The AnandTech Podcast: Episode 8

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• ssj3gohan - Saturday, October 13, 2012 - link

  The embedded player is essentially unusable for this type of podcast. I know, I know, I should just download it and listen it locally, but if you're providing a player, please:
  - Physically make it larger, because the granularity with seeking/finding stuff right now is like 2 minutes. I'm not sure how other people listen to this, but I really don't have 2 contiguous hours of free time to listen to the whole thing (but I do want to!).
  - fix the seeking bugs. Sometimes you can seek and it will play fine, sometimes it will just refuse to continue playing after you seek. And when you're looking for exactly the right point with 1-pixel accuracy, there will be a lot of seeking with, consequently, a lot of page-reloading and retrying because the player stopped functioning.
  - Maybe.... just provide a streaming link (like winamp shoutcast) so you don't have to wait to download the whole thing. I have a pretty decent internet connection, but last night when I downloaded the podcast my internet connection was already pretty busy and it took me ~15 minutes to download it before I could listen to it.
  - On that note: encoding VBR will really drastically reduce the filesize.
  
  Anyway, I love the content, please keep making these. Especially like Brian, I can relate to him very much (I am also always appalled by the apparent lack of optical engineering at optical device manufacturers :P )

• phillyry - Monday, October 15, 2012 - link

  that's what motivated me to download the podcasts.
  
  they should focus their time on making cool podcasts and doing work for their articles.
  
  the crappy drag bar should motivate you to take the 25s to download the podcasts. then your sound will work great for everything else too and you can take them with you on the go!

• slippysoup - Saturday, October 13, 2012 - link

  Really liking the podcast. It makes sitting in traffic on the drive home from work far more enjoyable. I would love to see an article some time on cellular base stations. That kind of stuff is really fascinating.

• EnzoFX - Saturday, October 13, 2012 - link

  Really glad this is finally getting some real focus. After years of complaining =P. This is one thing, trivial though it may be, I want my next upgrade to significantly improve upon. My old board has a quick boot option, and I do disable anything I don't use, and I have it down to around 10 secs. I've read that ASRock has a significantly better POST time.
  
  Keep doing POST time benchmarks with all reviews please.

• ervinshiznit - Sunday, October 14, 2012 - link

  Anand I'm not sure if you already know this but if you don't like Cyberlink for Intel QuickSync you can try MediaCoder.

• MrCake - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link

  Your MechE hasn't designed an aluminum part before, has he? "painted anodization"??? first time I've ever heard that. "it oxidizes a decent portion of the thickness". Wow..., just wow. "if you
  oxidized more you'd have structural integrity issues", absolutely not. "post-anodize machining...otherwise it would be matte. Yes", facepalms. Good god, and I thought journalists were
  bad at explaining this.
  
  It's not my expertise but I have designed a few hundred aluminum parts, so here's how it probably
  works. The call-out is most likely equivalent to mil-std-171 7.2.2; this is a ~.0005" thickness coat,
  decorative and scratch resistant. The coating itself is super hard, and can only be scratched by harder materials. The problem is the base metal yield strength is still fairly low. Chamfers (yes, we do pronounce the "h") have sharp edges, which make point contacts and therefore have a theoretically infinite contact stresses till they're rounded off. To summarize; small contact areas, equal high pressures even at low forces; pressures over material yield cause deformations, and deformations over .0005" make you see silver. The chamfer finish is probably not a post anodization process,it's diamond ground and has a much finer surface finish. The rest of the phone is cnc milled, and is matte from either a sandblasting, or vibratory media process to remove machining marks. Anodize surfaces are as glossy/matte as their surface finish. And as to the "structural integrity" concern repeated, and repeated, and repeated; The iphone is thin, but the anodize coating is a couple orders of magnitude thinner and has negligible affect on structural integrity.
  
  A possible fix would be mil-std-171 7.5.2 Anodize Type III which is an anodized hardcoat. It's a
  similar process but coats to .002" thick, packs it's molecules much denser, and can pass a hardness test to rockwell C60. It's a reasonable response to the scratching issue, however it may not be appropriate for other reasons(prone to cracking instead of scratching, tolerance issues, more costly, less pretty.)

• peter123 - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link

  Hey, for the next podcast you could talk about the samsung chrome netbook running on the arm cortex A15 Exynos5!

• creed3020 - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link

  Keep 'em coming guys! Each week I look forward to his podcast as some good morning listening while I work. Thank You!

• phy_lbc - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link

  Hey, I wonder if you guys (Brian, Anand, Ian, any other Brit) could cover this on the next podcast. Everything Everywhere (merger of T-Mobile UK and Orange in the UK) are to deploy their 4G LTE network on October 30th using the re-farmed 1800Mhz spectrum from the 2G frequencies of T-Mobile UK and Orange UK. What I wanted to know is what will happen to everyone who is still using 2G on T-Mobile UK? There's no information online about this. Would they upgrade people who only have 2G phones to 3G phones or something? Wouldn't they have to give current customers notice before they kick everyone off 2G?

• Peanutsrevenge - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link

  That's a good point.
  Not sure how they'd know who/where to contact people to inform them though.
  Those on <3G devices will obviously be PAYG and few would have registered the sim anyway.
  
  Hhmmm, I do have a mate that's still got an old ass phone he refuses to upgrade, I think it's on Orange, will have to get hold of him to check and see if it dies when we get 4G in Bournemouth (I hope to god it does so we don't have to look at the thing any more).