 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to every single one of you, including Adam Green, Dustin Campbell, Tim Deputy, and Douglas Dornberg. On this episode of DTNS, it's Folda Palooza. Shannon Morse and Android faithful Swen Thway Dao are here and will all compare our experiences with the Pixel Fold. Plus, Microsoft just gave its cloud gaming rights to Ubisoft, right? Yes, they did. Yeah, they did. Weird. We'll explain. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, August 22nd, 2023 at Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Sarah Lane, I'm Sarah Lane. From Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morse. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And also joining us from Colorado, Swen Thway Dao, Android developer and host of Android Faithful. Welcome. Hey, DTNS crew. Hi, neighbor. Hi, neighbor. We just found out, Shannon, I just found out we're neighbors, sort of. Yeah. They're roommates. They had no idea. We got to talk about the toilet paper situation, Shannon. I mean, we got to have a meeting after the show. After the show. Take care of it. No problem. All right. We have some good stuff on the show today. So let's start right here with the Quick Hits. At last, ARM filed for its expected IPO on Monday. I'm not going to do that anymore. The chip designer owned by SoftBank seeks a U.S. NASDAQ listing looking to trade under the ticker symbol ARM. That would be appropriate. After SoftBank's deal to sell ARM to NVIDIA fell through, SoftBank took ARM private back in 2016. So this is a long time coming. Indeed. NVIDIA announced that DLSS 3.5 will arrive in the next few months and work for all RTX generation NVIDIA GPUs. It'll replace the denoisers in the graphics pipeline with machine generated ray reconstructions. But the part you're really going to care about if you don't understand that is NVIDIA says it's going to improve performance and image fidelity. The Verge notes one of the first appearances of DLSS 3.5 will be in Cyberpunk 2077, which gets support with the release of the Phantom Liberty DLC on September 26th. It'll also be available in some editing apps like Chaos Advantage, D5 Render, and NVIDIA Omniverse to help improve render previews. Next on the docket AMD's Fidelity FX Super Resolution 3, aka FSR3, and everybody thinks we might hear something about that at Gamescom later this week. Attention Excel users. Microsoft is bringing the popular programming language Python to your spreadsheets. A public preview of the feature is available today, letting Excel users manipulate and analyze data with Python. Stefan Kinnisgrond, general manager of modern work at Microsoft, says you can manipulate and explore data in Excel using Python plots and libraries and then use Excel's formulas, charts, and pivot tables to further refine your insights. Meta announced a large language model called SeamlessM4t that it says can translate and transcribe between 100 languages, well almost 100 languages, just about 100 languages in both text and speech, so speech to text, text to text, etc. Meta released SeamlessM4t under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial International License and it also released the metadata of its Seamless Align Translation Dataset. Meta also announced it will indeed launch a full web app for threads rolling it out over the next few days. Thread spokesperson Christine Pie tells The Verge that you'll be able to post, interact with other posts, and look at your feed however you won't get all the features available in the mobile app. Limitations include not being able to edit your profile or send a post to Instagram DMs from the web version, but web app functionality might boost engagement for those of us sitting behind a computer like I am right now to use threads more often, but not during DNS because I have to, I don't know, not do that. Also from Meta, Facebook, and Instagram users in Europe will get the option to switch off personalized feeds before the digital service acts August 25th deadline for compliance. So this will be the last day I text myself what I want to write on threads so that I can. You can still do that Tom, you just now have more. I guess I could, you're right. No, that's a good point. All right, let's talk a little bit about this Microsoft craziness. Let's do it. Okay, so back on July 19th, you might recall that the UK paused its investigation to have talks with Microsoft about restructuring its deal to acquire Activision Blizzard. Now we know what came out of these talks or at least what has been shaken out of these talks. So Tom, let's walk through it. Yeah, so to address the UK competition and markets authorities concerns about cloud gaming, Microsoft has agreed should the whole thing happen to transfer cloud gaming rights to Ubisoft, the French company Ubisoft totally not part of this otherwise in perpetuity, mind you for all current Activision Blizzard games and any games released by Activision Blizzard over the next 15 years. So everything in the pipeline now and then anything that's released over the next 15 years, Ubisoft will have the cloud streaming rights. Ubisoft will pay Microsoft with the rights through a one off payment and a market based wholesale pricing mechanism. So they'll basically decide at once there might be per usage fees in there or something, but they're they're not going to keep adjusting it over time. Microsoft would then have to license cloud gaming rights back from Ubisoft for any games it wants to include in Xbox cloud gaming. Ubisoft has already announced that when this happens, should it happen, it will bring those titles to its own cloud gaming service to Ubisoft Plus, which is available on a lot of other cloud platforms like Amazon's Luna, for example. Microsoft must also adapt games to run on non windows platforms for cloud streaming purposes because some cloud streamers don't use Windows to stream their games. But that might have a downstream effect if they have to make a game portable to some other operating system. Different rules, however, will apply in the EU. This applies to everywhere outside the EU. In the EU, Microsoft already has a deal in exchange for an agreement to let users in the EU stream all current and future Activision Blizzard games through any cloud game streaming service of their choice. So there's a broader deal already in the EU. It was going to be worldwide, but then they changed it for the UK CMA. So the rest of the world doesn't get that deal. Only the EU gets that part of the deal. The UK has given itself a new deadline to investigate this new agreement of October 18th, which is also the new drop dead deadline for this merger to happen. Remember, they created a new penalty system with Activision Blizzard to give them a little more time. That was October 18th. The UK has until October 18th to approve this. And then on a side note, Microsoft also announced today that PC Game Pass is coming to Nvidia GeForce now starting August 24th, which is one of the things that it promised to do in order to prove it was going to be a good citizen as it put all this together. But kind of convoluted, Sarah, to do all this, but an innovative approach, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, when I first, you know, woke up and saw this news, I was like, oh gosh, you know, the whole cloud gaming thing had been a, this is a point of contention with, you know, with the UK CMA. But a lot of people were saying, but I mean, is it really a point of contention right now? No. But perhaps in five, 10, however many years it could be. So, you know, and again, as, you know, as I looked through it, I was like, okay, it's not that Microsoft, you know, can't, you know, do anything with Activision Blizzard games in the cloud. It just can't be exclusive. And that makes perfect sense. And hey, you know, the UK is, what, the better part of two months to sit and think about this. I think this is probably going to be a deal that goes through. It feels like Microsoft wouldn't have come out with this from talks with the CMA if there wasn't a likelihood that the CMA was going to approve. But the CMA was quick to say, we haven't green lighted this. We are beginning the new investigation of this right now. So they're, they're dotting their eyes and crossing their T's. I don't know, Shannon, what do you think? Well, one of the reasons I haven't really gotten into cloud gaming so much myself is because I, I hate getting stuck in like one specific service or one specific platform or computer or operating system in order to be able to play said game. I like being able to use whatever is in front of me at the time, whatever console or whatever handheld. So it sounds like this will make it easier for consumers to be able to play Activision Blizzard games on whatever platform they prefer, right? That's kind of the gist that I'm getting. Certainly the idea that the folks who wanted to block this merger said, well, hold on a second, you know, this whole cloud gaming thing, you know, if Microsoft has it all under their control, too much, you know, this is a competition problem. So yeah, exactly what you're describing, Shannon, is what, what that's, that's the end goal, at least in writing. It was going to be that way anyway with the CU part of the deal. It's just that the UK said, we don't, almost, almost said we don't trust you and said, we don't want Microsoft to be in charge of that, even if they're promising. We want it to be in another company's control. So they, they decided to just hand that over to Ubisoft. I'm very curious, curious about the backstory of how that came about, too. And how does it feel? Grumble, grumble. Just grumble. Yeah, they're, they're over there like fine, I guess they're just I guess they acquiesced. We'll live with it. Yeah. That's so, that's so neat. This is what they sound like. Yeah. All right. Now to Sarah with weather. Yeah, truly, truly IBM announced that it will sell its weather business, the weather company, to private equity firm Francisco partners, which is at least said it will operate as a standalone company slash app. In a joint statement, both companies within the site, they'll said that the weather company wants to move beyond just forecasting the weather and offer new tools for health and well-being because the weather is often a part of all of that. Now, if you're saying, hold on a second, the weather company, the weather channel, what are we talking about here? Little history. IBM acquired the apps and websites of the weather channel and weather underground back in 2016. In fact, the deal was announced in 2015, went, went through in early 2016. The weather company is a weather forecasting and IT company that owns and operates weather.com, which is the website for the weather channel, but not the TV channel itself and also weather underground. The weather company, so that's sort of the overall umbrella of all of this, has been a subsidiary of the Watson and cloud platform business unit of IBM since 2016, since IBM acquired it. Prior to IBM though, the weather company was owned by a consortium, including Blackstone Group, Vayne Capital, NBC Universal, so the first two private equity companies. That consortium still owned the weather channel cable network until March of 2018, when it was sold to Byron Allen's entertainment studios. So completely different deal, but understandably a little confusing to a lot of folks. Yeah, especially because they use the same logo. So the weather channel TV network licenses the logo and the right to point to the weather channel website from IBM. I guess they'll continue to license that from Francisco partners, but the TV channel is still separate. Francisco partners is interesting as a holding company. They own LastPass, MyFitnessPal. They have investments in LegalZoom, and Grass Valley, and Eventbrite, and even Corsair. Good Rx, pharmaceuticals. I was not aware of this. I've heard of Francisco partners, but there are a lot of PE companies, as you might see written down sometimes, that do a lot more behind the scenes than some of us realize. I use the weather channel app. In fact, I used it quite a bit this weekend when we had a tropical storm coming through. And I found it to be one of the more reliable ones with the data. It's interesting to see IBM back out of it. IBM's really just trying to focus. So they still want to use the weather channel data. So they're still going to have an agreement with Francisco about that part of it, but they're just not going to operate the website anymore. So I suppose the data, as long as the data stays strong, it'll remain my favorite. I'm actually curious, what weather app do you use? I used to use strictly the Google Weather app, but a good friend of mine Dan Kim and some compatriots created their own app called Hello Weather. So you got to use what your friends are doing. Yeah, yeah, that's good. Now I want to use it too. Nice. I love it. Shannon, you use the weather channel too, right? Yeah, I use weather channel and I started using the widget that Google integrates into their Pixel phones just because they have all the information that I need right there at my fingertips. So it makes it very easy and it has all the information. And if there's anything additional that I need, I can just click into it and it opens up weather.com. Yeah, 85 degrees. I was right there on my home screen. Sarah, which one are you using? Well, you know, for a long time I used BlackSky and that was when BlackSky was independent before Apple bought BlackSky and then it turned into something that it got spun out into something else. So right now, with the technology that Apple is using natively just because my Apple Watch talks to the iPhone and you know, I'm in the ecosystem, the weather system as it were. So that's kind of what I use every so often if I feel like, you know, for example, this has happened because the weather has been weird where I am lately where it's like overcast but not raining but it might rain. You know, I look at my weather app, which is the Apple's native weather app and it'll be like light sprinkles and it's not, not sprinkling. And I wonder, I don't know where you think it's raining. And so I'll check another couple. You know, I'll go back to BlackSky or, you know, just do some searches. But for the most part, I feel like this stuff is pretty accurate these days. You got your Doppler radar, you kind of know what's up. Well, folks, let us know what you use. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Also, if you haven't checked out Tom's Top 5 lately, we've got a whole bunch of them now for you to watch. They're all bite-sized just a few minutes long. The most recent one went up on Friday about the Top 5 operating systems that failed. This is a tribute to these beloved operating systems that tried, they tried so hard. Some of them I really rooted for too. If you want to know what they are, watch the video, youtube.com slash DailyTechNewShow. All right, folks, Pixel Fold has been out for just about 51 days now. So we have convened three different types of users to assess what we think of Google's attempt to challenge Samsung as the foldable leader. Each of us are going to talk about what we use the Fold 4 and a little bit about some of the things that we have noticed. When let's start with you. Oh, you're on mute. Sorry. There we go. That happens. Sorry, guys. Yeah, so I've been using the Pixel Fold since I got it. I ordered it at Google I.O. because I was incredibly excited. And yeah, it's kind of amazing. This has pretty much been my main computing device. It's been with me everywhere. And what I think is super fascinating is that I was a Z Fold 3 and Z Fold 4 superfan until I met this device. And I was very much alert by this very usable front screen. I mean, obviously the Z Fold 4 and 3 have a lot of polish, but that front screen I really found unusable. And it's so cool that with the last 51 days, I'm finding myself using the front screen a lot more. I kind of expected to always be using the inner screen. But now having an actual front screen that you can type on is super valuable. And also, I think what's really cool about this, and this might get into my dev rain a little bit, is that the inner screen is actually landscape. The Z Fold 3 and Z Fold 4 is actually more square. I think it's like 6x5. But I think what happens is that the inner screen becomes very tablet-like. And kind of in the traditional sense, we think of like folks using like an iPad or an S-Tab or something where you kind of have it in landscape mode, you watch a media, whatever. The fact that the inner screen is this landscape mode makes me feel like I am in fact carrying a tablet. So I open it up. I watch my YouTube videos. I watch DTNS. And it's all super comfortable. And from a dev perspective, I think it's really valuable because a lot of us have been ignoring large screens for a long time. But the fact that number one with foldable is being increasingly popular, and the fact that you have a single device that has both portrait and landscape, we have to pretty much confront whether we need to make an extra effort on both of these aspect ratios or be okay with letterboxing, which is really apparent in landscape mode. So as a dev, I love that. And also, it's going to be important because Google Play Store is starting to take large screen compatibility, adaptability, conformity into account with ranking. So I'm all for this, but mostly just to get all of us devs in line. And then finally, I love the specialized software. And I think that's something that has been really awesome. I think the thing that I show off most about this is the rear camera selfie, which is, I think, just part of showcasing what not just large screens, but this very weird folding device with multiple screens can show. And I think it's something that attracts normal people, normal people. I love showing it off to especially my iPhone using friends. And I've learned from a friend of mine that worked on the Pixel Fold that it will be a third-party API that is a third-party available API. So all of us can start doing cool, shipping things. Yeah, yeah. I think it's a little experimental, but I mean, especially with the drive foldables, I'm really hoping that this, both this device, the fact that Google is doing it because for devs is important that Google does it first, and the fact that they are providing APIs for us to do cool stuff is super important. So yeah, sorry, that's a bit devy, but... No, no, that's great. I love the dev perspective. That's why we wanted to have different perspectives here. Shannon, do you have like a hacky perspective? How are you? Not really. Like everything I've been doing recently has been about making my workload as a content creator less, so that I'm not as stressed out. And one of the reasons why I use my Pixel Fold every day is because I can do like multitasking on here. And to compare, like Gwen said, about using the Fold 5 and the Samsung Z Folds, this one, I love the landscape mode because it looks so much easier to use and it is so much easier to use whenever you're doing multitasking because you do have those nice big frames on both sides. So it's easier to read and it's easier to actually like type on the screen. And when you flip it the other way, you still have a really nice landscape. So you have that landscape up and down. So I'm able to do a lot of stuff where I'm like checking email on one side and adding things to my workload schedule on the other side. And it just makes life a lot easier and it's just very compatible with like being a content creator. And not just that though, since I'm using this interior screen so much, I also noticed that the the inner display camera on the Folds, it's built under the display. So it kind of looks like a potato. I like to say that it's a potato and we need to stop building potatoes into phones because they should be in stews and boiled and mashed and not in phones because it just it looks like crap. Like it's 2023 and I hate that they put that camera in there. It drives me nuts as a content creator. When I'm doing something like I'm on Google Meet and I'm talking to my niece and my sister and my brother and we're doing like a group call. It's so much easier to use this inner camera because I can see everybody so nicely on this larger display as opposed to the outer display. Like, yeah, I could use the outer display and get that nice selfie camera. But this one is such a big screen and I want to be able to see them better. And I like having that larger display. So having an actual decent camera on the inside is huge for me, not just to take selfies, but to also talk to people all the time. And last thing has nothing to do with content creation, but I straight up went to the Renaissance Fair and I opened this and I threw it down on the ground in dirt and gravel and everything and it landed face down with the folding screen on the dirt and the gravel. I know I terrified everybody mad. Was this an accident? No, this was this was a I really hope it doesn't break, but I'm going to do this because I'm testing it. I was reviewing it. I wanted to see if it would actually be durable because so many people were saying that it's not durable. And I was like, well, I'm going to test this because I want to do it like my own real life test. And if I'm taking this out, eventually it will fall upside down into dirt and gravel and it's fine. It's totally fine. I wipe the thing off. I don't hear any gravel in the hinge. The hinge is really, really nice. So I would say that this is a very durable phone. I mean, yeah, treat it nice because it's a piece of tech. Don't bend it backwards. Like, don't do those things to your pieces of tech, but overall it's a it's a great device. I'm really happy with it. All right, I'll finish up. I should point out that this is my second phone. I have an iPhone as well that I run. So I'm not using it all the time, but I generally have two phones going at once. And I will say folding has become normal. I don't think of it as a cool thing anymore. It's just a thing that a phone should do. And I sometimes look at my iPhone as the small phone, even though it's a pro, even though it's a pro max, because I can't unfold it. It's just got the one screen. So it's been amazing to me how quickly this just became a thing that is a function that I want and need and don't think of as weird. The fingerprint sensor is a little awkward in some orientations. It's a minor downside, but like if you have the hinge horizontal and then it locks and you're holding it to the sides, you have to kind of either turn it again or kind of weirdly put your fingerprint down there. So if you're using the fingerprint sensor, that's kind of a minor inconvenience. That's kind of the worst I could come up with, honestly. I'm very glad that it passed the Renfair dirt test because I still don't have a case for mine yet. And I'm definitely afraid that it's going to cause me pain at some point. So I'm going to have to get a case, but I haven't needed it. I've been going for 50 days with it and it's been fine. So far, so good. Well, we're going to talk a little bit more in good day internet about our foldable experiences. So patrons stick around for that. But before we get to the end of daily tech news show, Sarah has got a hot new car to tell us about. I do. I do. If you've got the coin, you might be interested in Lamborghini's new Lanzador. It's an all-electric departure from the two-seated sporty profile that the luxury brand is pretty much known for. Now, the Lanzador is different. It has floor-mounted battery packs, two of them, to power the cars to electric motors, which offer a peak output of over one megawatt. Now, when someone told me that, I said, is that a lot? And they said, yeah, it's equivalent to like 1300 horsepower. And I said, is that a lot? And they said, yes. Imagine 1300 horses. That's all pulling you at once. Very powerful. If you ask how fast it can go, Lamborghini's kind of mom on details like range, battery, charging capacity, acceleration speeds, all things that someone would want to know before they got into a car like this. But the company already has a more utilitarian SUV called the Urus. So if you're looking for that in the Lamborghini line, you might be familiar with that already. The Lanzador seems to be sort of a hybrid of that supercar and the soccer family fun boat of sorts. The company also says the design was inspired by a spaceship. So if it looks like a spaceship, well, they did their job. Yeah, it's got lots of glowy red lights. They haven't said exactly what all of them are. I feel like modern cars all look like spaceships. They kind of do, yeah. You know, at least the interior. But yeah, a friend of mine who is a bit of a car nut, you know, I was like, you know, it's 1341 horsepower or the equivalent. And he was like, that's ludicrous. That's insane. And I'm using terms that Tesla has already adopted. So, you know, it's like, we've all used all the terms. I was like, well, like how crazy is it? And he's like, my car is really fast. And it's about half of that horsepower. Like it's like insanely fast speeds that, you know, when you're talking about, you know, from zero to 60 type stuff, you know, the pick. I have a feeling my Honda Civic is not any more close to that. So, you know, my Volvo is, it's a comfy, but not a punchy ride. Don't think we have 1,300 horses in that car. Indeed. Well, if anyone picks one up, let us know. Because it won't be any of us. All right, let's check out the mailbag. This one comes from somebody who did not want to be named, but said in response to our conversation yesterday with Justin Robert Young about election workers and their experience with voting errors, this person works with voting machines on elections in the state of Georgia in the US. They said, we ask every voter if they've reviewed their ballot before scanning. As for what Justin said, it is correct. One vote isn't going to catch attention. But if we noticed a lot of people with the wrong person on the ballot, based on what they told us beforehand, it would raise some alarms. Surprisingly, we've had very few people who accidentally choose the wrong candidate. This is part of our training and our county is aware of voter awareness of hacking as well. We thank you for sharing that experience because that answers a bunch of questions we had, especially if you're a patron and you listened to the end of Good Day Internet yesterday. We were talking a lot about, like, here are the things we want to know. We want to know, do people look at their ballot? Are they told to look at their ballot? What happens? How many people does it take before they start to get suspicious? And this person, very bravely, I think, helped us to understand that. So thank you, person, for sending that to us. Indeed. We always love your feedback, whether it's something that we've talked about in a previous show or might talk about on a future show. Do send our feedback our way. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Wentway Dao and Shannon Morris, thank you so much for being with us today. When we'll start with you, where can folks find you when you're not with us? Well, actually, today you can find me right here in a few hours. I do host the Android Facebook podcast, which is recorded live every Tuesday, 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern. And if you are an OG, OG fan of Ron and Mai's previous podcast all about Android, you want to tune in tonight. Tune in tonight. We got something special. I'm going to say no more. Let's tune in. Well, that is what we call a plug, a tease, a promo. But don't miss it. Well, we're glad to have you on the show with us, bringing the knowledge, especially about foldables today. YouTube, Shannon Morris, let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morris, just like my name is spelled. I recently did a couple of tutorials about Google products. I did one on Google Meet, if you've never used it before, and also one about RCS versus iMessage and the kind of privacy implications since those two don't really talk to each other. So definitely check that out if you're interested in privacy and text messaging. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We're going to continue to compare notes on foldables and speculate a little on when and how Apple might get into the foldable game. Just a reminder, we do the show live Monday through Friday, and you can catch it live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 200 UTC, and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com.