Ep. 1390: Where we need a doctor's note

-It's Friday, November 22nd, 2013. This is The 404 Show on CNET. I'm Jeff Bakalar. -I'm Justin Yu. -I'm Ariel Nuñez. -Thanks for tuning in to the program, kids. I appreciate you doing that. Hope you're digging the week in the new studio. We sure as hell are, right? -Yeah. How's your night last night? -Why do you care? -Because I know you went to that Xbox launch at midnight and-- -All of a sudden you care about my night time activities? -Okay. Let's get right into the stories of the day. -All right. Well, since you're asking. -Okay. -So, it was interesting. So, last night for-- CNET teamed up with GameSpot a little bit and we went down to the Best Buy in Union Square to talk to the people who were waiting in line to be one of the firsts in the country to buy an Xbox One. -Uh-hmm. -And everyone knows I did this last week with Ariel and Richard for PS4. This one just wasn't as much fun. -The venue wasn't as nice either. This was at a Best Buy store as supposed to the standard which is-- -Yeah, I mean-- -much nicer hotels. -Night and day really. -Yeah. -And Union Square, I don't know if you've been down there, you know, around midnight on a Thursday. -Yeah. -It's not like the most lively place to be. -But they did start doing the Holiday Market in Union Square, right? That started last night I think. -Well, like all the-- -Yeah, all the venues. -The farmer's goods. -Uh-hmm. -Yup, not at midnight. -Yeah, right. Who hangs out at Union Square at midnight? -Riff Raff. -And people waiting in line for Trader Joe's to open up the following morning. -A lot of people like, you know, a lot of you know, unpleasant people to say the least. -You could probably say that about Best Buy's across the country. -It's not the Best Buy. It's just like the scene outside. Anyway, long story short, we did our hits and stuff and you know, it was tough to like create sort of lively mood just because it was so not exciting. -Okay. -It was just a Best Buy, people waiting at Best Buy, no one's happy when they're waiting in line. -Right. -You know, I talked to few people, everyone was like smoking pot, everyone was like just hanging out like, you know, I don't know. It was very weird. I felt bad for these people. -Okay. -I was just like, hey-- -But they were excited to get the Xbox for sure. -I guess. And they're all excited to play games that aren't good, of course, which I didn't wanna-- -I didn't say that their face though. -I wasn't like, "Hey, just so you know, you've wasted 20 hours of your life waiting outside here because that game is not that good." But no, Xbox One is pretty good and it's got a few good games but you know it was like, so, the funniest thing was like there were 20 people who pre-ordered, right? -Right. -So, they got to go in, in front of everybody and then got to get out of the cold and they just brought them in and like let them, you know, just enjoy Best Buy for a few minutes. -Yeah. Did you ask the people in line why they didn't just pre-order? -Yeah, I did. I took your advice. I'm like, "What are dealing? Why are you not pre-ordering?" and they're like, "You know, it's just not as exciting." -Uh-hmm. -I'm like, "Is that the reason?" -It's a camaraderie thing, is what they were saying? That they just wanna be in line with the bunch of other Microsoft. -I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Either way, don't get me wrong. Like, I can't talk crap because I did this in 2005. -Yeah, right. And now you work at CNET, so they hand deliver these consoles to you. Everyone else-- -We don't have to get into that. We don't have to get into that. -You don't have to call them Riff Raff. -It's funny-- oh, no, no, no. Not them. They're not the Riff Raff. The Riff Raff was like the other people-- -Oh, it's the general, the village-- -The passing pedestrians. -All right. Okay. -Who just like, like, "Wow, that's a really nice camera. Let me see that." -Yeah, right. -I was like, "No. You can't see that. That's ours." -Did you ask anybody if they bought both the PS4 and the Xbox One? -Yeah. Well-- so, there is this one dude, I think his name was Noel and he was like, I don't know why people are fan boys, they're idiots. -He's like, why-- he's like I got balls-- he's like, I'm fortunate enough I can afford it. -Oh, my gosh. -He's like, but what-- you know, you can't just like blindly choose loyalty. -Okay. That's fine. -And I'm definitely in-- just like, I understand not everyone can afford a thousand dollars every time consoles come out, but at the same time you can't just be like I hate PS4 because I'm an Xbox guy, right? -Yeah. -You can't just hate on the other one for no reason. -It's not a zero-some game. You can own both. -You can. I get it. Who can afford that? -Yeah. -Right? Last generation I waited, I got an Xbox first and I got a PS3 and then I got a-- what is it? Wii? Yeah. -Uh-hmm. -So, you wait. -Was there anybody in line-- and I mean, you mentioned doing this back in the day too but I imagine a lot of people were buying two and then putting one on eBay. -No, so I think you can only get one. -Oh, really? -Yeah. -I think the limit was one per customer. -Right. -And I was-- I mean, they had-- they must have had 300 Xboxes there. -Right. -It was crazy. I don't think there's gonna be that much of like a huge shortages there was last time. I don't know if you remember about Xbox 360. -Uh-hmm. -There was only like 300,000 in them in the country. -Uh-hmm. -Which is absurd. -Right. -Think about that. They sold a million PS4s in one day. -Yeah. -So-- -They probably learned their lesson from the last launch. -Right. So, you know, it's not as hot of a commodity but it's still, you know, -It's nice. -it's still going for. I looked this morning, they're going for 750 bucks on eBay. -Yeah. Yeah, I'm not surprised. Well, because, any at iPhone launch, right, you always see I think it's one per customer for that line too. -Right. -But then people always bring their grand parents and you see like 5-year-old kids with $500 in their pockets waiting to buy one of these things and they eventually just end up getting auctioned off, of course, but-- -Yeah. -And maybe a couple of people were doing it online. -But were people generally psyched? I mean-- -Yeah, they were pretty happy. I mean, you know-- -They'd better be. -I guess. -Waiting on the called for hours. How long were we talking about here? -So, the longest someone waited was 23 hours. -Okay. That's a really long of time. -Yeah. -Like, I think when I did it-- I waited 12 hours. -Uh-hmm. -I went from 8 at night to 8 in the morning. -But New York is a good place to wait in line because you can get-- there's bodegas, they are open 24 hours. -Right, right. -Places you can use the bathroom. If you're in the middle of a random town, a small town, -Yeah. -You're just in line out a really bleak parking lot. -Listen to this story. So, there was one woman, she was maybe like ten or eleven-- number eleven in line, and I went up to her, I was like screening the line, I'm like, who wants to talk when we go live? -Right. -Now, people are not as willing as they used to be to go on TV or the web. They're just-- -Yeah. -They just wanna be left alone. I get that. -So, this one woman I'm talking to, and she goes, you can't put me online but I'll talk to you right now. -And I'm like, okay. She kinda looked a little off, just putting it nicely, yeah, she just didn't seem like she really knew what was going on. So, I sat there and I'm like, "Are you excited to be online like what you did?" And she's like, "I don't really know what we're waiting for here." I'm like, "What do you mean?" She's like, "I just-- I just kinda got here. I saw a line forming and I'm like, oh well, there's a line for something, people are waiting. I'm gonna get in line." -What? -I'm like, "You don't know what's at the end of this line?" She said, "Swear, I swear." -This is like an improv everywhere. -And what, the joke is on me? -Yeah, yeah. Are you serious she had no idea? -Yeah, she's like, "Well, there's a line in Union Square. I'm gonna wait on it." I'm like, "Well, you have--" -Do you have $500? -I was like, "You have nothing else to do today?" -Yeah. -She said, "Nope. I'm just gonna wait on this line." She was bundled up, she was dressed appropriately for the wait. -Was she homeless? -She might have been. -Okay. -You know. -Did she end up buying one of the-- -Didn't wait-- didn't [unk], we jetted out of it. I mean, come on, how long do you wanna spend in the Best Buy when you're not even participating in the festivities, right? -Yeah. Right. Okay. -I'm sorry. That's-- look, it got me some slack, right? It's been a hell of two weeks for me. -Yeah. I wouldn't have wanted to do that myself. So, I applaud you. -You know-- -It's part of your job. Once every seven years-- -put on their face. -or twice every seven years, not too bad. -All right. And next time around, there's not even gonna be consoles. -Yeah. -Yeah, it's just gonna be like brain surgery. -Uh-hmm. And people will probably line up. -People line up for the brain surgery, for the implant. -So, I'd imagine a lot of people are probably taking the day off of work today and probably Monday too to sort of enjoy its games. -The trains were empty this morning. You saw that. Trains were empty. -Yeah, totally. And did you see that Microsoft actually put up a fake doctor's note online that you could print out or e-mail to your boss? -They're so funny huh. -Do you wanna read out what it says? Yeah, here it is. Here, I'll open this up while you read it out loud. -This is the grown section of our show. -I know but-- -This is the eye-rolling. -There's no way-- it's a joke obviously. There's no way this is gonna work but just read it off. -To whom it may concern. Due to the zombie flu-- why even start off with fiction? Why not-- you know, -Yeah. -you says-- Microsoft got a bunch of people fired today, that's what they did. Due to the zombie flu, your employee will not be able to fulfill the scheduled commitment he/she has with you. Because of the severity of this condition, I'm prescribing a heavy dose of Xbox One. Give me a break. He needs to destroy zombies. After a thorough examination, I've concluded that the all-in-one entertainment system is the only cure for the aforementioned condition. Who makes it this far to this? -Get it. -This treatment may take anywhere from one to three days to work and will require years of accumulating achievements thereafter. If you haven't punched a hole in your screen let me know yet. If the patient is disrupted with work, I will have to double the prescribed amount of Xbox One. If used effectively, Xbox One can help relieve the patient's entertainment deprivation and will have it in increase state of happiness at all times. -Right. This is Major Nelson's-- -You're fired. -Keep going, there's more. There's an addendum. -No. I am not-- I don't have that part. You read the addendum. -No, I don't want it. I don't want it. That's pretty good. They're that-- some things are better left to 140 characters. So, maybe we should just tweet it out that story. -What is that though? I mean, these are grown men and women. -No one is actually using this, right? -But it's not-- is it even funny? -Let's not even talk about it anymore. -Okay. -The next story that I wanted to do with Xbox is about iFixit. So, iFixit is kind of a tinkering website, where they always do these breakdowns in popular gadgets. -Right. -And last week, they published a breakdown of the-- oh, early this week, they published breakdown of the PS4 and yesterday, they did a fully illustrated breakdown of the Xbox One. -They did. -So, what have they found? -Well, they found that it's pretty fantastically contracted. -Yeah. -And it's relatively easy to repair. -Uh-hmm. -They gave it an 8 out of 10 in terms of their repairability scale, which is cool. -Right. -What? -Nothing. -Why did you laugh with that? You thought that was funny? -You said repail. -Repail? Is that a word? -I don't know. -Repail? I repail you. -Yeah. -Anyway, so that's pretty good. -Yeah. -iFixit always tears these bad boys down. -Cool. -And it's a modular construction, pretty cool. -They say it's like a little bit hard, a little bit easier to take a part than the PS4 because that has security screws. This one just has clips apparently. This is one thing I was really surprised about with the Xbox One. -Yeah. -We did talk about this the other day. -Exact. -Is that, for the Xbox One, you can't actually break it open and replace the hard drive. That will void the warranty. -Right. Yeah, you can only do that with PS4, sure. -And with PS4, you can replace the internal hard drive but for the Xbox One, you're sort of relegated to the 500 gigs you get on board. But if you wanna add it, you gotta do it with like an external USB-- -Right. That's what you could do with 360, you could add like a, you know, an external drive and just sort of rock and all that. -Yeah. Was it that way with the 360? -What you mean, what I just said? -Oh, I thought you were referring to the Xbox One. -No, the 360 you could add a hard drive. -Why did they take that off for this version? -I don't think they took it out. I think that you can do it. -No, no, no. Why can't you take the internal hard drive out? -No, and you could not take it out on 360. -Oh, so nothing's changed. -Yeah, right. -Okay, I got you. I got you. -Nothing's changed but I-- I mean, what's really cool and what we're gonna be doing you know, later on with the testing and stuff is like, if I do add an SSD drive to my PS4, -Right. -will it be faster? I would think yeah, it would be. -Yeah, I hope. -I don't know about like performance, because PS4 doesn't really install games as much as Xbox seems to do. -Right. But both of those consoles now kind of require you to install the game onto the hard drive, right? So, it's taking up space. -So, that's a good question and I'm not totally clear on it. Xbox One for sure dumps the whole game on the hard drive. -Uh-huh. And how big are those games? -Anywhere from like 10 to 50 gigs. So, I don't know if PlayStation-- I know PlayStation 3 installed a lot of games, like sort of behind-the-scenes. I don't know what the deals with PS4. It seems that you can like play PS4 games kind of immediately. -Uh-hmm. -So, yeah, I'm curious to see how that works. -Okay. -Yeah. -Do you have a hard drive hooked up to your 360 right now? -No. I have like a-- I think I have like 250 gigs. -Okay. -So, I don't need that. -How many games is that? -That's so much space. I don't know what to do with it, man. -Yeah. Okay. -How many games is that? I don't know. It's a bunch but it's not-- you know, after I'm done with the game, I delete it. -Oh, okay. -Yeah. -Yeah, that makes sense I guess. All right. Well, that's the Xbox. -That is the Xbox. -Do you need to cover anything else or-- -May we never speak its name ever again. -Yeah. That goes for voicemails as well. Don't mention either of those. -I guess, if you wanna send in one, you know, we can't really hear them now with our new show. We're working on that but we'll get to it. -Yeah. Just e-mail to us directly. -E-mail, yeah, e-mail-- call me up at home, do that. -All right. What else do we got? -Okay. So, let's move on and talk about Google. Remember those barges that were in San Francisco and we were kind of speculating about what they were? -Yeah, sure. -There are these giant ships that popped up in San Francisco Bay and you know, eventually CNET found out that those are gonna be Google glass stores, like floating Google Glass store. This is what-- -This is just Google Glass? -Well, Google hardware. So, Chromebooks, Chromecast and the Google Glass but this is what they're eventually gonna look like. These are the concepts. -Oh. -So, the sides of this building are meant to look like fish scales. Anyway, there's actually another twist on this story and it's kind of an exciting one and it shows a big project of the Hit-Killer Project, the next one that Google is working on. -Inside the barge? -No. Not inside the barge but at the same Mountain View HQ. -Okay. -So, two days ago, reporters at SFGate-- Ariel, you remember SFGate, right? -Yeah, yeah, totally. -Like a big local pub. -Uh-hmm. -They're making early claims that Google is in close ties with an Arrow company to make a personal vehicle for the road that can also lift up into the air and fly. -Shut up. -Yeah. -A lot of journalists online are making comparisons to the jets and mobile from The Jetsons. -You-- -And this is why. -Okay. -Because-- well, this is the story. The story is that a company called Z Arrow, whose offices are actually strangely close to the Mountain View Google Campus-- -Got you. -in California. They recently filed for a patent for something that they're calling a personal air craft. And I wanna bring out a picture of what this patent sort of looks like. But basically, they're saying it can lift up into the air, that's what it looks like, without the need for a runway. -Stop it. -And it doesn't need a runway because it has rotors on top and on the side, which you could see in this diagram here, that will allow it to sort of pick up off the ground like a helicopter would. -It looks like a flying centipede. -And then hover. Yeah. -It's actually kind of terrifying but awesome. -Yeah, it's crazy. -At the same time -It sort of looks like your normal airplane but then it has all these extra attachments. -Propellers, yeah. -Yeah, extra propeller in front. -So, where do I get in? -Well, okay. So, here's the crazy part, is that, we don't even know if Google is involved with it yet. The whole thing by the way supposedly runs on battery power, which I think is really cool. -Right, especially when you're-- you run out and you're in flight. -Right. -Right. -Sorry, hold on. We'd bring up another photo of this because I think it's-- it looks pretty awesome but, yeah, here's the thing, because we don't know if it's-- if Google is behind it yet. We're kind of-- everyone speculating a lot like they were with that Google barred stories, right? -Got you. -But after SFGate published that article we just looked at, they received a photo from a guy named Greg Espiritu, right? -Okay. -And this guy is claiming that he took a picture of a similar aircraft that he found on a naval base in Alameda earlier this year. And this is what that one look like. Let me see if I can bring that up. -So, he thinks he found one of these prototypes? -Yeah, yeah, exactly. And like a real life version of it. Sorry, hold on. Let me keep looking for this one photo. It is pretty cool, though, I mean, flying cars, did you ever think that we would be there? -Well, you know, I base all of my, you know, ambition in terms of like future stuff that we're gonna do on movies. -Right. -Right? If you notice like sci-fi stuff is really like what we only try and achieve, right? -Right. -Like-- -Everything is based off minority-- -Like all human innovation in terms of technology-- -Yeah. -seems to be trying to replicate what sci-fi movies are able to do. -Right, exactly. -That's the-- that's like the line we're taking. So, yeah, I thought maybe eventually this would happen. Just makes sense. -Yeah. -Right, doesn't it? -Would you feel comfortable riding in an aircraft? -Oh, I wouldn't be caught dead one but I'm just-- -If it was made by Google, maybe. -Yeah? Is that like-- I guess. -Yeah. -As long as the government is not making it. I'm-- sign me up. -Yeah. -Yeah. -So, sorry, the internet is kind of lagging here but I'm bringing it up right now. So, okay, so that's the story. It looks a lot like the Google aircraft that was posted in the [unk]. -Sure. -Another person though, named Thomas Shepard snapped a shot of another aircraft found in 2012 right by the Zee. Aero offices, that looks a lot like that diagram as well. -Something's going on. -Yeah. -Right? Something is happening. -Okay. So, here it is. This is a picture of that aerial shot that we were looking at. -Okay. -Doesn't it look a lot like that diagram? -Whoa! That's crazy. -Yeah. So, we haven't confirmed whether this guy in the picture actually works for Zee.Aero or not. -Or like he like leaked it out himself or something like that. -Maybe, maybe. -Yeah. -So, these are all sort of independent comments from that original SFGate article. Here's the other picture of the same aircraft. -Something is happening. -I think it's tiny, right? I mean, if that could be a little bigger. -I don't-- this-- how can this happen? Right? Like how can this be regulated for public consumption? -Yeah. I'm sure we're not gonna see it for a really long time. -I just don't understand how it would work. Like, so you're allowed to fly to work? -Yeah. -Sort of in your own little air space. I don't get it. -Something tells me that maybe this is gonna be like a commercial aircraft that they'll rent out and you could take rides on it and then test out Google Glass in the sky. Maybe it's like another PR thing. -I don't know, man. -Here's the crazy part though, is in Gizmodo article, that was about the same topic. The first comment is from someone named Ashley Feinberg and she said she received an e-mail from LinkedIn about an arrow dynamics job with Google and Zee. Aero. So, that's the kind of a last part of the puzzle here. -Plot thickens. -Yeah. -Flying cars. -Coming to a Google barge near you. -You ready, Ariel? -Yeah, I'm down. -Yeah. -Are you though really? -I've been waiting for flying cars since I was like ten years old, man. -Because Back to the Future. -Yeah, of course. -Yeah, totally. -That's it. -Yeah, it's been a long time coming. -Uh-hmm. -I can't wait to just retrofit my Buick LeSabre into a hovercraft. -Oh, that'd be nice. -How dope would that be? -Yeah, oh, man. That'd be awesome. -That thing is a beast. You need a couple more motors on that airplane. -Yeah. -Oh, my God. I would like knock planes out of the air with that thing. -Yeah. -Awesome. -Yeah. Okay. Well, next story. Speaking of airplanes, this one is gonna piss all of us off. -Nice. Let's do it. -And I love agreeing on stuff that we can collectively hate on together too, -Yeah. -the basis for this called show. But earlier this month they lifted a band on using devices as the plane is touching down, right? In an airplane. -So, correct me if I'm wrong. I'm gonna be in a plane in a couple of weeks but-- -Right. -can I use my phone the entire time? -Not the entire time but you could take it off airplane mode before the airplane touches the ground. So, previously, you had to wait until they told you it was okay. -Where do you get service anyway? -Once you're below 10,000 feet you could start using it whenever you want. -Oh. -That's the new. But the FCC also is gonna be proposing a new law next month in December that we'll make it okay for people to use their cellphones for both voice and text messaging throughout the entire flight. -But you're not gonna get service 35,000 feet above earth. -It's possible. Yeah, that's what they're saying. -You're saying it's possible? -They're outlining some ways to make it possible. Yeah. -No. Let's not do this. -They're gonna need to install some extra antennas on the ground and that stuff. -Just like floating base in-- -Well, you can make phone calls using their corded phones on an airplane, that's been a while. -All right but that's probably satellite, isn't it? -That's probably satellite but I'm sure there's gonna be something that they can do. I don't know the exact take. -No. We shouldn't do this. -But the point is that the technology itself shouldn't be only limiter. -Right. -We should collectively come together and stand up against this, right? -Do you wanna sit next to some schmow talking on the phone for six hours? -No. I don't think anybody does. But here's-- -Why is this even an option? -Here's the thing though-- -It's probably a safety thing-- it's a safety issue as well. -Oh, yeah, that's what the aviator, the pilots and a lot of the-- -Yeah, like I'm-- -stewardesses and if that-- -I'm sure like they have a union in a group and they're-- -Yeah. -Yeah. -They're all against it because it's obviously dangerous if they can't pay attention to the in-flight calls. -Like, sir, sir, take the soda, take the soda. -Right. -It's already-- -He's like, "Oh, give me one second, I'm talking." -Or trying to sleep. Here's the thing though, like when you're on buzzes and someone is talking really loud, -This is terrible. -I feel like people kind of come together and police themselves, right? Do you think that would ever happen on an airplane? -People feel like they're more privileged on an airplane. -Yeah. -You're paying a buttload of money. -But just the fact that you're squished so close to people, maybe their patients would get lowered and they would just tell someone to shut up. -Yeah and I would imagine everyone would sort of use their client voice, their library voice. -Hopefully. Man, yeah, I would want to count on that but something tells me people still wouldn't. -Yeah, I don't want this to happen. I do not-- you know what it is? I'm okay with like the texting, of course. -Text-- that's the thing. It should be texting-- -So, but how do you limit text and-- or how do you limit voice and not text? -Yeah. Because people can quietly talk on the phone and no one would know anyway. -I don't know. I don't want it. Also, don't forget, airplanes are a lot louder than you think. Like there's a lot of background noise. -Uh-hmm. -So, if you ever like look across the aisle, you can't always hear what the person next to you is saying. So, that might make it a little better. -Right. -It might sort of block out some of that sound. -Yeah. Yeah, I can see that. -But it's still a terrible idea. -It's a bad idea but you know what? I can also see some airlines doing is establishing a quiet zone and then charging a premium for customers to sit in that zone but you're not allowed to use phones at all. -Fine. No. -Just come back to airline mood. -So, you're saying I think you'd have to pay more to talk. -Oh, okay. Well, I was gonna say, yeah. Okay, they could do either. -Yeah. That's-- -If you wanna talk, then you have to pay for like a booth or something. -Yeah. -Yeah, 5 million booth. -That's it. Or maybe there's like a talking, yeah, like a little section that you get up and go to. -Right. Well, have you ever ridden the Metro-North before? I think we've talked about this in the show. -Yeah. -So, they have quiet cars in the Metro-North subways here. -Right. -And they're special cars. We're not allowed to talk or make phone calls and those are self-police, you know, there's not like a security guard walking through those trains. -Right. -And that seems to work out pretty well. It's kind of like the honesty policy but I don't know. I can't see this happening on commercial flights where everyone is invited. -Yeah. Let's just not do this. -Yeah. Ultimately it's gonna be up to the airline carriers to sort of bring the technology to their airplanes. -Right but like-- to me, it's like you know, if I'm-- it will now make my choice of airline that much easier. -Yeah. -Because if one does it, not the other, I'm doing the one that doesn't allow you to talk. -Right. If you're an airline, you'd be smart to not allow this. -Yeah. No, thanks. -Because people really enjoy their peace and quiet. -Yeah. Terrible. -Yup. I guess we're all in agreement on that. -Easy enough. -Ariel, you agree? -Oh, yeah. Totally. It's annoying. -Okay. Cool. -That's all I care about. -This is a really cool story. I think this might be one of the last ones for the day. -Uh-hmm. -We gotta check out this amazing story who about this woman who-- why she did this? I'm not sure. But she single-handedly taped 35 years of television news. -Yeah, yeah. Off her home TV set and on to a VHS recorder. -Why? -I don't know. -Just so she can have the reruns of news? -Yeah. That's the end of the show I guess. I don't know. Did you guys ever-- you guys must have recorded television programs to VHS tapes growing up, right? -Yeah. -Yeah, but not the news. -X-Men and Ninja Turtles and stuff. What do you guys record? I wanna hear it. -I recorded a lot of rap videos, -Yeah. -like the MTV Raps and stuff like that. -Yeah. Music videos. -Usually music videos. Yeah. -Break dancing videos. -Oh, totally. -What about you? Hockey games? -No. I never recorded. I don't like recording sports games. -No? Okay. -I think, you know, once it's old, once it's over it's sort of over. -Okay. -I would-- I don't know. Maybe like cartoons. -Uh-huh. -Yeah, maybe like Beavis and Butt-head or something. -Yeah, yeah. And then you re-watch it later. -Oh, you know what I would record? I would record 120 Minutes on MTV. -120 Minutes. -You don't know what that is? -I didn't have-- -I remember that. -That's right, no TV. -Yeah. -It's weird talking to you guys stuff like that. -Yeah, it's weird, right? It's a gap. We don't really have too many gaps in pop culture but when it comes to TV from our youth. -I'm like, remember Doug on Nickelodeon? He's like, "No." -Who's that? -What's that? -Exactly. -That's-- isn't that crazy, Ariel? -Yeah, that is kinda crazy. -I'm a very baseline. Like I know who Doug Funny is but I don't know the inside jokes of the TV Show. -What else is wrong with you? -We're slowly starting to learn. -It's crazy. Yeah, but I would definitely tape-- -What's 120 Minutes? -So, 120 Minutes was a show on MTV that aired Sunday nights at midnight. -Okay. -And it was like the good music. -Yeah. -Okay. Like alternative music? -They would play-- yeah, it was like-- in the early '90s, mid to early '90s it was like the punk and ska, that sort. -Yeah. -Okay. -It wasn't like really super mega underground but it was stuff that they just weren't playing during the day. -For sure. -Right. -And it was like Matt Pinfield hosted it and it was just him sort of like curating like, "You gotta check out this band, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones." -That's cool. -Uh-hmm. -Yeah. It was cool. -Yeah. -And so I would tape that and like Monday, when I got home from school I'll watch it. -Yeah. -Yeah. -I had this friend in high-- no, this is like middle school. So, do you ever watch WWF on Sunday nights? -Oh, my God, of course. -That came out like pretty late on Sundays, right? That's maybe like 10 or 11 o'clock. -It was Monday night. -Was it Monday night? -Monday Night Raw. -Yeah, yeah, Monday Night Raw. It was-- it came on pretty late that-- -I think it started like 10 and until like midnight. -Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. -Yeah. -And I remember we used to watch that every Monday night. -It's probably still on. -Yeah and then Tuesday, we would all sort of talk about it, what happened the previous episode, right? -Right. -And I was allowed to stay up late and watch that but I had one friend that wasn't allowed to. His mom was like, "That's too late." And so, what he would do is tape it Monday night and then he'd wake up extra early like at 7 o'clock in the morning on Tuesday. -And watch it. All right. -And watch it so that he wouldn't be left out of the conversation. -So he could be a part of the [unk]. -Yeah. I think it's like super adorable. -Yeah. -It's amazing. Good for him. -Yeah. -It's so funny. -About dedication. -Just to not be left out. -You know what's so funny? It's like, growing up it was never like, for me, I always wanted to stay up late, right? -Yeah, yeah. -That wasn't allowed. Like, you know, you always have like a bed time. -Right. -Most people did. But then it was always okay to wake up whenever you wanted to. -Sure. -Like, why was that not-- you know what I mean? Like-- -Right. -still getting the crappy amount of sleep, -Right. -why do I have to just-- yeah, it doesn't make too much sense. -I mean, you can't really control when you wake up. -Right. -But you can control when you leave your room. -Yeah. -If I was a parent I'd say, "Just stay in there until--" -Just get it-- stay in there and don't come out 'til 9 o'clock. -Yeah, right. So, we all recorded a lot of stuff. -Yeah. -But the story about this woman is really interesting. She spent 35 years from 1977 to last year in 2012, recording channels of TV news, you know, local and national broadcast, day and night, 24 hours until she filled up about 140,000 VHS tapes. -Oh, my God. -Yeah. -How much did that cost? -It's crazy. Well, I don't know, but you-- how much were blank tapes say in the '80s? -I don't remember. -That's a great freaking question. -I don't know. -Were they free? -No, they weren't free. -I feel like they were just handed out at the post office. -Like AOL disks? No. That was like-- -How-- Ariel, how-- do you know how much they were? -No, I was trying to think. I don't remember but I do remember buying them. -Yeah. -Yeah. -I feel like a pack of ten might have been like ten bucks? -That's crazy because there's so many-- there's so much mechanics involved in a VHS. -Yeah, totally. -Were there? -Yeah. A lot more than a CD, which cost kind of a lot of money like blank CDs were like 50 bucks. -How much did a VHS tape cost? -Oh, God. It's great radio right now. -What do you say, Google? -Well, I mean, you have to look back then. I mean, now they probably cost two cents-- -That's what I'm saying, like how much did they cost. -Right. -They're saying they cost about 5 bucks a pack? -Okay, right. -But that's-- -That's a lot of money, though. -Right. -That's like $1 million-- -Right. -for this lady. -Right. So, this lady is a Marion Stokes and she grew up during the beginning of the great depression and she had a tendency to save a lot of things, you know, she had a big collection of the early Mac computers and she saved a lot of newspapers and things like that. But her main passion was TV news and she kinda was something of an archivist because she eventually became a librarian, then she worked as a television show producer and that's how-- that's sort of how she got started, getting interested in recording television. -Got you. -And she started doing it back in 1977. That was also around the time when news broadcast started airing news 24 hours a day, which I didn't know. I didn't know that sometimes they would just switch off to different program. -Yeah. -Because now New York One, of course. -Twenty-four seven. -Twenty-four seven. -You Wait a Minute. -Yeah, I don't remember that. -Ariel, again, I need help. -I mean, I remember-- -I need an adult. -I remember obviously when those like, you know, FOX would have their like ten o'clock news. -They still do it. -Yeah, of course. -So, what-- I don't understand. -But this is when there was no 24-hour news stations at all. -Right, right. -So, of course I remember that. -They would break in sometimes. -Right, right. -Like breaking news. -Right. -Uh-hmm. -So, she started recording MSNBC, FOX, CNN, CNBC and C-SPAN all day long and it would take eight different television sets and VCR combos that were hooked up throughout her house to record all the stuff simultaneously. -Wow. -Sounds kind of crazy. -She does sound kinda crazy. I mean, she's obsessed with news and I kinda wanna get to that later because now, we're sort of all in that same boat. But she would slip a 6-hour tape into the recorder before she went to bed, right? Into all A recorders. And then she would let that run through the course of the night, then wake up extra early after six hours to sort of replace the tape. And then if she had to go to work or she was out with friends, she would basically commission the rest of her family members or various people around the community to assist her in recording. -Right, like feed the cat and then pull out all VHS tapes. -Right. So, obviously they started accumulating. Here's the picture of just one room from her house that just-- -Oh, my God. hoarding video tapes. She actually filled up several apartments with boxes that were just labeled with channels, dates and times. -So, let's say VHS tape is $1 to $5. -One to five dollars. -In the '80s and '90s-- I mean, it's still-- -Yeah. -an insane amount of money. -Crazy. Yeah. So, 140,000 tapes. -Let's say it cost 300 grand. -Right. -That's insane. -That's a lot of money. This television show, I mean, it doesn't really talk about her finances go up but she has to be making quite a bit of money if she owns several apartments and could afford to take this stuff. -Right. -Really insane. -Amazing. -So, unfortunately, she passed away last year on December 14. But after she passed, words started getting out about her recordings because, of course, the family sorted wanted to clear the house and they didn't know what to do with it. So, who do you think stepped up to the plate to sort of take these off her hands? -Archive data work. -The Internet Archive, yeah, totally. They're the superheroes of archiving everything. -They came in with their capes. -Yeah and their signals. A guy named Roger McDonald over at internet archive in California runs the Television News Division. -Okay. -So, he got word of it and called up her son, Marion's son. And you know, they basically have been trying to digitize television broadcast to the computers so you can access any time or date you want online. -Right. -And they've been doing that. So, you can actually do it for the last four years of coverage, which is really cool. But the problem is, apparently, and according to this article, a lot of networks before the digital switch, they didn't keep actual recordings of the news broadcast. They would keep footage of the shot for the new show. -Okay. -But they wouldn't record the actual show. -Got you. -For whatever reason. I mean, it was costly and took up space. -Sure. Interesting. -So, we don't have a lot of footage before the year 2000. And so a lot of that stuff is just kind of bleeding out. We don't have it anymore. So, that's what she's getting the stuff for and she donated all the stuff to the internet archive and now they're basically sifting through each tape one by one, probably with the team of [unk]. -But the 9/11 stuff is all in there. -Yeah. -That's pretty intense. -That is really cool. Yeah. So, for the tenth year-- -No, it's not cool. -Okay. The technology branding is interesting. Not cool. Cool is a wrong adjective. -Right, I'm joking around. -So, for the tenth anniversary of September 11th, the-- in 2011, they actually released a bunch of different footage. -I remember seeing that. -Yeah. -Yeah. -That was cool. As you could see, over 3,000 hours of footage throughout that week-- -Right. -is kind of crazy. -Right. -Did you save in the newspapers or anything from that day? -My dad did. Yeah, I don't know. I was in Baltimore when it happens. -Yeah. -Yeah. -What about you, Ariel? Did you save anything from that day? Did you record something? -No. Whenever there's a huge like tragedy, I just wanna forget about it. -Yeah, yeah. -You know what I mean? -Or you're just watching it. You're not thinking about it. -Yeah, exactly. Like that's enough for me. -Speaking of which, it's the 50th anniversary of the JFK. -Oh, JFK. -Uh-hmm. -Not to like go down that right at all, but you know, obviously none of us were anywhere near being alive then. -Uh-huh. -But that's like there's so much controversy and you know, what's it called? Sort of like just all kinds of different versions of-- and my conspiracy like-- -Yeah. -And everyone knows about that. When I was in Middle School, I remember-- I was like very temporarily obsessed with it for a while. -Oh, right. -Because it was right around the time that like computers were becoming a part of the education system. -Uh-hmm. -And they-- I remember I was in one like Social Studies class and they introduced all of these like 3D renderings. -Yeah. -That were really terrible looking but they were still kind of cool for their time. It's like '93, '94, '95. And like it would set up the whole Dallas scene and like you would-- like the part of this was like figuring out who you thought kill him and-- -Right. -It was really intense for like a 12-year-old to really process and I don't know. Like it's kind of amazing that whole circumstance. -Yeah. -I think students specifically are eager to launch on to conspiracy theories because they've been sucking up so much information that just gets handed to them. -Yeah. -The idea that what your parents say and what your teachers say may not be the truth-- -Right, sure. -is really compelling to a kid. -Absolutely. -[unk] in that same way. -And it's like 50 years, it's like 50 year ago. -Yeah. -That's-- -Yeah. -an insane amount of time. -You know what's-- -And it's still so massively important in American history. -And we still have no idea-- -Well, I mean-- -No confirmation that there may be a different story. -But then like, the craziest-- like, okay, so they have Lee Harvey, -Yeah. -and then the Jack Ruby kinda goes and shoots, like, imagine how crazy that probably was. -To live through, right. -For 1963 or whatever, you know, like that's insane. -Yeah. I saw a video that was a composite, sort of compilation of everyone's pictures and video that they were shooting, you know, various news, channels and things like that, of the entire motorcade. So, before we only saw like isolated news broadcast, -Yeah. -but this sort of traced and used photos to sort of recreate the entire scene as if you are watching the whole thing unfold. -Right. -It was really cool but I don't know, I still don't have an answer for that. -It's wacky. -Yeah. -Totally wacky and what's really kind of crazy is like, you know, a lot of people who were like adults when it happened, -Right. -you know, they're just not around anymore and it's really just like people who were kids back then. -Right, yeah. -Like our parents, like my dad was ten when this happened. -Uh-hmm. -You know, like I wonder what it was like for them. I don't know if I have ever talked to my dad about like, -Yeah. -"Do you remember this? You were ten years old, was it?" you know. -Yeah, I bet, you know, for a week-- weeks afterward probably, the streets in New York or big cities were probably empty-- -That's probably insane. -because people were just at home going to their televisions. -That's probably insane, right? -Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's interesting. -It's-- I mean, I guess it's kind of like morbid to think about it but like what if it happened now with the way we consume media? -Right. -What have been some-- I don't know, there was like some sort of, you know, different relationship between media and people back then. -Uh-hmm. -And now, it's just like everyone is a reporter, everyone is-- -Right. Well, that's something that I wanted to talk about with the stories that, you know, obviously Marion, the person who-- the woman who recorded all these video tapes, the news, she's obviously obsessed with news and keeping these around because she was brought up in a depression, right? And the Civil Rights Movement on the '50s and '60s. -Yeah. So, she was clearly just holding on to something like that and that her obsessiveness kinda gotten out control to like hoarding capacities. -Sure. -But now, I think a story like this is compelling for people like us and anyone who's obsessed with news-- -Right. and technology. And I think, you know, we should get someone in here so to talk about news addiction. But do you feel that you're addicted to news sometimes? And it can't-- -I was-- after 9/11 I was. -Doesn't have to be broadcast news either because news is everything. You know, like news is just things that are going around the world. -Twitter. -It could be Twitter or Facebook, Instagram is news technically. -Right. But the news in the sense that like I think we're talking about is like an anchor, right? -Right. Broadcastings. -Delivering what happened on the day. -Right. -You know, like the Walter Cronkites of the world. -Uh-hmm. -Yeah, I don't know. It's kind of-- after 9/11, yeah, I was like glued to CNN for like four years. You know, like that's what it felt like. -Right. But I remember when-- I mean, when Sandy Hook happened last year, I was on five different machines. You know, I was watching TV on one thing, live feed, like live Twitter feeds on another computer, and I was like checking Facebook and like looking at Vine and things like that for first person videos. News consumption is such an interactive experience now. It's such a different thing from the JFK assassination. People were just glued to their TVs. -Well, the hard truth and the upsetting reality of it all is that it's entertainment now. -Right, right. -And that's, you know, however, you wanna digest that, that's what it's manifested into, so. -Uh-hmm. And it doesn't necessarily come from those broadcasts anymore. -Right. -It's kind of grass works-- -You can-- you, your own, sort of guide to like the world of news now. -Yeah. But you can get obsessed with it too and it's something that-- -Oh, for sure. -like I'm very passionate about it because, you know, we both have to cover news so much that we always have our one eye at least glued to those feeds. -Yes, but our news, at the end of the day doesn't really matter. -No, it doesn't matter. It's completely forgettable, right? -No. Come on. -I don't recall any of the stories. -What we do is important. You think what we do is important? -But that's what I'm saying, is that now that news is so easily consumable, -Sure. -you can get it from anywhere and about anything too. So, it's so specific. You want news on, you know, like sustainable food. You can get that in a million different places now. -Right. -It's kind of scary. I think it's a good idea to just take a step back sometimes. -Just take it all in. -Go on a news [unk]. -Just unplug every now and then. That's all we ask. -Yeah. -All right. I think that's it for us today, sir. -Yup. -Good job. I wanna shake your hand. Good job. Excellent, sir. -Air five, Ariel. -Yeah. -Yeah. Oh, you got it. Nice. -By the million angels. -All right. Good first week in the studio. I'm very excited. -Yeah. Was it a full week? -I think we-- when did we start? Wednesday. -It was Wednesday, yeah. -Wednesday, we started. All right. Well, we're not gonna have a full-full week for a while. -Yeah. -So, some programming notes. Let's get down to it. Obviously we're here Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of next week. -Uh-hmm. -Right. -Thursday, Friday, no show, you'll enjoy your Thanksgiving without us and then I'm back here Monday the-- what is that? The 2nd? -Sure. -Sure. Monday the 2nd. And then I'm gone on San Francisco doing a video shoot with the guys at GameSpot. -Uh-hmm. -And then after that-- -It's all me. -We gotta shoot some freaking Yuletides, man. -Oh, yeah. -I forgot about that. -Oh, man. -Oh, man. Are we having a freak-out moment right now? -We're about to be here way longer than expected. -All right. Here's what I wanna do. Keep sending in voicemails, 866-404-CNET and we wanna get submissions for Yuletide topics. We have a bunch, I know we wrote a bunch of them down but we definitely want your input. We're gonna be shooting them in here, which is kind of fun too. -Yeah. -So, we look forward to that. But I will try and do like five to six, like we usually do and it should be a lot of fun and then before you know it, we'll be live in Las Vegas at CES 2014. I will leave three seconds so that we all may die a little bit inside. Okay. That's fine. All right. Excellent. You know how to get in top of the show, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, all that other stuff. -Yup. -Have a fantastic weekend, everyone. Until Monday, I'm Jeff Bakalar. -I'm Justin Yu. -I'm Ariel Nuñez. -Thanks for tuning in guys. This is The 404 Show. High tech, low brow. We'll see you on Monday. Bye-bye.