TechStuff Grab Bag: The Update Edition

change even faster. And some of the episodes that I have recorded in the last few months have already needed some updates. None of them really need a full episode as an update, however, So today's episode is going to be about a collection of updates on things that I have covered in the past few months since the outbreak of the pandemic. The first episode that I recorded at home was in the series that I did about the

history of PlayStation uh. The first one was actually PlayStation Part three and the second one was PlayStation Part four. And now since then we've had a brand new console, the PS five debut. It came out on Thursday, November twelve, and I am recording this on Friday. Also, for some reason, there is a guy in a hockey mask totally getting in my personal space, but we'll just ignore him for now.

When I recorded those episodes, we had an announcement about the PS five and a few details about the console, but that was about it. However, now it's out, it's

actually available for people to purchase, well kind of. We'll get to that, and we can talk about some of the specs of the PS five and how it contrasts with its chief rival, the Xbox Series consoles A, particularly the the Series X, although the Series S is also in play, and I'll be sure to talk about those a little bit as well, to give you some updates on on those. Now, first things first, we got to talk about how big this ding dang darn thing is. Now.

I do not own a p S five yet. I do plan on getting one eventually, and I also plan on getting a Series X console eventually, but I'm not in a rush to grab them right now, which is probably a good thing. I've seen photos of the PS five and I thought, wow, that's really big once I had something to compare it to, particularly a photo that had Trish Hershberger in it. Now, she's a tech journalist,

She's an awesome person. I've met her a couple of times great person, and she shared a photo of herself standing next to a PS five and said it's big enough to be considered about half of a Trish. Now. To be fair, Trish is a total Hermia from Midsummer Night's Dream. Though she be but little, she is fierce. And what I mean to say is that Trish is um. She's not very tall. The PS five, however, is tall,

at least as far as consoles go. It's fifteen point four inches tall to be precise, that's just shy of thirty centimeters. It's also ten point two four inches deep or twenty six centimeters, and it's four point zero nine inches wide or approximately ten point four centimeters. Now, that's if you have it standing upright and not down on its side. You can have it either way, uh, depending on your setup. But no matter how you position it that right there is a chalker. It weighs in at

fourteen pounds that's about six point four kgrams. So part of the early discussion about the PS five is really just that it's so large that it can actually be a challenge to fit into an entertainment set up, depending upon the size you're working with. It also has the white wing like sides and a black center of the console. That's led some people to call it a reverse ice cream sandwich, where you would have the ice cream on the outside and the cookie bread in the middle. There

are actually two different models of the PS five. One of them has a four K Blu Ray optical drive and the other one does not. And the one that does have the drive is the one that's a touch chunkier. That's the one that's the four point nine inches wide.

The digital only version is slightly more svelt. The Blu Ray drive version costs four dollars at least as the suggested retail price, and the digital only PS five is at three um digital only, being digital only delivery, the console is physical, but apart from the optical drive, those two systems are the same internally. They have the same processors, same memory, same same storage, same performance. This is one of the things that sets the two PS five consoles

apart from the two new Xbox consoles. One of the features that got hyped in the lead up to the PS five debut was that the system would load games much more quickly than the PS four, and we didn't have very many details about what this would actually mean,

I mean, what does more quickly mean? And fortunately the Verge, whom I referenced a lot for this particular part of the episode, they have a helpful table that breaks down how long it took the PS five versus PS four to load certain titles that are available for both platforms.

And that's also a good reminder that early in the lifespan of these next generation consoles, we're going to see a lot of cross platform titles that are available either for the previous generation or the more fancy schmancy new

generation of consoles. There will be and there are games that are made specifically for the new generation, but a lot of those titles are going to be available both for PS four and PS five, which makes sense if you're a developer, because you want to sell as many copies as you possibly can, and maybe not everybody's going after a brand new console just now. Anyway, onto the load times. To fire up the new game Spider Man Miles Morales and I can't wait to play that one.

But to fire that up on the PS four takes about a minute and twenty seven seconds, but on the PS five it was just seventeen seconds. Owls Now that's not to say all loading times will have that dramatic a difference or will be that fast. Death Stranding, which is a game that's been out for a while now, will load up in a minute fifty seconds on the PS four, and the PS five does it in fifty four seconds. So the PS five is faster, definitely, but not every game is going to load as quickly as

the New Spider Man game does. Moreover, if we see the PS five follow the same path as most hardware, it will only be a matter of time before game developers release games that tax the loading speed of the PS five, and we'll be back to waiting two minutes or more for certain titles to load up. That's just the nature of hardware and software, and it ties into an observation called Worth's law. Worth's law states that software is getting slower at a rate that's greater than hardware

is getting faster. So the hardware is getting faster, but software is getting slower faster than the hardware is getting faster, if you follow me. Essentially, it's an observation about software bloat and how as software gets more sophisticated, it does not necessarily become more efficient as well anyway. Another related

issue is in storage space. The PS five solid state drive is eight five gigabytes, but again according to the verge of that, only six hundred and sixty seven point two gigabytes are actually available for storage for games and stuff. The rest of that hard drive space is reserved for system data, or I guess I should say the rest of the solid state drive space as a reserved for that system data. The six hundred sixty seven gigabytes is

a lot. That's a lot of storage, no doubt about it, But some recent games that have just come out not too long ago are truly enormous, topping in it more than a hundred gigabytes for just one title, and some of them are getting close to a hundred fifty gigabytes

or more. When you take that into a count, the massive amount of storage really means you might only be able to have four or five Triple A titles stored on your PS five and ready to go at any given time, and other times you may have to uninstalled games in order to install a new one, so that

makes things a little tricky. Now. The PS five does have a slot for additional Sony certified solid state drives, to be added in so you can increase your storage, but there's no word yet on when those will actually be available. Reviews of other elements of PS five performance

are a little more modest. The console can put out four K resolution graphics with hd R and ray tracing and all that stuff, which is, you know, all about the visual appeal of this device, but these things only matter if one you happen to have a television that supports four K and HDR. If you don't, all that's going to be lost on you and to the people who are making the games have to be able to

leverage those capabilities. They have to create assets in the game that use these features so that you can, you know, enjoy the benefits of them. So many of the reviews that I have seen uh say that the games definitely look better, but that the improvements and graphics are fairly subtle, Like the jump in graphic quality isn't as great as you have seen in previous generations, And that kind of

makes sense to me. We're at a point of diminishing returns when it comes to stuff like graphics and video. There will always be room for improvement, but the jump from one generation to the next is going to be less obvious. It's not like going from eight bit graphics to sixteen bit graphics, or when we got up to sixty four bit graphics. Now the improvements are more polish than they are transformational. This isn't bad, mind you. It

just means that the graphics are aren't necessarily a show stopper. However, the way the game's load and run seems to be spectacular based on the reviews. And on top of that, reviewers have said really good things about the new PS five controller. In the last PlayStation episode that I did, I said we had yet to see the controller. Now that we have seen it, folks are really digging it. The triggers on the controller have variable tension and haptic

feedback built into them. Now that means that a game developer can create situations in which using the triggers feels different specific to whatever the context is within the game. So, for example, imagine you've got a game in which your character has a bow and they are drawing an arrow back with that bow, and the trigger that you're using is linking to that command to draw the arrow back. So as you squeeze the trigger, you feel an initial

resistance which represents the tension on the bowstring. But let's say in another part of the game, you need to use the same trigger to just pick up a small item, and this time you feel very little resistance as you pull the trigger, which represents how easy that action is within the game to your character. So it's a neat way to add some immersive qualities to a game. You can stress that this thing that you're having your character do is harder for your character to do because you've

increased the tension on the control itself. I think that's pretty genius. The controller can also make a lot of different kinds of vibrations. Gone are the simple days of the basic rumble pack. Now the vibrating motors inside the controller can be manipulated to simulate everything from you know, walking across crunchy leaves to flying through a war zone

in a helicopter. And I think Sony is in better shape when it comes to exclusive titles for the PS five compared to Microsoft and situation with the new Xbox consoles. The pandemic has had an enormous impact on the development cycle for games, and it's also done a serious number

on supply chain management. So it's actually pretty impressive that the console and any games are coming out at all, and not surprisingly, it could be a real challenge to find a p S five or an Xbox right now because supplies were limited due to that impact on production. But let's switch over to the Xbox for just a few moments, and switching is a good thing to start with, as one of the features on the new Xbox Series S and the Series X is the quick resume technology.

So say you're playing a game and maybe you hit a spot where you're not making much progress and you're getting frustrated, so you decide you're gonna take a break from playing that game and switch to something else. Maybe it's another game, maybe it's a video, but the Series X will suspend your gameplay in the active game as you swap over to your other task. And then you let's say you load up a second game and you're

playing that. Then you decide, you know what, I want to go back to my original game, So you back out to your little splash menu and you swap back over to the original game you were playing, and boom, you're right back in it, and it's super fast. The Series X and Series S are effectively putting their fingers on a page in a book for you, so you can just flip right back to that page without any real delay. You don't have to wait for the game to load back up into the system's memory. It's pretty

impressive to see. And what's going on is that your game state from game number one is sort of flash frozen into storage memory on the Xbox, and this memory is really handy to the Xbox processor, so when you swap back to the game, the processor can just fetch the game state from memory rather than having to root around in the solid state drive for that information. As a feature, I think it follows under the quality of life category. It's not transformational, but it's really nice to have.

The quick resume feature can accommodate between four and six games, depending on how complex those games are. One big selling point for the Xbox. Something that has been important since the very beginning is backwards compatibility. Sony has had a kind of spotty past when it comes to supporting games from older consoles. The company has made more dramatic departures from older system architecture, which makes it harder to adapt

older games to later systems. The p S three in particular was a real challenge because the microprocessor architecture, while powerful, was very different from earlier PS state systems. So the Xbox follows a philosophy that's much closer to what we see with PC games, which really should surprise no body. And one of the attractions of the Series X and Series S consoles is that you can play older games on those systems and you'll end up getting an enhanced

upscaled experience in the process. So you can pull up a real classic game like I don't know, Crimson Skies, I hope, and it should look pretty good. It's not going to magically, you know, convert up to four K resolution. It doesn't. It's not gonna measure up to the level of graphics you would see with a brand new game release, but it will look better than it would on the old original Xbox in theory. Anyway. I haven't actually tested

this out because I don't have an Xbox yet. I just really like that game, you know, Crimson Skies is an awesome game, and I really want to play it again. Remake Crimson Skies, Xbox, go and go and make a you know, a new current generation version of Crimson Skies that game is amazing. Now, I allude did to it earlier, and I've talked about it in other episodes. But Microsoft has taken a different approach than Sony has with the

two tiers of Xbox consoles. So the Xbox Series X is the one that has the optical drive, and it costs four dollars, just like Sony's top level PS five, but it also is a more advanced machine than the digital only Series S is. The Series X has more data storage, it's got a faster processor, it can support four K gaming. The Series S is limited to fourteen

four DP resolution for gaming. So while the two models of the PS five are identical except for one of them has an optical drive, the Series X is better future proofed than the Series S is. On the other hand, the Series S comes in at two dollars, which makes it one hundred bucks cheaper than the least expensive PS

five one that doesn't have an optical drive. Also, the Series S and the Series X have a one terabyte storage expansion slot, where you can purchase uh an extra SSD up of a terrabyte and plug it into the back and thus more than double the amount of storage in your Xbox I think Microsoft is going to struggle a little bit on the game front, at least for new games, because many titles that were meant to debut along with the console have since been delayed by at

least a few months. And again that's largely the pandemic having an effect in addition to the normal issues we see with game development where there can be delays. But Microsoft also has game Pass, which is a subscription based service that gives players access to more than one hundred

titles if they subscribe to it. So rather than buying games, you subscribe to the service and that gives you access to these games and you can play stuff that maybe you overlooked or maybe you never had the cat to buy that particular title back in the day, and a lot of game journalists refer to it as the best deal in gaming, and it's kind of hard to argue

with that. So let's say that I, Jonathan Strickland, have recently upgraded my television because honestly, the one I have right now is an outdated, regular old h d t V. It's not even a smart TV. This hd TV is from several years ago, works just fine, so I've never replaced it. But let's say that I go ahead and I upgrade. Now I've got a decision to make. Do I go with the PS five or do I go

with the Xbox. This is legit a tough question for me, because, for one thing, I'm I'm an Xbox die hard fan, but I don't you know, I don't immediately fall into a camp of Xbox good, PS five bad. The new games for the PS five look insanely good, Spider Man in particular, and Microsoft looks to lag behind a little bit due to those production delays. On the other hand, the game Pass deal is fantastic, and I'm all a subscriber.

But by that same logic, I could just continue to access game Pass on my Xbox One and then wait around a little bit longer to upgrade to a series console. In fact, I would probably do that even if I had the brand new, fancy television. I would probably get the PS five to start off and have a goal to get a series X later in the future. Now that's a moot point for me because I do not currently have a four K TV, so a lot of

these enhancements would not matter. I wouldn't be able to see them because my television wouldn't be able to show them. And also I don't have a whole lot of time to play a lot of stuff right now. That's just a bummer. But when we come back, I'm going to talk about something else that needs to be updated, a video streaming service that I covered during the pandemic that ain't round here no more. But first, let's take a quick break on August, which feels like a million years ago.

I know everyone says that, but man, it feels like this year has just lasted forever. Well anyway, On August seventeenth, I published an episode about Quimby, the streaming video platform that had been in development for a couple of years and had some big names in technology and entertainment behind it. And that episode is called Quimby Quibble if you want

to check it out. I talked about how the original concept for Quimby, which would feature short form videos that lasted about ten minutes each, was intended to go after a market of folks, mostly young folks, who are looking to pass the time while waiting to do other stuff like maybe they're on a train, or they're waiting in line for a coffee or whatever, and how the pandemic was eliminating the very use case that Quimby was based off of, and I concluded with some skepticism about the

long or viability of the platform, which I didn't think was particularly promising. Well, it's been a couple of weeks since the announcement in late October, but Quimby is sadly officially shutting down, and I hate that. I was right to be skeptical, and let's be fair, it was the only reasonable point of view to take given the circumstances. So I'm not really giving myself any credit here. It's like looking at the ocean and saying, I bet it's wet in there. It was kind of obvious on the

face of it. I take no pleasure in the failure because I think Quimby was giving a lot of really creative people an opportunity to do what they love to do, and seeing something like that go away just stinks. But at the same time, I think the decision to pull the plug was the most responsible thing to do. So we're going to take a look at the short span of time from August to October to see what happened. Now,

let me give a super quick recap of Quimby. I already mentioned the use case for the platform the short form videos of about ten minutes in length. Some projects, like some of the videos on Quimby, were a lot like a television series, with each episode being ten minutes right in a ten minute episode, but some were more like feature films that got divided up into ten minute chapters, which presents a challenge when crafting a story, but we'll get to that. Some were fiction, some were in the

reality TV space. Some fell into the category of news or coverage of stuff like sports or lifestyle. It was a pretty broad approach to entertainment as a whole, just that it was all in a bite sized form factor, and the guiding logic was that people are using their phones to watch stuff more than ever, and frequently do so to fill up time where they normally would be

doing nothing or at least nothing much. Quimby was meant to tap into the psyche of the TikTok fan base or snapchat platforms that excel in the present sentation of short form video clips. But Quimby would marry that with the original programming and high production value that you find

in services like Netflix. So yeah, kind of bringing together the Netflix model and putting that with the TikTok model, though the videos on Quimby were really, on the whole much longer than anything you would have ever seen on TikTok. On top of that, the service had a mobile specific feature that many saws nothing more than really a gimmick,

and some folks just outright hated it. And it was called Turnstile, and it let you switch between portrait viewing and landscape viewing on a mobile device, and all the content would be produced with this in mind, so that you would get a full frame presentation in either format. In other words, you wouldn't get black bars on top and below the video. When you switched it over to portrait, it would become a portrait view, and it would be design in such a way where theoretically, at least you

weren't missing anything important. But you have to remember that in portrait view it means that you have a narrower view of what's going on, so some stuff that would typically be in frame might not even be on camera. So the service really was going all in on the

mobile centric presentation of video. The two main people at the helm of Quimby were Jeffrey Catzenberg, former Disney and DreamWorks executive and Meg Whitman, former CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprises, and in the year leading up to Quimby's launched, they both appeared on stage together at various conferences and events pitching the service, talking about taking aim at a market that, while I wouldn't say was underserved, hadn't been explicitly catered to.

I mean, people watch videos on mobile devices all the time, but Quimby was meant to fit neatly into that style of viewing from the get go. So the thought was, if we make content designed to be watched on mobile devices in short spans at high production value, you we will hit that sweet spot for people who are already using their devices to do that, but the content doesn't

conform to the use. Quimby launched with a free trial period, after which users would be asked to choose a subscription plan, and there were two available here in the United States. The lower plan was four dollars nine cents a month, and that gave you access to add supported videos on Quimby, so you still had ads between videos. For seven a month, you would get the videos, but with no ads, the content was exclusive to the platform, and it was highly produced.

Like I said, you wouldn't find it anywhere else. But the question was would the variety and quality of content be enough to convince a large enough subscriber base to make the operation profitable. Producing content is really expensive, whether you're funding it directly or you're negotiating with content creators who fund production in return for a contract with the platform.

There was little hope that quimby would operate at a profit right away, as just the cost of making stuff would mean there would be a growing gap to cover with revenue before it could turn a profit now. In my previous episode about Quimby, I talked about how the

service was on uncertain ground. Even back in July, just a couple of months after the service had launched, news outlets like The Verge reported that quimby was losing around nine of users once the free trial concluded, at least for those users who signed up during the first few days of the app becoming available. Actually, it's a little

worse than that. The opening sentence of that Verge article says streaming service Quimby only managed to convert a little under ten percent of its early wave of users into

paying customers, says mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower. So imagine you have ten people together and you give each of those ten people a a slice of your delicious homemade pie, and afterwards you ask any of them who here wants to buy a pie so you can take it home for your family, and only one of them takes you up on the offer, and even that person is not super jazzed about it. That's not great, and it's way worse when that apple pie is actually a streaming video

content service with nearly two billion dollars of investment behind it. That, uh, that's some apple pie. Still as bad as that sounds, the Verge piece goes on to explain that in the grand scheme of business, this isn't as big of a disaster as it seems like. On the face of it, an eight percent conversion rate, that is, getting eight percent of your audience to commit to a paid subscription isn't the worst, but compared to other services like Disney Plus,

it was pretty far behind. Disney Plus had an eleven percent conversion rate. So on the face of it, you might even say, well, that doesn't sound like it's that much. I mean, eight percent to eleven percent. What's the big deal? However, it had You gotta look at the scale. Quimby signed up nd people in the first few days of going live, and that meant that about seventy two thousand of them converted into subscribers. But Disney Plus nine point five million

people signed up for a trial for Disney Plus. So it wasn't just that it was a larger percentage of a conversion rate, it was also a much bigger scale. Quimby tried to recover as it became clear that the mobile centric focus was more of a an albatross around

the company's neck rather than a selling point. Quimby began to work with set top box devices to produce apps for them so that people could watch the content of Quimby on their televisions rather than just on their phones or tablets, and at first the solutions involved services like Apple Airplay or Google Chrome Cast to you know, cast the content of a phone or tablet to a device

that's connected to a television. Just before word came out that Quimby was going to shut down, Variety reported that the company had created apps for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Google TV Slash Android TV. In addition, the company had been in negotiations with Roku to get on there as well, but all that focus on the mobile experience was a real issue for the company. We'll never know if Quimby would have thrived in a world that wasn't

hit by the COVID nineteen pandemic. I mean, I think it still would have faced an uphill battle even without the pandemic, but it is clear that the pandemic really shaped how people were accessing media because most of us just weren't out and about as much and had less of a need to be glued to our mobile devices. Meanwhile, the company spent money on some fairly luxurious digs for

a corporate headquarters. Now, arguably, in the business that is show this is a necessity, as having a cool space is a great way to impress potential content partners and to get them on board. I've seen it happened at iHeart, in fact, so you could argue that this is understandable, but it's also an expense and a pretty hefty one, and in a business where things are not going so hot, it can be something that critics will point to when

they discuss bad decisions. However, if Quimby had been successful. I'm not sure the nitro coal brew on tap or the sleek glass offices would have merited much discussion. I don't know that anyone would have pointed it out. Perhaps in an act of desperation, Quimby tested out a freemium version of its service in Australia and in New Zealand. So there you could sign up for a free account and you could watch ads supported Quimby content to your heart's content. You could still sign up for a paid

subscription and you could go add free as well. Perhaps the company was dipping its toe into the water to see if, may be it could entice enough users to adopt the service if ads were the only revenue generating avenue for the basic subscription. But it turned out that free, just I guess, wasn't cheap enough for people, because the offer did not receive that many takers, and as far as I can tell, Quimby didn't really try it anywhere else.

So a little more than six months after it launched, and after raising more than one point seven five billion dollars from investors ranging from the Walt Disney Company to JP Morgan Chasing Company to the Chinese mega corporation, Ali Baba Katzenberg called an employee meeting to break the bad

news the company was going to shut down. The three million dollars of cash on hand would be redistributed to the various investors, which raised questions from content creators about how or even if they would be paid for their work, questions that, as far as I can tell, have not mostly been answered, which is pretty darn rough now. Depending upon which report you read, the announcement either wasn't a surprise to most employees or it came as a total shock.

It seems like there's a bit of a discrepancy there. It's hard for me to imagine it as shocking. Not only was the company facing the challenges I had already mentioned, it was also doing so in an environment where content creation was either screeching to a halt or having to change dramatically to work within the pandemic era. Quimby had spent a lot of money on content production early on. They frontloaded the service with a lot of original programming

to attract users. But a service like Quimby needs to generate new content to refresh offerings on a regular basis, and the pandemic just isn't a great time to try and produce studio quality video content. A lot of people have adjusted to working from home studios or at least very limited sets in local aations, but it is still hard to do, and there's still a risk of someone getting sick, and if someone does get sick, that can shut down an entire production for a couple of weeks.

It was a pretty bad scenario, perhaps a worst case one. And maybe it's more accurate to say that people were surprised at the timing of the announcement, not that it happened, but just that it happened so early. Quimby had just secured apps on those set top boxes I mentioned earlier, and it had raised an enormous amount of investment money that there was kind of a general belief that could at least be able to stick around a little bit longer to see if perhaps it can make everything work.

But Katzenberg made the decision to call it quits in order to avoid losing more investor money. And that was probably a pretty wise decision on his part, because I suspect he will want to launch other businesses in the future, and it would be way easier to do that if he wasn't burning bridges. Between now and then, around two people lost their jobs as a result of Quimby shutting down.

And then there are the various production studios, the content creators, the crews, and all the other people who are impacted because their work was for projects that were based on Quimby. Behind the scenes, there was a lot of turnover at the executive level, with stories leaking that working with Whitman and Catzenberg could be challenging. Catzenberg in particular, has a reputation for micro managing. The service will continue operating until December one, when it will then all shut down, and

I think it's a shame from multiple perspectives. It is a huge challenge to get something made with real production value. If you're a content creator, there just aren't that many opportunities. For every TV show or film that you see, there are hundreds of ideas that never make it, and some of them never even get a chance. Some of them are just never even glanced at. So anytime there is an opportunity for a creative person to realize their vision,

I think that's kind of special. And Quimby also created an interesting challenge. It's not necessarily a good challenge, but an interesting one. And that's this. With content divided up into ten minute videos, you have to structure your story to fit the format. Now, ideally you would end a video in such a way that people would want to see the next episode or the next segment of your movie.

So if you make a movie that's essentially twelve ten minute long videos, that means you've got to craft eleven cliffhangers that lead towards a satisfying conclusion. It becomes the Dan Brown novel of films. And this is really hard to sustain. I think of shows like twenty four, a television series in which episodes take place in real time over the course of twenty four hours. Uh that's a twenty four episodes per season, with each episode lasting one hour.

The beginning and the end of a season of twenty four hends to be pretty amazing, and the middle tends to be less amazing, as writers are trying to find out ways that they can keep the momentum going from episode to episode in order to get to their conclusion. I imagine the same thing was true for a lot of Quimby creators. Still, this segment is for you, Quimby. We hardly knew ye. In fact, some of us didn't

know ye at all. Next, we'll look at a few other stories I talked about after lockdown and how things have changed in just a few months. But first let's take another quick break. One of the other series of episodes that I tackled while working from home was about Panasonic, and this should be a pretty quick update right here.

Panasonic's president at the time of those episodes was a man named kasu Hiro Suga, who technically he's still the president right now, but he had the unenviable task of reversing Panasonics slide into losses under the leadership of the previous president, Fumio Otsubo. Now where it comes that Suga plans to step down by June of one. His replacement will be Yuki Kusumi. Kusumi, like Suga, worked largely in

the automotive component division of Panasonic. The company also announced that by twenty twenty two, it would change the company's structure and convert it into a holding company, with each division within Panasonic operating more as its own separate entity. And the intent here is to make it more clear what the deliverables are for each division within the company, and also to free up leaders to make their decisions

more quickly and without any bureaucratic red tape. Now. I also did an episode about TikTok, the video social networking service that I mentioned earlier. In this episode, when I was talking about Quimby and when I last left off about TikTok, I mentioned that there was this growing pressure for TikTok to split off from the Chinese parent company Byte Dance, and that there were a few American company suitors that were toying with the idea of an acquisition.

The deadline for severing ties to that parent company in China fell in mid November, which is you know now ish. In fact, as I recorded, that deadline was yesterday, November twelve. UH News recently broke that TikTok's deadline has now had a fifteen day extension. This was not because of some sort of leniency granted by the US government, but rather because the US government failed to do anything after the

deadline passed and then negotiated a new deadline. But to be fair for those of US not paying attention, the US government has had a few other concerns going on right now, including the aforementioned pandemic and the fall out of the twenty twenty election, and boy, howdy is it a fun time to be paying attention to politics now.

There wasn't so much threat of things changing significantly for TikTok anyway, even if the government had tried to go through with this deadline, because in various court cases, federal judges have decided against the Trump administration and blocked the orders that the administration was was leveling to ban US

companies from having transactions with TikTok. In other words, advertisers wouldn't be able to advertise on TikTok's platform, that kind of thing, and those orders were struck down in federal courts. So with those judgments in place, the government really didn't have a whole lot of pressure that it could put on TikTok. So it's kind of like someone saying, you'd better not do that again, or I'll tell you not

to do it again. It's hardly an intimidating threat. Meanwhile, China has grown quite hostile to this whole situation, and since any deal would require cooperation between China and US companies and authorities, that presents a big challenge as well. Now what do I think about all this, Well, I mean, I'm still not a huge TikTok fan. From the perspective of personal security and privacy. I think it's fine for what it's doing except for that security and privacy side.

But that's like all social networking sites, right. TikTok collects a lot of information about users, and that information is going to a company, in this case a company that happens to be owned by a Chinese parent company. That does cause me a little concern, But then I also feel concerned regarding US owned social networking sites. Do I feel TikTok is more dangerous than say, Facebook, No, I actually think Facebook is at least as big of a concern as TikTok, and probably a bigger concern from a

security and privacy point of view. And and it's it's potential to do things like undermine the democratic process. I

think Facebook's the bigger threat. But this is all complicated by the fact that the timing of the US government's escalation in opposition to TikTok seemed to fall in line with a big prank that the TikTok community pulled on the Trump campaign staff during the lead up to the election, and that has led some people to hypothesize that the US scrutiny is fueled not through some concern for national security, but rather due to vindictiveness. Now I have no idea

what's going on at this point. If I'm being honest, I don't know what the motivations are. Really. The whole thing is a big, confusing mess. What I do know is I'm just about fed up with all social networking sites out there. In fact, I got off Facebook, although admittedly I'm still on it. Are a lot so I'm not free of it. Oh. Another story I talked about was Epic Games versus Apple, and here's a quick rundown.

Epic Games publishes many games, among them one called Fortnite, which is available on lots of different platforms, including Apple's iOS. Epic has micro transactions within the game. The game itself is free to download, but then micro transactions are how Epic makes money off of it. So players can spend real world money to buy digital assets to customize their characters in Fortnite. You give them specific costumes and dances

and that kind of thing. Apple's policy is to take a cut of all transactions that occur within apps that are in the Apple App Store, a thirty percent cut. In fact, Epic Games decided to try and sidestep this, and that gave iOS players an option to buy in game currency separately from iOS, so you could get more in game value for your real world dollar, because there wasn't a markup to compensate for that thirty cut that

Apple would have taken otherwise. Then Apple went nuclear on Epic for violating terms of service, and they removed Fortnite from the Apple App Store. And then they said to Epic, hey, anything you guys are working on, we are no longer going to support in iOS. And since that happens to include game engines like the Unreal Game Engine, which Epic is responsible for, and since many other game developers rely on that particular game engine to power their own games,

this represented a huge problem. So Epic sued Apple for anti competitive conduct. Apple filed a couple of counterclaims on Epic, saying that Epic was intentionally interfering with Apple's business. The judge would throw out Apple's counterclaims, saying that Apple was on the losing side of this particular argument, But the story is far from over. However, it did represent a

set back for Apple. Also back in October, a judge found in favor of Epic when it came to the banning of that game engine I mentioned, the Unreal engine. The judge restrained Apple from removing support for the engine, which was a huge win for Epic. You might even call it an Epic win, but the judge didn't go so far as to grant an injunction against Apple that would have seen Fortnite get returned to the Apple App Store.

One judge proposed a trial date for the summer of one to settle the whole thing, but so far both Epic and Apple have indicated that they would really rather have a case where a judge decides the outcome as opposed to a jury trial. So we'll see what happens next. And a couple of other real quick updates on the

update on the deep fake story I did. While deep fakes didn't really play that much of a role in the lead up to the election in the United States, there were fears that we would be flooded with fabricated videos,

but those proved largely be unfounded fears. There was no shortage of misinformation, and there were plenty of misinformation video clips, but these were mostly video clips that were taken out of context, so they were actual video clips of real people, not deep fakes, but they were edited in such a way to make it seem like a person was saying something that they weren't really saying. So we didn't see a big influx of deep fakes, but we were still

flooded with lies in misdirections. So yeah. I also did an update on the G four TV episode I recorded much earlier, and I did a little talk about the network's upcoming resurrection currently scheduled for Since that update, there's been a couple of others. There were rumors that Olivia Munn is in talks to potentially return as a host of a G four TV program. I think that could

be great if all parties can find agreeable terms. G four has also continued to put out casting calls for new shows, including a casting call that was a video that had original G four TV and and before that, Tech TV host Adam Sessler as a character called Crazy Adam calling for people to come on down and submit applications. I'm certain there are a lot more updates. I could probably tackle, but these were the ones that really stood

out to me. Since my office went into lockdown on March that also was a Friday, So I left the office on Friday the thirteenth, and I'm recording this episode on the next Friday. How about that. Now, I plan on dipping into the archives now and then and giving up dates on old Tech Stuff episodes. Some of the episodes that I've done about companies are now a few years old at this point, and those are almost certainly due for an update, at least for the companies that

are still around today. But if you guys have any suggestions on episodes that I should follow up on, or even brand new episode ideas, let me hear them. The best place to get in touch with me is over on Twitter. Just tweet at the show text Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.