Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back. This is theCUBE Live here in Barcelona for Cisco Live. You're up, I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE with Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon covering networking, storage, and all infrastructure cloud. Stu Miniman, Stu, our next guest is Eric Herzog, who's the chief marketing officer at IBM Storage Systems. Eric, CUBE alumni, he's been on so many times, you can't even count, you get the special VIP badge. We're here bringing down all the top stories at Cisco Live in Europe. Kicking off 2018, although it's the European show, not the big show, certainly kicking off the year with a lot of new concepts that aren't necessarily new, but they're innovative. Eric, welcome to theCUBE again. Well, thank you. We always love participating in theCUBE. IBM is a strong supporter of theCUBE and all the things you do for us, so thank you very much for having us again. A lot of great thought leadership from IBM, really appreciate you guys' support over the years. But now we're in a sea change. IBM had their first quarter of great results, and that we well report on SiliconANGLE, but the sea change is happening. You've been living this generation, you've seen a couple of cycles in the past. Cisco putting forth a vision of the future, which is pretty right on. They were right on at Internet of Things 10 years ago. They had it all right, but they're a networking company that's transformed up the stack over the years. Now on the front lines of no perimeter, more security challenges, cloud, big whales at no networking and storage, you're in the middle of it. Break it down. Why is Cisco Live so important now than ever before? Well, for us, it's very important because one, we have a strategic relationship with Cisco. The storage division does a product with Cisco called the VersaStack, converged infrastructure, and in fact, one of our key constituents for the VersaStack are MSPs and CSPs, which is a key constituent of Cisco, especially with their emphasis on the cloud. Second thing for us is IBM Storage has gone heavily cloud. So going heavily cloud with our software, in addition to what we do with our solutions as the foundation for CSPs and MSPs, just what we've integrated into our software to find storage for cloud, makes Cisco Live an ideal venue for us and Cisco an ideal partner. So I got to ask you, you've had conversations in theCUBE before, they're all on YouTube.com, so just look at the angle, just search Eric Herzog, you'll find them. But I want to recycle this one point and get your comments and reaction here in Barcelona. You guys have transformed with software at IBM, big time with storage, okay? You position well for the cloud. What's the most important thing that companies have to do like IBM and Cisco to play an innovative role in the cloud game as we have software at the center of the value proposition? Well, I think the key thing is when you look at cloud infrastructure, first of all, the cloud's got to run on something. So you need some sort of structural infrastructure foundation, servers, networking, and compute. So at IBM and with Cisco, we're positioning ourselves as the ideal rock solid foundation for the cloud building, if you will. So that's item number one. Item number two, our software in particular can survive not only on-premises, but can bridge and go from on-premise to a public cloud creating a hybrid infrastructure. And that allows us to also run cloud instantiation. Several of our products are available from IBM Cloud Division. Amazon offers some of the IBM storage software. Over 300 cloud service providers, smaller ones offer IBM Spectrum Protect as a backup service. So we've already morphed into storage software, either A, bridging the cloud in a hybrid config, or being used by cloud providers as some of their storage offerings for end users and businesses. Yeah, Eric, I want to dig into one of the partnership areas that you talked about with Cisco is versus stack. You know, we've talked with you a number of times about converged infrastructure, that partnership, Cisco UCS, taking all the virtualization. The buzz in the market, there's a lot of discussion, oh, it's hyper-converged, it's cloud. You know, why is converged infrastructure still relevant today? Well, when you look at the analysts that track the numbers, you can see that the overall converged market is growing and hyper-converged is viewed as a subset. When you look at those numbers this year close to 17 billion U.S., about 75% of it is still standard converged versus hyper-converged. One of the other differences, it's the right tool for the right job. So customers need to go in, eyes open. So when you do a hyper-converged infrastructure, by the way, IBM offers a hyper-converged infrastructure currently with Nutanix. So we actually have both, the Nutanix partnership offering hyper-converged and a partnership with Cisco on standard converge. It's really, how do you size the right tool for the right job? One of the negatives of hyper-converged, very easy to deploy, that's great. One of the negatives is, every time you need more storage, you have to add more server. Every time you need more server, you add more storage. With this traditional converged infrastructure, you can add servers only, or networking only, or storage only. So I think when you're in certain configurations, workloads and applications, hyper-converged is the right solution, IBM's got a solution. In other situations, particularly as you're middle-sized and bigger apps, regular converge is better because you can basically parse and size up or down, compute, networking, and the storage independent of each other. Whereas in hyper-converged, you have to do it at the same time. And that's a negative, and where you're either over-buying your storage when you don't need it, you're over-buying your compute when you don't need it. With standard converge, you don't have that issue. You buy what you need when you need it. But I think most big companies for sure have certain workloads that are best with hyper-converged, and we've got that. And other workloads that are best with converged, and we have that as well. Okay, the other big growth area in storage for the last bunch of years has been Flash. IBM's got a strong position in all Flash arrays. What's new there? How are some of the technologies changing? Any impact on the network that we should be really understanding at this show? Sure, so a couple things. So first of all, we just brought out some very high density all Flash arrays in Q4. We can put 220 terabytes in two RACU, which is a building block that we use in several different of our all Flash configurations, including our all Flash versus staff. The other thing we do is we embed software-defined storage on our, software-defined storage, actually on our physical all Flash arrays. Most companies don't do that. So they've got an all Flash offering, and if they have a software-defined offering, it's actually a different piece of software. For us, it's the same. So it's easier to deploy. It's easier to train. It's easier to license. It's easier for reseller to sell if you're happy to be using a reseller. And the other thing is it's battle-hardened because it's not only standalone software, but it's actually on the arrays as well. So from a test infrastructure quality issue versus other vendors that have certain software that goes on their all Flash array, and then a different set of software for all software-defined. It doesn't make logical sense when you can cover it with one thing. So that's an important difference for us and a big innovator. I think the last thing you're going to see that does impact networking is the rise of NVMe over fabrics. IBM did a statement of direction last May outlining what we're doing. We did a public demonstration of an Infiniband fabric at the AI summit in New York in December, and we will be having an announcement around NVMe fabrics on the 20th of February. So stay tuned to hear us then. We'll be launching some more NVMe with fabric infrastructure at that time. Yeah, Erica, just for, you know, people that have been watching, you know, there's been a lot of discussion about NVMe for a number of years, NVMe over fabric, you know, more recently, how big a deal is this for the industry? You've seen many of these waves, you know, is this transformational or is it, you know, every storage company I talk to is working on this, so how is it going to be differentiated? What should users be looking to be able to, who do they partner with? How do they choose that solution and when's it going to be ready? So first of all, I view it as an evolution. Yeah. Okay, if you take storage in general, arrays, you know, we used to do punch cards. I'm old enough, I remember using punch cards at the University of California. Then it all went to tape. And if you look at old Schwarzenegger movies from the 80, I love Schwarzenegger spy movies. What's there? IBM systems with big IBM tape and not for backup for primary storage. Then in the late 80s, early 90s, IBM and a few other vendors came out with hard drive based arrays that got hooked up to mainframes and then obviously into minis and to the rise of the land. Those have given away to all flash arrays. From an connectivity perspective, you had scuzzy. You had ultra scuzzy. You had ultra fast scuzzy, ultra fast wide scuzzy. Then you had fiber channel. So now as an infrastructure both in an array as a connectivity between storage and the CPUs used in an array system will be NVMe. And then you're going to have NVMe running over fabrics. So I view this as an evolution, right? What's the driver? Performance or flexibility? A little bit of both. So from the inbox perspective, inside of an array solution, the major chip manufacturers are putting NVMe to increase the speed from storage going into the CPUs. So that will benefit the performance to the end user for applications, workloads and use cases. Then what they've done is Intel has pushed with all the industry, IBM's a member of the NVMe consortium as well has pushed using the NVMe protocol over fabrics which also gives some added performance over fabric networks as well. So you've got it. But again, I view this again as evolution because punch cards, tape was faster, hard driver arrays were faster than tape, then flash arrays are faster. Now you're going to have NVMe in the flash array and also NVMe over fabric for without connecting all flash arrays. So I have to ask you the real question that's on everyone's mind that's out there because storage is one of those areas that you never see it stopping. There's always venture backed startups. You see new hot startups come out of the woodwork and there's been some failures lately in some blame NVMe's innovation to kind of killing some startups. I won't name names, but the real issue is the lines that were once blurred are now forming and there's the wrong side of history and the right side of history. So I got to ask you, what's going to be the right side of history in the storage architecture that people need to get onto to win in the future? So there's a couple of key points. One, all storage infrastructure and storage software needs to interface with cloud infrastructure. Got to be hybrid. If you have a software play like we do where the software such as our Spectrum Scale or our Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Connect Plus can exist as a cloud service through a service writer, that's where you want to be. You don't want to have just a standard array and that's all you sell. So you want to have an array business. You want to make sure that's highly performant. You want to make sure that's positioned in the infrastructure underneath clouds, which means not only very fast, but also incredibly resilient. And that includes both cloud configs and AI. If you're going to do real-time AI, if you're going to do dark trading on Wall Street using AI instead of human beings, A, if the storage isn't really fast, you're going to miss a $10 million, $100 million transaction. Second thing, if it's not resilient and always available, you're really in trouble. And God forbid when they bring AI to healthcare, and I mean AI in the operating room, boy, if that storage fails when I'm on the table, wow. That's not going to be good. So those are the things you've got to integrate with in the future, AI and cloud, whether it's software-defined in the array space or if you're like IBM in both markets. Performance and resilience. Performance and resiliency is critical. All right, so Eric, I have a non-storage question for you. Absolutely. So you've got the CMO hat for division of IBM. You've been CMO of a startup, been in this industry for a while. What's the changing role of the CMO in today's digital world? So I think the key thing is digital is a critical method of the overall marketing mix. And everything needs to reinforce everything. So let's take an example. One of the large storage websites and magazines recently announced that IBM is a finalist for four product of the year awards. Two for all flash arrays and two for software-defined storage. So guess what we've done? We've amplified it over LinkedIn, over IBM Facebook, through our Twitter handle. We leverage that. We use it at trade shows. So digital is A, the first for A, right? People look on your website and look at what you're doing socially before they even decide, should I really call them up or should I really go to their booth at the trade show? So discovery and learning is happening online. Discovery and learning, but even progression. We just, I just happened to tweet and LinkedIn this morning. Clarinet, a large European cloud MSP and CSP just selected IBM all flash arrays, IBM Spectrum Protect and IBM Spectrum Virtualize for their cloud infrastructure. And obviously their target, they sell to end users and companies, right? But the key thing is we tweeted it. We linked it in. We're going to use it here at the show. We're going to use it in PR efforts. So digital is a critical element of the marketing mix. It's not a fad. It also can be a lead dog. So if you're going to a trade show, you should tweet about it and link it in. Just the way you guys do. We all knew you were coming to the show. We know you're going to IBM Think. We know you're going to VMworld and Oracle, all these great shows. How do we find out? We follow you on social media and on the digital market space. And video, video big role. Video is critical. We use your videos all the time, obviously. I always tweet them and link them in once I'm posted. Clip and stick is the new buzzword. Clip them and stick them. Our new Clipper tool. You've seen that. Yes, I have.  I'm six years old. I've been doing this 32 years, seven startups, EMC, IBM twice, Maxdoor Seagate. So I've done big and small. This is a sea change transformation in marketing. The key thing is you have to make it, not stand on its own. Integrate everything. PR, analyst relations, digital in everything you do, digital with shows, and how you integrate the whole buyer's journey and put it together. And people are using digital more and more fast. In fact, I saw a survey from a biz school. 75% of people are looking at you digitally before they ever even call you up or call one of your resellers if you use the channel to talk about your products. That's a sea change. You guys do a great job with content marketing. Hats off to you guys. All right, final question for you. Take a minute to just quickly explain the relationship that IBM has with Cisco and the importance of it, specifically what you guys are doing with them, how you guys go on a market to customers, and what's the impact to the customer? So first of all, we have a very broad relationship with Cisco. Obviously, I'm the CMO of the storage division, so I focus on storage, but several other divisions of IBM have powerful relationships. The IoT group, the collaboration group. Cisco's one of our valued partners. We don't have networking products, so our global technology services division is one of the largest resellers of Cisco in the world, whether it be networking servers, converge, what have you. So it's a strong, powerful relationship. From an end user perspective, the importance is they know that the two companies are working together hand in glove. Sometimes you have two companies where you buy solutions from A and B, and A and B don't even talk to each other, and yes, they both go to the PlugFest or the Compatibility Lab, but they don't really work together, and their technology doesn't work together. IBM and Cisco have gone well beyond that to make sure that we work closely together in all of the divisions, including the storage division with our Cisco-validated designs. And then lastly, whether it's delivered through the direct sales model or through the valued business partners that IBM and Cisco share, it's critical that the end user know, and the partners know, they're getting something that works together and doesn't just have the works option. It's tightly honed and finally integrated, whether it be storage or the IoT division, the collaboration division. Cisco is a heavy proponent of IBM security division. Product teams work together. Yeah, they all, all the product teams work together, trade APIs back and forth, not just doing the, let's go do a test compatibility test, which everybody does that. But we go well beyond that with IBM and Cisco together. And it's a key relationship for you guys. Key relationship for the storage division as well as for all the, many of the other divisions of IBM, it's a critical relationship with Cisco. Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer for the Storage Systems Group at IBM. It's theCUBE, live coverage in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more from Barcelona. Cisco live, you're up after this short break.


So we've got a question from a buddy James Lee and he says I can lose a dream with reality checks about twice a week That's great But I experienced sort of random physics. So sometimes he'll be able to jump really high and other times He'll feel like he's stuck. You know, he'll feel like he just can't move or he's He's trapped on the floor of the dream. He can't really jump fly teleport anything like that He says rational thinking just stops him being able to do these things He's thinking too much. Okay He can't always control the dream And he says what perspective should I use? Do I just need to practice more or is it something else? Well, that's a great question. So I'm gonna start by saying first of all well done for having the reality checks You know reality checks is something that a lot of people find really difficult Especially remembering to do them And that's just something that gets better with practice, you know, you're just gonna have to set a reminder and at the start It's gonna be hard. You're gonna forget to do them. You're gonna go for days sometimes without even doing them at all That's just part of it. You just need to make sure you set reminders set notes on your fridge You know, have a note on your phone have a reminder everywhere you go in your house Eventually, you'll just remember to do them. You just be doing them more and more often And it won't feel like you have to try and remember because you'll just be doing them naturally So good that you're doing that already the physics of the dream is something which It will always be strange. Okay, so you can get to a point where you expect certain things to happen so you might say Expect it to rain and it might rain one time, but then another time, you know, the next night the next week Even you'll expect something to happen and it won't and there's not really a lot You can do to predict that sometimes the dream just has a mind of its own, you know, it just does what it wants No matter how skilled you happen to be Sometimes it will just do its own thing and that's fine So I think there was there was some sort of quote about how a sailor doesn't control the sea and in the same way You can't really control the dream in the same way that you would control say a character in a video game You can sort of more observe it and you can guide things you can sort of push things in a little bit of a direction But you can't Directly control absolutely everything at the same time. So sometimes it will be weird. The physics will be weird That's point one point two Sometimes the physics are weird because you just haven't got the right mindset for them. So what I mean by that is when You enter the lucid dream Especially if you're a beginner you might not be as stable as like a more skilled lucid dreamer You'll find that you you know what you want to do But the fundamental belief in your subconscious mind is that you can't do it. So the most common one is flying Okay, lots of people will try and fly and they'll find that they sort of held back They're pulled down Or they'll start flying and start falling you might have had the dream before where you you know You're flying and then suddenly you're falling you're falling through the air and then you hit the ground and wake up whatever It's mainly because your fundamental subconscious belief is that you can't fly humans shouldn't be able to fly right You don't see people flying around on their own without a plane So generally speaking in the dream your subconscious relays that back to you and doesn't allow you to fly So it's really working. It's about working on the subconscious belief that you can fly in a dream And sort of practicing it and maybe using some affirmations. So you could for example Say again and again to yourself or can fly And say this before you go to sleep and the chances are it will happen in a lucid dream So don't be too worried about the control of the whole physics aspects of it, you know, something that comes with time and practice So just go with the flow relax a little bit it will happen When it happens, okay in the meantime what you can do is you can meditate you can meditate every day every morning or every evening or both And just literally start by counting from one to ten counting your breath So count one on the in inhale to all the exhale three on the inhale four in the exhale all the way up to ten When you get to ten go right back to one again start again Just do this for about ten minutes do this twice a day. It's a very basic meditation technique And you'll find that just doing that you'll have not only more energy throughout the day But you'll start to think clearer, you know, your thoughts will be more structured and organized you won't find yourself struggling to pull out a memory or Lose, you know, you you won't be losing your train of thought as much and it's the same with the lucid dreaming You'll find it's just a lot easier so Lastly and it's probably the most important is as we're doing all of this make sure you write it all down write everything you do down in a diary a Journal it can be a document on your laptop. It doesn't really matter write it down write down the date So you can easily search and look back on it later write down what happened what you learn and what you're gonna do the next day and Just sort of see where it takes you don't be too stressed with the particular, you know the specifics of it So I feel like you're getting too stressed on oh, I can't control this particular thing of this particular dream It's not really matter. It's more about the bigger picture of the whole thing Just build the fundamental skills and habits and eventually it won't be an issue So hopefully that's helped if you have a question, please leave a comment and subscribe


Hello everyone and welcome back to the ether the podcast all about the upcoming the third person mobile ethereal clash of souls I'm your host the mangoes joining me on this journey as my friend and co-host jelly knees jelly how you doing I'm great man goose I'm stoked for this week because this is what I do on a daily basis for ethereal every time I see something it just becomes like what's the theory behind it so I'm ready yes you are the like king of ethereal conspiracy theories everybody goes to you whenever we did that livestream with the test like you were everybody's freaking hero because you just had this massive list of like hard-hitting questions like what is this what is this what is this everybody's like yes keep going jelly dude it's because that's the questions I've been asking myself for two years so it's like okay so now I have the opportunity right the free reign but okay so this week first we're going to start off they did do a new ethereal fun facts which is something jelly not kind of knew about already and pretended we didn't know but we're going to cover it this time we have insider information no you're you're telling me tell me it's not so sometimes we know stuff but we pretend like we don't know stuff right it happens it happens but we're going to go over that and then uh we are however going to go over a lot of stuff that we don't know we're going we're the theme of this episode is unsolved mysteries we want to talk about various things that have been hinted at but uh very very little information has come out about so uh and uh jelly knees is the datamine expert he's been uh I don't think we want to say that too loud there but you want me to edit you want me to edit that out it's fine it's fine but uh first of all let's talk about the ethereal fun facts uh they said that every hero we were talking last last week about Dante's right click being a risk reward sort of ability and it seems like every single hero is going to have an ability like that that is high risk high reward jelly take it away dude I'm so stoked for this yeah my like I said last week my favorite thing is counterplay so when you're creating counterplay moments in a character's kit by themselves that just is opens up so many avenues for like cool things to happen where you you see that Dante used his right click right and you're like oh he can't auto land you just get the cool play diving in on him while he can't do anything uh just it sounds like it's going to create some super good clips it's going to be incredible yeah or you you see a Dante going for it and you're on Dante and you roll just as he starts that fire so he misses all those shots and then you have yours up and you just finish him off yeah that'll be cool stuff I'm however I'm a what they go ahead with it yeah as far as the other heroes or other myths I mean yeah and what the the constraints if any are I like how because so the the issue with that is power creep could very much become a thing with right click abilities yes it's it's the super strong thing but it has a super big downside so it's this weird give and take that they're going to have to find a really solid balance on just like everything else in this game really so I really am hopeful that they can do it and it would be really cool if they can but it also could become a large issue at the same time that's that was about what I was about to say it's my concerns it's going to be a very difficult balancing problem um how big of a handicap guy do you have to put on that that reward like you it's going to be hard to make the downside meet the upside with the upside still feeling powerful um I talked about it a little bit of video recently about Revenant Morgash how epic tried to balance them by giving them handicaps but they gave them bullshit handicaps the handicaps weren't actually existent they they were very easy to bounce back from so the the risk did not match the reward so it's going to be hard for them to to do that yeah I mean you don't want such a high reward ability that it's just using it just isn't a downside because you're automatically going to kill your target you know what I mean so I don't know I have faith in them I have faith that they will be able to balance it out and when we're coming into this it's going to be pre alpha it's going to be the first time masses of people have gotten their hands on it so there's plenty of time for that I iron it out if it doesn't match up hopefully and I'm pretty sure they will undying games will listen to us a little more than epic games listen to us with Paragon hopefully yeah the other thing with those abilities is so not only can you do you put you can't put these these bs handicaps on them but also you can't make the risk outweigh the reward of it at the same time otherwise you'll never use the ability because it's just not worth it and so it's it's the that line is going to be have to be so carefully tread in order to find the balance between the two things that it's going to be interesting to see what they do and what I think when we see the kits for the other six myths in the pre alpha I think that'll give a lot of perspective of what abilities will look like on a right click and give us a better perspective of like the scale is it always going to be high damage but you lose out on something is it always is it tied into more than that or what I'm curious to see what they're going to do with those I would like to see a claret class have a right click that sacrifices their health to give this somebody else I think that would be a cool risk reward sort of thing I like that I'm not sure we have anybody thematically that that could tie into though uh maybe marina she gives she gives her water to you that's gross don't think about that too hard I have a dirty water out of her own body into yours oh yeah great really top notch ability that she dries up and dies the poor marina mains out there okay um so is that you want to move on to the uh to some of the mysteries that we have here absolutely so the first up we have to have this teaser image and um I don't like to get too visual on the show but if you're watching and we have the image up right now if not it's an image of what did they say it was jelly it said it was a passive some it was uh they haven't at all yeah they didn't have it they didn't say at all when it was in the discord dropped the image and that was it wouldn't give any information wouldn't give any anything I'd basically just let people like me lose our minds over the course of the next several days trying to figure it out I was telling us the story earlier on uh earlier this week on discord in their discord talking about how when this image first dropped page was here with me and I pulled it into photoshop and I was zooming in trying to find like any little detail I was trying to recreate the colors by so removing that section pixel by pixel go through and recreate the image oh it was it was a thing and uh my determination for it is it's an ability of some kind used by someone in ethereal yeah that is correct so uh if you can't see right now it's like a there's an it's an ability wheel it's like a wheel and it's got a symbol in the middle which looks like the marksman um class symbol and then this wheel has six selections and they're all various myths from ethereal and um and one of them is highlighted malaya is highlighted so I don't know what this could possibly be I really think it's I I guess I thought it was a passive because in my mind I think it is probably a passive um I mean bear in mind this is whatever this is isn't finalized at all I mean it has the myth Owen who uh to if I believe correctly is no longer going to be a part of the game but um they have Owen's picture on that wheel so it's definitely not anything finalized and we can get just a little tiny glimpse in the bottom left corner even though Owen tried to try to scribble it out with with some red ink you can see a little bit of red so I think that it's probably malaya or Dante I would even though both are represented on the wheel I would completely agree with that and I think I think Owen's tried to fake us out by making us believe that this is the marksman passive the class passive where you can select somebody who more damage I think that's a fake out I don't have very good reasoning behind it other than it feels like something Owen would do where he thinks because we know about the marksman class passive and this image is six people you can select one of them right and and like you said the symbol in the middle is kind of reminiscent of the marksman class sigil icon yep everyone um I think it's just trying to fake us out enough and but you're right the red in the bottom left of the image hints towards malaya or Dante um I think Owen is making the big brain play and has malaya selected because that's who it's for yeah and that it's just him selecting malaya as like you would as a marksman and you're selecting malaya but that's him saying like this is for malaya that's that says I'm 99% sure that this is a fake out and it's not the marksman passive oh you could be right you could be right I don't know and that's the only characters we have that have those red aesthetics currently that will be in pre-alpha are Dante and malaya yeah the thing that uh was brought up to me is that the red in the bottom left could be a skin for one of the seven pre-alpha characters oh yeah and it could completely just throw off everything we just said and Owen and Owen's probably just a little cackling at as far I'm sure he is but I didn't even think of the skins I didn't and everyone's gonna have one skin in pre-alpha so we know that they're there they're existent in some way yeah yeah no I just want to know I don't even care who it's for I just want to know what the ability is for more than anything let us know in the comments guys what you what you think it is please I will take any ideas I need to regain some sanity and then we have a a hidden message jelly you want to tell us about that so this message is if you go you access the sources for their website update for phase one this is listed in the sources and I combed through the actual code itself to try and figure out how this works and found something saying it was timed there was a timer set so I left the page open for a while and somebody on the discord mentioned this as well after in my testing 15 minutes and 14 seconds this image appears oh instead of the whatever the website says step into the light I think is what it is yeah so the the ethereal clash of souls step into the light is there when you bring up the page initially after 15 minutes and 14 seconds that fades away and the devour the old reborn the new appears in the middle of the screen uh I originally thought this was just like a little Easter egg that they threw in yeah and this week Sinist Virtue reached out to me which is from the ug team and specifically asked if I knew it was there which just set my theory brain off because I'm like okay why are you asking me about this it was nothing you wouldn't care but maybe you it is nothing and you're just trying to make me freak out about it and think about all the implications uh but what do you think man goose what do you think this means if anything uh we talked about a little this before we started recording and I think the second part doesn't make sense reborn the new if it's new you can't be reborn because it's new you can't have something new being reborn but yeah my my theory was it means they're going to devour all the old mobas and start a new with their own awesome MOBA that that was my theory I don't I hope that's it that they just send this to all the other MOBAs and be like yeah this is our this is our thought process about you and have them all wonder why it says we're born the new and then Dota comes back and goes what is reborn the new me so I was thinking about this a lot when I found it and it's to me it could be a motto of some bigger entity in the ether okay in that so it's devoured higher than a myth yeah so I'm thinking one of their deities okay I'm thinking that one of them it's kind of the to me it feels like a very take over kind of phrase that they're going to get rid of the old ways and then create their their own way the better way kind of ideals and maybe that's just the deity phrase across the board that that's just the thought process behind all of these deities and why their followers follow them is that their way is going to abolish the old way and then start a new with their own ideas or whatever you want to call it maybe it's malware hacking into a theory website oh my god okay that's that's what malware is all about is devouring the old giving birth to the new thing and hit the new order of malware they know that I look through their source files all the time malware is a code oh man goose you just broke my brain here this is why they asked me if I oh oh no oh dear lord okay I'm to come on everything again I think we figured out why I get your camera coming in all pixelated it's because you're you are pixelated now a little bit you've been infected with malware a little bit oh my god that's so brilliant oh very much like sombra did with overwatch when she released she's their hacker character so yeah hacked all of their stuff and was leaving a little bit oh a theory okay your sons of bitches so much for sleeping tonight it's fine I didn't whatever oh I'm so good at making you uncomfortable so good it's kind of uncanny uh all right but before my brain explodes let's move on to a different theory that made my brain explode the overseer class yep this is the eighth class in ethereal will not be present in the pre alpha it is still confirmed that they are working on it that it exists there is an overseer class still in existence it didn't just get removed but we don't know any details about what character is going to be in that class or what the class ability itself is what do you yeah we don't know any passives or anything yeah what do you think the I guess we'll start with the class ability what do you think the class ability could be I don't know see when I when I think overseer again I bring up this other game too much but here's the storm has a hero called abathur this is the first thing I thought of when I saw overseer was abathur but then I asked oh and I was like hey man um overseer is that going to be anything like abathur and he said who the fuck is that but he didn't say who the fuck is that but he said he didn't know who abathur was oh it doesn't talk like me nobody talks like me but um so abathur and here's the storm like he takes three hits to kill but you never see him he's like not he goes somewhere where he has vision on the battlefield wraps himself in a cocoon and then he can lay land mines all over the map or he can um do a symbiote where he put like he kind of attaches himself to another hero and he can't move them around or anything but he can fire from atop that hero and give them extra abilities and stuff so that's what I'm thinking it will sort of be as somebody that can place traps around the map perhaps place um like healing packs around the map we did see that healing globe in the uh in the demo maybe they could drop healing globes you know in places where people it'll be beneficial for the team and uh perhaps even um make their presence known on top of a of a of a myth and you know use them as a turret to fire so that was my idea just because you know I'm just basing it on my expectations of how abathur plays in here's of the storm that of course doesn't at all mean that that's what it's going to be in uh in ethereal jelly I know you've got a million theories on ever seers what you got buddy so my thing my theories start because of the symbol that they have for overseers it's kind of like a lizard's eye in the crest that they have to me that's a hint towards it's some kind of vision um whether that be a denial of vision uh extra access to vision or what that may be um the theory that I've always kind of I guess personally had head canon for what an overseer is is that they're going to have uh if you think something like rainbow succeeds you have cameras spread around the map that you can access and look at that area without having to be there but they're going to have some kind of access to towers eyes of sauron if you will that they will be able to just see specific spots of the map using their class ability at all times without award being there that they are kind of the information uh person on your team that will have constant awareness or will rather need to have constant awareness to be the most effective of the map something I heard somebody say while back is that they could also have some kind of uh some kind of drone eagle bird spirit whatever you want to call it fly around the map that they can control so when they step into they they press their class ability and they become this spirit that then can free fly around the map and look out at everything and gain awareness then when you repress you go back to your character and maneuver according which I thought could be a really cool idea and it kind of ties into that risk reward factor that we've been talking about of that you leave your body behind but you have the ability to just gain vision at will basically yeah throughout the entire map that's a cool idea but we have no information again it's another one of those things that they're keeping very tight lips yeah and I I think go ahead I think it'd be neat if they could take over turrets like towers and stuff and um just the fire like specifically maybe increase the tower range and specifically direct the fire of the targets I think that would be a kind of a neat thing that they would be able to do that way like if you think if you're pushing up with your minions you think you're you're safe from tower damage all of a sudden the overseer overtakes that tower and starts pinging you down instead of the minions well that could be taking you by quite a surprise that could be a good counter to what we were talking about last week of the potential for if it's double jungle for a lane to become a 3v1 if you have an overseer that can just jump into your turret you essentially balance that out to a 3v2 it's still not perfect but it's that quick assistance that you can get from somebody that may not be nearby you which could be a cool idea and I don't know there's a lot of I have no idea where overseers potentially even could fit on the map and it grants it's more it's based on what their class ability is going to be I think if they're heavily vision based it'll probably be junglers more often than not because that's just the most potential to use their vision type deal but we have zero idea they could be another support class for all we know I just I don't think that they will they will physically be on the map that's that's the that's my one theory that I'm going to stick to I don't think they're physically going to be on the map I think they're going to affect the battlefield in other ways and the downfall of that will of course you have one less body in a team fight unless they can somehow so they're going to be some kind of like spectator ask a spectator that can that can influence the map by like I said setting traps in certain areas or throwing down healing in certain areas and then every once in a while taking over a tower or something like that I really like that actually and it's yeah it's one of those things where it the the hard part with doing something like that is you're essentially telling somebody like you don't get to play the game in the same way as the other five people on your team but if that's how the game is built around that's also a cool idea that it's it's 5v5 with one extra spectator the I mean oh okay now that you're getting my brain to fire the whole thing of like the deities watching over everyone the overseer could act as that deity in your your way of like that they're flying over the map keeping control of larger elements than just a single character there were just there would have to be some way that you could kill them though like maybe whenever they do something like possess a tower or something or maybe I don't know there's a couple ways you you can do it I suppose it's all very interesting and yeah it seems like they're ramping up or more things to happen soon I mean we are phase one of the website and we know in theory phase two will be a huge release of information yeah the first release of the very first time they released that website that was a massive influx of information yeah I mean the it was the class abilities I think were the biggest thing that they revealed in that yeah we got class abilities we got class passives atropos we got a bunch of lore about the the various regions all kinds of stuff more information about the characters backgrounds and all that and yeah I'm excited they've been really putting a lot of emphasis on this new website which I like I think that's a great idea it's a great way to hype the game but not directly like it's this weird it's a path we're following their path of leading to the release of the game and I think this is a good like next step in that that evolution of waiting for the game to come out yeah so real quick I do want to go back to the website something I thought about with this hidden image that pops up after 15 minutes and 14 seconds super like probably not but it's it would make me die a little bit inside if it was true if the website phase one to phase two this the difference is 15 days I will lose my mind just because it's a the 15 minute wait to get the new image and then 15 days after phase one phase two begins and my little nerd heart will explode just saying like it's just what is that movie 27 yes oh that's you that's you it's hot dude it's the pepe silvia always sunny in philadelphia meme that's me 100 of the time with this game oh um did you have anything else to say about overseers I think that's it for overseers I can't wait to see more about what they might do and I think I mean if you guys watching have any ideas leave them in the comments for sure like I love reading other people's thoughts about what overseers could be and all that please please do I want to I want to see all that information and then I want to go back after we know what they are look back through these comments like that guy was right yep that guy was on it that girl had it had it all time we find out it was somebody from ug under a different name they're just teasing us the whole time yeah it was we told you a long time ago exactly what it was all right we have one last thing on here to talk uh yeah I think we got time to talk about this and it's the mini map and how the mini map will function how the hell are they going to do a mini map for three lanes that float atop each other go ahead I'll let you theorize first I think it really comes down to if the lanes are the same shape I think if the lanes are the same shape it'll be fairly easy to do but we we do have no idea maybe the top lane is a completely different layout than the middle lane which is a completely different layout from the bottom lane so without knowing that it's kind of hard to theorize on what they could possibly do what do you think they could do for a mini map my I've got two ideas and I'm not sure I like one of them so I'll leave it for the second one but the first idea is that you just destack them and sit them right next to each other on the mini map and granted that depends on size of the lane because if one if like the bottom lane is super large and compares into the super skinny other lanes then that won't work because you'll take up a huge chunk of your screen that way but if they're I'll say relative lane size comparatively to other MOBAs in theory you could just destack them and put them next to each other and then just make sure you're identifying which is which lane because the other theory I had is you leave them or you make it that there's a button and you switch between each lane's mini map whether that be that might be a nice option to have something it would other than at a glance you can't see vision of other lanes right it's the having to press whatever button that would be in order to if I have to scroll four times to see the top lane and then I see oh the sky slayers in top lane now I can go in on my guy that's a lot of time before I can just do something that I have to quickly scroll through see the sky slayer put it back to my lane so I can watch it and then engage on whatever I was going to do and to me that's a lot of downtime to force on somebody rather than just making it perfect at a glance that you can just see oh sky slayers there go okay yeah but I like that idea of being able to flip the lanes yeah I feel like it's very interesting and maybe it's a setting both ways whereas like somebody like like me that would prefer to see it all at a glance can have a larger mini map on my screen or that you can toggle a setting and then it's a you flip through the individual lanes my idea was to just if somebody's in a different lane then they're just a little bit grayed out kind of like mini maps in the world of warcraft like if you're looking for mining nodes if there's one that's underground it's a little bit of a different color than one that's above ground and then they could also just do you know to like just put a number beside everybody's portrait on the little mini map you know one for first level two for second level three for third level so that you could tell at a glance where they were I think that would they would need to do something about with with color though also because you know at a glance you're not you just kind of flick to the mini map with your eyes right like sometimes you watch it intently but most time you're just flicking to it and they need to be able to provide us a way with one small glance to give us the information that we need so it's going to be a huge challenge for them I can't wait to see what they actually come up with again if you guys have ideas if you have if you if you know of other games that with a similar layout that have have mini maps and uh just just let us know how they've done it in those games the only one I could take up again was World of Warcraft but and the other thing they have others out there that I don't know how it would fare it would be one of those things you have to wait and feel it before you could really determine is that only you can only see the mini map in the lane you're present in and then you're relying on your teammates for the other information from the other lanes okay it promotes that team play aspect but it kind of removes the feeling of being able to solo carry because I can't just watch the other lanes maps I have to wait for them to tell me so it's that that definitely give and take vibe where if they're going for a like we want everybody to play as a team as much as possible then that would make some amount of sense I guess but I don't know for sure we would definitely need I think you would definitely have to have voice chat for something like that yep I agree yeah our callouts just wouldn't be enough to relay all the information that you'd want to give I'll just be the guy in the in-game chat that just spams my discord link join my discord we have to talk to each other jillie needs ttv I'm a malaya main thank you very much okay well you will be a malware main soon me I don't get me started I'm not gonna sleep much tonight I'm watch tomorrow you know I'll just say it now tomorrow I'm gonna come out with a video about the website and it's just gonna be brain vomit because I'm just gonna lose my mind all over it all right I think that's about it for this week yeah yeah unless you got something else no not at all all right uh plugs jelly you got anything to plug uh the youtube video where I absolutely lose my mind on the website because by the time this goes out I will have that out 100 so yeah the jelly knees I don't know what how youtube does their links anymore just search jelly knees on the youtube search bar it comes up any streams going on this week yeah break back to regular stream schedule so twitch.tv slash jelly knees I know how that one works what you streaming streaming godfall this week I'll probably do some talks about ethereal stuff about the website and just talk to anyone in the community that wants to come ask questions and yeah mostly I think godfall in that yeah I'm going to continue my uh the pathless playthrough I meant to play some more today and I wasn't able to but uh yeah we'll look out for that if you want to watch that um I had some sound issues with the first two episodes so I think I have that all fixed up now so look forward to that and uh before we go I will say we were talking about numbers earlier and how you often see stuff that isn't actually there your your your brain just kind of misinterprets it I passed this sign at work at least once a week for about a year in this town and it said 3.14 will divide and I thought it was a sign advertising pie I'm like why the fuck does this podunk ass town have this signed advertising pie in the middle of fucking nowhere they had a lot that was 3.14 acres large and they were willing to divide it to sell it or some random sign just you know pie just why not let's say 3.14 we'll divide you divide I thought this was gonna start with another one of your like crazy conspiracy theory no it's just me being stupid actually that was me being too smart for what I was looking at anyway that is gonna be it for internet either this week thanks for joining us thanks for hanging out leave your comments down in the comments below of course anyway this is a man gives a jelly he's signing off you guys have a good one uh greatest sign-off ever you stick them comments up your ass you take them comments and put them wherever the comments go man goes


Hello and welcome to this session in which we will discuss the purpose of an audit and how does the audit reduce something we call information risk.  Let's assume as a loan officer, well your choice whether to grant the loan or not relies on how well the company is doing in the past. You can't see the future just we can't if you see the future that's a great. So you have to rely on their financial statements that's presented to you whether you should give the loan or not and what interest rate you need to provide and when you're determining the interest rate while you would look at the risk-free rate you would say okay well if I need to lend the government I will charge the government five percent the government is risk-free. So I'm going to start with this I'm going to add to this interest rate the customer business risk. What's the customer business risk? How risky is that customer in terms of how well are they doing within their industry? How well they are doing against the competition? How resilient are they to a recession? Well giving these factors I might add a few percentage point on the risk-free rate. So I would say maybe five percent is the risk-free rate and their business risk is equal to eight percent therefore together I'm going to charge them 13 percent. So based on risk-free rate and their business risk you will charge 13 percent but there's a third risk and that risk is called information risk. What is the information risk? The information risk is the risk that the information you are relying on is incorrect so simply put remember you are relying on the financial statement to be to to looking at their past performance to predict the future. How about if those statements themselves are unreliable they are they cannot be relied on that's another information risk and if the information risk is high you may either say you know what I am not going to give you the loan or I'm going to add maybe another seven percent to that 13 percent and I'm going to charge you 20 percent. So you have to compensate for that information risk now how can we reduce information risk? What are the reasons for information risk and how can we reduce the information risk? This is what we will discuss in this session starting with the causes of information risk. Before we proceed any further I have a public announcement about my company farhatlectures.com. Farhat accounting lectures is a supplemental educational tool that's going to help you with your CPA exam preparation as well as your accounting courses. My CPA material is aligned with your CPA review course such as Becker, Roger, Wiley, Gleam, Miles. My accounting courses are aligned with your accounting courses broken down by chapter and topics. My resources consist of lectures, multiple choice questions, true-false questions as well as exercises. Go ahead start your free trial today. There are four reasons why we have information risks. We have to kind of establish that we live in a complex society and the four reasons are the distance information which is the remoteness of information, the provider bias and motivation, three is data overload, four is complex transactions. Now if you know anything about farhat and every time I have a list of items I'm going to go over each item separately to basically explain how does each one of these factors cause lead to what we call the information risk. They're pretty self-explanatory but it's worth looking at each one separately. First one is distant sources. What does that mean? It means in a global economy you're going to be might be investing in a company that's in Asia or in Africa or in the Middle East. So you have to make a decision whether you should invest or not. What do you rely on? You rely on information provided by others unless you can travel over there and go and physically inspect the company, look at how well they are doing, inspect it yourself, otherwise you have to rely on information provided. Well that's the case. That's going to increase the risk of intentional or unintentional misinformation. So there is a distance between you and the company.  Well since you cannot visit the company you rely on the report and a case in point is a company called Wirecard. Maybe you heard of it, maybe not. It's a German fintech. It's similar to PayPal. Obviously they went bust. What they did, they claimed that they were growing by buying more companies in Asia. They're building offices, buying companies in Asia and they were reporting on customers that that customer did not exist for them, did not exist. They were not their actual customers. So what happened to this company? It went bankrupt. But people that invested in this company, they relied on the auditors. They relied on someone else. Also another reason for information risk is provider biases and motivation. Whoever's giving you this information, let's assume you're the bank. Well they have a bias. That bias could be deliberate or simply put optimism. All they can skew the data causing some misrepresentation. For example, a borrower might tweak the financial statements to improve their loan chances. Altering numbers or emitting details, fudging earnings to manipulate the stock. It could take any form. A case in point you're going to be learning in this audit course or in your audit course about a company called Enron. Now the sad part about Enron, which is really not a badge of honor for auditors, is the fraud was committed with the help of the auditor, with the help of Arthur Anderson. So they employed various accounting loopholes, something called Special Purpose Entity. I talk about in details in my advanced accounting course and what they did, they took advantage of those loopholes to do what? To fudge the numbers, to hide billions of dollars in debt. And this is what happened to Enron. So notice here, even with the presence of an auditor, we still committed fraud. The provider, Enron, did not give accurate information for the investors and many people were harmed. Another reason for information risk is data overload. So as the company grows, their transaction grows as well. And this surge could do what? Hightening the risk of inaccuracies. Why? Because you have a lot of transaction. Some incorrect transaction might sneak in into the record without being overlooked. For example, a company might overcompensate a vendor by $2,000 an error, and that error might go unnoticed unless you do what? You have some sort of an internal control system that's going to stop these errors from happening. Another reason for information risk is complex or exchanges or transaction. The complexity of transactions is growing over time because of the use of technology, like a cryptocurrency, blockchain, options, so on and so forth. Also, in a merger, when you have a merger, well, that's going to present its own complex accounting challenges. For example, how do you determine the fair value of assets, the fair value of liabilities? A lot of estimates and judgments go on taking place. That's considered complex transaction, especially in mergers and acquisitions. Also, if you are dealing with financial instrument derivatives, how do you value, correct valuation of these accounts becomes very complex? Therefore, information risk goes up. So how do you reduce information risk? You ask a trusted auditor, a competent, independent, trusted auditor. Again, not Arthur Anderson. That's the exception. We're talking about the norm. The norm is an audit will reduce information risk. So users commonly rely on an independent, competent auditor for trustworthy information. And this is the importance of you as a future CPA, future auditor, that the financial market, the economy is relying on your judgment. Therefore, you have to take your job very seriously. It's not your job. It's your career. It's your mission. Because public and private companies hire auditors to vouch for their financial reliability, their financial statements, because they want to raise money, either by borrowing money or selling stocks or bringing more investors on board. So external stakeholders like stockholders, lenders view the auditor's report as a credibility marker. And this is what we have to be. We cannot be Arthur Anderson. That's not what you should be thinking about. This is the exception. The reason we talk about one rule is to look at the exception. There is one Arthur Anderson and millions of other cases where the auditor helps. But we have to learn from companies like Arthur Anderson. So decision makers trust this information for its assumed accuracy and value the auditor's impartial expertise. So you'll have, you are to be going into a profession that has a lot of integrity.  Find something else to do because you are going to tarnish the image, the reputation of our profession. Let's take a look at a multiple choice questions from far hat lectures. A correct relationship exists between the auditor, the client and the external users when what? Well, let's take a look at the options and see what that relationship, how do we draw this relationship? Well, the clients provide capital to the external users. Not at all. The client don't provide capital to the external users. The client, the client, it means the company that's being audited provides financial information to the users to make a decision. Therefore, A is out. That's not the correct relationship. The external users can depend on the auditor's report to reduce information risk. I would say yes, we have the external users and we have the auditor and we have the client. And the external users like the creditors and shareholders, they do depend on the auditor's report. B looks like a good candidate, but we don't want to jump the gun yet. Let's go to C. An independent auditor is hired by the audit committee of a private company. Well, yes, but that's not the relationship between auditor, client and external users. This is the relationship between the company and the, which is the audit committee and the independent auditor. There's no client involved here. An independent auditor is hired by management of a public company. The independent auditor, this is incorrect, is hired by the audit committee. That's also incorrect and see it's incorrect because it does not include the client as part of this picture. So, B, the external users depend on the auditor's report to reduce information risk that's coming from the client. So, the answer will be B as in void. What should you do now? Go to far hat lectures, look at additional MCQs through false, that's going to help you in your auditing course. Invest in yourself, invest in your career. Accounting and auditing is a rewarding field. Good luck, study hard and have integrity.


I'm a roughly designer at GitHub. I would call myself roughly designer because I've actually been writing Ruby for about six years and that's kind of how I got to start designing was building things and I wanted it to look pretty. If you want to find me on the internet, my handle is pretty much cane-eath everywhere on Twitter, on GitHub, Flickr, anywhere you want to look. That's what you'll find. My blog is WarpSpire and if you want to look at these slides afterwards I'll post them up and they'll be able to be here shortly after. So I want to start off a little bit about what's important in life, right? My favorite beer. What is my favorite beer? And I tried to think about this a little bit. Dogfish, 90-minute, I think is an amazing beer. I love giving you guys a cup of beer. The 120-minute is also awesome but I cannot drink that lightly. I just had a couple of those and I'm pretty much done with the 90-minute. But what I thought about it, I don't know, I love Firestone Double Barrel Ale. I don't know if any of you guys have had that before but it's a pretty delicious, amber-ish ale. This is kind of what I grew up on. This is the first good beer I had, I think, in college when I decided to actually pay more than 30 cents for a beer. But, you know, I can kind of always go for a black-view porter. I discovered this through my PBX friends a few years ago and I love it. In Sierra Nevada, Sierra Nevada is always there, right? It's a pretty much every bar, delicious pale ale, great thing. But, luckily for me, I don't have to choose. I work at a company where we have a four-tap kiggerator and a custom green octa-ket top. So, I'm kind of lucky like that. I guess I like that. Also, I like to pull on the snow bit. I decided to learn how to snowboard this year and I've been going up to Heavenly all the time. So, I think that's pretty much my talk, I think. So, if I'm a designer, what am I doing at Ruby Conference, right? That doesn't really make a lot of sense, I don't think. But the truth is, developers actually end up designing a lot of things, even if they don't think they are. Stuff like their documentation for RubyGems, things like admin sections for websites, mini-apps and side projects, things that maybe your designer doesn't have time to help with or maybe you're just doing it by yourself. The truth is that you actually end up doing a lot of design. But that's actually not a really good point in that, I don't think. More importantly, designers versus developers is a false separation. It's really a spectrum. You cannot be a developer or a designer. You just kind of lie somewhere in between and you have skills that are better at different ends of it. Hello, there we go. And in the end of the day, design is just as important as tech. It's all about the end product. It doesn't matter if you have an amazing technology infrastructure, if the design doesn't look good and your users don't enjoy it. So I don't really think that you should want to be a better designer. A lot of people talk about designers who can't code are worthless, but how often do you hear developers who can't design are worthless? You don't hear that enough. And I don't want to insult you or anything, but it's the same exact thing. When you say designers can't code and they're worthless, you might be thinking about yourself and be like, maybe I'm a developer who can't design. So you should want to be a better designer. It's going to help you build better end products. So now I want to talk a little bit about how I got into the design field. I guess how I became what everybody wants to call a designer. I just wanted to build websites. I was in seventh grade and I thought Workout 2 was pretty much the most amazing thing on the planet. And I wanted to share this with the whole world. And websites were pretty awesome ways to do that. And so I wanted to build websites. And how do I do that? Steal everything. A few sources of great way, trying to look at designs. I just blatantly rip off everything. I don't recommend that for your work stuff, but it's a great way to learn, right? You just start stealing stuff and eventually you build up the skills that you need to become a better designer. And as I was stealing stuff, I realized that good design is really just kind of a collection of hacks. Maybe it's the way that my mind was working. And that's why I want to call it like design hacks for the pragmatic minded. Because I'm a very pragmatic minded individual. I like simple rules that I can build on top of each other and apply it all of the time. And that's kind of what I want to talk about. So what this talk is not about, it is not design theory, anything I learned in school, or really organized or coherent. This is just what it is. It's going to be a collection of hacks, right? Some tips to polish your designs, some quick things to make it look better. And a couple design strategies to hopefully give you a better understanding of where I'm thinking about when I'm designing websites. So let's start about type. And what I mean by type is fonts, the way the text is laid out and everywhere. Good typography really is 90% what you aren't doing. Stop trying to be fancy. I think that trying to be fancy is the enemy of most developers when they're trying to make good typography. Classic fonts go long, long ways, right? Alvetica, Ariel, Times New Roman, Georgia, Monaco and Korea, those six fonts right there. You can make amazing interfaces with this. Some of my favorite design websites on the internet today use just these fonts. So don't try to be too fancy just because you have this awesome font somewhere that you can use through Typekit or something. Maybe you don't have to use it. Start off with something simple and build from there. Instead of using different fonts, a good thing that I like doing is playing with the font weights and styles. And what I mean, styles, I mean italicized, underlined, borders around it, things like that. It's easy and less risky. So here's a little piece that I like from Twitter.com, this little section, tweets containing, I don't like the functionality, but I like the design of it. And what this really does is it's all Alvetica, it's all one font right here. It gives a lighter weight font for the beginning of the setting and a bold and just regular. So if you just mix and match different weights, it's very easy to get a coherent design and not that risky at all. Here's another thing, increase line height to improve readability. Standard line height is the distance between the lines of text. So the distance between the bottom of weird GitHub and the top of you probably know. By default, browsers use a pretty compacted line height. And if you just increase it, it makes things a lot easier to view. So you can see as it switched back, when you increase the line height, you increase the space between. It's not that noticeable on the slide because there's actually a little bit of text and the font size is huge. But when you start talking about smaller font sizes and longer line lengths, it really starts helping out. Here's another awesome thing. It's a tool called a baseline grid. And it's a great tool to align your type. I don't think you should be super obsessive about it, but it's a great tool. What is it? You line out a vertical grid. So I have a vertical grid here of 50 pixels. And you choose font sizes that fit within it, hopefully. So if you use font sizes of 100 pixels and 50 pixels, you're going to be able to spread things out really easily. But you're not mandated to do it. The idea is that you line up the baselines of the text to one of those grids everywhere. And if you do that with images and tables and borders, you get a really nice vertical rhythm to your designs. It's very easy to layout pragmatically. So now I want to talk a little bit about color. Color, of course, is a great way to highlight content to make things stand out to make people look at things. It's also a great way to set expectations, right? When you see this text here, you see the blue text of GitHub Trump. You're probably going to want to click on it. And that's of years and years of learned behavior that you see blue links on the Internet. Probably mean you can click on it. But you can do this a lot more through apps, too, by using specific colors to denote specific actions or specific functionality. So it's a great way to teach users what something might be. But using colors just for the sake of color can be actually pretty distracting and harmful. I like the colors here. That's pretty awesome. And so what I think is a great tool to do this is start your designs in grayscale. Make everything grayscale, build it out, and add color later. What that does is it kind of forces you to really think about why you're using color rather than I should probably just add some red to this design. And that's a great tool, I think. I do this a lot. I'm probably guilty about staying on the grayscale sky a little bit too much, but I guess that's kind of a personal choice at that point. A lot of people, when they try to use color, they use a color background and then they start putting gray text and gray borders around it. This is a super pet peeve of mine. I don't know if it's going to work out too well on this projector, but I guess we'll see. Add some of the background hue to the text and the borders around things. It really is a great small touch. And what it does is it makes it feel like you're using a darker version of the color rather than gray.  I should reduce the contrast and they take black to gray rather than black to a grayish blue. So try that out on your designs or borders, text. It really helps out, I think. If you ever play around with Photoshop or something, you wonder why your grayness looks so draft right? Everybody, it should be pretty easy. I just go in here and click gradient. And I see all these awesome designs on the internet and they're like very vibrant. But why does my stuff look so drafty? The secret is something called a color mode, right? A blend mode. So blend modes choose how to apply one layer on top of another. So if you start with one layer of a black to white gradient and below it you have blue, you can use something. This is an overlay blend mode. And it makes the color really vibrant. So if you look here, it's kind of drabby. If you go back here, it's pretty vibrant and kind of light. And here's another example is color burn. It makes it even more like a rich color. So try out different blend modes when you're creating gradients. I think you'll find out that you're going to be able to keep a lot more vibrant colors and a lot more livelyness to your design. In the end of the day, what I'm trying to say is that adding black or white as a staple opacity to colors actually desaturates them. When you want to make them darker, you want to add black. You also want to saturate it and make it a little bit more richer. When you're adding white, you don't want to wash it out. You want to make sure that you're creating a lighter version of the color. So that's a great way to play with gradients and make them a lot nicer looking. So cheating with stock icons and images. I think a lot of people are afraid to use stock icons and images. They think they're like cheap or a coward's way out that is not true at all. Stock icons are awesome. First off, the cells are hilarious, right? Great way to spice up the wording. I don't know if you know this, but single women love laughing alone in their cell. It's pretty sweet. Just check out the restaurant websites. You'll see what I'm talking about. Seriously, OptiCat is a great example. OptiCat was something that Tom Press would have found on iStock Photo because he wanted to spice up the 404 page. As it turns out, OptiCat has become a huge part of the GitHub brand. We have OptiCat stickers, OptiCat shirts. We've modified him.  But he started off as a little stock illustration that Tom was looking to make his web page a little bit better. Another thing is icon sets.  You can use them in buttons. You can scale them up and use them as backgrounds, use them as infographics. They're so, so useful. I highly recommend getting one. As far as how cheap, Bitfoss is a great example. 648 icons. They come in PNG and vector formats, which means that you can scale them as big or as small as you want. They actually have some available as a font-face compatible font. You can use them without using actual images, which is also awesome. 240 dollars. Think about how much you get paid and think about how much that might be useful to you. Think that you might be able to use an icon set for hundreds of projects. I bought my Metacons maybe a year and a half ago, and I'm still using them. It's a really good value. I highly recommend getting it. It'll make things look a lot nicer, a lot easier without having to think, oh, should I make a little icon that I'm going to draw and Photoshop and it's probably going to suck.  If you're not a great photographer and you're not a super professional photographer, go look at iStop Photo and buy some photos. It's really not that big of a deal. Alright, so as far as a greater design concept, I guess spacing and alignment is one of those things that really makes a design look good, and it's one of the biggest problems I see with things that I would like to call developer design things. I don't know if you don't think about it or if you're not aware of what's going on, but it's really something that bothers me. Your text is really trying for padding. I see this all the time. It goes right up to the edges of your containers. All you have to do here is bring the text in a little bit. But on the other hand, a lot of people kind of go crazy with the padding. They put too much in and they never know how much padding you use. So a great tool that I like to use when in doubt, wow, can you see anything there? That's crazy. Is to use equal padding on the left on the sides and on the top and the bottom, and make sure that the padding equals the margin equals the plot size. It's a great way to make things generally look good, and you don't have to try too hard. Is black on black considered good stuff? Yes, definitely. You saw the important parts of it. So grids are awesome. I don't know if you guys know too much about what grid is, but a lot of people think it's vertical and horizontal. That's kind of weird because on the web, when people are talking about grids, they're generally talking about just horizontal alignment, so just having vertical grid lines and aligning it that way. It's a lot like designing your, creating designs with Legos, right? Legos was really easy to make things that were awesome and symmetrical. The reason was that things only snapped into place in certain parts, like having a pixel unit who have maybe a 30 pixel unit with set gaps in between in between elements, and it's a great way to just kind of like selectively build stuff and make it look very professional and aligned without much effort at all. Speaking of alignment, please, just align things. I don't even know how to say this. Alignment is not hard. It's not a special skill. It just takes effort. Lines line up. Okay, line them up. There you go. Not that hard. Please, think about it. Look at your stuff. If it's off by 5 pixels and like on the jagged edge, that's just going to, it drives me insane. So, another overarching kind of like design concept I'd like to talk about is something called visual hierarchy. And visual hierarchy sounds really fancy, but really it's all about boxes within boxes. What I mean by that is that related elements should be grouped together. So, here's an example thing. We have a little user box that might appear in the top of your website. You have the, you have the user's avatar over here, their name, maybe some points that they've earned, and some links to the stuff. And why this is good visual hierarchy right here is that if you look at this block, the octaket avatar really owns this block. It kind of starts it off and anchors it. So, you should think that everything within this block is going to descend from that idea of what is anchoring it visually. And if you look at it, these links to the block are only relevant to Scottacat, right? No one else is. No one else can, those links don't apply to anyone else on the website. They're specifically for him. And always think about what owns the box, right? What if you, you see this extra space and go you know what, I'm going to put a site search here. But it doesn't belong, right? That's not owned by Scottacat. This is something that's owned by the site. So that's what I mean by think about what owns the box and make sure that related elements are grouped together. And again, UI design is really about a series of boxes within boxes. And I don't mean actual boxes. I don't mean squares. I mean boxed elements visually. And that's really what visual hierarchy is all about. So, here's a website Tumblr. I don't know how many of you guys use it. But I'm going to show you a little bit about what, how they use visual hierarchy here. So, if you look at this top header right here, we have the logo which really anchors that top box that I'm talking about. And these global actions here, so dashboard, explore goodies and account are all like different sections of the Tumblr website that you can go to. So they're really like global links that anchor there. And if you look at this next box, really this whole column right here is owned by the activity stream, which means other things that people are posting and things that you're posting as well. And that's really what you want to think about. Everything in that column should be owned by the activity stream. And so, if you take it one more down, one more box down, you see that this is a post by Pi here. And it's really owned by this avatar here. You have this post on the right, and if you hovered over this avatar you'd actually get functions to follow unfollow, things like that. And if you go one more, you'll see within the box there are actually post specific actions. You probably can't read that text, but it's a reply blog, and then an icon to like it and an icon to respond with a photo. But those are also post specific. They're not related to Pi. They're not followed Pi. They are actually specific to the box. And that's because the post owns that box. So some tools to, some like general concepts to make sure that your visual hierarchy is good on your pages. Write out an outline of your UI elements. This is how I start most of my designs really, is opening up my moleskin and writing down things like this. I'm going to write down header. What is the header going to have? It's going to have logo, global navigation user box. And then another section might be the dashboard below it that I'm going to do. And it's going to have this activity stream and this repository list within those, it's going to have all these new elements. Why I like this, it really forces you to group related elements together. So when you're writing something down as a tree list, it only makes sense to group related elements together. Whereas if you're giving a giant monitor campus to design something, it's really easy to group unrelated things together. And each of these trees is going to represent one of those visual boxes when you're done. So you can take out dashboard and everything under that should be in a containing box somewhere. And everything under activity stream, my friends actions and my actions should be within that box. So maybe you have tabs for my friends actions and my actions. Make sure those tabs are within the box of the dashboard somewhere or within the box of the activity stream. I see this a lot people use global navigation as tabs for content that is only a part of the page and it's kind of really annoying. But if you write it out as a tree, it kind of forces you to think where should this stuff be grouped together. Another tool that I like is something called the Squish Test. And what the Squish Test is, is you take a screenshot of your design or a cut from Photoshop or something and you shrink it down. And when you shrink it down, you really get to force yourself to look at the elements and how the group together, rather than being able to read pieces of text. And the point is that you're going to obscure details here and see how the design kind of fits together. So maybe you have a thousand pixel wide screenshot. You squish it down to 400 pixels and kind of look at it, see if it makes sense and it's a good, it's a really good reality check on things. And it also helps you see things like call to actions and can you actually, is that really what is anchoring the page visually, the thing that I want it to be? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but this is a great pragmatic way to do that. So now I want to talk a little bit about how to improve your presentations, which is a pretty big pet peeve of mine coming to a lot of tech conferences. And so increase your font size. I cannot go over this enough. You cannot have a font that is too big on a slide. Make it bigger. If it doesn't stretch to the edges, you're probably doing something wrong here. Well, in the lines of that, 80 characters is great for a text editor. Terrible for slides, seriously. If you have 80 characters, you're doing something terribly, terribly wrong. Way too many. So Truncate Strings, do you know that Ruby Code doesn't have to be accurate in slides? How about that? It's pretty crazy. MRI is not embedded into keynote. You can make Ruby wrong and that's fine. You can tell people your syntax is going to be a little bit wrong for the sake of shortening things. That's great. But sometimes you do have a big block of code and you kind of have to go through it.  It's very overwhelming visually and mentally to think about what this is doing. And how do you fix stuff like that? Step through one line at a time. So Truncate things on the top of the bottom. And just go through one line at a time. This is a lot easier to describe things and help people remember how it works. So maybe you start off with a slide like this and say, you know what, don't worry about it. I'm going to step through line by line. And then you start there and go through. Think about it, it's really not that hard. Some simple rules as far as like code goes. I think 40 characters wide is pretty much, it's pretty good goal. I don't think you should ever go past like 60 or so and make the font and about four lines of code vertically. If you have a lot of lines of code it's not just about whether people can read it on the screen. A lot of it has to do with mental overhead. People are listening to what you're saying, trying to parse what you're saying and they're trying to read code at the same time. They're probably going to fail somewhere. So if you only have about four lines of code that's a pretty easy thing to keep in your head. Create the font size as big as it will fit. You don't have to have the same size font on each and every slide. So if you have shorter code examples make it bigger just because it's going to be better. Always bigger fonts. And remedy over correctness. So like I was saying, there's no Ruby interpreter in Keynote, there's no reason it has to be syntactically correct. You just have to show people the idea of the Ruby that you're doing. And that's really important. So this is, right? Yeah, contrast. Contrast is awesome. Make sure your slides have good contrast. Do they look sleek? Increase the contrast, seriously. You don't want to do web design here. Web design is really geared towards people looking at monitors. Projectors are going to mess up things. You've already seen how crazy things are. This one's stretching stuff out wide. There's a little bit of red in there. It's kind of awesome. But you want to make sure that people can always read the main text or the main idea of what you're doing.   They'll either wash things out or not project it up. After you've done that, add a 75% black overlay to your slides and see if you can read what's going on. And what that's going to do is that it's really easy to see contrast on monitors, but not on projectors.  So now maybe here's a collection of stuff, but really not. How do you become a better designer? And this is something that's kind of weird for me because I never went to school for design. I never had any official classes, so I just kind of learned things by myself. Like I said, steal everything. Try to recreate a button in Photoshop. And then try and recreate it in CSS. Try to create like an OSX style button. And see how the gradients are layered, how the highlights work, what styles they have on their text. And by going through these examples, it really forces you to learn how people create designs. And the more you steal, the more you understand the general concepts and hacks that you can collect together. Try to build a website from a screenshot. So take a screenshot of it and try and rebuild it. See if you can actually recreate the visual styles yourself. Side projects. I'm a huge fan of side projects. Whether it's your blog, a gem, maybe a gem's documentation page, but have side projects. The great thing is you can constantly redesign them. So when I was really trying to become a better designer, I'd probably design my blog about somewhere on average about 10 times a year, right? I'd redesign it. And who cares? It's my blog. I get to do what I want. That's the glory of side projects. It's really no risk and it's a great way to experiment and learn. Practice, practice, practice. You're not going to become a better designer overnight. It's not something you can read a book and be a professional ad. You just got to try and do it every day. So that's it. AutoCAD stickers work awesome on Snow. Any questions? Yes. So you talked a bit about color. You didn't talk about accessibility or dealing with people who are color blind. And this is a bit of a hobby horse I like to ride. I know there's some good tools on Max in particular, I don't know about other classrooms, for viewing designs as if you were color blind. Do you ever do that? Do you pay attention to that? Is that something that you would talk about? So one of those tools that I was talking about to start with grayscale and add color later, that's a great way to kind of sidestep that issue. The way that people are color blind is that they see different cues and an orange and a green might look actually the same color. But when you start with grayscale, you force yourself to design with a contrast, maybe a lighter gray and a darker gray. And if you have a light green and a dark orange and somebody who is color blind to that, they're actually going to see the difference between that still because you're going to have different lightness in things. So that's another advantage of starting with grayscale and adding color later. This might be a weird question, but I'll pick to us, does the license follow the person that's live? As you go through projects, do you use different sizes? Yeah, generally, most icon sets and stocks up is a per person usage. Definitely read the licenses and see what you're doing, but the icon sets in particular are generally geared towards freelance designers, and so they're very much like, share between projects but do not distribute them themselves. Yes? I'm going to take the opposite perspective of my friend here, Josh, and ask you about color on the other side, which is, have you ever read anything by Donald Muth about the use of color in information theory? Probably not. You really ought to because I think you did a lot of that. Excellent. And everyone else did. Can you repeat this? Repeat what he was asking. He was saying that Donald Muth read a lot about the idea of color theory and use of color in information. Use of color and information, and it's a good resource to read about how, I guess, I'm assuming how people react to color in design. Use last spot, use it. Yes. Yes. Can you talk a little bit about any hints or tips you have as far as using progressive disclosure to reveal sort of depths of information? Because I noticed Github has done a couple of interesting things with that. Like, you know, clicking on source files and having that sort of slide in from the right. Just curious if that plays a role. Do you mean like, I guess there's two different ideas of progressive disclosure to me. A lot of them is like hiding elements and like collapsing them, and then expanding them later. Or are you, I'm not sure. I would just say any sort of element in the page that reveals other information that you don't see initially. Gotcha. The good tool of that is using kind of first run things. So I don't know if you've used the Github file finder, but the first time you use it there's a little banner that shows up that explains what it is. And then you can click X and it never shows again. That's a really good tool I think for application design is showing little tool tips and over help people in the beginning and then allow them to hide it forever and ever again. In general I like to over dispose at first because people will expand things by default and make them collapse at the first time and then maybe subsequent things or collapse. But if you show things at first it forces people to see what it is and it's a lot easier mentally to collapse something because you want it to go away than to expand something that you don't know of their stuff below it. You spoke briefly about font leaf and font style and the client language in a way to your style of body. What do you think the role of tech shadow is? It really depends I guess on the visual style of what you're doing. Can you repeat? Yes, he was asking what the role of tech shadow plays inside of making things easier to read and such. A really good example is using white text on top of a darkish gradient background button. If you use that it's actually kind of hard to read but it turns out if you add a text shadow which is actually negative so it's going up into the left and it's hard it kind of gives this idea that it's chiseled into the button and the end result is that it actually makes it much easier to read and by the same vein you can use a dark tech shadow on top of the light button to actually make the text easier to read. But you want to make sure a lot of people use tech shadow and it ends up just making it blurry. If you're just using this really light gray tech shadow on a white background with black text it's just going to make things blurrier so as far as making it easier to read I say just look at it and try it out. I've heard a lot of people recently will style key tags with this light tech shadow to make it feel like a different font even though it's not and sometimes they can see through it but it's a little too blurry. Yeah definitely. Just be careful with that stuff I guess. Cool. Alright well thank you guys.


UNAIDS and SARC law signed a historic MOU in Bangkok relating to legal issues connected with HIV and AIDS affected community. MOU was signed by Hamid Batra and Steve Krause. Speaking to the media Hemant Batra said this MOU is special, as for the first time an association of the legal communities of the South Asian countries is partnering with a UN body. Both Steve Krause regional director and Aids and Hemant Batra secretary-general SARC law expressed their optimism and jointly working towards the objectives of UNAIDS in the South Asian region. South Asian association for regional cooperation in law is an association of the legal communities of the South Asian countries comprising judges, lawyers, academicians, law teachers and others. SARC law is duly registered with the SARC secretariat at Kathmandu and awarded the status of a regional apex body of SARC. It owes its origin to the desire of the legal community to establish an association within the SARC region to disseminate information and to promote an understanding of the concerns for development. Thank you.