80: Tangled in Version Numbers
29 Aug 201452X CD-ROM drives, TiVo Roamio OTA for cord-cutters, version numbers, podcast patents, and trolling via domain names.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- iTunes on Windows uses Objective-C
- Lightning cables
- There's still a Mac with an optical drive
- CD-ROM nostalgia
- When will Apple let spinning hard drives die?
- Verizon "SpeedMatch"
- Merlin Mann asks about the new TiVo Roamio OTA
- Version Numbering
- The Infinite Version
- Do people care about pretty URLs.aspx?
- Podcast Patent Troll
- Ars Technica
- Hypercritical #67
- Hypercritical #68
- Ars on Carolla Settling
- Adam Carolla discusses the case starting around 40 minutes
- Marco's headphone review
- Post-Show:
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- Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Use code ATP for 15% off. (Marco's app-icon Fractures)
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to see you discipline your kids, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you don’t. You know what? You’ll see how ineffectual I am when we meet in
⏹️ ▶️ John person with my kids sometime in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you use the I’m really disappointed in you approach or
⏹️ ▶️ John kids don’t care? Kids don’t care. Kids don’t get you’ll learn. They you are the least
⏹️ ▶️ John impressive, intimidating. Like just they get used to you. It’s what happens
⏹️ ▶️ John in so many respects. They look up to you and the things that you do have such a profound effects on. But in so many other ways
⏹️ ▶️ John strangers are much better able to control and discipline them until they get used to the strangers Then they’re screwed to happens
⏹️ ▶️ John every school year and just ask Aaron the beginning of the year. They’re intimidated by you. You’re an authoritarian
⏹️ ▶️ John At the end of the year the badly behaved kids are just like I know that person and they just start goofing off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so let’s do some follow-up so let’s talk about iTunes on Windows and this was something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I did not know So John you got an interesting tweet in the last week or so
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, obviously none of us know anything about iTunes on Windows because how many of us I think the last time I even saw iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John On Windows is probably like in my Windows XP boot camp partition It probably made me install it at some point
⏹️ ▶️ John and I probably accidentally lost it launched at once But anyway, Chucker tweeted that Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John has a bunch of cocoa crap in it. Apparently there’s an Obscene a DLL and a core video to deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think core video is necessarily Remember if core video is an objective C API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never even heard of it I mean, there’s QuickTimeKit, but no, I mean, like what you’re talking about, like, and actually beyond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just iTunes for Windows, when they made Safari for Windows, there was also a bunch of this stuff. They ported over like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole text system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is which is why Safari rendered fonts on Windows the way Macs render fonts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So anyway, iTunes for Windows has been progressing. And obviously, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John stuck in the bad old days when it was. I mean, it was originally based off those like libraries that they had ported for
⏹️ ▶️ John QuickTime for Windows. obviously expanded since then. From what we’ve heard from various people
⏹️ ▶️ John who still use iTunes on Windows, despite its foundations being,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, based partially on Cocoa and Objective-C Stop, it is still not a good app on Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s an excellent app on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John People do not say that either. I mean, obviously, I see all the feedback that agrees with me, but what have you guys
⏹️ ▶️ John been seeing of like Twitter feedback and email feedback about iTunes?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d say I saw probably two thirds in favor of you and one third in our camp,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey roughly. Would you say the same, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t really see much about this, although my Twitter streams have been filled with other things recently. But I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I think another point to bring up here, which isn’t directly related,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think is relevant. The way Apple software works on Windows, first with QuickTime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco player back in the early days, and then now then with iTunes, I went Safari. It angers so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows people. I know I used to be one because it doesn’t it doesn’t work. The way Windows software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works, it is not a good platform citizen. It is not native. It is like, you know, an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app was dropped poorly onto Windows. It’s always like this giant pile of hacks. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows people hate them. They absolutely hate them. Geeks hate them. And I think that that actually contributes a lot to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC users hatred of Apple sometimes because like, you know, the geeks have seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco QuickTime player for years and all the crap it did and all the weird stuff it installed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the system tray thing and all this, you know, all the extensions it took and it was it was a really
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari for Windows didn’t catch on for many reasons, but that is one of the many reasons that it didn’t catch
⏹️ ▶️ John on because it totally looked like a weird, gross version of Safari for the Mac somehow made
⏹️ ▶️ John to lurch to life on Windows and they finally canned the thing. What was it, a couple years back they stopped developing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was about two years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, which is a shame because WebKit on Windows is definitely a viable thing to do. I mean, Chrome is popular
⏹️ ▶️ John on Windows and Chrome is not particularly Windows-like. It is more Windows-like than Safari was,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it just goes to show that Apple could have had a viable browser on Windows if they weren’t so
⏹️ ▶️ John married to making it look and act as close as possible as the Mac version, right down to the crazy text
⏹️ ▶️ John rendering that Windows people hate it because it wouldn’t use clear type. It would use the Mac font rendering,
⏹️ ▶️ John which looked wrong to everybody who uses Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Lightning cables. Apparently, this is becoming the follow up that never ends.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some warranty clarification and damage causes and other things to talk about.
⏹️ ▶️ John We didn’t talk about warranties last time. And I said, you know, if you have a lightning cable that’s dead or something, bring
⏹️ ▶️ John it to the Apple Store. Maybe they’ll give you a new one. Maybe they won’t. But I didn’t say what I hope was clear,
⏹️ ▶️ John but but apparently it wasn’t, if you have something with one of your Apple devices that goes wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s still under warranty, you can get a warranty replacement. Now, in the case of cables, there’s still a gray
⏹️ ▶️ John area where if you bring in something that was clearly chewed by a cat, you’re at the mercy of
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple genius if they wanna be nice. Because I think damage caused by intentional misuse
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like you drop your iPhone in the water unless you have that special AppleCare Plus that gives you
⏹️ ▶️ John replacements. Anyway, there are nuances to this. But in general, if you’re within the warranty
⏹️ ▶️ John period, yes, by all means, bring it in. You’ll almost certainly get something new. What I was talking about is if you’re not in the warranty period
⏹️ ▶️ John and you still have a broken cable and you feel like, boy, this shouldn’t have broken after a year and a half, you can bring
⏹️ ▶️ John that in and they may give you a new one. And we got some feedback here from Jem, who said
⏹️ ▶️ John that the genius at the Apple Bar said, genius at the Apple Bar, you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean. The standard rule is that you should bring it in before it fully splits,
⏹️ ▶️ John like before the casing splits open, because they’re reluctant to replace it once it’s split,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s better to take it in early. So take it in if it looks like it’s wearing out or whatever. But then that’s just one, what one person said.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of other people said, hey, I brought it in, it was totally mangled, and they gave me a new one. I brought something in, it was like five years
⏹️ ▶️ John old, no problem, gave me a new one, you know. Lots of people saying they got new ones in, and it’s not a big deal. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think anyone wrote in to say they had they took in a cable that was damaged and got
⏹️ ▶️ John turned away And you would think you would hear a couple of those stories But anyway, it seems like if you have a damaged cable
⏹️ ▶️ John if you go to the Apple Store if you’re under warranty Or if you’re nice or both, you’ll probably get a new one
⏹️ ▶️ John And for the damage caused stuff a whole bunch of people speculated about
⏹️ ▶️ John What might be causing it like ours aren’t broken everyone else’s are and we talked about pulling it out by the cable another common
⏹️ ▶️ John thing cited by a A lot of people responding to us who a lot of people attributed this advice to
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple geniuses as well is don’t use your iOS device while it’s plugged in You know to the charger
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever because obviously that puts extra strain on the thing and I think one person I wish I’d saved their tweet, but I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John one person said they had taken to using their iPad With the lightning cable plugged in
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom with the iPad resting on the lightning cable so like and you know in portrait orientation Resting
⏹️ ▶️ John on the lightning cable that is not a good You know, that’s exactly what people like us are thinking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, what are these people doing to their cables? You know, are they resting on the lightning cable while they read their book? Don’t do that. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not it’s terrible for the cable. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Just turn it upside down. You get better Wi-Fi reception that way, too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Not everyone knows you can do that. And not every app supports that, right, because that’s an orientation mode
⏹️ ▶️ John that apps have to actually explicitly support.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And how about Sandeep Shetty? Shetty. Yeah, good job. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glad you tried to pronounce that one. He, I’m assuming, said you’re right about cable shape being, quote, Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ive situation, well, sort of. Tell me about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was a couple of weeks ago. I was saying, you know, it could be, I was mostly joking, but I’m saying it could be one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John situations where strain relief looks nicer when it doesn’t look like the traditional strain relief with
⏹️ ▶️ John the little, you know, concentric rings or ridges or whatever. Instead, the Apple’s cables just have a smooth,
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly thicker sleeve over the connector. And we got a link to
⏹️ ▶️ John a Reddit thread where someone who used to work for Apple claims that that is exactly the case. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the basis of this claims, if it’s he making these claims, I can’t tell, is not particularly solid. He’s
⏹️ ▶️ John basically saying industrial design runs everything at Apple, and he finds it totally plausible that, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, he says the industrial design department hates how much strain relief looks like a power adapter. They would
⏹️ ▶️ John much prefer to have a nice, clean transition between the cable and the plug. But it’s not, you know, and then he says I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John the engineering division gave every reason the robot strain relief should look like the little rings. and I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John they got overridden. So it’s kind of like hearsay and speculation. Slightly more
⏹️ ▶️ John support because this person used to work at Apple and he’s claiming to know that the industrial
⏹️ ▶️ John design department hates that little ring pattern type thing. I don’t know, when I was reading this thing, I was looking down at my headphones
⏹️ ▶️ John that are on my head now and they just happened to have a strain relief thing of the cable going into the headphone
⏹️ ▶️ John part. And it looks like Apple’s. Is it because Sony’s engineers hate the little rings too?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that thicker sleeve type thing Is a vaguely plausible technique for strain relief
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just not as sturdy as the ring thing because the rings you know like they when you bend it the rings
⏹️ ▶️ John Knock into each other and make sort of a smooth curve, but anyway I’m sure Apple knows what
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing here. This is not new information to them They know how many lightning cables wear out. They know how many replacements they have to hand
⏹️ ▶️ John out if it’s a problem they will you know address it by either continuing to give
⏹️ ▶️ John out free cables or Maybe the next version will be a little bit stronger. We’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, for whatever it’s worth, I have a large quantity of headphones within eyesight right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I just took a look around as you were describing that and none of them have the little like gap ridge pattern.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of them just have little cuffs at best similar to the Apple lightning cable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe it’s like an expectation of like how much you know people don’t expect to be yanking on the cable that goes
⏹️ ▶️ John into your headphones right? You know even if you’re dancing around with your headphone cables I mean I don’t know Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an expectation of, you know, what does a typical usage look like? And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple appears to have misjudged the stress and strain of typical usage of
⏹️ ▶️ John lightning cables, if our feedback is to be believed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Now, kind of sort of speaking of lightning cables, Frank Enderle wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in to you to say that you were slightly incorrect about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an assertion you made regarding the cables. Tell me more about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John My information was correct. It was incomplete. I said the secret to knowing how to
⏹️ ▶️ John orient an Apple USB connector is to look for the logo. The logo faces up if it’s a horizontal connector on an Apple device.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is true. That is also true for non-Apple USB devices. The logo facing
⏹️ ▶️ John up thing is a part of the USB standard. So of course, that doesn’t mean that everybody does it because is there are plenty
⏹️ ▶️ John of vaguely compliant USB devices out there on the market.
⏹️ ▶️ John As we all know, sometimes they don’t even fit in the plugs, or they fit too loosely, or whatever. But anyway, that’s a USB standard, not an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple standard. In fact, I wonder if Apple is actually in violation of the standard, because it doesn’t emboss the
⏹️ ▶️ John little USB logo. It just sort of prints it on there. I don’t know. I didn’t actually read the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John in the standard to see if it demands that it be embossed versus a printed thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there you go. It’s not just Apple. work for you everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. Man, we’re cruising through this follow-up. All right, so just a little bit more. There is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Mac that is sold with an optical drive. A lot of listeners came out of the woodwork
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to tell us that the 13-inch MacBook Pro, non-retina, just the 13-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, is still a thing. It still has a platter hard drive, and it still has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a onboard SuperDrive. And actually, I just noticed it’s labeled in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifications page as an 8X SuperDrive, which just made me remember, do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you remember back in the days when there were just CD burners and there were like 52X CD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey readers and they were like 8X burners? And oh man, you thought you were so cool when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had like a 52X reader and you could load whatever, Wing Commander 3, well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s too old, but you know what I’m driving at. One of these old CD-based games in no time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the loading times were instant. Well, John doesn’t remember this, but you remember this Marco, I assume. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God, those were the days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the loading times weren’t instant because first you’d hear the CD spin up and then spin up further.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’d be like, Ooh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s like step through all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speeds. So everything would just freeze on your computer while this happened. Because I think, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think this was before, uh, more advanced buses. I think at that time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the type of IDE bus they put into, uh, one device would monopolize the whole bus still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and which was later alleviated I think but but at that time it wouldn’t and so they would just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like as you’d sit there hearing that whirlwind spin up and spin up and spin up just everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would just lock on your computer while that happened yeah it was it was a great time for computers there was also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Kenwood 100x drive which used if I remember correctly seven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lasers in parallel and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spinning speed of something 12x and I actually had one of these and it was a really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive because it was way quieter than all the other ones. But for whatever reason, I never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco caught on, probably just the complexity of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, the X’s in like the, you know, 2x, 5x, 52x, isn’t it times the normal data
⏹️ ▶️ John rate for the 1x CD-ROM, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super… Yeah, which is 150 kilobytes a second per X. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s ridiculous. So that’s why an 8x DVD is putting out way more data than a 100x
⏹️ ▶️ John because DVD data rate just, you know, from the how much you get from a 1x spinning DVD is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they reset the rates. Yeah, DVD, I believe it’s some DVD is something like nine times the CD speeds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like that. Man, I never thought I’d need to know these again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I remember just having this 52 X drive and thinking I was so awesome. And, and especially since I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my first CD ROM drive was way early on. And it was actually, um, what was the term?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was it a caddy where you put the CD in a plastic thing with a lid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it, And then you stuck the plastic thing with the lid on it that had the CD inside of it into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the CD-ROM drive. And it was slower than dirt. And I remember playing like, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this? And oh God, it was so cool. I think this was the 3D6 machine that we had.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we made it smoking fast by putting a math coprocessor on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nice. Oh man, those were the days.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a good time for us to appreciate Apple’s URL rot on their website, because that link for the 13 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro with an optical drive, look at the URL. It’s www.apple.com slash MacBook-Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John slash specs. That’s the whole URL. I checked it like three times. Like, did I put the wrong link in there? MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John slash specs is the link to the one with the optical drive. The ones to the current MacBook Pros,
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro hyphen specs hyphen retina. Weird. So like, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not, I mean, normally they do replacement. Like, so the new MacBook Pros, you know, like the OS X page,
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s a main OS X page and then like slash preview OS X for the new version. And when the new version is released,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yosemite will just be a plain old slash OS 10 or whatever the URL is. But somehow, Retina got
⏹️ ▶️ John stuck in the URL and they didn’t do full replacement on it. And they didn’t manage their redirects well. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that. At least there’s no.woa at the end of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which do you think will be the last Apple product to include a spinning disk?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And your choices are probably that MacBook Pro, the Mac Mini, the iPod Classic,
⏹️ ▶️ John Does the Mac Mini come with an optical as an option anymore?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, a spinning disk, like a hard drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, oh, uh, I’m going to say the iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Normally, I would say the iMac, because I think you’re right. I think, well, see, the chat’s all saying Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would actually vote for the iPod Classic because this thing is just it’s an undead zombie product. It will never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be killed. Oh, yeah. If
⏹️ ▶️ John they just if they just never get rid of it. Right. You’re right. It will win. It will win. It will win by never ever
⏹️ ▶️ John changing. But always being for sale. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I could totally see them like, you know, designing the next IMAX because three and a half inch drives are pretty large, like physically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I can totally see them designing, you know, one or two generations from now, an IMAX that is much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinner across the whole thing, not without that big like pyramid in the back, much thinner and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all solid state, just just like a MacBook Pro. They’re right in a MacBook Pro. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, that’s why that’s why I think the mini will go, because this whole thing is it’s small and you know, it’s you don’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ John it to have tons of internal storage. So it’ll go full SSD. Like, did you see the recent announcements? Like, see,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has like an eight terabyte drive, three and a half inch, eight terabyte drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but Apple’s already not, like, do they even offer a four terabyte in the iMac? I don’t think they do. I think they talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John three, right? I know, well, they’re always lagging behind, but like, if there’s gonna be one machine left that can actually, that
⏹️ ▶️ John actually has enough room for a three and a half inch drive, it’s gonna be the iMac, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gated by the size of the screen. I guess maybe they’ll get sick of that bulge being so big, and it’ll just keep shrinking.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s that, do they have 2.5 inch drives in the car in iMac? know they still have three and a half. That’s exactly what I was going
⏹️ ▶️ John to ask. They say the chat room says it’s 2.5 in the current iMac. I don’t think that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Three people in the chat room said it and three people in the chat room are never wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do three terabyte hard disks at 2.5 inches exist? I don’t think they
⏹️ ▶️ John do. Alright, now there’s dissension in the chat room. If only we could look this up somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m on, I fix it, I can only go so quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Alright, anyway, we’ll move on and Marco can cut that out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, because if I’m right, I’m gonna leave it in. Of course you are. That sure looks like a teardown that has a three and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch drive to me. Oh, did somebody already post it? If this is the most recent one? Yeah, tie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tie in the chat posted this link that clearly shows a three and a half inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was with you. I was about to call you out and say, No, I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dan stutters in the chat says two and a half in the 21 inch iMac and three and a half in the 27. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John You have failed me for the last time chat room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure that’s a pop culture reference I’m missing. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, Lord, Casey. Yes, let’s move on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So speaking of follow up that never ends, john Casey, no relation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pointed out to me via email that, quote unquote, speed match
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is coming to Verizon Fios quote in the coming months. And so if you recall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was, is I had sold my soul and sprout in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get symmetrical Internet. And this John Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said that, well, if you were just a patient person, you would have been OK and it will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the coming months. But let me tell you, my 7575 Internet is magnificent.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t get one of those emails. Is it regional?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, but I would assume so.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. All right. I’ll just wait patiently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me repent publicly that apparently that quote was from Star Wars. now the internet hates me even more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than perhaps they might have. So, my mistake. I’m sorry, internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So… You know who doesn’t hate you? Fracture. Our friends at Fracture are sponsoring our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show once again. Fracture prints your photos in vivid color directly onto glass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can see this at fractureme.com. I have a bunch of Fracture prints in my house. I can right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I can see five within iShot. What is the word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, I guess, within view? I think within iShot. With an iShot I have five fractures,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two big ones, three small ones. I love these things because for a few reasons. So first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one of the points they tell me to say is they put everything you need to get your photo on the wall or on your desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right in the box. So if you get a desk mount, it comes with it. If you get a wall mount, it even comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the anchor that goes in the wall. If you need it, if you need to use a drywall anchor, everything is included. The packaging is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastic. It is certainly a good question to ask how they ship around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big pieces of glass in you know relatively efficient boxes without them breaking and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will see this if you order one their packaging is awesome and I’ve never had one of right broken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even have a little like arrows on here pull here you know it’s very it’s very nicely designed anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every fracture is handmade and checked for quality by their small team in Gainesville Florida definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the best things in Florida and prices start at just $12 for a five by five inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco print. And so what I use the five by five inch size for it’s it’s a nice little square. I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for my app icon. So whenever I make a new app, which happens all the time, whenever I make a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, I get an icon printed of it and I hang it on the wall. So now I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this little like trophy row of the apps I’ve made on the wall and it looks great. I’ll link
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it in the show notes. And I’ve been doing this for a while. And now I’m seeing every time we do one of these spots,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I mentioned this a couple days later, we’ll get a tweet from somebody else saying they did it and they’ll show a picture of theirs and everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loves doing this. So if you’re a developer, you have apps, even if you’re a podcaster, you have podcasts, podcast artists square
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to they also have non square sizes. If you want to do something that’s rectangular, they have that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Really fantastic service. I love their prints. They look they look great. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need to frame them or anything like you just the print is effectively the frame.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s really an incredibly good value. Like if your other option is either buying a frame or having something custom framed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a fantastic value and the print quality is great. I love it. I’ll keep buying them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to fracture me.com to see more and you can get 15% off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with coupon code ATP. So once again, use coupon code ATP for 15%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off. That will let you know they came from the show as well. And they’ll keep buying ads so you can keep hearing about my icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco row. Thank you very much to fracture me.com. Thank you very much to fracture for sponsoring our show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so we had a request from dear friend of the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Merlin Mann, and he had asked, I will quote him, I’d love to hear John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thoughts on the TiVo Romeo OTA, who it’s good for and why, and is it worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it given the fee? Now I know nothing about TiVo, so John, can you start by explaining
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me what makes the TiVo Romeo OTA different than other TiVos?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do we know that it’s not pronounced O-TA? We do not. that
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s not out yet as I read a preview on CNET of it and that’s the only information I have
⏹️ ▶️ John about this thing it is a that all the Romeo is their branding for the current line
⏹️ ▶️ John of Tivo DVR it’s got a
⏹️ ▶️ John hard drive in it it’s got a CPU it will record television that comes into your house
⏹️ ▶️ John Tivo Romeo OTA like the name says gets a god I don’t know what over the
⏹️ ▶️ John air that’s capital T is throwing me. Anyway, yes, it gets a over-the-air broadcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t take in cable through either a cable card or anything like that. It gets
⏹️ ▶️ John high-definition television from an antenna over the air. And that’s all it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s interesting because I think this is the first TiVo since way back when, since, you know, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the first version. I don’t remember. The first TiVo I got was Series 2, and I’ve always had it hooked up to cable, so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John remember what the old over-the-air analog stuff was like. But this one does not take
⏹️ ▶️ John cable input and it’s only 50 bucks for the box and it’s a little tiny box it
⏹️ ▶️ John has a small hard drive for 50 bucks you wouldn’t expect much it’s a 500 gigabyte hard drive which doesn’t actually hold that much
⏹️ ▶️ John high-def video it has four tuners which is nice because it used to be four tuners was the top of
⏹️ ▶️ John the line so they’re making some progress there and making that technology go down market
⏹️ ▶️ John and it costs $15 a month and I think from looking at the CNET article I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lifetime thing like other TiVos if you don’t want to pay a monthly fee for the TiVo service,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just pay a lump sum up front and if you plan on keeping it and using
⏹️ ▶️ John it for more the next number of years you can do the math and figure out what makes more sense for you. I always buy the lifetime
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff with my TiVos because I use them until they die and they haven’t actually died yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I use them until I buy a new TiVo. I use them until I have gotten my money’s worth out of the lifetime
⏹️ ▶️ John service frequently, but I don’t think there’s any lifetime service for this this $50 thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yes it’s super cheap, but then you have to pay $15 a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John So who is it good for and why? I think maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s good for TiVo the company because it’s a way to $50 will
⏹️ ▶️ John trick people into buying because it’s like, oh, it’s so cheap. You know, like I’m a cord cutter. I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John cable service or whatever, but I like to watch my local sports or whatever, something else that I can’t get it
⏹️ ▶️ John in a convenient way. If I just get this $50 box, I hook it up to my TV. I’ll be able to record
⏹️ ▶️ John the local sports games. They get to use the same TiVo interfaces on their big fancy boxes, which as we noted in the last show,
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t use flash anymore. It isn’t horrendously slow, which is nice. And you know, and they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John either don’t think too much about or figure they’ll just, you know, stomach the $15 a
⏹️ ▶️ John month for a couple months to see if they like it. And the reason I think this is good for TiVo is because once you get used
⏹️ ▶️ John to that experience, like especially with cord cutters, are used to firing up the Apple TV or watching
⏹️ ▶️ John something on their iPad, TiVo is super convenient. Like once you hook it up to your television, you stop
⏹️ ▶️ John using your television the way you used to. And you get used to the convenience of having
⏹️ ▶️ John a built-in DVR right there. Like it’s the screen you go to when you want to watch television and there’s all your stuff. And you say,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I do the same thing with my Apple TV. Or I do the same thing with HBO Go. I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess you’d have to have a cable subscription for that or a shared password or whatever. But in my experience, having used all of these different kinds
⏹️ ▶️ John of ways to get video. TiVo is the most like old TV, where you sit down in front of your television, you
⏹️ ▶️ John turn it on, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John the remote at the TV, and there’s your stuff. And there’s no booting, and there’s no launching, and there’s no waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to wake from sleep, and there’s no doing any of this other stuff. Even if it’s not the fastest interface in the world, it is a convincing
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of replacement for your television that changes the way you watch TV. And the reason I say this is
⏹️ ▶️ John good for TiVo and not for people buying this thing is because once you get used to this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to wanna watch all your TV this way, any television that you watch on a television set,
⏹️ ▶️ John I really feel like once people get used to watching a television like that, they’re gonna turn it on, look for the show they
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna watch and remember, oh yeah, I have to watch that one on Apple TV. And they gotta switch inputs and then go over to the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and then wait for the Apple TV to wake from sleep and then move the little thing around and hold down the menu button to get back to the top level thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and go into the app they want and then get an iTunes error and it’s just, it is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as nice as it experiences, TiVo. and a tiny hard
⏹️ ▶️ John drive is not gonna hold that much stuff. And $15 a month is just brutal. So I can’t imagine someone,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would not recommend this box to anybody. If someone wants to record
⏹️ ▶️ John television that comes into their house in real time, time shifted for later, I would recommend they get, they
⏹️ ▶️ John either use their cables company DVR if they wanna get something super cheap and terrible. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John many people tell me they like their cable company DVRs, but anyway, it can be inexpensive, or they get a good TiVo.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is like the thin edge of a wedge for TiVo, just trying to say, you know, we think that if we can just get
⏹️ ▶️ John our interface in front of people, they will realize that it’s a nicer way to watch television than almost any of the other alternatives.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I agree with them. It is better. I watch most of my television on TiVo if I can help it. It is nicer than all
⏹️ ▶️ John the other ways I have to watch television. It’s a shame this doesn’t include the streaming stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why, I mean, they’re cheaping out or whatever, but like the fancy TiVos have, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can watch stuff, you can transfer stuff to your iPad and then take your iPad like on a plane watch something you pulled
⏹️ ▶️ John off your Tivo, you can watch it by streaming it over the network from your Tivo to yourself, although the bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ John required to do that with HD video is pretty terrible. I’ve done it a couple times, but it doesn’t look great.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they don’t have those features built into this $50 box. You can buy this other much more expensive box. It’s like a Tivo stream
⏹️ ▶️ John or something that adds this capability. All these are reasons not to get this $50 box. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John recommend it for anybody. But I do recommend if you have any interest in DVRs, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John here, here’s what I recommend for if you want to spend 15 you know it was like 80 bucks so to
⏹️ ▶️ John two months for the $15 a month service plus $50 for the thing you just want to try it out if you like
⏹️ ▶️ John it I recommend getting a good Tivo if you don’t like it now you’re out at 80 bucks so what not a big deal
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s basically I have to say about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I first saw this announcement whenever it was yesterday whatever it was at first I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like wow this is really interesting I thought about it and then I realized first of all yeah the $15 a month is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while that may at one time have seemed seemed fine and also compared to an entire cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscription that people are paying and compared to what some cable companies charge to rent their stuff, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might seem reasonable but compared to what cord cutters are used to, that’s a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m a quote cable cutter. I canceled my cable service in like 2006
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realizing that I was just not using it enough and I would rather spend that 80 bucks a month or whatever was the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco elsewhere and Now that I’ve gone this long without traditional TV, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I get most of my shows either through Netflix or I buy them on iTunes. I have to pirate stuff occasionally that I can’t get any other way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s very rare now. It’s almost always iTunes and Netflix. None of these methods have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco commercials, and none of these methods have the broadcast stream, the cross-promotion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap, the starting a minute off, all this crazy stuff that you deal with with TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes, or all the time. And so when I watch regular TV, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at family houses or something like that, when I watch regular TV, it’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I recognize this is a massive first world problem. That disclaimer aside, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a terrible experience and I look at that and I’m like, it’s like going back to using Windows. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t believe I ever thought that was normal. And so I look at something like this and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re the kind of person who is not a cord cutter but you’re thinking about cutting a cord
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you you were looking at this as possibly a way to do it great that sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know that sounds like a reasonable idea if you if you’ve already been a cord cutter though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this will be a lot like going back to visit your high school after you graduate like you’re gonna feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this is not a good idea
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like watching regular TV you don’t have to see the commercials and everything I mean you do still have to skip them I know but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not it’s not as bad as Like the reason you would ever even consider this is because there’s something you’re missing and
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to think that it’s local sports It’s basically what what this is for right because everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get or everything else requires cable because you’re like, oh I want like no one watch it to people
⏹️ ▶️ John watch Network TV I don’t know Maybe you get this for someone who only watches Network TV But the reasons to
⏹️ ▶️ John have a DVR because you want to watch shows right now You don’t want to wait for even if it’s 24 hours You just don’t want to wait for them to appear
⏹️ ▶️ John on Hulu or Apple TV or whatever wherever they’re gonna appear Or, you know, even HBO go, you don’t want to be locked out
⏹️ ▶️ John of Game of Thrones because everyone slams HBO go because they try to broadcast simultaneously and it doesn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. I never had that problem. I watched Game of Thrones exactly when it airs. It’s important enough to me that I pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John HBO. Right. So it’s either because you want to watch it now because you’re super impatient and have a lot of disposable income, or
⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s something you literally can’t get anyplace else like local sports because there’s a local TV blackout and
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of other crap like that. And so that’s like, that’s, that’s the market for this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just think even those people are going to be like, geez, is it really worth? I mean, you bring up
⏹️ ▶️ John cable again. Maybe these days you can’t get, maybe this is still cheaper. Like if you desperately want to see local
⏹️ ▶️ John sports, but you can’t be there for them, you don’t want to miss a single second of your favorite team, right? Maybe this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the cheapest option. What else? Because the cheapest you can get a cable, like if you say give me the most basic of all basic
⏹️ ▶️ John cable, you know, because like I mentioned, a cable company’s DVR. But then I realized,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you get a cable company’s DVR, you have to pay for cable. And how cheaply can you pay for cable? Probably more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, basic cable is usually about $15 a month, but usually by the time you add all the fees and everything, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty hard to get those kind of plans these
⏹️ ▶️ John would guess it was like, you couldn’t get any cable, television with any signal
⏹️ ▶️ John over at your house with less than like $40 a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s standard cable, but I’m talking about basic. There is almost always a level below standard. They don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advertise very much, but you can ask for it. This is the level I had growing up, which basically has the networks plus, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WGN and a couple other you know like not not not a great selection. The problem I see with this is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is I you know compared to what cord cutters pay for things this is not expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s mid-priced I would say you know compared to everything else. It’s it’s also though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substantially worse than a real standard cable package and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you if you have an ATSC antenna and you get enough reception like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get most of the value of this for free. You’re just not getting the DVR part.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, you’re not getting the commercials.
⏹️ ▶️ John All you’re paying for is yeah commercials and time shifting, but that’s like that’s worthwhile. Speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, that’s the worst watching live TV when you can’t skip commercials like that is the real bottom is then
⏹️ ▶️ John like the best you could do is mute during commercials like that is really going back to Windows to use your analogy.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s going back to DOS. Having to skip commercials. It’s not so bad. And
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on, like, I think it’s the AMC shows. Don’t even have that many commercial breaks. But anyway, that’s cable. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I think if you like the experience of being able to time shift
⏹️ ▶️ John and being able to see the shows when you want to see them without having to wait another day or whatever, and frankly,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reliability of knowing that you’re not going to get locked out of HBO Go and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not going to have streaming problems or whatever, or you’re not going to be ISPs, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John throttling your Netflix bandwidth and all sorts of other terrible things that are going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John DVRs like this are still the most reliable way to get TiVo when you, to get TV when
⏹️ ▶️ John you want it. But I just think this is not a very good TiVo because it’s so expensive monthly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you like this, like save, save more money. I mean, you can literally save more money. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the CNET did the math and said, if you keep this thing for three years, it’s like the most expensive device Tivo sells
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s so much cheaper to just get one of the more expensive Tivos and just buy a lifetime subscription and then keep it for more than three years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what I don’t understand is if you’re a cord cutter, oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would imagine it’s because you don’t want to spend the money on something that you may not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either enjoy that much or use that much or what have you. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re in that mindset where you’re either, I don’t mean frugal dismissively,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I can’t think of a better word. So frugal or whatever the reason is, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cost sensitive. And then TiVo is saying, well, actually, now that you’ve saved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money by cutting the cord, why don’t you pay us $15 a month for something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that really doesn’t have that much benefit other than maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey skipping commercials and maybe doing a little bit of time shifting? But to me, if I’m in that mindset
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, I’m trying to save money and that’s my priority, then I’ll just sit through the damn commercials. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really not that big a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you can’t go back to sitting through commercials. Just you just can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do it. I have a DVR. I do it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I can’t do it. Anyway, like the other advantage this gives you is the fortuners. If you just watch network TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John say you’re a bunch of old people, you give this to your grandparents or something, and all they watch is network TV and they have a couple of favorite shows, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a time conflict. This solves the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and you can tune to all four of the OTA channels you can actually receive. And record them all at the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can see all of your TV at the same time. That’s the problem. It’s applying a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature set to what most people would consider woefully inadequate input. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even people who watch network TV shows regularly, they probably also watch cable network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows. Yeah, at least one. There’s also other things they want to see. That’s why I’m thinking like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this won’t appeal to people who like TV too much to cancel cable. It won’t appeal to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it won’t appeal to cord cutters because it is both too expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not good enough. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the expensiveness is hidden. Like the only reason that I think this is an interesting product at all is because they chose to price it at $50. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the only reason that it’s even worth discussing because I think that will get people to try it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think TiVo is just hoping that they’ll try it. We’ll get a little bit of money
⏹️ ▶️ John out of them. They’ve probably calculated that the $15 a month will make up the purpose. This thing costs more than 50 bucks to make,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure, right? So we’ll get the money out of them from our outrageous monthly fee. Maybe a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ John those people we will convert to, you know, oh, I would, this is terrible, but I would get
⏹️ ▶️ John cable again if my interface to it was this, instead of whatever it was before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version numbering. And today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we had a little bit of news insofar as there’s a new release from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our friends at Lickability, and we’re probably going to talk about that in just a few minutes. But Brian Capps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Lickability wrote a very interesting and relatively brief post on version numbering.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I thought it was a really good post because in summary,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what Brian had said was, you know, version numbering, especially for major
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versions, you really don’t need a decimal or even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey multiple decimals. When you’re on version three of an app, just hypothetically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t need to be 3.0. It doesn’t need to be 3.0.0. It can be just plain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three. And I just thought I never really thought about version numbering this way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until I read this post. And I thought it was a really interesting take on things. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would definitely love to hear Marco, what your two cents is about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And how do you handle these sorts of things for overcast?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a good question. So I stressed a lot about version numbers for Instapaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I, I would like you to hold features like, oh, I have a big 2.0 coming out soon, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better hold back this good feature. Even with overcast, like there’s a great feature that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally figured out how to do recently. And I thought, you know, should I should I save this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for 2.0? Like some at some mystery point in the future, and, you know, maybe, you know, get people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pay again for something or something. And I thought about it. And then I, I realized, you know, that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a bad idea. But for various reasons, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think version numbers need to exist for technical reasons, you know, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to be some kind of identifier for the version for the programmers. But what you expose to users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to your marketing efforts is of course up to you. I think it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important to consider version numbers that you’re going to be publicizing as marketing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of your marketing message. And it probably matters less than you think most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time. Like so I submitted an overcast version 103 that has semantic meaning to programmers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It means that the base version is 1.0. It is not a major update because it isn’t 1.1. It’s 1.0.3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s a minor update, probably mostly bug fixes, not a lot of new features,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if any. So that means something to nerds like us. It doesn’t mean crap to regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. You see like if you if you see the version numbers for Facebook or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chrome, like the Facebook app on iOS, or Chrome, they’re comical, they’re just meaningless numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we you know, geeks make fun of them. And Facebook will be like, version 12.0, change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco log, bug fixes. Okay? And then Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey is like at version, you know, 273,000 something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s like, and you know, Chrome just increments the base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number every time. And you know, the fact is, they don’t really matter to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost anybody. The very, very few people who, oh, sorry, I was corrected in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the chat room. The current version of Chrome is 38.0.2125.24 dev 64 bit. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not great for marketing. Not a very, you know, human readable version. But it doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re going to make a major update, yeah, it makes sense to do, you know, a new version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that carries meaning to people. And that is how you can base your marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around. Like it makes it easier for marketing. you cluster together big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco releases or big changes into these big, like, you know, whole number releases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s also a good argument to be made, which I believe Casey posted in the show. Somebody’s posted in the show notes. I’m going to guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John because I don’t think Casey Reitz coding horror that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I got it right. All right. So John must have put the infinite version. One of Jeff Atwood’s post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on coding horror. We’ll put this in the show notes. I haven’t read this post, but I have a feeling I can figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it’s about from the title, which is does it really matter what version you’re ever on, just keep adding features
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not quite what it’s about. It’s actually a pretty old post. But I’ve linked to it like 1,000 times because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s one of those trends that I think some people have seen coming.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is like 2011. I’ve been in favor. I’ve been seen coming for a long time. But other people are
⏹️ ▶️ John either blind to or against because it’s different. The App Store in
⏹️ ▶️ John some ways is kind of holding us back from this because in the app store,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to charge money, like Marco was just alluding to before, if you decide you want to charge money for Tweety,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to, you have to market it differently. Like you have to say it’s Tweety 2 and
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose 2 might not necessarily be a version number. It could be like a Roman numeral, like a sequel, like a movie sequel,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you are forced to do something marketing wise to differentiate the new version from the
⏹️ ▶️ John old one because you want to charge money for it again because there’s no upgrade pricing. So that is possibly keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John versioning alive. That and the fact that apps don’t auto update. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think this is true, right? In iOS, they still don’t auto update by default. I know it prompts you and it wants you to tell them
⏹️ ▶️ John to auto update, but I don’t think it does it by default. Is that correct? Anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know? No, I thought it was by default.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if it does, but I can never keep track because I think the Mac doesn’t do it. Maybe iOS does. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John What the coding horror post is about is what what Chrome did is you have no choice. If you run Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John and you ever quit Chrome and relaunch it, like it will update itself. It had been quietly downloading an update
⏹️ ▶️ John to itself, the next time you launch it will install that update. Doesn’t really bother you too much about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It used to be a little bit more intrusive and give you more options to defer it or maybe say no or whatever, but Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to update itself. And this I think is exactly the right strategy for web browsers today
⏹️ ▶️ John because you just want to you don’t want to get into an IE situation where it’s just old versions of IE
⏹️ ▶️ John that you just can’t get people off. Even if you drop support for XP people still use it and or re-extend support for
⏹️ ▶️ John XP or it’s just it’s terrible. Like you need browsers to be up-to-date and so Google’s approach is
⏹️ ▶️ John if you run Chrome we will shove the current version down your throat just deal with it right and that’s the infinite version it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John do you have Chrome? It’s not what Chrome do you have yes I have Chrome. What is Chrome? Chrome is whatever Google says
⏹️ ▶️ John it is now and it will get it will change over time and Google has no problem we’ll totally change the UI, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John move menu commands around and drive some people nuts. It drives me nuts sometimes when I’m trying to get that stupid bell out of the menu bar for the millionth time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that is the correct approach, not to the UI, obviously, but for the rendering engines. Like, that’s the correct approach for the web.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish every browser updated itself like Chrome as a web developer, because they wouldn’t have to deal with IE8 anymore, because everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John would be infinitely updated to Chrome 37, which I think is the latest stable. 38 is like the canary thing. And maybe 37
⏹️ ▶️ John is beta, and 36 is main. I don’t know. Anyway, the point is, I don’t want to know. I just want to know. You’ve got Chrome,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you have the latest Chrome. And there are, you know, there’s different channels to get, you know, more bleeding edge crumbs. But in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a much nicer place to be. Now, is that the appropriate versioning technique for every single application?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe not today. But I think in the future, that is a much more viable approach from users perspective, because
⏹️ ▶️ John usually users hate upgrades. They don’t want to do them. And it’s kind of like kind of like autosave where
⏹️ ▶️ John people like, but but what if I wanted to keep the old version? I don’t want you shoving the new version down my throat and blah, blah, it’s exactly the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing people would say about autosave. They’d be like, but what if I don’t, I just want to speculatively make changes. I don’t want to automatically
⏹️ ▶️ John save I want to manually hit the save button, but nobody says that about iOS Nobody says I need a save button in notepad
⏹️ ▶️ John I sometimes it is speculatively type things into my notes app. I would need a button to save it don’t autosave No
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just something that people out there used to all of us will die Future people will think it’s crazy that we ever had to push a
⏹️ ▶️ John button to manually update our software And it will just be accepted as the way things are and at that point
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the version number can just be a random string of letters doesn’t matter It’s just it’s just a unique it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be they could be you know use UUIDs for versioning. Who cares? Like, it’s totally pointless.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s where I think we’re going. And hemming and hawing over whether it’s 3.0 or 3
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of pointless. I think the only thing that matters about versioning now and the App Store is, like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John said, for marketing purposes. And then developers can pick whatever they want. Because believe me, nobody but us ever looks at that number that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in light gray text next to Facebook. They don’t even read the release notes. They just, you know, if it’s auto-updated by default,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just notice it has a blue dot next to it. And they don’t know what that means. And they tap on it. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes away. Does it even get the blue dot if it’s auto updated? I don’t think it does. Maybe not. But well, and you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what what Brian’s point was in this article was was not the version numbers should go away, but that we should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care about the version numbers and present them nicely to people when it’s when it’s significant.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I think that’s not I don’t think that’s that’s that’s that important. Like I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t present a version number to people. You present the product name to people and tweet to is a product name. And
⏹️ ▶️ John is that to a version number? Who knows who who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. And furthermore, Like is Tweety 2 still the product name a month after it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out? Or did it, you know, is it just Tweety then? It’s Tweety 2 1.0.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the first version of Tweety 2. Oh, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re like getting tangled up in version numbers is something that really only we like, I guarantee
⏹️ ▶️ John if you asked a random person if they know the version number of any apps on their phone, or you know, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John no idea. In fact, the only reason the only app that Marco probably knows the version number is his own apps. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much. would nobody know. And we and we look at the release note, like I do manual updates,
⏹️ ▶️ John I turn down the little disclosure thing to see what they change. So I can see their one sentence thing that says bug fixes, or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever they’re going to say, like I actually read that. And I don’t know the version number.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s interesting to me that over the last few years, it’s gotten to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey important to consider URLs, we were just talking about this with Apple earlier. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having clean and easy to understand URLs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has gotten pretty important. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John maybe I’m- Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ John wait, wait. What do you say, gotten pretty important? What do you mean by that? You think this is a recent development?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the last few years. Maybe I’m looking at this through a very Microsoft developer lens. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in years past, especially in the Microsoft community, having these god awful URLs with.aspx
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the end of it all over the place, yeah, it’s just the way it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John No big deal. But yeah, that’s always been gross over there. Believe me, the clean URLs have been important from day one
⏹️ ▶️ John on the web. It’s just, I agree with you. Microsoft has historically not considered that to be the case, but we’ve all been laughing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, OK. And I think it’s more than just Microsoft. Like, do you remember when,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was it, the exclamation hash that Twitter was doing? Did I get that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah. That was because they thought their browsers didn’t support history push state, and
⏹️ ▶️ John so they used this crazy thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there was like six months where every major website started doing the bang hash thing when they picked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up JavaScript as like an everything all-encompassing framework for their site. It was a very dark time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was that was worse than 52 X CD-ROM drives
⏹️ ▶️ John Now web sites just say you know what screw you you better be using a browser you the supports history But I think I think even I eat supports
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know that’s you don’t do that kind of hack anymore That’s why everyone’s using Chrome because we could have all been updated to that
⏹️ ▶️ John Sooner the one I always think of is the hilarious city desk URLs the Joel still has
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yep, with all the zeros. With the zero padding.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s the type of thing, you know, I don’t want to pick on Fog Creek and those guys over there. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, there are windows that people founded by someone who
⏹️ ▶️ John spent a lot of his formative years in Microsoft. And I don’t know if it’s a cause and effect or just a correlation, but
⏹️ ▶️ John can you imagine anybody who’s sort of in the Apple nerd, Apple enthusiast camp
⏹️ ▶️ John ever like choosing that as a URL structure? Even if like,
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about your personal website you’re going to hand tune everything. If you’re making a product for other people to use, you would still be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want people to use my product and have their URLs look like this. But Joel was like, good, good to go, thumbs up. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John he got shamed into changing the URLs in that software so they’re not quite as ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I can’t even imagine that was an easy change to make. Whatever reason it was that way, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume the reason it was that way at first was so that file names would sort in order, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was before any OS did natural number sorting in its file browser.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, no, I think database back end. I assume it’s just so they can have a big zero padded
⏹️ ▶️ John number that he would increment because he’s a Windows user. He just wanted to like he wanted to do like s printf
⏹️ ▶️ John zero present zero 52 s or whatever d for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, the point I’m driving at is in looking at this from a Windows developers point of view, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rest rest style URLs got popular, I don’t know, four or five years ago, maybe a little more than that now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And all of a sudden, all the Windows developers, Windows web developers were like, oh, holy crap, we should kind of take URLs seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so over the last few years, it, again, from my point of view, over the last few years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it got to be really important to have really clean URLs. And it’s interesting to me that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that same care put into URLs, and sweating of the details,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those of us who do native applications just didn’t really have a similar amount of care for version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey numbering. And I think that Brian’s point was just, hey, we should care about this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is marketing. It can be important to some users, and you should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give a crap. And I think that was mostly his point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most people care about version numbers. As someone in the chat room pointed out, the Mac has had a longstanding tradition of the three-section version numbers for
⏹️ ▶️ John major, minor, and patch version, or major, and minor, and update, or whatever, down to the old VERS resources
⏹️ ▶️ John that enforce that, and that the Finder would render by reading that resource and parsing them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s always been, it’s always kind of a convention. Like back in the Apple days there was version
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers with letters in them, so you could have you could have D releases which was before alpha which had a little A in the name
⏹️ ▶️ John and then B would have a B so 1.0 you know B3 or 1.0 D5
⏹️ ▶️ John and then sometimes you get an RC or an FC thrown in there. These are all like little idioms and conventions
⏹️ ▶️ John among developers that most users don’t have any interaction with. But I still think there was care.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like there was a filename extension. It wasn’t like 1.0.5.aspx.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was the worst things of the, the worst of the URLs in the web was where you would expose the implementation
⏹️ ▶️ John of your web application through an extension in the URL, as if that had any meaning to anything except for your crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John server software, right? Like, do the people on the other end of it care that it’s like.asp or.pl or.cgi?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, they don’t care. They don’t care what technology used to implement this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not entirely true, because a lot of people would see slash pages slash something.aspx,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they would immediately say, oh, that’s SharePoint. This is going to suck.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s some of that. And there was the thing like early proxy servers would be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I won’t cache anything that has.cgi in the URL and all sorts of stupid crap like that. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same exact thing as file name extensions anyplace else. You are overloading. You’re inlining
⏹️ ▶️ John information into another location because you feel like there’s no other place to put it. Only in HTTP, there is totally another place to
⏹️ ▶️ John put it. And this piece of information doesn’t need to put it anywhere, but it doesn’t matter to anybody except for the server. So it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid, and people should not manage their URL space as if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s invisible. Now, there’s the open question of whether that should be visible at all. And we’ll talk more about that after Yosemite
⏹️ ▶️ John is released, I suppose. But we talked about it once when Chrome tried to do that thing to replace the address bar with the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that doesn’t show the address anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it was the, it was like the awesome bar or something, right? Or no, that was Firefox.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s like, it was like a URL. They called it the URL chip. It was in Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Canary. That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow. Yeah. It might still be there. I turned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it off. It was awesome. So speaking of lickability, Marco, is there anything else you’d like to tell us about these guys?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of fact, yes. So we had a last minute, uh, sponsor dropout because of a miscommunication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week. And like literally about an hour before we recorded the show, we went to Twitter and said, Hey, anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want this spot? and our friends at Lickability jumped at it. They were the very first ones to respond and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we want it, we will take it. And the reason they took it is because they’re awesome people. Lickability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is three guys, it’s Matthew Bischoff, Brian Capps, who we just mentioned wrote the article, and Andrew Harrison.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve definitely hung out with Matthew and Brian a lot. I think Andrew Harrison, I saw his Twitter picture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the side, he looks familiar, I’m pretty sure I’ve met him, possibly at New York Times, and I went to visit the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two when I, anyway. Matthew Bischoff used to be at the New York Times. He’s now at Tumblr.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Brian Capps, I believe, still is at the New York
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please correct me if I’m wrong. And Andrew Harrison, yeah, I’ve seen him somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, probably at the New York Times. These are really great guys. And if you follow what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do online, you can see that yourself. If you see their work, you can see it even more. I mean, these are the people who actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrote the New York Times app. And Matthew now works on the Tumblr app. Like, these are really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high quality, high skilled people. I even talked about on debug how if I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I was going to hire another programmer, I would try very hard to hire Matthew Bischoff, although I probably couldn’t get him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this is how good these people are. And what they’ve chosen to do in their free time is this company called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lick ability. And lick ability has this app called quote book. And quote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco book version three, there’s no dot in that there’s no zero, there’s no large number, there’s no meaningless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number, quote book version three was released today in the app store. coincidence,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they released a giant new version. It’s been eight months in the making. It’s a complete redesign and rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the ground up. And just by coincidence, they released that today right as we record and that’s why they decided to buy the spot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Quotebook 3 is a universal app for iPhone and iPad that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lets you collect quotes that matter to you and share them anywhere. You can collect lines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from movies, lines from books, song lyrics, crazy stuff you hear in real life from your friends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and family, even quips from Twitter. You can save tweets directly into it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All these things are perfect things you can use QuoteBook for. All of your quotes are synced via iCloud between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of your devices. And I trust these guys to do iCloud right, because I know they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care a lot and they test it a lot. I was in the beta too. You should see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the things they sweat about, like the details they worry about are stunning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really have… they have the attention to detail that we wish Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually had, that we sometimes think Apple always has, but a lot of times Apple doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have that attention to detail with their stuff. So anyway, quotes that are saved in Quotebook 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can have an author, a source, a rating, and tags. So you can do all sorts of great organizational
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and search options on these. So for example, you can say, show all quotes about Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show all quotes from John Syracuse, That’s just one tap in the interface to do stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The app is localized into four languages It’s fully accessible via voiceover and other accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options all the good stuff you expect from high quality app developers So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new in version 3 also the you can now add images and descriptions to authors and sources You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably have like a little like John Syracuse ahead on his name there It can even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pull information and pictures for your authors and sources automatically from Wikipedia if you’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like. It’s pretty cool. It’s like, come on, this kind of feature is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s just awesome. This is what happens when you take people who are extremely talented at what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do and you give them what is in theory a relatively simple database app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is how they do it. It’s pretty crazy. All the polish they put into this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the awesome features they put into this, they have really, as I said they sweat the details like crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco More things you can auto complete authors, sources and tags from within the app, your contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and your music library. So it scans all these data sources on the phone for auto complete information so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you’re typing, it’ll complete and it’s not doing anything creepy or anything like sending it to anybody. It’s just a local app that sings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with iCloud. So these people, these are good people doing good stuff here. Let me see what else they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco import quotes from your Tumblr posts and your Facebook profile. So you can have something to start with, you can start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco organizing things you’ve already posted. Really great stuff. You’re good onboarding experience. We could talk about those for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole episode as well. You can then share your quotes after you save them or look them up later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can share them to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and day one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, auto detection even works, so it will detect a quote on your clipboard from iBooks, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will even extract and parse the relevant book and author automatically. So if you hit something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in iBooks, it’s like something in iBooks, hit quote, So, switch over to Quotebook and it will recognize all that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff for you. Anyway, this is really great. Go to Quotebookapp.com. Once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again that is Quotebookapp.com. Download the app or just search for Quotebook, one word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the app store. It’s five bucks and I can tell you this is worth every penny. These, I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I was going to say I wish these guys would do even more apps, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of polish they put into this one, it’s just, oh man. I just want them to keep doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, it’s a concept. The idea of an app to save quotes in sounds simple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there are so many ways that it could have been done with mediocrity. And they did such an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly awesome job with it. And they have such great values and such great talent. It really shows through.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, thank you very much to Lookability for sponsoring our show for Quotebook. Go to quotebookapp.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or look up Quotebook in the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We really appreciate them jumping in at the last minute like that. All right. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a question from a listener regarding the podcast Patent Troll.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the question was basically, why the crap aren’t you three talking about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t verbalize my feelings about it, other than I think it’s crummy. But I don’t know, John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Marco, whichever one of you added this to the show notes, would you care to explain why you didn’t want to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John I put it in there and I think, well, first, to recap what it is. There’s some patent troll out there
⏹️ ▶️ John that personal audio. Yeah. That thinks they have a patent on like podcasting, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so if you were doing anything that looks like a podcast, we have the patent on that. And you would have never thought to do it without
⏹️ ▶️ John our hard work. And we deserve to be paid and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. And they’ve gone after lots of different
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasters. One of the ones they went after was Adam Carolla, who has a very popular podcast. Is it
⏹️ ▶️ John the world’s most popular podcast is very popular anyway. And they did a big lawsuit and he raised a bunch of money
⏹️ ▶️ John Along with the EFF helped me fight off this patent troll. He raised like half a million dollars He was going to lawsuit
⏹️ ▶️ John with them. They decided to drop the suit for whatever reason I think they might have thought that like
⏹️ ▶️ John he didn’t have as much money as that he thought They dropped it in a way that they can file it again
⏹️ ▶️ John For a little while it looked like he was gonna try to continue The fight anyway, but basically they
⏹️ ▶️ John both bailed out They both reserve the right to go back at it again in the future. EFF is still trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John get their patent invalidated, which, if this is a sane world, should be easy because their patent is
⏹️ ▶️ John dumb and has plumbed tons of prior arts. Hopefully that will go well. The question for the
⏹️ ▶️ John listener is, why haven’t we talked about this? And I think the reason is that, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John on Hypercritical, I talked about patents a ton. And basically, I am not
⏹️ ▶️ John in favor of any patents on anything. So anything that has to do with patents is kind of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not going to argue about this, you know, it solves the entire, what’s your position on this? I think patents shouldn’t exist. Next question,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So that’s what I have to say about that. Marco has a similar anti-patent stance,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not as severe as mine. No, it’s the same. Yeah, and so, like, so that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not going to get into the nuances of this type of thing. And, you know, so we all think this patent troll is terrible. We
⏹️ ▶️ John think patents are terrible. Casey, what do you, how do you feel about patents?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I have nearly as strong an opinion about it. Certainly, I don’t think software patents should be a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s kind of insane. Regular patents, I haven’t really put enough thought into it to come to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any particular conclusion. But, I don’t know. That’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good non-answer, I suppose.
⏹️ ▶️ John The real reason we haven’t talked about it, though, is because the patent system is so absurd and ridiculous, is that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing to talk about. Like, if they decide to come after us, we’re screwed, right? And that’s true of anybody because the patents
⏹️ ▶️ John to litigate a patent case cost way more than half a million dollars So that I’m Corolla wanted to actually go through with this
⏹️ ▶️ John case Like if they hadn’t dropped it He would have needed to raise millions of more dollars even when you’re in the right
⏹️ ▶️ John and usually you don’t get your legal fees back Because they all have these things take place in some East Texas,
⏹️ ▶️ John Texas court. That’s incredibly favorable to patent trolls And it’s just it’s a terrible rigged
⏹️ ▶️ John system. That’s that punishes everybody and you know There’s there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John point in discussing it like it’s you know It’s like why don’t we discuss whether we get struck by lightning if we get struck by
⏹️ ▶️ John lightning? We’re dead You know there’s nothing you can do about it right if we can’t even put little lightning rods on so
⏹️ ▶️ John the patent system is terrible Hopefully we are small enough that no one will ever come after us if they do we’re screwed. We
⏹️ ▶️ John all hate patents the end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The interesting thing about this case One of the interesting things about this case is it really what appears to have happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. You know the patent is Not from somebody familiar with podcasting the patent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I remember correctly from an a write-up on ours forever ago I believe it was something like some guy was like sending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cassette tapes through the mail what
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah It’s even it’s bogus II with him in the realm of bogus patents Even if you believe totally in patents
⏹️ ▶️ John you would look at this and you’d be like what they want money from everybody who does Podcasts now it’s it
⏹️ ▶️ John was updated I think did not be tapes in the mail and all like Whatever it doesn’t it meant like that’s why it doesn’t matter to
⏹️ ▶️ John argue about the nuances of this. If you believe patents as a concept shouldn’t exist, who cares about the nuances? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why I don’t really have any interest in, like, well, is it about tapes or about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just bogus. Even if he had exactly come out with the entire concept of podcasting,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s stupid because I’ve never heard of him until he started suing people. So obviously I didn’t get the idea for podcasting from him.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you got it from the person who got it from the person who got it from him? I don’t care. They don’t think they deserve any money.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not how I wish the world worked. But it is the way our legal system works, so we just basically shut up and hide,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? More or less.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pretty much. I mean, because you’re right. It is pretty much a crapshoot with patent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lawsuit threats from patent trolls, or even… The term patent troll is thrown around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, and there’s a lot of scapegoating that, oh, well, patent trolls are the problem. No, not really. Patents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the problem. And it doesn’t really matter who owns them. Patents themselves are the problem. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even when used entirely in the way that people’s storybook version of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they think patents are for, protecting some small inventor, even when used in that exact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intended way by people who are really making things, supposedly, and really need protection,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even then they don’t work. Even then, they’re a net loss on society.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that story is so rarely even the case, and all the other times they’re used are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way worse than that. The problem is not trolls, the problem is patents.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And because of the way our civil legal system is set up in the US, you know, John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was right, like if you’re attacked by somebody with an actual filed lawsuit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the threat of a filing a lawsuit, there’s pretty much nothing you can do except, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comply with whatever settlement offer they make you and give them money. It’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite a racket. But there’s nothing more anybody can really intelligently do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because what are you going to do? Fight it and lose hundreds of thousands,
⏹️ ▶️ John Millions. It will cost you millions of dollars to win a patent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it actually goes to trial, then you’re really screwed. But even just to begin to fight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even just to begin a lawsuit, you will lose all of your money. You will lose tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of time, you will lose all motivation to work and to do anything, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for what? You know, like, it’s a terrible system. It is… If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything in this country is a tax on innovation more than the lack of government healthcare,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the patent system. It is so incredibly destructive to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco innovation, and it’s so destructive to small companies, and large companies, actually, but small companies just feel it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more, I think. And so this is a horrible thing. However, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco particular case, I don’t think we’re… I don’t think I’m that qualified to talk about it because I don’t know that much about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s, you know, I agree with John, it’s not really any different than any other case. I think it would have been great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Adam Carolla and his people succeeded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in invalidating this patent, because I believe that’s what they were going for. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John They wanted to fight it in court and just to win the suit and invalidate as part of the court. I don’t blame them
⏹️ ▶️ John for settling. Some people are like, oh, we gave you half a million dollars and you just settled. They spent all that money getting to the point now where they
⏹️ ▶️ John can get out of it. The suit was dropped. The company reserves the
⏹️ ▶️ John right to file suit again, but it seems like the company has decided that there’s just not enough money to be had there or whatever. But EFF,
⏹️ ▶️ John as an organization, I believe, is still going forward with the patent office itself and saying, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the patent office and say, we think this patent is invalid and go through this crazy Byzantine process to try to get it invalidated.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think EFF is still doing that, independent of Attica Roll entirely. So we can only hope
⏹️ ▶️ John that this patent troll probably has 50 more patents that they can throw
⏹️ ▶️ John out. But we can only hope that this patent troll, by raising its head above and picking on somebody with a microphone and
⏹️ ▶️ John some publicity, has caused EFF to decide to go after them. And hopefully they
⏹️ ▶️ John get punished for being publicly terrible instead of privately terrible, like Lodzis, for example.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you mean like Nathan Mirrorworld and Intellectual Ventures?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, all those guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let’s, you know, let’s call it right out there. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. We all hate patents.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I forget how much I really hate this stuff until we bring it up again. Maybe I should listen to that episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Hypercritical or episodes of Hypercritical one more time to get myself all fired up. Oh, well.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I’m going to skip the rest of the read for now. I have a cool Squarespace story this week. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a small organization that my kid’s involved in, and I volunteered to be on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer website committee. They contacted me when I said I want to be in this committee, they say, Oh, good. We’re going to redo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the website this year. We have a budget of $3,000 that we’re going to… We need to pick a new web developer to have them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco redo our website for $3,000. And we’re also going to, you know, we’re going to go to WordPress, and we’re going to buy a theme, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to have this designer design us a new theme and everything, a new template to use for a site. And I’m like, Hold on, give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me an hour. And I literally, in the span of about an hour, went to Squarespace,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took everything off of their old site, which is, you know, it’s one of those like, you know, 10 page info sites with a couple of forms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here or there. it’s fairly simple. You know, a little gallery, a calendar, stuff like that. I took their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire existing site, imported into Squarespace, gave it a whole custom theme,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took pictures, put it up, put a picture as you know, put a header image and everything. I did all this in an hour.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I went back to them. I said, Okay, rather than rather than spending that $3,000 and having some developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco involved, it’s going to be custom work, it’s gonna take forever. I just did all this for us. and we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use that $3,000 for any other purpose and just spend $10 a month on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And needless to say, I won that that bid. My option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. And you know that this isn’t this is something that I can set up once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they could set it up. I could set it up and then just hand it over to them. And they can edit things without messing anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. They can change you know if they want to change the colors, they can change the colors. It’s no big deal. And the best thing is if they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support, Squareface has support, so I don’t have to support it. They can just go to Squarespace and they have 24-7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support. So I think this is all honest to God, true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco story. This is what happened. I’m actually meeting tomorrow to show them the final site, which took me literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an hour to make and saved a good cause $3,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by not having to go do something more complicated than this. So if you also want to do that, or for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any other reason, go to squarespace.com and use offer code ATP at checkout. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can start a trial with no credit card required, which is what I did. I started a trial and I showed them the trial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account URL here. I didn’t pay a thing yet. And then when you know when they say, okay, they’re gonna put in their credit card, and I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put in our promo code. And of course, anyway, when you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you decide to sign up for Squarespace, you should also put in our promo code if you heard it most recently. Otherwise, put in whichever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one you heard most recently in your favorite podcast but use our promo code ATP, it’ll get you 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off anything at Squarespace, you’re in your first purchase, and it will show your support for our show. Thank you very much
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⏹️ ▶️ John Should always use our promo code because it’s three letters long. It is the ultimate promo code ATP type it in every single
⏹️ ▶️ John box. That’s true. And check out who knows if I work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, you recently posted a large headphone review. Is there anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to add about that? Or is that pretty much self contained?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s pretty much self contained. I did I did face a little bit bit of a problem with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this review, which was…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you’re going to talk about how you’re being ridiculous about in-ear monitors?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, actually. The problem I had with this, which is really boring, I’m not going to spend too much time on it, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where do you put it on the site? Because what I’ve done in the past, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve mostly just, you know, made blog posts here and there with, you know, here’s what I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this pair of headphones, or here’s my current recommendations. This This one, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decided that I’m going to make it its own page that I can update continuously because blogs always have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a problem with accessing old content. How do you make old content useful? How do you deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old content that’s out of date? Do you go back and edit and put little headers and all of it saying, this is now out of date? Go here for an updated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version. There’s all sorts of challenges there. I decided rather than doing all that, I’m just going to have one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continuously updated page. And that was even more boring than I expected. So that’s pretty much it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny you bring it up because when I looked at Marco.org, I noticed that your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very long headphone post was very, very short,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was a link post. And so I thought to myself, well, weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess he added some sort of like read more functionality to his, to second crack, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my knowledge that didn’t exist at the time. And then I clicked the link post to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your own post and realized, oh, you just had this as a singular file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or singular URL just sitting off the route. And, and I did notice that and it did take me by surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that’s how you handle it. And then once I saw what you had done, it made perfect sense why you had done it that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it made perfect sense. I totally I saw that too. And I said, Oh, that’s not the way I would have done that. What I would
⏹️ ▶️ John I understand the reason you did it. But what I would have done is made the new post like just as a regular
⏹️ ▶️ John long post, and then gone back into all my old headphone posts and put as the very first line,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is old, you should go look at the new one here. Something nice to that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t like the idea of updating an old article to say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John these, you know, 10 years ago, these were, this was the headphone, this is what I thought all the headphones that are available,
⏹️ ▶️ John but, and this has a lot of Google juice because a lot of people have linked to it over the years. So if you landed here from Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t want you to see that I want you to see my new review. I’d rather leave what I I wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John as a sort of historical document at that URL, and then just have a constantly updated redirect,
⏹️ ▶️ John like not a redirect, constantly updated, like header at the top says, hey, you’re about to start reading. In case you didn’t, because people
⏹️ ▶️ John totally don’t notice the date, and this drives me insane. I feel like the new trend should be on people’s blogs instead of
⏹️ ▶️ John all the other design trends that we’ve had of making really big text and, you know, centering everything and all this other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John The new trend should be making the date just bigger and bigger until all you see in the entire screen is 2004.
⏹️ ▶️ John So because people read things, I tried your instructions on how to you know set up
⏹️ ▶️ John my SQL full-text searching and it didn’t work in like 2004 dude, I can look at
⏹️ ▶️ John people do not see dates But anyway, they will read the first sentence of the review you hope and the first sentence should be
⏹️ ▶️ John this is old The most recent one is here And yeah, it’s a pain to have to keep going back through those and re-updating the
⏹️ ▶️ John links or whatever but you can automate that if you really feel like it, but That’s the way I would have done it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I understand why you did it the way you did. It’s just it just seems weird
⏹️ ▶️ John You can do it better next time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week. Fracture, Quotebook 3 from Lickability, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace. And we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over. They didn’t even mean to begin. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental Oh, it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental Oh, it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into Twitter You can follow them Follow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s accidental They didn’t mean to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how’s the review coming?
⏹️ ▶️ John I made progress this weekend, but like every time I make progress, I like try to reassess percentage wise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, what percent done do you think you are now? And I keep coming up with the same number. Like it’s like it’s been like 70%
⏹️ ▶️ John for the past three weekends. Like, oh, I feel like I’m about 70% done. I wrote like 7000 words this weekend. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I’m 70% done. And I just found out that I’ve been taking my screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ John in the wrong size or some of them in the wrong size. Not that I’ve taken many of them anyway, but I have so much stuff to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Just rooting for a late October release date and then everything should be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what are you going to do if they release early? Would you rage quit the review even if you were half cooked
⏹️ ▶️ John cooked? No, I would rush to get it done even sooner than possible. I would probably miss
⏹️ ▶️ John the release and people would just have to wait and and it would be terrible and you know, what can you do? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John takes the time that it takes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I don’t know about this Tivo thing and everyone’s saying, oh, it’s for sports. It’s for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sport. Well, not everyone. People saying it’s for sports. That doesn’t make sense to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figure if you’re that into sports, you probably have cable, right? Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they’re trying to like it’s cord cutters who still wants. I don’t know. Like I said, $50. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point. This thing exists. $50. If they’d made it free, it would be even more, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John an interesting product, but just run a Tivo, get a real Tivo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. Do you want to talk about this Twitch thing or is that going to go on for two hours?
⏹️ ▶️ John It won’t go on for long. We can talk about it cause I don’t think I have much to say about it. Do you guys both know what Twitch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have any of the three of us actually like seen Twitch?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I watched like 10 seconds of it once when, um, if what was something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about playing Pokemon, like some chat room or something was playing Pokemon.
⏹️ ▶️ John like old people have any of you guys seen the YouTube? Have you seen the YouTube? I’ve seen the YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like as if YouTube is one thing. As if Twitch is like oh yeah I’ve seen Twitch. Have you seen Twitch? Yes I’ve gone to the website.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you seen Google? Yeah well at least Google is kind of one thing. Twitch is you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. You’re right to call me out. So I’ve seen a video game being played live on Twitch. I believe it was one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Pokemon. Is it Pokemon or Pokemons? I guess, Pokemon games. It’s Pokémen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, point being, it was something that went around like a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months back where it was like an entire chat room was trying to collaborate and play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the Pokémens and- Don’t actually say that, Casey, please. I was kidding. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kidding. So it was the chat room or something. Was it a chat room? Shoot. I don’t know what it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John They had fish playing it. They have chat rooms playing it. played these various Pokemon games. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I watched like 10 seconds of that and was impossibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bored after those 10 seconds and never looked back.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think we had in our show notes way back when, and since I just recently caught up on isometric, I heard them talking about it. There
⏹️ ▶️ John was some rumor a while ago that Google was going to buy Twitch. Do you remember that? Maybe we had it in our show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes briefly, but we never talked about it because Google never did buy Twitch. It was like, oh, it’s a done deal. Google’s going to buy Twitch. It was months
⏹️ ▶️ John ago, right? And they didn’t. And then, you know, people thought they
⏹️ ▶️ John might because it made sense. And now I don’t even know, is the Amazon actually a done deal?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think. I mean, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always wait. I want to see a press release on the company’s websites. That’s what I want to see. That’s when it’s confirmed. This is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, sources say that whatever. Anyway, the story about this is Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John lying to which I think the big story is from from my perspective, why hasn’t someone
⏹️ ▶️ John bought Twitch already? because twitch does tremendous traffic in an area that is
⏹️ ▶️ John underserved essentially like you know these uh for people who don’t know twitch allows you it was a website
⏹️ ▶️ John where people put videos of them playing video games and you could stream to it live and you can a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of the consoles have a button you can press that will stream what you’re playing up to twitch uh you can do pre-recorded
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff um and it’s like why why would you not want to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John this because millions of people watch i I think that like some eSports
⏹️ ▶️ John championship thing had like 41 million viewers or 70 million viewers or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Huge viewership on this. The question is like, well, why isn’t this all
⏹️ ▶️ John just happening on YouTube? Well, YouTube is a different kind of environment. YouTube is for people making like their
⏹️ ▶️ John own little shows and channels and stuff, but YouTube is really harsh on cracking down on copyrighted material.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, Twitch is specifically tailored to gamers has integration with the consoles and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Now in recent weeks or months or however long it’s been, Twitch has been starting to clamp down on
⏹️ ▶️ John the copyrighted stuff as well. Like if it hears, if it does that, you know, content detection, if it detects copyrighted music,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will just mute the audio track. And what’s happening is like people are getting their entire videos
⏹️ ▶️ John muted because there’s copyrighted music like in the game, the game people paid for, and like just all these problems
⏹️ ▶️ John of having machines try to enforce copyright. So I don’t understand why that’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like the biggest thing I don’t understand is Why didn’t Google buy Twitch? Why didn’t, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, they are a hot commodity. They are a place where lots of people are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to look at things that isn’t well-served by any existing properties, but is in that same vein.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, this is not like YouTube, you could say, oh, it’s kind of like TV, but instead of TV shows, you watch YouTube. And people
⏹️ ▶️ John who have kids of a certain age know that kids do watch YouTube just the way they watch TV. Well, Twitch is like that for people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John into games, only there never really was a TV analog because there was never any real TV channel you could go to where you just watched, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John hundreds of channels of people playing video games live or recorded and that’s what Twitch is.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not quite sure that Amazon buying them is good for anybody, including
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon. I think Google was a better fit because I feel like what’s happening on Twitch should be happening
⏹️ ▶️ John on YouTube and if YouTube is not doing something to make that happen and they need it to be in a separate branded site, then fine, Google should have
⏹️ ▶️ John bought Twitch and made it like as an offshoot of YouTube or tried to roll it into one or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think what Twitch does is only going to go away or fade if
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets screwed up by like stupid copyright stuff or whatever. I just think it’s inevitable. It’s obviously something that people
⏹️ ▶️ John want to do all over the world. It’s going to happen with or without Twitch.
⏹️ ▶️ John People should be interested in those people. Those people buy games, are worth advertising to, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in a demographic that people want to advertise to. Why did Amazon buy them?
⏹️ ▶️ John Google reportedly bid for them and didn’t get them, and then Amazon did. Did Google
⏹️ ▶️ John say, too rich for my blood and just bail out? Did Amazon outbid them? These days, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John feel particularly good about Amazon buying things anymore. I used to feel good about Google buying things and then not so much,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and now Amazon, I used to feel okay about them buying companies, and now maybe not so much with
⏹️ ▶️ John like the comiXology and stuff. So I don’t know, I mean, I guess maybe this is better than Facebook buying
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I just think it’s a shame for everybody who’s into Twitch. kind of a shame for Twitch, although presumably the
⏹️ ▶️ John people involved get a big payday. Uh, Twitch is not something that I
⏹️ ▶️ John watch regularly. Twitch is not something that you guys watch at all. So it’s, it’s very younger demographic, but that’s why I think like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the future, man, doing what Twitch does, uh, has a future.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I just hope Amazon doesn’t screw it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have nothing to add to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is one of those things that you should be old Casey. This is one of those things that is really popular that you, and it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John soccer where you understand that it’s really popular and always has been, it’s just not your thing. But this is like worldwide really popular.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you just have no interaction with it all. Like at least Facebook, like we may not use Facebook, but we know Facebook exists,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know what it’s like or whatever. So if you don’t wanna get out of touch with the kids, you should spend some time on Twitch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve genuinely been dreading the thought of Minecraft still being a thing in 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John years or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you can’t kill it. It’s gonna be like, it’s one of those games that just gets ported everywhere, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it was like, it had dated graphics the day it was made, right? So it’s not as if it’s gonna, oh, it’ll get old and people
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t like it. Nope. It’ll, it will never die. They’ll probably open source it at some point and then you’re really screwed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So is World of Warcraft or Minecraft dying first?
⏹️ ▶️ John World of Warcraft, definitely. That requires humans to maintain and run and presumably, eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John that will become, you know, unfeasible. Like whatever Blizzard’s next big project is will
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually, I assume, supply. They keep, they keep revving it and releasing it. I guess they have enough people addicted
⏹️ ▶️ John to it but that requires way more maintenance. Minecraft you can just let it into the wild like a virus you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need any human intervention. Blizzard needs to pay people you know millions of dollars a
⏹️ ▶️ John year just to keep World of Warcraft, keep them in new content every year and keep the servers up and running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. In wildly unrelated news I was somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stunned that it only took the internet a week to find Marco.coffee.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I didn’t even know that until this morning.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought Marco had registered that site ages ago. I didn’t know that I was yours as soon as I don’t. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John trying. I’m trying to say nice things about your websites, Marco, but I think I’m not Marco Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think everyone has already yelled at you. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah. Oh, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that site. Oh, God, it’s terrible. But I threw it together in like 20 minutes, so I didn’t care. Probably is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not worth a whole lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey effort. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I knew it was horrible. It’s worth it’s worth just enough effort to make the one page that is
⏹️ ▶️ John on that site look reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s all I’m saying. I really don’t even care. The point was to get to give a few people like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seconds worth of laughs or giggles or what have you. And I think I succeeded in that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny people are complaining and moaning about the fact that it’s frames because I was too lazy to figure out how to get GitHub pages to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accept. It’s frames? Yeah, it is. Well, it’s framed because it’s, it’s a hover redirect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I had it cloak the URL.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just a big iframe, I guess. And getting the layout the way I wanted was a pain in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the butt without using tables, which I don’t think I ended up doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, because I suck at CSS, I’m freaking terrible at CSS.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is one of those differences, like you would have been the person to make those, those city desk URLs, because you’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, just cut them out. I don’t care that much. This is a URL. Like, it’s like there’s something I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not saying this, that’s something wrong with you, this you are in the majority, believe me, but like there. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John if I was putting up a single page site that just had text in it, I would be there making sure that text was exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John where I wanted it to be and the font that I wanted it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be. Well, that’s because you’re extraordinarily critical.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, the joke still works if it’s marco.coffee slash pages slash troll.aspx, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the funny thing is, I think it was TJ Luoma, I’m probably getting that pronunciation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong, and I’m sorry about that, but I believe he was the first person to point out to me, In retrospect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should have just had to redirect to Starbucks, and I really had a missed opportunity there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s what I did with bad.coffee. So I own bad.coffee, redirects to Starbucks’
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wikipedia page. And then I also have overcast.coffee and podcast.coffee.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How did you not register marco.coffee?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I did. That, for some reason, didn’t cross my mind when I was entering all these in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, man, that’s funny. Anyway, I noticed this the other day. This was a week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the day. It was last Wednesday, and I noticed that Marco.coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was available, and I thought, what could I do with this? And well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, my first thought was, hey, did you know that Marco.coffee – to say to you, hey, Marco.coffee is available.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I was like, wait a second, there’s an opportunity here. And so, yeah, so I figured
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trolling you for a year is worth $25 of my money. So I will go ahead and register
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this and throw up the world’s crappiest single-serving site. And you did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s good. It’s funny. I’m proud of you for even doing this joke.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It originally was coffee is stupid and then I felt like that didn’t have the same ring to it as coffee is silly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re so polite even in your trolling.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had a domain registered for the flop house for a couple of years, but I just let it expire in
⏹️ ▶️ John protest because no one would accurately represent the joke I was making on that website.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course. Of course.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey frustrating. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re talking about like paying $25 for a year. Like I think I paid for three years, maybe it was even four years
⏹️ ▶️ John of that domain and it had nothing, it was nothing but a redirect. Like it was the whole point of the domain is like, oh, if you type
⏹️ ▶️ John this, you’ll get Those redirects aren’t as much fun. Back in the days when, if you were
⏹️ ▶️ John in the circle of Mac users, all the popular Mac browsers would first append, I forget which
⏹️ ▶️ John order they, the first appended .com and then www.com or the reverse. But if you typed any word, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what they did. Before the age of the various awesome bars and integrated search address
⏹️ ▶️ John bar, if you just typed a word by itself into your address bar, it would try the.com and or the
⏹️ ▶️ John www.com. And that was a cool way to navigate, but that that time has passed.
⏹️ ▶️ John So half the time people just type stuff and they end up with a Google search anyway. So you are
⏹️ ▶️ John getting a domain. It’s not as much fun as it used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to do titles real fast before Snell steals you from us? Three people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are never wrong. Oh, that was about the chat room. You failed me last time. Chat room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When in Star Wars was that I’m going to really, really get everyone to hate me.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no mention of the chat room in Star Wars. Don’t look for it. What?
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, I said, there’s no mention of the chat room in Star Wars. Don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, no, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mentioned the chat room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know you failed me for the last time. Admiral. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, that does ring a vague bell. I haven’t seen Star Wars movies in years. Um, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not the same line. That was a line in a similar scene. Does your member and Emperor Strikes Back? I couldn’t even tell you the plot of Empire
⏹️ ▶️ John Strikes Back. Darth Vader is mad at people. Darth Vader is mad mad at people because they’re doing things wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John and he kills them. And why does he kill them? Because he failed them for the last time. He’ll be dead
⏹️ ▶️ John now, you see, so he can’t fail them anymore. It’s very complicated.