Five, right? That's that's the reference. Is that right? That's what that song is, isn't it? Start me up. Well, it's a rolling stone song.  I was going to go like it's a Bill Gates song. So Patrick, lean back just a little bit. You see, let me go back to you like being back. Because I noticed that when you move toward the screen, not that far back, like, you know, upright, can you?  Is it a C920 still? No, no, that. Well, I'm still in Paris and I got another one so I didn't need to open the Mac. Every time I wanted to do a show with video and it's a cheaper Logitech and it's a little bit like a 910 or something. No, not even. It's like a 540. It's a Logitech zero. Yes. It's a Logitech camera. I can't put it farther. No, it doesn't work. You can see part of my head if you want.  Was that that show? Home Improvement. I never watched Home Improvement much. I think I saw it a few times. It says not tomatoes. It's a comedian. All right, Roger, you're going to try to keep pace with the lightning round with the screens. I'm impressed. Don't go too fast. Well, we got to go fast, though. That's what she said. Don't go too fast. So that's not what he said. No, it was Roger. Yeah, but it's not as funny. I'm not. I'm obviously not very funny today. Well, I couldn't remember if start me up was Windows 95 or Windows 98. It was 95 because it was the first time the start. Yeah, yeah, makes sense. All right, all right. I'm just raining on your parade. Let's go at 1055. Give give people two minutes to join on in, get so much CES. We've got to start or more things will break. Yeah, I also already didn't put the ASUS Vivo PCX in. Honestly, all of those laptops, it's kind of it's a little bit whatever. Yeah, I kind of threw them in there to kind of make that point, to be honest. The Vivo is a desktop, though. It's a compact VR desktop. OK, let's roll. Patrick, I have but one question for you. I was born ready. Damn, how'd you know? You're born psychic. I was born both of those things. I was born all of the things. All right. I'm like, just keep thinking it's going to flip to 1055. But that's not that I'm like on the atomic clock here. But I think at some point, well, you might be on the atomic clock. Isn't that what the Internet uses to? Oh, there you go. All right. Here we go. This show is brought to you by audience members like me, not outside organizations to find out more. Go to Daily Tech News Show dot com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, January 3rd, 2017. I'm Tom Merritt, Patrick Beja, alongside from France this time. And we have a little bit of CES News, Patrick. Yeah, it's it's it's started. It's happening. It's happening already. CES has started. So as CES starts Thursday, all of the press announcements are raining upon us today. And we're going to share some of the ones we find most interesting off the top. We're going to have some top stories about CES and other announcements to discuss, and then you're going to talk about a cloud PC service you've been trying out called Shadow, which is pretty interesting. Yeah, we'll we'll discuss things. There are pros and cons, but all of them are interesting. So all right. So before we get to the top stories, it's time for the temporary feature CES lightning round. We're going to move through these really fast folks. We'll each read the headline and then the other person gets up to five words to react. Are you ready, Patrick? You know, I was born ready. So, of course, here we go. Rokat announced the leader, no E, wireless mouse with virtually zero latency. They're not the first ones. The 3D rudder wireless is a foot powered VR mouse that moves you. I'm sorry, that moves you the direction you tilt it with your feet coming in spring for one hundred and ninety nine bucks for Oculus Vive and Gear VR. I'm afraid I'll fall. G's Wi-Fi oven now works with Nest. So if the Nest protects smoke alarm senses smoke, it can tell the oven to shut down. I want a RoboCook. Lynx's joined Eero, Luma, Plume, Google and Netgear with a set of mesh Wi-Fi routers. Three units bundle of the Vellop routers costs four hundred and ninety nine dollars for preorders today and in stores January 15th. They look like small buildings. They do. Tongfang Global introduced four KTVs under its Westinghouse element and Seiki brands, ranging in four sizes from forty three inches to sixty five inches, running Amazon's Fire TV OS and Amazon Voice Services available later this year. No price. I want a four KTV now. That's that six words. Damn it. Let Echo announced two of its Android powered bicycles with four inch touch screens are coming to the US in Q2. No price was announced. I want to ride bicycles. Mayfield Robotics began taking pre-orders for its seven hundred dollar Kuri robot for shipping later in the year. It roams the house with a 1080p camera, dual speakers, four mics, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as well as support for if does it cook? HB announced the fifteen point six inch four K specter X three sixty will be one point nine millimeters thicker than the previous model in order to add three more hours of claimed battery life for a total of twelve hours forty five minutes. It's expected to arrive February twenty sixth starting at a thousand two hundred and seventy eight dollars. I like more battery life. Good work, HB. Ev Leeks spotted a leaked blog post from Qualcomm describing its ten nanometer Snapdragon 835 processor with twenty five percent faster graphics, VR optimization and forty percent less power usage under load. Awesome graphics on mobile. Dell announced a new Kaby Lake Conspirian seven thousand laptops starting at seven hundred ninety nine dollars and new Alienware laptops with Kaby Lake and and four K including the Alienware seventeen with the GTX ten eighty old models will be available starting January fifth. It's all about Kaby Lake. Aces announced a refresh to its laptops and desktops with Kaby Lake processors and four K support available now or in May twenty seventeen depending on the model. That's way too light. Thankfully Acer's seventeen point six pound twenty inch predator twenty one X laptop will cost eight thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollars when it ships in February among the highlights specs are the at that price are the sixty four gigabytes of RAM of RAM gigabits gigabytes. I've always confused by this gigabytes of RAM dual GTX ten eighty video cards to be eye tracking for five five hundred and twelve gigabytes solid state drives in a raid stripe. The company also introduced the two thousand five hundred ninety nine predator seventeen X with only one GTX ten eighty and a refresh of the Aspire five nitro light laptops eight thousand nine hundred nine dollars. That's just too much. But you get seventeen point six pounds of it. If you count by the pound. Yeah. I think it's. No it's it's it's it's worth every penny. And pound penny per pound. Anyway here are some more top stories. Intel announced the full range of its seventh generation Kaby Lake processors with slightly higher clock speeds than the previous Skylake chips integrated GPUs can handle ten bit HEVC H dot two six five video and decode eight bit VP nine streams meaning 4K playback on a wider variety of machines. Essentially they support HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 for 4K output at sixty Hertz although no improvement on the Thunderbolt support for sixty Hertz. New motherboards are Intel Optane memory ready supporting the faster forthcoming Intel cross point storage drives. So essentially this is a minor upgrade to Skylake but it adds some 4K if that's your thing. And H two six five video is kind of cool as well. It's good that we're it's it's the kind of thing that you don't really need initially what's when it's introduced. But once everyone has it and the video players start using it you get better quality for less bandwidth which in today's world bandwidth is a precious commodity. Well and as we heard in that CES lightning round Kaby Lake is is the upgrade like there are several announcements happening today as you may have noticed that are just hey here's the same line as before with maybe a couple of spec tweaks but Kaby Lake processors like that is the big thing and it's not really that much of a performance increase. Like the tick tock of Intel is no longer there. Like this is a half tick sort of so to speak. Is Moore's law definitely dying. No we need a whole show for that one. Yeah I don't know if this means that but it's Moore's law is is definitely not a spry as it used to be right. It's it's a little bit ailing maybe it might be revitalized at some point but maybe maybe maybe we got the 10 meter Qualcomm chip out there. So there you go. That's true for on mobile. It's going great. Yeah. So it's all Intel's failing is what you're saying Tom Intel messes up again is not what I'm saying the DNS host of merit. It's not OK dish announced the air TV set up box running Android TV that can integrate over the air channels into its link TV channel guide. It can also run all Android TV apps and comes with Netflix and YouTube pre-installed the Bluetooth remote has voice control and infrared for controlling sound systems. The air TV is available today for one hundred and thirty bucks or a hundred bucks without the antenna adapter. You can buy the adapter later for 40 bucks. So you pay a $10 penalty if you don't buy the adapter right away. But but the key for this is that adapter. If you're a cord cutter who says shoot I get good over the air reception and I've been looking for an easy way to integrate that with a Kate you know over the internet television service like sling TV and you like sling TV's operating it gives you the channels you want. There's a lot of ifs here then this is a brilliant product because I I have this situation myself. Although I prefer PlayStation View let's say I wanted to use sling TV and I have good over the air reception which I do. Right now I'm using TV to watch my over the air channels. I could just integrate them right here into the air TV. The problem is you don't get the DVR capability on sling TV yet. And I'm not it's unclear whether those over the air channels could be DVR and recorded because this box you know it doesn't have a lot of storage in it. Also if as you said you're a cord cutter that says shoot it's impressive because you live in the 50s. So good on you for court cutting back then. Thank you. Sam Bifert at The Verge got a look at a prototype of Lenovo's first VR headset designed to work with the Windows holographic platform. Headset features two 1440 by 1440 OLED panels aims to be about 40 percent lighter than the HTC Vive. The system has two outward facing cameras for mixed reality applications and doesn't need those external cameras for head tracking like the Vive or the Oculus. Lenovo plans to ship the finished device this year sometime priced between 300 to 400 dollars. So it's cheaper. It's lighter and it's easier to set up. And and those aren't bad panels. This is very intriguing. Now Lenovo also announced its Legion gaming laptops. The 15.6 inch Y 720 has a 4K option. Dolby Atmos Sound GTX 1060 video card. I5 and I7 Kaby Lake processor 16 gigs of RAM. One USB C port, a few USB three ports, HDMI, VGA display ports, 60 watt hour battery. You can also get an optional integrated Xbox One wireless receiver that can handle up to four controllers. Then there's the Y 720 available in April starting at thousand three hundred ninety nine dollars. OK, then what I meant to say is then there's the Y 520, which has similar specs, but only offers the 1050 from Nvidia, the 1050 Ti, no 4K option or Thunderbolt support. That one's available earlier. It's coming in February at eight hundred ninety nine dollars. So that's more of a casual gaming machine, but it's a lot cheaper. Lenovo also announced a home speaker with Amazon voice services. It's got eight mics can handle commands up to 16 feet away. One hundred twenty nine dollars coming in May or you can get one with a Harman Kardon speaker for one hundred seventy nine dollars. And Lenovo announced updates to the Mix line and now has a Mix seven twenty detachable and a bunch of new ThinkPad X ones, including a silver ThinkPad X one. And all of those have Kaby Lake processors in them as well. So lots of laptops, I think by now we get the theme of this show. Today get those laptops announcements out. Yeah. But the their VR headset is really interesting because it works with the Windows holographic platform. So it means it does mixed reality and, you know, all of those holographic things through the cameras, I'm guessing. And it's a lot cheaper than Microsoft's HoloLens. But of course, that has the computer integrated into the headset. And that's the developer version. It's it's kind of priced to keep the consumer away from it, I feel like. Yeah, probably. But it's still, you know, it's a lot cheaper. It's cheaper than a simple VR headset. So yeah, I'm wondering if this isn't going to start pushing people. It forget about the holographic platform side of it. It's still a VR headset for three to four hundred bucks, which is, you know, half the price of the other contestants. So I'm wondering if Oculus and HTC or Valve aren't going to have to react to these headsets because this is just the first one. I'm guessing we're going to see a lot more. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of these at CES. And don't forget vaporware alert at CES. Whenever they say coming this year, they don't even give you a quarter and no price, my alarm bells start to ring. So I'm not saying Lenovo won't ship it, but it's it's very vague at this point. Ford announced plans to build a range of electric and hybrid vehicles over the next five years. That includes a four thousand three hundred mile range electric sub. Oh, sorry, that's your VSUV. That's my SUV. Oh, right, right, right. As you're not coming out with a submarine, folks, my mistake. A sub would be fun as well.  In fact, Ford says it plans high volume production for the autonomous car. Ford will build the cars in a flat rock, Michigan hybrid vehicles designed for police will for police use will be built in Chicago. So tons of announcements here, some of them sort of angling towards the. Hey, we're not going to build that plant in Mexico. We're going to put the cars in the United States, which is, you know, something that is becoming a common theme these days to win some applause in the press. But there's also this idea that a fully autonomous electric car fleet like high volume production will happen in twenty twenty one. And OK, that's four years away. It's it's not right around the corner. But I keep getting varying estimates. So there's lots of people who know this space very well, saying autonomous cars are much farther away than you think. But then we keep seeing new economies trying them on the streets. They're not perfect yet. Ubers tried them on the streets. They're not perfect yet. Google is expanding where they try theirs. So and then you see Ford saying, yeah, we're going to have fully autonomous now, does that mean level five, level four, level three? They don't specify that. But we're we're getting closer with everybody saying they're getting closer than a ton to autonomous cars. The most of the experts say that we're going to get. And so I'm curious how this all shakes out. Well, yeah, I mean, twenty twenty one, to be honest, it seems very close, but at the same time, if we look at where autonomous cars were two years ago, I don't think we would have thought that we would have gone that far in just two years. Yeah. So four years away is kind of a lifetime. So I don't know, but we can't say it's not going to happen. And this is the first of a raft of automotive announcements that will happen at CES around autonomous cars and electric cars, to not I don't mean to to diminish the announcement of all these electric vehicles either. They the focus that Ford has, I think is going to be the focus of all these announcements, which is these will be really easy to charge. We're going to try to make it easy for people so they don't have to worry about where and how they're going to charge these. And I'm curious how that plays out to some really sad news. Two Texas parents are suing Apple after their five year old daughter was killed when a driver rear ended them. The driver admitted to the police that he was talking on FaceTime during the accident. James and Bethany Mota set seek damages for quote, the defendant's wrongful failure to install and implement the safer alternative design for which it sought a patent in December 2008. And the US Patent Office did issue a patent to Apple in April 2014 for a method to lock users out of FaceTime while driving. Yeah, so this is kind of a difficult one to comment, but I suspect I mean, if the issue is that the patent, you know, the technology works, but can't, for example, differentiate between the driver and a passenger, you know, it would make sense that Apple wouldn't install it. My initial reaction is you sue the driver, not the company that made the phone. You know, that makes more sense. But at the same time, ultimately, the goal is to have safer, you know, live for lives for everyone as a society. So if that helps in this, maybe, but we don't have enough. Well, it's not an either or that, you know, the driver is facing charges of manslaughter, so it's not like they're letting him off the hook to go after Apple. They are in addition to that pursuing charges against Apple, saying, yes, no, he is responsible and he should, you know, pay for his crime. But Apple should have done more to stop this from being possible. And, you know, we can get into all kinds of conversations of what the responsibilities of a corporation are. But it is very interesting to me that they had a patent to do this. And so is it incumbent on somebody who has a patent on a safety mechanism to implement that mechanism? Especially since if they do have the patent, I mean, that's way too complex. But if they do have the patent, does it mean that no one else can use it, you know, can implement that technology? And does it have it has to be licensed on fair, reasonable, etc. From on those fran terms, I would assume would be one resolution to that. But yeah, I'm curious what people think about this weather. And I know the your instinct is going to be say, hey, the driver should be responsible like Patrick did. And he will be that that is going to happen. So it's not it's not like they're going just after Apple instead. Should they also be going after Apple for not implementing the safety measure? And my heart goes out to these two parents. That's horrible, of course. I mean, I think it's really easy to to take this and see the outrageous nature of it, thinking, yeah, it's not Apple's responsibility. But in the same, you know, there's one story about a lady that got coffee at McDonald's and sued because it was too hot and actually, you know, it spilled on her hands and she got, I don't know, 30 degree burns or something. And the story there is that the coffee made there was purposefully made hotter than it should be for, you know, different reasons. So there was a case. So I'm wondering if the complexity of it makes it less outrageous in this case as well. Yeah, it makes it maybe maybe makes it less dismissible. Yeah. And finally, Quartz reports that Koku Mutual Life Insurance, I Japanized the name here. Life Insurance will replace 34 human insurance claim workers with IBM Watson Explorer, starting in January 2017. Watson can scan records and documents to determine insurance payouts faster, improving productivity by 30 percent. The system will cost about $1.7 million to install and then $128,000 a year for maintenance. So it's going to save this company money. It's going to be efficient and it is going to put people out of work in this case. Now, this has been the question. If AI comes in and takes away jobs, will it actually reduce employment or will those people be moved to things they can do more productively now that they don't have to spend time doing the grunt work? And in this case, it will be very interesting to see who is remains with Fuku Koku Mutual Life Insurance of those 34 jobs, who gets let go. And I don't know if anyone will follow up on this. But if there are people let go because of this because of those 34 jobs being replaced, what do those people do? Are they able to find other jobs? And this is the question of the day as AI comes in. In the grand scheme of things, largely what happens is over time as new technologies replace dredge work, we find new things for people to do because, you know, there's there's there's a certain amount of economy that doesn't go away when it when a job goes away. It just makes it makes it easier for people, right? So we don't have to nail nails into things in factories anymore. We have robots to do that. But factory workers have gone on to do more productive things and make things for cheaper, et cetera, et cetera. But in that transition time is when it can cause problems for individual people who maybe don't have the right skills to move to another job. So I'm fascinated by this report. The really interesting thing here, I think, is the the level of work that is being replaced. This is not, you know, nail nailing. This isn't like assembly. It's actually reading, you know, it's scanning. But in essence, the job of the workers that were doing it before was reading documents, understanding them, deciding, you know, whether how the payout would happen, if it would happen, things like that. If there was a mistake. So it will be interesting to see if Watson can do it faster because this is high level work. And I'm thinking, you know, we used to think that some jobs were safe from computers, but with AI, no one is safe. Are we, Tom? Are we? There are things that are safe. There are things that AI can't do. We can exaggerate what AI can do. And yeah, I mean, that's like saying there are robots can do everything too. And so we don't need people to do any manual labor. And obviously that's not true. So that has yet to be determined, like, what are the things that humans just are better at? Because we have more intuitive thinking and we can make relationships faster. And at what point will I get to that? Eventually, maybe, but we're talking huge time scales. But this well, drudgery work is what Watson is starting to replace. And that is a large sector of employment right now. These are jobs. These people would have been doing manual labor jobs before the Industrial Revolution took place before before steam power and electric power. And so we what we did is over time, we found jobs that say, OK, well, now that now we can have people do these sorts of things. Like like the movie Hidden Figures showed how computers were people that actually did the calculations and they eventually got replaced by computers. But what happened is a lot of those people moved on to being able to administer the computer. So that's going to happen over time. I'm just looking forward to a time when I can do the show with Robo Tom since, you know, it will be able to replace you. I think my job is safe because the lovely, very light accent is difficult to replicate. So I'm confident I'm not going to be replaced. So it's fine. I don't know about that. I bet a shadow PC could work on something like that. Hey, folks, to get all the tech headlines for each day in less than 10 minutes, subscribe to Daily Tech Headlines dot com. And now let's talk about shadow PC. There have been a lot of virtual PCs out there for a long time. You can use VMware parallels. You can you can rent Amazon workspaces and get virtual desktops in the cloud. Roger was saying before the show that there have always been people renting virtual machines so they could run torrents without getting tracked. There are now, however, a growing number of cloud PC providers, some of them providing office PCs for people, some of them providing things like CAD design. If you can't afford to always have the latest computer, you can subscribe to a computer that can do CAD and then work on it from anywhere, including a tablet, if you want. And you have been using one that that seems to be designed for low latency things like gaming. Right. So this is a French company. They just started their early birds offering. So they launched commercially. I'm paying for it. And, you know, the early birds are paying for it. But it is still very early in the development cycle. They're hoping to launch for the public in March. I'm thinking they're still going to be relatively limited when they do. So keep in mind that I've tried it a few hours. It is still early and the software needs to be improved significantly. But there the way that the thing works is that they have at the moment a number of PCs in their offices, in their data centers, and they're renting to you for about 30 euros or 40 euros, depending how long you're going to be subscribed. That PC that you can then access with a thin client and the thin client is currently a physical box and they will have apps in the future on basically all platforms for you to access that PC. So it comes installed with Windows installed and then you can do anything you want. You can install whatever piece of software you want to, including games. And the thing they're doing at the moment is trying to show that this isn't a PC in the cloud that's going to work for maybe if you have something slow, if you're going to be browsing, if you're going to be using an office suit or things like that. It can do actual gaming at a higher level. And the key piece of experience I got out of it is how low the latency is. Basically, they said so when they were doing their communications around earlier in the year, but I didn't believe them. It's the kind of thing where you don't believe that a PC that is distant across the internet can have basically no latency. And honestly, I've played the game that I like the most currently, which is Overwatch, and I've played it for an hour or two. And I could not have told you that I was playing on a distant PC. Now, granted, I might not be the fastest reflex person in the world. I play maybe a hundred millisecond ping. It might not work for a pro eSports gamer. Maybe, but they've tried with other eSports players. And many of them have said I couldn't really tell the difference. The way they do that is that they have basically guaranteed appearing agreements through different companies, but they guarantee very low latency with the main French ISPs. And they require that you have a fiber connection at the moment and that you use Ethernet connection for your client. That's what's happening now. In the future, you might use Wi-Fi. You might use, I'm going to be back in Finland. At some point, I'm going to test it from there. We'll see how it works. The really important thing, though, as I was saying, was in these ideal conditions, I couldn't feel the latency. And that is an incredible achievement. Some people will say, well, it doesn't work over ADSL. It doesn't work for this or that kind of application. But already, the fact that you're using that technology that we've seen for a while now, you know, of transmitting video to you for whatever service and that it does work even in specific conditions without latency or without perceived latency is incredible. That doesn't necessarily mean that it will work commercially, though. This is the technology side of it. Commercially, I'm wondering, Tom, would you be interested in maybe, you know, you travel a little bit. You might not want to have to upgrade your PC, even if, you know, you don't travel. You rent, you pay 30 bucks, let's say, or 40 bucks a month for a PC. And that's the other thing. They upgrade it. They will, at least, that's the promise. They will upgrade it on a yearly basis or so with new technology comes out. As new technology comes out. So would you pay for an always up to date PC, 40 bucks or 30 bucks a year, a month? Sorry, do you need a gigabit connection or just a fiber connection? You need a fiber connection. Currently, I mean, they're ready for 4K. And I saw in their offices, a version of 4K, which is ridiculously, I mean, fast as well, just as fast as 1080p. But you don't need gigabit. You just need fiber for latency rather than bandwidth. I think depending on the quality you set, you'll need between 10 and, you know, 50 megabits per second down. OK, that 50 is 4K and 4K probably with relatively high quality. Even 4K can be done lower, but let's say 10 is so the magic is mostly done on the fact that fiber has some some latency advantages and they've struck deals, by the way, not to get into net neutrality. But whenever you hear about specialized services, when there's net neutrality debates, this is an example, right, where they've struck a deal with the ISP and said, hey, we want to make sure that these packets get in there without latency. Wait a second. They struck a deal. I know it's a third party. I'm not sure there's they're not like I said, I don't want to get into the net neutrality debate, but this is an example of a specialized service. And I'm not saying that these I don't mean to imply that these agreements violate net neutrality somehow at all. But when you're talking about specialized services, this is one where it says, hey, ISP, we need to make sure our packets get in here. What can we do? And there's lots of ways to do that without violating that neutrality. But that said, they that's where the magic happens, right? Because if you can do this on a 50 megabit per second connection, like there's lots of people in the US with 50 megabit per second cable connections, right, they just would need a fiber connection. And fiber is slowly rolling out in more areas. Actually, let me stop you. Sorry, the service I'm using at home is actually cable connection. It's not fiber. Yeah. And it's again, but it's working well. Yeah. And it's working really well. They're also developing and that we have to wait and see how it works. But down the line, they're thinking they might be able to make it work on ADSLE even possibly. Yeah, that's I mean, I'll say that's striking. That's striking some very specialized transit deals, et cetera. And I'm very curious how that works. But getting back to your question, which I've been avoiding up till now. It would I pay for that? And it's very compelling. I love the idea of saying, hey, all my data is available everywhere. So there's a there's a company called Paper Space, which does virtual desktop storage and Linux terminals. And there's a company called Zero PC that does content navigation for the cloud. And they both basically say, keep all your data in one place and access it from anywhere. And I love that idea. It's one of the reasons I try to use cloud services where they are secure and responsible. So I don't have to think about, oh, that's on that drive. And I need to plug that drive into this machine now. And I love that idea. That said, I'm still such a Luddite when it comes to connectivity that I want to have at least my most important data available locally if there isn't an internet connection. And that would be the tripping up factor for me where I'd say, I need I also want to have have my data locally. And I suppose you could do that. You could just mirror data, you know, have a two terabyte hard drive in your laptop and then use this service. But then you're you're kind of getting rid of the advantage, which is, hey, you can get a hundred dollar Chromebook, but have a super powerful PC because your PC is in the cloud. Yeah, I think there are a number of questions there. The price is definitely going to be one. Are they going to have cheaper versions that might be interesting? How well the Android and iOS apps are going to work? How well the Mac app is going to work? Maybe some people are going to use it to get a gaming device somewhere and just, you know, because the Mac is obviously not a gaming device, as we all know, unfortunately. So there are a number of questions there. But I think if it works, let's say down the line, one initially it only works with fiber and then down the line two, three years from now, it's it works reasonably enough that you can do most tasks even on a wireless, you know, a mobile connection if you're traveling and you don't necessarily need, maybe you won't be able to play a demanding competitive game like a Street Fighter or a first person shooter, but even a slower game is perfectly fine. You know, they're trying to show we can do these super demanding things in these conditions. But really what it's saying is anything that is a little bit less demanding is probably not going to be a problem. So two, three years down the line, you only have a very thin client. You can access this from anywhere. It it's kind of thinking about it the same way you think about your data with Dropbox or Google Drive or you know, when you think about it, a lot of the games you play these days need a connection anyway, like Super Mario Run for interest, for example. Yeah. So so you get ubiquitous 5G connections. You get decent Wi-Fi now available in hotels more often. You've got Wi-Fi on more planes. If that if that all pans out, if like 5G is available everywhere, we get this, we get like planes in the sky from Google and Facebook, you know, blanketing us. We get the satellite services blanking. If we get to that point, which is probably within the next five to ten years, then I'm all in on this because what I would want at that point is a Chromebook like machine with a five terabyte hard drive inside. So my data is local and I can still access it when I need to. But all these services and things that I need to be online for anyway are almost are available 99% of the time because there's very few situations anymore in that future that I've described where I wouldn't have some kind of connectivity. Well, I think, you know, even for the data that you think is local, I'm wondering how much of that is actually going to be an issue. We're old people. It's kind of it's almost like, you know, five to ten years, hopefully we're going to have such ubiquitous connections that you don't think about electricity in that way, right? You're not thinking I'm going to keep my paper records in case the electricity suddenly runs out and I can't access my computer records. So in that world, which might happen sooner than we think, I'm wondering if there isn't a financial, you know, very concretely thinking for myself, I don't want to have to bother with upgrading the computer. I don't want to have to bother with, you know, thinking about the hardware failures or whatever. I'm going to rent it just the way that I rent Netflix or Spotify or those services. TVZGun did the math. The Predator 21X, the $9,000 laptop would buy you 25 years of shadow BZ service. Well, the Predator, he's talking about this, probably a little bit more powerful. But then in three years, it's not going to be as powerful. Right, exactly. And I don't think these kinds of services, we're talking about shadow because they have this impressive demo of the lag free experience that just launched now. I mean, literally it was launched four days ago. So we have to understand that this is a very early version of the service. But I really think that it's not going to be for everyone. And you're always going to have people who are going to say, Oh, but I need my data or I need, you know, my games to have zero lag or things like that. But I think some people might like this. And again, I was in their offices when I got my box and they showed me the way you log in. It was kind of magical to just log in from a TV and then log in from a laptop and log in from a phone. I don't know how practical it is to have a phone logged into your PC, but it worked so fast. You know, it was like two seconds to log in faster than Netflix. I don't know if that's the way it's going to work when it's commercially available. But all of this brings unexpected advantages that I think might be interesting for some people, at least. And W. Scott has one points out. Data caps would be a sticking point, too. Oh, yeah, of course. So any any service that has data caps on it is going to be problematic unless those data caps become sky high. Maybe your data cap is a thousand terabytes. And if you know, it's a petabyte data cap and then it's like, OK, well, that that will work or like electricity. The the rate is low enough that you're willing to pay for it. But a lot of Roman in the chat room points out like you're going to have to consider any extra cost you would need to make the service work on your Internet service side. If a 50 megabit per second cable connection that you already subscribe to works with this and you've got and you don't have a data cap on that. That's great. But there's still the mobile aspect of it and what other connections you'll need, etc. And those business models are changing as well. So as this becomes more feasible and as connectivity becomes more widespread, there may be more competition. And what we get charged for Internet is going to change over time. There's a battle for that happening. So there's so many moving parts to the situation. Yeah, it's still very early on. The reason I didn't even really mention data caps is that we don't have them in France, we're a civilized country. Well, do you don't have them on mobile? On mobile, we do. Yes. Yeah. OK. So and I think that's where most people are familiar with them even in the United States. Right. Of course, of course.  If I'm going to rely on my computer to have all of it in the cloud, I'm going to have to have mobile data. Um, I don't know that you do.  You know, I don't want to go out and about and be like, oh, my computer doesn't work because I don't have data. Like, right, right. Of course, of course. Initially, it's only for local fiber connection. Once again, this is the they basically tell you in order to use the service, you need fiber connections period. So they're not even supporting anything else at the moment. So, yeah, although you were using them. So that's good. It's a good time. Well, Shadow PC, it's a French company. So only available in France right now, but we'll have some links to some other similar services if you want to take a look and compare if you happen to not be in France. We also Veronica asked yesterday if any listeners in the audience knew about ways that you could track people for marijuana use, if there's any technology similar to the breathalyzer for marijuana use. Now that marijuana use is becoming more legalized and we got a couple of responses. One said they were listening to Monday's episode and they know they wanted to note that CBC's quirks and quirks discussed this recently. The TLDR is something is coming, but it's not there yet. And then a law enforcement guy named Mike, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Florida when I was down there for CREACON, said that DUI DWI laws will work with new marijuana regulations here in Florida, where I work as a law enforcement officer. The laws are written around an officer's observations, not necessarily based on the number you blow during a breath test. And so he says that could be applied to marijuana as well. The TLDR version. And thank you, by the way, folks, for including TLDRs in your emails that you guys are fantastic. He says the TLDR version is that the breath test is a confirmation of the officer's observations, not the sole determination of intoxication. And he's got a great email that you can read more on this in our show notes at DailyTechNewShow.com. So there you go. The answer is no tech yet for that sort of thing, but also not necessary for law enforcement. And what I will add to that conversation is that I'm looking forward to my next trip to California. You don't have to go to Colorado now. Is that what you're saying? Is it Brian Ibbott? I'd never want to visit Brian Ibbott. Of course, man. Of course, you do. Well, thank you, Patrick Beja, for joining us. You've got lots going on. Philius Club, Le Rondeau Tech. What what what is there to tell people about specifically today? Well, I guess I'll tell you about Le Rondeau Tech for once. It's it's a French show and I have a number of people listening to that show just for practicing French. Some might have learned earlier in life and some might be in need of practice right now. And I just got an email about a lovely listener who said they loved the latest episode we made and that it helps them practice and improve even their French language. So if you're interested in that, just go to. Well, you can check out Le Rondeau Tech on any podcasting app or platform. But on Frenchspin.com is where you'll find the main source for the show. Go and check it out. I have to say I for one can can attest that if you're already listening to this show and you're familiar with the topics, it will it's easier to understand another language talking about those same topics. Because, you know, when when you say Facebook in French, you say Facebook, right? And so that helps give you context. And then you start to figure out other words that maybe would have been lost or gone by too fast because you're not working as hard to have to figure those parts out. So yeah, if you're if you're interested in technology and interested in practicing or fine tuning your French or you already speak French, then I highly recommend that you pick up Le Rondeau Tech. Thank you. Frenchspin.fr, right? Yeah, for the French shows in Frenchspin.com for the for the English shows. But yeah, English language, I don't actually start using an English accent for that. I wish you would, though. Big thanks to everybody who supports us. There's so many ways to support dailytechnewshow.com slash support, especially this time of year. If you, you know, a lot of finances are tight, I get that. So if you're able to swing a few dollars our way to keep us going, we super appreciate it. Welcome to Michael Couch and Eric Adler. And thank you to Erwin Wessels, who just increased his pledge. You guys are the best. And so are every single person who are among our bosses supporting us at dailytechnewshow.com or on patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday. Tomorrow we'll be live at 1 p.m. Pacific, 4 p.m. Eastern. And then on Thursday at 3 p.m. Pacific, 6 p.m. Eastern. Then back to 4 30 p.m. Eastern on Friday, diamondclub.tv and dailytechnewshow.com. See you tomorrow with Scott Johnson and hopefully Patrick Norton. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Well, got scared for a second when you said Patrick. Patrick, I know. And I actually had to stop myself from saying Beja just out of habit. Patrick, not that Patrick. Different Patrick, not Patrick. See, it's showbutt, showbutt. Showbutt. So top title is Step on that Mouse, followed by Robo Cook. Everything's coming up. Kaby Lake, Kaby Lake, Kaby Lake, whatever they give up. Do AIs dream of climbing the corporate ladder? Can they get bought insurance? The future of gaming, comma, the cloud's the limit. Now, what else do they got? Feel the latency, latency free cloud gaming. Winter at Kaby Lake, 8K, sir. My vote goes to I want a Robo Cook. OK. And I'm actually going to go. OK, thank you, Patrick. Thank you, guys. Bye. See you next week. Have a good rest of your day. Have a nice CES. I'll try. Bye. Fingers crossed. I want a Robo Cook is good by me. Cool. We can let people vote for a little bit, though. See if something else bubbles up. Bubbles, bubbles, toils and bubbles like bad Chinese food in your stomach. You, why would I want that?  And that does not sound like a job I would want. I remember watching a show that that went over all the jobs people didn't think were because we need to talk about new jobs. They're just going to bunch of all these odd jobs. And one of them was this woman who had to smell people's disguise armpits. They were like lined up in a row and they had different deodorant on and they did physical activity and she'd have to smell their armpits and then mark down, like, you know, was it stinky?  And it's just like, what a job. Yeah. Well, and that seems like, I mean, you can make an argument for replacing any human job with with a technology. If you give yourself the idea of like, well, eventually we'll invent something that will do that. That's a job that would be harder to replace because what you want is does this offend humans? And you can approximate that with technology eventually, I'm sure, and say, oh, well, we've identified the things that usually offend and we'll just detect levels of those. But the best way to do it, the most solid way to do it is to actually use humans, right?  Yeah, I wonder how many of those jobs that dirty jobs that Mike Rowe did for that show. I was trying to think of this example when we were talking about that during the show and I forgot it, but we, the sort of trend, and we poke fun at it of artisan-made, craftsman-made things is a direction that humans go after automation, which is to say like, there is something intangible to the fact that I know the person who made this by hand that we value. And so there will be services that we can then provide for a fee if there are cheap AI services doing everything else. You're like, oh, this artisan-concierge customer service is now provided at a higher level. So it's interesting to think about what kinds of things could become boutique industries because, ooh, this is provided by a human and most of the time you get an AI doing it. I see a day when, and so this is one of the weird things is with mass production, there is a longing for the slight imperfections of something that's hand-crafted, but that only applies to certain things. For example, if you need like a new bottle opener, you don't care if it was carved out of an old 50-gallon or some people do, but I don't think it's enough to... Well, we have a bottle opener. I'm glad you picked bottle opener that is mounted on our wall, that is R2-D2 mosaic made by someone. The bottle opener itself is probably machine-made, right? But there's a human touch to it that wouldn't be there made by a machine. I don't know. There's always that, yeah, but like you said, that drive for imperfection. And you're right, there will always be things that we don't really want humans to make. Well, eventually I'm sure the economy will not slowly, it'll probably have an abrupt change. Why did you take over editing the post? Oh, it's all right. I didn't mean to do that. Roger Chang has taken over and is currently editing. I didn't take over anything. I just clicked on it. Well, that takes it all? Oh, well, there, I took over. I'm gonna take it back. You know what I was trying to do? I was trying to get to the DTNS YouTube. Oh, I'm trying to get the link out of that. No, no, no, no, no. I was, I meant to go to the YouTube page and I just typed, because I always typed daily or youtube.com slash daily technician. Interesting. I just, interesting, the way it works. It's the way it works. I mean, interesting, man. I want a robo cook. Yeah, we're going with I want a robo cook. Nothing surpassed it. I would actually, that's, you know, that's the one thing that's always disappointed me about food processors. It's like, well, where's it, but what about the final step? Cooking it. Oh yeah. Well, people are working on that. Where you just like, basically 3D print, print cooked food. No, I don't want 3D print. I want it to cook. 3D print a burger. We're gonna have that grown meat. That grown fish. No, we're not. We're just insect-based foods. There's always a backlash, but there's always a backlash in other ways too. And the thing that people forget is there's not like a finite source of money or finite source of jobs. And if you lose jobs, jobs are the way. It's always a negotiation between people for available things. So in the longterm, if people are available to do things and before those things you couldn't afford, but the AI has made certain things cheaper and now you can afford to pay someone for it, then there will be new jobs. But it's always in the transition of who will be able to make the transition to what those new jobs are and is wealth available for people to afford the services. That's the bigger question. Is the economy gonna make it so that people can spend money on new things? Well, that's kind of, that's the big question, Marc. I think there will be a big shift at some point along the line where, no, I don't, I, you know, somewhere along the, maybe greater than the Industrial Revolution, just kind of a seismic shift in the economy. But I don't know if it will mean that people will kind of like, not lower expectations, but like money becomes not as a primary issue because people are not like, oh, I'll trade you this design for whatever and I'll just manufacture it at home. Yeah, if I'm not spend, if AI makes things cheaper, then I have more money and then I can spend that money on other things that I would never have been able to spend them on. I don't know, if AI can do healthcare, like. And the other difference, the other difference, I'm sorry, I just thought of this, we didn't see the Industrial Revolution coming, but now that we've been through it, we can prepare ourselves better, but there are probably things we don't understand about an AI revolution that will impact us. And I think, I mean, hindsight's always 2020, right? You can always see all, and this is the thing about politics. I mean, it goes into anything, politics, education, whatever, you don't see those trends until you're either in the middle of it or you're on the tail end. Yeah. The economy is the other one. Well, and that's why it was so good to have an Amy Webb on last month, because she was talking about, yeah, I mean, pretty much all you can do is look at trends. No one can just predict the future. There's not a solid way to do that, but you can see trends. You can try to see what trends are happening now. There's gonna be a council of AIs that will have, that'll be interesting, like in politics, what if it comes to a point where like, for example, either under parliamentary or a Republican system where you basically have a chamber of legislature that's just AI? Yeah, but we don't, that's not the way we work. If we wanted the most efficient legislature, we wouldn't have the ones we have now. It'd be just like in Buck Rogers. If anything, they replaced the clerks, right? And maybe there's an unexpected change because of that. Maybe there's an unmeasured influence that pages and clerks have. That's interesting to think about. This AI purposely miswrote all these words. I think one of the ways AIs could be useful, in that way, is to read through all those bills that are like hundreds of pages long. And provide like summations. Like a TLDR, that's basically their function. All right, Bill Botte, tell me exactly if Four Sentences, what this bill is about. Well, that's what the clerks do, isn't it? Yeah, well, that's what I'm saying, but like, you know, with the machine, it's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Or you can replace it to GAO with a bunch of AI. Maybe it'll be just like Joshua in the war games. There are no winners, you can't win. The only winning move is not to play. All right, thanks everybody for watching. We'll see you from CES tomorrow, if everything works out. Bye.


Felly, drwy'r ddweud, rydyn ni am fydd ei symud o bwymon yn ysgol o'r hanfodd yw'r sriff... ...y'r reisio yng Nghyrch, Christopher De Hamell... ...ac dyna'nnghyd am gyhoeddi, yn amlwn i'r ddegwyd gyda'r dyfyn bwysig... ...fe cyhoeddwyd wrth gyrth o hyn oherwydd Christopher rydyn yn ysgol ar y bwynd... ...yng Nghyrch sy'n enwed erbyn ar gweithreast o'r barot yn awdraffu amddangol... ...y'r bwyng yn ysgol ar gyfer hyffordd yma... Mae'r ysgolwch, mewn gwneud i'r ysgolwch, ac yma'r ysgolwch, sy'n meddwl am yr anhygoel, sy'n meddwl am yr anhygoel. Mae'r ysgolwch, sy'n meddwl am yr anhygoel, ac yn gyfwyrwodol cyd-chrystydd, ac yn gyfwyrwodol. Yn gyfwyrwodol, y gallu'r anhygoel, yma'r ysgolwch, is that it does what any curator and person who works of objects wants to do, which is actually to really look into these objects and tease out their history, tease out what makes them great, find out how they came to where they are today. So, you know, the best sort of detective stories. Today, Christopher, who we should congratulate for recently winning the Wolfson History Prize, is going to talk about something else, which is not in the book, and he's going to talk about Archbishop Thomas Beckett's library of books. Now, you all know Thomas Beckett. He is just the sort of person whom the Antichries have always been passionate about researching, finding out about, and if you go to the British Museum, you'll see one of the Antichries great treasures, which is a wonderful emoge casket with the martyrdom of Thomas Beckett, on showing the medieval gallery there on long-term loan from the society. So, Christopher today is going to tell us about Beckett, I guess a little bit about his life, but about his books, the manuscripts he owned, what happened to them, and this coincides with the unexpected and recent discovery of Beckett's sorter kept on his shrine of a cathedral throughout the Middle Ages. So, I'm very much looking forward to those letters I'd ask you to welcome Christopher Dahan. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I open, as is appropriate here, with the famous Beckett reliquary casket, which you've just heard about, given to the Society of Antichories by Sir William Hamilton in 1801. It depicts the martyrdom of Thomas Beckett in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170. That was an event which shocked all of Europe. A bit like the assassination of Kennedy or the death of Diana, probably everyone then alive remembered forever precisely where they were standing when they first heard the news of Beckett's murder. It became one of the great stories of the Middle Ages. There are also fragments of a medieval account of the life of Beckett in verse upstairs here in the Library of the Antichories. I don't really recall when I myself first learned about Beckett, but as a late teenager in New Zealand, I took several holiday jobs in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, then in the building shown here, where I came to know that most important medieval manuscript. It's a 12th century volume on music, and the special interest is that the volume was recorded, as I myself first found, in the 1160s in the teaching collection of the Cloisters of Canterbury Cathedral. This really caught my imagination, for I'd been with my parents to see the swashbuckling 1960s film of Beckett with Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, and it was exciting to me to think that the manuscript in Wellington had actually been in the cathedral at that very time. On my return to England for graduate work, even before presenting myself at university, I made a pilgrimage almost literally by foot from Winchester to Canterbury, my first visit there, to see the cloister where the manuscript on music had been kept, and to stand on the site where Beckett himself had been martyred. My subsequent thesis in Oxford was on 12th century glossed books of the Bible and their origins. These were really the first privately owned books in Europe, and I was particularly anxious to find datable examples of such books acquired by individuals. As it happens, one of the earliest lists of glossed biblical books is the record of the volumes brought back to England by Thomas Beckett himself when he returned to Canterbury from exile in France in early December 1170, a few weeks before his death. It's reported that when Beckett fled into exile in 1164, he took nothing with him. Williamford Stephen describes the Archbishop staying at the Cistercian Abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy, gathering and commissioning there the latest and finest manuscripts from wherever he could find them in France. And then the Chronicle of William of Canterbury records Beckett arriving back in sandwich in Kent on 2 December 1170 as shown here, bringing home with him the wonderful new library he'd assembled while he was abroad. For most of the Middle Ages, these manuscripts were kept together in Canterbury Cathedral on shelves in the Slype, the passageway of the southeast corner of the cloister, which some of you may know as the place where the Cathedral verges keep their bicycles and the gardeners their potting plants. Beckett's library was cataloged there in the late 13th century in the library inventory prepared under the supervision of prior Eastry, whose tomb still survives in the cathedral. And Eastry's list was printed in 1903 by M.R. James, paleographer and writer of ghost stories. You know, they are beginning on the left hand side, the Libri Sancti Tome, the books of St Thomas. There are 71 volumes described entirely credibly as having belonged to Beckett. The numbering of them is printed as running from 783 to 853, since these are part of M.R. James's arbitrary numeration of the entire library of the Canterbury Monks. It's remarkable what a lot you can tell about a person by looking at their books even now when some new acquaintance invites you home and while they're out of the room fetching the drinks, you run your eye critically along the shelves. I have to say that I love medieval inventories. They're a form of licensed impertinence. You can rummage through the cupboards and poke your nose impolitely into other people's possessions of 800 years ago and it's called research. My first impression from Eastry's list of Beckett's books is that here was a man needing education in a hurry. There are introductions to grammar and rhetoric and quick handbooks on clerical life and church law. There are no heavy authors, slow to read like Jerome and Augustine, but instead Beckett had gathered the very latest summaries and encyclopedias and dictionaries and above all there is an almost complete set of the gloss on the bible, the medieval google of scriptural interpretation. At least several of Beckett's actual manuscripts still survive and can be matched up with items on that list. In those student days of long ago I went to look at them in their current locations all as it happens in Oxford or Cambridge. They do seem to confirm that these are indeed mostly books which had been gathered while Beckett was in exile in France, here you probably can't read it, is the second page of the list as printed by M.R. James. There are a striking number of Cistercian texts including works by St Bernard himself consistent with the acquisition of books while Beckett was in residence at Portony. For example number 833 in the numbering here is a treatise by Odo of Moramond on number symbolism and here is the actual manuscript. It's now in the Renn Library at Trinity College in Cambridge. Among the manuscripts given by Archbishop Whitgift and you can just make out an erased medieval inscription along the top of the first page naming it as having belonged to Sancti Tomei Archipiscopie. Here I have marked the words Sancti and Tomei with blue arrows. The author was a Cistercian monk who died in 1161 and the manuscript is absolutely Cistercian in style with those characteristic monochrome initials without gold as decreed by Bernard as appropriate for production by Cistercian monks. This is its opening initial closely paralleled in its one colour decoration in manuscripts such as this made for the Cistercian Abbey of Villars in Brabant. Beckett spent nearly two years with the Cistercians in Portony and that also survives a library catalogue from Portony at precisely that date and in that thesis of more than 40 years ago I matched up texts on Beckett's book list with those which we know were available for copying at Portony. There are many of them mostly sermons and quick fix guides to instant erudition. Doubtless the kind of texts that Beckett or his advisors felt he needed with some urgency. That alone tells us an intimate fact about the man himself. There are several classical texts on Beckett's book list. They are rarities for such a date to survive. There's this. The second volume of Beckett's Livy, number 816 on Pry Eastry's list now also in Trinity College, Cambridge. And this in Mordland College in Oxford, the copy of the Vary Eye of Cassiodorus which is number 835 in Eastry's catalogue and is recognisable from the shelf mark at the top of the right hand page. Distinctio to Groddus 10, the second side of the slide shelf 5 where Beckett's books were stored. Then there are also the glossed books of the Bible which is what I was especially anxious to see. Such as this, Beckett's Glossed Pantaduke, the first item on the book list now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. And this for me is volume of the Minor Prophets with Gloss now in Trinity College, Cambridge. And this from his Glossed Volume of the Fall Gospels, number 799 among Beckett's books listed in the slide. These are books for use, but they are luxuriously and richly illuminated, not remotely or steer Cistercian texts from Ponteini. And in these we can glimpse the famous extravagance of Beckett's taste. There were also, they were also brand new texts in the 12th century and Beckett's Library was extremely up to date. That too is interesting. The manuscripts were doubtless, professionally illuminated, and they are not at all the work of monks. The manuscript of the four gospels includes a portrait of a scribe at the beginning of Luke, possibly a priest but certainly not a Cistercian monk. And the wonderful initial to the right shows a battle between two knights serenaded from the top left by a cat with a violin. Here's a detail. Doubtless from the iconographic tradition to which we also owe, hey diddle diddle the cat with a fiddle. In the initial for the opening of John's Gospel in the same manuscript is what appears to be an image of the manuscript's patron as you see here at the top. Clearly an Archbishop wearing the pallium of Canterbury with a scribe or companion below in this case not a monk at all looking up at him. This Archbishop may very well be an unnoticed contemporary portrait of Beckett himself. There seems to be another here too. This is from the author's copy of the manuscript of Herbert of Boscham's edition The Great Gloss on the Salter, which as Herbert writes in the preface was commissioned by Beckett when they were staying together at Ponteini. In fact it was never finished in Beckett's lifetime and it remained the property of Herbert of Boscham himself who eventually bequeathed it to the cathedral. The picture there presumably shows Herbert and Thomas Beckett with his name just visible above, Sanctus Tomas Martyr et Pontifex. In the thesis I argued that all these luxury gloss books were all made in Paris which is where the texts originated. I don't actually know now whether this is right and I may have overstated the case. One at least, the twelve minor prophets, is signed by an undoubted English scribe Roger of Canterbury who was doubtless a member of Beckett's household in France. Anyway I eventually wrote all this up into a slim book, now long out of print, with a picture on the front cover of a manuscript once attributed almost certainly wrongly to the possession of Beckett. In 1975 I joined Sotheby's, not far from here, as cataloger of medieval manuscripts. Among many other things I was responsible there for the rediscovery and eventual sale in 1986 of what I now call the Beckett Leaves, the earliest illustrated life of the saint. I showed you one detail a moment ago, here's another, illustrating Beckett giving the one finger of defiance to Henry II and another in which his petition is brought to the pope. I also participated peripherally, but not so closely, in the Sotheby sale of another 12th century Beckett chaos made to enclose relics of the saint, like the one here at the Antiquaries, but this one formerly of Peterborough Abbey and now in the Victorian Albert Museum. Both the Leaves and the Chasse still hold record prices both for any English manuscript at auction and I think for any work of art bought by the Vier name. Clearly the magic name of Thomas Beckett still has potency in the modern world. In the summer of 2000 I took my second and only other job as fellow librarian of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, from which I retired five months ago. My employer for 17 years was Matthew Parker, born in 1534, died 1575, former master of corpus and subsequently first archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. He was responsible for what is known as the Elizabethan settlement, which was the establishment of the Church of England as the religion of state, which it still is, unless Mr Corbyn abolishes it on Friday morning. Here is Parker's working draft of the 39 articles of 1562, the defining document of the Anglican Church. At least initially it was not Protestant and certainly not Lutheran. The English Church was to be Catholic but just not Roman. This is the clause in the original, the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England. Parker was a Brexit man. He believed that St Augustine of Canterbury had intended to set up an independent English Church unfettered by Rome and that it had all gone wrong when we joined the European Union in 1066. He therefore obtained license from the Privy Council to take into his own custody the oldest manuscripts in England in order to demonstrate with tangible evidence the antiquity and distinctive Englishness of Episcopal religion in this country. That is why the Parker Library was formed. Matthew Parker was especially interested in the history of the Archipiscopacy of Canterbury. He saw himself as the 70th Archbishop in an unbroken line back through Thomas Becket to St Augustine and even through the apostolic succession of Gregory back to St Peter himself. Parker wrote the lives of his predecessors published in 1571. This shows the opening of his long account on Archbishop Becket. He was also assiduous in locating and gathering medieval lives of Becket which are not common such as this by John Granderson Bishop of Exeter and this which he probably obtained from Lincoln Cathedral and this which is a unique life of Becket in Middle English verse. What's touching about this particular manuscript is that it had belonged to Thomas Cranbar who signed it and who was himself an Archbishop Thomas who was also about to be martyred when he was burnt at the stake in Oxford in 1556. Parker also had Matthew Paris' drawing of Becket's own martyrdom nearly 400 years earlier. For me at least one of the most evocative treasures of the Parker Library is the primary copy of the Polycraticus of John of Salisbury which was one of the books actually owned by Becket himself. The author was a close friend of Becket and had accompanied him in exile. I had not managed to see the manuscript when I was writing my thesis. I had written to the then fellow librarian at Corpus applying to look at it and as was the custom in those days he simply refused me admission. I was rather upset. Even today the Parker Library is still the only manuscript collection in the world to which I've ever been declined access. It therefore gives me particular pleasure to show you Parker Library manuscript 46. Here it is again with the opening of book five. This is one of the books I've often brought out for visitors for it still continues to give me a thrill to touch and to turn the pages of a book once owned by Thomas Becket himself. I think it's probably my favourite book in the Parker Library and if the fellows would like to give me a present to mark my recent retirement I would accept gratefully. The Polycraticus is really the first English text on political science and on the relationship of kings to their subjects and on the necessary deference to the church precisely the topic of the controversy with Henry II and it is almost inconceivable that Becket didn't read the manuscript or have it read to him. Becket's manuscript in the Parker Library has a good many notar marks added by some twelfth century reader drawing attention to passages of particular interest. No examples of Becket's handwriting are known and it would be interesting to know whether these markings have any bearing on the controversy. Here's another. The manuscript matches up with item 853 in that inventory of books owned by Becket as in this rather fuzzy scan where the wording corresponds almost exactly with that on the front flyleaf of the book shown here. The Polycraticus of John of Salisbury and his Metalogicum and then it did say Sanctitomio Materis of St Thomas the Martyr and so they knew it was his copy but when Becket's shrine was destroyed and his name was deleted from history by Henry VIII in 1538 one of the monks or subsequent owner must have scraped away the name to preserve the book. It was a distinctively canterbury custom to transcribe the wording of that inventory onto the flyleaf of a book a point to which we will return later. The shelf mark above, you can see it here, distinctly O2 gradus 10 is the location among Becket's books in the Slype similar to the numbering which we saw in the Cassiodorus at Mordellin College in Oxford. Second book case shelf 10. Let's come back to the storage of Becket's books in the Middle Ages. The manuscripts were marked with his name as the previous owner as in the Polycraticus and the Livy and they were shelved together but only as part of the working library of the Cathedral Priory with all the other miscellaneous book acquisitions of the 12th and early 13th centuries. It's an odd fact that although Becket was almost immediately declared a saint and was canonised in 1173 the books which he had owned personally were simply sent across for storage in the daily reference collection of the monks. The martyr's books were not regarded as religious relics. Canterbury Cathedral preserved and greatly venerated many other items associated with our new saint, recorded in detail in successive inventories including two miters, a gold one in which he was first buried and the white one he actually used, his embroidered gloves, his hair shirt, his bed clothes and bed hangings, his belt, his monastic cowl, his flail made of thongs, his chasable, his sandals and even his matintosh if I correctly interpret capo pluviali in the Cathedral Infantry but his books were simply shelved with other miscellaneous donations to the library of the Priory. Among the relics still exhibited in the Cathedral of Sons in France are 12th century vestments said to have been used there by Becket and those very many Becket reliquaries, here's another one, this one down in France, attest to a huge industry in the supposed body parts or other intimate possessions of the saint but these do not include books. The monks of Canterbury operated the biggest pilgrim site in Christendom and they exhibited items or places in the cathedral with only the most tenuous association with the saint. The equivalent of the postcard shop in Canterbury Cathedral sold items like this which is also from the collection of the Society of Antiquaries, a little container for holy water which had touched the shrine and was reputed to do miracles as it's not a word I use much I'm not actually sure whether it's pronounced ampola or ampula however both monks and pilgrims were oddly indifferent to the martyr's library then still in the cathedral it's very strange this good historical case for suggesting that the famous Eadwyn Salter now at Trinity College in Cambridge was commissioned by Becket but if it was the monks of the cathedral neither recorded the fact nor cared. They even discarded some of Becket's books when the library was rehoused in the early 15th century. Duplicate texts from the cathedral were at that time sent up to Canterbury College in Oxford in the late Middle Ages for classroom use and eventual destruction by students and at least two of these were carved from Becket's own shelf and they knew it blandly giving away the saint's personal volumes of the old new digest on Roman law like all good toys taken to school they never came back. The Cassiodorus of Mordland College was already in Oxford by the 1480s by which time its association with Saint Thomas Becket had been entirely forgotten. This all shows a very interesting difference of attitude between the Middle Ages and now. If we had a pair of socks for example which had been worn by William Shakespeare or even some strands of his hair I am inventing examples they would have only minor curiosity value for us but a book from Shakespeare's library if such a thing existed and it doesn't and especially if it had signs of use by him would be an incomparable treasure for us today for it would be a window into the intellect and the soul of the man. It was the other way round in the Middle Ages books mere books once owned or used by medieval saints did not generally have the status of relics. One day not long ago I had the Bible historian Ile Polleg to lunch at Corpusyn Cambridge and I remarked conversation over coffee afterwards something along the lines of what I've just outlined which is the oddity that books in medieval England were not regarded as relics. Ile said that he knew of a medieval reference to what had clearly once been an exception. He tapped at his laptop which he had with him and he brought up an entry dateable to 1321 in the sacrist role of Canterbury Cathedral describing an important but never traced manuscript among the relics of the cathedral apparently used in the liturgy around the shrine of Thomas Beckett in Canterbury. It begins in Latin, item textus cum solterio sanctitome Argento deorato co opatus gemis o natis and I had one of those sudden heart-stopping shivers of recognition which make our lives as antiquaries worthwhile for I have seen those words before. Here they are almost word for word at the end of a portable solter manuscript 411 now also in the Parker Library recording and I translate approximately. This solter with silver gilt boards ornamented with jewels formerly belonged to N Archbishop of Canterbury and eventually came into the possession of Thomas Beckett late Archbishop of Canterbury as his witness in the old inscription. We rushed across to the library at once and I fetched out the manuscript. We gazed at it together trembling with excitement. The writing shown here is Postmade Evil from the period of Matthew Parker. It might even have been added after the manuscript reached Cambridge. The book is now missing its front flyleaf where as we saw in Beckett's Polycraticus the wording of any Canterbury inventory would also normally have been written but it is and so that is what the reference is to the old inscription but it's no longer there the present binding to his 18th century. The manuscript itself dates from around the year 1000. Its origin was once assumed to be continental perhaps from Reims or Toa as M.R. James suggested in his catalogue of the Parker Library but it's actually written by the same scribe as the contemporary Boethius with Old English Gloss also among Parker's books and certainly from Canterbury. The prayer to all confessors in the Psalter opens with invocations of St Gregory and St Augustine of Canterbury evangelist of England and a Canterbury province is more or less absolute. Prayers added to the manuscript in the 12th century are in that distinctive prickly hand characteristic of the scribes of the cathedral scriptorium after the Norman conquest and we'll return to these later. The passage of a manuscript from Canterbury Cathedral into Parker's possession is very simple for that was his single largest source of acquisitions as Archbishop he simply helped himself to anything he wanted. There's not really much doubt that this was a former cathedral manuscript and that it is indeed the actual book described in the Sacrist Road in the 1320s. The inscription referring to N, Archbishop of Canterbury, is strange because the only medieval candidate would have been not Helen Archbishop for six years in the early eighth century. Clearly impossible and the assumption is that it's a general term, no men, unnamed anonymous and that the Psalter is being attributed to possession by unspecified Archbishops. An unusual feature of the book is that it has a second litany by another scribe with and I have marked these in the first and eighth lines the names of St Vincent twice and Eustace both written in capitals. Curiously the Benedictine Abbey of Abingdon had relics of both Eustace and Vincent and so it has sometimes been proposed that the Psalter might have been from that. That's not necessary if we accept that it was originally used by unspecific Archbishops of Canterbury for its first owner was then surely Elfridge Archbishop from 995 to 1005 who had himself previously been a monk of Abingdon Abbey. If it was a private prayer book for the use of an Archbishop then this makes sense. Now let's return to the sacrist inventory of 1321. I've subsequently been to look at the original in the British Library. It's describing items actually kept on or around Becky's glittering shrine. This is an imagined view of what it might have looked like before its total destruction in 1538. The entry begins. Item Textus Cumsulterio. Textus in this context means a binding from the verb tegra texitectum to cover. The word is commonly used for gospel books in dual bindings but it refers to the decorated cover not the inside. The same sacrist role includes three items described as Textus Cine Libro empty ornamental book covers. The binding of Beckett Salter is described in further detail. It was silver gilt with ornate gems around the edges with an ivory in the centre showing Christ in majesty holding a book between four engraved evangelists. Since manuscript 411 dates from around the year a thousand the likelihood is that we have here a description of an unrecorded Anglo-Saxon treasure binding. In fact it's almost impossible in England that a dual binding was anything but Anglo-Saxon. The famous example surviving intact is on the 11th century gospels of Judith the Flanders Countess of Northumbria now in New York. Similarly with Christ in Majesty but this time all in gold. Notice the nails which hold the metalwork in place. Another one's belong to Countess Godifew, sister of Edwin the Confessor who gave it to Rochester Cathedral described as ornamented with silver and precious stones. Beckett's manuscript was obviously much smaller and it had as I said an ivory of Christ in Majesty holding a book. Could that be something like the little late 10th century Anglo-Saxon ivory of exactly this subject now in the British Museum? The date and size would fit perfectly. The ornament on Beckett's altar was on one cover only presumably the bag. The last page of corpus 411 was up against the binding. It shows offsets from the edges of nails around the edges like those in the Judith the Flanders volume except in the middle where two pins perhaps secured the central upright ivory. Even from the inventory alone we might have guessed that Beckett's altar must have been something much older than Beckett's lifetime. Treasure bindings were not characteristic of the 12th century. Beckett as we saw in his gloss manuscripts had a taste for luxury and show. Would he have used a journal binding at all? Look at this. This mosaic is the oldest known image of Beckett as a saint in Montréal in Sicily probably based on information from people who knew him personally including Joan of Sicily daughter of hen of the second and Beckett's own nephew who lived there. The Beckett casket earned by the Antiquaries was found in southern Italy and is evidence of his relics down there too. The book shown in his hand in the mosaic consistently is the right size for a salter. It is indeed jewelled on the back cover. Nearer to home is this. In the windows of the north side of Triniti Chapel in Canterbury immediately above Beckett's shrine when his jewelled salter was probably displayed. There is uncertainty as to how much of this image is a modern replacement and it may be of no value to us that Thomas Beckett is shown holding a book of exactly the right size with decoration on its lower cover unless of course it's based on or is part of the lost original window of around 1200. Let's look inside the salter. It's decorated in the so-called Franco Saxon style rare but not unknown in England around the year 1000 including one initial which seems to be only partly painted. It is the last moment of survival of the old Irish or Celtic style found in much earlier insular manuscripts such as the book of Celts. Look at those panels of interlace in the salter and compare this from the book of Celts itself. The real puzzle is the manuscript's front is peace. This is not relevant to the Beckett story but it's very odd. The assumption is that the page was originally unfinished and that the central compartment was left blank with an empty border afterwards completed in an early 11th century hand. It's one of the most famous and widely published examples of Anglo-Saxon line drawing. It's assumed to represent David but he is not shown as a king or with his harp as one would expect in a normal Anglo-Saxon salter as here. The drawing of the standing man in manuscript 411 does not obviously fit that tradition. Here's the strange thing. At the foot of the drawing are two tiny initials WS in a hand which cannot be made evil. I'm at a loss to explain them. To my eye they look like the same ink as the drawing of the man. The question then is whether the drawing could be an 18th or 19th century forgery added by WS to fill a blank space that were English facsimilists around 1800 like John Harris and George Tupper whose work was so good that it's almost impossible to fault except that they customarily have subscribed their own initials. Yet surely the quality is too high and too convincing to have been invented since there's nothing known to me at least from which the picture is copied. Could those initials be those of some reader or admirer in the Parker library? Given the collection's notorious inaccessibility even then this seems unlikely. But candidates might have been William Stanley who catalogued the manuscripts in 1722 or William Stucley, FSA fellow of quarters but I simply don't know. Be that as it may let's come back to the inscription about the manuscript coming into the possession of Thomas Beckett. This has of course been noticed before. All others who've written about the book have made fun of it mocking the credulity of Matthew Parker. It's commonly cited as a classic example of Elizabethan fantasy, a piece of preposterous and romantic invention. As recently as the new catalogue of illuminated manuscripts in Cambridge published in 2013 it's dismissed as almost certainly a complete fiction observing that the manuscript is not in the medieval list of Beckett's books kept in the slide off the cloister. It wouldn't be however for it was in the care of the sacriston with the relics used in the liturgy. In fact Beckett's was not a particularly big name in the Tudor period when his name was more likely to be being erased from books rather than fraudulently invented. The wording is so close to that of the sacrist role of 1321 that I do believe that there was indeed a medieval inscription probably hard to read if Parker's librarian had to have it transcribed to make it more legible. It was as I said doubtless on the front flyleaf in the canterbury fashion. If the Psalter was for an archbishop's private use made for Elfridge, as I'm sure it was, it's very likely to have been inherited by his successor Elfhair or Elfedge archbishop from 1006 until he's mastered them by the Danes in 1012. It may very well have belonged to him too. In 11th century script the ligature Ae looks very like N, especially if it's written in a flamboyant sacs and hand unfamiliar to the personnel of Parker's household. The names of both Elfridge and Elfedge begin with Ae. Elfedge is an interesting man. He was born probably in Somerset around 953 and he became a hermit in Bath where he was famous for his piety and saintly advice. Here he is with a Psalter on his lap. In 984 he was made Bishop of Winchester and in 1006 archbishop of Canterbury. In September 1011 the Vikings laid siege to Canterbury, burnt the cathedral and kidnapped Elfedge. He was taken to London and on 19th April 1012 he was beaten to death at Greenwich, the first archbishop of Canterbury to suffer martyrdom. This is the stained glass window at the event in the cathedral. In 1023 his possessions and relics were sent back to the custody of Canterbury. In 1078 Elfedge was canonised as a saint. I think the Psalter was almost certainly among his relics in its Anglo-Saxon dual binding because look those 12th century additions at the end in the Canterbury script comprise unique readings for the passion or death of Elfedge otherwise inexplicable in the Psalter. See how the AE in line 2 could be mistaken for an N. Maybe then the added frontispiece, not obviously David, actually shows Elfedge holding his Psalter added in 1023 venerated but not yet canonised. It gets better. In the 12th century Elfedge was Thomas Beckett's patron saint. When Beckett became archbishop in 1162 he consciously modelled himself on the reputation of his martyr predecessor and if he existed he would undoubtedly have taken the Psalter of St Elfedge into his own possession. There were contemporary accounts of Beckett carrying a devotional book on his travels. I really think that the inscription is absolutely correct and that this was indeed the Psalter of the Archbishop's of Canterbury and, as it says, that it came into the hands of Thomas Beckett. Finally, of course I must ask the question, even if it's unanswerable, was Beckett actually holding this manuscript at the moment of his martyrdom? The event is well documented. In the last hours of his life Beckett knows that it's all over. The four nights arrived noisily, clearly drunk while the archbishop is at dinner.  His skull cap, his surplus, his dark cloak, his ring of office and it would be believable his Psalter of St Elfedge the martyr. He goes through the side door of the cathedral. I've peered closely at the antiquaries casket and I cannot see a book there, although it's very stylised. Medieval and later iconography of the murder does sometimes show a book in his hands or open on the altar or clattering to the ground. As Beckett died his absolute last words, at least according to one account, were to commend his soul into the care of St Elfedge. That might explain why the Psalter was kept on the shrine rather than being sent with Beckett's other manuscripts to the slide off the cloister and why a book, a mere book became a medieval relic. At the Reformation the dual binding must have been stripped off as the law required, but Matthew Parker, who was interested in archbishops but not at all in Psalters, doubtless requisitioned the manuscript for its known connection with the most famous medieval archbishop of Canterbury. 400 years earlier Beckett himself, already obsessed with martyrdom, had treasured the book for its previous ownership by the martyr Elfedge. In conclusion, I offer you an unpublished exclusive of what surely must have been one of the most evocative relics of medieval England and the only surviving object from Beckett's shrine. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Christopher. I think that I can gently say it's one of the most exciting talks we've had in these rooms for a long time. I'm not a wonderful part of discovery. Now Christopher Hamill has said he would take some questions, so if anyone would like to ask questions please go ahead. Lady there. I'm just going to say first of all the world authority on Thomas Beckett and Duggan is in the audience. I'll take questions from anyone except her. The question is really what do we know about the commissioning of books during a relatively short period while Beckett was in exile? Of course he was away for some years. We may tend to look at medieval manuscripts and think that they must have taken somebody years to write, but when we actually have accounts of people writing them, particularly if you were working for somebody as rich and powerful as Beckett, they probably, I bet you could write one of those gloss books in a matter of weeks. It must sometimes been a bit like having a suit made in Singapore or Hong Kong now. It takes a few weeks, but if you pay extra you can get it done overnight. There are clearly two real sources of Beckett's books. There were those that the monks are making him in Ponsonny where he was for two years, and you can get quite a lot in two years, particularly if a large number of people are working on them. The others are those that he must have commissioned from professional painters, and those gloss books are really among the earliest professional, commercially made books. These people were being paid to do it, and I expect the word went out. Someone was behind it, and it could well have been John Salisbury. Someone like that is going out and commissioning these books. I don't think there's anything unlikely about the life we've been put together in two or three or four years of books as grand as that. Writing a book, say you could do it in a month, illumination would have taken a bit longer, but of course it's not illuminated. The scribe writes the text, leaves a blank space, and it's given to the illuminator, so the illuminator can be working on the early pages while the scribe is still finishing writing it. I think it's perfectly possible. It's just that moment in history when the monks are losing control, are losing the monopoly of learning, and we begin to get the very, very beginning of a book trade. Is there any record of Beckett giving books away? The question is, is there any record of Beckett giving books away? I'm not aware of any, but it was part of what bishops did. Henry of Bloir, exactly this period, was giving books to Glastonbury and to Winchester. Hugh Pwysae a little bit later in the 12th century gave fantastic books to Durham. It was a kind of thing that a Baldwin, Beckett's successor was Archbishop, gave a number of books to Canterbury. It would have been part of what a bishop would have done in a pastoral role. I don't think Beckett had enough time in a pastoral role. He was in political trouble, he was on the run. Maybe he planned to give some of these away and it all got out of hand. I don't know of any references to Beckett giving books away. Question over there. In struggle further, Boson, who was one of his clerks, do hurry to Canterbury to gather up our money in the book and a particular little book is very precious to me. I wonder if that particular book, which is very precious to, and you take it ahead to South Berthyr, where they all met when they met up in Flanders. And I'm wondering if that precious little book is a sorter. I said I wouldn't take any questions from her, but as she recounts this thing, I feel a kind of shiver going down my spine. That wasn't a question, that is a statement, that Beckett goes back for a precious book. Of course the word precious may mean precious emotionally, but it may also mean precious in metallic terms. Maybe, because it'd be quite, it'd be very portable. I mean it's about that size. It's just the kind of book you take with you. It really is an extraordinary thing. He's probably already thinking about Marsatum, and that invocative association with this Marsat's book must have mattered to him enormously. That in a way may have a slight comment on the previous question about commissioning the library in France. Here may have been one book, but he actually took with him, so maybe they weren't all commissioned in France. But that's a wonderful, wonderful reference, and I wish I'd known that. The question is Sir William Hamilton. This is the Sir William Hamilton of Nelson fame, I assume. He was in Naples. I have no idea whether, actually, you expect he would imagine he would be more interesting classical antiquity than he would be in something medieval. But don't you, I could imagine he's in Naples in the turn of the 18th century, and he sees this very English thing and thinks that's amusing, brings it back, and then thinks I don't want it in the house and gives it to the antiquaries. But I don't actually know anything further about the history of that object, but it was given by him. Is your famously inaccessible library ever likely to exhibit this wonderful discovery? Our famously inaccessible library, I hope, is no longer inaccessible. My successor may close it down. We're now open to the public every week. We have a permanent exhibition upstairs. Every single manuscript has been digitized, every single page of every manuscript has been digitized, and is available free on the internet, and the Beckett Salter is currently on view right now. On that note, I think we should all rush to King's Cross to go to Cambridge, and I'm certainly going to try and do so myself. But I do also go to the British Museum to see Vianna Cree's wonderful Beckett Shass, but shall we leave it there with a heartfelt thanks to Christopher de Hamill for the most wonderful lecture today?