 You're Roger. We are now live Hello audience. Hello, Alphageek radio And we are about ready to go You're looking good John Yeah Now we got my Linux foundation Yeah, love it very good And I have down to introduce you as blockchain offerings director is that correct? That's right. Okay, great Product man. I'm a product guy offerings around here What would you like me to say that I'll say whatever you need? Offerings director is fine. Perfect. Oh, kiddoke. Well, then let's get going. You already Scott. I'm all set. All right. Here we go Daily Tech News show is brought to you by its global listener base not outside organizations to find out how you can contribute Go to Daily Tech News show comm slash support This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday February 22nd 2017 I'm Tom Merritt Scott Johnson alongside as he is most Wednesday's good day Scott Good day, Tom. Very excited to be here. Thank you for having me once again Absolutely. Good to have you alongside and very excited that John Wolpert blockchain offerings director at IBM is able to join us today To help us understand a little more about what the blockchain is good for John. Thank you so much for joining us Hey guys So, where are you at? It's a beautiful location you're in Raleigh, North Carolina. I'm a San Francisco guy, but I moved here most a good chunk of our engineering team and Jerry Cuomo the Grand Puba blockchain and IBM is is here and it's hard to make an insanely great product when you're 3,000 miles away from your team So I moved. Yeah, well, it looks like it's treating you well from from this this aspect, so We are gonna flip our normal Normal order of events which we do every every so awesome often we'll get to the top stories here in just a minute, but let's start With our discussion story today. Now back in December on December 7th. We did an episode explaining what the blockchain is So if you want you can go back and check that out We even clipped out the blockchain explainer kind of just giving you the basics But the idea is that it's a public ledger. It's verifiable. It's difficult to forge According to a finical. Let's talk payments survey 69% of banks are experimenting with permissioned blockchains. So this just isn't for cryptocurrency It's also for other areas of finance blockchain rollouts would prioritize business areas where it can improve transparency Use cases include cross-border payments digital identity management clearing and settlement letter of credit processes And these are not talking about Bitcoin. These are talking about Normal fiat currencies that we deal with today It could also be used for energy the energy web foundation is a global nonprofit organization focusing on accelerating blockchain in the energy sector So dealing with the distribution of energy IBM is working with Dubai on blockchain tracking goods and processing transactions Dubai is one of the largest re-export centers for goods flowing between Asia the Middle East and Africa So there's forget about blockchains Bitcoin connection for the moment Let's talk about it simply on its own and John I'm curious when when you need to explain blockchain to people. How do you explain it? Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna really bake your onion here. I I don't talk about blockchain much anymore I talk about the transaction fabric of the internet and How we're about to see the advent of that? So I remember in 1992 I'm sitting around trying to write a 500 Location application that needed to yeah, and I had to write all the my team And I had to write all the communication protocols between these different servers in these different locations And I was paying the butt took us a year and then 1994 It was just the internet and it was easy and it would have taken us a week You know for that part of what we were doing We're about to see the same thing again with the transaction web or the internet, you know The the transaction fabric of the internet When you say transaction fabric, what does that mean? Specifically it means that we needed and we need we're about to have A fabric layer a you know like the internet where we can have a standard way of sharing assets and The rules by which we move those assets around Digital assets of some kind or representations of physical assets in a way where we none of us can Has to be the central body or the central authority through which we're all doing business Right, and that's where blockchain Are Are useful in that structure, but it's not just about blockchain. It's really about You know distributed ledger technology and having the ability to do that those distributed Functions in a common way I think the thing that hangs people up and Scott correct me if I'm wrong here because I know I know you're always trying to wrap Your head around this too is that sounds great a way that I can just publicly verify that this box got to this place Or this amount of dollars got put in that account Without anybody being able to change that record and it's verifiable by everybody But how is that possible? How how how is someone not going to get into that and change it because we hear about so many security? vulnerabilities and things like that that's right and so And of course if somebody gets your private keys they can can impersonate you that's an issue, right? So we have a lot to do. This isn't just about you know blockchain isn't a panacea It does do a good job of Saying you know the thing I committed to this ledger Didn't get changed. I didn't change it. You didn't change So I agree to give you five cookies if you give me four donuts But if you give me four donuts within 15 days I'll give you six cookies and if fly board didn't go over five percent I'll give you seven cookies man live or I don't it's particularly. It's yeah. Yeah. Yeah Hey, so you know you could lie as we know you could lie about live or and You know so you want to make sure that you know and this is where cognitive technology and lots of parallel processing and lots of verification of Data sources really matters right because you want to know that if you put a lie on a blockchain. You just got a permanent lie Right, so that that's something yet. We all have to worry about but once it's there. You've got provenance. You've got You've got the Assurance that this agreement that you and I made For the cookies and donuts. I didn't change it. You didn't change it unless we both had it You know invoke the protocol to change it and we both knew So that's that's the easiest way I can explain it. It's it's like the permanent marker It's like the sharpie of the internet. Oh, and we needed that to handle Right, we needed that to handle the trillions of dollars of obligations That we make to each other as legally separate entities. Yeah, I love without that. We're sure here Here's here's the question. I always run into you described the internet as a As a fabric layer that came and was an important thing when it came and now it's this thing We rely on to send information back and forth, but it's missing this one component, which is Yes, we can have distributed information across many many computers There's no centralized control over any of them and there's so many benefits to that But the layer it's missing is the security layer the layer that says For sure what you made and for sure what I received was not doctored in any way was not hacked was not tweaked was not changed You are who you say you are and I am who I say I am those all are missing from the current The internet as it is today Is blockchain or technologies based on blockchain or the work that you guys are doing is the idea to get To basically plug a new component into the internet and say here is the new way that we verify everything is that the idea? Yeah, man, that's that's exactly what we're talking about. We're talking about maturing the internet That's what yeah, I've been part of IBM off and on two or three times always part of the team that Was in the open source trying to mature the internet was in the internet division. I Was in the Java division. I was in the XML division all trying to you know not just not to simply make money on on some kind of product but on a Much bigger thing, which is you know, I think we made a few pennies on the internet But we didn't make any money helping build the internet, you know I'm saying so It's that again. We need we need to build this playing field And play soccer and I we just want to get done playing building the playing field and And I don't want a lot of fooling around, you know arguing about what playing fields would look like I want to go out and play soccer so that that's and the thing about the transaction web if you want to call it that or the that the transaction fabric for the internet is that Before this notion of openly governed open source Openly governed open source you couldn't have the the advent of of a transaction fabric for the internet because Informations one thing tweets or one thing, but grandma's pension or Trillions of dollars in transactions if IBM built that Nobody'd use it if if a government like DARPA set it up. Nobody else other than, you know, you know the government government would use it It has to be built by all of us for all of us Why we took our code and some other companies took their code and at the earliest earlier than I've ever seen and I've been involved in open source 25 years 20 years The I've never seen A group of companies take the courageous act of saying well, this could become a giant mess But we're gonna put it in we're gonna put it out in the open and work together collaboratively from almost day one Ethereum doesn't look like that. Ethereum was you know a few cats smart guys love those guys very smart But they control that code and they have from the from day one Bitcoin to there's a small group of people It's open source But not open governed open source And it's a meritocracy anybody any competitor to IBM could become more of a maintainer of that code base more of a contributor than us The government, you know, the China. There's already a huge number of Chinese developers. There's 5,000 Developers working together out in the open. There's 120 companies in hyper ledger foundation and the lion's share of them are working on fabric and And there's also some really other cool other projects in there like saw two flake and tell which is really interesting when it comes to Internet of things and We actually think that the poet on fabric is a really great way of In fact fabric is very modular So when we talk about hyper ledger fabric as the transaction fabric for the internet the modularity of it Is why we think it's a good candidate for this because you can plug poet in there Or you can plug a Kafka algorithm in there or a or a dip or a tendermint or any other kind of you could you know Theoretically plug even a proof of work kind of algorithm in there. It's not something we're doing. It's not our interest But you could I've been a high school student could be right now writing the you know, the proof of work Ordering component for fabric So it has this flexibility How would an average consumer out there see the effects of this once it starts getting going once it starts adopted and More of these systems start using it well, we It's very viral, right? So we did this thing called a connect-a-thon with the early Fabric v.1 code base which right now is open source a skilled person could go and build it today and start using it running it By March 20th, it's going to be in production and it'll be easy to use you know to your JavaScript programmer could write applications on the fabric and you just put up a peer which is like a wet think of a peer a Fabric peer like an Apache web server for the for the transaction age Right and then you connect to an ordering service and you can connect to any kind of ordering services out there You could set up one of your own And and we built one or two, but we focus mostly on the modularities We're expecting lots of other people to compete to say oh, I'm the best ordering You can paint on and and for different functions in different use cases Everybody's gonna have so great platforms and great This is a fabric sign of platform. It's a fabric. It's below platforms You build platforms and compete on top of it. Yeah. Yeah, and and great things like that like the internet provide lots of opportunity for competitors to create stuff on top and so you could compete at the ordering service or consensus layer And then you just start putting peers up and then connecting more peers and more peers and And then you say well, okay, that's great. So we're all doing, you know dispute resolution on this ledger Let's do another channel where we can do We can do dispute resolution, but on trade finance or on supply chain. I'm trading radishes and and You know, I want to give you a special price on my radishes And I don't want the other guys to buy for me to have to You know to know about that price Well, I can create a special channel That's just between you and me and then we can settle on a more public channel That's handling says, you know that part of the supply chain There's a good video on this if you go to YouTube and you just start typing hyper ledger fabric V1 Okay, you'll see a two and a half minute video that gives you a pretty good use case on how that works So a quick question I had if if I mean obviously the idea is that we get to a place where this is so broad-based that even Average users won't even really notice what's happening because it's just happening and everything's working But who's the middleman that gets cut out with this? Do we do we see a huge shift in the industry when it comes to payment processors? Do all the middlemen that sort of handle all the stuff between banks between consumers between large Retail entities like Walmart or Amazon or whoever does does all that middleman stuff just hoof go away And we're looking at a whole new industry for for the the middleware of the transaction because of this In some places it's possible, but I think that Like banks, you know in 1993 banks were worried that the internet was going to disintermediate them I think they did okay in that right? I think that there's lots of creativity out there It's not like uber in the taxi industry first of all I think you know bankers are You know a lot more about how not to get disrupted than a taxi fleet owner So I think that it's not really it's how you respond to the technology and I guess at this point in my career I've been around enough. I've seen good responses and bad responses And I think a good response is to say hey wait a minute You know this this transaction fabric for the internet makes it really easy for me now to build viral business networks And I already have a whole bunch IBM in IBM global finance we are rating partners with us fabric of the internet and then we can start to virally scale that out into other functions just by adding a simple What you might call a smart contract we call an agreement or you know a piece of chain code We just throw on the ledger. I mean effectively smart contracts agreements chain code. They're all synonyms for A stored procedure on the on the blockchain ledger, right? It's basically saying I've got this logic that is invocable I'm putting it in a stored procedure on a transaction entry and making it permanent so you can't change it Right so I can just add those and I'm basically adding functionality and then I can add more viral Participants to that. I was in Hong Kong a couple weeks ago And somebody asked me they were an Ethereum developer and they said well Why would I want to do fabric? You know and I'm not mining and I'm like well if you're not mining you don't need to be You don't need to be compensated for mining because you're not burning down and everyone's worth of power every year trying to try to mine But and so now it's like a web server and the question I have to ask you is Why do you have a web server? Or why do you you know have a provider that gives you a web server, right? Why are you in on the internet because you want to do something right? So now it's really back to that same question So I would say that these intermediaries can start to Say I can add a lot more value as the founder of a very cool very massive business network Where I'm not decentralizing trust. That's sort of the that's second wave That's Bitcoin Ethereum that sort of thing or first wave second wave I think this third wave that's about to just break on us like you know I mean I would be out there right now if I was writing code You know if I wasn't helping right write this code Doing what what did you do in 1993 if you were smart you were you were registering? Domain names, right and you were you were staking your claim to conceptual spaces Well, what that's gonna happen again. You'll have IBM dot chain, right and and and you'll you'll say hey I've got 4,000 companies that are part of my business network and And and we're all Distributing trust not decentralizing trust the centralizing trust, you know sort of in in blockchain world implies trustlessness and You know, come on. I need to know who you are. I don't know who you are then Yeah, man I mean if I don't know who you are then it really is true that that smart contract becomes You know as final as a Supreme Court decision because you don't know who you gave the money to Right, if you're if you're an issue if you're using this for shipping You really want to know who the people doing the shipping are that it's coming from the right place, right? So yeah KYC AML all this stuff. We think that that's really important But why but such the Toshi Nakamoto wasn't the end of history was the beginning of history, right? Right, so we said hey, this is a pretty good idea But we also need identity. How can we and we need confidentiality? How do we get all of that stuff? Inspiration that we got from these awesome things like the planet Ethereum to to teach us how to how to do something that works for Industry and works at the internet level in a generalized way. So I mentioned finance. I mentioned energy. I mentioned shipping Are there any projects that you're aware of that either surprised you or you think people would find surprising that blockchain is being used in that way? I Think I don't know. I think that I'm not surprised by any of this stuff right now I think that Again, it's hard to predict We will be surprised because you couldn't have predicted uber in 93, right? I mean you might have Gates probably could but I think you probably didn't one of his books. Yeah, right? But but you could you could sort of project Some use cases. I think supply chain is going to be a huge use case area So it's a killer domain. I think for this and then I think finance starts to follow on that so Sort of learning about the blockchain the the the finance industry was The vanguard of you know companies who wanted to learn about it Now we're seeing supply chain very practical use cases Especially around provenance like ever ledger is a pretty cool company. You should take a look at A skew chain and these you know gem and others that there's really great examples of fluid of companies using a variety of different methods We think that ultimately they're all going to want to use fabric When everything shakes out That's just some folks right now because they really are they're loving their ethereum or what have you what I'm trying to suggest is that fabric doesn't There is no question about a private or public network with fabric You choose a channel You could you know any channel and so you can have a private transaction or a public transaction you could have While most of the things that we're doing as a company are probably going to be on What I'll call permissive Networks or channels you could theoretically have a permissionless trustless channel. Sure Just to make the point. I mean I I sometimes You know not everybody you know in a permission camp loves hearing that but I think intellectually it's it's honest to say You could have different kinds of channels to get a little wonky You'd have to just for those who know about data structures here You wouldn't have a channel that could allow forking and a channel that could At the same time allow non forking protocols So you'd have to say well I'm going to have a forking protocol with a proof-of-work system on this channel and a non forking protocol and Non, yeah, and a PPFT or coffee-based order on this channel As you get to its horses for courses you get to choose the right tool for the right job in your application There's so much to know about this. There's so much going on and it's still like as you mentioned very early days It's the 1993 of the internet For blockchain. You mentioned a good youtube video. We'll note that as well anything else That you would recommend for people who want to learn more about this Well, I'll say only one one last thing and that you know, we were saying in the beginning about permission networks what I'll say is that Is that identity is important but The internet so to make the point is a permissioned system It has ICANN at the top of it. Yeah, I would call it a permissive system Mm-hmm, right and and I think that's something to think about when it when fabric starts to roll out v1 And people start putting peers up all over the world Which is already happening And it goes viral Then it's not about saying I oh, well, I'm using fabric. Therefore. I'm a permission network. That's not true I'm on the fabric. I'm on the internet And I'm using a permissioned protocol for this particular channel or I'm not I'm using a permissionless protocol for this channel It's a network of networks Not a network Yeah, and that's what I think the mental model that everybody's had up until now is I I have this network a bit. There is a chain for this and there's another one for that. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, yeah But that's not fabric fabric is taking that to a next level Well, john, thank you so much for taking the time uh to chat with us today really appreciate it It's a pleasure guys. Thanks If folks want to follow up on you particularly, where should they go? Nope. Oh, yeah, he already a lot. Well, you know what? I'll tell you because he's on uh twitter So go look up john wolfer not twitter. You can find him there Uh, right. Thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit You can submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com Let's get into some top stories starting with sony announcing an sd card with read speed of 300 megabytes per second and write speed of 299 megabytes per second in 32 to 128 gigs coming sometime in march, but they won't tell us how much they are Now here are some more top stories Apple's gonna open its new campus in cupratino, california to be called apple park Starting in april about 12,000 employees are gonna move in over the course of six months And there will be a 1000 seat auditorium that they have named steve jobs theater scott Well, I was really hoping they'd go for pen apple pineapple pen. Yeah, hopefully that will be a conference room name Somewhere one would hope uh the pen apple pineapple pen. I I love uh, I like why I'd love following uh tim cook right now because he's I don't know letting a lot of stuff out on social media about How close we're getting what steve jobs had in mind what they're calling things like to me? This is sort of exciting Um to see all that stuff finally happen and see this great Earthbound spaceship come to life. So finally land in cupratino. Yeah Uh microsoft launched skype light. Oh my goodness another version of skype everybody This is aimed at the indian market specifically in india The new version of skype is only 13 megabytes So it's very small and designed to work well on 2g connections The app should be less battery or use less battery and have a mode that reduces data usage and video calls It will also support adhar india's national Identification verification system And this is interesting because I would like a skype light to be honest I feel like skype's a little bloated. So Maybe if this goes well or maybe if it's uh Regionalized I can install skype light. I understand why it's going to be useful where they're where they're introducing it But it seems like We're all looking for thinner clients for this sort of thing anyway And I wouldn't mind something a little thinner than what we got. Well, first of all, I believe in skype light and I believe in me but also As we see so many companies trying to figure out how to crack the indian market companies from outside india Particularly one of the things they're dealing with is low connectivity or lower speeds or You know high data costs And so they are as in skype's doing here trying to come up with Lightweight efforts to get people to adopt Their their system facebook famously Ran afoul of the national sentiment by trying to do some zero rating and that didn't work But they have now come up with a facebook light Lightweight version that that Seems to play that line better. So a skype light is great, too And like you say scott for those of us elsewhere who would just like more efficient software This this causes some nice benefits as well. Yeah, half the calories, but still tastes great amd announced three new ryzen processors. This was their big announcement the the ceo Lisa sue has really been saying this is the maker break year for amd all three of the ryzen processors announced use the zen core They have eight cores 16 megabytes of level three cash And they're all unlocked for overclocking top of the line is the r7 1800 x that one has 3.6 gigahertz base speed You can boost that up to four gigahertz and it has 95 watts of tdp It's 499 dollars So it's about half the cost of the comparable intel i7 6900 k which is 1,050 at least that's the one amd's comparing it to There's also the r7 1700 x that's 3.4 gigahertz for 399 the r7 1700 is 2.0 gigahertz for 329 And you can pre-order them today for shipping march 2nd Now comparing the 1800 x that's the top of the line new ryzen to intel's i7 6900 k amd says the 1800 x scores 9 percent higher in the cinna bench r15 multi-threaded test And is about the same as the intel in the single threaded test now broadwell still has more instructions per clock But amd made what a lot of people thought was a laughable promise to get that instructions per clock number for amd processors up 40 Over the excavator generation. They got it up 52 percent So even though there's still a tiny bit behind intel that's a huge jump amd also showed ryzen beating intel in handbrake video encoding with Better frame rates than intel using super elite 4 at 4k So these are compelling in that they are good performing chips scott But they're also especially at that top end way more affordable Also, I cannot help but go back in my head to the the heyday of the cpu wars between amd and intel and it wasn't that long ago, but When when amd and intel were really going at it and amd was getting some real ground And this is I think even before their their purchase of the video card division They seem to be Really on a roll I feel like part of that was There was a huge jump between generations back then if you went from a pentium 90 to a pentium 100 It was a sizable tangible measurable difference in the kind of performance you could expect as an end user even Um Nowadays It's so weird. It's like it's not about the chip anymore. It is the chip the chip matters But we're such a diminishing returns a point that sometimes video card is what matters most sometimes It's hard drives and how quickly their access and whether they're solid state or not to make the difference um refresh rates on monitors play a difference like there's So many other factors and I don't know if that war It feels like a cold war kind of like it's just sort of happening. It's not really affecting me But it's happening. We know it's there And I hope this is a sign that maybe we can see them get back into the um competitive seat again because it's been a long time and That long time has made people kind of forget why it matters Whether your cpu can keep up with the other cpu manufacturer or not So yeah, I mean a lot of people would say amd let that war cool off that that's actually one of the reasons Uh and and lisa su the c again ceo of amd is really Really trying to tout this as the heating it up of it again Yeah, well, they they're trying hard with their radion series as well their video card businesses Once again going after invidious throat. So it does feel like it's all hands on deck at amd right now and yeah I think that's probably good. Uh, verizon announced more cities will be into the test pattern for its pre-commercial 5g wireless service in the us talked about this last wednesday There's the last Wednesday whenever it was when we had We had molly wood on talked a bunch about what 5g is and how it works by mid-year customers in an arbor michigan, ablana Uh, bernardsville brockton dallas denver houston miami sacramento, seattle And uh, washington dc. There's no salt lake on there. It's driving me crazy. Yeah, no la either Maybe able to take part in the test 5g has not been yet set as a standard as we talked about last time this came up and the hardware is certainly in its earliest stages, but um I'm I'm stoked for what this from what we learned about what the standard is starting to shape up to be I would really like to be a test city. Yeah, I mean a lot of times they what they're looking for is business partners Uh, who are willing to invest in a little bit of hardware to test this out and see if it's useful Maybe sign up a contract to get them on verizon's version of 5g ahead of at&t. That's what at&t is doing as well Uh, so this isn't so much for the average person like you and I to just go out and start getting 10 gigabit per second speeds on wireless It'll be a long time before 5g is even capable of something close to that but it is Another one of those signposts along the road that verizon is like, okay We've got 11 markets where we can at least do some tests We at least have some coverage that we can try and this before the the actual standard is even set So it's them trying to make sure that they're ready as soon as possible to roll this out Sure, and I still have questions about you know I mean the hardware you have in your hand right now may not be able to take advantage of it at all or Wait, this is all early goings folks. Don't get too excited. I guess google announced it will discontinue google site search That's the search that you can pay for as a web publisher to apply google search just to your site google will stop selling new licenses april 1st If your license expires before june 30th, they're going to give you a free three months extension And then after june 30th, everybody whose license expires The product stops working so they won't cut you off. They'll wait until your current term ends And if it's ending soon, they'll give you a little bit of an extension But essentially they're going to phase it out over the next year google will continue to provide It's free ad supported custom search engine that sites can transition to If they don't want to transition to that they just need to shut off google site search and switch to something else I think it's interesting that you know google is built on search, right? But this is very telling that google is built on ads Because they're shutting off the one people pay for and saying we'd like you to use the one that delivers more ads I will give you purely anecdotal evidence here. So take this for all the green assault that it's worth But never had I ever come across a website where they had integrated google site search And I wasn't disappointed by it and I don't mean by the results. It worked fine I always felt like that was some weird cheapo slapped on snap in solution That made me think less of the site I was visiting it felt cheap and it felt like they were putting google in a frame Sometimes it really did. I know what you mean. Yes, and then it was never quite sure. Was I searching google? Was I searching just the site? Was I getting a combination of the two? Were the suggestions after the first search actually from google or was it from the site like There was it was never very clear and because google never went the extra mile to say Let's integrate everyone's ccss and let's get style sheets functioning together So it looks like we've never left your site instead. I always just felt kluji So that is purely a side to the personal impression, but I get it. Yeah, and it always bugged me So I'm actually not surprised that this is finally getting Taken away, but again, I have that by us. So, you know, you know, well, it's not going away You're just going if you're going to see it. It's also going to have google ad words on it Right. It'll look even more like google. Yeah. Yeah, exactly At ignite australia microsoft announced a second major update to windows 10 which will come later in 2017 It looked like it would come to insiders in april or may and be released to the public Around november the creators update has not been scheduled, but is expected in april That's when i'm very excited and curious about More details are likely at the microsoft build conference, which happens in may Um, I was looking just today at some alternative brands for digitizing tablets sort of wake home Uh level art tablets just to see what the world's doing now. Um, ever since they announced their Their creative studio, uh all in one pc thing and I played with that a bit found it a little laggy So now we heard the ces that Uh, who's doing it? I forgot. Oh del has a new one called canvas that looks really awesome Nice big and affordable Uh digitizing tablet for artists and for professionals and so, um, what I didn't realize that there are about two dozen Chinese manufacturers who are making pretty good stuff selling on on amazon for in some cases a fourth of the price of any of these All of that aside, they're all going to be able to take advantage of the windows creative update So I I've I've buried the lead a little here, but I really am excited for what that may bring, uh to windows It is really kind of a weird Mackifying of windows that we haven't seen in a very long time and I only mean that from The perspective of somebody who has been using these tools for so long for creative work and seeing the the pendulum shift between Microsoft and apple as to who is most interested in my money And right now microsoft seems to be way more interested in it than apple is on their platform So, oh, I I don't think that's true apple's very interested in your money Oh, they want my money, but they're not talking to me the way they used to they used to make amazing apps that were like Top of the line industry standard stuff and now they've just let adobe do that Um and others do that they let autodesk come in and just do that So they're no longer being the flagship of things like video editing and stuff like that They've they've led others come in and do that and now Okay, but to play devil's advocate microsoft's not making editing software. They're not making photoshop It's kind of the same thing. Well, so here's my point. You're totally right. But here's here's where it all boils down to me I've got to have a platform to to create on and up till now Apple has been for the most part the platform with the most creatives using it Therefore the the community had the most outreach in a mac sort of platform way And i'm not sure that that's so true anymore And when the whole when the company who makes windows shifts gears and says we think creatives are important Therefore we're going to have an entire update dedicated to a lot of these features We're making a computer and and portables for that matter with the surfaces that are going to Help those people in those careers along like they seem to be making efforts in that direction whereas apple has lately been making Directions out the other way and you could say well, what about the ipad pro which i love the pencil It's great. It's awesome That's maybe one exception for the most part. It's been phones phones phones and the mac stuff has just gotten further and further away from creative so It's hard for me to even say these things that used to be just so devoted in that regard But i'm i'm really starting to feel the shift from microsoft and i think it's good It's going to be good for apple too because i think that they're at some point going to have to respond to this If it makes some sizable difference, you know to the bottom line I don't know if there's enough of us out there to do that anymore but Well, I mean you could disagree with scott But what he's saying is this is the message i'm getting and he is not alone He is not the only one saying that on the other hand whether microsoft can actually deliver on the promises it makes Is going to be put to the test Uh, probably when this thing comes out, which we expect in april on the creators update so, uh, it it is an interesting time because More people whatever you think is best right now more people are open to the idea of switching platforms In the creative side. I think that's the most important thing about what you're saying right now And windows 10 is also switching and this is why this was released in australia to a different cadence so again instead of Wondering you know when you're going to get a security patch and then when you're going to have to drop a bunch of money on windows You're going to just keep getting two updates a year It sounds like because the slide they put out at ignite in australia shows windows 10 in july 2015 The update in november 2015 then the anniversary update last august Now this creators update coming up in the spring and the big news the second update coming by the end of 2017 So they're trying to say you will always have the best windows if you get windows now Yeah, and they're saying to me I mean, I mean specifically to me and creatives like me. They're saying You know, you draw a lot. You create a lot. Do you do you animate? Do you do these things? We know that that's still a thing in this ever emerging mobile world We know you still need a platform to create and build And so we want to build tools that do that That's a message that i'm getting loud and clear now now whether they it's or lip service and come this update We're like bam just kind of fizzles I'm not that impressed with the with the The surface studio that I played with at the mall kiosk It's a little laggy and some other issues, but all that aside if it's more than just lip service and they can actually You know really do this for my specific market That is a huge hand across the aisle I'm just saying I don't know what it means right and honestly folks if you're out there saying like hey Stop picking on my favorite company apple slash microsoft. This is good for us You want them to be going at each other because it means like like scott said earlier better products Absolutely, so let's see how it all turns out. I'm very excited to see how it pans out To get all the tech headlines each day in less than 10 minutes You can subscribe to our sister show daily tech headlines dot com I've got a couple emails before we are out of here emails not emails Emails are virtual moles that are good for your virtual lawn. That's not what we have for you Instead we've got emails and scott would you do me the honor of reading the first one? I surely will I live in britain and and sorry and your conversation about whatsapp left me scratching my head Both tom and rich from lovely cleveland talked about never using whatsapp and tom said something About using text messaging instead over here in the uk the only person I know who doesn't use whatsapp is american everyone else. I know uses it all the time I know there are national slash regional divides with apps like line for example But is it the same with whatsapp and is tom's unusual is tom unusual for using text messages Or is that something a large number of americans still use there's not a name here, but this person in britain Uh makes a really good point. I started using whatsapp because terpster and I Needed to keep communicating in a relatively free way and he had switched to a google pixel phone and because of that uh mark terpeter and I couldn't talk for free anymore i message so He says well i'm using whatsapp. I said oh, well, I should probably finally use that and it's fine It does totally exactly what it's supposed to do, but I do think it's a lot more texting in america than Then perhaps other parts of the world. What's your take on this? Yeah, I was just trying to find the name. It's david Sorry about leaving your name off of there david david wrote that I actually we got a response because this was posted on our blog from s tim stim Who said there may be some differences by age, but i'm around tom's age and I work in it at a university So I see a cross section It seems to me like texting is more common in the us because everyone has it With the variety of smartphone platforms and some older or tech phobic parts of the population still on dumb phones There's nothing quite as universal as texting and most plans here now allow for unlimited texting Or at least it's much cheaper than data plans can be in many cases the students I interact with seem to split time between texting snapchat and facebook messenger Somewhat dependent on the student their phone and their data plan And that pretty much sums up what I would have said in response is that I don't think on the loan Here in the us, but I also think there's an age related or at least community related aspect to it So if you are old and used to unlimited text messaging plans like me You use text messaging because you know everybody here has it in the us But if you're trying to go overseas where the text messaging plans might not be unlimited or might not be compatible or free Then you go to something else and I've used twitter direct message for similar reasons I've used whatsapp for similar reasons So yeah, I think I think it's particular to the us and it may even be A slice of the demographic of the us too. Yeah, I think you're probably right. It's funny. I find myself Using twitter dm's a lot more than I thought I was going to Turns out there's a lot of people I work with that are on twitter and they're checking those So it turns out it'd be a pretty good messaging service Slack messaging gets used a ton now by me maybe more than anything I use But even you and I one minute it might be text the next minute Yeah Slack might even be a twitter dm here and there Uh the sky message whatever like emails It's still kind of across the board and at some point that you know that consolidation is going to probably have to happen for me But right now I'm still sort of out there Finally daniel massias calindo wrote in today's episode tom made an interesting comment about making a single Processing service that can eventually use different platforms like amazon voice service siri facebook and so on I am currently working with this and proposing a similar approach at work Previously if you wanted to develop an android or an iOS app or even a windows phone app You needed a dev team for each platform with chatbots and personal assistance development is considerably reduced As you are most of the time dedicated towards implementing a single api And then formatting input and output for all the conversational interfaces you service However voice offers more challenges with respect to typing as users tend to be less forgiving when making a query by voice And not getting the expected results probably because they must make the same query many times Just to add to the conversation. I think amazon is moving away from only avs with their new service called lex Also microsoft is getting into the competition with louise called the language understanding intelligence service These platforms along with api.ai which was acquired by google last september offer intuitive environments to develop conversational assistance For different virtual assistants in some cases machine learning is offered as part of the package So the system can recognize utterances that were formulated differently And it'll be interesting to see both industry and end user communities embrace in that technology So yeah, we may get to that point where The developers just create their api it plugs into all the different services We just talk to whatever device we're talking to and we get to them on the other end kind of into that idea I like this fact. It's reminding me of the blockchain conversation of another open standard basically that Everywhere in all places at once for everybody who needs it. I like it big. Thanks again to john wolpert of IBM the blockchain offerings director for talking with us today And we'll have links to a lot of the stuff that we talked about with him in our show notes at daily tech news show Dot com and thanks to you scott johnson What's going on in your world? Oh, there's always so many dumb things going on in my life But if you want to follow, uh, I don't I never talk about the web comic on here So I'll do it here I always have some interesting ideas to talk about the through visual mediums And if you want to see what I'm drawing on ipad pros or waycom tablets or wherever I might be drawing it Even sometimes a piece of paper You can check out my comic. It's now nearly 15 years old and it's my extra life dot com Do check it out if you get a second Thanks to everyone who supports the show including jared gibbs Dennis thomas and david loveless And big thanks to stone harrowman and ron rhyman who just raised their pledges at patreon.com Slash dtns. We could not do it without you keep the support coming We love it and we love giving you extra stuff there. So check it out patreon.com slash dtns Our email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com We're live monday through friday 4 30 p.m eastern at alpha geek radio dot com and diamond club dot tv And of course our website is daily tech news show dot com back tomorrow with justin robber young talk to you then It's part of the frog pants network Get more at frog pants dot com Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program Boom that's a show What should we call it I was actually looking at one of those off brand chinese tablets on amazon the hui on Yeah, you were looking at I think the the what You were looking at what off brand drawing tablets. Oh, okay The one the one I was looking at today was the mono price one, which I didn't know more Don't go with the mono price one. I've heard I've heard mixed reviews on the on the reliability. It's so cheap Um, should definitely check out the amazon one. Sorry everyone Because I mean the only thing that I found really sticking out is that most of the chinese ones require batteries in the pen Whereas the white white com uses a induction to power the pen But other than that a lot of people like them Like but you know then again, I don't know what their professional state Yeah, I need that's the thing i'm trying to find out from some of the reviews I'd be happy to like even test one, but I don't know which one to go for Been thinking a lot about that check youtube There's a there's a couple of british artists who tested some of them out, but that was like four years ago So I don't know if it's still applicable Top is black blockchain in a nutshell top of our titles You mean top of our titles top of the titles like top of the pops Yeah, this will go down on your permanent blockchain. That's my favorite right at the moment. It's a good one That's a good one. Nothing is written in blockchain Nobody puts google in a frame Alice in slash block chains Making tom's blockchain onion. This will really make your onion is now one of my new favorite phrases, by the way But like what does that mean? It doesn't matter Yes It's like saying an elephant can ride a unicycle. Yes Yeah, I also love that one Uh, put the blocked. Oh put the block of the chain wax. That's a reference to uh key and peel a skit Ah, nice tackling blocks and chains The sound of the Apple park parc I play research park. Yeah clever John wool part internet blockchain man. Okay. It's a superpower Uh chain chain chains Alice in black chains half the calories still taste great. I don't remember that one It's maybe I'm missing it. Oh, is I don't remember that one one of the title suggestions or oh, no I don't remember that one. I don't know the reference to half the calories still. Oh, uh skype light Oh, okay, because I made a crystal light reference Uh, all I remember from crystal light is the uh dance aerobics things that show up on youtube. Oh, yeah um I like uh, I like this will go down down on your permanent blockchain. Yeah Can you imagine if that is like, you know, so like, you know, if you're if you're a religious person You you there is a cosmic scoreboard of of of one variety or another that keeps A list of all the crap you've done and all the good stuff you've done through your life I mean, this could this could be essentially like a non bureaucratic version Of that for your financial dealings That's the new the new uh story is that when you get to the pearly gates, they look at your blockchain Yeah To evaluate your life What was it? What were the two ghosts? Uh in the christmas carol the first one. No, no, there's three No, not the christmas past present and future. No, no, no the mortally. Oh marley. Marley. Yeah He was he was wrapped up in chains of his own He was wrapped up in blockchain. See we're already modernizing a christmas carol. Perfect. Perfect All right. I'm i'm exporting now Pretty sure i'm gonna go with this will go on your permanent blockchain I like that one a lot Let's see if I could find one of those uh reviews for you scouts The who young is the brand? Yeah h u i i go ahead Yeah, i've been looking at them too. The problem is they're they don't have anything bigger than 19 inch I want something like 22. Oh you want to yeah, I haven't seen I Drawed jazza jazza three months. Oh, he's the official video sponsor of who we on Oh, really? How big how big is this thing? What i'm looking at is the gt 185 that one Sounds of two men shopping for tablets I mean the biggest thing oh the action of the price of like equivalent Waycons, but they also might be a fraction of the quality. I don't know Yeah, that's the that's the Oh I don't know here. I'll send you something. I've never seen this before this could be what sure Yeah, just throw in slack There's just just the video spokesperson You know, I wish they would do You wish they would do what? Oh, I wish they would do for tech like they do for as seen on tv products where you just kind of have a really slick sales pitch guy Like oh you need this Google crow that's the past That's for grandma's You want the billy maze of Yeah That would be great billy maze. I used to think he was someone important outside of that like billy maze was He was important in getting you deals No, but I thought he was like so this is my thing my my my hope like you should have known him from something else Yeah, exactly. I thought maybe he oh, he might have been uh, that's the power of suggestion, right? They just made it seem like he was so important Of course, you all know billy maze billy maze sounds like like an athlete like I used to play for like, you know, uh, what's the what's the Like really maze. Yeah, it's it's another name for willy maze. Oh, right. Yeah Like, you know, you knock out the fat I could see that What did billy maze do? before Billy maze here He was a spokesperson He he was rocking the beard before the beard was cool too. Oh, yeah That that beard is still On the hunt man. That thing's everywhere. He was born in mckays rocks, pennsylvania raised in pittsburgh He was a walk-on linebacker on the west virginia university football town. Oh, that's right That's yeah, totally where you know Uh worked for his father's hazardous waste company Before moving to atlantic city in 1983 where he sold the wash matik portable washing device to passersby Along with other as seen on tv products wash matik I love that the way you could just put matik on anything in atlantic city. He was taught by older salesman to pitch Guy started traveling to home shows auto shows state fairs Uh At the pittsburgh home show in 93. He struck up a friendship with rival salesman max apple founder of orange glow Wow, uh, and then began promoting oxy clean orange glow and kaboom on the home shopping network You know what that sounds like a perfect treatment for a perfect american story This guy wasn't too happy with the uh this tablet or that the screen tablet after three weeks It's like my simple review. I'm really disappointed so Yeah, it's uh You know that that's part of the thing is it's so seductive. It's like, whoa, it's so cheap How could they do it and now you figure why? They did it by by uh eliminating the magic. It can't be possible But it is it's like a pocket fisherman. I used to think about that's like, yeah, that's kind of cool But then I was thinking like Exactly how strong would that be and it's not like you're gonna be doing anything larger than like a trout at most It's not a small man A trout is not a small man. No the pocket fisherman Yeah, haven't you seen that? From ronko. I own one of those. I had two of them. My brother and I had them Did you get any fish or was it just a gift? No, it worked. We can't see anything in lake pal. Yeah Nice. I mean, I don't know if it was great But for a kid, it's pretty cool. Yeah, we were like eight or nine. It was great. Oh, yeah, we got fish Catch bass off that back of the boat you go to the grocery store and they just jump right out of the refrigerator we bought a fish one time for the For the super not for the super from a chinese supermarket Before there were chain chinese supermarkets like ranch 99 And we brought it home. We took it out and started flopping around like flop flop flop flop flop. That's fresh. It's fresh That fish enjoyed a good warm bubbly bath filled with scallions assorted vegetables It seems all right Do That's pasted in I am uploading mo. I'm glad you got my email joke. I'm glad someone did. I appreciate that Joke may be a strong word. Thank you. Oh goodness It seems like the upload is the longest part of the day Is it? That's how I feel I get the show done like this morning and it's just oh, there's this part A watched upload never loads. Nope. I'm glad I'm not the only one All right, uh, thanks everybody for joining us I know we had a shorter pre-show today Because we were trying to get everything ready for mr. Wolpert, but I think it paid off Thanks again to him for joining us and we will see you all tomorrow Oh, goodbye. Bye. Bye