Australian Astronauts

Hey guys, it's time for another episode of Space Welders, episode 91 recorded for Friday 13th of October 2017. Australian Astronauts. That's right mate. With your hosts Mike Wise and Steve Rogers.

Yeah we're going to go fangy to the moon, chuck a yui around the dark side, come back, maybe stop at Maccas on the way home for a thick shake, how about that eh? Is this the internet doing what the internet does? No this is the Australian government doing what the Australian government does, which is generally waste money. But they couldn't have come up with the worst name for an agency.

Oh well this was an internet hoax. Yeah I think that was a bit of a hoax. The Australian Research Space Exploration. Paranautical Space Exploration for us.

Yeah not sure, I think they'll have to have a focus group on the acronym. Well we've been trying to build, there's been numerous attempts at getting a spaceport going in Australia, and we're a good location. I mean apart from odd cyclone. Especially so there's been attempts since like the 70s to get one in Cape York, because Cape York, the far tip of northern Queensland, is closer to the equator than Florida and Cape Canaveral is.

And if you've ever played Kerbal Space Engineer, like myself, then you would know that being closer to the equator is better for space launches because you get almost like more speed because the earth is rotating faster at the equator. So if you take off and depart to the east, and luckily to the east of Cape York is a large amount of nothing, then you kind of get a bit of a speed boost, to use very basic terms, by the time you actually get up 100 or so kilometres into low earth orbit. So equator based launch sites are more efficient and you know there's not that many countries that could sustain a launch site with the infrastructure for a launch site on the equator, if we're honest. It was tried to get up by good old Joe Bielke-Peterson, which if you know anything about Queensland political history, it's very contentious, but it ran into trouble with the original owners of the land, the various Aboriginal tribes in the area who weren't consulted.

They just said, yeah, we'll build it there. Some of the elders basically went, that's sort of a sacred area for us. We've been living here for like 50,000 years. So awkward.

So that kind of put a pin into it, but it's just become a bit more front and centre again. I don't know if there's any actual concrete plans or if it's just grandstanding and philosophising. Wouldn't it be great if? It comes off the back of plans to have a plan.

So essentially, backing in. Oh one of those. We've got to have a meeting in order to work out the plan for the plan, and then the day before, we've got to have a pre-meeting to get the agenda for the meeting for the planning to plan. But this is an expert reference group, an ERG, Steve.

Just tick to the TLA. It's all about capability, development and governance. And so they recognise that there's going to be a lot of obvious benefits to the Australian economy and space-related agenda reforms. I don't know what they particularly are.

We've got to stop the spaceships, Mike. We've stopped the boats. Now we've got to stop the spaceships. It's basically saying this Elon Musk, he's doing a few good things.

He's trying to fix the power in South Australia. Look at all the money he's making. Look at all the money he's making. Why are we losing out?

We've got all this space. What's that? What if we could use this stuff? What's that?

Fast internet, usable by anyone. No, we don't need that. But spaceships? Yeah.

We couldn't have a choco-vone over a shithouse that we tried. So I mean, well, no, not to disparage our great achievements, but I'm pretty sure we'll have a space. If it's done this way, I think industry should be involved. I mean, if it's going to be Australian government involved, they can't possibly have a NASA of the 60s approach.

Yeah, that's correct. It's far too expensive. What it needs to be, and this is where NASA needs to move into, is the Australian Space Agency, or whatever it ends up being called, needs to be a regulatory body. Yeah, I think it's somewhere between CASA and...

I think CASA, yeah. That's the area that NASA really needs to move into, is a regulatory legislative and not necessarily enforcement, but an education body. So they sort of make the rules in consultation with industry, they provide the framework for people to operate under, they do the approvals, but you have private business that actually produce the which is exactly what's happening with SpaceX and three or four or half a dozen other companies around the world that are obviously SpaceX is kind of the most ahead at this moment. But you know, it's still quite open for someone to do it more efficiently.

SpaceX has quite a head start. So since we've been on, there's been also a number of announcements apart from the world ending twice. And next week. And next week, is it?

Yeah, 20th. Is it? Yeah. Why?

I don't know. Random reason 12. Yeah. Muzo, excuse me.

Because the Bible says so. All right, great. Well, it's not down to numerology again. Just because the numbers...

What's wrong with numerology, Mike? Just because the numbers... Do you not trust math? ...does not necessarily mean the world's going to end.

One plus one equals two, therefore the world's going to end. It's obvious. It's true. In the time that we've been on, obviously, iPhone was released, we've discussed this numerous times.

Pixel 2, however, got released. And it was kind of interesting because they didn't have a headphone jack in it, which they openly decried Apple about it, and they kind of said, yeah, sure. The obvious progression for phones is to have no belly button on the phone ever. And that's the best thing for a phone.

So wireless charging, wireless everything, no holes on that thing whatsoever. So obviously, Google and Android think along the same lines, and I think that's just the way it's going to go. So I think just get used to it. Well, that's what they're doing.

Well, I mean... But the Pixel 2 running on latest... Let's talk about the iPhone first, because that was announced first. I think we missed it or we just missed it.

Just missed it. So... Apologies for the delay. We're on a satellite delay.

We're going to Albuquerque. So in the, let's be honest, fabulous Steve Jobs Theatre in the new Apple Park, was this the first... Like publicly open anything in their new campus? Yeah, and a beautiful...

In a very specific area, kind of off to... It's not in the main source of building. No, it's a visiting area. It's next to it, isn't it?

In the grounds. But it's a beautiful building. We kind of likened it to the Louvre, where you've got this fantastic above ground structural building, but everything is actually underneath it. The main theatre space, and then kind of behind the theatre space, you have the show off area.

So all the journalists and everyone that you go down, you walk down the steps, you go into the theatre, they have the presentation, and then you leave the theatre and you've got the big open room where you see people like Linus and Marcus Brownlee do all of their fancy super macro shots of the phones. And you can actually use them and fiddle with them and get your first up reviews and stuff. It was a purpose-built theatre to do these sorts of events in the way that they wanted it done. Where did they used to do them?

Was it still on their campus? No, in San Francisco, various different theatres. Just hire a theatre? Hire a theatre.

And they've done things like, legendary things like completely redo air conditioning or extend the theatre because they can. But building this means they have 100% control over every aspect of the seating set up, the lighting set up, the sound set up, the technical. Obviously, they do all their demos with the phones being produced on the screen, which sometimes fails as has happened, the face unlock failed. Although apparently that was because there were other people handling it before the demo and it went into it's like if you put touch ID, if you get touch ID wrong, it makes you put in the passwords.

It wasn't a failure of the tech, it was just it was a security feature. But he very quickly, was it Tim Cook? No, Craig Federighi. So Craig Federighi, very fantastic sleight of hand, didn't miss a beat, just went, okay, we'll just try the other one.

Oh, there we go. And their tech team must be on point because the projections switched to the new phone and it worked and the demo continued without many further hitches. Well, he was later on Daring Fireballs podcast, if you listen to that. I think I've given out a link to that before on our show notes, if you've been listening, or I may have tweeted at one of these things.

And you can hear him talk about that particular moment in time. However, yeah, he was able to continue with that presentation, no problem whatsoever. I think the significant thing was obviously that there is clearly now iPhone 8 represents the antithesis of that iPhone thing, since I guess 6 or whatever. Well, since the iPhone, I think it's since the original.

It's had generally the same design in terms of you have your all glass back, you've got your bezels top and bottom, you've got varying degrees of thickness of the side bezels, but you have your physical home button, you've got a single speaker with a camera above it and a light center or whatever, or single camera on the back in the corner. That's been the general Apple iPhone design for better or for worse, like some people saying that they never update their design, but you know what you're going to get and it means they can iterate other things. I think it's amazing because most of the world, it really is a first world problem where we think, oh, boring. Yeah, come on.

It's still pretty good. I feel it's the last in this series that we'll see. They probably won't release an iPhone 9 with that same design next year. They will release an iteration of the iPhone X.

Yeah, I think X is a new way forward and it's allowing them to separate the two. And if they can get Touch ID working through the screen next year, which they'll have to do, like they were trying to do it and they couldn't get it working through the screen because it obviously has no hardware home button, so it doesn't have the fingerprint sensor built into it. They were trying, so was Google, so was Samsung, like all the big players were trying to get fingerprint sensors through the screen working and none of them have done it this year. But just interestingly in specs, like you're talking, the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, well, the 8 Plus is a 1080p display.

The iPhone Plus, well, it's not quite 4K, it's 2436 by 1000. These generation phones kind of have a slightly weird aspect ratio. That's right. So this is a big thing.

So this is this new edge-to-edge idea where many other manufacturers... So they're not 16 by 9, they're not 21 by 9, they're kind of decimal aspect ratios. Yeah. But the unusual thing about iPhone X is that it's got its strange cameras sitting on the top.

Then you would have thought, well, why didn't they just put a whole big black strip across there like many of the other manufacturers have been doing? So there's also, just looking at specs, the X, the X is 3GB on board, as opposed to the 8, it's 2GB, the 8 Plus is 3GB. But it doesn't obviously have the Touch ID. I use Touch ID quite regularly.

I know you have a lot of trouble with Touch ID. It's the most common thing I use. My 5S, it never works. And it is quite good at keeping kids out from your phone.

But the battery life, much longer and extended on X, I still got the Lightning port. I wish they would go to... USB-C? Yeah, USB-C.

That's never going to happen. That's never going to happen. And you're looking at around $1,000 entry point for the X, but I also think... And the rest, $1,300 to $1,800.

Apple have something for everybody now. Even in their watch category, you can get into a watch really cheaply now, and that's really good. So it's not just... it's something for everybody.

You can enter into the ecosystem. And I think that's the point to make right now. It's choosing the ecosystem you want to be in. Well, speaking of the ecosystem, this last couple of weeks has been the tipping point for me.

So my 5S, which I've had for two or three, probably three years, is dying. It will regularly turn off at 27%, or so it says, battery left. It's on two charges a day. The Touch ID doesn't work.

In fact, the Touch ID doesn't work at all. Every time it turns off and turns on, it says, unable to activate Touch ID. So it doesn't even come on, let alone work. So I've been waiting for these last two flagships, iPhone and the Pixel, to finally make a decision.

So we had the iPhone, and it was... it's an iPhone. You know what you're going to get. And the iPhone 8 is basically the iPhone 7.

Maybe a slight bump in specs, but generally the same. The X is what it is. It's quite a bigger jump in specs. You've obviously got the bigger screen, but quite a lot like talking $500, $600 more expensive for the equivalent phone.

So Google came out, I believe it was last Monday, Tuesday-ish, Wednesday-ish, last week sometime with the Pixel announcement, and it was a resounding... like very underwhelming for the advertising that they were doing. So they've iterated on the design a little bit. They have the Pixel 2 and the Pixel 2 XL.

The Pixel 2 XL is obviously the bigger phone, but they're both very similar. The design is the same. The difference is the screen-to-body ratio and the specs. But I think other than that, they're basically the same.

They kind of look like a phone from three years ago. It's a bit disappointing. So they have, and again, this is First World Problems. Let us be absolutely clear when we say this.

But the Pixel 2 especially, the XL is a little bit better because it's a bigger screen. I believe they have the same body size. So the size of the case is almost exactly the same, but the 2 XL fills it out with more screen. It's almost like they've put like gaffer tape top and bottom.

Oh, you've got to pay to remove the gaffer tape. So the XL, the screen looks pretty good. It looks kind of similar to the S8 style screen where you have maybe a half centimeter top and bottom bezel for the speaker and the front-facing camera. The Pixel 2 is more similar to the iPhone, probably six size top and bottom bezels where they're probably one to one and a half centimeter top and bottom bezels.

Very big, very thick. They do that because it has dual front-facing speakers and a physical home button in the bottom bezel. But the main problems with it is, as we mentioned, no headphone jack, no 3.5 millimeter headphone jack, no wireless charging, which is like inconceivable for a flagship phone, which they're priced essentially the same as the iPhones, maybe one or $200 cheaper for equivalent sizes. Of course, being Android phones, they do, I believe, have expandable memory.

You can put an SD card in, but they're comparable price, comparable size, comparable specs, no wireless charging, no headphone jack. They're waterproof, whoop-dee-doo, and the design is not great. Yeah, there's the Pixel 2 XL and the Pixel 2. So the Pixel 2 XL, just to get a feel for where it sits, like the iPhone X, as I said, resolutions like that weird 2436 by 1125 versus the Pixel XL, which is, well, it's a 2880 by 1440.

So, you know, that's significantly more real estate, but it's six inches versus like a 5.8, almost six inches. So it's a bigger screen than the iPhone 8. Yeah, so you're getting kind of more. You're getting more screen, but that's not everything.

It's on par with the Galaxy S8+, which looks a hell of a lot better and has a headphone jack and has wireless charging. It appears, spec by specs, pretty much the same. Yes, and which I will be buying tomorrow. Probably not the S8+, probably the S8.

Yeah, the S8 or the S8+, whatever at the moment, seems to be the winner. The only difference is obviously the Pixel 2, you get Android Oreo, which is the latest version of it, being what is basically a first party phone, whereas the S8 is a third party phone. Although Samsung is working on their Oreo update for their version of the Android operating system. So it should be out fairly soon.

Yeah, I mean, interesting. They're all got the same megapixel type camera. They're all sort of the specs. They're all basically the same, but like Apple will always be on the photo side because they're in the...

I think the Pixel camera is meant to be really good. Yeah, there's a lot of focus. And last year, the Pixel camera was really good too. And the Pixel comes with unlimited Google Cloud storage, which is one of their big selling points.

They're saying you don't need a big phone because you store all your photos. The space on my phone is not taken up with photos. You're probably different because you have children, but most of the space on my phone is various apps and games and things of that nature. So the Google Cloud storage, this brings me...

Kind of what I wanted to talk about based on this is the trends in the phones this year. I don't get it. The front facing speakers, I don't... Why?

I don't use my phone for the concert experience. The little bottom mono speaker on my 5S is perfectly good enough for what I watch on my phone. Even on my iPad, which I usually watch Netflix on, that's only got the... Well, it's got two bottom facing speakers, but...

That's perfectly fine. I don't feel I need a better listening experience from my phone. If I want a better listening experience, I'll plug in headphones. Oh, wait, I can't because they're removing the headphone jack.

But this ubiquitous analog technology that is not beholden to batteries, it's not beholden to signal strength, it just you plug it in and it just works and you know it's going to work and it's cheap. It's non-proprietary. So you don't have to pay to use it like HDMI or lightning. You can charge your phone at the same time and they're removing it in the pursuit of waterproofing.

And, you know, I've never had a phone that's died because I've dropped it in a puddle or it's got wet. So removing features for the sake of waterproofing makes no sense to me. They could well be a function of scale. Like I've never had a smaller Nokia phone you would have dropped because it fell out of your pocket or whatever.

But the larger the phone is, the more likely it's going to fall out of your pocket as well because it wouldn't be sort of cradled nicely. Microsoft and Google had a slew of releases as well this week, actually. So Google are in the race now for the HomePod. So they've got their their home kind of like device.

But they've released a mini speaker, which the quality of is amazing. For what it is, it's only like 40 bucks or something like that. But you can now get Google Assistant in your home and you can place these devices all over your home. Now, I've been for the past, I think, now six weeks on Alexa at home.

And Alexa at home is actually really good for a small for a family like mine. In my demographic, I think. Can she cook dinner yet? No.

But I I thought I was never going to use it. I thought it was just a gimmick. Yes, there is a distinct difference between what Alexa is doing and what Siri is doing. Siri, Siri is all about she's all about productivity and, you know, executing commands and getting things done.

Where Alexa is is some of that, but more. She really does win at the pub quiz stuff. She does pub quiz. And you can't do that.

You can't use your phone in a pub quiz, Mike. No, you can do worse than Hitler. This is Alexa. She rocks up and just although it's a bit it's a bit obvious when you're in a pub quiz and you hear the doo doo.

But, you know, you have to your question is 1987, 36 survivors. The first week you get it, you just you just waste your time. And the kids are you. I think Alexa is just about given up.

She's like, oh, just kill me because the kids have just nailed her for questions. Better language, Mike, use better words. She but then it got me into trouble because, you know, we request music and you just say and the recognition is excellent, but considering a noisy kitchen where it's located, we use it for things like egg timer, temperature, traffic updates. What's my traffic like today?

You know, general notes, just listening to you just come on and say just making sure it knows every detail of how you can do things like in context. So you ask for some jazz music and then you say, turn it up or turn it down. And, you know, obviously you can say, Alexa, give me a drum roll and she'll give you a drum roll. Alexa, give me an applause.

You give an applause. And it's really good for self actualization. When you know, when you do those things, like you do something really good, like say something falls off the table and you drop it and you catch it. Yeah.

And nobody sees it. And then you go, it's like Alexa applause. It's like, yeah, that exactly. But the thing is, the skills, the skill sets and all of the skill trees that you can add to it, plus you can write little apps for it and enhance it and make it do things that you want it to do.

I really I like it. I haven't tried Google assistant at home on anything, so I'd be interested to see what it's like, but I think Alexa is probably going to own it. And there's many other companies who are producing now physical hardware microphones to just support Alexa alone. So you can make turn anything to an Alexa supported device.

And I'm sure they're all 100 percent secure. And there's no way that the data that they collect would ever leak to anybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's correct. So but we already said this about IOT.

I thought at home assistants would be useless, but they're actually quite useful. You do find a use for them. And they are like I as I said, like just around the kitchen is quite good. Even just finding what's the recipe for such and such or lists.

I actually use it for adding lists to things. Alexa add. Well, we're out of Cheerios or something, an Australian delicacy. And she'll still say, oh, yes, about the cereal.

But you can or you can just say it's like we're out of milk and whatever. And what happens is using if then that you can actually synchronize it with various other things that you do in home. So Alexa plus if then that if the just such a delight, I really. Yeah, that really just comes together.

And I think that that's pretty good as opposed to some of the other related crap that Google released. They've got now this thing called Google Clips. You've seen this one, Steve. This is like it's basically a wearable camera and the whole idea and the ad for it is this creepy AF because it starts at two hundred and forty nine bucks for a camera that you can wear.

And I'm like, yeah, I'm into that. I wish something I could wear record my entire day. And I've seen a hundred. I can't tell you the number of times I think that to myself every day.

What's that? That I wish I had a camera recording. What was going on right now? Just about 90 percent of that would just be just computer.

Start up. I'm honest with myself. Startup owners meetings. I would I would I wish I could just record the craziness of them.

But, you know, you've got Silicon Valley for that. But I mean, this clip comes with 16 gig on board and it's got a hundred and thirty degree field of vision. It's made out of the Gorilla Glass three. It's got USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, whatever.

And it's about 15 frames a second and it's got stability in it. But one of the things it does that's human, I can't see that super creepy. And the use case example is setting it up. So, you know, he and his daughter can share a moment.

But the thing is looking at your face and recording his daughter can share a moment with a thousand strangers who are watching on their dodgy Internet site. I came home the other day and my wife is having a stand up argument with our toddler who's decided to strip off this there and diapers and it just like literally yelling at each other. And it's like, I wish I would share that with the world. And then like the screaming and the yelling and the ooh and the aahing.

And, you know, that's not that you just can't have that. But I do want something that sort of floats around me and records my time. There was that little drone for that, wasn't it? That didn't go anywhere and the Kickstarter failed.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. No, no, it was the food processor that failed. No, there was well, there was that one.

There was also a drone. It was like you threw it up in the air and it followed you around and it passed Kickstarter. But they went bankrupt. Oh, yeah, yeah.

So the Wii something? Anyway, it doesn't matter. But in any way, in other news on Google, Kickstarter, Google doing stuff that's good is Teachable Machine. Definitely worth going to.

Teachable Machine is really good. It's all about learning how a machine learning framework works. It runs in the browser. What you do is you give it facial inputs or inputs from your camera and you get it to match things and you learn how to try stuff and experiment and all that sort of stuff as Steve was playing.

And it doesn't come. That's not recorded. All right. So play anything.

It's not recorded. All right. OK, so, yeah, it's you get it. You teach it like hand gestures and whatever.

But what it's trying to teach you is how convolutional recurring network will happen. And you can use things like pictures and output. It seems like another Internet site that's just wanting access to your microphone and camera to do stuff. No, never do that.

Google would never do anything evil, though, would they? It's in their motto. No, but that's Microsoft's job. Also, this being evil this week, they've released MR or XR.

What is it going to be? You're in your keen enthusiast on VR technology, Steve. Oh, it's another stupid it's mixed reality. They're calling it it's a VR headset.

Come on. So this is the start of the 210 different headsets you can buy for for VR. And Facebook have just released another VR headset themselves. It's something that Oculus plus between useless and useless, less than useless.

Yeah, it's well. So, OK, well, we started with these headsets. We can start off with the Facebook one because the Facebook one is is super useless. Oculus Go, which is a two hundred fifty dollar standalone headset positioning between the the the Samsung Gear VR, which is basically a box you put your phone in.

It's essentially Google Cardboard, which is about one hundred dollars and the Rift, which is about four or five hundred dollars. So they're positioning it in the middle of that. It doesn't have any controllers. It doesn't have I don't know what the specs really are.

It's it's it's a mid level VR headset for your mom. It's not really aimed at gamers, I wouldn't suggest. So that's like that would be great for VR 360 photos. Sure.

Or like experiences, but really not for gaming things where you stand in one spot and you look around you. So that's that's the Oculus Go. OK, sure. They're just wanting to to open up the market a bit more.

They've seen a little bit of a gap. Then you've got Microsoft's one. Microsoft is is more I guess they're trying to compete with the Oculus Rift and the Vive. So they're targeting it at that five to six hundred dollar mark.

Both the Rift and the Vive have had price drops recently to about six hundred five, six hundred dollars. Depends on the country. It's still eight hundred dollars in Australia. They're calling it mixed reality, but let's be honest, it's virtual reality.

I don't know why they're saying mixed reality. The thing is, it's got that special thing where it's inside out. Yes. So this is the main point of difference that no one else is actually doing at the moment where they're doing inside out.

So most or really all of the higher end VR headsets are outside in. So both the Rift and the Vive are this where the tracking for your position and rotation and where you are and the controllers and everything comes from. In the case of the Vive, there's the lighthouse base stations. In the case of the Rift, it's the little camera and some accelerometer data.

But the processing of your position comes from the computer and from these tracking stations that are looking at you. The benefits of that is it means it can track you 360 degrees even if you turn around because with the Vive, you have two in opposite corners of the room. The Oculus, you have less movement, but the Oculus is not designed for a stand up room scale experience. The Oculus is designed for a seated experience.

And they're different things. And this is the unusual Microsoft style. There's like let's do something different. Yeah, well, there's Acer now.

You've got Dell, so you get the Acer Mixed Reality, the Dell Vizor. They're all the same. You get the HP Mixed Reality. You've got Lenovo Explorer and the Samsung HMD Odyssey.

Now, the Odyssey is around 500 bucks here. They all come with what are these hand controllers and the actual headset itself. Now, all of them have cameras much like the Vive. So, so the difference is the ecosystem.

So the difference with this, with the inside out is the tracking comes from the headset itself. So rather than just having some IR blinkers that a tracking sensor can pick up, it actually has the IR blasters and it has cameras and it's looking out and it can see your controllers and it's got a reasonably wide field of view and it can see the controllers and then it does the calculation on where you are based on what the headset is seeing. The benefits of this is that you don't have to have two things looking at you with their associated power cables and signal cables and everything else. It also means you're not limited to any particular size of room.

There's no minimum size, there's no maximum size. You could walk through an entire building with this. Presumably you have a long enough cable to go back to your computer, but that's just a that's that can be overcome with wireless, wireless video and things like that. The actual tracking is done by the headset, which you might think, great, that's it, that's the next spot.

But the problem is you can only track what you see and the headset can only see in front of it. So as soon as you put one of the controllers behind your head and a lot of VR games use that movement for things like switching weapons, reloading shields, shields, shooting behind you. There's a lot of games where you move the controllers, where you're not directly looking at it. It stops tracking.

Now, it doesn't go away. It kind of hangs in the game. It hangs the controller where you where it last saw it. So you could put a shield up, look away and the shield will stay there.

But that's kind of silly. So it's I mean, the answer to that is to put more tracking around the headset of the of the thing. Right. So it's all around the outside.

That's going to make it heavy. You're going to need more sensors. It's going to make it more expensive. I'm sure it can be overcome, but I don't see this as a competitor to the Vive.

This is another alternative. Yeah, well, it's not a competitor. It's more of a competitor to honestly, it's more of a competitor to the Oculus than the Vive. So the higher resolution, they've got AMOLED displays, 90 hertz refresh, 10, 100.

Yeah, that's that's not a huge difference. Like the next version of the Oculus could have a higher. You just chuck a higher resolution screen in. That's not that's not insurmountable.

The big difference they're going for is the inside out tracking and the inside out tracking is not really good enough for high intensity game playing, if we're honest. And it's still it's in the same price range as the Vive and the Oculus. So that's what they're clearly competing with. And then you've got five different versions.

I don't there's no difference between the versions. They all look slightly different, but they're exactly the same thing. This truly is the statement that we made ages ago. It's just a peripheral.

But with a peripheral, you need an ecosystem to work inside. The what they were showing off this week was Microsoft. We're talking about the ecosystem, people who are producing content for that ecosystem, showing what they had and then talking about how that comes together. So this is confusing because it was a VR event where they normally talk about AR with a HoloLens.

Microsoft is so far behind in the ecosystem. You don't think of when you think of gaming, you don't think of the Microsoft store or the Windows store. Do you think of Steam? Well, Steam owns this.

So Steam is so far ahead with their Vive and Oculus integration and Oculus has its own store and Vive has its own store. Which and that's what you need because you need you don't buy a five hundred dollar peripheral if there's nothing to nothing to use, VR is at the point now, AAA games are starting to come out. Doom VFR is out this month or next month. Fallout's out in a couple of months.

There's been some other AAA games that are starting to come out. It's at the point where in the next two to three years, VR will either become ubiquitous to the point where everybody has one or it will become a peripheral, much like a joystick or a steering wheel for driving games where you have it in your cupboard and a Saturday afternoon you go, oh, I want to play that VR game. I'll bring it out. I'll play it for an hour and then put it back.

It's not going I can't see VR ever replacing a monitor. Really, as much as people like Microsoft want to do that with HoloLens and everything else, I really can't see it ever replacing a panel in front of you. Yeah, it's that that that resolution is probably closest to that. HoloLens is more likely to do it than a VR headset because you have the AR component of it and you can see through it.

You're never going to chuck a thing on your because if you if you've ever worn a VR headset for more than 45 minutes, it gets a little bit sweaty. Yeah. Can you imagine wearing one of those for an eight hour work day? Yeah, no, no, no.

It's it would drive you mad. It most certainly does even staying in there. Like if you've got work health, not to mention. Yeah, there's no there's not a real there's no research on what potential visual effects there could be of having a screen that close to your face for more than an hour or two at a time.

Who knows? But we're we are now at that point where it's going to go one way or the other. Either way, they would Microsoft were talking about the next release of Windows to contain all of the features that would accompany this, it's not the it's another creators, another creators. This is to support this is to support all of this stuff.

So look out when the Microsoft updates. How is update Wednesday for you, Steve? Always come in and find my machine dead. So every time, every single one, it's it's one way or another.

Yeah, it's either it's getting the computer doesn't start or have to restart halfway through the day or restart halfway through the day and then it does the update. Or I had one the other day where I had to just completely reinstall everything because it completely failed. And for some reason, it doesn't create a system restore point before it does the automatic update. Yeah, it's like, fuck you, Microsoft.

So we have been watching things once we've been busy and some things that have we've been definitely keeping an eye on. I haven't spoken about really Rick and Morty. That's probably I don't think we should. It's gotten a bit much.

What do you mean? Have you not been paying attention? No. What happened?

I love Rick and Morty. Yeah, the season was dub dub and all of that. And get me my Sesh one source. All right.

Because I'm funny and I totally get that Rick and Morty is making fun of all of these kind of things. I'm going to ignore that. I'm doing it ironically. Right.

So was it the it was the first episode of Rick and Morty that aired on April Fool's Day this year? That's like randomly aired. And in it, Rick was talking about Sesh one source from McDonald's, which they had in the 90s. And suddenly everyone on the Internet went absolutely insane wanting McDonald's Sesh one source.

Even your favorite Internet chef, Babish made some Babish made. So what Microsoft, Microsoft, Jesus, what McDonald's decided to do was, hey, let's release, let's re-release the Sesh one source. Let's brand it Rick and Morty without actually getting the approval of the Rick and Morty creators, by the way, and send 20 to every store. That's 20, 20 packets, like the source that you get with your nuggets.

Right. And suddenly 500 people show up to the store and there's 20 packets. But these 500 people are the kind of people that would go to McDonald's to get Sesh one source and perhaps may end up rioting to get Sesh one source from McDonald's, which is essentially just teriyaki sauce and ketchup with probably a pound of sugar in it. Look, I love this.

Watch some videos. This season of Rick and Morty was was very good. It was a fine season. But it's the Rick and Morty fan base is just terrible.

Yeah, it might be going a bit Xboxy. I don't know. I loved it. I regardless of of the outside world.

I thought it was funny. There's lots of great moments inside of there, and obviously I don't get into the depth of it as most people might, but I thought that was really good. Complete Season are available on Netflix. I also got through Expanse, which was amazing.

The space battles, the story, the production work was incredible. Of course, something that everyone's been asking about is clearly Star Trek Discovery otherwise STDs. Yeah, we've got to work on that acronym. It's not like TOS or...

Star Trek Disco. Star Trek Disco. Discovery was very difficult to get into for the first two episodes because I was very... I just didn't get it, but obviously it's clearly...

I'm an original fan, I'll just put that out there. I think TNG, The Next Generation, yep, it's there. I prefer Voyager out of all of the new stuff, and I don't mind Enterprise. Is that the one with the crappy theme song, or was that Enterprise?

That was Enterprise. Oh, right. I haven't got there yet. Enterprise, the later episode's much better, but Voyager for me, that sort of sells me on that generation.

Obviously with really, as an original fan who was sort of on the tail end of when the shows were being aired, and physically in that era having a lot of meaning, and it was campy as well, but when you revisit the storylines, they're still enjoyable and you can watch them on any streaming service. Some of them. But some of them. Some of them are terrible.

It's like early James Bond. I know, but you can still get into them. There is a premise. There's a few.

The way that the stories are told are pretty original, and so that to me sticks in my mind. It's kind of like when you go back and watch old Monty Python, you're going to go, Christ, how did I like that? Monty Python is timeless. Same thing.

So Star Trek to Discovery for me should have started in episode three with a flashback to episodes one and two of this season. That's how it should be. I really am digging episodes three and four so far. I think episode four and the whole premise of where they're going and how the cast is coming together works for me.

And I get that we're never going to have that kind of TNG, TOS kind of style or voyagist storytelling. You know, that singular episode which starts off with the conundrum and we work it out at the end. The alien of the week or the planet of the week. Planet of the week.

Or you've got the space anomaly of the week. And we work it out. Or Q shows up and starts messing with things because he can. And there's this like...

I think on the bright side, though, we're never going to have a holodeck episode again. Never going to have a holodeck for a... I don't think they even have a holodeck. No.

Yeah. See, I agree with you. I enjoyed the first episode off the bat. I got into it straight away.

Production is amazing. I agree with you. It should have started. And there's not really any spoilers.

Nothing's really happened that's spoilery, I don't think yet. Even if it started just on the shuttle, transport shuttle, cuts to her and then it's like... And then you have to work out how she got there. I guess you could...

The reason she's on the shuttle is a bit of a spoiler. So I don't think we'll mention why. But the first two episodes is of the same event. You can think of the first two episodes as a two hour long pilot or prelude.

And then episode three, it starts for proper with... The character is Michael Burnham. First male main character. I can't remember who...

Shaniqua. I don't know who the character is that's playing Michael Burnham. What's her name? Shaniqua.

Shaniqua. Shaniqua. Shaniqua. Shaniqua.

Shaniqua. Shaniqua. Shaniqua. Shaniqua.

Shaniqua. Shaniqua. Shaniqua. Shaniqua.

Shaniqua. Shaniqua. People have been talking about... Yes.

People have been talking about... Very funny. So the captain is Jason Isaacs. Which is amazing.

Of Discovery. And he will basically have maybe five minutes per episode. But the focus is on... The main character is Michael Burnham, clearly.

But there's a few other, mainly lieutenants and other enlisted personnel on the Discovery. So the focus is not on the captain or even the first officer or any of the... The focus is not on any of the bridge crew, is really the distinction here. And we've known that for a long time.

But it's working. You don't need to have the captain and the first officer and the science officer going into the dangerous situation. Because that wouldn't ever happen. It would be, that lieutenant, pick a team, go and die for me.

Yeah, we've had... And report back. There are red shirts in this, there are... But we're following the red shirts.

Yeah, we're following the red shirts. There's an episode of Next Generation. And it's probably the best episode of Next Generation. It's called Lower Decks or Below Decks, something like that.

And it follows four junior officers who are friends. And each one of them works in a different department of the Enterprise. You've got one who is underneath Riker in the sort of command helm department. You've got one working with Dr.

Crusher in the medical department. You've got one working with Geordi in engineering. You've got another one working in the science department. And they're all friends.

And they're basically an analogue to the senior officers, because they play poker and everything. And it follows them. And they're just regular, regular young junior officers with career aspirations. That's exactly what everyone on this ship is.

And they're just, they're not going, they're not doing anything spectacular. They're not saving the world or the ship. They're just doing their work. And their work is told to them by the captain and the first officer on the ship.

So it's refreshing. And the difference is, and you touched on this, it's for purists. And I'm not a Star Trek purist, let's be clear. And neither are you really.

I have many t-shirts. You have many t-shirts. But you could suggest it's not Star Trek. I love the universe.

If you define Star Trek as the monster of the week or the planet of the week or the space anomaly of the week, it's not that. Discovery is a serialized TV show. And we were having this discussion about it. And that's the way that television is going these days.

People want big, complex, well-plotted, entire season-spanning arc stories. That's what people want these days. We're in an age of streaming. Yeah.

And you can get away with it. In the 90s, or even up until two years ago, you had to have very stand-alone episodes of TV shows. Because if you missed the first episode, and every other episode depended on the episode previously, if you missed an episode, you just wouldn't watch it. Consider this.

X-Files, for example. Awesome, back in the 90s. But that was still a singular episode. You could watch any of those.

It was a singular episode. It was the alien of the week. Come on board. For some reason, all of the Star Treks up until now, most sitcoms in the 90s, all drama apart from soap operas.

Soap operas are the massive exception to the rule. But if you missed the first few episodes in the 90s, you couldn't go back and re-watch them because they weren't on. The new X-Files, which is coming, which they're advertising, it's a very long movie. It's the same thing.

Because nowadays, with Netflix and HBO and Hulu and all the rest of it, if you miss the first few episodes, you just go back and you watch them. You are stuffed. And you watch it from the beginning. Or House of Cards.

Any of those sort of things. That's the way that that's what audiences want. And I want that. That's cool.

I mean, one of the very early TV shows to actually do this was the original Twin Peaks. It was to do a serialized television show in the early 90s like Twin Peaks was unheard of because the networks were scared. If people missed the first episode, they just wouldn't watch any of the rest of them. And we've kind of come back around to that because you can now get away with that.

You can get away with missing a couple of weeks because you just go back and you watch it whenever. But I think production on this is incredible. It's over the top. I think we said it's got JJ Abrams visual design.

JJ gave them the book. This is how you do this stuff. But visually. Yes.

It doesn't have JJ Abrams style writing or acting. It's good acting and writing. But with the slightly high tech, slightly grungy new Star Trek, it's not a utopia, which is interesting. We see little things like this episode four, someone gets hurt and you see them in the sick bay being repaired.

Yeah. They have some technology, which is more than what they have in the original series. The replicators. Yeah.

They didn't have replicators in the original series, did they? Because she gets her uniform replicated. Yeah. She gets her uniform replicated.

So they've had a few things, because they couldn't have a set that looks like the original series set, could they? For a new show. No. They'd never get away with it.

Abrams told you how to do new Star Trek. Yeah. He told you how. That's how you do it.

So they're going to have to do something to kind of bring it back down to match. Because this is set. It's only set like five or ten years before the original series. Yeah.

It's concurrent, essentially. Yeah. There are some interesting plot developments, which will probably be cleared up later. Yeah.

Particularly in relation to Spock, et cetera, going forward. So I don't understand. I don't know whether that is necessary for me. I don't think it...

I think it's not necessary for the plot. It's an Easter egg. I think Sarek is f***ing everywhere. That dude.

Oh, Sarek's been in every series. Yeah, I know. He's in episode one, so that's not a spoiler. And I love all the callbacks as well.

They're rewriting some of space history. This week's episode is Do You Want to Be Known As... and they had Zephym Cochrane and Elon Musk. Yeah, I noticed that.

Well, I think they said Neil Armstrong, Elon Musk, Zephym Cochrane. And ships named like the Glenn. But I also love the Discovery's design, the classicness of it. The new propulsion system, which we probably won't mention because that's a spoiler.

But that design of that is cool. I like it. Hopefully people watch it because they had issues. In America, only the first two episodes were on free to air and everything else is behind CBS's paywall.

Yeah, that would be... We're lucky in Australia it's on Netflix, which we already have, but in the US not so much. And that's probably the main thing they're interested in. Hopefully it stits around for a few seasons at least.

Most of the other have done like seven seasons. I doubt it will go that long, but we'll see. Yeah, I like it. It's pretty good.

If you ask me, I'd wear a t-shirt still. I think it's great. I just like the production design. I like the long form narrative that they're offering now.

And I just think it's just a nice change and I'm not really going to rag on it. Speaking of which, nice change. Interesting. There's been a couple of movies.

I'm going to see Blade Runner this weekend. It's just had amazing reviews. Didn't do so well in US box office, but it's probably going to make up the dollars elsewhere hopefully. The cinematography of all of the reviews has just been gushing for this movie, so I'm really kind of excited to see it and I'll talk about it probably next week.

Steve went and saw It. I did not see It. It's good. Go see It.

Yeah, so there's a brand new cast, brand new way. But basically it's kind of like a more condensed telling of the It story, which is rather big. And it's actually... Well, they've done the right thing by making it two movies.

This is the first half of the book, although it's not like The Hobbit and two movies. No, no. The book jumps back and forth, but this is the kids only. They've jumped it ahead.

So in the book, it's in the 50s. This is in the 80s. So they're just trying to make it more relevant. The reason being for 27 years after it, when they do The Adults, The Adults will be like now or in three or four years when they release the next movie.

Stranger Things this month. Stranger Things this month. Very soon. Just in time for Halloween.

With the same kid in it. Halloween, by the way, in my neighborhood, people go nuts for it. What are you, American? Yeah, I know.

In my suburb, and I don't know whether it's just isolated to my suburb, but folks, like kids just go nuts. Like kids riding around on BMX bikes dressed up as whatever. I am betting, absolutely betting, I'm just going to see a slew of clowns. Without doubt.

Spoopy clowns. Spoopy clowns out on the streets. But what was interesting about it, it's R-rated, it's got all the key money shots, but I think the, who was the lead who played the guy who was the son of the guy from Good Will Hunting? The Swedish guy.

Yeah. He, you know, he seems to be getting a lot of praise for the role. It was great. I can't Google it because Apple wants me to go to itunes.apple.com, so whatever, look him up.

So it is doing, had been going really well for us, and yeah, so yeah, that's about it. So guys, I know we are, our episode's come few, but we are tracking towards 100, we'll probably put out a large space-like sign in the solar system to say where we are, setting down to see if anyone wants to pop in and have a drink with us on our 100th episode that's coming up, and we'll find ways to celebrate it. Probably in about six months. At the rate we're doing this, I know.

We are extremely busy, we're just a few things on at work, we do it as a hobby of course, and we love doing space welders and talking about tech and space and everything else in between. So Steve, if you wanted the space welders to send you some Sash 1 sauce, how would you do that? Just raise up a rabble of like-minded individuals and chant, we want sauce, while people look at you funny, because why would you care? Sash 1 style.

Alternatively, head over to www.spacewelders.com, you'll find the show notes for this episode or the other episodes, with links to everything we've talked about so you can play the home game. Let us know who wins. You can follow us on Twitter, twitter.com.spacewelders, facebook.com.spacewelders, you can subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher and Soundcloud, just do a search for the Space Welders podcast while you're there, leave a comment and a like and a favourite and a rating and a share and whatever. Smoke signal.

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It's Mike out. Steve out.