[00:00:19] We just made you part of the tech team. Welcome to the show, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Sam Bushman. Jay Harrison is with me. We keep an eye on tech so you don't have to spread the word, share the love. NPITechGuys.com, our website. We're also available on YouTube and Rumble and just about everywhere else. Spread the word. The radio version is available also on all kinds of radio services. Spread the word about that too. NPITechGuys.com is the website for the show. NPITechGuys.com.
[00:00:43] And this broadcast is underwritten by NetworkProvidersInc.com. They can help you with all your IT needs from IT strategy to a help desk to guidance and security. We do it all. NetworkProvidersInc.com. All right. So we're hearing now costs are going up and they're going up in just about every single thing we can think of, but even your internet connection.
[00:01:06] So now Elon Musk and company raising prices and it's frustrating, but at the same time, when you think and hear about what they're doing, it's not so bad, Jay. Yeah. They, you know, they've got a lot of going on there. They're providing internet for the entire globe, which is incredible. But they announced an upcoming price adjustment for residential max customers with monthly service going to $130 per month beginning on or after June.
[00:01:31] The company says that from how much from 120 was their residential max and that $10 increase. Yeah. $10 increase residential. They have basically three tiers for residential. You've got the 120, which is max and you can get up to 400 megabit downloads. Then you've got their, I think it's called a plus or whatever. And that's 200 and then their basic, which is 100. And, you know, I've recently decided that. And that's download speeds. Those are download speeds. Yeah. The uploads are a little bit slower than that.
[00:01:59] But it's not symmetrical exactly like you get with fiber or some other things. Is it about half? It's a little less than half. So, for example, on the max, you could see two, three hundred down and 80 up, stuff like that. And so. Yeah. Okay. I think it scales accordingly. And so it's now 130 bucks. What about the other two plans? Are they increasing too? I think that they're all increasing. I only happen to know of this other one. I think they're all kind of going up some. But I've decided that I'm just going to fall back to the residential.
[00:02:28] Because the 100, which is kind of their basic one, you know, 100 down is a lot still compared. I mean, you know, with the DSL that I had, for example, from the local phone company was only like five megabit. Yeah. It depends on how you define a lot. And it depends on what you're doing with the connection, really. Yeah. If you're just day to day doing email, watching TV, and you don't have that many people connected and everything else, then, hey, 100 is plenty. And it does really well. If you're talking about, you know, doing video all day long and that kind of stuff in terms of uploading and downloading video.
[00:02:56] And that's where you work from home and there's 20 people on your connection because, you know, everybody works from home. And you've got all these devices. Or you're trying to run servers. Then it's nothing. Right. So understand the realm. And you're just saying for a residential service, I don't need. So I got, for example, an internet connection from Comcast. It's got an 800 download, which is great. And it only had 40 upload. It was just a problem. It was like, oh, my gosh.
[00:03:22] Now, 40 upload is pretty good compared to, you know, but yet it's pretty slow. Yeah. And well, now they just upgraded me. They took my internet down for a couple of days last week and I was kind of mad. But now I'm not too mad. What is your up speed now? It's 800 down, 300 up now. Now, that's much better. All I'm telling you is 800 down, 300 up is a pretty dang good connection now. So anyway, it's kind of relative.
[00:03:52] But in whatever link, what's it called? Starlink. Starlink. I don't know why I always forget that name. There's so many different terms with link. We used to have Starband, you know, 10, 15 years ago. Starband, uplink, downlink, you know, whatever. When Starlink first came out, I couldn't stop calling it Starband. I would always fall back to that. But now I've finally gotten over it. Right. Well, anyway, my point is Starlink, though, when you read, read the details about what they're upgrading, though, what they're doing. They're not just raising your prices. They're... Yeah.
[00:04:22] So the company says the increase is tied to expanding network capacity, improving reliability, and covering rising global operating costs. They pointed to the growing demand for satellite internet services proof that customers continue to see value in their platform. The residential max plan will still include unlimited data for things like 4K streaming, gaming, video calls, high-speed internet access. See, and that seems something. They could shut down how much data you're using and go back to that old tired model. But they're not doing that either.
[00:04:49] So anyway, I know it's increased cost and it's frustrating, but I also understand it. And I think at least they're justifying it. Instead of some of these other services just raise costs and don't even tell you why. Or give you, you know, hey, if they make Starlink much more stable and more robust and more bandwidth. Because remember, it's shared. And so they could just leave it like it is and then put too many people on it. It slows down and now you're paying for $400 and getting $100. Yeah. Or they can level with you, right? I do like the options that they have.
[00:05:15] Some people don't like a lot of options, but, you know, they have roaming options and they've got marine options and aircraft options. I mean, some of their options, like for aircraft, can be $10,000 a month. But they're incredible that you can get that kind of stuff. Now, one of the things they're also doing is they're small dishes. And if you have systems that you just put in standby mode for a site that maybe only has it as a backup internet connection or whatever. Used to be the backup connection was $5 a month just to have it there. And it kind of shut down when it was like that. So they are increasing that to $10 a month.
[00:05:45] But one of the things they've done, which I think is kind of cool, is they've allowed slow transaction or slow bandwidth on even the ones that are in standby mode. So not only can the device itself get updates and things like that, but if you're just doing email or something like that, you can oftentimes just use your small dish in standby mode and it's enough to get by. So kind of like the old hotspots and things that we used to have.
[00:06:09] And it means if you're doing simple things to running just maybe a camera to get video where unless you connect to it, it doesn't send the video out. So I connect to it just to check on my pigs or I don't know what I'm checking on, but whatever. Pictures like a field or what are they called trail cam? Yeah, or whatever then, you know, and so it might only transmit when people are watching it or whatever. You know that there's a lot of uses where that makes a lot of sense or if it's maintaining the temperature of something.
[00:06:35] So it just has to turn on and turn off like a device, a heater, a lot of those uses. And they're simply saying, hey, we'll make that really inexpensive for you. Right. Which is pretty cool. So I like that. But, you know, anyway, I'm just defending Elon Musk because I think when you're the leader in this kind of industry and when you're really rolling it out this big is, you know, a lot of people talk. This guy's delivering. You got to give him credit. Yeah.
[00:06:59] I think I read something not long ago where it said he's single handedly with his private company now lifted more tonnage into space than every other government combined. So I'm sure that's true. It's incredibly like one tenth of the cost to. And now Jeff Bezos wants to get into the Internet game, too. So there's going to be some real competition in this world, which I think is great. It probably won't drive prices down, but what it'll probably do is drive more capabilities, more data, more throughput, more. So look forward to that kind of happening as well.
[00:07:29] And, you know, I kind of envision someday people will kind of be like, why would I not have a satellite connection? Yeah. And why wouldn't you? I know it's not here yet, but eventually there's going to be that Rubicon, right? Yeah. And I think that a lot of people are doing that. I know people I've helped people put in Starlink as backup systems, even for their house, their home office, things like that. They're saying, you know, especially after a couple of last years that were heavy in hurricanes here in Florida, people are like, we want a backup system that's completely independent.
[00:07:57] It's not dependent on because when you have a local emergency like that, a hurricane, it affects everybody. And people are on generator and the power is down. And even the phone company, their batteries go out. And then, you know, you don't have connectivity. All the cell towers, you could have mobile hotspots as a backup. And that's great if somebody hits a cable with a backhoe or something. But if everybody's switched over to that, it just falls apart. There's no bandwidth available. Yep. And there's where this kind of flies.
[00:08:23] And I'm just telling you, as he builds this thing for the whole world, though, eventually, the everywhere capability of it, it'll get faster and smarter and better and more holes filled in. It'll just become solid. It'll get so good as a backup, but you won't even know when you're on wet, Jay. Yeah. Exactly. I'm just telling you, that's where it's headed. You will know. And I'll tell you why. So somebody that I helped this with was their house and their home office. And I set up an auto-switching router that would switch between Winstream, their local DSL.
[00:08:51] They had a really good DSL that was like 89 down and stuff. And their Starlink account. And it would just switch back and forth to whatever one was good. And it was fine. It worked great for them. They loved it. They didn't have to ever go out and switch. Everything was just up for them, basically. Except for their Netflix account and different accounts started timing out and saying, hey, you're sharing this too much. You're sending it because their IP address kept switching. Yeah. And eventually that's going to be solved too because they're going to do geolocating and stuff like that. And they're going to do geofencing and stuff.
[00:09:21] And eventually that's going to get solved on the back end. And it's going to see that, you know what? Nope. It's just a different connection. But it's the same people doing the same thing. Whatever. So they'll get that stuff worked out too. Yeah. But now you're right. You can tell. I'm just saying eventually it's going to get to where it's going to be so seamless. Don't know. Don't care. Internet everywhere, baby. That's the way we want it. All right. Now, Jay last episode told me how he got an empty box from Amazon. Right. Had to send it back. He had to send back an empty box too. They didn't believe me. But hey man, did it come to you in 30 minutes, Jay? No. No. It never does. Come on.
[00:09:51] No. But Amazon is going to launch. They're launching their 30 minute. They're calling it Amazon Now. And it is going to be a delivery service. It's in Atlanta, Dallas, Fort Worth, Philadelphia, and Seattle with expansion planned for Austin, Denver, Orlando, and Phoenix. And so, number one, you have to already be paying Prime. And number two, you pay a little premium, like a $399. You want something now? And they give it to you within a half an hour, which is pretty cool. Wow.
[00:10:19] I mean, I know they're saying now and it's not now. It's 30 minutes from now. But that's pretty dang now. Yeah. That's pretty now. You know, especially you're probably going to have a drone drop it off or something. And what you got to know about this is that Amazon has made a big play. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago on the show. They made a big play to say, you know, they're going to compete with UPS and FedEx and whatever else because they've got this big supply chain deal worked out, last mile stuff, whatever you want to call it. And so, this kind of delivers for that. If they can start doing now, they're going to give the UPS and the FedEx and the people
[00:10:49] that run for their money. They better embrace AI and do, I don't know what you want to call it, electric vehicles or whatever they're going to do to keep up because, man, it's coming. Maybe the post office will have to partner with Amazon. Somebody will have to do something because I'm telling you, it's getting crazy. And I think it's really good news, though. I mean, the fact that you can get things really that quickly and everything else, the modern storefront, I mean, you think the mall's seen it's yesteryear. You ain't seen nothing yet, baby. You've seen these proposals everybody's saying, we need to take the old malls and turn them
[00:11:16] into data centers because you already got all the stuff there, the food courts and everything else. And yeah, it's kind of interesting. The food court and the data center, do the robots eat food? No, no, no, no. For employees, for the elderly. Oh, yeah. We still have employees? I thought they were all gone. Well, you know, you might have people that want to use it as an indoor track and there might be a few shopping centers and stuff still around in there. But, you know, a lot of the old stalwarts that make up the mall, you know, you might just
[00:11:43] gut that out and use all that empty space for local data centers and do it kind of a little bit more small scale. But I mean, you've already got the infrastructure, you've already got the water and everything else run to it. And, you know, it's an interesting idea, right? It's people thinking outside the box a little bit. All right. You got to pay what? $3.99 per order on top of your Prime membership too, though? Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be a little bump of a fee to get it that fast. But hey, if you've got a sick kid and you need some medicine or if you've got, say again?
[00:12:19] You need a stapler now. Yeah. And if it's really for legitimate reasons, and I used to have a problem with those extra fees. I'm kind of like, you know what? Why are they going to charge me that? And my wife brought this up, but I know I'm kind of stupid and I'm kind of the last man understanding things. But my wife's like, honey, if you go to the store right now and go pick up a stapler, okay? How much is it going to cost you to do that? First off, you're going to spend what? An hour of your time. Right.
[00:12:46] Get in your car, roll to the store, go look for the stapler, find 20 of them, decide which one you want, get one, go get in line, do, okay, do all this crap, go home. How long is it going to take you? Plus you're going to hit Taco Bell on the way. Well, good point. See now. And so if you do all that, but anyway, $100 stapler, how much is your time worth, Sam? And I'm like, oh, probably less than 395 for an hour. No, I'm just kidding. But, and so then I, she says, and on top of that, they can get it to you.
[00:13:14] They're probably as fast or faster than you can actually go get it yourself. Will you be back in 30 minutes, Jay? Probably not. No, you won't. Because you'll look at other things in the store. You'll see someone you need to talk to. You'll put, and so she's just like, you think this is, you think this is expensive? Yeah. Our producer is saying traffic, potholes, the list goes on and on, but I'm just saying. And so my wife's right though. It's like, is that really expensive? Because how much will I pay in gas just to go get that?
[00:13:42] Let's say it's probably three miles to the store. So how much does the IRS pay per mile, Jay? Last I heard it was 55 cents, but that. All right. It's like 70 cents now. You're way out. You're right. You got to keep it a while since I've been paid by the mile. You can tell. Anyway, 70 cents. Just saying it's two miles to the store, two miles back. So I'm 70 cents times four. That's 280. Yep. And how much do they need? 3.99.
[00:14:10] So 280 to 3.99, I'm paying a dollar extra, a little over, a dollar 50 extra to have them do it and get it there faster than I can do it. You can't even buy a Coke with that and equal it out. I'm just saying people pay more than that for a bottle of water. So you got to put it in perspective. And my short-sightedness sometimes just says, oh, that's crazy. I don't want to do that. But I think I do, Jay. People do have the fee fatigue, though, of getting nickel and dimed for everything. Yes. But is it really nickel and dimed for everything?
[00:14:38] Or are you just getting things that you never could even have before? It's both, probably. Yeah. All right. There's a viral crowd campaign going on. They need to fund me with this, Jay. Yeah. So people have put together this website. And it's called letsbuyspiritair.com. They put together the website. Spirit Airlines just went belly up. They completely shut down. They left people, a lot of people in a lurch, not just employees, but travelers and people that had stuff.
[00:15:03] But they're trying to crowdfund this together to buy Spirit Airlines. And experts say regulatory hurdles and the carrier's $8.1 billion debt make the effort unlikely to succeed. But there's a lot of people out there. In fact, I went on the website and you pledged $45 a share. Like, hey, if we can get this together, we can make this happen. We put $45 in. So I said, yeah, I'll do it. So you put $45 in, though. And if it happens, you put your money in. If it doesn't happen, you're not out, right? Yeah, that's exactly right.
[00:15:33] It's just a promise. And that's important because if it goes, it goes. If it doesn't, it doesn't. So, I mean, you wonder how many people could pledge to do this. And I wish personally that they got bought up by another airline frontier or whatever in the first place. I don't know why that was stopped. To stop it and then have one declare bankruptcy, I just don't know how helpful that is. I don't know. But somebody's going to get a good deal on all those planes. I hear they're shipping them all out to Arizona. Okay. And we need them in Utah so we can fly over the data center and see that sucker. That's right. All right. Do we need a pause or what?
[00:16:02] Yeah, we do. We need to take a quick break. We'll do it. TechWatch Radio. TechWatch TV. It's all available for you, ladies and gentlemen. Spread the word. NPITechguys.com is our website. We're available on all kinds of audio services. Check it out. And we're also available on Twitter. Oh, that's X now. YouTube. Rumble. Spread the word. We keep an eye on tech. That's who we are. NetworkProvidersInc.com is our sponsor. More in seconds.
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[00:18:14] I'm telling you right now, ladies and gentlemen, I refuse to give up. Welcome to the show. I'm Sam Bushman. Jay Harrison is with me. What's this thing called, Jay? Cognitive surrender is what they're calling it. No, no surrender, baby. Not me. Not happening. No, we got to keep our faculties about us. But researchers are warning that there's a global trend that they're calling cognitive surrender. As more people rely heavily on tools like ChatGPT and other AIs, that AI is actually making us worse thinkers.
[00:18:42] And, you know, they're asking the question, how can we stay sharp and still use AI? Because a lot of people, you know, they're just not, they're kind of giving up that space in their head. It's kind of like, reminds me of how, you know, 20 years ago, how many phone numbers could you remember? Or did you have in your head? Dozens, you know, a lot of them. And is it because of AI or is it because I'm getting old? Well, no, that's not AI. But we invented a tool where we no longer really have to remember phone numbers. Yeah, because we've got our phones and you don't remember numbers.
[00:19:10] You just say, you know, call so-and-so and or you tap it and it dials, right? Yeah. And so, I mean, my wife messes with me about this because her number, now granted, is newer than mine. It's probably eight years old or something like that. And I've had my phone number for like 25 years now. But, you know, sometimes I have to think about it to, and I have to look at a keypad generally to remember what her phone number is. But, you know, I can't believe you can remember my phone number right now. But, you know, we get that when we build these tools.
[00:19:40] And you just smile and say, I love you anyway? Yeah, exactly. Right. So, this cognitive thing where people kind of give up or whatever. And I don't really agree with it. To me, AI is stimulating because it gives me all this potential and I can have it do all these things. And it takes a lot of the blood, sweat, and tears out of things sometimes. But the creative side is still me. And so, I kind of look at it different. It energizes me. I get a lot of cool things done and work on a lot of cool projects.
[00:20:06] And I actually have time to pursue interests that I've wanted to pursue for a long time that I never had time to before. That's true. But the question… It's in the eyes of the beholder is, I guess, the deal. Yeah. And it's in the eyes of how have people dealt with this. So, the researchers are questioning, though, you know, you've done that. You've been there. You've had the experience. You kind of are before, really, like the World Wide Web and these things. And what about kids coming up that are having this? They have all the information that they need at their finger. Like, they don't even know how to use a card catalog in a library.
[00:20:35] They don't know how to find the information that they need. It's kind of like the Indians and the white man. You know, we don't know anything about their world and herbs and how to live off the land and all this kind of stuff. We're totally ignorant. And they're kind of going, man, these goofy white people don't have a clue. And why do they think we have to learn their ways and do their things? And it's nothing. It's not different than that. Yeah. You know, there's a point to be made. And so, you know, they're just saying, hey, cognitive surrender. And I see the point. And I agree.
[00:21:02] You know, don't let yourself go dull just because someone can answer that for you. You know, still learn, be engaged, and stay sharp. All right. Tell me about Visible. They run full circle, Jay. Yeah. Visible is going full circle. So I don't know if you remember, Sam, in the old days, Visible had party pay plans. And then they went away from that. They said, everybody's going to have their own plan. We're not doing that anymore. And when you get together a party, everybody would save five, ten bucks or whatever, depending on how many people are in there. This is the Verizon-owned company, Visible.
[00:21:31] And they are creating a new thing that they're calling the Inner Circle. And it feels a whole lot like the group savings concept that they moved away from a few years ago. With Inner Circle, you can have up to eight people together. And they join together for discounts while keeping everybody's accounts separate. They separate billing. They still have separate passwords and full privacy. But you can have somebody in that group pay for you if you can elect that they can pay for you if you want them to. I elect that you pay for me, Jay. Thank you. I certainly do. I've been waiting for that.
[00:22:02] But unlike traditional family plans, nobody has to manage everybody else's line or payments or anything like that. Right. When you're on the Visible Plus or Visible Plus Pro, you could save five bucks per month once you've got at least two people. I want to be on the Plus Pro Super Elegant Deluxe, buddy. Absolutely. That's what I want to be on. And so it's kind of cool. I mean, they're putting it together. You can get these circles together. They're not as valuable as the old ones because every time you'd bring somebody in, everybody would save. But this is just everybody just saves.
[00:22:31] It's a way to save five bucks if you have one other purpose. By and by, Lord. Isn't that what we sing, Jay? When we use the Visible Circles? Yep. All right. There you have it. Very interesting indeed. But it is a way to save money, so we thought would bring it to your attention. Now, PC World is in the news. And they've reported, and this is just epic. I've been telling them to do this for years, Jay, and they're finally coming aboard.
[00:22:53] PC World is reporting that Microsoft is introducing a new feature called Cloud Initiative Driver Recovery that aims to enhance PCs, your Windows computer. They've been aiming for that. This feature will automatically roll back drivers that were installed that have a problem. And normally updating drivers is kind of a manual process and everything else. But they say they're going to do this. They believe it'll really help people recover.
[00:23:21] It'll help people have better updated drivers, make systems more stable. They say this development is part of Microsoft's ongoing efforts to streamline PC maintenance and basically solve issues. I've been telling them to do this forever, Jay. Now, I will say. Operation Stability, baby. Let's go. I will say this. I usually don't have much positive to say about Windows 11. You know that. I'm still running Windows 10 on my two main machines. Yeah, but you're coming to your senses over time as they come out with these cool things.
[00:23:51] But they've rolled out this new feature, and we've been using this on PCs now, where you can – and it's only a Windows 11 thing, but you can go to a PC. Sometimes you buy a laptop or whatever. It's got weird, goofy drivers that are very proprietary that are installed. Well, now you can download the whole set of drivers for that computer, save them off onto a thumb driver, whatever. And then if you reinstall a clean copy of Windows, you can then just install the hardware drivers that were on there before. And it's pretty seamless. You can basically hit a button and say, sync this up. Yeah. And it'll just pull. It's sweet.
[00:24:21] It'll back up all the drivers, and it'll put them all on on the new one when you either roll it back or reformat the drive. And I think that's pretty incredible. For once, Microsoft puts us in the driver's seat. It's pretty cool. I like it. By the way, did you hear ChatDBT now can connect to your bank account, Jay? I'm scared. Serious privacy concerns, ladies and gentlemen. We'll talk about that soon. I'm Sam Bushman for Jay Harrison. Make it a great tech day, will you? Hey, thanks. We're taking a mic. міka by by by by by by by the back of the Okay, let's get started.