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38: Auto-Update My Parents

 

00:00:00   You know, if only you had a picture management solution.

00:00:04   Yeah, that would be nice.

00:00:06   Wouldn't that be awesome?

00:00:07   We should talk about that for another hour.

00:00:09   Let's do that.

00:00:11   Last week we talked about the problem of turning on the reduce

00:00:16   motion thing.

00:00:17   And if you turn it off, then you get the parallax effect

00:00:21   and it zooms in your background image

00:00:22   and it was cutting off my background image

00:00:24   that I wanted to use with my dog.

00:00:25   And so I was talking about if I could extend the background

00:00:30   of the image of my dog to make the image bigger

00:00:32   so it kind of looked like-- I could get the same crop as I

00:00:35   had with reduced motion on and off

00:00:38   by using two different pictures.

00:00:39   And I mentioned using Content-Aware Fill

00:00:41   to try it in Photoshop.

00:00:42   And I did that.

00:00:42   Content-Aware Fill is not magic.

00:00:45   It worked OK.

00:00:46   I tried touching it up, and I made

00:00:47   a version that was extended a little bit, but it wasn't great.

00:00:50   And then a lot of people recommended to me

00:00:52   an iOS app called AntiCrop.

00:00:54   And I'm like, well, that's probably going to work about the same as Content-Aware Phil,

00:00:58   but that was not the case.

00:00:59   It worked way better than Content-Aware Phil.

00:01:01   Obviously, Photoshop in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing might be better

00:01:05   than Andy Krop, but for me, who just wanted to spend two minutes in Andy Krop, I just

00:01:10   pressed the button, extended it, and I'm like, oh, yeah, that's what I did in Photoshop over

00:01:14   the last five minutes, only this is a better job.

00:01:17   So I was impressed by that, but of course, Andy Krop has the same limitations as Content-Aware

00:01:22   a film in Photoshop, and then it has no idea what a dog looks like. And my dog is going

00:01:26   off the top and right edges of the screen. So neither one of these programs is going

00:01:32   to draw the rest of the dog. It'll draw the rest of the deck, which is pretty regular

00:01:35   straight lines and, you know, a single color and stuff like that, but it cannot draw the

00:01:39   rest of the dog.

00:01:40   Until maybe Photoshop CS10.

00:01:41   Yeah, I'm not holding my breath. So someone named Jim Pierce on Twitter said, "Hey, I'm

00:01:47   a visual effects artist. Do you want me to extend the picture to every dog?" He said,

00:01:50   So I sent him the picture, he sent it back to me, and he did an amazing job.

00:01:55   He extended not only the deck edges, but also the dog, because he knows what a dog looks

00:02:00   like.

00:02:01   So once again, humans triumph over computers.

00:02:04   His website, I believe, is hatandsuitcase.com.

00:02:06   You can look at his portfolio and everything up there.

00:02:09   But I'm not sure if I'll use the picture, because I just couldn't stand the parallax

00:02:14   stuff.

00:02:16   with the picture crop looking right,

00:02:19   the dialog boxes still move,

00:02:20   and the icons in the home screen still move.

00:02:22   Like my background is black,

00:02:23   but the icons still move on the black background,

00:02:25   then I can see it and it drives me nuts.

00:02:26   So I'm still in reduced motion land,

00:02:29   despite the fact that I don't like the cross fades.

00:02:32   - Yeah, it's funny you say that.

00:02:33   So my friend, Chris Harris,

00:02:35   who I believe both of you guys have met,

00:02:37   he works for the other media

00:02:39   and has been making a few waves lately

00:02:41   for being the head of the company

00:02:45   or product called Glide, which DownRipple's using for his rebooted Loop magazine.

00:02:50   Well anyways, he saw me or heard me complaining about the same issue and did some sort of

00:02:55   Photoshop magic on my picture of Aaron that I took in 2008 and extended, it was taken

00:03:02   in our kitchen, so he extended all the bits that are easy to extend.

00:03:06   And that was the first time I'd seen a instance of Content-Aware fill in my world.

00:03:12   I'd seen the original video from whenever, a few years ago, when this concept was kind

00:03:17   of invented.

00:03:18   And my goodness, it worked flawlessly and looks really good.

00:03:23   It's kind of creepy how good it can just invent something out of nothing.

00:03:27   So I was very impressed.

00:03:28   So thanks, Chris, for that.

00:03:31   And then I guess something happened with Lynx and Mavericks.

00:03:34   Is this you, Jon, that added this?

00:03:35   Yeah.

00:03:36   I think we talked about a couple of shows maybe way back at the beginning.

00:03:41   I don't remember even which podcast it was on.

00:03:43   I mentioned that I have a little folder or a little tag set in Yojimbo where I keep the

00:03:49   starting point of my notes for each new version of OS X, and I have to make those notes before

00:03:54   I know what the name of the OS would be, and I always guess and put the name down there.

00:03:58   And then for 10.9, I made a links folder, L-Y-N-X.

00:04:04   And not necessarily because I thought that would be the name of the next big cat thing,

00:04:07   I've always thought like where can you go from a lion and you know mountain lion seemed kind of lame

00:04:11   But it's like all right well, they're done. You know it can't possibly be a cat

00:04:14   But if it was a cat it should be links and so I wrote links and then you know of course

00:04:18   It's called maverick has nothing to do with big cats, but

00:04:20   This past week. I did get a tip that

00:04:23   Apple was at the very least

00:04:27   Investigating the word links if they were to go with cat names which of course they didn't in the end

00:04:32   So I feel feel slightly vindicated in my instincts for links because I got mountain lion I

00:04:37   I, you know, if you had forced me to guess, I would have said, "Well, it's got to be some

00:04:42   sort of thing on Mountain Lion or something like that."

00:04:45   I feel like I have a good sense of what the cats could be.

00:04:48   I think we talked about this on the recent episode of "Talk Show" more about the cat

00:04:51   stuff.

00:04:52   But anyway, I feel good knowing that Lynx was in play and that it could have been a

00:04:56   10.9 name, and I would have been perfectly happy with it.

00:04:58   But we're on to the places in California, so that's fine.

00:05:02   Well, it's funny because looking in the show notes, the only entry is OS X 10.9 LYNX.

00:05:08   And I assumed this was going to be you lamenting the lack of the web browser or something changing

00:05:15   about the web browser in Mavericks.

00:05:17   That would be lowercase links, right?

00:05:19   Because the executable is lowercase.

00:05:22   And I always install it, install links on OS X.

00:05:26   Do you test your websites in it?

00:05:28   No.

00:05:29   With JavaScript off?

00:05:30   I don't know.

00:05:31   I can finally find myself firing it up, even if it's just to run Lynx --dump or something.

00:05:37   I use it.

00:05:38   Fun.

00:05:39   You would.

00:05:40   You would.

00:05:41   I haven't used it in forever.

00:05:43   Okay, so the other big news that just happened this week, and then I think we have a tremendous

00:05:48   amount of Mavericks review-related follow-up, is Everpix folded, which I'm really, really,

00:05:55   really disappointed by.

00:05:57   After listening to, I don't recall what episode it was of the prompt and I don't think Hackett

00:06:02   is in the chat to correct me, Bradley Chambers came on the prompt to talk about photo management,

00:06:07   which is something I've classically been very bad at, and said, "Oh, you should really try

00:06:12   Everpix.

00:06:13   It's really good, blah, blah, blah."

00:06:14   I tried it and decided it is really good and actually paid for your subscription.

00:06:20   It turns out that they have just decided to close their business.

00:06:26   I'm very sad about that, and I don't know what you guys have to add.

00:06:30   Certainly there's some things we can talk about here in the show notes, but Jon, it

00:06:33   seems like you've taken a keen interest in this.

00:06:36   Yeah, I signed up for Everpix just because I'm, like a lot of people, looking for some

00:06:43   way to deal with all my pictures to give me a little bit more security.

00:06:45   And I'm all paranoid and have all these multiple backs of my pictures, but the thing about

00:06:48   Everpix was like, "We'll store all your pictures for you.

00:06:52   We'll suck them out from all the places where they are."

00:06:54   So it didn't want to own the pictures.

00:06:55   it was like, we'll pull them out of iPhone,

00:06:57   we'll pull them off your phone, we'll pull them from wherever,

00:07:00   and we'll store them forever, and there's no limit.

00:07:03   And the price was like $50 a year or something.

00:07:05   So I was like, all right, I'll pay $50 for one year

00:07:09   just to try this thing out, see if it'll give me like a fourth

00:07:11   or fifth backup of my stuff.

00:07:13   And the fringe benefits of it were

00:07:15   that I had access to all of my pictures

00:07:18   from any device that could run a web browser.

00:07:20   And they had a nice iOS app as well.

00:07:22   So if there's some picture I wanted

00:07:24   to see from like seven years ago or something. I'm not going to have it on my phone because

00:07:28   I can't have all my photos on my phone and if I didn't pick that one it's not going to

00:07:31   be there. I can wait until I get home and go through my iPhoto library or something,

00:07:35   but Everpix gave me access from anywhere to all of my pictures. And you could easily give

00:07:40   full resolution download links to relatives if they wanted. "Oh, I want to do new prints

00:07:46   for my wall, this picture of whatever." It was just convenient. It's the way, you know,

00:07:51   What everyone's saying about Everpix now that they're gone is like, "This is the way insert

00:07:55   companies should do photo management, whether it's Google or Microsoft or Apple or anybody."

00:08:00   And actually, Google sort of comes close to this with their photo stuff, but they don't

00:08:03   have as many hooks into Apple's applications and stuff.

00:08:06   But anyway, you don't have to worry about your photos.

00:08:09   They're all in the cloud.

00:08:10   We'll save them all for you forever.

00:08:12   Storage is unlimited.

00:08:13   The pricing is reasonable.

00:08:15   You have access to them anywhere.

00:08:18   So it was great.

00:08:19   And mostly I didn't think too much about it because I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to try this

00:08:24   for a year, and if it seems like it works out, I'll sign up for another year."

00:08:28   So I didn't just sign up for a month.

00:08:29   I was like, "Well, 50 bucks, I'll try the whole year."

00:08:31   And had it gone through the whole year, I probably would have signed up for it again.

00:08:34   If only for just like—I would pay $50.

00:08:37   It's like even if they didn't store them but somehow gave me magical access to them

00:08:40   from everywhere by tunneling through to my home computer or something.

00:08:43   It was just great to have access to them.

00:08:44   And there was a feature that Lex talks about a lot, Lex Friedman of the Unprofessional

00:08:49   podcast, and other things, that he liked the flashback emails that it would send you. It

00:08:54   would send you an email like, "This is what happened a year ago today, two years ago today,

00:08:58   three years ago today." And if you don't have kids, you may think, "Well, nothing happened

00:09:02   three years ago today." But when you have kids, you take pictures, especially when they're

00:09:04   young, you take pictures every single day. And so it's kind of nice to see on this day

00:09:07   in history when your kids were three years younger, these were the pictures you took.

00:09:13   And I thought that was a little bit silly, and I didn't sign up for the emails because

00:09:16   I don't need to get any more emails. But occasionally when I'm flipping around on my phone, I would

00:09:19   to the Everpix app and look at the flashback, and it was cute and enjoyable. But alas, the

00:09:24   company is gone, and they're supposedly refunding the prorated amounts for the people who subscribed

00:09:31   and their subscriptions weren't up yet. And I think it's sad for everyone involved, because

00:09:35   I think when we first talked about Everpix, we said, "Apple should buy this company. It's

00:09:40   filled with a bunch of ex-Apple people. They're doing things better than Apple does. I don't

00:09:45   understand why Apple can't do what they're doing or couldn't do what they're doing, but

00:09:48   They're not, so why don't you just buy this company and do it?"

00:09:50   And that didn't work out.

00:09:53   Nobody wanted to buy them.

00:09:54   They could.

00:09:55   They tried to sell themselves.

00:09:56   They had a couple of close calls, but no takers, and they just ran out of money.

00:10:01   Yeah, and it's funny that you mention the daily flashback email, because when I started

00:10:06   the trial with Everpix, which would give you, I think, a year of photos, and then you can

00:10:11   pull a Mike Hurley and sell your soul in order to get more time for free.

00:10:18   Well, even the one year of flashbacks, even for a person who doesn't have children, I

00:10:23   thought was really cool.

00:10:24   And man, as soon as I signed up for the full year like you did and started getting the

00:10:28   flashback emails from as much as like 10 or 12 or whatever years ago, it was the neatest

00:10:34   thing to be able to see.

00:10:35   And I found myself, I realized that I was sending pictures to like Aaron and my friends

00:10:40   of, "Oh, look what we were doing six years ago."

00:10:42   I was probably getting to the point that I was becoming a spam bot.

00:10:47   It's probably for the best in my personal relationships that Everpix is going away.

00:10:51   But the point I'm driving at is that the flashback emails were incredible, even as someone who

00:10:54   doesn't have kids.

00:10:57   You had mentioned being able to get to your pictures from basically anywhere.

00:11:03   Not unlike Mike, I was one of those people who had a camera roll of three gazillion pictures.

00:11:08   And the reason I did that, even though I had gotten them off my phone and onto my computer,

00:11:13   I always wanted to be able to show a friend or someone I just met or family member a picture

00:11:21   if I felt the need.

00:11:22   So for example, if I'm talking about when Marco and Tiff and Erin and I went to Germany,

00:11:27   I want to be able to have those pictures always.

00:11:31   Or the top-year parties that we throw or whatever the case may be.

00:11:34   I want to be able to show someone those pictures.

00:11:37   And with Everpix, I could do that.

00:11:40   And I didn't have to have a camera roll that was 3,000 pictures, which is literally what

00:11:44   I had.

00:11:45   And now, I don't really have a solution for that at the moment.

00:11:49   And perhaps in a minute, we'll talk about some of the alternatives, but it seems like,

00:11:54   from what I've gathered, there's no clear winner.

00:11:57   And the other thing that I thought was interesting about this, I don't think it would have worked

00:12:02   because it's too fiddly.

00:12:04   What I was surmising on Twitter earlier, what would have happened if you could provide your

00:12:10   own storage, but Everpix provided the software?

00:12:14   So I'm thinking kind of along the line, kind of a cross maybe between File Transporter,

00:12:19   a past sponsor of the show, and the Fever RSS reader, where you need a web server that

00:12:28   you install their software on, or at least that's the way it was originally, it may

00:12:31   not be any more.

00:12:32   even like Arc, the backup app for Mac, which uses S3 as a storage engine, but you provide

00:12:37   your own S3 credentials. So you're paying for all the costs and they just sell you the

00:12:42   app.

00:12:43   Right. And so I was thinking, I wonder if S3 bills weren't an issue for Everpix, could

00:12:48   they have survived? And both Bradley and Steven Hackett, who I was talking, or I was exchanging

00:12:54   tweets with, of course called me out, and rightfully so, saying, "Well, then nobody

00:12:59   would have bought it because it's way too fiddly, and that's true. But on the other

00:13:03   side of the coin, I can't help but wonder what could have been. And it's very easy

00:13:06   to be an armchair quarterback in this capacity. But I'm really, really bummed about what's

00:13:12   happened with Everpix, and I wish that Apple had bought them up. Although, John, you had

00:13:17   exchanged a few tweets with, I guess, one of the employees, one of the founders. I don't

00:13:20   know if you want to talk about that at all.

00:13:22   Yeah, so a couple of people were responding to the news and responding to my retweet of

00:13:28   whatever announcement it was, and one of the people,

00:13:30   Rorio on Twitter, said the classy thing

00:13:32   to do for these failed companies is to open source

00:13:36   their technology.

00:13:37   So the stuff that they wrote doesn't just go away.

00:13:39   OK, well, the company failed.

00:13:40   Why not make all your code open source?

00:13:42   And one of the engineers of the company

00:13:44   said, we wish we could have, but we

00:13:46   had to sell the technology to pay for an orderly wind

00:13:48   down and refund.

00:13:49   So they already sold the underlying technology, I guess.

00:13:53   And they did that so they would have enough money

00:13:55   to keep the lights on long enough

00:13:57   wind down the service and to give everyone back their refunds. You know, I have to pay

00:14:01   their bills and all the outstanding stuff. So they're trying to shut the company down

00:14:04   in a good way, like giving you a refund for the time that you paid for that you don't

00:14:07   get because the service is going away and doing all that stuff. And to do that, apparently,

00:14:12   they had to sell the tech. And so, of course, I asked, "Who bought it?" And he said, "That's

00:14:16   currently private." So we don't know who bought it. So for all we know, Apple bought the tech,

00:14:19   Yahoo bought the tech, Microsoft, Google, who knows who bought it. So that was interesting.

00:14:24   So they couldn't sell the company, but apparently they could sell the tech or whatever at fire

00:14:28   sale prices.

00:14:30   And then some other back and forth about, you know, why didn't the company make it?

00:14:33   There's like, you know, big long blog posts about it and speculation, but this is from

00:14:36   the guy at the company who said, "Variable costs were covered by customer income."

00:14:40   So they had enough subscribers to cover their variable costs, but they hadn't yet reached

00:14:44   the economy scale to cover their fixed costs.

00:14:46   Like basically, they didn't have enough customers to make the fixed costs of like running the

00:14:49   service infrastructure and everything to cover all that stuff.

00:14:53   And that was really the problem.

00:14:54   They needed to scale up to get bigger and bigger.

00:14:57   I think this is another one of the guys the company said.

00:15:00   If they had three times their current subscriber base,

00:15:02   they would have been profitable.

00:15:03   So they just needed more people.

00:15:04   And so that's another thing, to put another nail

00:15:06   in the coffin of Casey's idea, to have your own server

00:15:09   and your own storage.

00:15:10   They had to make it more accessible.

00:15:11   They needed to market it to more people.

00:15:13   And there's been a lot of articles

00:15:14   written about how having an awesome product

00:15:16   is not enough in the startup world.

00:15:18   Because everyone who used Everpix loved it,

00:15:20   and their conversion rate from free to paid was excellent.

00:15:23   It's just that they didn't get enough customers fast enough,

00:15:26   and they couldn't get more funding

00:15:28   with the tiny subscriber base they had,

00:15:30   which was measured in the thousands,

00:15:31   and their growth curve of how many new subscribers

00:15:33   they were getting was just too small.

00:15:34   So they were so close, like, oh,

00:15:36   if we only had three times more customers.

00:15:37   Well, that's not that big of a deal

00:15:38   when you've got a couple thousand customers,

00:15:40   or whatever it was, I forget what it was,

00:15:42   like 55,000 free customers and like six or 7,000 paid.

00:15:47   They just needed to grow a little bit faster.

00:15:49   They just ran out of money too fast,

00:15:51   despite the fact that the product was great.

00:15:54   So that's kind of a shame, but when I look at companies

00:15:57   like this, I think, and everyone thinks it,

00:16:00   why is this company with this great product

00:16:01   that everybody loved, with this team of like six people,

00:16:04   able to do something, this giant company

00:16:06   that has billions and billions of profit,

00:16:07   like burning a hole in its pocket,

00:16:09   has got so much cash, it's trying to give it back

00:16:10   to the shareholders to the tune of billions of dollars a year

00:16:13   and it still can't get rid of the cash fast enough,

00:16:15   this cash pile is still growing,

00:16:16   I'm talking about Apple here, of course,

00:16:18   how come their thing people don't like

00:16:21   and is confusing and is crappy and doesn't cost more money

00:16:24   than Everpix.

00:16:25   But it's like Apple has huge profitable businesses that

00:16:29   could easily subsidize the cost of an Everpix-like service.

00:16:34   And it's just an opportunity for these big companies

00:16:38   to see, to learn from the small companies.

00:16:40   As everyone says, whoever uses Everpix,

00:16:44   the big thing is, why doesn't PhotoStream,

00:16:46   which Apple seems to now be rebranding as just iCloud,

00:16:49   you know, it's an application. Why doesn't it work in reverse? Why is it your device has the

00:16:53   last thousand photos and then the stuff? Why isn't it reversed? Like where the photo stream

00:16:58   keeps all your photos and only the most recent thousand are on your device instead of being,

00:17:03   oh, well, you know, your pictures, once you hit a thousand photos in photo stream,

00:17:07   the pictures aren't in the cloud anymore. Only the most recent 1000 are in the cloud. And of course,

00:17:11   the rest of them will be an iPhoto or on your phone or whatever. Like the whole point of any

00:17:16   any kind of cloud-type service for pictures and photos.

00:17:19   The whole point is you don't want people to worry.

00:17:21   It has to be, you don't want to have to do math in your head

00:17:24   of like, well, where are the photos?

00:17:25   Will they have a sync this recently?

00:17:26   And if I run out of room on my phone, that's fine

00:17:28   until I hit the thousand picture limit

00:17:29   and then they start going off the end

00:17:30   and I gotta make sure I sync the iPhoto on my computer

00:17:32   but then I gotta backup my computer.

00:17:33   It's like, people shouldn't have to worry about it.

00:17:36   And if you have to charge money to cover the cost, fine.

00:17:38   Charge money to cover the cost.

00:17:39   Can you work it into the margins of your other products?

00:17:42   I feel like a company like Apple could.

00:17:44   The big win only happens when someone says, "Oh, you should get an Apple whatever phone,

00:17:49   iPad, computer, because then you won't have to worry about if your photos are safe."

00:17:53   Nobody ever says that now.

00:17:55   And Everpix, you could have when the company was still around, say, "Get Everpix, then

00:17:59   you won't have to worry about if your photos are safe."

00:18:02   And speaking of that, the second issue that a lot of people are responding about is like,

00:18:05   "Oh, you know, we heard you talk about Everpix.

00:18:07   Now look what happened.

00:18:08   Now we've learned our lesson.

00:18:09   Never trust anybody."

00:18:11   I think we emphasized this in the past show about backups.

00:18:13   The whole point is you never put all your eggs in any one basket.

00:18:17   So if a company like Everpix goes down, you shouldn't lose your photos because that should

00:18:21   not have been the only copy of your photos.

00:18:23   You should have your photos in multiple places.

00:18:26   And if all those places can be like fire and forget all my photos are saved forever, like

00:18:30   you have them all on your computer and your computer is backed up with like CrashBanner

00:18:33   BlackBlaze or something like that, or it's backed up to a transporter in your house and

00:18:37   that transporter syncs with the transporter, you're obviously like many, many layers of

00:18:40   of backup and all those you want to be as brain dead simple, don't have to think about

00:18:45   it, everything gets backed up automatically as you want.

00:18:48   And if any one of them goes down, if your hard drive dies and your Mac dies, you should

00:18:51   be able to get your stuff back from like your time machine backup.

00:18:53   If your house burns down, you should be able to get your stuff back from your cloud backup.

00:18:56   If your house burns down and your hard drive dies, you should be able to at least get your

00:18:59   family photos back from Everpix or whatever other online service you're using to just

00:19:03   store your photos.

00:19:04   You need to have multiple layers and if any one of those layers goes out of business,

00:19:08   down, breaks, you replace it. Replace Everpix with another service does the same thing.

00:19:13   Replace your online backup with another backup thing. Replace your house with a new house.

00:19:16   Replace your Mac with a new Mac that works. Replace your broken hard drive. That's the

00:19:19   whole point of backups. It's not that all these things are going to be around forever.

00:19:23   It's acknowledging that every one of these things that you're backing up for will eventually

00:19:26   not be around. Either the company will go out of business or the hardware will die,

00:19:29   and you should be able to replace it because that shouldn't be the only place you have

00:19:32   your stuff.

00:19:33   I think you guys are being a little bit easy on Everpix.

00:19:37   I think everything you said about backup is correct. I agree with everything you just said.

00:19:41   I have nothing to add to that. So I'm going back a step instead.

00:19:45   You know, you look at, you know, they say their variable

00:19:49   costs are already covered by customer income. Well,

00:19:53   is S3 a variable cost? I don't even know if they were using S3. They were.

00:19:57   And so, there's this article on the Vergs that we'll link to

00:20:01   that is like kind of like a first person account.

00:20:06   Anyway, we'll link to it.

00:20:08   And they mentioned they had a $35,000 S3 bill

00:20:11   that was about to come in that was going to be a problem.

00:20:15   So anyway, I think it's obvious that they were not

00:20:19   about to be profitable.

00:20:20   Because if they were about to be profitable,

00:20:22   then it wouldn't be an issue to refund everyone's

00:20:25   annual pre-purchases.

00:20:27   Because their annual pre-purchases

00:20:29   wouldn't all be spent already.

00:20:30   No, they needed three times the current subscriber base to be profitable.

00:20:34   Right.

00:20:35   But like I say, three times 6,000 is not insurmountable with another funding round.

00:20:40   I feel like they could have got to three times.

00:20:41   Well...

00:20:42   Their biggest cost was personnel.

00:20:43   They spent the vast majority of the money invested on people.

00:20:46   So yeah, that's their fixed cost.

00:20:48   We have six people, we pay them salaries, and that's where all their money went.

00:20:52   And so if you can get three times the subscriber base, you don't need three times the number

00:20:55   of employees, and they would have been in the black.

00:20:58   I'm not saying they were just this close.

00:21:00   They weren't.

00:21:01   That's why they're gone.

00:21:02   They didn't make it.

00:21:03   And they didn't make it probably because they spent

00:21:04   too much time trying to make their product better

00:21:06   and not enough time trying to get more customers.

00:21:08   But, you know, lesson learned.

00:21:10   - I mean, I think they committed a massive strategic error

00:21:14   in their product creation and in their business plan,

00:21:18   which is, generally speaking, when you're making

00:21:21   a new service like this or a new product like this,

00:21:24   you gotta choose one extreme or the other.

00:21:26   You know, like as we learned when _DavidSmith and I taught Casey how to play Puerto Rico

00:21:31   a few weeks ago, in the game of Puerto Rico, generally speaking, you have to pick one extreme

00:21:37   strategy and stick with it.

00:21:39   If you try to do like a middle strategy that combines elements of like, "Oh, I'm going

00:21:43   to ship a whole lot of goods, but also I'm going to build a bunch of buildings," you're

00:21:47   not going to do either of them well enough to win.

00:21:49   VC funded company, or I mean, web services and new services like this are kind of similar

00:21:55   in the growth factor versus financing and versus paying your own bills, which is you

00:22:00   have to either go for something that is very cheap to scale but will attract tons of users

00:22:07   very quickly, in which case you can pay for it by lots of VC money coming in because you

00:22:12   have tons of growth, or pick something that's hard and expensive to do, like hosting a ton

00:22:19   of photos on S3, but don't go into that with a free growth-based model upfront. Go into

00:22:26   that with a more bootstrapping, more self-financed model, which is you shouldn't be losing money

00:22:32   on every new customer. And you should also enter that kind of market with very low expenses

00:22:39   to begin with. Not a big staff, not an office. Enter that market with low expectations of

00:22:46   profit for a while and adjust your cost accordingly.

00:22:51   And instead, Everpix kind of tried to ride the middle.

00:22:55   They chose to do something that's very expensive to scale.

00:22:58   They chose something that was not likely, and maybe this was their error, I don't

00:23:03   think it was ever likely to have booming explosive growth, because the market for it is not everyone

00:23:10   who ever takes pictures needs this and is driven to do this.

00:23:14   It's really only people who care about their photo storage

00:23:17   and who know enough about photo storage

00:23:19   to know why they would need something like this.

00:23:21   And that is not a big market relative to something

00:23:24   like Instagram.

00:23:26   And this, to give you some idea, Tumblr,

00:23:29   like three or four years into it,

00:23:31   had something like 20 terabytes of photos.

00:23:35   By my math, Everpix had 400 terabytes or so,

00:23:40   if their S3 bill was correct.

00:23:43   And so obviously they were scaling at a storage level

00:23:47   that's insane.

00:23:48   This was one of my main things-- and John,

00:23:50   if you go back a sec, what you were saying about how

00:23:54   we all wish PhotoStream kind of worked this way,

00:23:56   and it doesn't.

00:23:58   It's because people's photos can vary so much in size.

00:24:03   The idea I've ever picked of upload all your photos to us

00:24:05   and we'll store all of them forever,

00:24:09   You're talking potentially hundreds of gigs for people, or even terabytes for people,

00:24:17   and that's not that uncommon of a case.

00:24:20   But Apple could absorb that easily.

00:24:21   If this company would be profitable with their income stream with three times the number

00:24:25   of subscribers—and remember, they're doing freemium.

00:24:27   If they take the freemium out of the equation, it's even more close to being profitable.

00:24:31   Fifty dollars a year, Apple just adds fifty dollars a year, spread across all its profitable

00:24:36   product lines.

00:24:38   You wouldn't even notice that.

00:24:39   who knows how much money they're already spending to do photo stream? It seems like,

00:24:42   I feel like a company like Apple, with their margins and their profit and what they're already

00:24:47   doing, could easily absorb this business. A six-person startup with a freemium model where

00:24:53   they have 55,000 customers but only 7,000 are paying, can't absorb it. And they came close.

00:24:59   If they got one more funding round, which they might have gotten, if they might have gotten

00:25:03   another funding round, if they had started this company 10 years ago earlier, because it's just

00:25:06   harder to get funding now because people want to see, you know, Instagram or something and

00:25:10   if they don't, they're like, "Meh, don't bother funding them."

00:25:12   No, I mean, the problem is that they were never going to have the rate of growth needed

00:25:17   to get tons of VC money to pay these ridiculous costs. Like, they are paying tons and tons

00:25:23   and tons of money as people upload massive photo collections. And that's another thing

00:25:28   too, like, if the whole point of your service is upload everything you've ever shot, like,

00:25:32   you first start using it, then your storage needs don't grow slowly over time as people

00:25:37   accumulate new photos. Your storage needs spike up at the beginning. I mean, the whole

00:25:42   thing was a very, very expensive business to run, not even considering the staff, which

00:25:47   staffing is insane. I mean, like, the staff cost of something like this, because what

00:25:51   do they have, like five or six people, something like that?

00:25:53   If you took away 90% of their storage costs, they would be fine. It's the freemium guys

00:25:57   that killed them, because they said, "Hey, sign up for free, upload a year of photos."

00:26:01   and 40 or 50,000 people did that.

00:26:03   The people who were paying,

00:26:04   that was a sustainable business.

00:26:06   If it was pay $50, we'll store all your photos,

00:26:09   because people have variable sizes of photos,

00:26:12   but apparently they had figured out a model

00:26:13   where they could store all your photos

00:26:15   and be profitable as a six person company

00:26:17   with like 7,000 subscribers.

00:26:19   - Here's the other problem.

00:26:20   $50 for a year of Amazon storage buys you about 20 gigs.

00:26:25   Maybe by the time they're getting into their bulk pricing,

00:26:28   maybe you're talking 25 or 30 gigs.

00:26:30   So for everybody, I mean, maybe that's the average.

00:26:34   That sounds a little low to me though.

00:26:35   For anybody who would use a service like this,

00:26:36   that sounds low.

00:26:37   Like I shoot 20 gigs in a year.

00:26:39   - They were doing, I'm pretty sure they were doing

00:26:41   lossy compression though.

00:26:42   So I think they were saying they get 5x compression.

00:26:44   - Did they support RAWs?

00:26:45   'Cause that matters a lot.

00:26:46   And that makes it like five times bigger.

00:26:48   - No, it was not.

00:26:49   That was the other thing, talk about going

00:26:50   in the middle road.

00:26:51   Like they had a thing where they thought this could be

00:26:53   for everybody, but they weren't storing RAWs.

00:26:56   And they were doing 5x lossy compression.

00:26:59   all things that professional photographers would never accept.

00:27:02   And the pricing, I think, was priced like that.

00:27:04   It's like, well, it's $50 a year.

00:27:05   This is not a thing for professional photographers.

00:27:07   It's a thing for everybody who just wants access to all their pictures from everywhere

00:27:10   and wants to know they're safe.

00:27:13   And if you're the type of person that says, "Well, you're not saving my raw, so my pictures

00:27:15   aren't really safe," this is not the service for you, right?

00:27:19   So they had a misbalance of their business model and their funding, and they made mistakes,

00:27:28   But it's not entirely crazy because I think this same company, like I said, this same

00:27:32   company had gone 10 years ago in that VC environment.

00:27:34   I don't know if 10 years it was in the middle of a bubble crash.

00:27:36   But at this point, I think it's getting harder to find VC funding for a company in the state

00:27:42   that this thing was.

00:27:43   Whereas when you're in the midst of a run-up or a bubble, people are like, "Oh my God,

00:27:46   you have actual paying customers?

00:27:48   And you have a product that people like here?

00:27:51   Take our money."

00:27:52   But now they're like, "No, you have actual paying customers.

00:27:54   That means you're never going to grow that fast.

00:27:56   "Yeah, people like your product, but who cares? No thanks. We'll pass." It's the

00:28:00   curse of a business model. If you didn't take money from anybody, then you would be

00:28:06   on the Instagram type thing. "We have no revenue. We don't take money from anybody."

00:28:10   Well, not the Instagram. Whatever.

00:28:12   Yeah, but if that was the case, then their user number would be impressive, and it wasn't.

00:28:16   I know. Then you have the potential for explosive growth. So they were in this... It's an unfortunate

00:28:22   situation. And the thing about it is I get the feeling that the vultures surrounding

00:28:26   Both the VCs and the other companies were like, "Why would we ever buy your company?

00:28:29   Why don't we just wait for you to run out of money and then scoop up the technology?"

00:28:32   Which seems to have been what happened, because it's like, you don't need the company, and

00:28:36   you don't need to invest in the company if you don't think it's going to be the next

00:28:38   Instagram.

00:28:39   If you think the technology is interesting, just wait, sit back and wait.

00:28:42   And then after it all goes down, I bet you can get the technology involved really cheaply.

00:28:47   That's true.

00:28:48   You know, I—well, firstly, real-time follow-up.

00:28:51   Someone in the chat who—I've already lost your name.

00:28:53   It was savvy.

00:28:54   Posted a tweet from one of the gentlemen that worked at Everpix saying, "We use perceptually

00:29:00   lossless 5x compression."

00:29:02   So you were right about that, John.

00:29:04   So, JPEG.

00:29:05   Yeah, but perceptually lossless means lossy.

00:29:07   It's like virtually spotless.

00:29:08   Yes.

00:29:09   But anyway.

00:29:10   Absolutely.

00:29:11   But the thing that I really take issue with is something that Marco said a few minutes

00:29:14   ago, which is this isn't for everyone.

00:29:18   And I actually strongly disagree.

00:29:19   I think Everpix in principle was maybe not literally for everyone, but was for any normal

00:29:24   human being that shoots pictures with any device that they don't want to lose, which

00:29:31   is to say almost everyone.

00:29:33   We don't have kids, but if we were to lose some of the pictures we've taken of vacations,

00:29:39   of family gatherings, of us goofing off at BMW in South Carolina, if we lost those pictures,

00:29:47   I'd be devastated.

00:29:48   And Everpix was such an easy and reasonably cheap way of getting yourself a backup.

00:29:57   And John, I completely agree with what you said a while back, that this is just one leg

00:30:01   in a chair that holds up all of your pictures and makes sure they're safe.

00:30:07   But it's a very easy way to do that.

00:30:10   And if you think about it, I don't think most people that I know use a crash plan or a back

00:30:14   blaze or anything like that.

00:30:16   And so getting all of your pictures into the cloud is such an improvement over having no

00:30:22   backup or just having Time Machine, which by the way, most people I know don't use

00:30:26   either.

00:30:27   And so I agree with you guys that this probably was doomed.

00:30:32   And Marco, your Puerto Rico analogy, while ridiculous, is actually fairly accurate.

00:30:37   But on the other side of the coin, I strongly disagree that this wasn't for everyone.

00:30:41   It may not have appealed to everyone, but I think it should have.

00:30:44   Well, it's not for everyone in the sense that Marko meant that it's not that everyone can't

00:30:48   benefit from this, because they can. It's that it's not of interest to everyone, which

00:30:52   I think is totally true.

00:30:53   They're not going to rush to it.

00:30:54   Right. For everyone, it doesn't mean if everyone's to have this, they would get benefit from

00:31:00   it, because everyone would get benefit from this. The question is, is this a type of product

00:31:04   that if you describe to anyone, they immediately say, "Oh, yeah, I totally would like that.

00:31:08   And yeah, here's $50." And the answer to that was definitely no, because it's the type of

00:31:11   thing that people don't really know that they need. And it's also the type of thing that

00:31:14   we've been conditioned by sort of modern computing platforms to assume is a platform-level concern.

00:31:20   Like, "Oh, doesn't Apple take care of that for me? Or doesn't Google take care of that

00:31:24   for me?" And it really properly should be a platform-level concern, which is why everyone

00:31:28   kept saying someone should buy Everpix, because it's like, you know, it's the type of third-party

00:31:33   thing where you're like, "Whoever my platform vendor is should be providing some way for

00:31:38   me to do this, whether it's paying for iCloud storage or as part of my really expensive phone

00:31:44   or as part of my Google account so they get all my personal information or whatever. It should be

00:31:48   a platform-level concern. And so people aren't going to say, "I'll pay an extra 50 bucks to

00:31:52   this other company if you do this thing," that, yeah, I may get value of it, but it's not something

00:31:56   that's eating it. It's only people who are really bothered by it are crazy people like us who think

00:31:59   about backups and stuff. And that's the terrible thing about Everpix is most people don't think

00:32:05   they need this at all even though they do. And if you gave them to them for free, they

00:32:08   would probably enjoy it, but they're not going to go out and buy it. And if you have something

00:32:11   people aren't going to go out and buy, you basically have a business that's "not for

00:32:15   everyone" because everyone does not come to you to buy it. And it's a subtle distinction,

00:32:19   but it's an important one when you're sitting there waiting for the customers to arrive.

00:32:23   Also, I want to address two quick follow-ups here. One, the idea that Apple should just

00:32:29   do this for everyone, it is, to put it bluntly, it is not that easy. Because Apple is so big,

00:32:37   and the number of iOS devices being used and having photo shots on them is so large, that

00:32:42   like, S3 isn't big enough for that. Like that's the kind of scale that we're talking about.

00:32:46   They're too big for S3. And doing something like this on Apple's scale is such a completely

00:32:54   different ballgame than doing it on the scale of a new web service with 10,000, 50,000,

00:33:00   whatever users. It's not even close to the same game.

00:33:05   Number two, the idea that a startup is only worth, is worth a lot less once they've made

00:33:11   any money at all is mostly not true in practice. In practice, growth matters above everything.

00:33:20   Even if you aren't making a whole lot of money right now, if you are getting user growth

00:33:24   traffic growth, attention growth, but especially user growth. That papers over everything.

00:33:29   That's what the entire VC world is based on, just like the stock market, is the potential

00:33:34   for future money. If you've made some money now, but it's been disappointing, but your

00:33:38   user growth is totally through the roof, that doesn't mean you're worthless. It means you

00:33:42   didn't try the right business plan yet or the right revenue plan yet, but that doesn't

00:33:46   mean there isn't one. If you have user growth, VCs will give you money, period.

00:33:50   Yeah, but the easiest way to get that explosive growth and to make people believe that there's

00:33:54   going to be explosive growth is to not charge anybody money for anything, because then people

00:33:59   will truly believe, "Oh, this can scale to all the people who have computers." As soon

00:34:03   as you charge any money for anybody for anything, they're like, "Well, that automatically puts

00:34:07   a cap on your potential growth rate," because you're asking for money, period.

00:34:12   Totally agree. But I'm saying if your actual growth rate is really good, regardless of

00:34:16   whether you're charging for anything, if your actual growth rate is consistently good, you'll

00:34:20   keep getting VC money. And that's why VC-funded companies always give everything away for

00:34:24   free because you're correct that since the whole game is based on growth for as long

00:34:29   as possible, the last thing you want to do is inhibit growth by charging money for any

00:34:34   part of the product.

00:34:35   And their growth rate was not great, and they kept touting their conversion rate, which

00:34:38   was very good, but your conversion rate doesn't matter if you're converting on peanuts' worth

00:34:42   of people who are not growing fast enough.

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00:37:44   - All right, so do we want to,

00:37:46   oh, I should note actually before we move

00:37:48   into the review followup,

00:37:50   that a lot of people have been wondering

00:37:53   what are the alternative SaverPix?

00:37:54   I can only speak for myself, I don't know about you guys,

00:37:56   but I haven't looked into any yet,

00:37:58   I haven't had the chance,

00:37:59   but the three that we're aware of are Loom,

00:38:03   Picture Life, and Adobe, is it Revel, is that right?

00:38:07   - Yeah, Revel, yeah.

00:38:08   - Okay, and those are the three that we're aware of.

00:38:10   I don't know, John or Marco,

00:38:11   if you have anything to add about those three,

00:38:12   but those are the ones that are the obvious ones.

00:38:16   - Revel is interesting.

00:38:17   I have a brief conflict of interest

00:38:20   in that they sponsored my site when they launched Revel

00:38:22   for something like eight weeks in a row.

00:38:24   But it's an interesting product, I think.

00:38:28   It seems as though Adobe is not paying a lot of attention to it recently and maybe,

00:38:33   I don't know, Adobe, it seems like the Lightroom team is rocking it with the success of Lightroom

00:38:38   and I wish these things were just part of Lightroom and it seems like there's no good reason,

00:38:44   or rather, I'm sure there's a good reason, but I wish Revell was just like a Lightroom cloud.

00:38:50   And it's not. It's a separate thing and Lightroom can publish to it, but it doesn't store RAWs and

00:38:54   and stuff like that.

00:38:56   And it kind of tries to bridge the gap between consumer and pro

00:39:00   and doesn't really satisfy either of them amazingly.

00:39:03   And so it's kind of an odd product.

00:39:06   And it seems like it's kind of getting lost in Adobe's

00:39:09   complexity.

00:39:09   But what I would love, really, is Lightroom Cloud.

00:39:13   Like, I would pay a good price for that

00:39:17   to basically have the revel ability

00:39:22   to store everything online and just have thumbnails and stuff on iOS devices and be able to download

00:39:26   anything by tapping it. To have that but integrated fully with Lightroom and supporting RAW, that

00:39:34   would be amazing. But it doesn't exist.

00:39:37   I haven't tried any of these services yet either, although I did look at all of their

00:39:41   pages and the one thing they all have in common is much higher prices than Everpix. So take

00:39:47   that for whatever you will. Are there chances of surviving better than Everpix? Are they

00:39:52   worse? I mean, I don't know if I need them to even have a freemium model. I think they

00:39:55   all just charge up front. Is that the case? I don't know. I haven't investigated it. But

00:39:59   anyway, maybe I'll look into them all and try it. But one of the things that I found

00:40:03   attractive about Everpix was that it was so inexpensive. It's kind of like the back place.

00:40:08   When they first came out many, many years ago, they're like, "Oh, well, this company

00:40:11   will be out of business because they're charging like $5 a month for unlimited backup. How

00:40:14   How can that be sustainable?

00:40:16   And here we are many, many years later, and they're still around, and they have competitors,

00:40:20   and apparently they've been able to make that work.

00:40:21   And actually, I want to get back to what Marco was saying before about how Apple's scale

00:40:26   will be much larger.

00:40:27   I think that's true, but Everpix said they would be profitable with three extra subscriber

00:40:32   rate, and that's $50 a year per person, right?

00:40:35   So Apple will have 300,000 times their subscriber rate.

00:40:40   So presumably, if it's profitable with three times Everpix's subscriber rate, it would

00:40:43   be profitable through $100,000. And I think Apple is especially positioned to be even

00:40:47   more cost effective for this thing because Everpix had to pay S3, which means Amazon

00:40:54   gets to skim some profit off the top because they're reselling the storage service.

00:40:58   Apple presumably would implement its own storage solution or have its own storage stuff that

00:41:05   it doesn't have to give Amazon or some other company a piece of its profit. And that's

00:41:09   it before you get into what I was talking about, like, okay, we'll take some of your

00:41:13   massive profit from your other product lines and plow it into that, which presumably is

00:41:17   what they're doing with the iCloud storage, which must be subsidized by their other products

00:41:21   and stuff.

00:41:22   And iCloud storage, I don't know how it compares to $50 a year.

00:41:25   It's obviously not $50 a year for unlimited.

00:41:27   But again, I feel like if Everpix, with their technology that they were using, was able

00:41:31   to be profitable at $50 a year, if Apple charged $50 a year and they would store all your photos

00:41:37   in iCloud for you and then just put the most recent thousand on your phone or something,

00:41:42   they would have, I think, a service that at the very least breaks even, if not makes profit

00:41:47   on its own.

00:41:48   Yeah, I mean, the issue I don't think would be profitability. It would just be dealing

00:41:52   with that scale. It would be a ton of engineering time and resources just to deal with the scale,

00:41:59   not necessarily the raw costs of, "Okay, we're paying for this many servers and this

00:42:03   much bandwidth." It's not that. It's the massive engineering effort required to

00:42:08   to operate something at that scale where something like S3 is really not suitable. And by the

00:42:12   way, an S3 is not cheap. I mean, none of Amazon's web services are cheap. And there's this culture

00:42:19   in tech startups these days that the default of you're starting anything, the default answer

00:42:24   is let's host it all on Amazon Web Services. And that is not cost effective at all for

00:42:30   almost anything. You do it on Amazon Web Services because the scaling is effectively free up

00:42:37   to a limit that's so high that even Tumblr probably hasn't reached it yet. Although

00:42:42   Apple I think would with that dataset. But you're talking, Amazon scales very, very

00:42:50   easily with some of their services. EC2, maybe. S3, definitely. And you pay a big premium

00:42:57   for that. If your entire business, like Backblaze, if Backblaze was based on S3, they would not

00:43:04   be able to offer that kind of pricing.

00:43:07   Backblaze very famously made their own storage servers.

00:43:10   Like they designed their own storage servers

00:43:11   with massive numbers of hard drives.

00:43:13   Cram into this case, they even open sourced the design

00:43:15   and something like that.

00:43:17   And they actually designed custom hardware

00:43:21   to get tons of storage as cheaply as possible.

00:43:25   And that's why they can offer that.

00:43:27   If your entire business is storing a very large amount

00:43:31   of data for as little money as possible,

00:43:34   S3 is not actually a good fit for you. That's not going to scale very well. But it's the

00:43:39   easy quick fix up front, at least, while you figure out whether your business has legs.

00:43:43   And that's the problem is that EverFix didn't.

00:43:45   Yeah, I mean, it lets you get in without putting a bunch of money down. Because with S3, it's

00:43:51   like, "Hey, zero dollars," and you put your first byte of storage in, and you pay for

00:43:55   that first byte of storage, and you keep going. And eventually, it becomes ridiculous and

00:43:58   unsustainable because now you're giving all your slim ploppet margins to Amazon. But it

00:44:02   you get off the ground. For companies like Apple, though, at a certain point, this is going to

00:44:08   become the price of entry if you are a platform vendor. Google's already there where there are

00:44:12   certain things people just start to expect. A long time ago, Apple didn't give you an email address.

00:44:19   Nowadays, if you are the platform vendor, even if a lot of people don't use it, and even if your

00:44:24   thing doesn't become the most popular email thing, Apple has to offer people a way to have a Mac.com

00:44:28   or an iCloud.com email address.

00:44:30   Is it a core part of the business?

00:44:32   No.

00:44:32   Are they ever going to threaten Gmail or Hotmail?

00:44:33   No.

00:44:34   But it's the price of entry.

00:44:35   You just have to do that because you're

00:44:37   going to have an email application.

00:44:39   And so at a certain point, I hope, eventually,

00:44:41   a price of entry will be, of course,

00:44:44   whoever my platform vendor is will store all my pictures

00:44:47   for me in the cloud.

00:44:48   As per some yearly fee, part of my cell phone plan,

00:44:54   some way to get enough money to cover the cost for that,

00:44:57   it'll become the price of entry because Google is almost already doing it.

00:45:01   And if people get used to that, it is terrible for Apple to be like,

00:45:04   well, let me show you this diagram showing you where your pictures are

00:45:07   and how much money you have to pay and which device burns down,

00:45:10   which photos you'll lose at what time.

00:45:12   You just want to not have to think about it.

00:45:14   And so it's difficult to do.

00:45:17   And they can't do it through Amazon because why would you

00:45:20   give Amazon all that money?

00:45:21   Apple's supposed to do it themselves.

00:45:23   Apple has to figure out a way to do it.

00:45:26   time is coming where they're just going to have to face that music and just do it.

00:45:29   Although, again, I'll make the same argument I made last time we talked about that, which

00:45:32   is that the reality is that people's photos and, God, especially videos, are so large

00:45:40   file size-wise that you're into pretty severe upstream bandwidth problems and data cap problems

00:45:47   if you try to do a lot of this.

00:45:49   I mean, that's another one of the problems that Everpix had, is that for Everpix to be

00:45:54   useful to you, you had to upload a lot of photos to it.

00:45:56   And a lot of people just don't have a fast enough connection

00:45:59   to do that in a reasonable amount of time.

00:46:00   Online backup has a similar problem for a lot of people.

00:46:03   And I think that limitation of just bandwidth

00:46:07   not catching up very quickly, and when it does catch up,

00:46:11   you start getting data caps and stuff like that.

00:46:14   That's always going to be a problem.

00:46:16   And as bandwidth increases, so will photo size,

00:46:20   and so will the amount of videos people take.

00:46:22   Bandwidth is already out running photos. I think video you're it's still true because video

00:46:26   It's a big problem

00:46:28   It's gonna take a long time for bandwidth to catch up to video

00:46:30   And I don't think 4k videos around the corner

00:46:33   But 1080p video is already way too big for anyone to do, but I think photos

00:46:36   I think we're already there for photos

00:46:38   I think anybody with a photo collection and any what you would call broadband thing

00:46:43   It's gonna take a while, but all your photos will eventually go up

00:46:45   Which is not true of video, so I think I think we've it's kind of like the when we passed the point where you could download

00:46:50   download music on Napster, but you couldn't download feature-length movies. We're at that

00:46:54   point. You can do photos, all right? Most people don't have RAWs, and they just have

00:46:58   cruddy JPEGs. And yes, the pictures are getting bigger, but I think bandwidth is getting bigger

00:47:02   faster. I mean, just look at Casey with his LTE nirvana, where he's amazed at the speed

00:47:06   he gets on his little phone. Like, the speed that he gets on his phone is sufficient for

00:47:11   any photo collection of anybody who's been alive less than 100 years and takes a dozen

00:47:17   pictures a day. I think we've passed the photo realm. The fact that videos are mixed in is

00:47:21   a problem, but I would say for Apple, they can just say, "Oh, we don't back up your videos."

00:47:25   Because what can they do with videos? This 1080p is just too much data already from ... Maybe

00:47:30   when they do H.265, whatever the next standard is, I think that's ... I got the number right,

00:47:35   it's supposed to give you another 2x or 3x compression thing with no loss. Maybe we start

00:47:40   ... And then LTE becomes common and people's broadband has to at least match LTE. Then

00:47:44   maybe we start to enter the realm of video. But like I said, if we ever go to 4K, it just

00:47:48   starts that all over again. But pictures, I think, are going to probably top out at

00:47:52   like 30, 40, or 50 megapixels. Like regular people are never going to want more pixels

00:47:57   than that in their images because what are you going to do, put it on the side of a building?

00:48:00   Like it's big enough to get a 24 by 24 inch print and you're fine, right? And so I think

00:48:05   that will top out and I think we've passed that. But if Apple doesn't start trying to

00:48:10   do it now, it's not like they're going to wait until bandwidth can carry it and say,

00:48:14   "Okay, now that we feel like we can so comfortably do it and everyone can upload their total

00:48:18   photo collection in an hour, now let's do it." They've got to start now. I mean, arguably

00:48:22   they have started somewhere with PhotoStream. It's just that it's kind of a shame to do

00:48:26   a half solution. They should just try to do the whole thing and bite the bullet now.

00:48:32   All right. We've spent quite a bit of time talking about Everpix, and I think that's

00:48:38   because I know I speak for myself and probably both of you that I'm really bummed that it

00:48:43   left. Any other thoughts, though, real quick before we move along?

00:48:47   Rob Mathers in the chat room thinks that upload bandwidth is still a problem. I point to Casey's

00:48:51   phone. You had good upload speeds, too, right? It wasn't just download that you were impressed

00:48:54   with.

00:48:55   No, no, no, no.

00:48:56   What was your upload speed on that LTE?

00:48:57   I forget off the top of my head, but it was something to—I'm trying to look—but

00:49:00   it was something to the order of like 1515, which—

00:49:02   15 megabits up. That's plenty. And that's on a phone. Everyone will have a phone.

00:49:08   upload speeds are fine. Home broadband upload speeds are terrible.

00:49:11   I know, but if that happens, home broadband will be eclipsed by the people who are selling

00:49:16   LTE, because everyone already knows they need a cell phone, and everyone is eventually going

00:49:20   to have an LTE cell phone. And that's bad for cable companies if they can't get their

00:49:23   acts together to get their upload bandwidth better, and people realize they have faster

00:49:27   upload bandwidth from their iPad or their iPhone. And that's not even a problem from

00:49:31   Apple's perspective, since if everyone's taking their pictures with their iPhone, and it's

00:49:34   already on LTE, there you go. There's your upload bandwidth.

00:49:38   Right, but then you have data cap limits. I mean, there's no clear path for this immediately.

00:49:44   Like, maybe in five years, typical carrier data caps will be two or three times as high.

00:49:51   Who knows? Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll be exactly the same as they are today, or lower.

00:49:54   Who knows? Well, data caps are artificial, though, so that is the type of thing that can

00:49:59   change without people running new copper or putting up new cell towers or doing the infrastructure

00:50:03   thing. Someone just changes a number in a spreadsheet, and all of a sudden you're allowed

00:50:06   to upload. I feel like that's the type of thing that will solve it.

00:50:11   Well, there's also issues with radio spectrum space and crowding of the towers, though.

00:50:17   None of this scales particularly gracefully, and all of it's controlled by companies that

00:50:21   historically have not shown much of a willingness to lower prices over time or to give you more

00:50:26   over time. You never know what's going to lead, though,

00:50:29   because sometimes it's competition amongst the people providing the service where they

00:50:34   compete with each other, oh, Fios is coming. Now we need to-- as soon as Fios enters town,

00:50:37   you see all the cable people crank up their bandwidth and everything. Because that's one

00:50:41   level competition. And the other level competition is if there's something on the net that draws

00:50:45   customers, customers will be drawn to it. Like, say, oh, I've got to have Netflix. And Netflix

00:50:52   doesn't work on Time Warner Cable, just to pick something out of a hat, because I don't have

00:50:56   enough bandwidth and it's terrible. I'm going to find a new ISP, assuming there's any competition

00:51:00   at all, which is another big problem. But I'm going to find another ISP, even if it's wireless

00:51:04   or WiMAX or whatever the hell it's going to be because I need to watch Netflix.

00:51:07   And in that case, Netflix is the draw.

00:51:08   So you have forces on both sides.

00:51:12   And I think the forces on the side of competition among service providers is so terrible that

00:51:16   we should be relying on the force of "make this thing on the net that people want and

00:51:21   who will get pissy if they can't get it."

00:51:23   And if part of the thing is, "Oh, all my photos are backed up and safe because I have

00:51:27   a decent ISP or my caps are high or whatever and yours isn't," you should switch to T-Mobile,

00:51:32   whoever the hungry competitor is who gives you some insane no limit, you know,

00:51:36   T-Mobile doing like the 200 megabytes free bandwidth or whatever.

00:51:40   Despite the incredible dysfunction in our thing, I think if you make a product

00:51:44   or service out there that everybody wants, they will be pissed if they can't get it, and they will be pissed

00:51:48   at their carrier and they will look for any alternative. That's a market opportunity for the people who are

00:51:52   currently losing in the market to do something.

00:51:56   So real-time follow-up from myself. I just ran a speed test on my phone

00:52:00   phone on LTE and I got 25 megabits down and 15 up and I know I've told the story

00:52:05   at least once or twice before but I'll tell it again when Aaron and I bought

00:52:08   our house in 2008 I was arguably more excited about getting files than I was

00:52:12   about owning our first home and at that point in time the reasonable MacDaddy

00:52:18   service was 15 15 and that was just 2008 which is just five years ago and on my

00:52:25   My cellular telephone, I just got 2515.

00:52:29   At this point, we're past the point in which photo uploads are doable over even LTE, with

00:52:36   the exception of the data caps like we talked about.

00:52:39   Yeah, you should see—how much of your data do you use per month?

00:52:41   Like, not counting—you know, you're not uploading photos, but just like regular phone

00:52:44   use.

00:52:45   I'd say between one and two gigs in a general month.

00:52:48   And I don't even know how, to be honest with you, because I'm on Wi-Fi always, but

00:52:52   somehow or another I find a way.

00:52:54   If you're running the Overcast Beta, it doesn't do cell filtering yet for the downloads.

00:52:58   I'm not? Wait, there isn't? Is there a beta? No. I was gonna say.

00:53:02   I just saw my usage today and it was like 400 megs for the month so far.

00:53:06   I'm like, "Whoops." Our second sponsor this week is

00:53:10   FSim Space Shuttle. This is interesting. This is a new kind of sponsor

00:53:14   for us. FSIM.com, as in Flight Simulator.

00:53:18   FSim Space Shuttle is an iOS and Android flight simulator

00:53:22   that is highly realistic and it's designed to simulate specifically the landing of the

00:53:31   U.S. space shuttle in its final descent into Kennedy or Edwards Air Force Base.

00:53:38   When I first saw this, I was like, "They have a whole app for that?" And then I tried the app.

00:53:42   It's incredibly detailed. I mean, they've... You've got to read the reviews. I mean, the reviews back this up.

00:53:47   it's not just them paying us to say this.

00:53:49   There's this great review on the Mac observer.

00:53:51   I'm not really a flight sim person in general,

00:53:54   but you can look at people who are flight sim people

00:53:57   and you can see what they say about this.

00:53:59   And they just love this thing.

00:54:03   It simulates very realistically these space shuttle landings.

00:54:06   And you can configure everything.

00:54:07   You can challenge yourself.

00:54:08   You can be like, all right, well, let

00:54:10   me turn on a major turbulence, and I'll

00:54:13   do it at night with really cloudy visibility.

00:54:16   and I'll simulate the failure of one of these instruments,

00:54:18   or my flaps won't work, or something like that.

00:54:21   And I'll have to still try to land it well

00:54:24   under these challenging conditions.

00:54:26   Or you can just do it straight and do it

00:54:29   under perfectly clear conditions and just try to get it exactly

00:54:32   right without slamming down too hard

00:54:35   and putting too much force on the landing gear,

00:54:38   or being unsafe, or missing the glide path, things like that.

00:54:43   It's just really interesting.

00:54:44   I didn't realize there is this whole world around this stuff

00:54:49   until we were sent this app for review for this spot.

00:54:51   And I have to admit, I'm terrible at it.

00:54:54   I mean, I've tried a bunch of landings myself.

00:54:57   And the best I can get is what they call a crash landing,

00:55:02   which is like you don't crash, but you've landed hard enough

00:55:06   or wrong enough that you've put too much force

00:55:09   on certain parts and it's not proper and it could be unsafe.

00:55:13   So there's the crash, which I haven't gotten.

00:55:15   There's the proper landing, which I haven't gotten.

00:55:17   And then in the middle, there's the crash landing,

00:55:19   which is what I keep getting.

00:55:21   But it's an exercise in precision and just practice

00:55:26   and self-control.

00:55:27   It's really cool.

00:55:28   The graphics are amazing, by the way.

00:55:30   Flight Sims are always-- and again,

00:55:32   I don't know that much about Flight Sims,

00:55:34   but I've always noticed that they've always

00:55:36   been amazing with the visuals, with the graphics

00:55:40   and everything.

00:55:41   And this is no exception.

00:55:42   You can play this on a retina iPad.

00:55:45   It works on iPhone too, and I did it on both, but man, it looks fantastic, especially on

00:55:50   the retina iPad.

00:55:52   So check out fsim space shuttle.

00:55:54   It's f-sim.

00:55:57   You can search for that in the app store, or you can go to f-sim, with or without the

00:56:00   dash, doesn't matter, fsim.com.

00:56:04   It's only $4 US and probably some similar amount elsewhere.

00:56:09   for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Android. Check out the screenshots, check out they

00:56:14   have videos. It's not like an arcade game or anything, but if you like flight sims,

00:56:19   you will like this.

00:56:20   I think the amazing thing that they did about it is that when you get thinking about flight

00:56:24   sims like that, you're like, Oh, this is gonna be too technical for me, I'm not gonna be

00:56:27   able to do it, there's gonna be too many buttons, it's gonna be too fidgety. The amazing thing

00:56:30   about this game is that you can start it and just start playing. No, don't read a single

00:56:35   Don't don't don't read the help don't look at the controls won't do anything just start the game and play it and you can

00:56:42   Successfully do what you think is a landing until it tells you that it does technically is a crash landing because you just jam the

00:56:48   Space shuttle into the ground way too fast and you'll get a low score and you feel bad

00:56:52   But the point is you don't have no idea what to do

00:56:54   You can immediately pick it up and use it and the one thing I really liked about this game is that I hate games with

00:56:59   Tilt controls, but this game when you do the tilt controls and I don't haven't seen any other games

00:57:03   do this, but I think they all should now that I've seen it. When you tilt the iPad, the

00:57:08   picture stays level. So like the horizon stays level with your eyes, even as you tilt the

00:57:13   iPad. And tilting the iPad is how you control, you know, like rolling the thing from left

00:57:16   to right. But this image on the screen doesn't tilt. There's nothing worse than playing like

00:57:20   a game like this driving game, so you try to turn to steer the wheel, and the whole

00:57:24   world tilts when you tilt the screen.

00:57:25   I hate all those games.

00:57:27   This works in that mode if there's like an option to turn on that mode if that's what

00:57:29   you prefer, but I vastly prefer the mode where, as I turn the iPad, the horizon does not tilt

00:57:35   with me until the thing is rolling. So that made it immediately accessible. I played just

00:57:43   long enough to beat all you guys' scores, because you guys are terrible.

00:57:47   My best is like 7,000, which is terrible.

00:57:50   My best is like 40,000, but all my scores for the 40,000 still were crash landings.

00:57:55   It is really, really hard.

00:57:57   And I'm playing with-- I'm not turning on the inclement weather, or I did random a few

00:58:01   times or whatever.

00:58:03   This is a game that if you're into it, you can pick it up immediately and do it.

00:58:07   And then if you are obsessive or into flight sims, you could-- I don't know how long it

00:58:11   would take you to do this perfectly.

00:58:13   Forget about failures.

00:58:14   Forget about that this thing doesn't work and the wind picks up.

00:58:19   Can you actually do a perfect landing in perfect weather, perfect visibility, and no other

00:58:23   things?

00:58:24   I think that would take you a long time.

00:58:25   This is an extremely deep game that nevertheless you can pick up and just immediately play

00:58:30   and do something with.

00:58:31   And it's short.

00:58:32   Like, if you do a final approach, it's like two minutes' worth of gameplay.

00:58:35   It's not something you're going to be there for seven hours flying across the country

00:58:38   in Microsoft Flight Simulator.

00:58:39   Right.

00:58:40   That's what I was going to say to really quickly kind of wrap up the spot, that it's

00:58:45   a really good in-line game, or online, depending on who you ask, in that it's only a couple

00:58:49   minutes long.

00:58:50   And so, unlike, say, Flight Control, which is a very good game but could last forever

00:58:55   if you do well, no matter what, you're going to land that shuttle. So it's a matter of

00:58:59   just a couple of minutes. It really works well when you just have a couple of minutes

00:59:03   to kill, which is when I typically play these kinds of short games.

00:59:07   That's the brutal thing about the shuttle. No engines. You're going to land the shuttle

00:59:10   because gravity is like, "Okay, I'm going to come in for another approach. Let me just

00:59:14   hit the engines and circle back." Nope. It's going down like a rock if you don't do it

00:59:19   right. It's definitely an extra twist on flight simulator landing because I'm accustomed to,

00:59:23   OK, I'm coming a little low.

00:59:25   Let me just boost my engines a little bit here to get--

00:59:27   nope, there's none of that.

00:59:29   You're going down.

00:59:30   Yep, it's a glider.

00:59:31   Yeah, anyway, so thanks a lot to fsimspaceshuttle.

00:59:34   You can find it on iOS or Android app stores, fsim.com.

00:59:39   So John, when you install Mavericks,

00:59:42   do you do a fresh install or do you update?

00:59:43   And I should say that this is from listener Mike.

00:59:46   There's going to be a series of questions, which

00:59:48   I will attribute to him.

00:59:49   So do you do a fresh install?

00:59:51   I've answered this before.

00:59:52   do an update install on OS X.

00:59:54   I did manually integrate-- in the classic days,

00:59:58   I would do a fresh install.

00:59:59   And then I would manually bring over all the little files

01:00:01   that were part of the system folder,

01:00:03   because I like to manually merge it together.

01:00:05   But when an OS X came, I realized,

01:00:08   A, there are way too many files for me to do that manually

01:00:10   anymore.

01:00:11   And I didn't know them like the back of my hand,

01:00:13   like I knew the classic ones.

01:00:14   And B, once I started doing the update installs

01:00:17   and saw that it didn't lose my settings--

01:00:19   because that was the old slam against classic Mac OS.

01:00:21   If you tried to do an update install, you could lose some of your settings or overwrite

01:00:25   your preferences with new ones and it wasn't that friendly.

01:00:27   But OS X has always been pretty good about that.

01:00:29   So I always do an update install.

01:00:31   So much so that I probably have plist files from companies that have long since gone out

01:00:34   of business just lurking inside my library folder.

01:00:37   And it's fine.

01:00:38   Works fine year after year.

01:00:40   Always do an update install.

01:00:41   JONATHAN: Do you have auto app updates on or off?

01:00:44   JEREMY CHAPMAN-MCCABE I'm assuming they're asking on the Mac.

01:00:46   On the Mac, no, I don't.

01:00:49   I haven't really decided what I'm going to do in the Mac.

01:00:52   I think probably I won't, just because I don't want to be bothered by the little dialog that

01:01:01   says, "Oh, we have an update ready.

01:01:03   All you need to do is restart, and it will start your install."

01:01:06   I would rather be bothered by a little badge on the App Store or something like that than

01:01:10   be bothered by the, "Oh, we've already..."

01:01:12   I know it's the same amount of bother.

01:01:14   The file's on your disk or it's not.

01:01:15   It's the same kind of nagging.

01:01:16   it makes me feel worse when it says, "We've already downloaded it. In fact, all you need

01:01:21   to do is restart, and we'll start the installer." Somehow that still bothers me, so I still

01:01:26   have it set to manual.

01:01:28   Now for family members' computers, will you have them on auto?

01:01:31   I don't know. I think I would put a family member that I wasn't going to be—like,

01:01:37   if I go visit my parents in Colorado, I think I would put them on auto update after I update

01:01:42   them, because I'm not going to be there to every once in a while run updates for them.

01:01:46   But for a computer in my house, I won't set my wife's computer to auto-update.

01:01:50   If I'm not going to be there, I'd rather set an auto-update to at least have some confidence

01:01:53   that updates are being plied in some fashion at some point.

01:01:57   But if I have access to the machine in any way, I'd rather handle that myself just so

01:02:01   I can…

01:02:02   Like I wouldn't put my wife on auto-update because what if some update ran and she didn't

01:02:05   like it?

01:02:06   I want to be able to clear this with her.

01:02:10   When I'm far away, I'd rather just have the updates run.

01:02:12   So I guess it's a distance thing.

01:02:14   And then what are your thoughts on the yearly release cycle?

01:02:17   From your view, I got the impression

01:02:19   that you have some concerns that large important features will

01:02:21   have a hard time fitting in.

01:02:23   It was mostly-- I talked about it in the review.

01:02:25   It was mostly about the idea that Apple shouldn't

01:02:29   feel like it has to do yearly updates just because iOS

01:02:32   does yearly updates.

01:02:34   Just as if we didn't have yearly updates,

01:02:36   people would say, oh, they're ignoring the Mac.

01:02:38   And the reason I worry about it is

01:02:39   because if you're always in that yearly update cycle,

01:02:41   it's more difficult-- not impossible,

01:02:43   but more difficult to do features

01:02:45   that can't be done in a year.

01:02:48   Because then you gotta sort of half do them,

01:02:51   all the while you're tracking the two versions of OS X

01:02:54   that slide by underneath you

01:02:56   and see which one you can land in.

01:02:57   And that is a little bit more uncomfortable.

01:02:59   It's like, well, if we had 18 months, or even two years,

01:03:02   we could do a really impressive update.

01:03:05   And in the middle of that 18 month or two year cycle,

01:03:08   we don't really have anything releasable that's worthwhile,

01:03:10   so why bother going through,

01:03:12   this is overhead for each release,

01:03:13   overhead for the QA process and putting out the marketing message and figuring out what

01:03:18   it is you're going to highlight.

01:03:21   Even now, especially now that the thing is free, it's not like you're forgoing any income

01:03:25   that you could have gotten in there.

01:03:26   So I'd be perfectly fine with them sort of slackening off a little bit, but I think Apple

01:03:31   thinks that they need to do every year you get a new iOS and every year you get a new

01:03:35   Mac OS and they're both free.

01:03:38   And I understand why they're doing it.

01:03:39   I just think it's actually going to delay

01:03:42   some interesting new features more so

01:03:44   than they would be if the OS X releases were allowed

01:03:46   to come out sort of as they naturally wanted to.

01:03:50   That makes sense.

01:03:51   Now, can you estimate how much time you took on your review?

01:03:54   Well, you guys know, and listeners of the podcast

01:03:56   know, because you could just track based on when

01:03:58   the whining began about working on it.

01:04:02   For Mountain Lion, I had a huge amount written

01:04:05   before I ever went to WIDC.

01:04:07   This year, didn't have anything written before I went to WIDC.

01:04:09   I had lots of notes and stuff of things to look into.

01:04:13   But did we know anything before WWC?

01:04:15   I don't think we knew anything of substance.

01:04:17   Nope.

01:04:18   I don't think so.

01:04:19   We didn't have builds.

01:04:20   We didn't have a name.

01:04:21   We didn't have, "Oh, here's what's going to be in the OS."

01:04:24   And insider hints were thin on the ground.

01:04:27   There wasn't, in all the stories about, "Here's what might be in 10.9," there wasn't even

01:04:31   the whole, "10.9 is going to be about energy saving."

01:04:33   Even that vague rumor was not in the air before WWC.

01:04:36   So I didn't have much.

01:04:38   So I guess you could probably track it from—as soon as the old release is done—not as soon

01:04:44   as the old release is done.

01:04:45   I haven't created my new document for 10.10 yet, but I guess when I do I'll mention

01:04:48   it on the air.

01:04:49   Once I have anything to put in a document, I'll make it and I'll start adding stuff

01:04:52   to it.

01:04:53   But I didn't start doing real work until WWDC.

01:04:57   And then it just worked on it basically straight through from what?

01:04:59   W

01:04:59   I forgot this year.

01:05:00   Early June.

01:05:01   Yeah, until October.

01:05:02   So when did I work on it?

01:05:08   After the kids were in bed, and towards the run up to the end, I stole a couple of weekend

01:05:13   days when my wife would take the kids out somewhere during the day, and I'd get some

01:05:16   work done during the day as well.

01:05:18   So I don't know how you'd add up the hours.

01:05:20   It's not as long as it seems, because again, this is not my full-time job, as many people

01:05:23   don't know.

01:05:24   It's what I do on nights and weekends.

01:05:26   And then you just hibernate for the entire rest of the year.

01:05:30   Well, you know, maybe I'll actually post something to my blog again.

01:05:34   It could happen.

01:05:35   Weird.

01:05:36   If my life is, "Wake up, get the kids out of the house, feed them breakfast, get them

01:05:40   off to school, go to work, pick the kids up, make them dinner, get them to bed, go to work

01:05:46   on a review, go to sleep," I can't sustain that.

01:05:52   I need downtime.

01:05:53   desperately need some kind of downtime where I just sit like a vegetable and don't do something

01:05:56   with my brain. Sometimes at the end of a long day of work, I don't want to use my brain anymore.

01:06:03   At work, I'm not just twiddling my thumbs. I'm using my brain. I'm programming. That can burn

01:06:09   you out. And plus, sometimes you want to have that downtime. I'm sure Marco and Casey both do this,

01:06:15   where you spend the day programming, right? And you come home, and that break where you're not

01:06:21   not doing anything where you're just making dinner and you're just watching some dumb

01:06:25   TV show or whatever, that's when your brain is working on the programming problems that

01:06:30   you encounter that day.

01:06:31   So when you come in the next morning, now you have a much better approach to that problem.

01:06:35   It maybe occurred to you during dinner or in the shower in the morning or whatever.

01:06:39   If you didn't have that downtime, if you had just sat there plugging away at the problem,

01:06:43   you never would have come up with that.

01:06:44   It's almost like sometimes, "You know what?

01:06:45   I should have stopped working sooner because as soon as I stopped working and just let

01:06:48   my brain chewing that, it became obvious to me, "Oh, what are you doing? That's stupid.

01:06:52   Do it this way." And then you go in the next morning, all ready for that stuff to just

01:06:55   dump out of your fingers, and you're like, "Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, done, done, done.

01:06:58   I worked on this for three hours before I went home yesterday and got nowhere, and all

01:07:02   I needed to do was stop working, let my brain stew for a couple hours, go to sleep, wake

01:07:05   up, and 15 minutes of work." And it's like, "Yep, that's what I should have done last

01:07:10   night." So that's the way I feel. And if I try to take that time when my brain will be

01:07:16   working on work programming problems and say, "Okay, nope, switch gears. Now you've got

01:07:19   to work on this whole other thing. Work, work, work." You burn out. So I really try to save

01:07:27   the crunch time for just a couple of weeks or maybe a month of crunch time where it's

01:07:31   like every waking moment I have to do it. And even then, I try to give myself downtime,

01:07:35   even if I'm sacrificing sleep. Like, "Okay, I've got to stop writing for the night. It's

01:07:38   11 o'clock. Let me watch an hour and a half of TV and then go to bed," because I need

01:07:41   that hour and a half to decompress.

01:07:44   Right. There's also a little bit of feedback from Michael James Boyle. I guess this is about the

01:07:49   ebook. Is that right? Yeah. We're asking about how the ebook stores handle updates and how Amazon is

01:07:56   very bad at it. And the question really is, if you do stuff to your ebook and you make notes and you

01:08:01   make highlights and you do stuff like that, and then you update the ebook, how well does each

01:08:05   ebook store handle that updating process? Do you lose all your notes, all your bookmarks,

01:08:10   and all your highlights and everything, or does it try to incorporate them? And so he gave the

01:08:13   the answer for how iBooks works. And he said, "It does not lose everything you have. It

01:08:19   tries its best to preserve it and doesn't do a very good job, but it's better than deleting

01:08:24   everything."

01:08:25   So even highlights of passages of text that have not changed, the highlights will be off

01:08:30   because they'll be shifted by other texts or other things, but the highlights will be

01:08:34   there and the notes will be there. And so you could, in theory, if the book hasn't changed

01:08:37   that much, manually fix them, which is vastly preferable to wiping out everything, but it's

01:08:43   It's not as great as like, oh, we figured out they added a paragraph here.

01:08:47   So I'm just going to shift all my other highlights down because I can find where they begin and

01:08:50   end before.

01:08:51   It's not like running diff intelligently and trying to figure out, oh, this was inserted

01:08:54   here and then shifted everything over.

01:08:56   It sounds like it's literally just like storing a text offset and length for each highlight.

01:09:01   Yeah, and which is better than nothing.

01:09:03   I mean, for example, one of the updates of my iBooks thing I did was I changed all the

01:09:08   primes and double primes into curly quotes and smart apostrophes and everything.

01:09:13   And that will totally—if it was trying to track the text, if the text has any sort of

01:09:16   contraction in it or quotation mark, the text is different.

01:09:20   That would totally throw off any kind of, "Oh, I'll fake diff algorithm," unless

01:09:24   the diff algorithm was also smart enough to know, "Oh, this character is more or less

01:09:28   equivalent to that one."

01:09:29   So it's very difficult to do this correctly, but I think Apple's solution of doing it

01:09:32   badly but attempting it is way better than what used to be the Kindle solution—I'm

01:09:36   sure if it still is, of like, you lose everything. No trace. Tough luck.

01:09:42   Anyway, all right, let's wrap it up for the week. Thanks a lot to our two sponsors

01:09:47   this week, Hover and FSim Space Shuttle, and we will see you next week.

01:09:52   [music]

01:09:53   Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin

01:09:58   'Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental

01:10:05   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:10:09   'Cause it was accidental (it was accidental)

01:10:12   It was accidental (accidental)

01:10:15   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:10:20   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:10:25   @c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s

01:10:29   So that's Casey List, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:10:34   Anti Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-S-A

01:10:41   It's accidental (it's accidental)

01:10:44   They didn't mean to accidental (accidental)

01:10:49   Tech broadcast so long

01:10:54   Before the show started, Erin was in the office with me and so I played the live

01:10:58   feed just to hear what awful drivel you were putting all of our

01:11:01   beloved listeners through. And she said to me something to the effect of, "How come you never

01:11:07   get to pick the music?" Because your music's terrible. Speaking of your terrible music,

01:11:10   there's somebody in the chatroom named Pills who is asking what my opinion of Dave Matthews' band

01:11:17   is. And I think I've talked about it before, and this is—I'm going to cut this out of the actual

01:11:21   show—but my opinion of Dave Matthews' band is that they are not a jam band. And I know that is a

01:11:27   contentious position to take among DMB fans, but I... a jam band... like people don't really

01:11:36   know... people who are not really fans of jam bands rarely have a good idea of what they are.

01:11:41   Are you really going hipster on us? Are you really going hipster on us right now?

01:11:43   Most people who are big jam band fan... or most people who are not jam band fans think that what

01:11:50   makes a jam band a jam band is that they play really long songs. And that's not really it. That

01:11:55   happens to be a side effect. They usually do play long songs, although we're not talking

01:11:59   like half-hour songs usually. That might happen once every three years that a band might play

01:12:03   a three or a 35-minute song. Most fish songs are like eight minutes long. By pop standards,

01:12:10   yeah, that's long, but we're not talking half hour every night.

01:12:14   But a jam band is really a lot more about improvisation and style. It really is a genre,

01:12:23   necessarily a type, if that makes sense. And there aren't that many of them that anyone's

01:12:28   ever heard of. There's a very, very small number. So I think Dave Matthews Band is really

01:12:35   a rock/... not really a pop... they're a rock band that happens to play their songs a little

01:12:42   bit longer live sometimes. But for the most part, you're still hearing like... for the

01:12:47   most part, you're hearing the album version of the song every time. It doesn't vary as

01:12:51   as much as a real jam band.

01:12:53   Oh, I'm so angry right now.

01:12:55   Oh, we got to change the subject.

01:12:56   I'm so angry I'm about to get in my car

01:12:58   and drive up and beat you.

01:13:00   By Marco's definition, I think Paul and Storm are a jam band.

01:13:03   But neither one of you know who Paul and Storm are.

01:13:05   I've heard of them.

01:13:06   People in the audience might know.

01:13:08   30 minute songs, improvisation, changes every night,

01:13:11   Paul and Storm.

01:13:13   I'm so angry right now.

01:13:14   All right, now that I'm all punchy, let's start the show.

01:13:18   So angry.

01:13:18   You're so wrong.

01:13:19   Oh, you're so wrong.

01:13:21   Anyway, okay. So we have a lot of follow-up this show.

01:13:24   Also, Dave Matthews is always just kind of like asleep.

01:13:26   Like, he always-- I don't know if he's drunk, like the Eddie Vedder style of singing or what.

01:13:31   I hate you so much.

01:13:33   I'm trying so hard to be the better man and I'm about to lose my self-control.

01:13:37   That is Eddie Vedder.

01:13:38   Yeah, right? Like, jam bands are, you know--

01:13:42   A lot of it is from Phish, of course, but overall the jam band culture is very, like, happy, upbeat most of the time.

01:13:50   Whereas Dave Matthews Band is like, "Hey, hey Virginia."

01:13:57   He's so just down and drunk and he never seems like he's having any fun.

01:14:04   Oh my god, I am so angry right now. Alright, I'm not engaging with you anymore. I'm so f***ing fired up.

01:14:13   Also that voice, I mean, come on.

01:14:15   That I will give you.

01:14:16   Alright, so...