 Hi everybody. It's DTNS Pre-Show. I'm Tom Merritt. Joining us today, Justin Robert Young, Garrett Weinserl, and of course our producer, Roger Chang. I don't usually do an intro, but maybe I'll start. Today is that day. Yeah. The day that the courage of men fails. Guys, I think that now that I'm a lowly gold member of United that I can't do free same day changes anymore. Welcome to my world. I mean, like, what the hell? What is, what the hell? How do you live like this? This is like my whole life is based on getting from here to there. Well, no, buying crap fares and then switching it same day to better times. Yep. Now I'm, now I'm, I'm, I'm not, I'm not here. By the way, news breaking Jeff Sessions will recuse himself from the investigation. Oh, wow. How long did that take? A day. Which, by the way, that's what we like to call blood in the water. Oh, there was blood in the water before and now it's just, they're just pouring over the chum. No, there was a suspicion. He seemed weak if he has now done a thing based on the, the, the swirling. That's the blood. And that happens when he does not feel comfortable. Oh, I was talking about the, the, the wider administration. It's an important story that's breaking right now that you will follow at politics, politics. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. But diamondclub.tv or Justin, what, what's your poll, what's your website address? I don't even know, man. I don't really have like a website that bring you don't have a single destination website, which is like, I don't know. Here's my website. iTunes. Go to iTunes type what you want and you can get it. It's the modern generation. Yeah. I don't know. I just do so many stuff. And in a way, I almost don't want, I don't want people to know that like politics, politics, politics, that I do a wrestling show and people that like the wrestling show that I prefer for them to stay as well. Well, diamondclub.tv is, is the one destination that yeah. Everything streams and, and, and then twitch.tv slash Justin, our young is, is another place where you can see everything. So Justin, you're frankly of all the friends I have. You're the one that I'm, I would expect to, and I'm most surprised by the fact that you do not have a podcast that you do under like an assumed alias. One of your shows you just don't do under a fake name and you wear like a disguise. I mean, that you know that you don't do one under nail. I was actually, oh snap. That's a good point. Didn't think of that. I was actually thinking about doing something within alias. There's a new service that probably can't talk about publicly, but Tom, Tom knows what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah. I was thinking about the launch soon. I was thinking about some of the stuff that I made for that was very silly and very avant garde and I was like, would it be better if I was not me? And I guess they would probably not want that because they probably want to talk about it and for me to read about it. I ran into my first influencer thing. I'm not sure when I'm allowed to tell you what it is, but essentially it was one of these things relating to my book where they said, we'll promote your book and we'll stock it and put links for our members to buy it, but you have to tweet about it six times that's in the contract. And it's over the course of like a month. And I'm like, well, I probably would anyway. I just want people to know, like, hey, there's this thing over here where you can get discounts or whatever. Right? But like, it's just weird to have them say like, you have to because we, and they're like, your publisher tweeting doesn't count. We want your... You need to tweet, yeah. Yeah. But that's where the money comes in, right? Yeah, yeah. That's what they're paying for. Alrighty. Mr. Wienzerl, thank you for joining us. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me. It's like, I'm going to pretend I didn't just geek out about Star Wars with you last night. I will try not to introduce you the way I wrote in our document here at Wienzerl. Host of Let's Talk About Star Wars and many more successful shows. I missed that. And now I'm seeing it and that entertains me. Host of Overwatchers and many more shows. I'll say Overwatchers particularly just because we're talking about Overwatch. Do I have two seconds? Yeah, yeah. I'm going to stow the puppy in case she gets loud. Stow the puppies. It's one of the... It's on our checklist, actually. We batten down hatches. We stow the puppies. That's one of the things that happens when you're about to queue into a Hearthstone match. That's one of the... Stowing puppies. Stowing puppies. Yeah. Stowing puppies. Goddamn. Now I really just want to know if I can... Because the problem is I'm trying to get the Syracuse tomorrow. Mm-hmm. And the way that it is now, I get in at like 11 o'clock. But that takes like four or five prime hours of time when really... That's if they get you there on time, which now that you're not, you know, super, super secret elite. Well, and I'm leaving it alone. I'm leaving it one, which is a problem. Yeah. Because I'm not leaving it... I don't have to call them. And maybe on this drive to Hayward. Hey, remember me? You used to like me. Yeah, you guys. I might be willing to pay a little bit extra to get out a little earlier. Yeah. Man, I've been flying Delta and I've been enjoying it. And I have to say, they've been pretty good to me. It's the rewards though. I don't know. I know. I know. Them golden handcuffs. They are, man. And I still... Although you want to know what? Once I don't have any more mileage, actually, you know where I really screwed up? I screwed up in not cashing out with... I should have jumped ship because they will match. Yeah. A lot of times. Yeah. I should have jumped ship and got another year of high status. You should have. You should have. Man. All right, ladies and gentlemen, please make sure your puppies are all safely stowed as we prepare for our show. All right. Is everyone ready? Yeah. Here we go. Daily Tech News Show is powered by its audience, not outside organizations. To find out how you can help power the show, visit DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 2nd, 2017. I'm Tom Merritt. Joining me on Thursday is Justin Robert Young alongside. How are you, sir? Oh, man. I am excited. We got some great stuff to talk about this week on the Thursday edition of the Daily Tech News Show. This week in Thursdays. I am going... Controversial, high stakes edition. Everybody looks forward to the cut it up and let it fly Thursdays. I'm going to tell a tale of a typo that brought down the Internet. We're going to talk about a new battery technology. This has got to be the one this time. And also, thankfully, because our guest is here with us, we're going to be talking about Overwatch and what it has done for Blizzard. It won an award yesterday. Garrett Wines are a host of Overwatchers, The Angry Chicken. Many more awesome shows on the Internet is with us as well. Garrett, thanks for joining us, man. Thanks for having me, Tom. And good to see you again, Justin. Oh, it's a pleasure. Oh, it's a pleasure. Now, I've been experimenting around with doing some like hot headlines before we get into the top stories of the day. So let's start with those. Google updated its alo messaging app with support for animated emojis and GIFs. It also gets easier access to Google Assistant with a button in the compose box that can add assistance to any conversation. Features are available on Android now. Coming to iOS soon. So both you alo users are real excited. Snap Inc began trading stock on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday under the symbol SNAE. Snap issued its stock at $17 a share and it jumped at market open to $24. Partying like it's $19.99. Chevrolet announced that starting March 3rd, owners of Chevy's can get unlimited LTE data and an on-star Wi-Fi hotspot for $20 a month. That's a better deal in your Chevy than in your tablet. Now, if it would just come to Scion, I'd be happy. And finally, IDC's numbers for wearables showed a rise of 16.9 for 2016 over 2015 with Fitbit still the top manufacturer. Despite a drop of 22.7% in shipments year over year, Xiaomi took over some place, shoving Apple to 3rd. That's a big jump. It was a 90-plus percent jump for Xiaomi and wearables are back, I guess. Wearables are cheap and we're going to find out what happened. There you go, that's it. All right, let's get into the top stories. So short version, Amazon says a typo in a command meant to take down a small number of servers offline Tuesday on S3, ended up taking out a large number of S3 servers, one of which was responsible for all the metadata and location information in the Northern Virginia data centers. And if you didn't experience it yourself, that took down the back end storage for a bunch of websites, which made their websites not work, which caused much grinding of teeth, gnashing of jaws across the world. Now, would you guys like to hear what actually happened here? Indeed, I would love to hear it just because it's amazing that this was not some bizarre botnet. This was not a ransom job by some some wily kids or anything. This was something that we have all done, a mistake in which you cannot press Control-Z fast enough to undo. Yes, settle in, children, and I will tell you the tale of the typo that ruined the internet on Tuesday for a few hours. It was a slow day, and that was the problem. A slow day on the S3 billing system and some Amazon employees were debugging that. Why is our billing system slow? I know it will do. We'll enter the command that takes just a few of the servers related to the S3 billing system offline, and we'll take a look at that. So at 9.37 a.m. on Tuesday, somebody did that, but they didn't do it right. A typo in the command took down a large set of servers. One can imagine it was like, take down servers one through 10, and accidentally typed take down servers one through 100. One through infinity. Yeah. Some of the servers that were accidentally taken down support what's called the index subsystem. That manages the metadata and the location of all S3 objects in the region, so S3 objects being the things that are stored. So when a website goes to S3 and says, hey, find me that image, the index server says, oh, well, here's where it is. We can give it to you. Well, it went down, so it couldn't find anything. Another subsystem called the placement subsystem handles the allocation of storage. That's the, I want to put something on S3 and placement system goes great. I've got some space for you right over here, but I need the index subsystem to tell me where the space is. And with the index subsystem down and some of the placement servers down, that whole subsystem went down. Removing the server capacity for these systems required a restart. The only way to fix it was to restart those systems, which meant while they were restarting, that S3 could not service any requests. When S3 couldn't service any requests in that region, that affected EC2, Amazon Web Services Lambda, a few other services that rely on S3. So suddenly you've got a restart going on that is bringing down large chunks of the internet. And Amazon's like, come on, baby, get back up. We've all been there, right? Hurry up and reboot. Hurry up and reboot. Well, my friends, Amazon hadn't restarted either of those subsystems in many years. And as you probably have guessed, Amazon's grown a little bit over the last few years. You don't say. Having a little trouble fitting into those old pants now, are you, Amazon? So that subsystem restart is like, whoa, there's a lot of data to do safety checks and validation on. This is going to take a little bit. By 12.26 PM, finally, the index subsystem was back up to capacity. It still took to 118 for its APIs to fully recover and start functioning normally. Once the index subsystem was back, then the placement subsystem, which had already been restarted, could begin its recovery. And it was functional by 1.54 PM. Then of course, all those other dependent services that I mentioned earlier that need S3, they had to start their recovery and work through the backlogs that it built up as they were waiting for S3 resources to come back. And then the internet came back. In my head, the gentleman or lady responsible for that just looked like Samuel L. Jackson from Jurassic Park, sweating, cigarette hanging out of the mouth, burned down to the filter, having the worst day of their life. You know, I mean, you gotta think, just start the weekend, right? You know, if that happens, it comes back fully online at 1.18. You wanna know what? I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna take a couple sick days. Like I'll see y'all on Monday if I still have. I'll be having an artisanal cider somewhere in downtown Seattle. Talk to y'all later. Amazon says it has modified the tool it uses to take out servers so that capacity will get removed more slowly and actually stop capacity from being removed if it would bring a subsystem below its minimum function. That would have stopped this from happening. Amazon's also gonna make a change to speed up recovery time so they don't have people imitating Mike Shannon sitting there going, get up, baby, come on, get up. They also changed their status dashboard. That was a thing that people found amusing is that the status dashboard stayed green through the whole thing because the status dashboard was looking to S3 for its updates, which was down, so it couldn't update itself. Now the dashboard will run across multiple regions so they can update it when S3 is down in the region that it is trying to tell you the status of. Tom, that sounds like a slow motion disaster. In an unrelated story, in a Tumblr post, Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer announced that she will forgo her annual bonus and equity stock grant to distribute it to the Yahoo employees due to security breaches discovered in September of last year. Yahoo also filed its conclusions with the US SEC that its security team knew and notified 26 targeted users of state-sponsored access to their accounts while consulting with law enforcement, but the legal team did not properly investigate. Up to 32 million accounts could have been affected by cookie forgery. Yahoo General Counsel Ronald Bell has resigned without a severance payment. Yeah, no money, no money for Ronald Bell. Ronald Bell got fired is what that is basically meaning. And he is... Not just accidentally give a command to Ronald Bell and then back up online by 118 p.m. He's gone. No. So, yeah, this is definitely the final chapter for Ronald Bell. Yes. Now, Marissa Meyer, this is certainly her very publicly falling on the sword. It seems like what they want to do is get past a lot of this very ugly chapter that almost, I mean who knows if it almost derailed their acquisition talks, but it certainly wound up bringing down the price on what they were going to sell Yahoo for. That is indisputable. Is this just Marissa Meyer being a scapegoat so they can just kind of close this chapter and move on? Yes. I think that's fair. She obviously, the deal with Verizon has been negotiated. I assume that part of that renegotiation was talking through what was going to happen here because they knew about this cookie thing as they were announcing the announcement. But this is just the news today is that they filed it with the SEC. So, I imagine they were saying, okay, we're going to have this 32 million cookie problem here. And Verizon said, fine, here's what we'd like you to do. Get rid of Ronald Bell probably was part of that, I'm going to guess. And or maybe not him by name, but whoever's responsible has to go once you've determined that. And I wonder if they said, we need one of you to make a demonstration so that when we bring Yahoo into the fold, people know that Yahoo was properly contrite about these things because we don't want to suffer brand degradation to Yahoo when we're paying so much to get it. And, you know, this partly was a public problem when this first broke. The issue was, what did they know and when did they know it? Now they are saying we knew more than we were letting on. This was something that going forward, we wish we had handled differently. And now I am going to give up money to show just how sad I am about how all this went on. The question for where Marissa Meyer goes after all of this acquisition comes to fruition is kind of, I think a larger question, Mark, that we're going to see play out. I mean, she's going to stay on initially with Verizon. That's what has been said in the past, but for how long and doing what are questions that remain to be answered? And does this make her more or less toxic going forward? Right. Could she leave Verizon and head another company or would any company at this point say, that will do more harm to us than good? I don't know what the answer is. I'm not saying she is toxic, but it's a matter of perception. No, I mean, but she wouldn't have made a move unless this was something that publicly kind of fell on her shoulders. And so now she wants to show a personal contrition about it and to give it to the employees is a good story to tell. I think she'll be able to land somewhere. She has a big enough name and a good enough resume. And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if she sticks around at Verizon doing something that doesn't have as much of a public face or pressure to it as being a CEO because she's an incredibly talented product manager engineer and could do a lot of good for them. Certainly so. And she built a reputation working in a large company. At the Game Developers Conference, Microsoft announced the Xbox Live Creators Program. That'll let anybody who's got an Xbox One, just a retail Xbox One, develop and ship a video game on the Xbox. Games developed in the Creators Program have to use the Unified Windows Platform Application Architecture. So you're a little limited in how you can code it. You don't get access to Xbox Live achievements or the gamer score or multiplayer matchmaking. So yeah, there's some other limits there as well. And the games are going to be sold in a specific creators section of the Xbox Game Store. So Microsoft doing a lot to wall it off and go, this is what anybody can make. This is what developers who we've worked with closely can make. Xbox Live Creators Program will only carry a one time fee. Now, the weird part is they said it's between $20 and $100, but they didn't give us any details on why someone might pay $20 versus $100. Yeah, why the range? Yeah, although if it's under $100, and that seems about in league with what other developer one time fees are. So this is Microsoft making an effort to say the next time there's some wacky, simple, silly indie game that comes around, we want them to have the ability to easily put it in our store along with Steam and the App Store between Google and iOS. So it's interesting. It's one of those things that you kind of wonder why this has not happened before now, right? It's not like the lesson of Steam hasn't been out there for many, many years at this point. Well, and Sony allows people, has a lot more latitude for independent developers here. Garrett, this kind of strikes me as opening up a playpen rather than a true developers platform. Yeah, to me, I agree. This is something that actually piques my interest. I've never messed with a console as a development tool. I've never developed a darn thing in my life, but this piques me enough to be like, oh, cool, I have one sitting in my living room right now. Maybe I'll play around with this. Yeah, and that's not a bad thing necessarily, right? No, no, not at all. And Xbox has had in my eyes a good history with indie developers going all the way back to the early days of the 360 in the Xbox arcade. So I think it's good timing. That makes sense. GDC is going on. It's Nintendo Switch Week, and the indie lineup for the Switch was released this week, and it's pretty strong. Personally, I'm very excited to play Stardew Valley on my couch. If you're just wanting to get started, if you're like, I don't know how to program a video game, but maybe I can learn on my Xbox, that's a cool thing. If you're somebody who's like, I know how to develop, but I don't have any connections and I want a platform, I'm not sure this is where you would necessarily start. There's so many free engines out there you could use. No, it doesn't leave a bad taste in your mouth, Garrett. How so? I'm just asking this, the fact that it is walled off, it doesn't leave like a bad taste in your mouth. I mean, could they have done more? Yes, at the same time, though, I can't think of, I can't help but think of myself putting my own personal experience on this. Like when I was growing up, I had to have one console, and that was it. And if I could have had, if my one console, I could also develop a game on that'd be pretty sweet for the young budding gamer nerd of me in the past. Well, here's something that will leave a bad taste in your mouth. It's the Nintendo Switch's new SD card size cartridges, which are apparently now as revealed by Nintendo itself, meant to taste awful. Nintendo says a non-toxic bittering agent, Dentonium benzoate, is applied to the game cards to deter accidental ingestion. Who is licking these cards, Tom? Lamar Wilson, someone pointed out to me, actually does a lot of licking of products in his videos. That's one of his things. Jeff Gershman is the one of the people who started discovering this when he put one in his mouth on stage at GDC and then could not get the taste out of his mouth. But yeah, I mean, forget, forget that. Forget, you know, one is part of a good comedic stick. The other is a demonstration, but Nintendo, Nintendo, when they made these SD cards, looked at them and said, hmm, choking hazard, we know people are going to stick them in their mouths. Let's make it so they won't want to. Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up, Tom. This is the most Nintendo thing I've heard all week, and it's Nintendo Switch launch week. The fact that they looked at those tiny things and intentionally made them taste bad. Well, but this is the opening argument for any, you know, possible choking hazard lawsuit that comes down the pike, right? Is they're saying, well, look, not only did we list it on the box, not only did we list it on the cartridge itself, but we also took the extra step to make them taste awful. So the accidental ingestion of something would be something that would be very, very rare because babies and children will probably wind up spitting it out immediately. You would have to be somebody who is intentionally getting through the awful taste that we have dusted upon these things for you to actually wind up swallowing it. I think it's just kind of a brilliant idea. BioCAD, our chat room, asks, why hasn't Sandisk ever done this? I mean, granted, Nintendo is much more child-appealing, right? Because it's a video game console, and it's got child-friendly characters like Mario. But, you know, we leave Sandisk as the cards laying around all over the place, right? Like, maybe they should. Maybe that'll be the new spec that you look for in SD cards. How does it taste? Makes me wonder if somewhere at Nintendo, someone brought their small dog in one day, and it got ahold of one of the cartridges, and they're like, oh, man, we need to fix this. Yeah. Although I tried that bitter Apple stuff to train one of my dogs from chewing things, and she wouldn't stop eating anything, sort of. Team at University of Texas at Austin's Cockerell School of Engineering led, this team is, by 94-year-old John Goodenouth, co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery he is, this team has released findings in the journal Energy and Environmental Science claiming to solve some of the life cycle and cost issues with solid-state batteries. Now, solid-state batteries have the potential for safer high-density energy storage versus lithium-ion. In the paper, Goodenouth and senior research fellow Maria Helena Braga describe producing batteries using glass electrolytes that allow sodium to substitute for lithium. So the kind of sodium you get out of the ocean, right? That's a lot cheaper. It's a lot safer. And they were able to create three times the energy density, demonstrate more than 1200 cycles, and operate between negative 20 degrees Celsius and 60 degrees Celsius, which for you Fahrenheit people, is really, really, really, really cold below zero and super, super, super hot. Tom, the breakthrough has occurred. Batteries are going to take- Finally! Everything from wearables to the power wall in your home will now totally change forever. Right? I'm going to start holding my breath. Look, I've never reported on a battery technology before. This is the first one. Yeah, obviously, we've reported on many of those, and they all claim to be a breakthrough. And even electric.co, where we resourced the story, said, look, we don't like to use the word breakthrough anymore in regards to battery stories, but this one, if you were going to use it, might be the one you would gamble on because it's a highly experienced team, and it's practical. It's something they've done in the lab. So who knows, though? Like, these things always run into problems when you try to scale them up, and when you try to make mass produce. But like a stopped clock being right twice a day, we're going to report it so that we can say we were the ones who reported on the battery technology that revolutionized the industry. If this is the story that comes to a Duracell near you, you can be on the right side of this story. You are. You know, I mean, listen, they're always cool to talk about, but you should definitely take this and all stories with a few grains of, what is it, glass electrolytes. Along with your sodium. All right, earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported Apple's next iPhone would have a USB-C port power cord. This is the quote. USB-C port for the power cord and other peripheral devices instead of the company's original lightning connector. That was what The Wall Street Journal reported. I read it. I read it as instead of the lightning connector meaning the port. That's not what they wrote. Yes. Yeah, instead of the port, right? A researcher, note KGI Securities Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo published by MacRumors says the new iPhone would support type-C power delivery for fast charging. But Apple would not abandon the still recently added lightning port, which they went to from their 18-pin connector but a few years ago. Tom, this was a media story that vexed me. Should I take the tech press to task for letting this fester and grow wild when it was called? You should. You should. And you can include me in that. But before we get there, just in case people aren't quite sure, like, wait, what does it mean now? What it sounds like, and what it sounds like The Wall Street Journal might have been trying to say, is the port on your charging wall wart will be USB-C. The cable that connects that wall wart to your lightning port on your phone will use USB-C power delivery for fast charging. So the other outcome, if that's true, is that your MacBook Pro with USB-C ports would be able to plug in directly to the iPhone using that cable. You'd have USB-C on one side, lightning port on the other. And it does mean that the rampage of the dongles does continue if you would like to charge your USB-C end of your iPhone cord into your regular USB port on your Mac. If you have a Mac or a Windows machine with USB-A, then you're going to need a dongle, yes. So there will be dongle. However, the idea that Apple would abandon lightning when they, I mean, that seems very, very, very far-fetched. And the fact that we would just be hearing about this in a Wall Street Journal report when they went from the 18-pin to the lightning connector, we knew months, if not up to a year in advance because they have to alert to other, to their manufacturers that this is something that is going to happen. I mean, this stuff winds up getting out usually fairly early because of how gigantic that ecosystem is. The fact that this would just be a mere whisper in a Wall Street Journal article was kind of far-fetched from the very, very beginning. And I do think, you know, you don't want to get into reporting on the reporters too much. But at the same time, there could have been a little bit of break-pumping on this story, although it was ripe for more heckling of Apple being hashtag so brave for changing another port. I was taken up by my own desire to see more devices, not even just the iPhone, switch to USB-C because that is the future. Everything plugging into everything else by USB-C would be a wonderful world, in my opinion. I also generally have trusted the Wall Street Journal to have very good sources. And I don't think that I am going to change that opinion based on this, but it was something where I saw what I wanted and what they wrote. Yeah, you squinted that sentence and you're like, oh, okay, oh, I guess that means that and not that. But we all ran with this because it's just kind of a better story to be like Nelson Laugh, haha, Apple, you are already abandoning your lightning port for this god forbid exchangeable way for everything to plug into everything. Isn't that hypocritical? Oh, dongle. I fell for it too. Yes. Well, folks, we do what we can. We do our best and we'll keep trying. The more you support us, the harder we work. To get all the tech headlines at each day in less than 10 minutes, you can subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Go do that and supplement your life. All right, folks, at the Game Developers Choice Award, Wednesday, Blizzard's Overwatch received awards for best game and best design. They were one of only a few games to get two awards. Santos Firewatch got best narrative and best debut. Inside took best audio and best visual art. And then there, of course, was Pokemon Go getting best mobile game. I think the funniest one was No Man's Sky getting the Innovation Award and the developers tweeting, oh, we won an award, apparently. We were at dinner talking about how there's no chance we would win any awards. We weren't there. Oops. But as you pointed out, Justin, when we were talking about our stories today, Overwatch has been a huge success. I'm sure bigger than even Blizzard hoped it would be a success, but it's been huge. Well, yeah. And that's kind of what I wanted to talk to Garrett about a little bit, because when you look at where Blizzard was as a company, not but I would say six years ago, six, seven years ago, certainly, it was defined by World of Warcraft. And you had very troubling long-term trends of people shedding subscribers. They were relying on China a lot for subscriber growth. Even that started to soften. And there was, in the offing, this big rumored project Titan. Project Titan was going to be the new thing. It was they were betting big on it. It might have been free to play. And then all of a sudden, Project Titan kind of goes to the wayside. And it is at that point, which I think, safe to say, was looked at as maybe is Blizzard in trouble? They weren't in trouble now, but maybe in the next few years, could that company be in trouble that they wind up having this renaissance? Would they a huge hot streak of games that have been released? Yeah, no, you're not wrong. Other than maybe the suddenly Titan goes by the wayside. It was not sudden. It was years of BlizzCon after BlizzCon of everyone going, is this year? Is this year we hear something about Titan? And it just it never came. It never came. And Overwatch, you're 100% correct. It's been a bonanza. It's insane how what a warm welcome it has received in the gaming world. I mean, it was just the very tail end of January. We found out that it surpassed 25 million players. Which is, yeah, that is insane. However, and this is if you know me, this is going to sound biased. I will say that Hearthstone was the turning point. That was the turning point, I think, for Blizzard as a company. That was when it felt like the game had changed for what Blizzard was going to be known for and what was going to kind of take them into their opposed world of Warcraft world for them. It was because it was different than Wow, that it was like, oh, wow. Now the parameters of what we expect from Blizzard is different. I think it was because it was different from everything they had done up until that point. Everything that Blizzard had put out up until Hearthstone was a box product made by a large team built to with a lot of hands involved in its crafting where Hearthstone got announced and they came out and said, hey, guys, look, we have a small team. I want to say it was like 20 or so people at the time that it was announced at PAX. And we're trying something new. We're going to try a game that's going to be playable on all devices, including your PC, including your Mac, and including phones and tablets. And they were trying to be flexible, trying something new, trying to, I don't know, something we would never have expected from Blizzard. And then after that came the announcement of Overwatch. We finally got a peek at what they did, what they managed to salvage from Project Titan. This is a difficult thing for a tech company to do. Keep in mind, this is a company that started technically into the 1980s, right? And they rode a wave on Warcraft, then Starcraft, and Diablo into the 2000s. And then they turned one of those properties, Warcraft, into an incredible success in World of Warcraft. So at that point, you might be forgiven for saying Blizzard's probably run its course. I'm not saying they're going to die. But I wouldn't expect anything crazy new out of them, because it's really hard for companies that move that long to stay innovative and change things. You see it in lots of game titles. It's sequel after sequel after sequel, and they're done well in a lot of cases, and that's fine. And that's what I personally kind of thought, well, that's what we'll see from Blizzard. They'll make lots of good games in this world. And Hearthstone, Heroes of Warcraft, as it was called at launch, often played very recently, felt like them saying, well, we should probably try this mobile thing, but we're not going to launch on mobile with this mobile thing, because we're not that good at mobile. We're not a mobile company. And it really felt like not the wrong way to go, but like, yep, that's that's what we're seeing. They're going to do little spin-offs. And of course, as you said, Garrett, it was a turning point, because Hearthstone blew up. It was a huge success when they brought it to mobile. And now it's not even called Hearthstone, Heroes of Warcraft anymore, because they want to make sure that you enjoy this game on its own and don't feel like you need to know the Warcraft universe. And then Overwatch, as you were saying, Justin, kind of came out of a failed project and launched an entirely new, not dependent on any of their previous intellectual property system that could have gone horribly wrong as well, but instead has become the award-winning game of 2016. So just to give you a sense on the timeline here, it is in September of 2014 that Blizzard, and this was fairly outside the lines for them, acknowledged that Project Titan was not going forward. They normally don't comment on internal development going one way or another, but this had been so reported on, including a year prior, there was a report that they were going back to the drawing board, because they were not happy with where the project was. Overwatch launches what? A year after that with a lot of the same IP, and people were wondering, wow, there's a lot of these mini movies and everything. This is really, really high quality. And a lot of that had spun out of what was supposed to be this gigantic MMO that they then turned into. They figured, you want to know what the most fun part about this is this Team Fortress 2-esque style shooter that has now not only eclipsed, certainly Team Fortress 2, but also almost everything else that Blizzard does right now. I mean, this is the biggest game, and this is not like they've been barren over the last three years when you've got successes like Hearthstone and Heroes. No, no, not at all. I was looking up because I couldn't remember the exact date, but I was trying to figure out when the peak of World of Warcraft players happened. And that was in 2010, it turns out. It was after the release of Wrath of Lich King. So from then to 2014, where something as big as Overwatch gets announced, that's a long time in game, as far as a game developer is concerned. But I think it makes sense that they kept their cards close, that they waited until it was right to announce Overwatch. It makes sense to me because even if we think about the Hearthstone announcement, I don't think Blizzard was super behind. It's probably the wrong words to say that they weren't behind it at Hearthstone, but that they weren't, I'm not even sure Blizzard was sure what Hearthstone was going to be. They wanted to do it, but they weren't betting their future on it. It was a minor project. They announced it at PAX, which is, they never announced anything at PAX. Nothing, not a new game for sure. We might hear about a new patch for an existing title, but not a whole new product. So it makes me wonder, what does that mean about Blizzard? Does that mean that they have built up a system that independent of the kind of game or the story they're telling in the game is more likely to produce something quality, or do they just get lucky? I think it's both. I'll be the first to admit that I'm biased in that. I place a lot of value on how much Blizzard focuses on the creatives. I mean, you go to BlizzCon, they have an art museum, they have tons of art panels, and I know Chris Metzen's not there anymore, but you go and listen to his story. He was a DM before he started working for Blizzard. That's Dungeon Master, kids, not direct message. Yes, yes, Dungeon Master, sorry, or Game Master if you prefer. That to me, and having covered Blizzard games for the last four years of my life at least, then maybe five, whatever the case, that to me, that seems to be the binding principle over Blizzard is just this focus on creativity and these ridiculous epic over-the-top stories that they tell. Some of it is definitely luck as well. I don't think anyone, including Blizzard, thought Hearthstone was going to be as big as it was, but I think because of that, that allowed them to come out swinging with Overwatch, because that felt like a Blizzard announcement. Right, it happened at BlizzCon, there was the big reveal. It was the video game announcement equivalent of like an Iron Maiden concert. It was big, it was bombastic, it was what we come to expect from Blizzard. It felt like a return to form for Blizzard. It was just surprising that it was a unique, a brand new IP and not a sequel to one of their existing 10-pole franchises. Well, and here's the other big thing is that they uncoupled themselves from the expectation that the next big thing that was going to carry them financially forward was going to be either a free-to-play MMO or some kind of other WoW-esque subscription. And now, if you look at what they've done and the money they've made on Hearthstone, what they've done with Overwatch and what they've done with Heroes is establish a new kind of DNA for that company that, hey, look, we can do smaller projects, we can do big projects. We can, now the idea of what is next from Blizzard is far more, the perception is far wider than I think what it was, and it might have been, you know, Scott Johnson of course, the contributor here to DTNS did a fantastic interview with Chris Metzen after he had announced that he was leaving Blizzard. And what you can kind of intuit from that conversation is that part of that pressure of what Project Titan was going to mean for Blizzard, I think weighed on that project and now it just seems like a company that is in its element a little bit more. Not to say that they're taking less effort in developing the games, but now the games can be kind of anything. It doesn't have to be, yeah, okay, but how does it fit into the free to play universe? How does it fit in to the subscription universe? Now it's just a good game. You're absolutely right. And that story too echoes what we've come to know from Blizzard. They're a company that after Starcraft Ghost became known for scrapping almost finished projects because they didn't feel it was up to snuff. And that's what's really, I think, what happened with Project Titan. At the end of the day, if you look at what was happening with every other MMO besides World of Warcraft of Time, yes, WoW was declining in subs, but they were still King of the Mountain and they still are to this day on the MMO landscape. But MMO after MMO came out and tried to be the next big thing, and it just wasn't working out, even the ones that entered the fray as a free to play MMO. I mean, it is a tricky, tricky thing to say. We are going to shut down something we have spent so much time and money on, and we are going to pick part of it to turn into a different project and not screw that all up. I mean, it's hard to shut that thing down, and it's hard to rescue the thing that's going to work out of it and not have that thing come out of it looking kind of like half-baked. And the fact that you have people who think of Blizzard as the Overwatch company rather than the Warcraft company these days is ridiculous. The idea of that would be laughable two years ago. I get real old man on my portrait about that. Also, by the way, this is from a Kotaku article that came out after the official cancellation of Titan. They described Titan at the point that it was canceled as you, the player, maintaining a mundane job. They described as example butchering, engineering, or entrepreneurship during the day while waging clandestine warfare against opposing factions at night. And what everybody can kind of intuit from that is that they just kind of cut out the mundane job element of this MMO and instead stuck with the clandestine warfare against opposing factions part, which is, I think, you know, in the words of, you know, Robin Hood men and tights, it's a good change. Well, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewShow.Reddit.com. Before we get out of here, I got some great emails from folks about home networking and response to our show yesterday, one writing while the periscope, oh, sorry, that's about the camera. This one is about home networking. I listened, said Zach from So Much for Global Warming Minnesota. I was listening to the discussion on mesh networking and I was going to chime in on my experience with them. We built and moved into our house last January. Our house is 1,020 square feet with a 576 square foot attached garage. I ran Cat 6 Ethernet through the house and put in ubiquity access points. I made two RJ45 ports specifically for the mesh network. One access point is on the main level in a central location. The second is in my garage. This way, when I'm outside or in the driveway, I still get coverage. We left our basement unfinished, but we plan to finish it at which point I'll get one more access point, which will integrate easily into the existing mesh. I pay for 50 megabits per second from a local ISP. And in doing speed tests, I've gotten very consistently 48 to 50 megabits per second over my routers. I'd recommend them for nearly everyone, including Scott Johnson. There's no reason he can't be getting nearly full bandwidth in his entire house. Then we also got Don in warmer than normal St. Louis with saying mesh wireless isn't an antenna improvement. It is a method to connect wireless access points without needing a wired connection. Multiple access points on a wired network is not necessarily a mesh. That is a Wi-Fi roaming feature. A mesh wireless access point uses one Wi-Fi radio, usually five gigahertz, to interconnect the access points and a different Wi-Fi radio, usually 24 gigahertz, for user access. One of these access points is connected to the wired network for access. Wireless access is shared. Access and adding more access points to a mesh does not increase throughput because the wireless interconnecting network is a common network between the access points. So for instance, my three ERO routers, they connect to each other on a different frequency than they broadcast the internet. And that's one of the ways you can have that faster throughput happening. But he's right. It doesn't add, it doesn't increase throughput by adding more access points. And then real quickly, regarding a home network scanner, Jason, a patron of ours, thank you boss, said one he uses is Fing. I scan my Wi-Fi. It is a mobile app and will show you what is on your network and what new devices have appeared since your last scan. They also have an Indiegogo campaign for a standalone hardware device that would constantly scan your network and offer a bunch of features such as notifications and parental controls. You can find that at Fing.io. A couple other people mentioned Fing as well, so thank you, Jason, for that. I don't know if you guys use any of these kind of multi-point networks like ERO and Ubiquiti has them, and Netgear has one as well. I'm mad interested in it as I just moved into the first house that I'm not renting, and I did just finish wiring it with Cat5 because I had a big spool that just laying around. Well, you know what? I still believe that wired is more reliable. And then real quickly, before we're out of here, a couple people wrote in to say that that periscope type implementation of Zoom that we talked about in the Oppo phone isn't new to phone cameras. They were used in digital cameras years ago. In other words, it may be new in phones, but it's not new to cameras. Fuji FinePix and Olympus used them when the super thin credit card size point and shoot was popular. Google Periscope Zoom point and shoot, and you will see, in other words, search, and you'll find it. So Oppo may be licensing this technology. And then Tyler writes, I swear there was a phone that had an implementation of folded optics, but I think it was one of those phones that was more camera than phone. And either way, I can't seem to find it. Then he writes, found it. The Zen phone Zoom seems to have folded optics. It doesn't clearly state it, but looking at the length of the module, it must be sideways for it to fit into the module. And he's got a link to that we'll put in the show notes as well. Optical Zoom in a thin little phone. All right. Thank you, Justin, Robert Young, as always, what you got going on to tell folks about? Well, I'll tell you what, I'm partnered now on Twitch. So if you have one of them Amazon Prime subscriptions and you enjoy the content that I produce every weekday or at least weekdays when I'm not sidetracked, going to the DMV and circumventing all levels of hell, you know, you can go out on over Twitch.tv slash Justin R. Young or JustinRYoung.tv. Enjoy everything there. If you like Twitch, of course, everything also streams on DiamondClub.tv as it is and always will. Garrett Weinzerl, working for people. Find more what you do online. Every podcast I do can be found over at amove.tv. That's amov.amove.tv. Might I recommend Overwatchers, if you enjoyed the Overwatch talk today. The Angry Chicken, if you like the Hearthstone talk. And let's talk about Star Wars if you want to hear me talking with Tom even more specifically about Star Wars. And our own Jenny Josephson. Indeed. Check it out, amove.tv. Begg, thanks to everyone who gives a little value back for the value they get from the show. We super appreciate it, including at patreon.com slash DTNS Tony Staley, Josh Wilcox and Leonard Stanky. Welcome, bosses, and thank you for supporting us. Quick programming note, if you didn't catch it already, our show will not be at its regular time tomorrow. So it'll be a little late coming into your feed. We're doing it Saturday morning at 8am Pacific, 11am Eastern time in order to get on the show someone from Thailand who will have to be up at 11pm his time to talk with me and Patrick Beja about the crazy way they do online shopping in Thailand. They don't use shopping carts, they use chat, and then they do scanning of, it's weird, it's weird. We're going to talk to their thought about it and of course have our impressions of the Nintendo Switch as well. So that coming into your feed on Saturday. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30pm Eastern at alphageekradio.com and diamondclub.tv and our website is dailytechnewshow.com. We will see you Saturday morning. Boom. Good show, you guys. Yeah, man. I like it. Thank you for having me. Yeah, man. Oh, thanks for being on, Garrett. That was great. Gratitude sequence initiated. Hey, by the way, I'm going to be in the central Florida area at the end of the month for WrestleMania. Nice. I could see your smile and face. Peel off of a little, little time. Drive on out to O-Town. I don't actually live in Orlando. I live in Sarasota. No, I know. That's why I'm saying drive on out to O-Town. Oh, you're saying drive on out. Okay. Right. I'd be down. I'd be down. Man, I want to go to wrestle. Many of those tickets are stupid. I know. I had to start a whole podcast to pay for them. Last I talked to you, the podcast hadn't paid for them. Has it paid for them now? No, not yet. Well, I mean, my ticket was a gift from my wife. We're working on paying Dills's ticket. That's, that's the really, that's, that's the big, the big hook. I'm mad. I'm mad jelly. That would be, that'd be quite the, quite the event to attend. But yeah, no, there's, there's all sorts of stuff. In fact, I'll tell you what, maybe maybe we'll, we'll, we'll continue this offline, but maybe we could see if we could all go to the NXT show on Saturday. All right. We need to pick some titles. Roger's been looking over showbot.chat realm.net. You got any good ones, man? Well, the top of the heap is Amazon turns itself off and on again. Snap into a slim gym and then, you know, the standard. Oh, yeah. Oh, because the snap, the stock. No, it's because of rocks. Excuse me. Well, Joe Manetti savages it, the commercials, remember? Well, no, but it's because of the Snapchat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what makes it funny. Right. Okay. Oh, I thought you meant the, oh yeah, part. There will be dongles, stow the puppies, typo in Amazon, and in Amazon, there's no A, a better pill to swallow. Oh, my nose. I'm a fan of there will be dongles. It's a good kind of like there will be dongles. Yeah. To Nintendo releases some stinkers, but they didn't really stink. It's more of a bad flavored thing. Overwatch is a titan of a game. You'll USB seeing dongles. Any port in a blizzard, a better game to swallow. I mean, any port in a blizzard does mash up two different shows. It seems like two different stories. That it does. I'll leave it up to you to decide. Any board in a blizzard just that's a Oh, well, I'm still leveling. So we'll let, we'll let the votes pour in showbot.tv. I remember the days when getting a ticket for an NXT event was a cheaper prospect. Oh, really? Because when I, when we went with you, it was dirt cheap. Well, yeah. Well, now they're playing the Amway center and they have literally every, every wrestling fan from around the world is going to be at the city. So Amway has its own center. In Orlando it does. I thought Amway died with like the 90s, or at least. One of the problems with the tickets is that your ticket only gets cheaper if you get other people to buy more tickets. Oh my God, you were kidding. Yeah. Hey, how about we just get a beer? We'll watch it together. That'd be a great time. Yeah, actually. Find some cool bar where we watch it together. That'd be cool. Yeah. That sounds fun. If you've got a rental car, just come to my place. Yeah. Oh, they don't do electronics anymore. That used to be one of the funniest products in Amway. I didn't know Amway had electronics. Fun story. My parents used to do Amway. Did they, were they good at it? How do you think they got the money to buy that? Stadium rights. I don't think they were. No, no, I mean his parents. Does the person who owns the stadium rights receive money from everyone else in Amway? Is that how that works? It's a pyramid scheme. And so the Coliseum's. It's not a pyramid scheme. It's multi-level marketing. Mmm, yeah. What do they call it? It's a parallelogram. It's mathematically impossible for you to lose money. What movie was that? There's a guy who's pitching all these people. And basically a pyramid scheme, but he kept calling it, it's not wrong. This was a parallelogram. It's mathematically impossible to lose money in this. Yeah. I know the reference that I can't think of the movie either. Yeah, they used to sell these really janky home stereo systems that were complete with speakers and everything, but they were like back then like these off name Korean brands like GPX or something. Do y'all remember DAC, D-A-K? Speaking of weird sources of electronics. So they used to have a catalog and it was of off brand, like no brand, DAC brand electronics. And they were supposedly way cheaper than you could get in stores, but you had to order them from DAC. I'm looking at a bunch of PDFs of their magazine right now. Yeah, it was one of those catalog magazines, where they had a story written up about every single product. And my dad was way into it. So we had a couple of DAC gadgets and they were awful. But we would buy the DAC cassettes because they were way cheaper. Yeah, I'm looking at the Smart Sound Detonator right now from the DAC Industries Incorporated. They're called their toll free order line now. I wonder what happened to them. I don't know, but you can go out to eight. Well, that's one crabby looking. Crabbit Avenue and Canoga Park, California to find out what happened. Canoga Park. All right, we're headed. Oh, title. There Will Be Dongles or Amazon Turns Itself Off and On Again? I like there will be dongles. All right, there will be dongles. There will be dongles. That was my vote. That was my vote already. Hot products. And you were kidding. This stuff is junk. It's like some of this software just looks like the free stuff that gets packaged when you buy a new sound card. No, absolutely. We took the disks for the package. I mean, basically what I learned later in life is they were selling shareware. Cables and adapters. You don't even need to buy. You know what? It's more expensive. You just go to Monoprice and you get better quality cables. Well, there was no Monoprice back then, so to be fair. This was Monoprice the catalog. Yeah, maybe. I hate to throw a cast shade on Monoprice. That's insulting the Monoprice. It might be. There's federated back in the day. They kind of did what Fry's did, but they only did it with consumer electronics. And Doljins. I don't know if you guys knew Doljins, the catalog store. It was called something else. Best. We call it best out here. It was the most ridiculous thing. You would go into the physical store and you would still have to fill out this coupon thing. And you weren't allowed to touch it. Everything was under glass. And then the store associate would disappear behind the door and go into the stock room and pick out what you wanted and give it to you and you would pay for it. It wasn't like you would just go to the shelf and pull it off yourself. You had to fill out. It was weird. I mean, this was back when Carbon Copy was like the thing for credit cards. And apparently putting in a mail order that doesn't go anywhere in the mail, you just give it to the guy at the counter and he walks back and grabs it for you. It's a very odd, odd store. I wish we don't have a jam. Just the idea was they could have more products on the floor because they didn't have to stock everything out there. That is ridiculous. That store eventually closed and became like a Walgreens or something. That does sound ridiculous, although as someone who used to work in stock, it's like, well, at least I didn't have to front face everything when people came through that. The problem is that the whole thing just had a feel of a, what do you call it? When you go into a store and you trade something in a pawn shop. It felt just like a corporate pawn shop because everything was under glass. Like you could touch it unless maybe you asked him but I was like, this is just really odd. Yeah. I sold stuff at a pawn shop once in my life. I've sold a bunch of old video games because they were going to give me more than GameStop. And I'd never done it before. And I remember just feeling I was completely disarmed when they needed my fingerprint. I was like, wait, what? Yeah, I went to a video game exchange for my parents. I did that. They gave me more money for my Dreamcast than GameStop would because GameStop wouldn't take it. It says like, hey, give me 80 bucks. It was the weirdest store. They sold used video games and old game consoles, Dreamcast all the way up to Xbox 360. They have a huge library of VHS movies. Like if someone still had like the entire three walls of VHS movies and then like a bunch of used Bibles. I'm going to say it sounds like a store we had but then you got to VHS and used Bibles. I'm like, never mind. We did not have that store. I guess the guy ministered on the weekends or something. Well, you got a you got a good deal on your Dreamcast because it's looking like it would cost me about 80 to $90 for working one off of eBay. You know, those things, old game consoles are fun when you think about them. But when you actually sit down to play it, it's kind of like unless you were unless you were alive and played them when they first came out, you don't have the sense of nostalgia and it gets frustrating. It's like why are the graphics looks so crappy? Why is the machine so loud? I like it when I go to a friend's house and they already have it set up and it's ready to go. I have my own old consoles and it's an excruciating hassle to set them up and get them running. And but what's annoying is like, especially with like I used to when I had my old PlayStation that it's just like games take forever to load. And then it's like, you know, it's like then you're looking at like really crappy graphics. You know, you're looking at a bunch of triangles making up a person. Like and not even like good tessellation is just one triangle for the body. It's like, this is ridiculous. Oh yeah, no, no, you got to do NES or like SNES or Genesis. Super NES is probably the only retro console I would purposely own. I think they age better. There's something about, you know, Well, you know, the aesthetics is part of the charm, but it's like it's 2D, right? That was the pinnacle of 2D. You're not, you're not going to get anything higher. Maybe a Neo Geo, but like, try tracking one of those things down. You're not paying like a thousand bucks for it. Yeah, we went to a, we went to a hipster bar in Orlando last weekend during the fireside that was a all retro video game themed. And they had arching cabinets and a bunch of pinball machines everywhere. And they had the original NES hooked up to a TV like with some couches that if they were not occupied, you could sit down and just start playing. And I hadn't played NES in forever. That's still fun. And you know what? No load times. Yeah. Well, I remember participating in a Tetris tournament. They did pretty well, but they play all of them were the old NES systems. And they said, don't start on the first level. Start on the second level. That's okay. That game. So crazy. That's, that taught me how to look at the world as cubes and things to create together. Yes, sir. Would you mind if we did our call while I was on the road? Or do you want to do it here now on looking at each other? Ah, you know what? I don't really want to encourage you to talk on the phone while you're driving. Okay, cool. Do you want to do it after? What was that? You want to do it after you get back? Oh, no, I'd rather just knock it out now. All right, I'm almost done. I'm getting the archive.org code right now as we speak. Very sweet of you though. Look after me. Just thinking of your health and welfare. Yeah, so let's get out of here. Thanks everybody for watching. Enjoy the Friday. And don't forget we will be here on Saturday morning with our Friday show, which will actually be Sunday for you in Australia.