 and people who know us and give us feedback. This is, I guess, aid labs, you know, first. Yes, we thought that we would try to give everyone an opportunity to have more of a voice on the show because we get so many emails from you and tweets and feedback in general that doesn't make the show because our show is 30 minutes and thought that this might be fun. Yeah, and we've just been getting more and more email all the time, so we wanted another venue in which to address things. Sometimes that maybe in the course of the 30 minute news show would take too much time to set up. And I think the other thing, Sarah, that you were saying you wanna do is put people in contact with each other and do more of that thing where someone asks a question. Maybe we don't answer it, but we know someone in our audience has the answer they're looking for and we throw it out to you and then the next version of this episode, we get the answer from them. Yeah, exactly. And that's part of the fun of the show is like somebody gives us really good information all the time and it always sucks if we can't put it in the show for whatever reason. So that's what Mailbag is for. Yay, where you're clearing this. Where your ombuds people. We're for you. So Tom, what do you think of my new setup here? I like it. Is that the Mailbag corner? It is, it is. Got a fishing pole here. I mean, I've got a little of everything, but you know. In case Mail gets too hectic, you can just pop out and go fishing. Yeah, I mean, at some point, I will like light this properly and all that stuff, but I think for our purposes today. Audio listeners think it's lit perfectly. Well, God bless y'all, God bless y'all. Yeah, before the show, Tom was like, do you wanna just do audio? And I was like, no, no, what feedback? I have been working on this set. I do, okay, so should we get right into it? Yeah, let's do it. All right, first question, and this is a little bit of curveball, is from Carl and he said, how do we listen or watch Mailbag show? Can you please give me a link? I think that that's actually important because we're kinda doing this under the radar a little bit. Yeah, if you're watching or listening now, you've figured out at least one way, but yeah, the way it will go out is as a DTNS Labs. DTNS Labs goes out in the main feed. So if you're subscribed to Daily Tech News Show Audio, you'll get it, same way you always do. If you're a patron, whenever Sarah is finished recording and producing them, it'll go into the Patreon feed right away. If you're not a Patreon or you wanna get it out of the main feed, what we do with DTNS Labs is we always put them in the weekend feed. So you'll get it on a Saturday or Sunday. And the videos will be on YouTube and we will give them to Sean and Roger to put in the video feed as well. Yeah, so, you know, when you hear us talking about doing like experimental stuff, you definitely have many options to watch or listen. We got an email from Lee the other day that said, people complain about Apple and batteries, but what about Sonos? They offered a sweetener of a one voucher per household regardless of number of CR100s you have, which is their sort of like, I guess, Sonos 1.0 kind of remote station. Very poor. Now, Tom, you wrote him back and that actually happens a lot. Emails that don't get on the show, like we're still hoping to get back to everybody. Yeah, I tried to, when there's something I can say of use anyway, I'll try to get back to people if I can. And with him, the first thing I said was like, well, this is a more than 10-year-old product. So I'm not sure if the comparison to the iPhone is exactly apples to apples because with the iPhone battery, you're talking about a two or three-year-old device, but the Sonos, you're talking about a 10-plus-year-old device. You don't expect those things to last forever. So on the one hand, I'll give Sonos a little bit of a break in that this is a very old piece of equipment and they have a replacement for it. The Sonos app is what I use for my Sonos. That's what they provide now. They don't even give you those old controllers anymore. They just expect you to have an app on your phone. On the other hand though, I get released coming from, which is I could still use this controller if you'd just let me replace the battery, but yeah, it didn't make the battery replaceable. So now you have to say, well, it's a dangerous or a lithium-ion battery to be that old. And so we have to discontinue use of it, which is a pain if it's still working. And it works fine. I mean, I never had one, but people that were cooler than me that got Sonos speakers way back in the day, like I remember being like, ooh, wow, yes. It was like sort of the first smart home in a way. So yeah, we feel your pain, but not exactly the same thing. Moving on, we got an email from Natron who said, I think the most obvious use case for anything archiving and hiding photos is when you have pictures of someone special. He's talking about the new Instagram feature where you can archive a photo, but not delete it so that people don't see it on your feed. And we were sort of like, who does that? Well, maybe it's just kids. He said, well, somebody that, you know, a picture you don't wanna lose, but you don't wanna share with the world, I will let you, your imagination go from there. He wants to keep it clean. He said, Facebook already allows us using privacy settings. See, here's where I don't really understand that. If you wanted to use Instagram as a photo, you know, backup place, I could see why this would work. But otherwise, if you've got a racy photo, and I think that's what he's alluding to, why would you post it on Instagram and then hide it from me? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if the racy photo is the best example. I can think of an example kind of based on what he's saying that I hadn't thought of before he sent the email, which is you've got a picture of a loved one. Maybe it's a spouse or a friend or a relative, and you've got a great picture of the two of you together hugging and that person dies, right? I mean, I know that's horrible to think of. You don't want that out there on your public feed all the time, getting comments, maybe just, but you don't wanna delete it either, right? You want that picture for later when you're okay with it, but you don't want it right now. It's a pretty specific example, but yeah, I could see that being a case of like, you know what, I just don't need this in public right now, but once I'm past this, I will still want this picture, so I don't wanna delete it. You know what I think this probably has a lot more to do with death, yes, but more like breakups, right? Yeah, breakups, that's a little less dramatic. But yeah. All of a sudden you're like, probably do wanna look at this picture at some point, but I don't want anybody to see it on my feed anymore. I'll eventually wanna Photoshop the person out of it because it's a great background, but... Speaking of breakups, I did not know you could do this on Instagram. Do you know that you can pause your account so it appears that you've deactivated forever, but it's only temporary? Ah, so if you've got someone bugging you, you could just be like, oh, I'm gone. Yeah, or just be like, I can't even deal with you guys, but I'm not gonna delete my account. I wanna come back at some point, yeah. Interesting, I did not know that. Another breakup thing. Okay, so Natron actually emailed us twice and said, I read that as party of the split with eBay, PayPal got a look at eBay's business until 2021, and really favorable terms. eBay is just planning ahead to lower their costs and the vendor they picked to replace eBay is legit processing for companies like Netflix, which is true, even though none of us had ever heard of them. Yeah, they're a little more enterprisey, I think, which is why we were unfamiliar with them. But it's a fair point. It's not like PayPal's business with eBay goes away today, but in 2021, PayPal's gonna wanna have had something else lined up, which, you know, good point, gives them a few years to do that. I guess I just, I don't really, and I, you know, we talked about it on the show a couple of days ago when we talked about the fact that eBay was going to go with another payment vendor. They've had such a good relationship. How is it that they wouldn't, I don't know, I don't know, make a deal between themselves because they have such history? I guess once you go independent, the two of you, then you don't care about that as much. Yeah, I mean, it may be that this Dutch company just had a better proposal. Like we can do it cheaper, we can do it the way you want because PayPal has to be a consumer-facing product as well and this other company doesn't. So it may give them some efficiency somehow. Netflix, Uber, Spotify, big companies. Yeah. So, yeah. On Wednesday, there was discussion about whether Facebook Messenger was the same as text. And I see major differences. Here's one, Facebook Messenger pops a window up like a Skype message waiting for your input. Even though you don't have to answer right away if you dismiss the window, you might forget to answer it. And if you just dismiss the window, it's possible that the person who sent you the message can tell that you read it and then dismissed it. It demands your attention either way, that text does not. All right, so Tim, not sure how your text is set up but mine is like a full-on notification message like Messenger is no more invasive than text is for me anyway. Yeah, Messenger is actually more invasive than text for me because I get so few of them that it makes this weird popping sound and even makes it if like my iPad is closed and I've absolutely called attention to it where I have my text messaging sound set very low so that it's not always going off and grabbing my attention. But wait, the Messenger notification sound is louder than your text? It's different, it's like a plop and so I never hear it unless it's Messenger so it really grabs my attention more. You know, it's funny Messenger as well as LinkedIn profiles and certain other services, it is mandatory if someone saw the message that you sent, you know, you know that they saw it and you know exactly what time, timestamped. And there's like a whole thing that goes on with me and my friends about whether or not read receipts are valuable, I think they are for text. I'm talking about text, particularly message between iPhones but I'm like, if I'm not like hiding from you what does it matter that you saw when I, you know, when you say your text? Like isn't that helpful to you? Well, so these are the sort of things like they don't really bother me but I understand the idea of people wanting privacy. There's a whole other conversation to be had about the etiquette of responding. And I wonder sometimes if it's generational because I'll send a message to people and they just, you know, I'll see they read it and they don't respond. And I'm like, why aren't you responding? I just want them to respond to say cool, right? Because there's a difference between I opened my phone, I saw you sent me a message and I read your message and I totally understand and I have nothing more to say. I always want that last minute like cool or okay, got it. So that I'm like, all right, this person doesn't have any questions versus yeah, they read it but maybe they didn't quite get what I was saying or they, you know, they're gonna respond later or something and I always miss that. And I read receipt isn't enough to make me feel comfortable in some cases if it's not important, it's different. Which is funny because that's exactly why I like them. You know, if you text me and you see that I saw it, you know that I saw it, but you're like, hmm, but what if you do it? Well, because I do this all the time where I unlock a phone after with by touching, you know, I touched the message, I unlock the phone and I get distracted. So it's gonna show that I read it, but I don't read it. Yeah, you know, it's funny. There are certain email clients that will let you know like how many times the email's been opened, I'm not down with that. Email's one of those things where it's like, we're all so behind on that, please. I never wanna tell anybody when I read an email. I like the dot dot dot that tells me they're typing because then I'm like, oh, okay, I'm gonna wait till I hear the response or see the response. Got another email from Nick. This is about RAM prices. Hi, Tom, just to note that the hardware price discussion on today's show was a Wednesday show, I believe, which I'm surprised Ryan didn't mention was the Chinese NDRC is investigating RAM manufacturers for price fixing. If they find that price fixing is going on, this wouldn't be the first time, the RAM manufacturers have been caught price fixing. Having the might of the Chinese government, looking at the price of RAM will very likely put downward pressure on the price consumers paying for RAM. Yeah, okay, so this is the kind of story that I always raise an eyebrow and say, well, wait a minute, what's really going on here? Who's reporting this? Is it getting blown out of proportion? So I did a quick search while you were reading that. And there's a Reuters story, which is trustworthy to me. China's economic regulators paying close attention to the surge in storage chips and could look into possible price fixing by the firms that make them a senior official told the state run China Daily newspaper, citing official with the National Development of Reform, the NDRC. So it's not quite they're doing an investigation, they're paying attention. So it may be overstating it to say they're looking into it as in they're pretty sure it happened and they're gonna crack down on it, but it's not like they're not paying attention to it. They are keeping an eye on the market. All right, hope we answered your question. All right, this next one is from Doug in Michigan, and this was actually a really interesting conversation we had the other day with Scott Johnson, I believe, about the subscriber model and when it works and when it doesn't. So Doug says, I was just listening to that episode and I've got some thoughts. Product aging is not only the wear and tear that happens on goods, but also the desirability. If you wanna rent out clothes, you don't wanna rent out 10 year old clothes, you wanna rent out new clothes. Subscription orientation hits the problem with the snowboard. The snowboard was one of the examples that I had brought up like, well, it's seasonal, right? It's gonna sit in your closet the rest of the time. But he says, well, but everybody wants to rent that snowboard at the same time, right? Unless you're gonna ship it across the country. So that's also our problem too. That sharing economy thing only works when you really don't want your item and somebody else really does. As far as rentals go, I think that he does hit on something, you know, the fashion thing, yes. Cars, the same thing, you know, you wanna rent a Cadillac, it's expensive, but it's new, you know, you don't have to buy it, you know, there's a status thing associated with that. The clothes item, you know, is not as big of a problem because that's what Mr. and Mrs. Collection does. They rent out clothes. And yes, the clothes that they were renting out last year probably aren't in the system anymore. But because they give the option to buy to people, they're definitely going to, you know, have some attrition in the system, which probably helps pay for the rest of the clothes, to be honest. And they can then sell clothes used afterwards once it gets to the end of the cycle, like, well, we really can't send this out to people anymore because it's starting to age. Well, would they have a way to liquidate that? And it seems to work. So it's not, it's a great point. It's not a kill, it's not a deal killer for the model. And obviously, you know, the whole thing with the snowboard and the camping equipment and everything, you're absolutely right. You know, in the middle of the snow, you're not gonna get camping equipment or requests, you're gonna get snowboard requests, but that's a logistical problem. That's a supply and inventory problem, but that company that we were talking about on the show seems like they have a handle on it. Got another email from Norm, and this is for people who are actually paying attention to DTNS Labs. Norm lives in the Central Valley and says that next time we do an LA meetup, he'll be there, so we'll keep that in mind. He said, one request, can we get more non-games content in the labs feeds? Ryan Trout was phenomenal. So how about an extended interview with somebody who's an expert like Ryan, in an area for a deeper dive? I think you guys and Ryan could have talked about memory, processors, or ever, I think he means Ryan Trout, or maybe an extended discussion on a place of new technology. I got an Apple Watch for Christmas. I'd like to listen to people I trust talk about Apple Watches, et cetera. So, well, Norm, as a fellow not super high tech gamer, hopefully this is something that will, you know, satiate you a little bit, but the whole idea of labs is like, yeah, we wanna know what you wanna see, what you don't wanna see, what you want more of. Yeah, I mean, here you go, Norm. We're doing this show. It's not game content. The only game content that's in the labs is Patrick Beja's. The other content that Scott does is about art, and that's deep dive on art, which I get may not be a thing. And I've been doing a very similar thing to what Norm's describing. We talked to the guy from the CEA for labs. We talked to an Apple developer at length in November. We talked to a musician. I'm thinking of talking to a guy who does the cartoon Wonder Mark. So, granted, maybe these things aren't hitting exactly Norm's interest, but hopefully as we do more and more of these, we'll hit that interest more and more. Julian wrote in on Monday, we were trying to figure out Veronica's studio name because Tom and I both say I'm here at Studio Feline. He's at DTNS headquarters. And his suggestion for Veronica was silicone for her, but I feel like she's not gonna like that one. Wait, say it again? Silicon Studio. I don't wanna speak for her either, but I get where he's coming from, right? Cause it's Silicon Valley-ish, even though she's in San Francisco, which isn't exactly Silicon Valley. But then Silicon Hills, Silicon Beach, Silicon Alley, feel like that's where everybody goes. It's not quite distinctive enough. SillyCon Studio now. Hey. That's a really bad idea, too. The Dega Corner Store Studio or whatever. Oh, yeah. This one is from Paul. Says, good morning, Tom. Or good afternoon, good evening, good night. I usually listen to DTNS every day that it airs. The news is still pretty fresh. 16 hours later, you guys do an awesome job staying on top of things. Thank you. I found myself coming to what I think is an interesting realization. I had to get a quick dinner last night and I ended up getting Burger King. I never eat that stuff. Being a man of a certain age, I was still lamenting the choice this morning. After hearing you mention Burger King's net neutrality ad on the show, I realized I watched it and then I immediately went out and bought on another cheeseburger. Well played. Man, all I could say has been there done that. When McDonald's had the Apple Pay implemented, under the guise of research, I did go and buy a cheeseburger there. Was McDonald's like the first fast food place? It was one of the earlier ones, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was Whole Foods and McDonald's. I actually went to Whole Foods and then McDonald's and used Apple Pay. Wow. Interesting. Well, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It's like Burger King net neutrality. It's like, well, sure, that was a play to get people who care about net neutrality to go to Burger King, but you know, that's what you do. It might make me go get a cheeseburger somewhere else though. Why? Because we're talking about it now. But I don't want to get one of Burger King. Yeah, no, because we're talking about cheeseburgers. Oh, right. Okay. What is our next email? I had it here. No, no, no, no, sorry. Getting towards the bottom of the mail bag, so Sarah has to dig down in, you know, through all the letters. Mail bag never ends. Under the bills. I just looking for all my stars. The junk mail in there. Yeah. Oh, you know what? You know, this is really simple, but Toby wrote in and said, thank you so much for having Mike on. Mike Cole, he's talking about, really enjoyed hearing his points. I have to agree. One of the, you know, I don't know. I love all our guests, of course, but a really interesting guest that I hope we have on as soon as possible. Yeah. He's a very handsome and intelligent man. Mike Cole. Got another email from Toby who says, we were talking about, remember the company that had figured out a new unit of measurement for like. Oh, right, the flick. Yeah, the flick. All right. So he says, subject line flick unit of measure. He says, it occurs to me that this more precise unit of time measurement in respect of video frame might have an application in the development of new compression algorithms or methods that might result in smaller, higher quality streams and reduced sizes. Yeah, I didn't. Did we not read that one on the main show? That sounds familiar. Oh, well. But it's still a good point. I didn't think that we did, but yeah, I mean, well, I think, and my whole thing was like, but why it's fine, but yeah, that's, I mean, anything that reduces a file size I'd be into. Yeah. Because things are more easily accounted for and divisible, that makes sense. Yeah. All right. Next one goes to you, Tom. This is from Carl. Not sure what show you want to ask this on, DTNAS Record Killers, but if the cell phone companies come out with 5G service in the next couple of years, do you think that they would offer some sort of a combo with home internet and cell phone service? I think they could provide some competition to the local ISPs and maybe drive down prices. Yes, they absolutely will. In fact, there's kind of two flavors of 5G out there. One is more of a fixed wireless that they are going to be using as a way to provide home internet service. And then there's also the 5G that is meant for mobile service. And even though they're two different implementations, they're gonna be done in a lot of cases by the same company. So yeah, absolutely expect Verizon and AT&T and probably T-Mobile and Sprint to provide you some kind of bundle where they're like, hey, get your home internet service. Don't need to worry about wires, you know? And it's gonna be super fast. I would highly expect that to happen, yes. Speaking of cord killers, what is your and Brian's? I mean, if you guys are in agreement on this, what is, do you think is the best bundle if you're going to choose one and want to keep your cost down as much as possible? Bundle? I would not get a bundle. I'm a cord killer. So what do you get? Well, when you say bundle, that makes me think like spectrum and Comcast and selling you home phone and internet. TV or direct TVs, a cord killer option or... So you're saying, you're saying which over the top streaming service? Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, sorry, I misunderstood that. We actually did a whole segment on that on cord killers this past Monday. So you can get the longer version of this answer there. But the short version is it's got to the point where it kind of does depend on which channels you want. You'll want to go and look at which of the channels that are really important to you, which one has those. And then the other question falls into how important is how the DVR service works? Because PlayStation View has a 28 day limit on the DVR, which I almost never run into because things rerun so often and they count those. And otherwise it's unlimited in storage. Hulu Live seems like the best DVR because it works unlimited, but occasionally one of the Hulu on demand services replaces your DVR recording, which is not a big problem if you're paying for the commercial free basic Hulu service. But if you've got commercials, that could be an issue. YouTube TV is the same way. So you got to look at how the DVR works. Direct TV doesn't even have DVR yet, Direct TV now, but it's coming. And then just look at the price compared to the channels you get. Streaming-wise, Direct TV now solve their problems. Hulu Live seems to have worked out most of their problems. They're all pretty equal on that level. Care to share what your actual setup is? Yeah, I mean, I am unusual because I do cord killers. I subscribe to multiple services, but I spend most of my time in PlayStation View because it has most of the channels and it has a nice grid and an easy way to keep track of shows. I kind of like Hulu's way of keeping track of shows better, though, and it integrates with Apple TV's little TV app. So when a new show does get recorded, it just pops right up there. So I've been splitting my time a little between those two. We got a really, really cool email from Rob, very thorough that didn't make the show when we were talking about Meg Whitman leaving HP Enterprises and going to this new venture, New TV, which is a Katzenberg venture. He says, to follow up on yesterday's listeners, this was, he wrote us the next day, thoughts on Meg Whitman leaving to take the new TV role as a passion project. I wanna share my point of view because not only did I work at HPE for the last five years, but in the last year, I had the opportunity to work directly with or for Meg on a large project. Through my personal experience with her, I can say she not only loves the startup world, but it's in her DNA. It's what she loves to do the most. If you take a look at the direction she's taken HPE in over the last few years, I think it exemplifies the entrepreneurial spirit that she has. She splits the historic HP into HPE Inc and HPE and the whole thing back in 2014. And then in 2016, Spun merged off the enterprise services lean into, anyway, we're going on on, but Rob is quite a fan of Megan says a few years ago, she even started a program called HPE Pathfinder. It allowed employees to invest and build alliances and industry shaping startups. He's got a lot of links that he adds to this as well, but it's kind of funny because we were all sort of sitting around being like, wasn't she, didn't she wanna be president or she wanted to be governor and she was a real enterprise person and what she'd do and I think it's easy to speculate, but none of us have worked with her. Yeah, and who was it that wrote that one in? Rob from Chicago. Right, we had a shorter version of the same sentiment from Chris that we did read on the show. So you're not alone, Rob. This is sort of a universal sentiment. Like, oh yeah, anybody who knows who follows Megan that closely, this makes sense. This is what she loves. She wants to get back and she wants to get on the juice again and get in there in the trenches and start building something from scratch. She doesn't wanna be the helm of a blue chip, if you will. I was talking to somebody the other day about Jimmy Iovine and like, he's leaving Apple, he vested, what's he really doing? And it's very hard for me to relate to somebody who's on such a high level of sort of executive and riches, I suppose. I don't know what Meg Whitman wants to do with her life. I mean, I can try to guess that she wants another, you know, a hint or something. Although Jimmy Iovine said he's not leaving Apple. So that was just a rumor and he's now denied it. We'll see. There are lots of rumors out there. We will see. Okay, I thought that I, well, see, we're not doing this live, so we're not gonna get any questions from our DTNS Slack group, but I don't know, Tom, what do you think? Yeah, I think what we can leave people with is this show is gonna evolve, it's gonna change as Sarah does it. And the one thing that you can do if you like this, send us some questions for us to ask the audience. You heard, there's like people who've worked at HPE, there's people who work in the ISP industry. We've got experts abounding in the audience who can answer your question without even trying, just like, oh yeah, no, I know that off the top of my head. So you got a question about how the industry works or technology, send it here, we'll read it out and somebody will be able to answer it. And I think it's nice to know that there's another outlet. Some of the emails we get are like, fantastic, but they can't really be parsed, depending on the show when we're doing DTNS, just because we have time constraints, it's like, we'll save that. So the whole idea of the email bag, it was like, we just don't wanna not respond to these folks publicly because they can help other people. Yeah, absolutely. It's not just about getting a response from us, it's about passing along information and questions and comments. So feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Well, Tom, what do you think? I like it. I think it's a good first crack. I can't wait to see where we go from here. Either, yeah, I mean, this was literally us going through the mail bag and just saying, all right, let's read a few things, see how it goes. Hopefully you like the idea, but really the content comes from you. So you have, it's your opportunity to dictate what we talk about. And if you have something that you're looking to get on another show, but think that we could unpack it further here, that's cool too. Yeah, absolutely. That's the point of this. Alrighty then. Well, how should we end this? We gotta figure that part out too. Yeah, from Studio Feline, thanks for being with, no, no, that's terrible. If you like my fish and pole. Send us an email about how we should close the show. How's that? That's the first feedback I want. Tell us how to close the show. But thanks to everybody for giving us feedback. Thanks in advance anyway. And yeah, let us know what you wanna see, what you want us to do. We'll do it within reason. This show is part of the Broad Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club, all of us who have enjoyed this program. We definitely said within reason. I said that.