 Coming up on DTNS, we break down the new one plus eight phones and Patrick Norton recommends websites to help you pick a gaming PC plus tips on how to get free TV. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, April 14, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I am Sarah Lane. And from Alamos, Colorado, I'm Patrick Norton. And occasionally I'll even remember which person I am. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. It's right there. It's written right under there. I'm sorry. I should have told you that earlier. Today you are Patrick. We were just having a wide ranging conversation about Mongolian and throwing trash cans in Manhattan, all kinds of good stuff at patreon.com slash DTNS where you can get good day internet. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. A new version of Minecraft using ray tracing graphics will arrive April 16th as a free update on Windows 10. Minecraft RTX beta was co developed with NVIDIA and needs an NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics card to use the DirectX ray tracing API and NVIDIA's DLSS pipeline, which can improve frame rates by upscaling resolution. The beta will not support online play or world seeds at launch. The distributed computing project folding at home has reached a peak performance of 1.5 exaflops, making it more than seven times faster than the world's fastest super computer. That's the summit of our national laboratory. I know folding at home beat supercomputers to the petaflop milestone back in 2007 as well right after it launched on the PlayStation 3 folding at home had been declining. It has gone from 30,000 volunteers in February to more than 700,000. Now part of the increase came from users leaving the SETI at home project which announced it was shutting down March 31st. But folding at home, of course, is also looking for proteins that can bind to SARS-CoV-2 and inactivate it. And that has really been the reason that more people have jumped in. So it is now the only exaflop system in the world folding at home. Good luck finding that binding protein, please. I just want to say if you need a team, Team Texill is still up there. Robert Herron found that out this week and we're still in the top 25. It goes all the way back to DLTV. So if you're looking for a folding at home team, by all means, it's very cool. According to government data, March iPhone shipments in China rose 19% from a year earlier to 2.5 million units. Now iPhone shipments in February in China fell more than 60% year on year. So interesting difference between the two months. Government data shows the overall smartphone market, however, shrunk by roughly 20% to 21 million shipments. Yeah, you're looking to see how fast China jumps back. You're going to want to see those numbers. The Entertainment Software Rating Board or ESRB announced a new label for games that offer in game purchases of loot boxes or other randomized rewards. The SRB says the snappily named label in game purchases, including random items will be applied to loot boxes, gotcha games, items or card packs, prize wheels, treasure chest and more. Microsoft Nintendo, Sony and many game publishers have all committed to disclosing the odds of receiving items from loot boxes with 2020 as a target for that policy to take effect. That's now so it needs to take effect soon. Speaking of Nintendo, the Nintendo Switch got system software update 10.0.0 on Monday, which lets console owners remap controller buttons on the Joy-Con controllers and also Nintendo Switch Pro controller and transfer data back and forth between system memory and SD cards. Animal Crossing New Horizons also get some new user icons for players of that game that hardly anyone's ever heard of. Tom Nook, Timmy and Tommy Nook, Isabel, Wilbur, CJ and Flick. I like Flick. You can get good prices from Flick. Apple is aggregating anonymized data from its Apple Maps users in a mobility trends report. Information is not tied to Apple IDs. Apple doesn't even maintain a history of where individuals have been. This is all randomized and the data is available from Apple's website as a CSV for anyone to access. But it is meant for use by state and federal policymakers to assess how well social distancing measures are working, similar to what Google did a few weeks ago. All right, let's talk a little bit more about that new OnePlus phone. Yes, it's exciting. Many of folk. OnePlus announced the OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro handsets running on the Snapdragon 865 chip with support for sub 6 gigahertz 5G and Wi-Fi 6. The OnePlus 8 Pro has a 6.78 inch 3168 by 1440 120 Hertz OLED display, comes with a 48 megapixel main camera, 3x hybrid and 3x digital zoom telephoto lens, a color filter camera and an ultra wide lens with a 100 120 degree angle capable of fast wireless charging with a $70 one plus 30 watt wireless charger, as well as a 10 watt Qi charger. The OnePlus 8 Pro is also IP68 rated for water up to 1.5 meters for up to 30 minutes. And it ditched the pop up camera so it can fit into a 45 10 milli amp battery. One plus eight pro starts at $899 for eight gigs of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage or 999 for 12 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage. The base model one plus eight has a 6.55 inch 90 Hertz display 48 megapixel sensor 16 megapixel ultra wide lens and two megapixel macro lens with a 4300 milli amp battery starting at $699 with eight gigs of RAM and 20 128 gigs of storage and $799 for 12 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage. A millimeter wave 5g version will be available in the US from Verizon for $799. Both models come in black blue green with an interstellar glow option coming to the US on April 29 and Europe on April 21. Yeah, those are good specs. It's good to tell people about them. But I'm sure that no one heard anything except $799. But that seems to be the reaction out there to the one plus phone which has some lovely improvements. Basically, what they did is they made the one plus eight the base model, the upgrade from the one plus seven pro, and then they added a lot of cool stuff to the pro. And because they had to add more cool stuff to the pro, they had to raise the price. They've got that fast wireless charging. They've got that IPS rating. They've got the stellar camera option there. And so it's going to cost you $899 to start. That's still cheaper than Samsung and Apple because this is their top level. But it's more expensive than one plus users are used to. It's a weird I mean, buying a cell phone right now, if you're buying a flagship, I mean, it's it's sticker shock. It's incredible. You're looking at like $1,300 flagships. And yeah, I get it on one hand, like I look at this and I think, okay, fewer megapixels, bigger pixels, better low light performance on the camera be killer. But this is so inexpensive compared to what you're getting from what I will affectionately call the majors. I mean, this is by all accounts, and I've seen multiple outlets say this, the best flagship smartphone released in 2020. That's fake praise for 2020, to be honest. But but it's a really good phone for the price. It's just more expensive than people are used to from that company. A court in Nanterre, France has ruled that Amazon may only accept orders for groceries, hygiene and health related products in France for a month. So no other things, no video games, nothing. If it's not groceries, hygiene or health related, Amazon isn't allowed to ship it. While it reviews its health and safety practices in order to better protect its workers. Amazon has been prioritizing essential items, but not limiting orders that just took longer to ship the other stuff. This order is subject to extension on review by the court. So the court said, unless you can show us that it's safer for your workers, we're not going to let you ship anything with groceries, hygiene and health related products, even in a month, you've got to you've got to do better. This is a tough one, because on the side of France, you say, Well, yeah, the Amazon workers should should should come first. And if Amazon has to prioritize that ahead of non essential items for customers, which either means kind of postponed indefinitely, or at least, you know, for a little while, then on the surface that sounds great. But if Amazon effectively sort of winds down a huge part of its business in the country, well, that's not good for the workers either. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that would be what Amazon would argue is that they need to be funding the ability to improve this. I don't think Amazon's running out of money anytime soon. That's fair point. But but this is the the hardest that anyone has cracked down on Amazon, who have been criticized both from within and without, for not doing enough to protect worker safety. I mean, let's be clear, they have done things. They are providing mass and sanitization. It's not like they're not doing anything. But people are saying that it is kind of impossible in some of these warehouses to maintain proper social distancing. I mean, it's a microcosm of the argument that we're hearing in a lot of places where it's like, you know, do we save the economy or do we save people? And I think there's a middle ground that everybody serves. But, you know, case in point, there was a meatpacking plant in South Dakota where they shut down because there was a breakout of 300 cases of coronavirus because you're right up next to each other. You're constantly moving PPE is difficult to wear or maybe ineffective or maybe they didn't have it. And that's a, you know, it's a miserable decision to have to make. Yeah. And then that was in a state where the the orders to do social distancing across the state were late in coming. So it was it was spreading faster. France, on the other hand, you know, has been on top of this about the same as any other country has. So it's not that there are big outbreaks in Amazon, but it's it's that the court is saying you need to make sure there aren't. And we need you to do more. Axios sources say that Google has taken shipment of prototypes of its own processor design code named Whitechapel meant for pixel smartphones in 2021 at the earliest and eventually also Chromebooks. Google's new chip reportedly has an eight core ARM processor hardware optimized for machine learning and was designed in cooperation with Samsung using five nanometer technology. Samsung manufactures iPhone chips as well and its own ex news processors. Yes. So this, this is kind of the movement, right? We're seeing Apple doing this. There's a lot of rumors that they're going to do it more in their laptops as well. And it gives you more control in your hardware design to be able to design the chip yourself. In fact, in our pre show, Roger, you pointed out that that game consoles have done a similar thing in designing the chips and having the chip makers build them, but designing them custom in the past for the consoles. Yeah, it's it's it's a very interesting thing. And part of the one of the things they learned was it worked well up to a point where coding games became incredibly complex and complicated affairs and that having a standardized, you know, instruction set architecture would would help alleviate some of the costs of not only just developing games, but being able to port it from system to system. I would imagine that with this that Google is not going to move too far out from well, they use an arm, right? If they're using an arm, then they they avoid most of those instruction set problems. Absolutely. Patrick, what do you think of this? I mean, I kind of find it fascinating. I'm also kind of giggling because, you know, the the Sony placed it was I can't remember which which PlayStation it was that we're like, we're going to move an entirely different direction from the rest of the industry. And it created like this series of nightmare for developers who wanted to work multi-platform on games. You could argue it was either the PS2 or the PS3 because they both kind of threw caution to the wind. I was going to say developers are under the bus, but caution to the wind is probably a better way to say it. That was the wind over the bus. Yeah. The wind over the bus or under the bus. I think this is inevitable in a lot of cases. I also think Google's I want to learn. I'm still trying to figure out what Google's doing with machine learning and as much as my brain as I keep applying to machine learning on phones. I still find it so poorly documented. I don't know. I'm curious to see what they do with that section of the phone and whether or not it does anything that I particularly want Google to be doing on something in my pocket. Well, basically the biggest benefit of doing machine learning more on hardware and that's not specific to Google designing it itself. But the big benefit you get is that you don't have to send your data to the cloud to inform the model. And that's great for privacy, which everybody wants Google to take more steps to protect. So, you know, that's good. They're doing it on the phone. Doesn't mean they won't suck it back up into the mothership. Yeah. Well, if you don't trust Google, the nothing they do is ever going to be good enough. And you, technically, you would be able to design a chip that would adhere more to whatever you're writing so you could get more efficiency out of it thereby, you know, impacting the battery less. Absolutely. Battery and performance are the big benefits that you're going to get in being able to design this. And having, I mean, Samsung is basically becoming the manufacturer to the designers, right? It's not, it's not like Google and Apple are making these chips. They're designing them because they work with their designs, but they're still asking Samsung in both cases to manufacture them. So that's interesting. I'm just curious how this rolls up. So sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm curious to say like, yeah, Qualcomm versus Apple versus now Google versus Samsung. I'm kind of curious at what point does it become harder and harder for smaller cell phone manufacturers to keep pace? At what point does Qualcomm decide to offer design to smaller manufacturers as a way to compete with Samsung on this, right? More details are coming out about the Apple Google Contact Tracing API. This is the one we've been talking about basically since last Thursday when we were talking about an MIT program that's very similar to encourage adoption. That's one of the problems Singapore ran into. They only got 12% adoption on their Bluetooth tracker, which made it less, less helpful. So to encourage adoption, users of the Apple Google API will be able to opt into the system once it rolls out on the operating system level, which again is the second phase. So that's not going to be for a while, but they'll be able to opt into the system without having to download an app. That makes it easier for people to do. You'll get a prompt from your operating system saying, hey, would you like to enroll in this and protect your privacy? Here's what you can learn about it. If a user is then notified that they may have come in contact with someone infected, they will then be directed to download the Revolvent Health Agency app for more information. The idea is getting people to download a Health Agency app is hard unless they have a real reason. So having it at the operating system level that they can opt in into off of a notification will increase adoption, and then you have them download the app when they need it. Also, Google will distribute the operating system update through Google Play Services, meaning it will not have to wait for carrier adoption. That was one other concern people were asking about. Apple and Google have explicitly said that the system will not be used for any other purpose. We've talked previously on the show about the anonymization, the rotating numbers, how this doesn't geolocate. It doesn't store any identifying information that no one government or private will be able to use this for anything other than tracking COVID-19. And it will be shut down when Health Agencies deem the threat has passed. Again, you don't trust Google or Apple, then none of that makes any difference. But they're saying the things that you want to hear them say. Yeah, if you if you're like neither of these companies, you know, I just I just don't believe what they're saying about data, then you wouldn't opt in. Otherwise, this sounds like the most frictionless version of the way that this rollout should go. Yeah, I this is just an update to kind of bring people up to speed on this, because there's a lot of misunderstanding about what they're doing. But my problem isn't with the way they're rolling it out. This feels like a very well done API for protecting privacy and providing information. I just don't know how helpful this is beyond the actual like widespread testing, social distancing, and isolation as well as human tracing. It may help with the human tracing, but the human interviews as a supplement to that, in which case, that's worth doing. And seems to me like they're doing it right. Also good for somebody, maybe Facebook launched an experimental app for the Apple Watch called kits that short for keep in touch, just like a yearbook signature. By scanning a QR code or entering a code manually on the web, you can set up the app to stay in touch with a messenger contact kind of designed for your closest friends or maybe a family member. After that, you can tap your watch to send voice recordings, emoji, location sharing, scribbles, or even use a speech to text. Now this is just for Apple Watch. So this is not something that I can take advantage of. If for some reason I had more context on Facebook Messenger than maybe I did using I message on iOS or, you know, a big list of folks that I talked to using SMS. This would make a lot of sense to me, Tom, you do have an Apple Watch. I mean, is this something that you're like, Ah, just what I wanted. I have friends and relatives that only use Messenger to contact me. So I'm the target audience for this experimental app. This is one of those Facebook apps that that they throw out there and they see if it sticks. If nobody picks it up, then they retire it. So I try not to be too critical of these things, because this is a good example of the of a research agency saying, let's come up with ideas and try them and see if they work. I get the idea here, which is my nephew Ben in Australia. We talk on Messenger. That's how we talk. And if I want to talk to him and I'm out and about with my watch, it would be easy for me to be like, OK, bends my contact. Now I can just tap on it, say, hey, I'm, you know, out and just thought of you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't use Messenger that way. I don't use Messenger for urgent communication, but I can imagine that there are plenty of people who do who are who are going to, you know, coordinate with people on grocery pickups or or heading to the testing center or whatever. And this would be this would make it easier to contact them using your watch instead of having to pull out the phone. So it seems to the pretty sure the bend diagram between Apple Watch users and Facebook is probably staggeringly high or should say, yeah, it's probably pretty thick. Yeah, one with things. So I don't know. I'm not saying that this is that keep in touch is for sure going to be the hit. But this is one I at least understand better than some of the other experiments I've tried. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to Daily Tech headlines.com. There's a lot of free television out there right now, folks. Sling TV just launched happy hour across America. Now that does not involve a beverage or chicken wings, according to Sling's own press release, they specifically said we can't give you chicken wings or a beverage, but they are offering free TV every evening from 5 p.m. to midnight local time. So whatever time zone you're in, you'll get it from 5 p.m. to midnight. The idea is that they say that that people stop watching news around 6 p.m. and switched entertainment. So they want to give them some free television to entertain them and then try to convert them into paying Sling TV customers once this limited time offer ends. If you want to try this out, you have to be a new customer and enter an email address at sling.com slash deals slash happy dash hour, but you don't need to enter a credit card. Just they just want to be able to bug you about signing up for the service later. They don't want to take your payment information. And if you do that, you get access to 50 plus channels on the Sling TV blue service, blue I believe is the one that has the NBC channels. Orange is the one that has the Fox channels. But Patrick, you pointed out that there are a lot of these kinds of trials out there right now. Yeah, I just want to spread some extra love on Sling TV for any time you can sign up for a trial without a credit card. You know, that's that's a big positive for me. It's kind of crazy. Consumer reports did one of the better collections I've seen of it. But the thing really we're talking about on a VXL was that HBO is doing their stay home box office or making like 500 hours of programming available. The Sopranos, the wire films, documentaries, and it's running over HBO Go and or should be HBO Now or HBO Go. I thought that was pretty cool, actually. The you know, I'm also really curious about HBO Max, but that's a totally different subject. Hulu's given 30 days and Netflix's has a 30 day free trial. The new QB, which I hope I am saying right quibby, like quick bites, quibby. Yeah, quibby. I've seen three commercials for it. I've presigned up for it and I still can't say the names. A quibby. You should definitely check out fresh daily from Rotten Tomatoes on quibby as produced by my wife's team. Good to know. Good to know, sir. The that's how I know how to pronounce it. At least one of us knows. Thankfully, we're spreading good information here. But I mean, you know, Amazon Prime Video is a 30 day free trial, a corn TV. It's kind of crazy like the one I'm actually looking at in circling is CBS all access, you know, so I can finally, at least through the almost the end of April, watch Star Trek Picard without actually having to pay any money for it, which I actually found now feel very small and cheap for saying out loud. It felt better in your head when you said it that way. Yeah, it's just some things just don't sound good out loud. But yeah, props for HBO and sling and everybody else are actually trying to make some more content available without charging people any money. Yeah, I mean, showtime shutter Sundance now urban movie channel. I mean, there's so many of these Apple TV plus even putting some of their content out there for free AT&T, like, you know, you don't hear a lot of nice things said about AT&T, but they're doing some free free trials here. So and for some he is doing nice things. For some reason, NBC has decided to stick to its plan to release its streaming service Peacock only to Comcast cable TV customers starting April 15th. So April 15th, Sarah, I guess you can get it of us. But none of the rest of us can try it until July 15th when non cable customers are still scheduled to get access. And they've been over backwards trying to explain it's a marathon, not a sprint. We're sticking to our time schedule because, you know, our work schedules have been disrupted by having to work from home and all this stuff. And I get all of that. But I just can't imagine that they wouldn't want to put this out for a wider number of people for free when their their own properties are doing free trials in other situations. I mean, I'm not a one cast cable TV customer either. I thought maybe you were in a Comcast region. I don't know why I thought that I am in a Comcast region, but I don't have a T don't pay for yeah. Okay, we would have the opportunity to try it if you wanted to spend money to get Comcast is true. That is where that is where I have one overall of you. Yeah, potentially. Anyway, before we get we get off this topic, though, Patrick, I wanted I know people love to hear about the different setups people use for streaming TV because there isn't the one way yet. There's not one best way. So when you watch all these free streaming services, what do you watch it on? You know, 90% of my family's viewing back in our former home was 100 inch projection screen and Apple TV. Although because of the stuff I do with a VXL in other places, I had Apple TV, Roku TV, Android TV and several other things connected at all times because I like my life to be complicated. But right now, given the space constraints, everything stuff into the TV, we got like 90% of what we do is is the Roku TV TCL 5 series television. And it's amazing, like I hate television operating systems like Web OS on the LG OLED TVs isn't bad, but I have faith that just like every other TV operating system, it will sort of, you know, become crappy over time. So I just want to say it's kind of amazing how good the Roku TV stuff is, you know, and it's got everything we need, which has been really amazing. Although all of our, you know, content in other areas, I do have a separate Apple TV that I used to do some of that stuff, but 90% of what we're doing Roku OS on the TV on what feels like a very, very tiny 43 inch television. It's really nice 43 inch television for 250 bucks. But it's not as majestic as what we're used to. And if people are like, wait, why did you give up the screen? It's because they switched to living in an RV. So so you've got space constraints. And what do you use into stream when you're when you're moving around like that? Well, basically, everything's going over all of our internet is either over a box we got that came with a one year unlimited AT&T data subscription, which is managed, but still unlimited, which is amazing, and a 100 gigabyte a month Sprint account, which, you know, Sprint's 4G map lies, but don't get me started on that because I'll keep you here for the next three hours. And it will be not safe for children. Got it. Yeah, it works. It's great. They they they love to to claim speed and range in the same sentence when those things don't necessarily always overlap. So yeah. Well, when I'm there are other things to talk about today. Sure. Sure. I won't start because I won't stop. Oh, well, thank you. Thank you for sharing the specs. I know there's a bunch of Roku TCL fans in the chat room. And in fact, that's what my wife uses in her office as both her computer monitor and a way to watch TV when she relaxes. So that's cool. Thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Sarah, let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's are wanted to know. And this is actually great timing because Patrick's on the show today. My brother wants to buy his soon to be 14 year old son, a new gaming rig, but he's confused at what the best deals are and what the differences are between models. I know the bargain sites, but I have no idea what to look for in a good gaming machine or compare them. Thought you might know where to look. Oh, my goodness. Just about every tech site, just about every website seems to have gaming PC picks, especially bargain sites. You know, a lot of these are actually generating revenue and not particularly good value. If the website doesn't benchmark and review gaming PCs, the recommendations probably suck or motivated by whatever they can get the best return on. I've, you know, Tom's hardware PC mag several sites like that. Those are two of my favorites for looking to see what people are, you know, finding is a good value. The thing is, is, is starting with the bargains is probably the worst way to pick out a gaming PC. It's mostly about CPU and GPU and prices can vary a lot. There's like a, you know, if you look at like a $700 gel G5 gaming desktop, there's no lights. There's no fans. There's no elite. Well, there's like one LED on the front. There's no glass door, but you get a vastly better GPU than say digital storm has a $700 links config, which does have fancy LED fans and glass and stuff like that. So you have to kind of start with the CPU and the GPU and how much you actually want to spend. And there's not a whole lot. If you're just using a 1080p monitor, you don't have to spend a lot of money. You know, you just don't need to. There's no point. You're wasting your GPU like cause, you know, if you have an entry level GPU that can do ultra settings at 1080p and decent frame rates, you don't need to go out and buy a $2,000 GPU. PC parts leaderboard, you know, give a shout out to Sebastian and the crew over there. PC parts picker, they're great places to get an idea of what parts you should get, given how much money you want to spend. I'll give you a hint right now, a Radeon RX 570 that's like your entry level GPU and either like an Intel Core i3-9100F for a Ryzen 5 1600. That's your entry level GPU and a $500 to $700 system and stepping up to a NVIDIA 1600 series GPU or S series is a little bit more expensive. It gives you more power and for 1080p gaming, that's probably all you need. And so budget first, then look at PC parts picker and the leaderboard over at PCPeru.com to figure out like what parts you should get for that money. And then you can start looking for bargains based on that. Excellent stuff. Thanks, man. Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Dustin Campbell, Andrew Bradley and Scott Hepburn. Also thanks to Patrick Norton. A wealth of information if there ever was someone with information. It is you, Mr. Norton. Let folks know where they can keep up with everything else you're up to. Robert Herron and I are recording another episode of AV Excel on Thursday talking about home theater and audio and that's avexcel.com. Hey, folks, thanks for continuing to send in cool things to highlight at the end of the show. We're just trying to share the love out there. As more people are shut inside, more creators need your attention. And the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California is offering online tours of the Animal Crossing New Horizons Museum on their Twitch channel. In fact, if you were listening to Friday show, paleontologist Riley Black told us on Good Day Internet that the museum's fossil representations are pretty good. They're up to snuff. And the Museum in Animal Crossing also offers fish and insects. So experts in fish and insects in the Monterey Aquarium are joined by a Chicago Field Museum fossil expert and have been doing what they would normally do in their own real-life locations explaining the wonders of the natural world but inside the Nintendo Switch game. You can see the Animal Crossing Museum tours at twitch.tv slash Monterey AQ. That's M-O-N-T-E-R-E-Y-A-Q. We'll have the link in the show notes as well. And man, we got the nicest note in the world from somebody who's an events planner who it should be out of work but is using some technology to still be able to do some work doing online and virtual events and was able to step up their patronage. I can't tell you how that made me tear up. So thank you to everybody who's been able to. We know not everybody can. And we are fine with that. If you can't continue to support us, we get it. It's tough times out there. 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