CNN Max is going to thrive. I don't think it's a terrible idea. In fact, as somebody who pays for YouTube TV, because I don't even watch it. I don't even watch anything that's sort of like cable network-esque things, but maybe there's an earthquake. I might go to CNN or some other news channel type thing to have something like that at my disposal that's less sort of lifestyle stuff and more news. Exactly. I don't exactly know what it's going to look like. Rob, what are your thoughts on this? I actually think that CNN Max may have a shot, unlike CNN Plus did, because the problem with Plus was that the demographic that you're going after, they're not buying CNN. If they were going to do that, they would have just watched cable. So to have another service that wasn't the same content that you even got on the thing that they already weren't watching was just, I think, a bridge too far. I think with this though, the fact that it's coming with something that literally millions of people already have, folks will get to kind of play around with it and see, oh, okay. I actually kind of like that. I like that thing that wasn't regular Anderson Cooper that was a little bit something different. I think it's just it's given people the opportunity to kind of test it out before they go and feel like they have to buy yet another service. Yeah. And we should say there's going to be four hours of every day of original programming. I think it's basically because there's contractual agreements. You can't just start the, you know, the CNN in America, international feed onto a streaming service. So there is going to be four hours that is different from your normal CNN. So I think that could be quite compelling for certain viewers as well. And also, we do have to talk about that cord kill element. If people are just not buying cable bundles, but are paying for max say, this is a way to get them to watch CNN where they might not have just watched it for. And that's really what it comes down to a tech solution to getting people to watch an old format of media. Yeah, that's that is a good way to look at it. I'm sure CNN is hoping that many people will say, we want this. I really need it to be described. Well, another thing that people want is concrete. You might say, how much do they want concrete? Actually, quite a bit. People make about 4.4 billion tons of concrete every year. You're building new stuff, your land sidewalks. Concrete is very important. It involves though, needing 8 billion tons of sand. And that's caused some concrete shortages in recent years. You know what else humans generate a lot of though? Coffee. People love coffee. And that creates coffee grounds and the coffee grounds mostly become trash. However, a team of researchers from Australia's RMIT University School of Engineering have discovered coffee grounds when used properly can be used as a silica substitute in the concrete production process, offering significantly stronger chemical bonds that sand alone, which is part of what makes that sort of the basis of concrete, gives coffee grounds a purpose beyond landfills. The process is a little involved. Pyrolyzing the materials at 350 to 500 degrees Celsius, then substituting them for sand in 5, 10, 15 and 20 percentages. That's by volume for standard concrete mixtures. So to the outsider, you might say, I don't really know what's going on. Anybody who knows concrete knows that that is actually a stronger concrete, which is something that will be more soluble. The study was published in the September issue of Journal of Cleaner Production. That's more about concrete than I've ever learned in my life. So thank you. You're welcome. Yeah. Well, it wasn't me. I think that folks at RMIT University School of Engineering, but yeah. I don't know, Charlotte, Rob, if y'all are coffee drinkers, I'm not a huge one. Sarah. I throw out coffee grounds pretty often, and I've never really thought about how to repurpose them in a way that would make our cities safer. Sarah, I'm in England. I drink tea. Come on. I drink coffee once in 1982. Oh, Sarah. Really? I think I was nine. I'm the coffee person that cares about this the most. Got it. That's there is contributing to the future of concrete. That's what we've learned. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The next time you see a cement truck, you say to them, have you heard about the coffee grounds? Heard it on DTNS. All right, Rob, let's talk about cobalt in our mailbag today. So Andrew had thoughts on yesterday's story about cobalt translation using AI, and he writes, as a Java developer, I never would have wanted to take on modernizing cobalt alone, but I could see a tool like this making it more manageable. But I think the current cobalt developers will get the most out of it as they'll already understand their systems and be able to learn Java as the translation happens. It actually points to a good learning path for developers as new languages come out and their older system can be translated to keep up with new tech. It also underscores the need to keep good software engineering practices like automated testing so that everyone can trust a new system will work like the old one. IBM mentioned this as well as the first step listed to modernizing cobalt, as it is refractoring it to a high enough quality to be translatable. Andrew, this is so great. And yeah, what a good point for anybody who is unfamiliar with cobalt. And we talked about it on yesterday's show. I mean, this is legacy code that goes back to 1959. I'm familiar with it. I don't know if I've ever said this on this show, but my very, very first real job with benefits out of college was working for a consulting firm where I basically was looking at cobalt and Fortran for Y2K errors, basically going debugging for dates. You know, this is, I think this is like in 96 before Y2K. Wow. So you were doing that four years before, at least someone on the four side to be like, you might have a problem. There was a lot, there's a lot of mainframe stuff that was written with like, oh, this, this works until 99. And, you know, they just didn't think about having to have 2000 in it. And, you know, the thought that that was going to break earth if we didn't get all this stuff. I'm having real millennium bulk flashbacks. I'm just pleased that Rob saved the planet really. Yeah. Thank you, Rob. Appreciate that. And also, thank you, Andrew, for, for writing in and saying, this is something that affects me, and this is something that I think will affect other people and potentially in a good way. If you have anything that you would like to give us feedback about that we talk about on the show, something we might talk about on a future show, please do send it our way. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Charlotte Henry, thank you so much for being with us today. Let folks know what you've been up to these days. No, thanks for having me. I love doing these additional conversations with you. Head over to TheEdition.net. You can find blogging, you can sign up to the newsletter there. If you want to head over to newsletter.TheEdition.net and you can just sign up straight away. For the newsletter, it goes out twice a week. Have a podcast for some really great guests also called TheEdition that goes out once a week as well. So I'd love for you to come and hang out with me there. Well, we're happy to have you hang out with us. And Charlotte will be popping up around these parts more often than not. And we're so happy to have you. Thank you again, Charlotte. Speaking of people that we very much care about and love, that's our patrons. Stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. If you're a patron, you're at the show. It's a new era at Netflix. Have you heard the good word? We're going to talk about where all those DVDs are going or maybe not going. But just a reminder, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. You can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com. We're back doing it all again tomorrow with Chris Ashley joining us and Lynn Peralta. You're on the top tech stories. Talk to you then.