Windows Weekly 375 (Transcript)

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Leo Laporte: This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley.  Episode 375, recorded August 13th, 2014

Use Your Selfie Stick

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It’s time for Windows weekly the show that covers Microsoft and all its various multi various incarnations on the net.  Joining us as always Mary Jo Foley from allaboutmicrosoft.com.  It’s great to have you Mary Jo.  Paul Thurrott told us last week that he was going to be jaunting around Spain so we brought in a ringer. 

Mary Jo Foley: We did.

Daniel Rubino: Found me on the street.

Leo: Glad to have Daniel Rubino back from Windows Phone central.  wpcentral.com.  Nice to see you again Daniel.

Daniel: Pleasure, it’s always fun to be with you guys on this lovely day here.

Leo: Welcome. 

Daniel: Thank you.

Leo: Where are you located? 

Daniel: I am now in Marlboro, Massachusetts.  About 20 minutes from where Paul normally resides. 

Leo: That’s funny.  Hey he’s not home you could go ransack his house.

Daniel: Yeah exactly.

Leo: He’s got like 500 Xbox 360’s. 

Daniel: Just laying around?

Leo: He does.  He has a ton of them.  Looks like we are going to have a light show today.  So if you are in the chatroom, we will have a chance for you to ask questions.  Don’t ask them now because I am not going to be writing stuff down.  But we’ll let you know.  But before we do anything else let’s talk about Windows Phone.  Actually we were talking at the beginning of the show about my 1520 which is not yet updated to a Cyan.  But that’s because I followed Paul’s instructions and I joined the developer preview.  We thought at the time that if you were in the developer preview you’d get treated like everyone else when the update came out. 

Daniel: There are sometimes unforeseen bugs that happen. 

Mary Jo: Don’t count on it.

Leo: So am I going to get Cyan?  This is an unlocked, it’s not carrier locked.  So it’s not like T Mobile which I am using as a carrier is getting in the way.  Or are they?

Daniel: No, no, it’s nothing to do with T-Mobile.  This is just the bug with the bitlocker issue.  What I presume what is going to happen is, Microsoft will fix this.  How that fix will happen is they are going to do another update for preview.  There is usually about 2 or 3 or even 4.  We’ve had 4 for the last 8.1.  They’ll do another update for this probably in a week or 2.  Then you’ll get that update and then what I assume is going to happen.  You’re going to get that update, the phone will reboot and then it automatically checks again for if there is anything else there.  Because sometimes there’s multiple one.  If your phone is qualified for Lumia Cyan at that point it will ping the server and find it and download it.  Then you will get the new Cyan.

Leo: I did get the system update last week.  But you say there is going to be another.  What is the bitlocker problem?  Have we talked about that Mary Jo?  I remember if we’ve talked about that?

Mary Jo: Yeah, I think we were trying to figure out why people who were on the preview couldn’t get it and it was kind of some conflicting information if it was about bitlocker.  Microsoft hasn’t really laid this all out clearly I don’t feel like.  But you guys on WPcentral have been all over this and providing regular updates which has been great.  I think they are advising people now if you really need to get Cyan right away undo the preview and then you can get it possibly if your carrier is ready to send it on to you.

Leo: Should I really care?

Mary Jo: I’m on Verizon I don’t have it yet.  I am actually not running the Dev Preview on my main phone so I would know if it were here.  There are things I want in Cyan but I’m willing to wait. 

Leo: Next to Lumia black it has a little info button.  I click the info button it says get ready for the smartest personal phone yet get Windows Phone 8.1 now.  This is on Nokia’s site.  Then it does say I can get the Cyan update.  But is this that process I have to do that.

Daniel: Yeah probably have to roll it back.  Which actually it’s a really easy process.

Leo: Maybe I should do that?

Daniel: The only thing is, it’s a little time consuming.  Not that you actually have to do much.  What you can do is back up the phone, save it to the cloud basically and then you’re going to roll back the OS.  You plug it in and let it roll the OS backwards.  Then you go and check for an update and then you’ll see Lumia Cyan and all that and it pulls that down.  Then you can hard reset the phone and it’s going to be like brand new Welcome to Windows.  As you login, it will ask you if you want to restore from a backup and you’ll actually pull down that backup yes or no.  Then you’ll restore and that could take some time depending on how much stuff you have and if you used a MicroSD card but that’s basically it.  Then you can actually go back to Update 1, go back to the preview program and do that if you wanted to.  Then you’ll have everything.  I did that on my 1520, one of them.  It worked perfectly but you’ll lose any game saves.  That’s basically about it. 

Leo: Unless you want to get those game saves.  Because we don’t know how long it’s going to take Microsoft to fix this bitlocker issue.  They haven’t said anything.

Daniel: No but I’m not expecting it to be too long.  I think what they are waiting for is they didn’t want to hold up Update 1 preview for developers for bitlocker.  Which is what they could have done.  So they wanted to push that out right away and now they are going to work on that and get it out there.

Leo: They review on Before you Buy yesterday the Lumia 635 the 99 dollar on.  I was actually quite impressed.  Of course it’s not as big as this and it doesn’t have a great camera like this does but for 99 bucks.  It’s got a nice screen, it’s very fluid.  You guys like it?

Daniel: Yeah it’s a great phone.  It doesn’t replace the 520 but it kind of does in the sense that T-Mobile and AT&T have basically used it to replace that device.  It definitely improves upon the 520 because it has a clear black display.  The display on it is actually really nice.

Leo: A gorgeous display I was really surprised because usually that’s what you give up on a cheap phone.  It’s 720P probably but at that size it doesn’t matter.

Daniel: Yeah the resolution is not impressive but then again like you said at that size.

Leo: Yeah who cares.  It felt good, it felt fluid.  Like you said the dark black, so it’s an Oled display? 

Daniel: Yeah and they used their polizar their dual polizar technology which filters out the light.  So it gives you stronger colors and also works better outside. 

Leo: Nokia makes great hardware.  Microsoft and Nokia makes great hardware.  Everytime I hold it I just have to think this is really nice.  For such a big screen, this is the 1520 I am talking about. 
Daniel: Look at it the green 1520.

Mary Jo: Oh you have the green one!

Leo: It’s not really green. Mary Jo you’re a women what color is that?  Guys go that’s green that ain’t green it’s sea foam.

Mary Jo: Oh sea foam.  You're going to get into the bittersweet shimmer thing aren’t you.   

Leo: Don’t you think that’s more like a sea foam?

Mary Jo: Yeah I mean it’s hard to tell over Skype, I mean is it bright bright green or is it more of a muted green?

Daniel: No it’s florescent green. 

Leo: Let’s see, hold it up again.  It could be teal, it could be mint, someone is saying. 

Daniel: It is Mint.

Leo: Mint is the actual name.

Mary Jo: When I went to the picture on the actual website it looked like fluorescent green.  It looked bright.

Leo: It doesn’t look that bright.

Daniel: No it is.  When I pulled it out of the box especially in daylight it is intense.  I grew up in the 80’s and I remember florescent green being everywhere and so it’s sort of funny to have it back on my phone.  But it’s pretty impressive.

Leo: Oh yeah you’re right if you look on the website, look how green it is compared to the others.  But that’s not what it looks like on Skype.  So I guess that’s a Skype issue maybe.  So now they have green, red, white, yellow and black. 

Daniel: Surprising not orange.  They didn’t make orange for the 1520, I am not sure why. 

Leo: Maybe they still will.

Daniel: Nokia’s argument is that green and orange are the new colors for this year.  So this is why they aren’t using Cyan and yellow as much.  I don’t know they do research.

Leo: It’s so funny.  Mary Jo and I are old enough to remember avocado refrigerators, burnt orange refrigerators.  That was the 70’s very very popular.  Now they look 70’s they really look dated.  So I guess it only makes sense that phones should start to have that fashion, this year’s colors kind of thing.  Why not?  What else is new?  Have we seen all the great new Windows Phone’s we are going to see this year?

Daniel: No and Mary Jo knows some of this too.  Well there’s two things, HTC is expected to launch the HTC1 next week. 

Leo: By the way I use an M8.  Love that hardware that should be a beautiful choice for Windows Phone.

Mary Jo: I am so excited to see this phone.  I love the 8X. 

Leo: If you like the 8X you will love this phone, Mary Jo.

Mary Jo: Yeah, they’re going to launch it in New York next week we think.  They haven’t plainly said that but it’s pretty apparent this is coming next week.

Daniel: Pretty obvious. 

Leo: I think you’ll really like it.  I have an M8 running Android and it is easily the nicest Android phone right now.  I like the front speakers, it’s like why doesn’t everybody do that.  Well I know why because it makes the phone long.  It adds to the size. 
Daniel: All the reports that we have, it’s going to be the exact same device as the Android, there is no compromise.
Leo: Interesting.  How hard do you think that was to port Windows Phone onto it?  Like they’re going to use the super 4 megapixel camera and all that? 

Daniel: Yes, it’s got everything.  There’s not going to be any differences really between this and the Android.

Leo: SD card? 

Daniel: Yeah it’s got the SD card.  I think this is going to be a real fascinating case.  Because for the first time, at least for Verizon, customers can go into the store and basically see the exact same phone one running Android and one running Windows Phone 8.1 and there won’t be any difference between the hardware.  You can’t say well this one can do this.  They are going to do the exact same things.  Now the customer has a true choice.  That’s good and bad because I think Windows Phone people have saying that for a long time that the OS stands on it’s own.  If you remove the hardware stuff from the equation it shouldn’t matter.  But you have to be careful what you ask for.  Because I am not necessarily convinced that just because this is like that, that it is going to all of sudden sell gang busters. 

Leo: Well first you have to get the Verizon employees to even mention the Windows Phone version.

Mary Jo: Yep, definitely.  And not disparage it.  When I went in to buy my Icon they were like hey you are like one of 2 people who’s ever bought a Windows Phone in the Verizon store. 

Leo: What’s wrong with you?!

Mary Jo: That is going to be a super interesting test case when you say here’s the identical phone and here’s one with Windows phone and here’s one with Android.  Let’s see.

Leo: I have to say when you put them side by side the Windows Phone does feel more elegant.  I’m an Android guy, I use Android day in and day out.  What do you think Daniel, people have told me that this 1520 feels sluggish.  It’s not it’s a very fast phone.  But when you slide right to launch it has to redraw the screen.  That’s of course an aesthetic decision not a speed decision.  It makes it feel like it’s maybe a little slow.  You know what I am saying.

Daniel:  I would say 2 things to that.  I don’t necessarily disagree with it but I will say with the Lumia Cyan update, what makes Cyan important in this case is it’s basically firmware for the phone.  So it tweeks things like the display, the memory and stuff for the telephone.  And it does make it a little bit faster to use.  So you to get some optimizations there.  When using a developer preview without the proper firmware it’s a little hard to make that solid judgment.  The animation stuff is always a little bit controversial.  IOS7 has this complaint too that is does unnecessary stuff.

Leo: I turn it off. 

Daniel: I think that’s something that they can always work on and tweak.  But it’s also relative.  When you use a Lumia 520 or say the new 635 it’s slower than a quad core 1520.  But if you use it every day by itself you’re totally fine with it.  It’s only when you pick up another phone and compare it directly do you notice it.  Which is why these devices sell well and people actually are really happy with them.  When we’re reviewing phones you don’t get that.  You go Oh my God it feels so  sluggish.  But once you start using it every day it’s relative and it won’t necessarily feel like that. 

Leo: Well now you’ve convinced me I should put Cyan on here.  By showing me it’s advantage.  I am going to do it.  So do you have an article on Windows Phone central about doing this?

Daniel: Yeah, we have the tutorial and I also did an article specifically on the 1520 and what Cyan does for it and listed all the changes.  Because there is actually quite a few including now it can record Adobe digital 5.1 for video.

Which is actually really cool.

Leo: That’s really big.  Not that I have a surround sound microphone.

Mary Jo: There’s a tool that Leo should use to turn it back, right?  I forget what it’s called.

Leo: Do I have to use that Windows tool or can I do it all on the phone?

Daniel: No you have to use the tool.  Because what it’s going to do is it downloads the actual OS from Nokia’s site and then installs it.  It’s actually between 1 and 3 GB, I believe.  Then it will install it to the phone.  It takes about 15 to 20 minutes to download and then it has to process.  But it’s all automated. 

Leo: Well I have to do it at home, my Windows computers are at home not here.  I can’t do it today.  I know there are a lot of changes in Cyan.  But just making those animations speed up would nice.  There is no way to shut those off, inaccessibility can I turn that off?

Daniel: No, not yet.

Leo: Somebody in the chatroom said there is a reason they slow it down a little bit, they are loading stuff.  So there is stuff going on.  It can’t be just arbitrarily fast. 

Daniel: Right, that’s always the argument for animations.  The animations themselves aren’t slowing down the operating system, it’s there to sort of cover up what the operating system is doing in the background.  Some people talked about this with apps where when you launch an app for the first time you get the logo screen.  People say if you just took that off it would load faster but that’s not actually the case.

Leo: It’s doing something.

Daniel: Exactly. 

Leo: Well I guess I know what my homework is for tonight.

Mary Jo: You needed a project tonight didn’t you?

Leo: Well you don’t have to sit and watch it, it will still do it.  It’s like baking bread you’ve got to let it rise you can go and do something else.

Mary Jo: Exactly. 

Leo: Making beer, a month later it’s done. 

Mary Jo: A watched pot does not boil when you’re making beer. 

Leo: A watched system update does not complete. 

Daniel: It’s true.

Leo: It’s a new saying for the 21st century.  So we are looking for next week in New York City the launch of what we are pretty sure will be the HTC1 running Windows Phone.  That’s exciting.  Epha’s coming up early September.  The Selfie Phone what is that? 

Daniel: Mary Jo you want to talk about that one.

Mary Jo: Yeah this is again something we think is going to happen based on an invitation that Microsoft sent out.  It said join us quote more face time in Berlin, Germany.  Oh I am frozen again. 

Leo: I know and you’re frozen on kind of a funny face which is appropriate for face time.  There we go we’ll restart her video.

Mary Jo: I’m having problems with the whole Skype thing.
Leo: This keeps happening. 

Mary Jo: I know, Alex said he’s going to work with me on it and fix it.  We think it’s the Lumia 730 that’s going to launch at Epha.  I don’t know if that would be considered a “high-end” phone or mid-range phone or what.  But supposedly a 5 megapixel camera that’s front facing.  Based on what rumors we’ve had.

Leo: 5 megapixel front!  Is that the highest resolution front facing camera made? 

Daniel: I believe so right now.  Although a device like the 1M8 also has a 5 megapixel front facing camera.  The difference here though is that the 1M8 is a flagship phone and this is supposed to be a mid.  It’s hard to describe Mary Jo is right on that.  Is it a high end low, an upper range low phone, low end midrange?  I don’t know.  The difference here would be the pricing.  You’re going to get a 5 megapixel front facing camera on a relatively cheap phone probably around 230 dollars off contract.  The idea of course is that this is more geared for younger people.  Who want a selfie phone that’s also not super expensive.  It’s good for a merging markets.

Leo: Yeah poor people take more selfies I think that’s a fact.  I am just kidding.

Daniel: No comment.

Leo: Just because you don’t have the money to buy a flagship phone you shouldn’t be disadvantages in terms of selfies.  More selfies.

Mary Jo: More selfies for everyone. 

Daniel: The new thing with selfies apparently it’s not just enough to sit there and take it with it in front of you like this.  Now they got those, this is big in Asia apparently, where you’ve got the stick.  You harness the phone.

Mary Jo: I saw that, its’ so weird.  It’s like a robot arm and it holds the phone out.

Leo: We’ve used that.  It’s a monopod but not designed to be put on the ground but to be held so you can take a selfie.  Let’s not do that kids.

Daniel: We’re expecting it here in the U.S.  Apparently Sarna just came over now.

Leo: Well I’ve done that for a long time and I’ve seen people do that.  But you’re saying everybody does it in Asia now?

Daniel: Well it’s becoming like more common to see out in public.

Leo: I have one. 

Daniel: So you’re a trendsetter.  I got it 2 years ago or a year and half ago at CES.  It’s the same company that makes these very lightweight mono pods for the poor guys on film crews that have to hold the microphone up out of the camera range.  This same company makes these.  They said we can take these carbon fiber poles and turn them into selfie poles.  So I have one.  The problem is you have to have a special case or something so you can put it on the end of a phone.  That’s neat.  I mean it’s not neat, it’s not anything anybody should do.  It does give you a good result except like any selfie you always have one hand out of the picture.  You look like kind of a weird person. 

Daniel: Yeah that’s kind of the thing.  I don’t even do selfies now just holding my phone.  I always think it’s a little strange.  To carry a stick around and do it!  But I find it fascinating just from the sociological trend thing.  This is becoming the norm. 

Leo: I’ve always felt it’s self involved.  It’s like look at me, look at me.  But really if you look at instagram the most like pictures on instagrams are almost always selfies.  People want to see.  Well if you’re a beautiful person they want to see you.

Daniel: Yeah it helps if you’re good looking. 

Leo: I try not to do too many selfies.  I keep the selfies down to a minimum.  MS, Microsoft keeps it’s feature phones alive.  This is the new low end.  It’s not Asha which is gone?  It’s not Lumia X which is gone. It’s a Windows Phone for how much?

Mary Jo: 25 bucks!

Leo: It’s mostly a feature phone though, there’s no data, right?

Mary Jo: It is.

Daniel: Right, so it’s a feature phone.

Leo: So what could you do?

Daniel: It raises interesting questions. 

Mary Jo: Yeah it does.

Leo: Like who wants this?

Mary Jo: We had thought Microsoft was getting out of feature phones unless they were running Windows Phone.  That was kind of what everybody had assumed after we saw the Satya Nadella memo’s and the Stephen Elop memos.  But if you really go back and dissect what was said I think they said we’re getting out of the S40 and S60 but not necessarily anything else.  This isn’t running Windows Phone.  But it’s a low end phone.  I thought it was interesting they said exactly what they said about the Nokia X when they were talking about this which is this an on ramp to Windows Phone.  So they are using that idea again if you’re going to get people early in developing countries you want them to at least have a phone where they are familiar with some of the Microsoft apps or services.

Leo: This was the advantage of the X phone, get you into the Microsoft ecosystem.  Because you can use One oh no I guess you can’t use One Drive because there’s no data.  So you get a Microsoft account.  No, because what are you logging into.  What services does it get you into?

Mary Jo: What do you get on this phone?

Daniel: I don’t know yet. 

Mary Jo: I don’t know yet, either. 

Daniel: I guess it’s one of those things where long term we could see what Microsoft does with it.  Because there is this on-going question about Windows everywhere. Even the internet of things they are putting Windows into little chips.  All sorts of stuff.  So the day may come where they can actually fit some sort of operating system onto what’s called a feature phone and give you some of those services.  That might not be here right now.  But I am sure this product had already been in the pipeline for a while and they want to just release it.  But we may see this evolve into a more Microsoft Windows thing in the future but just not right now. 

Mary Jo: Yeah we don’t know very much about it yet.  It seems like there is going to be chat obviously and FM radio’s on it.

Leo: Wait a minute, chat via SMS?

Mary Jo: I think?

Leo: Again there’s no data?

Daniel: Probably. 

Mary Jo: Right, not that way.  I’m looking at the screen and it looks like there is a chat icon on the screen, of some sort.  Yeah it’s kind of a mystery at this point.  They just hey we’ve got this thing coming it’s the Nokia 130 and they advertised it as something for the developing world primarily.  Although not exclusively either.  They said for some people here it might be a backup phone for them.

Leo: I think that in a way you could read the tea leaves and say this is Microsoft acknowledging that it’s having a hard time getting a foothold as a flagship phone or highend phonearena.  Of course what’s the big growth market it’s going to be low end phones, feature phones.  Especially aspirational feature phones.  So if you can make 25 dollar phone that kind of looks like it’s a Windows Phone or a smartphone.  There’s a market for that.  It’s not really locking anybody into Microsoft but it’s the psychology of getting them to take the first step towards the smartphone. 

Mary Jo: I agree they don’t want to leave that to Google and Apple.

Leo: Well Apple’s I think it’s very clear has decided it doesn’t care.

Daniel: Yeah not to.

Leo: Doesn’t want to do that. 

Daniel: They don’t like poor people. 

Leo: We don’t care about poor people.  I think Android is doing quite well but it’s not really benefiting Google because it generally doesn’t include Google services right?  It’s just the AOSP fundamental Android stuff.  But it’s free so it’s a good OS.  Does Microsoft give away?  Well I guess it’s all made by Microsoft.  Is there anybody making low end Windows phone’s?  Besides Microsoft?

Mary Jo: Oh yeah.

Leo: Oh yeah we talked about that.  There’s all these weird ones.

Daniel: Carbon and all the new ones in India and China.

Leo: Do they do as they do with Windows itself?  Do they give that away to low end?

Daniel: Yeah I believe so, right Mary Jo?

Mary Jo: Yeah the OS is free for everybody on 9 inch or under devices now.

Leo: Even Windows phone OS?

Mary Jo: Yep, even the phone.

Leo: See that’s smart I think.  It’s like my first Sony.  Remember that?  My first Windows Phone, my first smartphone.  Why not get them to use Microsoft phones. 

Mary Jo: This phone, my understanding is that it comes in below the other OEM’s phones that we’re talking about.  Like Wawe.  This is a section of the market that’s not address by those OEM’s right now. 

Leo: I think this makes sense.  A marketing strategy. 

Mary Jo: Still it’s caught everybody by surprise.  Everybody was really surprised when they announced that this week.

Daniel: They were probably just like, it’s almost done, let’s get it out.

Leo: There was a time where they killed Asha immediately.  That was the Nokia feature phone.  And Zambia they killed immediately or when did they end them?

Mary Jo: No that was when they announced all the layoffs. 

Leo: Oh okay so it was a few weeks ago.  The X at the same time the Android Windows phone was dead.  So that makes sense.  The timeline makes sense. 

Daniel: This is their strategy, they are trying to push down technology so getting back to Epha real quickly although I expect to be the 730 if you look at the actual invitation or announcement.  The O actually looks like a camera for the Lumia 830.  Which is another phone.  So my guess is, Nokia but now they’re gone.  Nokia and not Microsoft traditionally when they do these announcements always do 2 phones.  So they did the 1520 and the 1320.  The 920 and the 820.  The 720 and the 520.  All those were coannounced, my guess is they will do the 730 and the 830 as well.  So the 830 was supposedly described as an affordable high end phone.  The rumors of it having a 20 megapixel pureview camera.  I am not really sure on the megapixel aspect but it will be a pureview.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 20.  But that makes it interesting because the Lumia 820 the device it’s replacing doesn’t have pureview it has a carl's ice lense on there.  Pureview was always Nokia’s high end premium for 920’s and the 9X series and higher.  So now they are pushing pureview down to the 800 series.  As that technology becomes more affordable they are going to keep doing that with what they can.  This idea is of course to trickle down all that technology to the most affordable phones so you can compete with companies, with Android specifically. 

Leo: So nice to have Daniel Rubino on.  I guess Paul does too, he certainly focuses a lot on Windows Phone. 

Daniel: Yeah we all have our deal.  Fortunately or unfortunately I just do phones.  Although we are doing more and more stuff as Microsoft blends everything together. 

Mary Jo: We are waiting for Hadoop central.  I’m waiting for that one.

Leo: Not going to happen. 

Mary Jo: Never say never, guys. 

Leo: You know there’s a lot of big data stuff out there.  A lot of it, I don’t think you could feel too left behind.  Horton hears a Hadoop.  We are going to take a break.  Daniel Robeeno is here from WPcentral.com.  Of course Mary Jo Foley as always.  Paul Thurrott is touring around Spain on vacation, he will be back next week.  Our show today brought to you by our good friends at shutterstock.com.  Best place to go for royalty free high quality stock photo’s, illustrations, vectors, even video clips.  They add about a quarter of million new images every week.  I always like to look and see, at the bottom they show you.  40,559,566 images on there right now.  They added 274,000 this week.  Most of those images are from professional photographers and artists.  They review each image individually for content and quality.  So you’re always going to find great images here at Shutterstock.  What good would it be to have all those images, 40 million images if you didn’t have a great search.  The Shutterstock search blows me away.  So you can narrow it down as you choose between photo’s, vectors, illustrations, footage and even music.  Let’s see what should I enter today?  You can put in nouns like tree and you will get a lot of pictures of trees as you might imagine.  But then you can narrow it down.  You can add emotions, I want a happy tree.  I don’t know of any other site that will let you find happy trees.  They have a tree that’s actually smiling.  Happy people under a tree.  Then you can get even more granular if you want.  Refine your search even more.  You can say what orientation, horizontal or verticle.  What category, you can exclude keywords, you can a contributer that you like.  You can say only images with people.  So let’s say tree images that have people.  In fact let’s say tree images with both men and women, children, boys and girls, and the ethnicity.  You can narrow it down by ethnicity, by how many people.  I want to have have 2 people, 2 children and a tree that’s happy.  Oh and I can even use their color wheel to say what color the predominate color of the image should be.  Do you think I’ve narrowed it down too much?  Nope, here’s trees with kids.  Wow there’s that image I was looking for.  Now when you buy an image, I want to remind you to use our offer code windows 814 you’ll get 20% off.  20% off when you use the offer code windows 814.  I love this, 2 kids sitting in a tree.  Now what’s great, this is for bloggers, for anybody who’s creating content for the web.  You’re always looking for inspiration.  In fact I was just thinking there was a blogpost I just read apple and orange sitting in a tree.  I think here we go I’ve got the image for that blog post.  That’s what so great about Shutterstock.  Sophisticated search tools.  If you haven’t got a Shutterstock account create one.  It doesn’t cost you anything, you don’t need to give them a credit card.  When you create an account you’ll have an advantage because you can save images to the light box.  This is a nice feature that Shutterstock has.  Save it to a lightbox then you can share it with clients, colleagues, friends, save it for later use.  Multilingual customer service, they are in a dozen countries worldwide and full time customer support throughout the week.  It means shutterstock’s great for everyone.  The Ipad app if you haven’t seen it, is spectacular.  It might be award winning.  Actually they have it on Android now too.  shutterstock.com, try it today, sign up for your free account, no credit card needed.  Just start an account and start using shutterstock for inspiration, for fun.  Once you decide to purchase and image use the offer code windows 814 and new accounts will get 20% off any image.  They also have subscriptions and image packages.  shutterstock.com  when you buy an image use the offer code windows814.  For August 2014. 

Daniel Rubino is here, Mary Jo Foley, we’re talking Microsoft Windows.  We’ve been talking a lot about Windows Phone.  Update 1 has been out now for a couple of weeks.  More and more people are getting it. We’re learning more and more about it.  What else is in Windows phone that we haven’t talked about? 

Mary Jo: This was kind of a crazy one, that I heard rumor about and then I found out that it was true.  One of the things that Microsoft is introducing with Windows Phone 8.1 update is the ability for OEM’s to take that and put it on devices up to 7 inches and onto devices that don’t have a phone in them. 

Leo: Oh interesting. 

Mary Jo: Right.  Up until now it was not legal and really not technically feasible to put Windows Phone OS on a tablet.  But as of this release it is.  I am going to be super curious if any of their OEM’s do this. 

Leo: You know why this is interesting.  This back up the contention you and Paul have been making for months now.  That RT is essentially going to be replaced by Windows Phone.

Mary Jo: Pretty much, they claim.  Well I shouldn’t say they claim anything because they haven’t haven’t talked about what they are going to do with Threshold.  But from what we’ve heard and from what our sources have claimed.  We have heard they are going to somehow munge together the Windows RT and Windows Phone OS and make this thing that will run on both.  But I have a feeling and I’ve always thought it would be more Windows Phone that it would be Windows RT.  Although I can’t prove that. 

Leo:  How do we feel about that?  I think that’s good.  I like Windows Phone.  You can’t run Office on it right?  Is that the big deal about Windows RT?  Can you?

Daniel: I’ve heard things about a new Office coming to Windows Phone.

Leo: Will Gemini be Windows Phone compatible? 

Daniel: I think it’s related to the touch apps, yeah.  Go on Mary Jo you probably know more.

Mary Jo: What I’ve heard so far is they are building this thing we’ve called Gemini which are the touch first apps for Windows.  So there is going to be Word, Excel, Powerpoint, a new version of One Note and probably Outlook as well. 

Leo: That would be Surface compatible? 

Mary Jo: Yeah right.  So that would work on ARM, anything based on ARM including phone because of the way things are going with universal apps so that they would take this CORE that they build and make the new apps for Windows Phone.  Basically the same app that is running on the ARM chip on tablets.

Leo: Do you think that’s why Gemini is late?

Mary Jo: No. 

Leo: Thanks for poopooing my idea.

Mary Jo: No I think it’s more of a case of, the Office team even though it’s a pretty big team they have to pick priorities.  I think because of the new cross platform missive at Microsoft they are putting more of those people on Android right now which sounds crazy when you think it’s Microsoft.  But they’re going to try and get Office on  Android tablets done before they get Gemini on Windows Tablets done. 

Leo: Okay.

Daniel: It’s always a tough thing for people to understand.  Because you look at Microsoft you just think moneybags.  They have 100,000 employees but everything does get prioritised and it’s odd to hear but they do have to go through and say we are going to do this first and then do this.  Unfortunately some of Microsoft’s own product line’s take sort of a back seat  to that.  That annoys people but it’s just the realities of software development.  We see it on Windows Phone itself where for the longest time people wanted them to redo podcast the podcast app.  They finally did with 8.1.  It was always on the roadmap but it was just that they had other things they needed to do first.  So it’s just sort of the reality.  With this Windows Phone and the Office stuff, it’s interesting because it’s going back with this idea of taking stuff out of the core OS and making an updateable app that can be dynamically changed.  Because right now as far as I know you can’t update Office on the phone unless you do the whole operating system.  But like Xbox music, Xbox video, podcast and all this other stuff they are pulling it out of OS so they can work on it dynamically.  

Mary Jo: I’m sure they have to wait or have decided to wait for Threshold for Gemini too.  Because what’s the point of coming out with the Touch First apps running on the current operating System if you’re going to change the entire operating system next spring.  That doesn’t make sense.

Leo: Really?  You would hold up Office for an operating system? 

Mary Jo: Yeah because a lot of people especially corporations when they do deployments they want to deploy both at the same time.  So they want to have Windows 9 and Gemini.  If they can just touch the machine once it would be better.

Leo: Oh that makes sense.  Do it all at once.  Does this mean the end of the line for RT?  Can we call it?

Mary Jo: You choked me up on that one.

Daniel: I like RT but honestly consumers have sort of spoken on it.  I think conceptually it was not a bad idea but the naming scheme was not executed well.  Everybody mentions this, if the RT tablets didn’t even have desktop access it would have been a lot clearer message.  But I think if Microsoft can reduce their operating systems from Windows 8 and just have Windows Phone version that could basically run on tablets.  Just have those 2, I think that makes it a lot easier message to send to users.

Mary Jo: I think question I have foremost in my mind is what happens to people who are running Windows RT right now when Threshold comes out?  Because you would assume there is going to be a way to upgrade but if it’s a different operating system I don’t know how that will work.

Daniel: Yeah I am not sure how they would do that.  That’s not an update now.  Now you’re talking about flashing and getting into the Bio’s.  That’s certainly a lot trickier. 

Leo: What about developers who wrote for RT? What happens to them?

Mary Jo: Yeah that’s the other question too.  Microsoft’s been kind of taking a gradual process for developers where they’ve been taking them in baby steps towards this idea of One Windows and Universal apps.  So I hope they’ve thought this through and there is some way they can move apps over and move people over from an OS perspective.  I mean my assumption is you’re going to be able to do it, I just don’t know technically how you would do it. 

Daniel: Thresholds going to be really, really interesting.  I am really curious to see how that all comes together because there are rumors.  Their goal is they want developers to write an app for Xbox, Windows PC, Tablets and Phones and then they handle all the slight changes for different screens on their end after a developer submits the app.   That is their goal.  It’s just weird because I was thinking about this the other day.  Mary Jo you might know was it in 2010 where 3 screens and a cloud, Ballmer said that.  Here we are, it looks like it’s finally getting there.  I don’t think anybody said it would be like 5 years.  But then again it’s such a huge project  that who know how all the details of things have changed.

Leo: It’s interesting that people credit Satya Nadella with this but really it started with Ballmer back 5 years ago.  Mary Jo: It did.

Leo: Then was there a break or is it just that’s how long it took?

Mary Jo: I think as things changed and priorities changed and ideas changed of how this would be achieved that they’ve kind of had to do some resetting.  A couple people on Twitter are pointing out something that we should say.  Windows RT is not WINRT.  Universal apps are WINRT. 

Leo: Thank you Microsoft for making that clear as mud. 

Mary Jo: Yeah, just to keep that really clear. 
Leo: Windows RT which is runtime and there’s Windows RT which means it doesn’t have any meaning. 

Mary Jo: It kind of still means runtime. 

Daniel: It’s insane.

Mary Jo: Yeah that was a crazy naming thing.  When people write to the WINRT framework like you’re doing now that framework is going to continue.  So maybe that’s good enough as far as how things will carry over to the new operating system.  I don’t know enough technically to say that will automatically will solve everything or won’t.  I don’t know.

Daniel: Yeah it gets really confusing fast.  Especially with the stores merging.  I would like to see the Windows Phone stuff up to 7 inch devices.  I think that’s a market there for really affordable tablets.  The question is price.  The idea of a Surface RT is actually not bad.  Consumers have spoken, they’re okay technically with tablets that are limited to tablet things.  But you have to have the price right and you have to have the message clear.  With RT the problem is you go into that desktop and you’re like oh I’ve got actual Windows on this and then you can’t install stuff.  To explain to people X86 and ARM, even I get confused on that stuff.  So I am not sure how a consumer is supposed to do it.  This price of the RT for Surface was just a little bit high for what it could do.  I say that as someone, I have a Surface II with LTE, I absolutely adore it.  I think it’s an amazing device but it’s not something that they had a clear message on and they really needed to figure out. 

Mary Jo: I think just from the few leaks we’ve had so far about Threshold.  A lot of things are going to change.  Hopefully the things we haven’t got leaks about which are things like naming, pricing and positioning.  Hopefully those are going to change too.  To make things a lot clearer for people buying new machines. 

Leo: So let’s talk about Threshold.  Have we learned more and new and wonderful things? 

Mary Jo: There was a new rumor this week that was kind of interesting about Threshold.  Neil Winn had a story saying that Microsoft is looking increasingly likely to include Cortana of an integrated piece of Windows Threshold.  Which would be pretty interesting if they end up doing this because there’s been rumors for a while that Microsoft’s ultimate plan was to integrate Cortana not just on Windows Phone but on Windows and Xbox.  Right into the operating system.  Neil Winn says there are internal test builds at Microsoft right now that have Cortana integrated into Windows Threshold.   This is another thing that Steve Ballmer talked about I remember back in 2011 he was saying how cool would it be if you could say to your Windows PC print my boarding pass for Southwest and it would know what that meant.  So we’re starting to get there.  If this does come to pass. It will probably be very rudimentary at the beginning what you can say to Cortana on Windows and what it can know how to do.  But it will be definitely a start towards them taking advantage of the machine learning and the Bing capabilities that are built into the OS and harnessing them so that you could ask Cortana to do things on your PC just like you can now on Windows Phone.  It would be pretty cool.

Daniel: Yeah absolutely.  Markowitz Ash who leads the Cortana team there for Windows Phone has spoken about this.  Because Cortana is only as good as the data it collects.  So the more it sees.  Everything is linked to your Microsoft account so the more data it can collect on what you’re doing, I don’t mean spying per say but apps you’re running, your interests, all those kinds of things the smarter it can get.  So they stand to gain a lot by putting Cortana everywhere because it’s going to be much more powerful.  This is the reason they are doing India and China as the Alpha program is there for rolling it out the early access stuff.  The more data they collect on how people are talking to it and using it the more they can refine it.  I think it’s just obvious that Cortana is just too powerful to limit to the phone.  You look at Kinect and Xbox it’s like designed basically for some kind of voice assist.  It already does the passive listening so why not do that the extra step.  It’s also a lot of work.

Leo: Do you think users are scared of passive listening? 

Daniel: I don’t know, it’s an odd technology.

Leo: Some are.

Daniel: Sure.  It’s almost one of those things where the term passive listening I don’t think in the normal culture, I mean regular people, I don’t think they know what that means. 

Leo: But I think when you say to somebody oh by the way Kinect is always listening for your commands.  That scares them, I don’t think it should.  I don’t think it’s sending everything you’re saying back to Microsoft, it’s processing it locally.  I hear from people who are scared by it.  I just wonder if that becomes generally available on Windows 8 if that’s not going to make people nervous.  Certainly Google is doing the same thing with Chrome.  It’s always listening now.  My phone is always listening.  It didn’t happen to me, but when they had Aaron Paul, Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad in their Xbox 1 ad saying Xbox turn on.  I think actually he said turn off, was it turn off or turn on?  People said it’s responding to Jesse Pinkman and that bothered them.

Daniel: They have to walk a fine line.  It’s the same thing with Xbox 1 development.  Everyone wants them to open it up to developers to make apps for and I agree.  But with the Kinect system they have to be very careful that the API is written in such a way that people can’t hack it.  All you need is one story of someone releasing Malware that will go out and take advantage of your Kinect and they’re done.  That’s going to be like all over the place.  So they have to be careful about how that technology is used.  The funny thing of course is if you are worried about government spying they could do it now without passive listening. 

Leo: Just turn on the Mic is what you’re saying? 

Daniel: Yeah, exactly.  They already can do that stuff. 

Leo: Someone said Microsoft did the first hack with Jesse Pinkman saying launch Titan fall.  The TV takes off Titan Fall launches. Hey I was watching that. 

Daniel:  This is always a tradeoff though between technology.  Same thing with biometrics.  We don’t like the idea of a computer scanning your face and recognizing you.  We hate typing in passwords, fingerprints on IOS.  All that stuff is convenient but there’s that tradeoff with security.  So how do you get around that stuff.

Leo: I guess my thinking on it is, Google Now for me is the poster child for this.  Google Now works because Google has been collecting information about you for so long.  Goes through your email, looks for boarding passes and all kinds of stuff.  And yet it’s so valuable I think people who experience the value of Google Now don’t really worry about it as much as people who just hear about it abstractly.  So in my opinion if the technology is useful and works people are going to accept it much more than if it’s just a proof of concept.  Right now voice commands aren’t that useful in any context.  On the phone, on my Xbox.  I use Xbox pause all the time to get up to pee and then I use Xbox play.  But it’s not so useful that you go well I can live with whatever potential risk there is.  It has to be really useful before people are going to have that feeling.  Otherwise they are going to go, no I don’t want it because what do I get, I get nothing.  So why take that risk. 

Mary Jo: Yeah I totally agree.  You have to see it in action and see how it benefits you.  Recently on my phone I signed up to take a trip somewhere and I got my airline ticket sent to me and then suddenly Cortana said do you want me to track the flight you’re taking to Toronto.  At first you’re kind of like wait how did she know that, like I didn’t tell her that.  Then you’re like well this is actually helpful, I want her to track that.  Now I am saying her.

Leo: Yeah no that’s good.  From Microsoft’s point of view. 

Daniel: Yeah they refer to it as her.

Mary Jo: I’ve been saying it.  I know I’ve been saying it but now I guess I have changed.

Leo: She’s got a female voice. 

Mary Jo: She does.

Leo: Wait a minute now they’ve got Cortana in China and Britain, I think it’s not a female voice in some countries.

Daniel: I wonder what the gender of the voice is in China, that’s a good question. 

Leo: Is it in England too?

Daniel:  In the UK it is. 

Leo: Is it female in UK?

Daniel: In UK it’s female. 

Leo: I think Ceri is a man in the UK for some reason.  I think it should be a woman.  Do you agree Mary Jo?  Maybe that’s just because I’m a guy.

Mary Jo: Yeah, I’ve never really thought about it.  I guess I trust women to keep track of details more than I trust guys. 

Leo: The headsup systems on jet fighters I’ve always been told this may be a urban legend.  The one that says if you’re in a stall Pull up has always been a female voice and the Air Force says that’s because men tend to listen to female voices better than male voices.  But then that’s all the Pilots are men the question is does it work for Women as well?  So apparently it does.

Daniel: All these questions with how you do that stuff, the Cortana team is dealing with right now.  It’s one of those things we take for granted.  Back in the day before I did all this stuff I was doing a PHD in linguistics.  So all I did was language.

Leo: So you know about this stuff.

Daniel: We used to do research on gisting and how people summarize.

Leo: What’s it called, gisting?  Like the gist of the matter?

Daniel: Right and it was actually done for NSA and FBI this was post 9/11.  It’s part of their language lab that they have now.  Looking at this stuff in cultural references and how things are perceived it’s a very nuance topic.  I’ve always found it fascinating.  Like in Korea they have honorifics and how they respond to people.  Things that we don’t even have in English.  So the Cortana team is having to face this.  One example they did was calling it a British accent.  As Americans that’s how we say it, oh it’s got a British accent.

Leo: But if you’re in Britain it doesn’t have an accent at all.

Daniel: There’s no such thing as a British accent.  To us it’s funny but when someone in the UK here’s that they almost get offended.  They are like what are you talking about.

Leo: We don’t have an accent what are you talking about.  You have an accent. 

Daniel: Well they say because Ireland, Scotland, even in the England proper has so many dialects.

Leo: Scotts have an accent for sure.  They have an accent.

Daniel: So even how you talk about this stuff.  I don’t mean PC but it’s borderline.

Leo: You have to not be central gross centric or america centric.  You have to realize that people don’t all think the same way.  That’s not PC that’s getting out of your box.  It’s not getting into a box, it’s getting out of your box. 

Daniel: Mary Jo, in China wasn’t it Cortana itself you have the option of it being this circular orb that they work with.  But they also have another version.

Leo: They give it eyes. 

Daniel: Yeah with the eyes because culturally they like to talk to things with eyes.  Actually all human do but apparently in the U.S. we’re a little bit different.

Leo: I can only imagine the difficulty of making a Chinese version of Cortana.  Obviously it has to be done by Chinese people, by native speakers who are very familiar with the culture.  Because otherwise you have all sorts of cultural biases that are completely unknown.  Like things like saying oh that’s a British accent, that’s a cultural bias.  They don’t speak with accent speech any more than we do.  I love it.  I didn’t realize that, did you study semiotics or linguistics? 

Daniel: It was all linguistics theoretical sintacs.

Leo: That’s fascinating. 

Daniel: Brain stuff.

Leo: I love semiotics.  I’ve been fascinated by linguistics since I was a kid.  Just really interesting stuff.

Daniel: Just no money in it.  I guess in hindsight now I probably could have worked for, if I went to machine learning I could have been working with the Cortana people.

Leo: That’s the key, machine learning.  I agree it’s a fascinating subject because we are in a brave new world and you have to understand and solve problems that never existed before.  Things like people’s concerns about having always on Microphone’s for one.  I like that as being part of the operating system we know that Apple is going to do the same thing with Yosemite the next version of OS 10.  This seems to be the predominant direction.  Most phone now are listening at least a little bit. 

Mary Jo: If you believe in the whole one Windows vision.  They’ve got to make these operating systems even more common.  So things you see in phone should be in Windows and they should be in Xbox and viceversa.  It makes a lot of sense that they are going that way. 

Leo: Yeah if you get used to talking to your phone you’re going to expect to talk to your desktop.  Are you?  Don’t we know the difference?  I think we know the difference.

Mary Jo: I don’t know, look at touch.  Microsoft betting on touch being everywhere and it all started from the phone.  They said hey everybody is touching phone, now everybody wants to touch everything so why not make it part of your laptops and your desktops.

Leo: But in fact that was a flop.

Mary Jo: I wouldn’t say it was a flop.  I would say they might have been too early. 

Daniel: Right, that’s my take on Windows 8 in general.  Nothing was necessarily wrong with 8.  It was just too forward thinking and it was too radical of a change for people.  That’s an interesting problem to have because now it looks like when they are going back and trying to ease people back in.  It looks like they are undoing what they did.  But they aren’t really, they are just saying alright we went too forward.  I like touch on a laptop.  I think if you use tablets it makes sense.  I think they still need to solve the fingerprint issue because that does get very annoying after a while when you look at your screen.  My computer that I’m using right now is a 27 inch Dell all in one.  And it’s a giant touch screen. 

Leo: Nice, and yeah a giant fingerprint magnet. 

Daniel: I rarely use it as a touch screen but it’s kind of fun to reach out and do that. 

Leo: I think maybe we should question the conventional wisdom that people want the same features across the board.  I think maybe people do know the difference between a desktop and a mobile device and they don’t necessarily want touch on a desktop OS. 

Mary Jo: I think it depends on where you use it too.  Like if you have a big PC like a 21 inch screen. 

Leo: That makes no sense.  Then you’re reaching out.

Mary Jo: In your family room and you’re pointing to something and you want to enlarge it and show them hey here’s a map and you’re using it almost like a demo thing for a group.  I can see that.  But me sitting here with my big screen, no.

Daniel: Yeah Yolo has that.

Leo: Yeah Yolo has a crazy stupid surface table like thing.  We’ve had it and it’s got dice you can throw on it and stuff. You know what one thing that is probably also the case when there is a lot of work put into scenarios where you're using computers in a group situation? People use computers by themselves. It's a solo activity. I don't oftentimes find myself being like, oh hey look at my screen, look at that.

Daniel: Yeah.

Mary Jo: What if you're in a meeting?

Leo: That's the one exception is PowerPoint presentations, sure. But even then, you're looking at that and you're putting it up on a big screen while you control it. I don't know...

Daniel: Yeah, it's a changing landscape.

Mary Jo: It is. And we were just talking about seven inch tablets, right? This is where the lines really start to blur. Should you have Touch on a seven inch tablet?

Leo: Tablets have to have Touch.

Mary Jo: Yeah but then you've got Surface. Surface is kind of a hybrid device, which has a keyboard and is it a tablet? Microsoft says it's a tablet but is it actually a PC?

Leo: The jury is still out. Microsoft might be going upstream on this. This kind of hybrid thing, I think if there is a problem with Windows 8, it's this attempt to hybridize and to mush together tablet and desktop. I don't think they're the same thing. And I think users don't want them mushed together so that hurts the Surface.

Mary Jo: Some want it, I think.

Leo: It's neither fish nor fowl.

Daniel: I was going to say because I have the Surface Pro 3, and I also have a Dell 15 inch and it's also a ridiculous laptop. It has a Core i7, 16 gigs of RAM and Invidea, it's just got everything under the hood. So the notion that my Surface Pro 3 can compete with that of course, is kind of silly. Having said that, I find the Surface Pro 3 immensely useful. It's so light and thin that I throw it into my day bag and if I just go out for the day visiting friends, I just throw it in and take it because it's so light and it can do what I need to do. If I need to do a story quickly or any sort of work, I can do that right away. Now the question is, basically what I was saying is the device is more of an in-between device for people who can sort of afford it. That's not necessarily a great market but that's how tablets were for a long time too. People couldn't afford a $500 iPad and it seemed like a luxury item but technology always starts off as a luxury item and then it works its way down. So the Surface Pro 3 is hard to justify to someone who has a great laptop and then like a nice 8 inch tablet. It's like, now go buy this $1300 device. But I almost guarantee you if you had this device, you would find a use for it because it's still 1.8 lbs and it's so powerful. It's a great device, it's just not necessarily everything for everybody. And you do get that little bit of a compromise but I think as prices come down and people need to diversify what devices they have, it'll catch on.

Leo: Daniel Rubino filling in for Paul Thurrott on this edition of Windows Weekly from WPcentral.com. Mary Jo Foley is also here, we're going to take a break and come back with lots more. Stay tuned, but first a word from our friends at ShareFile. Citrix Share File is the way in business to share files. I guess it's well-named. I use it all the time, and I'll be using it today to send ads to the various radio stations for my radio show over the weekend. I use it every single week. I've tried all sorts of ways for sending these files, and maybe you have too in business. A lot of business emails have attachments, whether it's a PowerPoint presentation, a document like a contract or PDF. And so number one, we always say don't send attachments, don't open attachments. That's a really big no-no in security terms, even if it's from somebody you know, that's how a lot of viruses are spread, frankly. There's also the issue of those attachments going through the public internet, it's almost like sending a postcard and there are many businesses like the medical industry or financial services where you're not allowed to share files via email attachments, it's illegal! And wouldn't you like to keep control of those files as well? This is all something that Citrix ShareFile offers you. It's the easy-to-use business solution for sending, receiving and sharing files where you're not sending the file as an attachment, you're sending a secure link. It's easy to use for the other end too, they don't have to log in or anything. They just click the button, download it, and it's done. And for the kinds of files I'm sharing to a variety of different kinds of users, ShareFile has been the best solution and I've tried them all. Here's my ShareFile and you'll note, by the way, when you log onto your ShareFile account that it's branded. That's the same thing the person receiving the file sees, they don't see ShareFile, they see your logo and they know where they're getting it from. It's very easy to share a file, in fact you can even set up permissions as I have set up here. So anybody who is on my Permissions list can see when I've updated a folder and so they'll know that without me even having to send out an email, and they can also upload to those folders. It's a really great way of working together with other people when you need to share files with other people. I highly encourage you to try it if you're in business, a small business. There's also a button that says, 'request a file' and that's really nice too. I had a lawyer call me and say I'm a personal injury attorney, I want my clients to send me pictures of the accident. Is there a safe and easy way to do that? ShareFile. You can send them a request, it's easy for them to use. You just drag and drop the file, it's done securely and automatically. I think it's just a great solution. If you're in business and you'd like to try ShareFile, visit sharefile.com and on the page you'll see a link at the top of the page that says, 'podcast listeners' and it's kind of in fine print up here at the top, click that. 'Podcast listeners,' and then use the offer code: WINDOWS. That'd be a big favor for us because then Mary Jo and Paul will get a credit, which is nice. Sharefile.com, click the microphone at the top of the page there, enter WINDOWS as the offer code and you'll get 30 days free. I think if you try this you'll realize why it's better than any other file sharing solution. And a heck of a lot better than doing it by email attachment. It says here that I haven't used it since February. That's just not true, not true at all. I use ShareFile all the time, I will be using it- Oh this is when it was updated or uploaded, when the folder was created, February 2012 but I upload files all the time to sharefile.com. I love it, this is great. I usually have a little widget that will automatically synchronize it. This is the most recent one I sent on July 30th. You just click the link, say 'send this file,' you can do it right from the webpage if you want, get a secure link that they just paste in- It's totally awesome. Sharefile.com from Citrix, try it today and use the offer code: WINDOWS. Mary Jo Foley, Daniel Rubino and we're talking Windows phone, a lot of Windows phone conversation. Daniel is from WindowsPhoneCentral. But let's talk about IE for a moment. Microsoft is going to drop support for what older versions of IE, Mary Jo can you...?

Mary Jo: This is good news-

Leo: It is good news because some of the older versions of IE are not secure at all.

Mary Jo: Right. And so Microsoft announced this week that they're going to be dropping support for many older versions of IE, as of January 12, 2016. So you still have a wait before this happens.

Leo: What's the number that will be supported, and then the rest are through?

Mary Jo: So it depends on which operating system you're running.

Leo: Ah.

Mary Jo: But the one version that goes totally away is IE 8, which a lot of people are still using.

Leo: Well that's the last version you could use on XP.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: And we know that 25% of all Windows users are using XP.

Mary Jo: Exactly. Yep, makes sense. So if you're running Vista SP2, you'll only be able to run IE 9 or above. Windows 7 SP1, IE 11, Windows 8.1, IE 11, Windows Server 2012, IE 10. So they're still going to be supporting a bunch of different versions but the idea is, let's up-level everybody at least to some agreed upon point so that people will then be more current, more secure, and we can do more automatic updating of the browser, knowing that people will be on a certain baseline.

Leo: Now is this like XP where I can keep using it and they just aren't going to update it or are they going to, somehow break it?

Mary Jo: That's a good question, I'm not 100% sure because I didn't write this up. But I'm thinking that they just aren't going to support it anymore.

Leo: So people are still going to be able to use it, right?

Mary Jo: Yeah, they do have this feature in IE 11 called IE Enterprise Mode, which let's you fake out your browser, basically. So that if you're running a site or app that's dependent on IE 8, it can work in IE 11 so that's good for enterprises that have built apps and kind of standardized around IE 8. That kind of gives you an out to move to the latest version. But yeah, this is going to be a big deal but you have a couple of years to prepare, it's not like they're saying, hey next Patch Tuesday no more IE 8, it's not like that you've got until 2016 to get ready for this.

Leo: IE 6 is the one you really want to get rid of. Even Microsoft has created pages saying, Kill IE 6! Don't you feel bad for them, they've actually created something so successful that-

Daniel: They can't get out of it.

Leo: Yeah. -They can't stop people from using it. But it really is IE 6 is 14 years old now I mean...

Mary Jo: Yeah, I'm looking this up now and it says you'll receive no more technical support or security updates for the older versions as of January 12, 2016.

Leo: I guess they can't just make it stop working and even if they could it would probably be ill-advised.

Mary Jo: It would be, yes. And the other thing they're doing around IE that is kind of interesting is they're finally going to block out of date X controls for IE. So this affects Java heavily.

Leo: Wait a minute, ActiveX is still around?

Mary Jo: Oh yeah, ActiveX is still around.

Leo: Do people...

Mary Jo: Yep, people use it.

Leo: Nobody's writing new ActiveX controls are they?

Mary Jo: I can't say for certain.

Daniel: There's one guy.

Leo: Holy cow.

Mary Jo: Yeah so in this Patch Tuesday that just happened on August 12, they actually put the feature in that's going to block the out of date ActiveX controls but they're not going to turn it on to start blocking until September 9th, which is the next Patch Tuesday. And the reason they have that little delay is if you're an IT Pro, you want to make sure everything is up to date, and suddenly a bunch of stuff doesn't stop working so they're giving you at least one more month to make sure you aren't using out of date ActiveX controls anywhere in your shop before they start getting blocked.

Leo: Ed Bott said this is a monumental changer. Colleague Larry Seltzer said but it's not enough. ActiveX is a huge security hole because you're essentially giving a website programmer-level access to your operating system.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: So it's something that really needs to be controlled. This is a start better than nothing.

Mary Jo: It is, a lot of IT people are very happy that this is happening, they're like wow I can't believe it took this long.

Daniel: It's funny because now Microsoft has almost gone in the opposite direction with IE 11, where- At least, I'm part of that crowd that really wants plug-ins for IE 11 because I like using Chrome but I'll definitely say Chrome has it's own performance issues, especially like on laptops. But Microsoft is pretty adamant about doing that and I understand because it's a security issue and they want to prevent that. So IE 11 is considerably locked down, you know, compared to the older stuff.

Leo: A lot of banks, payroll services, business services that use ActiveX, I always know that's the case when they say, sorry but you have to be using IE and you can't use IE 11, you can't use Chrome, and I always- It just sends a chill down my spine. You know? Our payroll service requires older versions of IE and I know why- Because they're using ActiveX and that means they're insecure as far as I'm concerned. It bugs the heck out of me but...

Mary Jo: It's changing. Things are changing. You know when you've got a billion+ users-

Leo: Legacy. It's the number one reason for Windows' success and the number one reason for it's problems. Legacy, it's all about Legacy.

Daniel: Yeah.

Leo: And in the absence of Paul Thurrott Daniel, would you like to be our Xbox One correspondent today?

Daniel: Oh sure. I actually have two Xbox One's.

Leo: I love my Xbox One.

Mary Jo: Yeah, I put this in the show notes.

Leo: Thank you Mary Jo, we thank you. I was a little disappointed because the Destiny Beta, which I was having great fun playing, got turned off.

Daniel: Sure, yeah.

Leo: So I have to wait until the game actually comes out now. Back to Titan Fall. But I use the Xbox One as a media center.

Daniel: That's me too.

Leo: I love it. I love it, it works really well. So they are doing a Call of Duty bundle with a terabyte of storage but no Kinect!

Daniel: Yeah.

Leo: I don't know how I feel about that. Part of the reason it's so good as a media center is because of the Kinect. And the Kinect works dang well, when Michael comes in, it pops up on the screen and says, 'Hello Michael." The weird thing is, to Michael's mom, Lisa, it says, 'Hello Michael' to her too. I think they look enough alike. Isn't that weird?

Daniel: Strange, yeah.

Leo: It knows me. It knows I'm not Michael and it knows Michael is not me. But sometimes Lisa will come in and sit down and it'll say, 'Hello Michael.

Daniel: Kinect is an interesting technology. Once again, I think, a case where Microsoft was ahead of the curve. I mean, we've all seen Minority Report and their time in the future, when computers and things are portrayed it's always like holographic screen and voice and gestures. People like want that stuff but it also has to work well, like we were saying before, it has to be tremendously useful. And the Kinect thing is just, I like it, I'm glad I have it. But I'll be the first to admit that I don't think it has paid back what it was supposed to necessarily do. And you look at that and with that rumored Microsoft cancelling McLaren, their Touch 3D phone, I think they're learning some hard lessons here and there about bringing things to market that are too early for people to actually make use of. From my understanding, that's why McLaren was cancelled, that it was a cool technology where you use 3D Touch on your phone, but when it came to actual usefulness, that was left in question. And so they decided to not put it out yet. You know, maybe down the road as it refines a little bit. But with this Kinect stuff, it's just- You know I understand why they've been putting it to the side a little bit. It's become less important to the experience.

Leo: Are they going to kill it? I mean the price of Kinect was not just developing and shipping Kinect, but that they made their console $100 more than Playstation4. Playstation4 has sold- I just saw the number. -Many, many more units. Like 10 million units. I guess it's because of the price differential, so the cost of Microsoft was high.

Daniel: Right.

Leo: Are they killing it?

Daniel: I don't think so.

Mary Jo: I'm curious to find out what they're going to do because Kinect for Windows, they seem to be putting a lot of investment into and really trying to get developers on board and really playing that up. And Kinect for Xbox, I don't know. I haven't heard about any kind of, here's what we're doing next with that. It doesn't mean they're killing it but there was a Tweet that Tom Warren from The Verge caught from Phil Spencer and it kind of made everybody wonder, is he like backing away from it now? Or like, what's up with this?

Leo: The Tweet was, he blamed it on people stealing his phone.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: What was the Tweet?

Mary Jo: It was something like, you're the Kinect slayer. And he supposedly re-Tweeted that.

Leo: He re-Tweeted, "CVG News. Phil Spencer is here. What a man. Leader. Gaming pioneer. Destroyer of mandatory Kinect. #Hero." He said, someone stole my phone. What?

Mary Jo: Who knows...

Leo: Who steals your phone and then re-Tweets something? That doesn't seem like...

Daniel: It's a subtle nefarious plan.

Leo: Yeah, that's very subtle. Oooh, watch this I'm gonna screw Phil and re-Tweet this. When Dvorak steals my phone he makes the whole thing Russian. He changed it to a non-Western alphabet so I can't figure out how to change it back. That's what you do, just a tip, when you steals someone's phone. You want to do some damage, don't re-Tweet.

Daniel: I think they're de-emphasizing Kinect, at least for now, but I don't see them killing it. Because the technology is good and he invested a lot into it you know, everything-

Leo: You'd be nuts to kill it, it's great.

Daniel: Yeah. I just think they're putting it a little more to the side and de-emphasizing it until things get better as far as development tools or- You know because it's an issue about how do you really integrate it into a game and make it convincing...?

Leo: I work out with my girlfriend, Jillian Michaels every morning.

Daniel: Yeah I was going to say the exercise stuff really is good. I like-

Leo: It actually works. I mean, it measures your heart rate, I mean it knows whether you're working or not, it's incredible.

Daniel: But trying to convince Americans to exercise...

Leo: I just sit on my couch and watch her. My heart rate still goes up, so yeah, it works. These are the new Kinect-less bundles that will be out for the holidays. The sentinel task force Call of Duty version with a terabyte of storage, and then there's going to be a white one right?

Daniel: Yeah, the white one's pretty cool.

Leo: Yeah, I like that. It looks like a Storm Trooper white, and the white controller too. Will this have Kinect?

Daniel: I don't think so...

Mary Jo: No Kinect-

Leo: No Kinect bundle and Sunset Overdrive.

Daniel: That's a fun game.

Leo: Is it, I don't know it.

Daniel: Yeah I played it at E3.

Leo: Is it a driving game? It sounds like driving.

Daniel: No, no it's like a - I'm bad at describing video games. It's like a 3rd person sort of like Tomb Raider but it's in this post-apocalyptic future where some energy drink that people drink turns them into mutants. And so it has a-

Leo: When will a video not be in a post-apocalyptic future? That's what I want to know.

Daniel: But it has a great sense of humor, the graphics are phenomenal and it sort of breaks the fourth wall sometimes. It's very much aware that it is its own sort of... It's a video game. And yeah, it has a bunch of co-op codes and I think it's going to be a bigger hit than Titan Fall will be so we'll see.

Leo: Titan Fall is a little bit of a disappointment.

Daniel: Yeah, I agree.

Leo: This looks fun. I like something with the tongue and cheek. I like Watchdogs. That's a lot of fun, you played that?

Daniel: I haven't played that but yeah, I've heard some decent things about it. I actually like the indie games.

Leo: Hey there's selfie's in those... In Overdrive.

Daniel: Yeah.

Leo: Awesome. Yeah, indie games are a very interesting and- Wait a minute, is that an ad for a soda pop? Oh that's the game with the energy drink.

Daniel: Yeah, yeah.

Leo: Oh dear, he's spewing Orange Crush. Was this based on a comic?

Daniel: No. It actually reminds me very much of Borderlands with the same sort of graphic style that they're doing.

Leo: I can't wait, this looks great! Mary Jo is going, what is wrong with you people? Why would you want to play this game? You know what my favorite game was? Abe's Odyssey and all the Odd World games. They had a sense of humor, and this reminds me a little of that.

Daniel: Yeah, this has got some really great stuff in it and it's one of the few games that I'm really looking forward to.

Mary Jo: They announced a ton of games though this week, right?

Leo: Did they, for Xbox?

Mary Jo: Oh yeah.

Daniel: Yeah.

Leo: Finally! I don't think I could play Rise or Assassin's Creed much longer.

Daniel: Anymore? Yeah. Have you tried Guacamale?

Leo: I saw Guacamale. Really? Really? Really? Okay, I'll try it.

Daniel: But the graphics are great on it. It's free too if you have an Xbox Gold.

Leo: I keep seeing the promos and I've resisted. But I did get Crimson Dragon for free because that was nostalgic for me. That was a fun old game.

Daniel: I'm more excited that they're finally getting that Robust Media Player because one of the reasons I still use my 360 is to play video files. Because I throw them on the thumb drive and then throw it onto the Xbox and even on a 360 it was good but it was limited by file formats and what it could actually play. But now, coming to the One, it's supposed to play everything from NKV files to other broad bands codecs.

Leo: Oh that's good.

Daniel: Yeah, the subtle message here is you can play your torrented videos if you decide to download them...

Leo: Piracy is okay. It's okay.

Daniel: So I think that's the reason they didn't do MKV. I think they were very cautious about wading into that stuff but now they-

Leo: Matryoshka format seems to be only used for pirated video you know? I've never seen anything legit using MKG, oddly enough. So I can torrent something, put it on a thumb drive, bring it over to my Xbox, put it into the front and watch it.

Daniel: Yeah, and plus they're going to bring support finally for network drives, which I'm really also excited about. So you don't have to do the thumb drive thing. Just have the Xbox recognize the hard drive.

Leo: Yeah, that's what you need. Plex style client server solution.

Daniel: Exactly.

Leo: Good, good good good. Oh there's a new-

Daniel: They're kidding there. No, everything with the Xbox and the Playstation 2 I think it was, if you're going to ask both companies they'd be like please give us another year to get this stuff out. I don't think anyone wanted to release it now.

Leo: Hardware always comes first because people have to get it and see it selling and then write games for it and all of that stuff. And of course, hardware when it's incompatible with the previous versions, that's a particular challenge.

Daniel: Yeah.

Leo: Sorry Mary Jo.

Mary Jo: Nope. It's all good. It's all good. I knew we had to do some Kinect after all of the news this week and some Xbox would-

Leo: This would be a good time if you are in the chatroom and you have a question, just precede it with my name - Leo and I'll see it and we can get your questions for Daniel Rubino and Mary Jo Foley about Windows phone, Windows, Hadoop, anything you're interested in. Will Xbox One, revX asks, support network attached storage over the network? How's that going to work?

Daniel: Yes.

Leo: Yes? And that'll be in the August update or no, that's coming.

Daniel: No I think it's coming, by the end of the year, it's supposed to come.

Leo: Remember the Fortaleza glasses, GeekUmray asks. Where is Microsoft's wearable solution?

Mary Jo: Good question.

Daniel: I don't have any details on that, Mary Jo might but I wouldn't be surprised if that was axed with everything else.

Mary Jo: I know. I think the first wearable will be that rumored Microsoft FitBit type thing that is supposedly this fall. That is my guess.

Leo: And aren't they doing watches again?

Mary Jo: Yeah, that might be the watch, it might be... Or it might not, we don't know. There might be a watch plus that but that seems to be the new latest rumor as to what the watch is.

Leo: You have an Icon, is that what you're using right now Mary Jo?

Mary Jo: It is. Yeah.

Leo: KidClayton says, should I get the Icon on Verizon or should I should I get- If this next Verizon phone that they might announce next week... I would get the M8 if you can, right?

Mary Jo: I would wait and see so that you can compare.

Leo: I'll tell you one of the biggest differences, because I have the M8 with Android on it, is this 4 megapixel camera. Well... The Icon has a better camera. Yeah, I think the Icon will have a better camera.

Daniel: It really depends on what your priorities are. If you do a lot of photos, I know the Icon will do a lot better. That's not to say that the M8 won't do-

Leo: I get great images on my M8.

Daniel: I think the M8 is good enough and I don't mean that as a slight yeah. I think most people who care about taking images, the M8 would be fine, but if you want the best, you're going to want an Icon. And the same thing with video right? Video recording on the Icon is going to be way better, especially because you've got the optical image stabilization and once it gets Cyan, you could do the Dolby Digital Audio Recording. So for recording and making content I would say the Icon is better, but for if you consume content, the M8 might be better. Because with the M8, you're going to get 32 gigs of storage, micro SD expansion, which is pretty huge. You'll also get that BoomSound for playing audio.

Leo: I think the sound is better on the M8 than anything that is out there right now.

Daniel: Sure, yeah.

Mary Jo: Plus, I would think the M8 is going to be thinner. The Icon is not huge but it's hefty. Still kind of hefty.

Daniel: Yeah, it's very square. A very square and blocky device so because of that I don't think it feels as ergonomic as the M8 does, which- I wish Nokia didn't get rid of the curved feeling, like to the 920. So the M8 has that and when you're holding that in your hand- Also the M8 could be slippery too. But I will say the M8 is kind of heavy so Mary Jo-

Leo: It's kind of heavy and kind of long because of those speakers.

Daniel: And there's still that stupid power button on top, which...

Mary Jo: Oh they do, well...

Leo: And you get used to that.

Daniel: Yeah but if you have small hands....

Leo: It's just the wrong spot. I have a problem with the standard placement of the Windows phone power button on the 1520 because I'm a lefty. So I hold the phone and my middle fingers always hit the power button because of where it is. So I don't know if there is a right answer for power button positioning. ChemMalensky wants to know, are you happy about the Microsoft store that is rumored to be coming to the 5th Ave Mary Jo Foley?

Mary Jo: Yes! Oh man, I hope this is true. That would be so awesome. I could walk to it from my house if it's where they're saying.

Leo: The rumor is that it's just a couple of blocks from the iconic Apple 5th Avenue store and I think that makes sense.

Daniel: That's all, yeah...

Leo: Stand up to-

Mary Jo: They want a good spot for their first flagship store in Manhattan.

Daniel: Which is why it's taken so long. Real Estate in Manhattan is not something easy to come by.especially in the prime areas. You basically have to wait for some like borderline thin space to go wonder and like snatch it up. I assume that they had just been waiting for that right location. Yeah because every Microsoft store right now is next to an Apple store. Even up here, I moved to Massachusetts in Natick. There's an Apple store, a store in between, and then there's the Microsoft store. It's great.

Leo: Funny. In our local mall it's right across the hall and it's right there. Look left see Apple store, look right see Microsoft store.

Daniel: I love the Microsoft stores, I go to them all the time.

Leo: They look so similar. Anymore UI leaks on Threshold asks Swebb8721.

Mary Jo: Here's what we know; Mini start menu the windowed apps, the windowed metro style apps in the desktop, the virtual desktops and probable elimination of the Charms panel. Those are all what we know, plus the Cortana. Those are the main leaks that we have so far.

Leo: Are you having battery life issues with your Icon, Mary Jo?

Mary Jo: No, I get pretty good battery life with my Icon.

Leo: So that's a hardware problem with your phone, my friend.

Mary Jo: Although, Twitter really does eat battery life on these phones.

Leo: I think all social media has to be turned to off, have it be pull not push. Because if it's going out and checking Facebook, that's a killer too. Where it will just go out and check the news feed all the time, you won't have any phone left. Kanice wants to know if the Lumia 620 will get to use equalizer over speakers and get the updated displaced lighter with Cyan.

Daniel: Probably not for the equalizer. So this is a fascinating thing that I've heard a lot of complaints on: The higher end Lumia's get a graphic equalizer, which is good for the speaker and headphones, although it doesn't work through Bluetooth. So with Cyan it actually enables it over the speaker, previously the equalizer only worked if you plugged in headphones to it. Now it works through the normal phone speaker, which raises the question of how good that really is that it's still a mono phone speaker. But it's still an interesting thing and what I always hear is like people with a Lumia 520, they don't have a graphic equalizer. And so at least with the 620- I actually don't remember if the 620 has a graphic equalizer but if it does and if it gets Cyan, which it will, then it'll get it over the speaker.

Leo: A couple more, MikeHallsy says hi Mary Jo. Also for the games coming up this fall he likes Elite Dangerous, he says don't overlook that. I don't know anything about that.

Daniel: Yeah, neither do I.

Leo: TousonFoodGuy asks if the Xbox One will support the Xbox 360 Kinect if you buy the Kinect-less Xbox One and I think the answer to that one is no.

Daniel: No...

Leo: I don't believe it will. Let's see, a lot of silly ones here. Let's get some serious ones. There was speculation that Threshold would be free. Is that insane?

Mary Jo: It's still active speculation and I have been asking around about that this week and it's still definitely active speculation that it might be.

Leo: Isn't the business of Microsoft still selling software still, kind of?

Mary Jo: Kind of but you know what, these days I think they're looking at it more like, we're going to make more money in the long-run if we can get people on our Cloud services and our app software like One Note, Office 365, Skype, OneDrive... Those are kind of the potential money-makers at some point and I think they're looking at an OS as, yeah it would be great if it were like the old days and we could really charge people like over $100 per copy to pre-load it on their hardware but we can't.

Leo: Yeah. BallmersGhost asks, what's going on with Midori?

Mary Jo: Oh man, guess what? I''ve been asking around about this too. So Midori is this Operating System that an incubation team has been building inside of Microsoft for a number of years that is built on a micro kernal. It's not Windows-based at all, and I asked around about this fairly recently and that project is still continuing. It's not dead, hasn't been killed. There's still a group of people building Midori. We don't really know when that will come out commercially, if ever or what they're going to use that for - we still don't know.

Leo: Here's one for Daniel. Will there be, on the Windows phone version of the HTC One, will they put BlinkFeed on it? That's something that's on the Android version.

Daniel: It's a safe assumption.

Leo: I don't know why anyone would want it, but okay. Some poeple really like it.

Mary Jo: What is it?

Leo: It's like FlipBoard but it's part of their launcher on Android so it's kind of integrated in. Actually, speaking of that, what about FlipBoard on the Windows phone?

Daniel: Oh yeah, I have no idea why that is, right? That's a good question and I'll have to dig around for it.

Leo: Ya don't know. That's okay, you don't have to know. Web9868 says my workplace is moving from Blackberry to Windows phone over the next two years. Do you guys know if Outlook Notes is fully functional, including editing on the Exchange mail app? That's a pretty specific one, don't know...

Mary Jo: Don't know.

Leo: No idea. Some want to know if they're ever going to sell the Xbox One - Kinect separately. So you could buy the Xbox One without it but later upgrade it. Presumably they're going to do that right, Daniel?

Daniel: I don't see why they wouldn't. But it's probably an issue right now of- There's probably not a huge market for that at this point since they're trying to de-emphasize the Kinect. So I don't think it's something that a lot of people are going to want right away but I imagine at some point when they come back to Kinect and wind up pushing it again that will become relevant. Obviously, I don't want to say trivial thing for them to do, but obviously it's not too hard either.

Leo: I presume it's too early to know, but will Windows Media Center be included in Threshold? It wasn't included in 8, right? But you could download it later.

Mary Jo: I'd be surprised.

Leo: It'd be shocking if they put it back in. Look you got a menu button, let's not push it okay? But they make it like a offer as a download. I think Microsoft wants to stop that and I bet they'll do so as soon as they can. Alright we are going to take a break and come back with the back of the book. Tips, tricks, tools, beer, all of the above. Yes, Daniel didn't know. Our show today brought to you by ziprecruiter.com. This solves a problem anybody who is either looking for a job or looking for talent to fill a position at their company faces. There are more than fifty different job boards out there and which one would you like to use to get the best candidates for that position you'd like to fill? Well ziprecruiter could really solve this. You could post with one submission to all of them, more than 50 job boards. Plus, a lot of the social media sites too like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google automatically. Post once to distribute everywhere and then of course ZipRecruiter does a great job of managing those resume's as the roll in and make it easier for you to screen them, rate them, and then hire the right person fast. They've got a mobile platform so mobile job-seekers could respond Quickly. You can view and share formatted resume's with colleagues, it makes it easier to find the superstars. Screen the candidates the eaasy way with real-world questions. Multiple choice yes or no, free form, your choice. Customize your branding so it looks like your companies job pages. You can even create an instant job page on your site. ZipRecruiter is a great solution, if you're hiring you absolutely have to check it out and we've made it easy. If you go to ziprecruiter.com/windows, you can try it free for 4 days and get an idea of exactly what ZipRecruiter can do for you. Of course, they have a 100% satisfaction guarantee and premium support from real people. Ziprecruiter.com/windows. A quarter of a million businesses use ZipRecruiter, including us. We've been very happy, don't worry about juggling emails and calls to your office. If you're an over-taxed HR person- And who isn't? -You can do this so much faster with ZipRecruiter. Ziprecruiter.com/windows and we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly, try it free right now. Ziprecruiter.com/windows. Paul Thurrott has the week off, he's traipsing around Spain, the lucky guy. But we're lucky too because Daniel Rubino from Windows Phone Central is here to take his place and fill in. I suppose since he won't end up doing the tip we'll let him do some software. How about that? We'll let Mary Jo do our tip.

Mary Jo: Yeah, I actually have a tip if you guys want... Yeah, sure. So this is a tip some people may know but I think it's worth repeating because I know there are a number of people who don't. But if you go to microsoftvirtualacademy.com, there is a ton of IT training on that site for free. All you have to do is give them your Microsoft ID and sign up with that, and you can look up courses by products or topics. It ranges from everything like Sequel Server, System Center, Dynamics to how to write universal apps, hybrid cloud, C#, XAML and they're always adding new content. So I had somebody ask me the other day if we ever talked about it on Windows Weekly and I thought, you know what? It wouldn't be bad to remind people this is out there and it's free. There's a lot of really great stuff. Not just for students, for anybody who just wants to learn something new for their career or whatever. It's just right out there so you can go in there, download it and check it out.

Leo: This is phenomenal.

Mary Jo: It is, right?

Leo: Most of them are video courses but they do have live events and webinars. That's great and it's microsoftvirtualacademy.com and it's free. Look, just by watching the first few seconds I have 7% complete on MDOP. Look at that, I'm an MDOP expert. Hey that's a good tip, thank you Mary Jo. And we're going to let Daniel give us an app of the week.

Daniel: So the big news for today and actually, kind of this week since it's been sort of slow, is Swarm finally available for Windows phone. Yeah, so this was announced, I believe, back in May as coming for iOS and Android and Windows phone was going to be on it's way and now it's here. For those of you who aren't familiar, Swarm is the new service from Foursquare as they continue their track of trying to discover how to make money off of the internet.

Leo: Is Foursquare still available on Windows phone? And was available before but this is what they did, they separated the apps. Swarm is the check-in part.

Daniel: Yeah, it's the check-in thing but it's also meant for meeting up with friends. You can basically see where your friends are based on mileage. Like who's near you right now or who's far away and that kind of stuff. It's for planning with friends, you can send out messages to each other like, hey let's go here and do that. So I think it's definitely trying to steal stuff away from Facebook with how people plan to do things outside, versus just text messaging, as it gives you a check-in ability and they've got stickers. I don't know. The app, itself is interesting on Windows phone because you could tell that it wasn't finished completely, there were just some bugs with it. And then Foursquare is going to get a new version later this fall.

Leo: I'm just watching my Foursquare because on the other platforms when you launched Foursquare it would say, oh by the way... Time to get Swarm. Okay I'm going to go to the Windows store and get Swarm because I use it actually, I like it.

Daniel: Okay. Yeah, I'm still kind of new at it but it's a nice looking app at least.

Leo: Are you a Yelp user?

Daniel: I do use Yelp on occasion. That's another interesting example of where technology, I think is- You know, just all of these discovery apps for trying to find places, you know? Like City Lens. It's a neat idea but I always kind of end up going back to Yelp.

Leo: Right.

Daniel: I just like the way it's organized.

Leo: That's what I find is people are either Foursquare users or they're Yelp users. And usually there's not a lot of cross-over because you don't want to have to check-in twice every time you get somewhere. It's bad enough you can't talk until you check-in. I'm not seeing Swarm, maybe it's a staged roll-out then. Yeah, it might take a little while for it to populate in the store for the search query. It's literally just a few fours old, so ...

Leo: Good I'll definitely get it. That's great.  So that's our App of the Week, we move on to Mary Jo Foley with our Enterprise pick of the week.

Mary Jo: Enterprise pick of the Week is something that Microsoft released in late July but was kind of underneath the radar screen. It's called EMET 5.0,  which stands for the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, that's a mouthful. And this thing is a free tool for people who want to better protect themselves against cyber-attacks and Microsoft is always revving this tool, updating the core a bit, and this version- The 5.0 version, which you can get from the Microsoft download center adds two new Mitigations: A tax surface reduction an export address table filtering plus, also known as EAF+ for acronym lovers. So all you have to do in order to get this is go to Microsoft downloads, type in EMET 5 and you can download it and start using this to start helping you better defend against cyber-attacks.

Leo: EMET!!! Help me EMET! Well I have my work cut out for me tonight. I'm going to wpcentral.com and will be taking the step-by-step to get my phone to Cyan, dammit. If I have a backup check so I don't have to do a separate one, right?

Daniel: Well it does backup automatically but you can actually force it to back up like right now.

Leo: I should do that just in case. See this is why we love having Daniel on, Daniel Rubino wpcentral.com @Daniel_Rubino on the Twitter. Real pleasure having you on from your new home in Natick, Massachusetts.

Daniel: Thanks, it's always a pleasure to be here.

Leo: Mary Jo Foley is at allaboutmicrosoft.com, her ZDnet blog where she works constantly to keep us up to date on everything that's going down in Redmond. Thank both of you for being here, Paul Thurrott will be back next week, all refreshed. Good for him. Thank you all for watching. We do this show every Wednesday 11am Pacific, that's 2pm Eastern time, 1800 UTC on live.twit.tv. Watch live if you can, if you cannot we make on demand versions available in audio and video, all you have to do is go to twit.tv/ww, press the button, and within seconds your very own copy will be produced. There are many other ways to watch, of course such as, the podcast app on Windows phone etc,. etc,.. Thanks everybody, we'll see you next time on Windows Weekly!