 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Scott Hepburn, Bjorn Andre, and Jeff Wilkes. Coming up on DTNS, the U.S. CHIPS Act restricts what companies can do in China. Samsung and iFixit launched their repair program, and the Open Risk 5 chip instruction set might be bad news for ARM. John C. Dvorak is here to tell us why. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, August 2nd, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And we welcome technology and sub-stack columnist, co-host of No Agenda Show and D.H. Unplugged. Mr. John C. Dvorak, welcome back. Hello. Good to see you, Tom. You look good. Oh, thanks. You too. You know, your background there. You got a lot of junk. You maybe should clean out the place. You know, people keep telling me that, but I like it. You know, I can spot you have the Oxford English Dictionary Compact Edition, which comes with a magnifying glass. And I need that at my advanced age. Well, if we need it, though, I could pull it out at any time. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Uber turned a corner at seemingly just the right time, reporting positive free cash flow last quarter. That means it can fund itself and not worry about running out of cash. Free cash flow rates into account operating and capital expenses, but not non-cash things like share-based compensation and changes in the value of Uber's investments. They have some investments in Zomato, Aurora, Grace, et cetera. Once you take all that into account, given the state of the stock market, Uber lost a dollar 33 cents a share, but it's gross bookings. The actual business that it conducts on its platform, like rides and subscriptions and deliveries, that all rose 33% on the year. So the actual business itself isn't doing bad. That was led by ride-hailing, which rose 120% on the year, while food delivery slowed to 7% growth, though food delivery still brings in the most money for Uber. Logitech announced a partnership with Tencent Games to launch a dedicated cloud gaming handheld later this year. The device will support Xbox cloud gaming and NVIDIA's GeForce Now game streaming service, no word on price or specific release date. Wi-Fi 7, which you can put in your brain as 802.11 BE, could start showing up in laptops within two years. Intel's vice president of wireless solutions, Eric McLaughlin, told a conference in Asia, quote, we are currently developing Intel's Wi-Fi 802.11 BE in order to obtain the Wi-Fi Alliance certification, and it will be installed in PC products such as laptops by 2024. We expect it to appear in major markets in 2025. If you're wondering, Wi-Fi 7 is going to double your bandwidth, double your speed over Wi-Fi 6, and promises to improve stability in the 6 gigahertz spectrum. Insta360 announced a new 4K webcam with a three axis gimbal, the Insta360 link. It uses a half inch sensor and physically pans and zooms the camera to keep a user's face in frame. Also supports gesture control for zooming, offers a desk view mode to point the camera down for overhead content, and it can go into portrait mode for vertical video and you can get it for 300 bucks. Finally, Xiaomi announced the Mijia glasses camera, a pair of smart glasses with a single Google Glass style micro OLED display on the right eye and two cameras, a 50 megapixel main shooter and an eight megapixel periscope zoom. Xiaomi says the display can be used for real time translation and AR effects, something Google Glass doesn't do. Other features will be added in future updates. The Mijia glasses use a Qualcomm snap dragon chipset with three gigabytes of RAM pre-orders start August 3rd for $2,499 yuan. That's about $370 US. All right, John, let's talk about Samsung's repair program. Have you heard much about this? Yeah, something that I mean, ever since the days of Word Star when licensing came around, these guys, all these companies think that they own their products, you know, even when you have them because you're just licensing the product, when in fact, you bought it and you should be able to fix it and that you have to have legislation so you can now fix it. This is a part of that fix it legislation. Yeah, this is a response to that. Samsung announced this program back in March. It's fairly limited. If you own a Galaxy S20 and S21, a Tab S7 Plus, you can buy official Samsung replacement parts and access guides on how to how to do certain types of repairs. So your phone may not be on that list, for instance, the S22. The flagship is not on there. Yeah. Samsung plans to add more parts and support more repairs going forward. No word on when or if that will happen. One of the things you can't do is just replace the battery. You have to replace the entire display if you want to get a battery. But for now, what you will get are parts, tools and guides to fix your screen, like I just said, back glass and your charging port. Well, the screen is the big deal because people break the screen. The next thing you know, they had to buy a whole new phone. The battery thing, I mean, the phone makers could have the early I have a Galaxy, an old one, like the original. I think the one and the back comes right off. It snaps right off and put the battery, put new battery in. But they seal those batteries in. There is another way of getting people to buy more cameras. Yeah, I'm trying more phones. Cameras is what they use them for. It gives you it gives it's easier from to do water tight and dust tight. And it's easier for them to make you buy a new phone. So it's yeah, I guess if you do drop in the toilet, like people do. Got it made. If you want to get any of these parts, you can get them through iFixit or you can go to Samsung service locations, retail locations. Samsung is also providing a return label. If you do the display replacement, so you can send back your old display for recycling. And as I mentioned, that display assembly does include a battery. So even if your display is fine, if you're really in a pinch, you could plop down for a whole display assembly and at least get a new battery. Samsung says the prices are the same that repair shops pay. So for example, for an S20 display assembly is 200 bucks, back glasses, 70 bucks, charging port is 60 bucks. And this is an iFixit's first partnership. In fact, they have partnered with Google and Valve on repair programs as well. And Apple has its own. They haven't partnered with anybody because they're Apple, but they have their own DIY repair program where you can order parts for them. It is becoming the norm, though, for these big companies to at least do this much. I congratulate them. Yes, Pat, that themselves on the back. Roger, I know you you're interested in this, particularly for your own phones. I think it's a good sign that, you know, I don't I don't see this as being a big, a big thing for for the larger consumer population. But it is a good sign to recognize that there are people, or at least customers, who do want to go through the the hassle of, you know, fixing it themselves. And it's at least a nod that it is something important. I mean, realistically, I mean, most of these phones are still, I mean, just especially the way they're constructed. This is probably something that's probably going to be attempted by probably by less than 10 percent of users. But, you know, it's still a good step. Ideally, I would I would like a device that's consciously designed in a way that allows it to be separated into pieces and put back together with with the with the the mini the minimum amount of lute swearing as you jab your thumb with the jeweler screwdriver again. But no, it's a it's a good step. You know, it's best for is I fix it. I fix it doesn't lose it all here. They get direct supply of parts. They can also still sell third party parts so that you can actually repair more things on a Samsung phone through iFix that then you can through this official repair program because iFix it's also like, well, if you want to repair a battery, we can sell you some of those. They don't have it for the S 22 yet. Not sure why, but there's other ways of doing it with iFix it. And then they get to offer this like, well, if you really want like certified parts from the manufacturer, you can get that through us now, too. And let no one under be any disillusioned. This isn't a product of some sort of forward, you know, egalitarian thinking. It's probably like, hey, we want to stave off potential, even more potential legislation that really puts us on. No, it was altruistic, Roger, the looming thread of legislation had had I'm sure had zero effect. That'll be the day. Speaking of legislation, let's talk about US President Biden expecting to sign the Chips and Science Act of 2022. May have signed it by the time you listen to this. We covered the details of the act itself on Friday. The short version, if you missed that, is it's going to authorize the United States government to spend 280 billion dollars on research and development over the next five years, 39 billion of that is going to go directly to subsidize semiconductor manufacturing. 11 billion goes to chip plants, research and workforce training and another 2 billion for making older chips used in automotive and military applications. It's not a ton of money going to semiconductor manufacturing in the grand scheme of things, but the chip companies are excited by it. Nonetheless, TSMC is committed to spend 12 billion on plants in Arizona. Samsung said it's going to spend 17 billion in Texas. SK Heinecks announced 15 billion dollars coming to the US and investment. Although they haven't given any plans on where Intel and Micron to US companies also planning to take advantage of the subsidies. But there are strings attached. Both Bloomberg and Nikkei Asia noticed a clause in the final version that passed the House that says that a company that accepts a subsidy agrees not to make a significant transaction that would materially expand its semiconductor manufacturing capacity in the People's Republic of China called out specifically or any other foreign country of concern for the next 10 years. China is already on that list of countries of concern alongside Russia, North Korea and Iran. Companies would be allowed an exception to protect existing business interests or expansions that serve that country of concerns market for legacy semiconductors. So if you're making and that's defined as 28 nanometer process semiconductors or older, you can spend some money expanding your plant there, especially if you're making chips for the Chinese market. But not anything newer. Most of these companies don't make anything newer in China. TSMC makes a 16 nanometer process in Nanjing, but most of the potential subsidy recipients wouldn't be affected. So John, there's a race on China says it aims to source 70 percent of its chips from its own domestic companies by 2025. Bloomberg estimates the China's premier chip company, SMC, though, is about six years behind TSMC and advanced chip making equipment from companies like ASML and the Netherlands are being restricted by US export rules. So it might be tough for China to catch up. Well, you know, they steal stuff better than anybody else. I don't know how tough it's going to be. They've caught up to everything else. This, by the way, I think the word that you read in there about the money going to China, you do. I think they dropped in the word significant. And I think is that defined in the bill? I don't think so. I read not to make a significant transaction. Yeah, it's significant for the semiconductor industry is in the billions. I mean, it's a significant would be half the bill. I don't know what what they're trying to do here. But a lot of the R&D money, I don't know. You know, a lot of that's going to green stuff. And I just don't feel sorry for the semiconductor industry. I mean, Intel generally just itself and it's not even the first, second, third, fourth, I think it's like the fifth or sixth biggest chip company now with TSMC being number one and surprisingly Nvidia being number two. They do usually about $80 billion a year. I think they've dropped off quite a bit because of the pandemic or something happened. And this is a lot of money that they're just plowing through. And now they're whining about the fact that they've outsourced all their stuff overseas to these fabs that are just doing a better job in terms of what it costs to make a chip. Intel does have a fab. They're going to start there. What is Intel fab systems? The IFS or IFB or something that's not IFB. And I think they're trying to get into the fab. And I think they're just looking for the government to give them a little little extra money, free money is the way I see it. I'm not I'm not as jacked up about this chip's bill as everybody else is. I just don't see these guys needing that much help from the government. They can do it themselves. They know how to do it. They're smart. Some of the smartest guys in the world. I did a quick search on the bill. The significant transaction is defined in your agreement with the secretary. So when you sign your agreement to get the subsidy, that's when they agree on what a significant transaction is. It could be different for for different companies. And it's well, I know Intel, the CEO of Intel is out yacking about how you know, they were going to move their facilities or their manufacturing to Europe. Yep. And it just seems to me that what is Europe? I mean, Europe, which is I don't see why why why we moved any of our fabs out of the United States, because this is all protected stuff. It's dangerous for the national security for these chips to get out and show up in Russian airplanes, for example. It's just always this whole thing, this loss of the industry in the United States has always baffled me. And it happened pretty much overnight. It started happening, but it snuck up on you. Next thing you know, I think we make 15 percent of our chips in this country. Maybe the argument has always been cost, right? And and so that's the argument they want to use to get the subsidy, which which honestly, again, this is not that much money. It's it's almost like bragging rights to get this money was free money. Yeah, it's and who doesn't like free money, right? So any free money is better than not getting any money at all. But it's enough to to get the plant made. It's it's basically using the United States government as an investment arm, you know, sink a little seed money into us, building a new plant. Yeah, I can't live with it. Chinese do. So the cost thing is I've always thought was something somewhat mythical because I think it's less cost and more tax benefits, tax breaks, special deals. I mean, the first time I went to China, China, mainland was in the 90s early. And I visited the Samsung keyboard plant. And Samsung had a keyboard plant there. It was either Samsung or maybe an Acer. Whatever the case, one of the two, they had a keyboard plant there. And I was talking about the reason you guys are you're paying at the time they're paying their workers $25 a week. And I said, so the whole reason for being here is because you're saving so much money on labor. And he says, you know, maybe, but the real we want to move to we want to get rid of all these people and put in robots. We want to robotize everything. And then we'll be, you know, then we can make some money. And it always seemed to me that the labor thing is kind of a stopgap, the cheap labor in China, which isn't as cheap as it used to be. And the whole thing is going to be robots. Well, we can do robots here. So there's got to be some other element here. And it's got to either be the cost of land, the tax benefits or some other thing incentive to build some incentive missing that we don't have in this country. I know in California, what it is, it's the ridiculous personal income tax and taxes on business. Yeah, I think what would be best for everyone is if we had a nice distributed system where if something goes down in one place, it doesn't bring down the whole system again, you know, like a good distributed. Yeah, good luck, Tom. Yeah. Yeah. One of these days. Oh, well, we could, we can try to come up with solution next week on DTNS experiment week. We're swapping out our normal DTNS shows, trying out some new ideas. We did this last year and now you can enjoy shows like barbecue and tech and the tech, John. So who knows what's going to come out of this this year. We've got Rob Dunwood and Rod Simmons giving us a reaction show, instant reaction to Samsung's announcement. Nicole Lee is doing a show on tech culture from an Asian-American perspective. That all starts next week, Monday, August 8th on the DTNS feed right here where you're getting this show. Risk Five is an open standard instruction set architecture based on the old reduced instruction set architecture risk. Dates back to about 1980, Risk Five was introduced in 2010. It's kind of like ARM, except you don't have to pay anybody to use it. Earlier this month, the first laptop running on Risk Five, the Roma, went up for pre-order. That'll be shipping in September, they say. Pine 64, a maker and seller of hacker-friendly single board computers just introduced a Risk Five powered single board computer called the Star 64. And John, you've been following Risk Five. What do you think it offers over, say, an ARM or an X86? Well, for one thing, I know I had a chat with David Patterson, who's a retired. He's the guy with Hanna C. Designed Risk to begin with. And he's his fingers are all over this thing. And it's really been redone a lot. It's not nothing like the original risk. And I'm not sure how much it's just this this re-architected. And it's it's got some elements that are quite interesting in so far as it's free, it's open source. And it was described to me. The best way to describe it was because I'm trying to describe it as something that's modular, you could take a part because you could put another instruction set on top of the basis, the basic architecture and actually make it an X86 chip. But it's described as a standard in in in line with Ethernet. Look at his Ethernet. That's your best bet or the IEEE floating point standard. That's what they wanted. That's how they're handling this. So it's going to be a standardized product that anyone can build and it's open source. And so you can do the modifications, do whatever you want to it in the same way you can with ARM. And so ARM costs money. You buy the IP from ARM and then you have to pay a royalty. You have to do the same and you can't even do that with Intel. They just keep it for themselves and you have to re-engineer it from scratch if you want to do anything with the next X86 instruction set like AMD did and surpassed Intel in some ways. So so the idea is that this thing is just it's a true open source and standard. It's a standardized product that will be available to anybody to use it as they wish. And there's already being used a lot. I understand by some of the chip companies like I'm guessing Nvidia has got a risk chips built in here and there. And other people are looking at this as a way of saving money. This is a winner except that, you know, they're they're making some missteps in so far as their marketing is concerned because I was watching a recent discussion about from one of the guys that is part of the team at the risk or risk five dot org or whatever the main site is they have. You can go there and you got some videos. You can learn quite a bit, but there's talking about, well, we're going to do a laptop because developers love laptops. And so we're going to do the laptop and and we're going to be able to take the chip out and put another more a faster one in. You can do chip replacement. And this is something I've been hearing about since the 80s where, oh, yeah, you can upgrade. I think even IBM tried to do this once is you can upgrade the processor. And anyone who's watched this fiasco go on and on. It's just that when people upgrade the processor, if you could say you can, it's that's not the problem. The real upgrade you need is it changing to USBC, changing to a better display, changing to a different HD, you know, an HDMI, something with a different kind of. Yeah, something more like what the framework laptop is trying to do, whether we're allowing you to swap everything out. Yeah. Well, it turns out to cost more. It's easier just to toss a machine, just go. But, you know, I don't know. I just bought a Lenovo from my wife, which she wanted to touch screen. So I just I don't know what I didn't pay anything for it. And and then to me, I've been buying these little I don't have one here. I should. You know, the Intel NUC, which is a new unit of computing. Well, they're actually, you know, B link and ace PC and all these other guys are building these things. And they're I just did this B link. Yes, I just bought one from Amazon. They were one hundred and sixty five dollars with a 10 nanometers cellar on in it to I think to a four cores. And with a 20 percent 20, no, twenty dollars off coupon that comes with it. So for one hundred and fifty bucks and it's got two HDMI for two monitors. This thing is loaded. It's got built in Wi-Fi. It's got a decent solid state hard drive. I don't see why I'd be swapping anything. So I mean, the whole idea of swapping stuff is kind of dumb to me. Getting back to risk five. Do you do you think that this is at Raspberry Pi level yet? Do you know it's at Raspberry Pi level? Yes. Well, within 20 percent, they've been doing some tests on that little board you just mentioned. Yeah, they ran it against the Raspberry Pi. Running the same software. And it turns out to be about 20 percent 20 percent slower. OK, but, you know, with the with the brain power behind this thing and now Intel is dropping a billion dollars into the project. And I don't know if they're doing it as a defensive investment or they're doing it to get on board. Don't know. But if they bring some of their technology, process technology into the fray, they can get Raspberry Pi will be left in the dust. But right now it's I'd say almost on par. Yeah, it feels a little like Arm did way back, which is I don't know if this will ever be in a PC. And of course, now we look at ARM instruction sets inside the MacBook Pro and people are saying it's one of the best laptops out there because of the chip and the chip design. So it certainly could have the potential for that. It sounds to me, if I had to guess, that Intel is throwing money at this in the hopes of leapfrogging ARM, which is to say ARM is not going to throw money in this because it's a competitor. So if Intel can make risk five work better, Intel can not only put a competitor on ARM, but also take advantage of it because they're working directly with it. Yeah, and Intel needs something like this. So it's like IBM getting involved with Linux. I think it's probably a good idea to play it right. The problem is Intel has this huge problem with not invented here at the at the corporate level. And so they will have people trying to submarine the efforts, I believe, because Intel has always had this problem with with taking in other technologies. And it's a it's a it's a corporate culture problem. It doesn't matter. It's a troll call, yeah, which means you can't fix it. Yeah, yeah, it's tough to. So we'll see where that goes. But I do think that and I looked at the timeline of Ethernet, which I believe was invented around 1973 and came into the play around in 782, took about 10 years, took actually about 12 years before Ethernet 10. Probably it was the one or two megabit per second. Ethernet, it before it started becoming a part of the public domain and public consciousness. And then you didn't get to I forgot the year that 100 megabit than that gigabit and I got 10 gigabit. It's got 40 gigabit Ethernet. It started jumping when it when it jumped to gigabit. And so it took that long. The this project, this risk five began in 2010 at Berkeley. It's a Cal project. And so now it's 12 years old. So it is getting to the point where it's like Ethernet, one megabit per second. Ethernet. And so now the timeline follows through within two or three years. I'd say within 22 by 2025, I think this will be a player. It's a Swiss company now. It's a nonprofit that is overseeing it. So it's the perfect positioning to be a standards organization. Right. It they're kind of cagey about the license. If it looked the only licenses I could find were Creative Commons licenses. But I didn't dig down far enough. So I'm curious if my understanding is it's open source period. Yeah, I think everything is certainly open source. And it may just be a Creative Commons license on the source code. I think I think that I don't know the license either. But I would say the license, I'm guessing the license is one of those. You can use it, but you whatever you develop, you have to put back into the pot. Yeah, I it's perfectly positioned to be a standard. It's certainly something to keep an eye on. So good, good thing to talk about it again in three years when you have me back on. Yeah, please make it back before three years from now. To make you to make you feel welcome. I put a win app story in the show today, you know. Oh, yes, great. Just something comfortable. Win app. Win app's back four years in development. The popular media player software is back out of beta. You may think, well, wait, Win app sees development in 2013. But if you think back in 2018, there was a leak of a new version of Winamp, Winamp 5.8, and they went ahead and published it because of the leak at winamp.com. Well, now Winamp 5.9. The next version is official. The code base was updated from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2019. That sadly means that no longer will work on your XP or Vista machines, but it'll work on Windows 7 up. Work can now begin because of that code base switch. That's what took them four years to add things you want from it. So native support for more file formats. They're they're talking about VP9, HLS, H.265, stuff like that. Support for new online services, which is, I think, something that a lot of people would want out of this. You know, Winamp stories may be a little similar to Risk 5, something with its roots in the past, but positioned to be a little more open and accepting and as an alternative in the future. Yeah, well, let's hope not. I'd hate to equate the two, to be honest about it. Winamp's like an old model. Feelings for Winamp? It's like an old model T, you know, that it just worked in this day. Yeah. And and it just chugs along. And so instead of like just dropping it like you should have, bringing it back is kind of a model T hot rod. OK, well, it probably, you know, be out. Try it. Yeah, I will do, of course. Let's check the mailbag real quick. We had our photo news monthly episode this weekend hosted by Amos and Rich Drafilino and Yaniv photographer with a Nikon ZFC and manual lenses wrote in and said a few years ago, I had the Sony A6000 great little camera, but I wanted to take time lapses with it. There was no way to do it easily. But I found out that someone hacked the software and with a new software installed in the SD card, you can override the latest version and be able to create amazing time lapses with a few clicks. I think companies create a version of the camera's software and sometimes don't realize what people want or what they can do with it. Important details like incomplete software is a problem and shouldn't be released until they're complete. But I am all in on new capabilities created by software updates. Agreed, Yaniv. You know, time lapses is a great little item to have on your camera. Very few cameras have it. And the last camera I had that had it was an old Kodak three megapixel clunker. It was a big thing and it had time lapse on it and you could put it on the outside and it also had variable time lapse. So you could do one frame a second. You could do one frame a minute. One frame an hour, one frame a day. I believe that had all those variables, but it had variables. And it was a great idea. But I don't know why these guys can't just won't just do that. This is, you know, and now in those Sony cameras, which are stunning kind of pro grade cameras, these things are used by movie makers. It's a good idea to put it on there just to draw attention. But of course, it has to be done by a hacker. Yeah. As so many good things are, John Dvorak, a pleasure to have you back on DTNS. I know you're up to no agenda show. Tell folks about that. And what else you got going on? Well, the no agenda show with Adam Curry and myself is a three hour twice a week show, no agenda show dot com. If you want to listen to an episode, we deconstruct news stories. Basically, we take a look at a news story and then we take it apart and see what PR agency was behind it. If it if it's a really a native ad, we're seeing a lot of those on NPR now and you can tell the native ads because it's some stupid story. The taco Mexican taco story, which they ran over and over again is one of them. And it always runs exactly one minute or exactly two minutes. It's right on the money for a native ad and it's about Mexican tacos at Taco Bell, something like that was one of the more recent ones. There's a couple more that come out. Apple's got a new native ad that's been floating around the country. Somebody sent it to me the other day. But we look into those, but we look mostly in the news stories and we try to get to the bottom of the various bills in Congress and the repetitive news stories you see here and there. And then the other show I do, which is DH Unplugged, which is a stock market analysis show. I've always written about the financial business. And so I'm not writing about anymore. I'm doing the show with Andrew Horowitz, who's in Florida. And we talk about it's a one hour show to the money. It's like an hour. It's not like no agenda show is open ended so it can go on for days. We once did a seven and a half hour show. But DH Unplugged, if you're an investor, I think you'd get a lot out of that show. Excellent. Go check them out, folks. No agenda show dot net and DH Unplugged dot com. Big thanks to brand new boss Paul just joined us. Started back in us on Patreon. Thank you, Paul. If you go back us at Patreon dot com slash DTNS, we might be thanking you tomorrow. Patrons, stick around. You get an extra show, Good Day Internet, coming up right after this one. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday four p.m. Eastern 200 UTC. Find out more at Daily Tech News Show dot com slash live. We're back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.