Gadgetory

good morning on Tuesday October 25th it's episode 129 of the 359 podcast and we are gearing up for Microsoft big event good morning jounin been how are you hey thanks for having us hey everybody thanks for having us again we're going to be talking about Microsoft's event that's going to be coming out tomorrow 10 a.m. eastern 7 a.m. pacific so wake up really really early if you're a super duper Microsoft fan will also be discussing Friday's DDoS attack and also Twitter's expected layoffs as always send in your comments and questions and try to be nice to me about Microsoft questions not to specific because I might not know everything there is to know about microsoft office but i will try to gamely answer as many questions as you can with the help of brian and joan so okay Jon Snow yeah either way let's kick it off all right let's start the recording of the podcast will be back answer your questions and exactly 3 minutes and 59 seconds from 32 welcome to the 359 where we talk about the top tech news of the day plus whatever crap we want to throw in I'm Ben Fox ribbon and I'm Joanie salzman so tomorrow Microsoft will host a hardware launch event but a lot of the best-known products aren't expected to show up there likely won't be news on Microsoft Office or Microsoft band or a new microsoft surface pro but then what will be there we may see this could be interesting this could be interesting i'm gonna try to get excited about this there may be a new surface branded all-in-one desktop right on is that yeah is that is that right on I think I mean that is correct that is correct that is the best rumors that we actually have like an all-in-one desktop you know like they've been doing really well with the surface tablets the surface book seemed pretty interesting when they announced that last year like a desktop does this make sense to you well I think that it's noteworthy in a sense that it's something that Apple hasn't done you know like that's a place where they're all in when they don't have a touchscreen all-in-one for total Mac right so that at least if nothing else it puts Microsoft in a contrast with Apple providing something that Apple hasn't gotten so you can like touch the screen if you feel like it yeah yeah which you know as I'm sure you know and I know like in today's world people are getting used to the idea that you can touch every screen if it doesn't work you get annoyed yes absolutely i'm trying to do that right now that's not working so there's also the potential that they're going to announce or provide more details on their ugh mented and virtual reality effort which is called windows holographic is this something that you see taking off that somebody's going to like put on a hollow lens and start I don't know doing though like work updating their spreadsheets yeah doing their Excel species and talking to a virtual dog yeah go fetch my document virtual dog I don't see it I don't I think like maybe that's like gonna be like super future tech or something but like I don't really see the possibility that a lot of people are really gonna jump into that kind of technology it doesn't know it does seem a little hackneyed doesn't to kind of force where Microsoft has a lot of skill set which is in you know office kind of like documents right things to force that into the gov'ment of reality or a virtual reality you sort of use when I mean people are gonna start using virtual reality or augment really for gaming and for entertainment and like not once they get used to it yeah not spreadsheets it's necessarily so the event kicks off at ten a.m. eastern tomorrow will be live streamed check us out at cnet com will be writing all about it next our cybersecurity reporter Laura hatala wrote a follow-up on Fridays big DDoS attack she explains how DVRs and security cameras are very easy to hack because they're so easy to access remotely these days so to me this shows that like technology convenience can come at a price which to me makes a lot of sense and a lot of what I've read about that attack is is that these are supposed to you're supposed to end up with more of these and more severe ones coming into the future right I mean there's so much especially right now there's so much emphasis on packing and how it can disrupt elections how can do anything and the fact that very popular services on the internet were brought down for most of one day because so many people just don't change their passwords yeah from admin admin password yeah yeah it just makes it totally default passwords yeah I could be a hacker you could be a hacker I can do that I would love to do that no I'm kidding that's a horrible thing to do last twitter is expected to announce hundreds of job cuts and the as the company continues to struggle financially I mean I feel like every single time we talk about Twitter on this show it's to really I don't know sad trombone those guys do they do they have a chance they almost got bought but then everybody was like no thank you I mean they're definitely I mean this is a sign that they're going to be retrenching they're going to be re-evaluating where they need to stand in terms of how many people they have how much money they're spending how much money they need in order to continue to go but I don't think you don't think Twitter is going to disappear I don't think now a great disappear but like there's nothing sadder than like a social network where like you know all the rats are fleeing so anyway if you want to read more about these stories check us out on cnet I'm Ben Fox Rubin & I'm Jenny salzman thanks for listening we don't have should I always do that we forget so ghagra from back obviously it's just probably it's just a YouTube thing um so we don't have a ton of questions by our conversation going on with thank God no no just you know who doesn't hate DDoS attacks but hey Joan are you new has anyone seen you before i have i've been alive in this world for more than 30 years and I've been on yes you don't look a day over 29 we love it so it says that's what you say yes you're buttering me up Joan sits next to me and she's my awesome buddy I brought Ben is here then been sprung into existence like a pokeymon at Cena thanks thanks to me yes and I'm always grateful you can send all your fruit baskets and flowers to me for making been your lives and see me yeah and we've been shown on the on the podcast every so often especially to talk about hey can we talk a little bit about time Warner thinking it was you yeah I would be very happy to hear some of your insights so the time warner 18-team deal it's very important in terms of media like industry chessboard landscape stuff it's very important for a really big company in our country which is AT&T but in terms of how it's going to affect people on the ground normal folks it's really not going to it's going to be kind of a non-event if it goes through or doesn't presuming that for it to get approval for it even happen it's going to have a bunch of regulatory conditions set upon by root ball so we saw conditions similar so the last time we had a situation like this was when comcast was taking over NBC Universal and even though the conditions that were put on that deal have gotten a lot of criticism for not being easily and for being difficult to enforce and therefore not very effective I mean it'd be I'd be hard-pressed to find a consumer that's really really pissed off about NBC writing part of what I'm change because nothing like nothing really changed your comcast bill still went up because all cable bills don't went up it's not like that was unusual and the complaints that sprung out of that deal are things like Bloomberg TV was not pleased with its number it's like channel number being so far apart from other like like CNBC like he like they wanted those to be close together so if you're watching CNBC which is an NBC own thing on the comcast grid then you'd be able to find Bloomberg very easily and they were separated so those are the kind of compelling ho hum I never liked that means like Bloomberg's annoyed by that but just get a number your money for that care of Bloomberg people and number of consumers like care about stuff like that it's pretty small and also the grid is going away in like a year and a half anyway so it doesn't even matter interesting yeah so in case anybody's interested I didn't provide necessary context joan is our digital media guru so that's why i asked her about this and it's very interesting and it also we talked about this a little bit on the show yesterday that content providers want to distribute as widely as possible which is why you know Game of Thrones or whatever else is going to continue to be distributed the way it is so the time warner can keep making the money that it wants to make yeah you don't need to worry about HBO or CNN or TV a sortie you don't need to worry about them not being on any of the things that you liked already watch them on that's not going to happen right because that would be a really stupid movie it would make it almost pointless to spend 80 plus billion dollars on a company and then completely undermine how it makes money mmm-hmm well put right yeah our longtime friend and listener Michael yo Michael how you doing uh he says with all this talk about Twitter failing should I mention google+ well google+ arguably never actually got off the ground yeah and when I can only crash and burn so hard barely out but when i am on google plus you're on google very much very infrequently but when i am on there it is actually like a reasonably enjoyable experience it's clean it's well set up by terrible i mean like it's it's fine as like an experience to like post your stuff and see what other people posted it is perfectly fine i mean like it's a little bit more like tumblr i guess that yeah twitter or facebook where it's like the newsfeed is a little bit i think you're given I think you're giving Google+ way too easy to be extremely generous to let your social the social network that doesn't really exist so I I can I can stand to be generous in that situation by i don't i don't think twitter is going to turn into Google+ at all but i think that it's just not its financial viability is a lot less than a lot of folks expected it to have yeah i mean that's that's the thing its expectations versus reality like it's really on garbage in my eyes so it's a pretty good quote unlike unrealistic expectations it's like a breeding ground for it mm-hmm um so well not only yeah there's gonna be companies like that that fall too close to this that's what does it fly too close to the Sun and then right and there were big expectations the Twitter was going to be like the third one along with Google and Facebook to make a ton of money off of digital advertising and they just didn't bear out I think that these guys continue to be non profitable so I think that Twitter and it will be diminished but continually continuing to exist company I also don't understand like what is its headcount that they're going to be cutting hundreds of people because they're cutting 300 and that's eight percent so how many people work at Twitter like I don't know the mess right now um oh god math is hard yeah I became a journalist for a reason yeah give up on this wait i said was eight percent eight percent so that's like 3750 people i don't want to be no not against that many people work at Twitter that's I don't wanna be mean about it but yeah I don't like it's not like they're coming out with like new features every day on Twitter I don't actually know like what all those people are doing they're probably all sales and partnerships yeah there's yes that's certainly a possibility and internationally at that so sure yeah it's a company yeah it is a company it's just a larger than all agree it's a larger number that I agree then I pictured in my head I know bagel about the business aspect from a user standpoint though I don't want to be and again I still think I want to be unlike the experience their job like that sucks so like I don't want to be glib about it and of course yeah somebody did work hard allegedly yes so we haven't we request uh well poor poor muser in the chat just had the revelation that we can read his chats so yeah watch out what that's of chats are he's a big fan of joan however oh cool great dimitris wants to know do you think they will come out with a new surface pro i think that is the expectation is absolutely not tomorrow though many tweaks to the current one to the surface pro for the expectation is is that there's not going to be a surface pro 5 coming out not at this event anyway so yeah so like an S year yeah to speak in Apple Apple ecosystem speaking Tamil there's also going to be an apple hardware event on thursday so it's going to be a very busy week for us here and that's the one where we're likely to see stuff with Mac and with me on TV and so maybe Microsoft is trying to you know take the wind out of apple sales a little bit but it's with like an all-in-one desktop which I would be surprised if Apple spent that much time focusing on an all-in-one during their event yeah yeah if Google Plus were dead cnet wouldn't post there we do post there we do post there yeah probably automatically they live yeah they make us kind of cover a blanket across everything when we do anything currently I also hear there was like a change in our instruction as reporters that you don't really need to post right like that Jen says with a but with a whisper don't do that you're gonna get to some like weird yeah what's it what is mr yeah yeah that engine BuzzFeed does that don't do that they report the news and like this weird whisper well while putting ice cube it's a Spanish thing so stop there okay to just convinced me forget it alright this show's over this is done shutting it down shut it down once the whispering starts we're so sorry everybody our brains are pre melted before the events this week so I that's fine we'll be back later tomorrow after the microsoft event I believe Joe yeah well we'll figure it out on the fly as we usually do it the 359 either way the podcast is available on iTunes TuneIn stitcher SoundCloud feedburner google play music and of course on cnet.com Joan thanks very much for visiting today always happy to have you and thanks for watching guys you