 This 10th year of Daily Tech News Show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to every single one of you, including Kelly Cook, Scott Hepburn, Jeff Wilkes, and our brand new boss, Gil, who just started backing us on Patreon. Welcome, Gil! Coming up on DTS, Scott Johnson weighs in on Sony's plans for more original IP and cloud gaming, and we look at some new desktop tech that wants to make you more productive. Will you let it? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, May 24th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. From Northwest of Canada, I'm Amos. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Wait, Northwest of... Oh, Alaska! Oh, I get it. Thank you. All right, we have an Alaska story in the show, but let's start with the quick hits. Apple announced its WWDC schedule, kicking off on Monday, June 5th. Not a big surprise, but now it's official. The keynote will take place at 10 a.m. Pacific time on June 5th, and most of WWDC will be online. Select developers and media have been invited to the campus to watch the keynote in person on the first day, however. Wednesday, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said his sources say that Apple will show off its mixed reality headset to be called the reality one at the event. We'll find out. Let's hold Gurman's feet to the fire here. Tuesday on DTNS, we got word that Netflix's password crackdown had begun in the U.S. that broke right as we were recording. It offers the ability to add extra users outside your household for $8 a month. It's a perk they offer, right? Not a crackdown. Netflix has since told the press that it is, quote, now starting to roll out updates to sharing to countries around the world, including the U.S. So if you're not in the U.S., you don't need to feel left out anymore. In the last few years, Embracer Group has acquired some big intellectual property rights like Tomb Raider and Lord of the Rings. Wednesday, the company announced that one of its biggest deals that was verbally agreed on in October fell apart Tuesday night, a day before it was supposed to be announced. Subsequently, Embracer has lowered its earnings forecast for the next year by around $300 million. We're still waiting for reliable info on what part of what deal fell apart. I'm guessing Tomb Raider, because I feel like we'd heard more if it was Lord of the Rings, but yeah, it could be either. China is limiting its domestic companies from using Micron's memory chips. We told you about that. That presents an opportunity for Samsung and SK Hynex to kind of fill the gap because they also make memory chips and they're in Korea. Well, those two companies would also like to benefit from some U.S. money that is given out as a part of the CHIPS Act, which gives companies money to come make chips in the United States. However, the CHIPS Act limits expansion in countries of concern like China for 10 years if you take the U.S. money. And the U.S. explicitly has said it doesn't want China to be able to use Korean manufacturers to make up the chip shortage from banning Micron. So given all that, it's not surprising to hear the government of South Korea has asked the U.S. to reconsider some of the details of the CHIPS Act, you know, to ease the burdens on Korean chip makers, specifically the definitions of material expansion. Vietnam is the latest country to consider banning TikTok, but for different reasons than in the U.S. and Europe. While those countries are concerned about censorship originating from Chinese influences, Vietnam is concerned there isn't enough censorship. The head of Vietnam's state broadcasting, Li Quang Tu Do, referred to a trend making the waves on TikTok of giving bad college degree advice as critical of the value of degrees offered by universities and even if it's ingest could discourage young people from studying and working. The government has also accused TikTok of being anti-government. Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications scheduled a probe of TikTok earlier this week and is threatened to cut off advertisers or possibly ban the app altogether. I don't know if you're angering the democracies and the communist governments. Feels like maybe you're somewhere in the middle. I don't know. Good luck, TikTok. All right, we talked about Microsoft Build yesterday, so Tom, let's talk a little bit about some other tidbits that have come out since our show yesterday. Yeah, starting in with the Windows 11 update coming later this year. That's the one known as 22H2. Windows 365 Boot will let you boot your computer directly into Windows 365 Cloud PC bypassing your local drive. You don't have to boot up the Windows that you have locally installed. You can go right into the cloud. Your Windows 11 login will still secure the computer, but after that you're using the Cloud PC, which theoretically would have more capacity than the local machine. This could be used in a shared device situation when multiple people are logging in on the same device. Windows 365 Boot works for folks at a company that uses Windows 11 Pro or Enterprise and subscribes to the Windows 365 Cloud PC license. So if you want to try it out, you'll also need to be in the Windows Insider program. Also later this week, Windows 11 should get native support for RAR, 7-Zip, and GZ Archives, as well as TAR, according to Panos Panay. Windows has had Zip since way back in 1998, but other formats require you to install third-party apps to handle them. Microsoft is using the open-source Lib Archive project for this implementation to make it easier. GZip and TAR particularly will be useful for anybody working on the Windows subsystem for Linux, which I'm sure some of you out there are saying, that's me. Oh yeah, no. A lot of people might be like, wait, I've used RAR on Windows before, but you probably forgot you installed some third-party support to do that. So this will be nicer and faster. Stoic Squirrel asked a really interesting question, if that Windows 11 boot, 365 boot is like Chrome OS, even more so. Chrome OS, the operating system runs on the device, and then you log in for all your stuff, although it can have local Android apps. With Windows 11 365 boot, there's no local OS. Yeah, your local OS isn't running at all. You're running entirely off that virtual machine in the cloud. Yeah, I'm happy to hear this. I prefer to have some of this stuff built into operating systems. I think having being able to unzip things in both Windows and Mac for all these years has been a real boon to people that want to quickly get through their files, quickly compress stuff, pull things down from Google Drive or wherever you're holding them, and have them zip them, then know it's going to be easy to do it without third-party software. I'm a little surprised it took this long to do it, but maybe it's because, I don't know, folks like Winrar and a few other Windows-based extractors, they were all, maybe they kind of have a business around this a little bit. Yeah, and they were good enough. Microsoft may have been like, why mess with that? It works, whereas now that they're doing more of this open-source stuff, it is less convenient to have to rely on a third-party app. Yeah, in the case of the 365 boot, direct boot, I think that sounds great, because as the world has not exactly shifted back to 100%, no one's working at home, we're all back in the office sort of thing. I don't know how much longer that goes, or if it's going to continue to be a point of contention in the business world, but a lot of people are using Windows 365 to get work done, it's part of their company. This seems like a great boon to them, where they just want to get in, do what they have to do in that secure environment, and use it where they need to use it. Another thing I feel like was probably a long time coming, I'm glad they're friends. It's also good for the Windows bottom line, because if you're sharing more desks with people these days, you're buying fewer Windows licenses, but if you have multiple people logging into a virtual machine, even if as Microsoft is doing, they give you three licenses for the price of one, you're still going to be bringing in more money overall as you spin up a lot of these Windows 365 subscriptions. Yeah, that's a really good point. I was thinking of this as, okay, traveling, maybe you can leave some stuff at home, and just kind of log into the cloud, and you still need a computer for that though. You have to have advice of some kind to access that. So yeah, maybe that sharing a workspace coming into the office three days a week makes a little bit more sense. Yeah, this is for the enterprise that wants to make the most. This is a compelling offering for Microsoft to enterprise that want to make the most out of smaller office spaces now that they don't need it as much. Yeah, and it's like you said, I mean, everybody's got Windows, but Microsoft doesn't necessarily have a long tail revenue plan for all those people. This is a great way for them to make up for that. Yeah, they do have a long tail revenue plan. It's called the Windows 365 subscription. Yeah. Well, for everybody who loves productivity and optimizing productivity, we have three stories for you today. They all revolve around maximizing the potential of any given workstation. So let's start with just the idea of using four computers with a single mouse and keyboard. You can do a KVM, or of course, or you could go for power toys. Microsoft updated power toys 0.70 with mouse without borders, which is a great name, a utility to control multiple systems with just one keyboard and one mouse. You can also move files smaller than 100 megabytes between devices, drag and drop, text and share, clipboard contents. It works like similar software from Synergy. If you're familiar with that, you move the mouse cursor to the edge of the screen, you switch between systems. And if you don't already have power toys, you can get it in Microsoft Store or off of GitHub. Yeah, if you're only Windows, right, you don't have any Linux or Macs in the mix, this is a great solution. There's lots of cool things in power toys since they revived it, I think in 2019. And this is a good one to be able to maximize. If you have multiple machines, you know, not everybody, we just talked about the opposite problem a second ago with the 365 virtual machines. But some people do have like, I have multiple machines right now. I've got a Mac laptop and a Windows machine, but if that laptop was Windows, I could, I could switch between those. That'd be great. Yeah, could see them adding functionality for different systems as well down the road. They seem pretty open to that idea these days. So maybe watch for that. But on the opposite end of all of this, what if you just want a monitor, one monitor? All right, like you use with your television, for example, well, Samsung has the answer or an answer. Samsung updated its M5, M7 and M8 smart monitors. A smart monitor is one that can act like a TV when you're not using it with your computer. Samsung's version supports Netflix, Apple Airplay, Samsung's Gaming Hub, which includes Xbox and Nvidia services. And they come in 27 and 32 inch models. The new models come to the US in June, ranging from $280 to $700 US depending on the size and screen resolution you're looking for. Yeah, so if you're not catching on to this, your monitor doesn't have to even have a computer plugged into it to act like a television. Like when you don't want to use your computer, you can just watch Netflix on the monitor itself. The monitor has its own connection, its own small little operating system and works like a smart TV. That's great for efficient uses. Like maybe you have roommates and you want a TV in your bedroom that you hook your computer up as you use it as a monitor or something like that. Yeah, it makes sense. You're working from home or have limited space. At first I was like, wait, I could use my monitor to run Netflix right now. Oh, sure, yeah. But it's not built into the monitor itself. My monitor is nothing without being, in my case, hooked up to Mac Mini. But yeah, it's kind of neat. 27, 32 inch models, so they're not huge. Small room size. Yeah, in most cases, you probably wouldn't want anything much bigger because, well, I mean, I'd love to be looking at a 56 inch monitor right now, but that's a little crazy for my desk. For a while, Eileen was using, I can't remember exact the dimensions. I think it might be a 50 or a 46 inch TV as her monitor. And she finally got to the point where she's like, it's just too big. That needs to be on the wall and be a TV. You don't want to scream where you're having to go like way over here to see anything. And I did this exact same thing with a 42 inch or maybe it was 46 and I did like it for the size and I liked it for the convenience of I had other inputs in it. So I could run an Xbox through there or run a PlayStation through there or whatever. This makes me think that we don't know this, but these monitors might also have additional inputs like a television would so that you can have more than just one or two HDMI inputs. That would be awesome. They have HDMI and USB ports, different numbers on the different models, I think, but yeah, they are just like a monitor. Very cool. Finally, in the workplace, what if you're sharing your desk? Logitech has something for that. Logitech announced the Logo Dock Flex. It's a USB-C docking station with an eight inch touchscreen, but hold on, hold on before you mock it. It's meant for offices. So when you're sharing desks, the screen lets you reserve rooms and desks using Zoom workspace, Microsoft Teams or Logitech's own software, which you can actually get separately from the dock, but it works on this as well. It has three USB-A ports, three USB-C ports, an HDMI port, a display port, and gigabit ethernet and can deliver 100 watts of power through USB-C. So you can use the screen to display calendars, photographs, and away messages, and it is $700 per dock coming in the autumn. But that's a company expense, right? So a company is going to buy a dozen of these or more to throw in hoteling stations and stuff like that. I definitely was one of those people who was like, who would ever use this? Why don't you have a touchscreen on my dock? Yeah. Well, it turns out I don't, but I'm not in a larger kind of enterprise-type workspace. Listen, if you have hoteling stations where people are coming and going, there are a lot of meetings being scheduled. The calendar is life. I can see this being kind of cool. 700 bucks seems steep, but so what goes? I wonder how many companies are going to look at this and think it's worth it, right? Like, I get the convenience of being able to walk into the room and say, oh, well, let me just reserve this. Tapity, tap, tap, tap, plug in. Here I go. Now I got my desk. And just like we were talking about with the virtual systems from Microsoft, there is a more of a need for desk sharing and hot swappable desks and things like that. This feels more like it's supposed to look cool so that when you're showing people around the office, you know, the new employee, you're like, ah, these are our hoteling station. Oh, it's got a touchscreen. How nifty, right? I'm not sure just how necessary this is, but it isn't totally unnecessary. It just maybe is a little bit overkill at 700 bucks. Also, I know we're using the term hoteling stations. I think everybody knows what that is, but it's a computer that, you know, I mean, back in the old days of, you know, working at a cable news network, hoteling stations were everything. And you just had to log out unless you wanted some weird email to be sent from your account. Yeah, I think the name comes from like somebody who's staying at a hotel and doesn't have an office here. The visiting gets a station where they can sit and work. But I've heard that term used in a lot of different enterprises. So, yeah, not everybody might know that. That's a good point. Hey folks, if you knew it, and you just want to tell us, you can get in touch on the social networks, or maybe you know the real history of the word, hoteling station, anything you want to say to us, get in touch on the social networks at DTNS show on Twitter and Mastodon. We're on the mstdn.social, but it's DTNS show, daily tech news show on tiktok and DTNS pics on Instagram. Sony's PlayStation Showcase is taking place right now as we record DTNS, Helldivers 2, Immortals, Love Avium, Ghostrunner, Phantom Blade Zero, Sword of the Sea, The Talos Principle. Those are some of the things they're talking about over there. But they also gave an investor presentation earlier today. Here are a few of the major announcements from that. These are not games. They're more strategy things. For example, Scott, are you surprised? I know you're not, because I told you this earlier on the morning street, but act like you are surprised to hear that Sony says it sold 600,000 PSVR 2 units in its first six weeks. That's 8% more than the PSVR 1 or just PSVR sold in its first six weeks. I was surprised when you first told me, because that is good. I mean, an increase is good, obviously. I responded somewhat tepidly, I think, because I think these numbers are not near what Sony needs to justify the development and the R&D that they put into this. And it's an expensive device. I think they'll launch this thing in the smack dab of the pandemic, 2021, maybe even they would have had a better time. The problem is they also had supply chain issues with actual PS5s, which are required to use the PlayStation VR 2. So maybe that wouldn't have gone so well after all. But traditionally with consoles of any kind, after the launch of the console, if you add accessories in, whether they're things like, I don't know, Microsoft's Kinect or a dance pad or a new kind of controller, which is something Sony did in the original PlayStation lineup later on. They just don't sell one to one. They just don't. And so these are good numbers for what they are. I don't think they're going to be happy though until these get much closer to their sell rate of the actual console. Do you think some people are waiting to see what the VR landscape looks like after an announcement, June 5th, for example? I know they are. The reason they know that, I've talked to some people who have straight up said, look, I'm excited about all these things, but I'm not getting any of them metas or anyone else's until I see what my or what Apple's doing. And once they hear that, that will that will make a decision for them. And it may not be Apple is the decision. It just it will just finally give them the landscape and they can they'll know what else is out there coming from Apple and then they can decide whether they want that or not. Few other things here. Sony expects PC revenues to double in 2023. So they're bullish on on PC sales from their studio games. Also, they're not going to cut windows off because they're going to get a bunch of money from making games that run on windows. 50% of PlayStation studio investments in 2025 will be for new intellectual property. And if you're like, Oh, well, Sony does a lot of new IP 2019, that was only 20%. This year, it's only 40%. So they're they're continuing to raise the amount of money on making new stuff. Those of you who are like, I'm tired of sequels. Good news. Yeah, this, the only thing I would say about this is this is actually really great news. If Sony has one really defining strength that is their original content, it is their first party content. And even though they're in the sequel territorial bunch of those, they have shown in the past, they're not afraid to launch something big and new and have it become a big hit and a classic after that. And I think this is this is good news. That's that's more investment in that direction. Being up 20% gives me a lot of hope in the future. What we've seen so far from this showcase, however, not a lot of original new content yet doesn't mean that we're going to see what they said in the earnings call immediately on screen with this event because that stuff usually these are investments that they're putting in now. How long, how long do you think it takes for us to see new IP? I think next year you will start to see more. I think we'll still see some this year, but I think it'll be smaller, smaller stuff, but things that are on the scale of your gods of war or horizon zero dawns, these kind of larger, bigger original IPs, which again, weren't very original to Sony at the time. I think those just take a little longer. So 2024, 2025 maybe sooner than then later would be nice because we're already getting halfway through this console cycle, at least traditionally speaking. So we'll see what happens. And then finally, Sony says it's going to flip from spending 88% of its money in 2019 on traditional games to 60% in 2025 going to live service games. They talked a lot about cloud gaming. Not everything live service is technically cloud gaming like streaming in the cloud. Some of it's just online multiplayer. But PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan did say they're doing something in cloud gaming that will quote unfold over the course of the coming months. Yeah. I don't know what that's going to be. I have some thoughts. There's a rumored handheld that will just be a cloud playing device that they're working on. That's possible. There's some other stuff going on. It's a little concerning and depending on kind of you're bent toward how games are going, if you like the direction of live service games or games as a service, then this is probably good news to a lot of players. I tend to be a little concerned about that 60% going, I'm sorry, flipping from 80% of its money going traditional to 60 going to traditional. No, 60 going to live service. 40% would be traditional. So it's even a little bit worse in my head because again, Sony's Hallmark are these amazing in depth, huge, really expansive, incredible single party games that are often single player experiences. Those who could still be live service if they're in the past. Absolutely could be. No doubt about it. And there's a lot of this that's still sort of being defined like what even is a live service game. So there's a lot to be said about what, well, we need to hear what their plans are. They obviously are following the trends everybody are following. So this isn't like crazy to hear, but I guess the proofs in the pudding, we need to see what games they're talking about. Breaking news, Sony just announced Cat Quest, Pirates of the Peribian. What? It's a new sequel to Cat's Quest. Cat's Quest, one and two excellent games. So it's probably not an exclusive though. That's the other thing is I'm noticing a lot of stuff in this event. I'm just sort of eyeballing it from the side, but a lot of existing IPs that are either on PCs already or already sort of multiplayer games. They're treading water while they develop the new IP kind of makes a little bit. And that's okay too. There's nothing wrong with any of this. I just, I guess this new IP stuff, I would love to hear it more soon than more late. Well, a startup space company called Astronis says it has successfully deployed and tested a kitchen stove sized satellite called Arcturus in geostationary orbit and has begun delivering internet service to Alaska. Astronis launched the satellite as a rideshare payload on a SpaceX Falcon heavy rocket. The two separated a few hours after liftoff and successfully deployed the satellite solar arrays, its boom and a sub reflector. But that's not all because once in place, Arcturus, the small satellite connected to an internet gateway in Utah. Utah, Scott. From there, it communicated with multiple terminals in Alaska with the goal to provide high speed bandwidth to an internet service provider called Pacific Data Port, which is in the Alaskan region. So this is backhaul. This is providing, this isn't, we're going to broadcast the internet like SpaceX does. This is giving like basically fiber level bandwidth or more to an ISP that can then distribute it. But Amos, you live in Alaska. Does this get you excited? The idea that ISPs would be getting spaceman with basically? It does. I personally have fiber to the house. I have option for two gigabit cable as well, although I've stuck with my fiber for reliability purposes. But what really excites me about this is that approximately 30% of Alaska has no capability of high speed internet. They're using either slow satellite linkages or they're using stuff or something. Yeah, or they're just getting internet over, you know, over pots. So, you know, just dial up is still a thing up here. One of the things that really gets me is that sometimes the reach of high speed internet here in Alaska is skewed slightly because while about half of the state's population lives in Anchorage, another several hundred thousand live in bigger cities like mine, you know, Wasilla, most of the population outside of that lives in very rural areas on the hillsides or just out in the middle of nowhere in small communities. And those people would really benefit from having high speed internet at least into a local distribution area that then can spread that high speed throughout the small towns that they live in. And the really big part about this is politically here in Alaska, one of the big things that is constantly talked about is the has versus the have nots. And a lot of that is the native population here in Alaska. They often are left behind on structural improvements, you know, infrastructure for the state. And this could really improve the the access, especially for education and, you know, wow, the last in bandwidth decided to go out on Amos right at the end of that statement. Oh, man, that was awesome. As if on cue. So to sum up, please more bandwidth soon, says President of Alaska. Hey, Utah's doing their best. All right, we're going to send him what we can as soon as we can. All right, let's check out the mail. This one comes in from Nick in Australia. This is in response to a conversation we had a few days ago about CRISPR making mustard greens taste better for people who want, you know, healthy greens, but don't think mustard greens taste very good. Nick said, I was so happy to hear you guys talk about making something like cilantro or as it's called outside North America, coriander tastes great for everybody with the help of CRISPR. I'm not in the coriander tastes great category, but I'm not also in the coriander tastes like soap category. I'm in a third category that a small part of the population is, where coriander tastes rotten. Since finding out the hard way, I've had several great meals over the years ruined because the restaurant screwed up and put coriander into the meal. Bring on the tasty CRISPR food, please. Thank you, Nick in Australia for this email of, you know, supporting this kind of technology, but also for letting us learn that cilantro and coriander are the same thing. We call the seeds coriander in the US and I know elsewhere, but we call the leaves cilantro. And I guess what Nick is saying is that they call the seeds and the leaves coriander. So yeah, I've got coriander seeds in my spice rack and I don't know. I don't, if a recipe calls for it here and there, I use it, but yeah, I did not know. I did not know that was where cilantro originated from. Thanks, Nick. Yeah. Thank you. Also, thanks to you, Scott Johnson for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. Well, I launched a new thing with my friends over at core. I talk about core on here all the time. We cover video games. So all this video game talk today, you'll get more of that on core as usual at frogpence.com slash core. But we also launched a daily YouTube episodic show called core daily. And basically it's just kind of taking one of the hot topics of the day and doing a little five, six minute video about it. We alternate turns. I do a couple, but we'll do one, John will do one. Anyway, you'll get all our takes on lots of stuff, including the Sony stuff that's happening. We will have words on that both there and on the podcast. So to learn more about what core is up to, check us out at frogpence.com slash core. Now patrons like Gil, don't go anywhere. You get the extended show, Good Day Internet on today's Good Day Internet. Some very sad news about Taco Tuesday, possibly more on Coriander and Scott's take on the new Minecraft movie. You can catch our show live Monday through Friday at four p.m. Eastern at 20 hundred UTC and you can find out more at daily tech news show.com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with Megan Maroney joining us. Don't miss it. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.