Windows Weekly 831, Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott here. Richard Campbell's here. Of course, we're gonna do a after action analysis of Microsoft Build. Now that it's over, what, what did it all mean? And what was the highlight? I think we all agree. What was the lowlight? I think we all agree. We'll also talk about new Windows 11 preview builds. And Hall convinces me to go back in the Insiders Program. The reasons why may surprise you all coming up next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love

Speaker 2 (00:00:36):
From people you trust.

Leo Laporte (00:00:39):
This is

Speaker 2 (00:00:40):
Twit.

Leo Laporte (00:00:48):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Throt and Richard Campbell. Episode 831 recorded Wednesday, May 31st, 2023. Skied both and drunk in the Middle. Windows Weekly is brought to you by ACI Learning IT Skills outdate in about 18 months. Stay ahead of the curve and future-proof your business competitiveness with customizable entertaining training. Fill out the form@go.acilearning.com slash twi for more information on a free two week training trial for your team and by Lenovo, orchestrated by the experts at C D W to help transform your organization with Lenovo ThinkPads, equipped with the Intel Evo platform for effortless connectivity and collaboration from anywhere. Learn more at cdw.com/lenovo client.

(00:01:48):
Larry Sanders show. I love the Larry Sanders show. Oh my God. It might be literally the best show I've made. Yeah. Because we're on in two one. Yeah. But they just did a retro from Hollywood. I love that. I guess one of the, the one of the things they used to do to keep it going was they would just start recording. Like, he would just start talking and then everyone else was like, oh crap, we gotta go. Oh, that's cool. And it would just, it would make it seem more Oh, so you mean they actually in the recording would do that. Wow. That's awesome. Good for them. Yep. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft. It worked. No one, no one will ever know why that was great. <Laugh> <laugh>. That's Paul the rot. I cracked them up. Ladies and gentlemen.

(00:02:28):
The rot.com and his books are lean pub.com from Run as radio. It's red flannel guy. Mr. Mr. Rich Campbell. That's hysterical. I put the flannel on today because we're talking Canadian whiskey today and I thought it was legit. Good. He, he's second. He's Okay. We're gonna, we're gonna explain why we're super contrasty today. Why are you super contrasty today? Oh, it looks kinda weird, doesn't it? I don't know the whole thing. The thing I notice is that you part your hair on the left and rich parts it on the right. That's the only thing I notice works, right? Yeah. It's kind of perfect. I've, the reason I'm aware of that, I went to my hairdresser you know, well, hair's, Barbara, whatever, the person who cuts my hair mm-hmm. <Affirmative> Sure. Last week. And I said, do I is my hairstyle fuddy-duddy? Am I, look, do I look like an old man? It's says, no, no, <laugh>, which you mean. Yes. Yeah. So, so, so I said, what can we do different? She said, well, you could part it on the other side. I said, sold <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:24):
I went this wasn't, not the most recent time, but maybe two or three times ago, I went in and she kind of looked at my hair and she said, so where do you, where do you part this? Exactly, <laugh>. And I said, let, lemme help you with that question.

Leo Laporte (00:03:38):
Hobby is,

Paul Thurrott (00:03:39):
Where do you think your part is? <Laugh>? You

Richard Campbell (00:03:44):
Know? No, I'm, I'm, I'm dealing with the hairdresser. Retired and sold her, her, her place. And it was bought by a group of Iraqi men of all things. Oh dear. Sorry. And I went back there and the Iraqi, the Iraqi fellow, cut my hair and he goes, oh, you have very beautiful hair <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:04:00):
In Iraq. That's a, that's a normal

Paul Thurrott (00:04:02):
Guy. No, I used to go to

Leo Laporte (00:04:04):
The men hold hands on the street too, so it's okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:06):
This Asian guy back in Boston, he used to cut my hair and he said, I, he goes, I make you look like Paul Newman. Paul Newman's dead buddy. <Laugh>. Precisely my point. Yeah. Maybe could we pick someone who's alive? <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:04:19):
Hey, hey, hey, we're here. Not to talk about hair. Although as fascinating conversation as that might be, we are here to talk about Microsoft and Windows. And here we are, you know, post build. I like, you know.

Richard Campbell (00:04:34):
Well, I, I know I'm hungover. Yeah. In the midst

Paul Thurrott (00:04:37):
Of one of these. I spent a lot of the weekend looking at videos session videos.

Leo Laporte (00:04:41):
Oh, catching up. Yeah. In the midst of these, I think it's sometimes it's a little hard to assess what we're, what we're seeing. But I always like to do a postmortem, or That's probably a rat bad way to put it. It's not dead. Yay. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:51):
A triage. A triage. If you'll a

Leo Laporte (00:04:53):
Af somebody said, don't call out a postmortem. Call it an after action report.

Richard Campbell (00:04:58):
There you go.

Leo Laporte (00:04:58):
You go. What's the after action report on Build?

Paul Thurrott (00:05:03):
Yeah. I've been interested to see people's different reactions. I, I read Should last week, I think referred to it as one of the best builds in memory. Right. I know.

Richard Campbell (00:05:11):
A long time. Best keynotes. Best keynote.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:12):
Okay.

Richard Campbell (00:05:13):
Yeah. I mean, there's lot, there's, as a conference maker, of course, I have concerns about conferences at all times, but Sure. I use, for me, it was very unusual to have a single themed keynote come outta Microsoft. That's odd for a company that makes hundreds of products to clear, clearly align everything with theme. And some of the product teams I know mm-hmm. <Affirmative> were pushed out of the keynote entirely and said, like, you and not only are not in the keynote, you can't talk about your stuff this week. You have to wait until build is over.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:39):
Yeah. Actually, there was a, there was gonna be a session about the Windows 11 Explorer redo and all the tech that was going on with that. And they quietly dropped right off the, they should all that. All back. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:05:48):
Wow.

Richard Campbell (00:05:49):
I, I would also say the least on time keynotes

Paul Thurrott (00:05:53):
I've ever seen. I know. What the heck was that?

Richard Campbell (00:05:55):
Yeah, I know.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:56):
Strange. So crazy. Yeah. They actually

Leo Laporte (00:05:58):
Thought that was strange day two, because they were a little late on day one. And so I, I, I came in at my leisure and there's Paul sitting there and there's Saja going, or I guess it was it wasn't Sacha, it was it was panel

Paul Thurrott (00:06:10):
Aja. No, well before Panos. The Raja, Raja Rajak,

Leo Laporte (00:06:17):
You know, he has beautiful hair too, by the way. And

Paul Thurrott (00:06:21):
And I thought, oh, that's good. Cuz he can't hear anything I'm saying to stare at his hair. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:06:26):
I like day two. Better than day one. I thought both were very good. I agree. It was a little weird. We, we kind of thought this, and maybe now I'd like to know if you consider it Yeah. The case that Panos kind of got the, the rug pulled out from under him,

Paul Thurrott (00:06:41):
Like he did. He did. Is that confirmed it? You've confirmed it. Okay. Yeah. Two different people. I, based on what I was talking about last week, contacted me. I didn't reach out to anybody. Two different people from Microsoft contacted me about that. But,

Leo Laporte (00:06:53):
And they said essentially that he was gonna do some of the stuff that ended up going into day one and as a result had very little to say in day two. <Laugh>. Is that what Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:03):
But did he not know it was coming? Like why would, why would he just compress his piece? Yeah. It happened last minute and you, you know, how bad would it look if this guy's was on the schedule to do this thing and then did almost nothing? Right. I mean, it would've, you know, I give him some credit for going out Gamely and just doing it, I guess. But you <laugh> as we, as we noted at the time, not great. No, no. But you know what though, it's not a thing to wing. No, no. I, geez. I really like the amount of Windows content at the show. I like that they talked about Windows broadly. There's some stuff coming soon. There's some stuff coming later this year. And then to Richard's point about the all in on AI thing, I mean, I, I don't think I've seen Microsoft line up like this since the internet tidal wave or whatever the Yeah.

(00:07:52):
Basically you've wo awoken a sleeping giant. And can we give kudos to Steven Bati? Oh my God, his 10 minutes are the best. 10 minutes of both days. I think that was his coming out party for a lot of people who didn't know who he was or still maybe don't know who he is. I always knew Ms. Panos demo Monkey, for God's sake. Oh, he was the hard He's the, he's Hinge boy, right? The, the guy that makes all the hardware. Right. <laugh> he, look here, I'll give you a star. So I'm gonna, I, I'll condense this down, but we were at a, a surface event, you know, five years ago or something. Oh, no, I know exactly what it was. It was one that came up in the Surface Book. And surface Book is, you know, has that giant kind of teardrop hole in it.

(00:08:30):
And they talked about Hupo, whatever, and I said, well, aren't you concerned about stuff falling in there and whatever. So I got hit, I pulled, I saw him at the event, I pulled him over, I say, Hey, Stevie. I said, come on, clearly you intend to close the gap on this thing eventually. Like, you, you, this is, you're acting like this is the design. Like you, you know, like you wanted, but really this is the first iteration toward this thing. And he goes, oh yeah, totally. I mean, obviously we, and then this woman comes over, she's like, all right, Stevie, that's enough that <laugh>. And you know, and it's like every once in a while you just get like a, like a straightforward answer outta someone's mouth and then you pull 'em away, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:09:04):
And they pull him in.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:05):
Yeah. Totally. Put enough of that.

Richard Campbell (00:09:07):
That's very funny.

Leo Laporte (00:09:08):
Hinge Boy, Stevie. But but his, he's great. But his so, and instantly, obviously Microsoft has, has put these on their site. And we have, if you go to twit tv slash news our coverage of both day one and day two, and Yeah. If you only had maybe 20 minutes, watch that very end piece on day two that Steve ish mm-hmm. Lays out the vision for ai,

Paul Thurrott (00:09:33):
Right? Yes. I, for, so two days of keynotes what do you, three hours of keynotes probably, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and this guy that virtually no one has heard of or knows Yeah. At the very end gave a 20 minute, maybe 15 minute talk and completely encapsulated Yeah. How they're gonna roll out AI across the stack.

Richard Campbell (00:09:52):
Like, if you ever wondered why folks are called Technical fellow at Microsoft, because every single TF I've ever worked with can do that thing. Why they've never let him do that before on stage. I can't

Paul Thurrott (00:10:03):
Imagine. And he did to ai, what I just described with service book, which was he actually show, he's like, here where we we're now, and this is not the end. Normally when you lease a product, you're like, look, let's just focus on this, right? This is mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, this is what we're doing. We're not, we're not talking about the future. We're not. But he was like, no, this is step one of three and here's the path. Thank you for that. And that's honestly, I think a developer show build in particular, that's really what it's about, right? It's about the future.

Richard Campbell (00:10:28):
And it's the confidence. Like I wish that was part of day one for the confidence to the press to say, right, we're not winging this. We have a plan that's right. Now we know they're winging it. Like that's a different thing. <Laugh>, but they made a plan

Paul Thurrott (00:10:41):
<Laugh>, right? No, but, but you look right. That's right.

Leo Laporte (00:10:44):
It's like you have a roadmap, but you don't plan which hotels you're gonna stay in every night. Mm-Hmm. So it's a little, little both. Right,

Paul Thurrott (00:10:51):
Right.

Richard Campbell (00:10:52):
And there's no, and, and to, to be clear that there's no real way to know how this is gonna emerge, what excited me about the whole thing overall was Microsoft doing their actual playbook, which is we build ecosystems. That's right. We're excited to see what you are gonna do with this ecosystem where you are going to take it. And we're gonna be here to facilitate all of that. And I don't know, we haven't had a message that clear in a while like

Paul Thurrott (00:11:15):
That. Well, I go say your, your Bill Gates quote about the definition of a platform, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I mean,

Leo Laporte (00:11:19):
That's, yeah. But that was Satya, wasn't it? Who was it that pulled that out of the, out of the hat? It was day one,

Paul Thurrott (00:11:24):
Satcha, I think it was

Leo Laporte (00:11:26):
Sat. Yeah. And it was in, maybe it was the guy after Satcha. But it was interesting because Yeah, it's an old quote, but it really set the, set the table for saying

Paul Thurrott (00:11:34):
That's who we are.

Leo Laporte (00:11:35):
We're a platform company. Yeah. This is

Paul Thurrott (00:11:36):
What we do. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:11:37):
And I love that. I mean, that's, that's what they're best at. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:40):
Yep. It, it's important because the, there's been a lot of wobble from here from time and time and again or whatever, where they kind of look like they're gonna stop doing that. Right. when they do something like Office 365, that becomes Microsoft 365, you can kind of view it as well, they're cutting out some partners here. This, this used to be something that partners did, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And you get this, like, they're, are they doing an Apple thing? Are they slowly getting rid of this partnering ecosystem or whatever? But then they come out with something like this and you realize like, no, this is, this is what we do. We're not, we're not keeping it all for ourselves. You know, we're not trying to do it. Go a let alone we're gonna be a partner to you, and we're gonna give you the technology you need to succeed, yada, yada, yada. I mean, it's, it's,

Richard Campbell (00:12:22):
And I would argue it's, it's the first truly Azure centric ecosystem play they've made. Yeah. They've moved a bunch of other existing platform pieces into the cloud, and often you have choices as to where you're gonna run them and so forth. But the only way you get G P T four is to run it off of Asher. Like, that's reality. And so here it is, they finally have a product utterly dependent on Azure that has compelling in an ecosystem.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:46):
Right?

Leo Laporte (00:12:48):
So they didn't say Windows 12. I know Paul had that on his Bingo card.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:56):
Yes.

Richard Campbell (00:12:56):
And he put it right in the middle too. So there was a whole lot of Bingos <laugh>, but

Paul Thurrott (00:13:02):
When a single round. But,

Leo Laporte (00:13:04):
But I mean, sa so Sacha at the beginning said 50 plus, we got 50 plus AI dev announcements this, this week at Build. Right? I'm gonna give you five. And one of 'em was windows co-pilot. I mean, he, he did say that. I mean, I guess that's what Windows 12 would be.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:21):
Well, no. So actually, if you go back, going back to the Stevie Batist thing, co-pilot is Windows 11, because it's a thing on the side. It's

Leo Laporte (00:13:29):
Still a sidebar

Paul Thurrott (00:13:30):
There. Now it's Windows 12 is where it becomes f more fully integrated. And is that middle piece where it's, what is it beside inside? Yeah. Yeah. I

Leo Laporte (00:13:40):
Have actually, I wrote down, cuz I thought it was so good. I actually took notes on Steve and, and Stevie, I guess you call him. And I don't know him that well, but I, I call him Steve, but I I I will summarize if you wish yeah, please. The, the flow. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Let's see. So this is when that was Kevin Scott, oh, maybe I'm still on day one. Let's

Richard Campbell (00:14:08):
Go back. It's day one.

Leo Laporte (00:14:09):
Yeah. Yeah. Let's go

Paul Thurrott (00:14:11):
Back in. It's like Kevin Scott UF Medi. Where are using here somewhere?

Leo Laporte (00:14:14):
UF Medi, Kevin Scott and then goo.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:20):
That's all day one. That was the end of day

Leo Laporte (00:14:22):
One. Okay. Okay. Oh yeah. Day two comes after day one, doesn't it? There you go. <Laugh>. Here you go. Stevie Batis, technical fellow, Microsoft Applied Sciences Group, actually put this up on the screen. AI is the new interaction technology. And that's kind of one of the things they've been saying is

Paul Thurrott (00:14:43):
Le I'm sorry, sorry to interrupt. What, what is this thing we're looking at?

Leo Laporte (00:14:46):
What's my notetaking, what is

Paul Thurrott (00:14:47):
This not notion?

Leo Laporte (00:14:49):
Well notion is not great for, you know, fast note taking. So I use log sec or log seek, L og, s eq, AI's new interaction technology, less programmatic, more piloted. So this is the three stages he says of AI beside, which is that sidebar, the helper alongside your app. It's your first AI experience. And, and it's minimally disruptive. I'm sorry, the text is so small, I can't make it bigger. Inside is the next stage. And this is what you're talking about. This is Windows 1212.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:19):
I'm just, yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:15:21):
Extrap AI is the main scaffolding of the app. It's, and he says it. So remember again, I think it was on day one, they showed Douglas Engelbart's mother of all demos where we first saw the mouse, right? And the connection of the pointer on the screen to your hand moving. And, and, and really ever since Gooeys, all programs have had an a, a main loop that is, what's the mouse doing? What's the keyboard doing? What's the mouse doing? What's the keyboard doing? It's

Paul Thurrott (00:15:47):
Literally a video game. They call

Leo Laporte (00:15:48):
It the event Loop. Loop. They call it the event loop. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:15:50):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:15:51):
Yeah. he says the new loop, the main input loop is gonna be the AI loop, less dependent on point and click, fewer tool bars, fewer deep menus. Can't hate that, right? Mm-Hmm.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:03):
<Affirmative>. Well I, we'll talk, let's talk about that in a bit. But <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:16:06):
And then finally outside where then this is a little scary. This is what the, all the Sam Altman and everybody just wrote that note. Oh, oh, extinction event. Skynet <laugh>. Yeah. It's ex A I X executes globally. In other words, it's no longer trapped inside an app or inside Windows, but it is the, it is executing everywhere. Orchestrating multiple apps, acting as your agent. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's Jarvis, it's the, it's Bing Orchestrator, he calls it, or Windows Shell is an orchestrator. It said

Richard Campbell (00:16:38):
In the end, what it is, is just a set of ruled APIs that these agents can access. Right? Now, if one of them happens to be the nuclear codes, okay, that's on you. Like, I wouldn't publish that api. I mean, it's just me. But I'm saying <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:16:50):
Don't please if it,

Richard Campbell (00:16:52):
What they're talking about exposing

Leo Laporte (00:16:54):
Apis. Right. I made a note. The final thing he said, which I thought really is the, is the kind of overarching point, which is use AI to reach your customer's goals, not their tasks. Don't focus on getting a task done. Go, go a step higher and say, what is, what are you trying to

Paul Thurrott (00:17:12):
Do? This is a message for developers, you're saying. Yeah. In other words

Leo Laporte (00:17:16):
Yeah, yeah. What are you trying to do? And let me help you do that. Not individual tasks. It's gonna take some getting, I mean

Paul Thurrott (00:17:23):
So

Leo Laporte (00:17:24):
I mean, wasn't that

Paul Thurrott (00:17:25):
Clippy the one Yeah. The one thing he talked about was in the middle part of that was this notion that UI would get simpler because AI was there to get it done. And that was, and and that's why I said let's just hold off on that part cuz it's a little complicated. Like today, we don't have AI in Windows. So Microsoft goes through a process in Windows 11 and where they simplify the user interface, which is valuable and useful, but we've got that one. Every person has that one thing they need and it's not there anymore. Everyone complains kind of problem, right? And so we all know the stories about the TAs bar and everything but I think the goal here would be that UI can be simpler because we just don't need those controls anymore because it will just be something that is done, is done for us more seamlessly, you know, whatever that thing is. Right? So, you know, we went from toolbar and menus to Ribbons in office, and we went from, you know, this traditional desktop UI to a traditional desktop UI and Windows, but <laugh> one that is, you know, simpler I guess. So yeah, I mean I, we'll see how that goes. I mean, we in the Microsoft community have kind of suffered from don't take my feature away <laugh>, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> don't move my feature to a new location. We hate that too. Well,

Richard Campbell (00:18:32):
And Microsoft, especially the Windows team has being consistently punished every time they try. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:37):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and the earliest thing that they tried along these lines, well, not the earliest, the recent thing, sorry, I was gonna say not the earliest, sorry. Remember they were gonna do this Windows 10 X thing, and of course that UI is what they eventually brought into Windows 11. A key component of Windows 10 x, which is a completely different kind of simplification, was you know, 1 32 isolation, right? This notion that well, we're gonna make the system more reliable as well when we do this. And that kind of fell apart. But I don't anyone noticed this. There's a feature coming to the next version of Windows 11 called 1 32 Isolation <laugh>. Right? And it's not the same thing. It technically, they're not using containers. That's not what it is. But it, I, but I always said about that feature, to me that was just as exciting, if not more so than the ui, that if they could get this thing to work, this is how we bring Windows into the 21st century, basically. You know? Do

Richard Campbell (00:19:34):
You think they're gonna invert it now that for me, is it admin? I can apply isolation per app rather than them saying everything is isolated, try and undo it. I

Paul Thurrott (00:19:42):
Do. Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:19:43):
And, and that's the logical thing to

Paul Thurrott (00:19:45):
Do. Yes. And I, and, and it, you know, without knowing if this there's someone like Mark ov actually who does this to me a lot, will say, Paul, those three things have nothing, you know, to do with each other. But then I would read the high level explanation, both, I'll say, you know, I, I hear you, but they sound exactly the same to me. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So as long as it accomplishes the same goal, I always thought that was a great idea. And I, and I, what I mean by that is not the exact implementation using containers, but rather this notion of isolating these things from each other Yeah. And making win 32 apps safe and, and eliminating that problem. You know, just

Richard Campbell (00:20:18):
Being able to limit the ability for any given piece of code to call to other pieces of code. Yeah. You need to manifest.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:24):
A lot of times it's not malicious, it's just stupid. Right. Poorly written. But then again, those APIs are terrible. So no one's, it's no one's fault. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, sometimes it's malicious, obviously. Yeah. Anyway, I I, it's gonna Interesting. There's no question this is a difficult thing to do. Yeah. That's and that's right. My hand, I think, no question that Microsoft's tried it before and failed. Yeah. Yeah. But Leo, you know, we, these things, not because they're easy. We do them because they are hard.

Richard Campbell (00:20:50):
No, no, no, no. We do them because we thought they were gonna be easy <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:55):
Nice. Yep. Well, we, we tend to make ourselves look better than we are. So that's a,

Leo Laporte (00:21:02):
It's interesting. It's really interesting. But at least of all the speakers, he was the most very clear in the vision and the roadmap. And I think it was a, it was a really excellent presentation. Yeah. And, and, and an exhortation to developers to do it this way. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:21):
Right. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I think,

Richard Campbell (00:21:23):
And to see that there's a roadmap for it. It's like, you're not gonna be done with just this one little thing. There's going to be more stages to it. And really what he's, he's making a commitment to Microsoft is we're gonna expose more interfaces mm-hmm. <Affirmative> ways for you to integrate and for it to be, you know, to integrate in your applications and be more effective. And you're not gonna be responsible for trying to build all those hooks.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:43):
We'll do it. Yeah. Right. I can't wait to see what this looks like. I'm, from a developer perspective, I mean, none of this

Richard Campbell (00:21:50):
Survives contact with reality. Right. Like, it's all

Leo Laporte (00:21:53):
Gonna, well, that was exactly my question. I mean, is it possible that they are overestimating the value of that AI brings? And cuz I'm, you know, I think there's some question

Paul Thurrott (00:22:03):
That's a hard one because it's a case by case basis, right? You have a guy that makes like a, I'm trying to think of something like it's a stupid thing. I do. The little text editor. Is there some way that AI makes that app better? That's a different conversation than you have this other gonna be people who come into this, you

Leo Laporte (00:22:18):
Know, so look, you understand very well exactly what's required for, for that. Yeah. Paul's notepad, right? Could AI help there? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:25):
So yeah, it could, right? So if you're using an app like that to create text, text based content Yeah. All those same tools that you see in the ai the edge sidebar or in and bang up on the web or whatever it is, where they, you say, Hey look, I, I need to write a letter. I need it to be formal. I need it to be short. I need it to be concise and to the point and, and I'm, I'm leaving my job. I always do that one example for some reason. But it's like, I'm leaving my job. I wanna write a letter to my boss and my colleagues <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:22:53):
It's little Freudian. Okay

Paul Thurrott (00:22:54):
Guys, it's 2023, we all wanna do this <laugh>. And it generates this thing. And then you can use that editor to keep going with it. Hopefully. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:23:04):
But partly the reason you do that is cuz you don't really give a damn how anodyne or insightful it is. You're not trying to

Paul Thurrott (00:23:11):
No, no, I'm used. Don't, don't worry about the specific example. The only point was just that you're, you're trading but

Leo Laporte (00:23:16):
Wouldn't use it to write your novel or a great essay. You, but you.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:19):
But I wouldn't, but you know what, what people, what are you telling me? They wouldn't Yeah. A

Leo Laporte (00:23:22):
Generic

Paul Thurrott (00:23:23):
Business. You are sure. Listen, I I love Stephen King. He's written some of the best books I've ever read in my life. Doesn't know how to end a book to save his life. Oh, maybe he could use it. Do the end. Here's the story. Tell me how to bring it together at the end. Tell me how to end this. Yeah. AI endings to Stephen King's book. King Books would be a cottage industry. You're

Richard Campbell (00:23:43):
Missing the obvious one, which is we

Paul Thurrott (00:23:44):
Need a learning monitor for JR or Martin and try and finish those down. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:23:48):
<Laugh>. Exactly. Game of Thrones. Please just finish. Yeah. Volume six. And you would

Paul Thurrott (00:23:52):
Say, make it better than the TV show. And the AI would just laugh and say, lobar lobar, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:23:58):
<Laugh> hoor. Yes. You know, AI would ever come up with Hodor. And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's a good thing. All right. What else? So it's not Windows 12 yet,

Paul Thurrott (00:24:13):
But No, I think we've got so yeah, I have a theory at the end here about the schedule and all that. But yeah, I think, I think Windows 11 will be the beside interface for ai, right? I I, the old thing that gets tacked on with ai, right? There's gonna be a lot of that. And you know, some of that stuff is coming soon-ish. <Laugh>, some of it's coming later this year. What we'll call 23 H two Microsoft keeps mucking up. I shouldn't say it that way. <Laugh> effing up. No. <laugh>. They keep changing the way that they deliver things even since we've talked last time. Yeah, yeah. It seems like every time I look at a blog post, there's a new thing, there's a new goofy thing. So for example this is kind of a apropo nothing in a way, but in addition to the preview releases, we were talking about the, remember the week d preview releases, I just gotta bring this up so I can see what it was called.

(00:25:08):
There was something last week called a Windows configuration update. Came out on the same day, I believe, as that preview update for the, for next month's moment three release. And it enabled moment three <laugh>. So now there's something new called a Windows configuration update. Guys, seriously stop. Like how many, I can't remember this many terms. <Laugh>, you know, let alone figure out how to differentiate them. And when you look forward to things like moment three or 23 H two, which I believe will be moment four basically, but probably two things that kind of sit by side and are delivered at the same time. So to the user, they're just the same thing. You can't say with any certainty how any of those things are gonna be released because honestly, it seems like every time there's something new, it's, it's a new way to do it. They might have, it's like they opened the, like some kind of a, a nexus to like another dimension. Now they can just throw stuff into it. It comes out of the other side. Nope. No one has any idea how it got there. Anyway, so that's my little stupid part of the world, I guess.

Leo Laporte (00:26:13):
Now this next line I'm not sure what this all means. Dev Drive, dev home. Are these tools? Yeah. Is this their,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:20):
This? Well, this is some of the Windows announcements that came out of, oh,

Leo Laporte (00:26:24):
So this was later, for example, this was, oh, I guess I saw Dev drive. Yeah. Yeah. Dev

Paul Thurrott (00:26:28):
Drive, right? This is the R A FS thing. That's great. That's a, that's an excellent idea. This is

Leo Laporte (00:26:33):
Explain for people who didn't watch R A F S

Paul Thurrott (00:26:37):
R E Fs. So this is the file system. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:26:39):
Yeah, yeah. R E

Paul Thurrott (00:26:40):
Fs. Yeah. This is what this came up out of the synsky windows eight timeframe. It was gonna take over for ntfs because we have to get rid of everything. We didn't invent <laugh>. And you know, that was the thing at the time. And when Windows time kind of came around, I RFS went forward. I in server, I guess it was not really a thing on the client. I don't mean to say it wasn't there. I mean, you didn't see it take over for when n tfs you, you know, it's not something we were all using. But anyway, our, they, they're using RFS for the dev drive. So this is something they can figure it for you. So you don't have to go into a DIS manager and shrink the drive add, the drive formatted is rf, you know, it just does it for you. And you can, this is something I think they should do for consumers. Well, they should just do this for everybody. You know, put all your OneDrive stuff on our afs and, and make that faster too. Why wouldn't I want everything to be fast? It's, it's supposed to be significantly faster than n ts. And, and specifically for, I don't know if this has something to do with like, the specifics of you know, GitHub and wi you know, visual studio projects or whatever. But apparently it's dramatically

Richard Campbell (00:27:40):
Faster. You always have this battle between, I have a lot, I have very large files and I have lots of little

Paul Thurrott (00:27:45):
Files. Lots of Exactly. Which is the type of thing you would see in a GitHub, right? Repo if it was a developer.

Richard Campbell (00:27:50):
And you know what? It, it's hard to make a file system that's good at both. It's just a one of those schisms,

Paul Thurrott (00:27:55):
Right? So maybe, maybe that is it. Maybe it's RFS is optimized for lots of small files versus some big files, that kinda

Richard Campbell (00:28:03):
Thing, versus managing really massive files.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:06):
Yeah. So I think that's, that's cool. That's a good feature. Dev Home, which is just an app, you can get it now, it's available in preview in the Microsoft store, which maybe is a hint <laugh>, but how sophisticated it's gonna be to me hits at a weird place. Because I don't, I don't really feel, I feel like developers have their ways of doing things mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and that they have ways of configuring a system to be exactly what they want. And they don't necessarily sit there and manually configure features like in a ui like you or I might, and, and this is part of what this thing will do, is kind of help with that. It, it lets them, it's, it's almost like a visual front end to wind get in some ways where they just select the apps they wanna

Richard Campbell (00:28:45):
Install. It's more about you end up working on more than one project mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and sometimes even for different companies. And so configurations can be very different from each other. And it's a pain in the butt to maintain separation between 'em. Like you, you really want, you end up with separate copies of studio. Literally. Like I, I've gone so far as have separate VMs in some

Paul Thurrott (00:29:06):
Cases. Oh, interesting. Okay. I know some people would probably use like a preview version over here just to have a different version of it. So it could be side by side or something. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:29:13):
So,

Paul Thurrott (00:29:14):
Okay. So this is kind of addressing the freelancing world of the present, which, but even

Richard Campbell (00:29:18):
When you're working for a given company, it's like, Hey, I have the new project I'm work on, but I'm still maintaining that old project. And there's enough difference between them that trying to use a shared environment creates more problems than it solves. And so more and more this mentality of for this project, this box,

Paul Thurrott (00:29:33):
Right, right. Kind of thing.

Richard Campbell (00:29:34):
But now the box is more important as smaller footprint as it casts. Again, it as it can be

Paul Thurrott (00:29:39):
Windows 365 was less expensive. That would be a viable solution for that. Yeah. Especially if you needed G or something.

Richard Campbell (00:29:46):
Well, and also when you get into lots of remote work where it's like, Hey, I don't actually want you to have the source code on your machine, so I'm gonna have you, you can use, use a Chrome

Paul Thurrott (00:29:53):
Virtualize some awesome virtual machine

Richard Campbell (00:29:56):
On the backend, big punch machine back there, which is always correctly configured. And you know, and, and keeps local store,

Paul Thurrott (00:30:04):
I'll just make this prediction. I think Windows co-pilot either fades away or is improved dramatically. And they've done this a lot terminal.

Richard Campbell (00:30:13):
I'm, I'm, I'm afraid they've missed a boat. I think M 365 co-pilot is gonna win the day because that's where, that's where the info worker actually is. Windows Co-pilot has the possibility to be even larger than that, but United to be on it and Right. Although now didn't pano say samples or demos in June? Like

Paul Thurrott (00:30:31):
Yeah. That, that immediately you'll see it in the Insider program.

Richard Campbell (00:30:34):
Right. Okay. So it'll start appearing the insider. I mean, it's the end of May. Right. Two weeks now. It's gonna be two

Paul Thurrott (00:30:39):
Weeks. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:30:40):
Yeah. And that's at least pretty prompt. The, the real challenge you've got here is what will make Windows co-pilot compelling is how many third party products work. That's right. We'll work with it.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:50):
So yes. And that's why I have this in the maybe category, because I have to say right off the bat, some of the stuff they showed was kind of interesting, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, obviously mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I don't, I don't think anyone's gonna sit down at a computer and say, make this computer more efficient for work <laugh>. Right. You know, which is sort of what they said. And it's like, oh, you can try like a focus session. You can put on dark mode dark mode, yeah. Whatever. And it's like, okay, that's cute. I do like the file drag thing where it could give you a summary and have some other functions related to that. I think that's actually really kind of a neat thing. But then again, you know, it's like, these are just little, these are little cute things. Like they're kind of like little ideas and it's like, okay, that's fun. But I, I agree with you. I think the, the real power of this, and unfortunately they didn't have the greatest demos of it. The first one they did was a Spotify demo, which I thought was stupid. But I think the real point of showing Spotify was that it was this third party app integration.

Richard Campbell (00:31:40):
Yeah. It was a third party app integration that people recognized. Yeah. That's, that's, I think that was what it came across to me. But it was like, seriously, you know what this icon is? It's not like,

Paul Thurrott (00:31:47):
Yeah, play me music that's good for work. Like you know, okay. But the second one was better. I, I don't know that a lot of people understood it, but, well, not that it's super complicated, but it was specific. It was just, I need to create a graphic for my business or whatever it was. And I brought up Adobe Express and that's cool. And then I have to share it with the team and it brought up teams, right. You know, and so Teams obviously is not a third party app, but the idea was you've got this chain of tools you're using and you don't really have to think about the tool, which goes back to that thing we talked about document centric interfaces. Right.

Richard Campbell (00:32:15):
Well, and more goal centric work versus task centric work. Yeah. But I just can't wait to see what kind of battles are going on inside of Microsoft for which app gets prompted. Right. Well,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:25):
That's Yes.

Richard Campbell (00:32:26):
And not, and that's not our problem. Like, I'm glad it isn't.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:29):
And is, is there gonna be a way where, you know, we have this notion of default apps today. We're gonna have to have a much bigger selection of those and they're gonna have to integrate with that. I say, I want to create a graphic. It ha it needs to know that I'm using Photoshop or Adobe Express or Affinity whatever. And, you know will it allow for that? Is it gonna be that smart? Yeah. Well

Richard Campbell (00:32:50):
From that smart from, from an IT perspective, it's like, here is the specified set of apps for this organization. These are the ones you suggest. Do not suggest this. We don't use it.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:00):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:33:02):
Big speed up though. I'm looking at this graph from the Visual Studio blog that somebody put up in Discord.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:10):
Yeah, that's a big deal. Yeah. So you notice get get his 40 big

Leo Laporte (00:33:14):
One. Yeah. Biggest

Paul Thurrott (00:33:16):
One. And that kind of doesn't surprise me, although I guess you would use get with Net Java or Python, I suppose. But yeah, that's interesting. I, we talked about this, I think we did, right? That this notion like why isn't get just part of Windows. Like why isn't this,

Richard Campbell (00:33:33):
They Yeah. They've chosen to keep it a wholly owned subsidiary, I think largely for political reasons.

Leo Laporte (00:33:38):
Oh God, yes. What I mean, just look it, but

Paul Thurrott (00:33:39):
Put it in win. No, but but make it but put it in Windows. But you could still

Leo Laporte (00:33:42):
Incorporate it in Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean it's, I always

Richard Campbell (00:33:46):
Thought that they, the Windows gets built into my all over Theron guys.

Leo Laporte (00:33:49):
Right? It's in my emax. Yeah. <laugh> oh, well, okay. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:58):
Interesting. And then there was also this notion of when, I think it's called Winget config, where he uses a YAMMEL file, which this

Leo Laporte (00:34:04):
Right. A

Paul Thurrott (00:34:05):
Very simple XML format for a config, you know, for reproduce, what I do with

Leo Laporte (00:34:10):
Reproducible bills. Well, this is huge. Mm.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:12):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> and, you know, install, like, in other words, using winget to install, so

Leo Laporte (00:34:17):
Not just install config, the whole thing thing, right. So you mm-hmm. <Affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:20):
That's right. Install can fig and keep up to date. Right? Yep. So it's like kind of install config and manage, I guess. Yeah. <laugh>, you know. Yeah. But I but again, I'm a little confused that Microsoft hasn't come out with a G U I for winge to make it more mainstream. In fact, I don't understand why the Window store, the Microsoft store isn't the G U I for Winget <laugh>. Right. we have these two kind of data stores for for apps. I mean, maybe, maybe this could be one thing.

Richard Campbell (00:34:52):
Yeah, I know. I feel like it's different teams, different motivations. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:34:57):
I,

Richard Campbell (00:34:57):
Yeah. There's gonna be a schism there.

Leo Laporte (00:34:59):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:35:02):
Still a great idea. And you know you don't have this in most operating systems. Even there are some Linux distros that have reproducible builds, but a lot of people use Ansible and things like that to try to do it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I, I, I think it's something developers love the idea. It's not a mainstream idea. Cuz most people don't have 15 machines they wanna set up or move from machine to machine. I

Paul Thurrott (00:35:23):
Do <laugh>, I,

Leo Laporte (00:35:24):
You and I do, I, you know, I have a dot files config that I, you know what, put on GitHub and download and run every time I get, nobody

Paul Thurrott (00:35:33):
Finds religion until something goes wrong. Yeah. And it's a until they half the pain, there's a little bit, there's a little feature. I don't think it's anywhere in the notes per se. Well, you know, it's later we mentioned a little bit, but there's stupidly they're calling it Windows backup, but there's this notion of we're gonna back up your settings and your app installs for store apps only and some other things. And when you go through the u in the beginning when you set up a new computer, you can more easily restore more stuff at once. Right. And you get back to where you were, that kind of thing. Right. It's obvious it, they've taken away some of those features, now they're bringing back more. They're gonna have more now. So that's great. It's a really good idea. You shouldn't have to explain to people why that's important, but if your computer is configured correctly and everything's stored in the cloud and you have a, your s s D goes up and, and nothing works anymore, you should be able to sign into a computer and after some few minutes go into your exact desktop where everything's exactly where you left it, and you just get back to work.

(00:36:29):
You know, and it's, it's sad that people need to experience a hardware failure before they say, you know, I really need something like that. Yeah. And so I'm hoping by putting this just kind of into Windows, making it a part of Windows and I should say, you know, parenthetically again, <laugh>, right. That more people will use it and it will work, hopefully. So we'll see at

Leo Laporte (00:36:51):
Some point. Have you ever used

Paul Thurrott (00:36:53):
Only it once?

Leo Laporte (00:36:54):
Have you learned Ansible, Richard? Have you ever used it? Because I,

Paul Thurrott (00:36:57):
No, I keep, I know what

Leo Laporte (00:36:58):
It is. I've starting with the idea of, of it's just a lot of, you know, it's one of those things where you could automate it and then you wouldn't have, it'd be easier from then on, but it's a lot of work to do that <laugh>. Yeah. Or just keep taking the same commands every single time. And I went down the box starter chocolatey path. Right. Chocolatey the same is similar. Yeah. Yeah. Winget gets you half the way there.

Paul Thurrott (00:37:22):
Box, box that Winget gets you all the way there eventually. I think

Leo Laporte (00:37:24):
That's what, oh, I think there's their plan, right. And there is a, there's another reason for Reproducible builds because then you have consistency. So if something does go wrong, you know, you know, you don't have, oh, is it something weird about this configuration? Or am I missing a library here? Or, you know, that's, that's a real pain for developers. So I can, I think this is great. Doesn't come up. Right. Yep. I hope they continue forward. Sally fourth as it were. <Laugh> finally, you said you you wanted to close this segment with your prognostications.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:00):
Yeah. Actually we skipped one thing though. We should just Oh, speak briefly about this 1 billion thing. They said this on stage, they wrote a big blog post about it. The blog post is called Delivering Delightful Performance for more than 1 billion users Worldwide. And then it's a post about Windows 11. And Windows 11 does not have more than 1 billion users worldwide. Now if you look what Windows X-Ray is in the post Windows does, but here's the thing. Windows in <laugh> in lemme see. A year ago had 1.4 billion users, right? In 2018, it had 1.5 billion users. <Laugh>, you know, in 2015 it had 1.5 billion. So the, the question, the two questions there are, well, a do you mean Windows 11? No. Right. It's Windows 10 and Windows 11. Because when they say Windows, they're talking about supported versions Windows, which today are those two versions.

(00:38:46):
Okay. And if you kind of do the math on it based on stat counter type stats, it's roughly two thirds of those are Windows 10 and one third are Windows 11. So neat. But what's going on with the number? How did the number go down? You know? And so all we can do is use the language they provide. Back when they were talking about 1.4 billion, it was active divi, it's monthly active devices. That's not the same thing as users. Right. I w I sort of think of that as like actual PCs out in the world. Obviously some people have two PCs you use of work, PC in a home pc, whatever it might be. It was also a long time ago. So the world has changed, you know, where everyone wasn't working at home at that point. Also it was Terry Morrison. So they were counting phones and Xboxes and Hall lenses mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Cause that guy's

Richard Campbell (00:39:35):
Were counting Windows kernels. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:37):
He was, he was, he was gonna get paid more if they had more mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. so that was, you know, that's another story. But when they have used the number, when they have used the term users, which they've actually done a few times it's actually pretty consistent. So it's kind of an interesting thing. I I, I would've thought it was a higher number, but between Windows 10 and Windows 11, there are in fact, well, according to Micro, there are over 1 million users, roughly 324 million of which are on Windows 11, which is, you know, artificially limited because they're not letting some people upgrade because of the hardware requirements. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Otherwise those would be, otherwise that would all be the same Windows version.

Richard Campbell (00:40:17):
Well, and it, and it's still not real enterprise friendly. I, I have a show in the Can now with Johann Arid Mark. It'll come out in a few weeks. It's specifically about, okay, in the enterprise, how do we roll out 11? What does it take Ellen? Look, M d t, the Microsoft deployment toolkit not supported. Right? Right. If you're running Configuration Manager, fine, but if you're running Configuration Manager, you're a big organization. Sure. And, and if you're trying to try and do it within tune an autopilot, well, there's a few caveats. Like it's, they have not made it easy for an enterprise. If you've got 300 seats and you're trying to talk about get to 11, yeah. You're in trouble. Like, there's no way you're running config, man, MDTs gone away in Tunes too slow. Like, there's no simple solutions.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:58):
I have to think, and this is just kind of ties into what we've been talking over the past several shows now, I guess that this is purposeful on Microsoft's part that they really wanna do some things with Windows 11 that they know will be semi controversials. They, they wanna make it simpler, et cetera. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, and they know that's not gonna fly in the enterprise. And so they're giving a few years where they can kind of play around with these ideas, throw stuff out in the world, see how it goes, and they're slowly gonna kind of scale back where they're almost basically Windows 10 means won't be exactly the same, but at some point this thing will hit that point where it's acceptable to the enterprise by and large, and that, that will

Richard Campbell (00:41:33):
Coincide. I, I think you're right. And this is the sort of the conclusion we came to in the show is Microsoft is encouraging us to test now so that we can push back on the fact of, hey, this isn't the path. Like you may need to give us an M D T to win 11 solution because a lot of people are depending on it. They'd love to retire that software. Yeah. This is the usual exploration. There's a half a dozen paths. Can we only support two of them? Right. Like Right, right. Same ourselves of money

Paul Thurrott (00:41:57):
And on the enterprise. I mean, those guys, there, there are people testing Windows 11 of course. And their answer was a hard no at, in the beginning, I'm sure mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and it's probably softened a little bit. And maybe by this time next year I'll be like, okay, yeah, we

Richard Campbell (00:42:09):
Got that. Yeah. I mean, to be clear, for the really big orgs for a thousand plus seats, folks that will run sccm, there's clear path, right? And, and, and part of this, you know, is a subtext of what's My Life and Run has, it's like how hostile to you are you to the a hundred to 500 folks? Because it's getting really hard. Yep. Like there's no, there, a lot of these inexpensive solutions are being squeezed.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:31):
Yeah. How hostile are they, Richard? How would you, <laugh> how would you

Richard Campbell (00:42:36):
How would you the moment? Pretty, pretty hostile. Yes. I like

Paul Thurrott (00:42:38):
Pretty

Leo Laporte (00:42:39):
Difficult. I was in the ever grades. Glad I asked. The same thing about the alligators. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:43):
Yeah. They're not hostile until they want to eat you <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:42:46):
Yeah. All right, let's

Richard Campbell (00:42:49):
A crocodile, a crocodile's not ho, an alligator's not hostile. He's just busy and you look delicious.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:54):
Yeah. He's not gonna any, he's busy. You're delicious. And he runs faster than you do. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:42:59):
<Laugh>, ah, did, oh, did we get to the

Paul Thurrott (00:43:04):
No. So the last moment one, the last one. Four. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So and again, this is evolving, right? But, but if you look back over time and, and it will include next or two weeks from today, two weeks from the essay in this list week week, we have gotten, we have gotten moment updates, right? These moments, right. So we're getting moment three and two weeks. We've got moment one back in November, December, we've got moment two in February, March, we're getting moment three in May. June when would moment four fall? Well, September, October. Interesting. That's when they release a new version of Windows. So I think that 22 for all they, they may not do mean this like technically or do this technically, but I think that 23 H two and moment four are the same thing. Essentially they might be delivered in two different ways.

(00:43:50):
Like there's a, a kind of an enablement package that puts you on 23 H two, and then the moment four bits come be through some c f r slash whatever the other thing was called, I forgot, I forgot. Windows configuration, updated whatever was it doesn't really matter how they do it, cuz again, they have a million ways to do this. But I think this stuff all happens at roughly the same time. The nature of these updates means that sometimes you'll click on something in Windows update and you'll get it. And sometimes you'll have to wait because it'll come through A C F R and it's random and whatever. It doesn't really matter. The details aren't super important. But I think moment four slash 23 H two, I think those are the same thing. I think that's that's the same, it's the same milestone and they're just making it vague. You know, it's like we see, we told you we were gonna release one feature update a year. We didn't tell you it was gonna be nonsense and not amount to anything <laugh>. We also did in Delia, we're gonna have 117 features we're adding. But you and now and then, but you know what, enjoy. Because 23 H two for businesses will also be all of those other moments in CFRs that occurred after 22

Leo Laporte (00:44:48):
H two. You know what I say features is, is features does <laugh>. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:44:53):
Right. See, bars are like a box of chocolates.

Leo Laporte (00:44:56):
<Laugh>. Exactly. That's even better, more apt. Yeah. I was

Paul Thurrott (00:45:00):
Just thinking, what are you gonna get

Leo Laporte (00:45:01):
At these notes? I took Stevie Batis, you know, and there's, you know, a couple pages of really juicy stuff. And then I went backwards to see what I took from Panos Bennet.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:12):
Amazing <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:45:14):
It's three lines. That's amazing.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:16):
One of them is you could almost, you could literally, if you wrote those with your hand, if you wrote that with your hand, you would see the line go across the page as you fell asleep. <Laugh>.

Richard Campbell (00:45:25):
And, and I'm pretty sure the Onyx runtime with the people between Panos and Steve.

Leo Laporte (00:45:29):
Yeah. You know what, I should really, let's have that backwards because that is true. That's true.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:33):
Actually. That was a different person. This

Leo Laporte (00:45:35):
Is, this is Panos pumped. What does it mean for us as people? That's it right there. 12 minutes. 12 minutes.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:42):
This is like the Dana Carvey impersonation of pres George w HW Bush was like,

Leo Laporte (00:45:48):
I'm pumped. Thousand

Paul Thurrott (00:45:49):
Points a light. It's like, still two more, two minutes. Mr. President <laugh> thousand points a light. <Laugh> didn't have anything to say. <Laugh>. He's like, people like it. When I say pumped, I'm gonna say

Leo Laporte (00:46:00):
Pumped. A lot. Pumped. Well, he got it in right away. And that was good. We didn't have to wait too long. Let's take a little break, <laugh> and we will continue lots more to talk about. Windows Weekly is on the air with Rich Campbell and Paul Throt. Rich, you're back in Coquitlam, right? You're back at the house. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (00:46:20):
I'm, I'm home for a couple, three weeks now.

Leo Laporte (00:46:22):
So then, then back on the road, man, you travel.

Richard Campbell (00:46:25):
One more, one more. Run to Kansas City for the K C DC conference. And then I'm gonna try and spend a few weeks on the coast Oh, cool. Finishing this dang book. And fun. So we'll have a, we've got a couple of juvenile sea lion hanging around right now, so you'll hear them in the recordings. Oh, cool. Oh yeah. It's cool for you. You've been, you've never seen poop till you've seen a thousand pounds of Sea Lion

Leo Laporte (00:46:47):
<Laugh>. Ah, oh boy. <Laugh>, we have, we have peacocks. They're just as noisy but they're not as poopy,

Richard Campbell (00:46:53):
So Yeah, no, that's a lot of animal. Holy man. Yeah, that is

Leo Laporte (00:46:56):
A lot of animal. Wow. Okay, well there you go. Something to look forward to. Meanwhile, <laugh>, let me talk about our sponsor. ACI Learning, you know the name it Pro our trusted sponsor for the last decade. That's kind of blows my mind. Yeah, they opened in 2013. IT PRO has always provided engaging, entertaining, it training. I know many of you are it pro I wanna say customers. It's not really customer members. Commu, you're in the community now that it pro's part of the ACI learning family, their capabilities impressively grow along with their highly entertaining bingeable, short <laugh>, and I mean, bingeable short format content over 7,000 hours now. And counting to choose from that by itself shows you what the merger has meant. That's more than a thousand new hours since the last time we talked. One of the things that really is one of the stats we, you know, I talk to these guys all the time.

(00:47:59):
One of the stats that they they gave us the other day that I thought was really interesting, about 30% of ACI learners are MSPs managed service providers. People like our beloved Russell people who do it for other companies, you know, not as employees, but on contract, you're an msp. You should know ACI Learning is dedicated to supporting your team through any challenge. You know, if, if you run an msp, you know, the most important thing is, is keeping your team engaged in informed, and up to date. And that's one of the reasons MSPs love ACI learning. Well, they love the Practice labs, by the way, where you can test and experiment before deploying new apps or updates without touching your live system. You can do it all on virtual machine labs with multiple instances of whatever you need. Windows Server desktop clients, and you can run it on anything including a Chromebook.

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It's about 30%. Most people, more than most people don't even finish those. It's a very, very different picture with ACI learnings videos about 80% completion rate. What does that tell you? That they're compelling, they're entertaining, and most importantly, people are learning from them. Cause you know, it's, it's, you don't watch something just cuz it's fun. When you're watching these kinds of training. You, you wanna learn, you want to come away with it going, yeah, I am better than before. Don't settle for sub-part training. This is the format it pros and their teams want. You have a complete learning portal. The pro portal lets you assign courses, even little bits of courses. And by the way, all the videos have full transcripts. So you can say, I need them to learn this 13 minute segment right here. You can manage seats you can see monthly usage reports, logins and so forth.

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Viewing time courses viewed tracks completed. That's very helpful to understand how your team's using it. But also to justify the spend at the highers up. Even get very visuals reports. So you can, you know, say here's the graph or whatever, you'll stay compliant. That's really important these days. You can identify potential risks equally important and weaknesses before they become problematic. Future proof your business retain top talent. Cause this is a great benefit. Upskill your team. Gain essential insights with training for individuals, teams, and leaders. And by the way, you'll be glad to know ACI Learning, unlike many other facilities, is ISO certified. So, you know, you're receiving world-class training the best for your team. And don't they deserve the best ACI learnings, by the way, best doesn't have to cost more. It's very affordable. ACI learnings courses, easy to navigate. Their structure is much more straightforward than traditional training programs.

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Look, I think the best thing to do, try it for yourself and then it, and then, you know, you get an idea. Then bring the team along for individuals. We got a great discount. 30% off. Just use the offer code TWI 30, 30% off. That's either a standard or premium individual IT pro membership. But if you wanna learn about all that ACI learning offers across audit IT and cybersecurity readiness, just go to the website and please use this address so they know you saw it here. Go dot aci learning.com/twi. Go dot aci learning.com/twit For any size team from two people to a thousand people volume discounts, start at five seats. Fill out the form@go.acilearning.com slash for more information on a free two week training trial for your team. Thank you ACI Learning. They sponsor our studio. They sponsor Windows Weekly, many of other, other shows. We appreciate their support and you support us back by going to that address so they know you saw it here. Go dot aci learning.com/twi. Okay, let's see. Going back to the notion windows 11, time Paul and Richard.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:48):
I inserted an image there. That's,

Leo Laporte (00:52:50):
It's beautiful. It's a, it's

Paul Thurrott (00:52:52):
A, the real, the real source of the Windows 11 bloom imagery. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:52:57):
That's a Kleenex box with all of the beautiful paper bloom coming out. I thought it was all about the tears, but, okay. <Laugh>, well, that the tears make it blue. That's what's, you know, it's a combination, right? Yeah, that's right. Very pretty <laugh>. All right, what's new with Windows 11?

Paul Thurrott (00:53:14):
Yeah, so, I mean, in the week since Build kicked off, there hasn't been a lot of new news, right? I mean, yeah. Build was kind of the big thing. There's some around when we're gonna see features, right? Some of the stuff that Microsoft showed off that the show is happening in moment three. So it's in about two weeks. Some of it's coming in, what I think of as moment four slash 23 H two, right? So co-pilot obviously is one of those features, but we'll be available through the Windows Insider program starting next month now as we record this in June. But since we talked last, there has been new build builds, sorry, across canary dev and beta. The canary and beta builds are fairly minor, but if you want to get started on some of the stuff they showed off and some of the stuff we just talked about like Dev Drive and Windows backup, that's actually available now in, in the dev channel which is pretty good. And a feature that a lot of people have asked for in the task bar, which is bringing back that combined, never combined option that we always had before for the icons in the task bar, not the ability to move it to the top of the screen. Don't ask <laugh>.

Richard Campbell (00:54:21):
I was gonna say anything. Not saying I'm, I'm genuinely holding out for an arm laptop. I think now, yeah, I'm going to. Interesting. I think I'm gonna pave this book to down to a Purim 365 Convey. Okay. And hold out for an arm. Why? Because service, because I think it's only months away. And, and let's fa I I spent a little time with the one of the new MacBook heirs mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, aren't they great with the, it's the best computer on the planet. Like, and, and

Leo Laporte (00:54:44):
It runs. I I, ironically with parallels runs Windows on Arm pretty well.

Richard Campbell (00:54:49):
Pretty well. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:50):
Let me, let me assist on that sentence. It runs it better. <Laugh>, which is a huge problem. So

Leo Laporte (00:54:56):
Depressing.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:57):
A huge problem now.

Richard Campbell (00:54:58):
But this is this, this happened before, right? This is, this is how the whole P four architecture got abandoned right? When the Israelis made the P three Multicore. That's right. And it's outran the best P four and it cost a quarter. That was like, oh gee, I guess we're going Corn Duo.

Leo Laporte (00:55:14):
It was more dramatic than that because Intel had gone all in on Itanium, right? That's

Richard Campbell (00:55:21):
Right. Well, that's, that's earlier, but Yes. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:55:23):
But but they, but they, they said that's what they, they

Richard Campbell (00:55:26):
Said, holy,

Paul Thurrott (00:55:26):
That was gonna be the chip set of the future. Holy

Leo Laporte (00:55:28):
Crap. This, this architecture doesn't work. And it was a lucky thing they had that skunk works in Israel.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:32):
That's

Richard Campbell (00:55:32):
Right. Yeah. They, they were working on mobile chip sets, right? There was a

Paul Thurrott (00:55:35):
One two punch of embarrassment there because the other thing that happened around that same time, real RAM forced to adopt the AM MD thing. The AM MDX 64 stuff. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:55:44):
Which

Paul Thurrott (00:55:44):
64 bit windows is something that came up out of AM md

Richard Campbell (00:55:47):
Yeah. Cuz Cutler put out Windows on w as the, as support for that. And that was also when they had been misled by the folks that made the cereal Ram sram. And they were that whole, all right, that's that same like year where you're gonna talk about how Ram Ram detail is today. Was that Rambus? That's Rambus, yeah. Rambus going to the open meetings for RAM architecture and then writing patents against the open meeting. Those guys remember those guys? And

Leo Laporte (00:56:13):
Remember we thought, man, this is gonna change everything.

Richard Campbell (00:56:16):
Oh no. I built one SBUs SRA machine. It didn't work at all. And then they made a retro kit to convert it to regular dram and boy, talk about a bad sideline.

Leo Laporte (00:56:28):
You know, it's funny, it's somebody you that would be a good book is Dead Ends, you know, tech Dead Ends. Oh my God,

Paul Thurrott (00:56:34):
Yes. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:56:35):
Places, companies said this is the next, cuz I think we're go, I don't mind just between you and me, apples about to head down a very long cul-de-sac with I think VR <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:46):
That's

Leo Laporte (00:56:46):
Right. This would be a fast, they

Richard Campbell (00:56:49):
Don't pull back.

Leo Laporte (00:56:50):
They're not gonna pull back. They have too much invested.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:52):
No, no, this is happening.

Leo Laporte (00:56:54):
I, well, and

Richard Campbell (00:56:55):
I, and I also went into the same thing with G P T four, right? Like I agree.

Leo Laporte (00:56:58):
I agree. This

Richard Campbell (00:56:59):
Could the, you know, the alternative to this is not that it takes over the

Leo Laporte (00:57:03):
World,

Richard Campbell (00:57:04):
It's that it's too expensive to operate and gets shut down. This could be the 3D tv.

Leo Laporte (00:57:09):
This would be a good time to write, to start that book and leave a hole for two last chapters. <Laugh>, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:57:16):
Yeah. Well, because either individual hardware, hardware makers or people that, or companies that used to not be hardware makers like Microsoft that are rushing to make their own hardware will either get this right and lower the cost, or we're just all gonna, or Nvidia becomes the biggest company in the world. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, they,

Leo Laporte (00:57:32):
They are sure ballooning up. The question is, is it hot air? Enjoy it right now. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:38):
Hey, a billion dollars is a billion. Or sorry, a trillion dollars is a trillion dollars.

Leo Laporte (00:57:42):
Yeah. Let's up

Richard Campbell (00:57:42):
A trillion here. A trillion there. Pretty soon. You're talking real

Leo Laporte (00:57:45):
Money. Real money. It isn't real money, Paul. That's the problem. No, I, I it is not real money unless you decide to Well, let's just liquidate. Ah, geez. And you better doing

Paul Thurrott (00:57:56):
Chris Cap thing. You know? Market cap floats all boats.

Leo Laporte (00:57:59):
Yeah. I guess guess, does it? Is that what he says? I'm paraphrasing. Yeah. <laugh>. But yeah, I guess, yeah. I, we've seen companies though, with the inflated market caps that have, I, last time I checked Invidia was 200 do 200. The priced earnings was 200 times, I think. Yeah. It's probably a big bigger now. Yeah, but you know

Paul Thurrott (00:58:17):
What,

Leo Laporte (00:58:17):
We, it's Amazon number industries.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:19):
We've never had a bubble, so I'm not really worried about

Richard Campbell (00:58:21):
Anything. Yeah. Bubbles aren't a thing. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:58:24):
I'm telling you, what a good book. You guys gotta write this book Cul the Dead Ends. I have known and love it.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:30):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Technological cul-de-sacs. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. It's the Stephen Wright joke. It's a one way dead end street. I don't know how I got there, but now I can't leave <laugh>, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:58:40):
And Waymo can be one of them because those Waymo cars in San Francisco, they keep going down that dead end <laugh>. There's seriously, there's a dead end street. Because the strict rules are, I guess you can't turn left at one point. So the only way if you're gonna follow the rules is to go down a dead end street, make a U-turn, and come out and make a right turn. And so, you know, normal drivers go, well, screw that. I'm gonna turn left here. But the Waymo's, they all go down that street. And the neighbors are, because I'm sure they fixed it by now.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:11):
Well, you know what would be worse is that they went in reverse and then they could be like, beep,

Richard Campbell (00:59:15):
Beep, beep,

Paul Thurrott (00:59:16):
Beep, <laugh>. You know. Well, they probably do. Causes way to get outta it.

Leo Laporte (00:59:19):
I don't think they can do a full u-turn. I bet you that's one of the problems is they do a y u-turn and so you get the intermittent beep

Paul Thurrott (00:59:26):
Beep. Yeah. He's like, look at this guy. He's doing like a 21 point turn for some reason. Beep beep <laugh>. Unbelievable. Another good one.

Leo Laporte (00:59:35):
Literal dead ends. All

Paul Thurrott (00:59:36):
Right. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Literal dead ends.

Leo Laporte (00:59:38):
Literal dead ends. So

Paul Thurrott (00:59:41):
As opposed to figurative dead ends. Right. Although apparently it means the same end, it ends up the same way language, which is nothing. Yeah. Oh God. Anyway, I'm

Leo Laporte (00:59:49):
Sorry. So I did

Paul Thurrott (00:59:51):
An episode of Hands On Windows the other day that will come out in the future. I don't re about moment three. And I was <laugh>, the third feature I highlighted was adding seconds to the clock. And I said, in case you were wondering if this was a big update or not. <Laugh> we're already on seconds. <Laugh>, so <laugh>, sorry. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:00:09):
That's hysterical. I think we made that one public. I can't remember it. I think that one is on the YouTube not Yeah. Channel. So that I should mention what that is. Paul does a weekly show called Hands-On Windows. Micah does Hands on Macintosh. We have lots of other shows. They're club only. And then we, we'll take one that, you know, has a universal interest. We'll put it out on YouTube as a, you know, kind of like a tease. You want more

Paul Thurrott (01:00:31):
Sure. You want more buddy, you know where to go.

Leo Laporte (01:00:34):
Twit.Tv/Club twi, seven bucks a up, put a quick plug, seven bucks a month. Ad free versions of all the shows, access to the Discord, access to special shows. We launched shows in the club, hands on windows, hands on Macintosh, Scott Wilkinson's, homes Theater Geeks. That's where this week in space came from. It was launched out of the club thanks to the club members. So it's a great way to support us as advertising dollars dwindle and then is podcast wide. They're dwindling. We really realize that the subscription model is gonna be, I don't, I don't want to ever have a paywall. I don't like that idea. But you know

Paul Thurrott (01:01:11):
The way to look at this is I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but if you look at Spotify, which has both paid and non-paying customers, the, the paid customers are a small percentage of the non-paying, but they are,

Leo Laporte (01:01:22):
They support everybody

Paul Thurrott (01:01:23):
Else to generate 95% of the revenues, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's kind of a nice system from that perspective. And it's good for people.

Leo Laporte (01:01:30):
I'm happy for that. Yeah. I can

Paul Thurrott (01:01:31):
Pay Yeah. To have a nice ad free experience.

Leo Laporte (01:01:35):
And we want to offer, you know, our content free to everybody cuz it's democratic, you know? So if, if we can do this the best of both worlds, offer the

Paul Thurrott (01:01:42):
Choice. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:01:43):
Exactly. Even if advertising kind of just goes away, I think we would always have free content. But we just encourage people to subscribe. Right now it's a little more than 1% of the audience subscribes. It's, you know, if we get it a 5% Yeah. We'd be, we'd be able to continue on forever. That forever. Great. Yeah. And I want to continue on forever, because I will never die now. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:07):
All right. We will

Leo Laporte (01:02:08):
Eventually there will

Paul Thurrott (01:02:09):
Be digital Elon Digital Leo.

Leo Laporte (01:02:12):
Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:12):
Yeah. You know, you can't spell Elon without a Leo. That's a good point. <Laugh>. I just saying, I

Leo Laporte (01:02:20):
Let's see. So there were d there were preview builds last week. Did you? Did you? That's

Paul Thurrott (01:02:24):
Right. Yeah. Yeah. I just went through that. So nothing major there, but, but

Leo Laporte (01:02:27):
Moment three next week, test stuff. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:30):
Yeah. Moment three next week. Just remind No, not next week. Sorry. We in

Leo Laporte (01:02:34):
Week D, 14 days, you know, week D

Paul Thurrott (01:02:36):
Yeah. Week B, sorry. B B of June. Cause we're moving into June.

Leo Laporte (01:02:39):
Oh, we're going. Good Lord. It's the end of May. I forgot. Yeah. Oh my God. It's gonna be June. Holy cow. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:46):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:02:48):
I loved this story.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:49):
You know, I did too.

Leo Laporte (01:02:50):
Here's the windows. You've always wanted <laugh>, but could never activate.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:55):
You know what? Every version of Windows is the version no one wants until it's the version they can't stand to give up. <Laugh>, you know, windows XP people kind of forget this. It debuted to not necessarily hugely positive reviews. And then it was Windows 2000 with the Fisher Price interface. Exactly. A sea of blues and greens. I called it causing me to lose a friend at Microsoft who designed it <laugh> and and was in the market forever. Right. And then it became like, oh, I don't wanna go to Windows Vista. You know, everyone loved it all of a sudden again. But I went through this process myself of installing Windows XP a couple years ago because I was writing the book, right? I wanted to go back and install old versions of oss, put old versions of Visual Studio on top of it.

(01:03:36):
Old versions of office. I did all that stuff. So there have been lots of cracks for Windows XP activation, and I think I probably have a a, a silly number of keys for this actually. But there have been different cracks over the years. Microsoft took their activation service offline, right? So what this crack does is it lets you do it offline. So interesting. Yeah. It just works. And it works. And it generates exactly the same key for a PC every time. So if you run it on that p against that pc, you'll get the identical key every time and it'll always activate <laugh>. So, wow. It's kind of an interesting thing. So they're done with that. Like XP has been done. And I'll just tell you the, the <laugh> I probably told the story before, cuz it's Windows Weekly, but at the in June of that year, so June 2nd, 2001, we went to New York for the reviewer's workshop.

(01:04:23):
There was a beta one back in Seattle in that February. And then in the summer they had the reve the main re reviewers workshop. That's when they introduced activation. They didn't talk, they didn't say anything about it until June. And no one wanted to talk to anyone at that show except for that guy, the one guy who was there for activation <laugh>. And so there was all these product tables and teams around completely empty ru and one giant ru line waiting to talk to this one guy. It was like that scene in the airplane movie where everyone's standing with like a pipe and they're waiting to smack that woman around or whatever. Yeah. Like everyone on the plane is in line to get their turn. That was that guy. And he was so beaten up by the end of the show it was him and Joe Bell Fior and a couple of other guys. And they were like, we want to go out and get, and I took them to little Italy and we went to a, an Italian restaurant called Lunas Luna, of course was the code name for the Windows Xpc of Blue and Green UI <laugh>. Right. So it, it kinda worked out nicely for him. But man, did that guy need to drink <laugh> that day? So anyway, here we are. What is it? 22 years later finally cracked.

Richard Campbell (01:05:29):
Completely cracked. Yeah. Yep. He figured it out.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:32):
Par Bastard. I don't even remember his name. I bet

Richard Campbell (01:05:34):
It installed really quickly too.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:36):
<Laugh>. Yeah. That's the, that's the thing about these old oss. It's a, it's a nostalgic walk through the park of course, but there's not a lot there compared to what we have today,

Richard Campbell (01:05:46):
Right? No. And but it doesn't understand hd mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So that's a problem. Like

Paul Thurrott (01:05:51):
Yeah. Lots of security availabilities and this thing right off the bat too. I remember it being in the audience at the launch and there were like a hundred wifi networks you could connect to, and all of them were wide open cuz we didn't know what we were doing, you know? No. And then there was the what do you call it? Universal plug and play thing. Yeah. That happened over the holidays that year. And Jim Achin infamously was on vacation with his family, got the phone call, and he is like, well, you guys enjoy the rest of your vacation. I'm flying home <laugh>, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. but,

Richard Campbell (01:06:18):
But they didn't get U sbn until service after service back too.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:23):
Yeah. I don't reremember you would u p np, I mean, this is the Universal, oh,

Richard Campbell (01:06:26):
University of plug bla as opposed

Paul Thurrott (01:06:27):
To, this is the thing that kicked off Trustworthy computing, right? Yeah. It was, they released this piece of junk out into the world. It was completely mm-hmm. Open and unprotected. And they were like, we gotta get at top of this. And so they halted over time. Well, they already knew that haled all new development,

Richard Campbell (01:06:40):
But they already knew that before they shipped. Right. Because the trustworthy computing letter came out at the beginning of 2001, and they shipped x P into 2001.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:49):
The exact

Richard Campbell (01:06:49):
Timing. But so an an SP one was already all the stuff they'd shoved out to get delivered. So that's why the SB two team was formed. Right. And stripped a lot of senior guys outta Windows to be able to, to re-engineer the kernel.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:01):
Right. Because service packs back then were created by a different team at Microsoft than the main Windows team. They were, it was sent into basically a servicing stack and there was, it was not. The main Windows team was gonna go off work on the next version mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and not for s SP two. Yeah. Yeah. They had to change it.

Richard Campbell (01:07:15):
And one a moment argue that was part of the problems that led to Vista was that those guys were head down for three years. They delayed

Paul Thurrott (01:07:22):
Make it delayed. That's s was part of the reason it was delayed. That's right. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:07:25):
And, and so was worked on s SP two. He didn't, it was Val Valentine that was leading Blackcomb.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:31):
That's right.

Richard Campbell (01:07:33):
Before AlTiN finished SB two, and then it became Longhorn

Paul Thurrott (01:07:36):
Black Hole. It's a, and then Whistler. Right. Where was

Richard Campbell (01:07:38):
Whistler? Well, Whistler was xp.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:40):
Xp. Okay. Okay.

Richard Campbell (01:07:41):
And then Blackcomb is the next mountain over in between the two mountains is a great big bar called the Longhorn Bar <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:07:48):
A million years ago. But I, I did, I was the person that broke the Whistle Crow name and the person who broke the Longhorn Crow name <laugh>.

Richard Campbell (01:07:54):
So great. I

Paul Thurrott (01:07:54):
Love that.

Richard Campbell (01:07:55):
Skeed him both and got drunk in the middle one. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:59):
They definitely got drunk in the middle.

Richard Campbell (01:08:01):
Yeah. And so and so did Gates. Right. Like they were famous for, for that was the, but the Longhorn bar used to go to Whistler. Really? Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:08:08):
That's when he became the chief software, what do you call him? The chief what was he called? The Chief Soft, what was he called?

Richard Campbell (01:08:15):
Yeah. Chief Architect.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:15):
Chief Chief Architect. Whatever he was. Yeah. But, but yeah, he was, yeah. He was all about database back file systems and

Richard Campbell (01:08:22):
Yep. I think he was a big believer in that. And there's an apocryphal story of the drive up to Whistler on the 99 mm-hmm. And, and Gates and a bunch of the guys breaking down on the side of the road north of Squamish. Yeah. And an old guy coming down at a pickup truck and fixing their car on the spot for 'em. So they continue on and Gates wanted to give him a thank you gift and basically got his name. Yeah. Found his mortgage and paid it.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:42):
Wow. Wow. Nice.

Leo Laporte (01:08:44):
Wow.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:46):
I would've left that guy. I would've done that joke. Right. Pull over and say, you guys need a ride. And then he'd come to the car and I peel out and leave him in the dust

Richard Campbell (01:08:52):
<Laugh>. It's like, it's been all downhill since Millennium Edition

Paul Thurrott (01:08:57):
<Laugh>. Right? Oh, you guys did Windows Me. Hold on one second. Puts the car

Richard Campbell (01:09:01):
In reverse. I gotta go <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:09:07):
They kind of did that with a Do parody yet. Yeah. They left the, left the Stinky the

Paul Thurrott (01:09:12):
Smelly Sun Microsystem Box Station Home <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:09:15):
Yeah. Oh man. Yesterday he Steve Gibson said, HP stands for Huge Pile <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:28):
You're still my favorite computers. He,

Leo Laporte (01:09:30):
Yeah. Actually the, you know what, once the Division PC divisions spun off from hpe, I think they make really nice PCs

Paul Thurrott (01:09:39):
I think it was a couple of episodes ago, I complained about earnings and how it actually, you think it's all gonna happen in the same week or two, but it's actually kind of spread out. Yeah. Those companies reported different things. So Yeah,

Richard Campbell (01:09:47):
They have a different quarter, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:09:49):
Yeah. They're quarter ended on April 30th. Like, seriously, guys, it's not a clown card. Let's, can we just

Richard Campbell (01:09:53):
Line up <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (01:09:55):
You know,

Richard Campbell (01:09:56):
Just cuz it's inconvenient for you. I know <laugh> well

Paul Thurrott (01:10:00):
Just like to get it outta the way. It's like going to the dentist. Can I do all my teeth at once? You know? Anyhow as with the rest of the industry, obviously things aren't going great over there. Most of their revenues come from PCs. PC business revenues fall 29% in a quarter. Consumer PCs fell 39% commercials down 24 total units sold. We're down 28, which is kind of in line with the estimates from idc. These

Richard Campbell (01:10:24):
Are comparables, right? Yeah. Like absolutely comparables. I'm sad that the printer businesses in down Marcus, God, they're

Paul Thurrott (01:10:30):
Printers. They didn't, I literally declined to write much about that cuz I just didn't,

Richard Campbell (01:10:35):
I, she said, you know what, this is a whole other article. Yeah, that's right. How printers make me

Paul Thurrott (01:10:40):
Angry. Yep. they, it's like they're adding d r m to ink now or something. It's unbelievable. Yeah. truly. Yeah. That's

Leo Laporte (01:10:48):
Why I call em huge pile, by the way, because Oh no. Oh, I, oh, it wasn't that. Although that's a good reason. It was also the fact that they pushed out an update that bricked their printers cuz they, because they were trying to update the d RM on the printer Inc.

Richard Campbell (01:11:04):
Right. We're, we're trying to screw our customers in the process. We screwed our customers. We really

Paul Thurrott (01:11:09):
Screwed them. I mean, the first one was on purpose, so that would've been

Richard Campbell (01:11:12):
Fine. But Yeah. But, but this accident, we're sorry. We're really sorry about that.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:16):
That was a mistake. Anyway I, I hope this is the last one I do for a while, but no, what am I talking about? Yeah. Get 30 days until the end of this actual quarter. So we'll be doing this again soon. We'll see how things go. I a lot of people expect the second half of this year to be better. HP sort of said the same thing, although the second half of HP's year is, is what it's, I think it's, I think there was the second or third quarter. I don't remember The next quarters. Doesn't matter. It doesn't line up exactly. It should be more positive, but year over year comparisons will still be negative. So they're hoping it's not gonna be as bad <laugh>, I guess is maybe the way to look at it. We'll see, man. We'll see what happens.

(01:12:01):
There's that, and I haven't written about this. I've got two things in the notes say I did not write about yet, and I may st I may not. But the Wall Street Journal has a very interesting interview with pat Gelsinger speaking of Intel. And he, I have to say, has been pretty open and honest as you know, as much as we can tell about what's going wrong there. He talked about the culture at the company before and how it was a disaster and you know, and his current strategy, which is to kind of turn Intel into a foundry business right. Where they're gonna make the chips. And this is kind of what differentiates Intel from its competitors. I gotta tell you, I I, this is maybe not a great comparison, but this is, they want

Richard Campbell (01:12:45):
To be T S M C. Is that where they're Yeah. Well, they

Paul Thurrott (01:12:48):
Want be, be another tmsc, I guess. Yeah. Right. PS

Richard Campbell (01:12:51):
Embassy you really like, like to put a Tmsc

Paul Thurrott (01:12:54):
Yeah,

Richard Campbell (01:12:55):
I'm sorry. Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:59):
All when you say it like that, it makes sense, <laugh>.

Richard Campbell (01:13:01):
So

Paul Thurrott (01:13:03):
This reminds me of Nokia, right? If you had gone to Nokia a couple years before they were sold to Microsoft, you know, most of 'em sold to Microsoft and you said, you know, what are your big strengths? I I think one of the things they might have said was, we do the whole thing. We do everything. Yeah. they had places factories and, and facilities all over the planet. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, tons and tons of employees, all of them with expensive health insurance plans and retirement plans and whatever else. And honestly, there was just a lot of overhead there. Commodor actually had the same problem a million years ago,

Richard Campbell (01:13:35):
But they also believed they could build an operating system. Right. We do these things, not because they're easy, but because we think they're easy <laugh>. And and Symbian was bad.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:44):
It was bad. Yeah. No,

Richard Campbell (01:13:45):
But it's also just a fundamentally did not understand and neither did Rim by the way. Like Yeah. Just cause you make hardware. It's like you almost have this disease. You think software is easy to link good operating systems. By the way, that disease flipping

Paul Thurrott (01:13:58):
Hard, that disease goes both ways. It's like mad cow.

Richard Campbell (01:14:01):
Oh, without a doubt. Yeah. The hard, the software people are like, you just make hardware. Just make the hardware. It's not hardware. How hard could it be? We'll make hardware

Paul Thurrott (01:14:08):
Be with our software.

Richard Campbell (01:14:09):
Are you saying the brain

Leo Laporte (01:14:10):
Blood barrier is permeable

Paul Thurrott (01:14:12):
Is exactly like hardware, software? Yeah. I did make that comparison.

Leo Laporte (01:14:16):
Know I liked called, I'm gonna go on record saying I liked Symbian on the Scion three A. That was just right, but it was Right Scion.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:25):
So Wait, wait, wait. Was that what those little brain things? Are they scs or Ryon or what? Pon

Leo Laporte (01:14:29):
Crayon. They're s Yeah. You're talking about mad cow disease? Yeah, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:14:34):
Yeah. So I,

Leo Laporte (01:14:37):
This is a wide ranging conversation. Sorry, I'm, I just wanted to say No, I love it. No drugs were taken before the recording.

Richard Campbell (01:14:43):
No, no. We're like this, normally, this is

Leo Laporte (01:14:45):
Just

Paul Thurrott (01:14:46):
A little punchy on Wednesday afternoon. I love it. So I would like until to succeed, I really would. I don't know. You know, I don't know. It doesn't

Leo Laporte (01:14:56):
Look, honestly, it doesn't look good, really.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:59):
I know, and it's a weird thing to say because in this industry they still at the top, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but I feel like there's a big chunk of losses to come that's going to come from servers and cloud computing that they're just not gonna be part of that wave. And I think when that falls apart, or it, I should say, if that falls apart for them, if that part of the market goes to AM MD or arm, which is more likely I don't know how you recover from that. So we'll see.

Leo Laporte (01:15:25):
Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:15:25):
I think EMD will continue to make the compatible chips for the old architecture for the X 86. Yeah. X 64 and ARM is beginning to dominate.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:35):
Right.

Richard Campbell (01:15:35):
Now we're just getting such good results.

Leo Laporte (01:15:37):
We should say that Intel has announced, and they talked about it at Build the Meteor Lake, which will have not an N P U <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:45):
I know God damn them, but

Leo Laporte (01:15:47):
A v seriously,

Paul Thurrott (01:15:48):
A vpu. And what does that stand for, Leo? What's

Leo Laporte (01:15:51):
The processing unit?

Paul Thurrott (01:15:52):
Yeah. And actually, oddly, I've seen two definitions of it. I've seen two different terms and I'm trying to remember what the other one was, but yeah, we'll call it

Leo Laporte (01:15:58):
Visual. I think that's what Intel's saying. It's a visual practice. Okay. And of course, NPU is neural processing unit, which is a general purpose. No, no, what I mean,

Paul Thurrott (01:16:06):
And the vn vpu, I've seen it written two different, two different terms. I

Leo Laporte (01:16:10):
Think Intel said visual, but I might be wrong. But anyway,

Richard Campbell (01:16:13):
Let's, let's just go with victory because they, that's why they're looking

Paul Thurrott (01:16:16):
For now. And

Leo Laporte (01:16:16):
You see the problem the entire industry, even at build Microsoft n b npu, npu. So, and, and Intel, which has an NPU in Meteor Lake, but they've chosen to call it a vpu.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:28):
Well, if it helps, and I know it doesn't Qualcomm doesn't call it that either, right? What do they call it? Apparently NPU is a, well, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:16:34):
Maybe Apple owns it or something. Or no,

Paul Thurrott (01:16:36):
Is it Arm nmp? They told me that NPU was a Microsoft turn, by the way. I, I I think Mpu is sort of the micro Apple calls

Leo Laporte (01:16:42):
It an npu, I think.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:44):
No, they call it an neural engine. They have a, they have a, oh, you're

Leo Laporte (01:16:46):
Right. Okay. So maybe Microsoft Jones npu.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:50):
I think we're getting a little crazy with the brands here. I think we should just admit that these things are all the same thing. But from Qualcomm's perspective, they have something called an AI engine, which is not that chip. It is the combination of the, it's everything on the S o c. So it's what we would call the C P U, the G P U plus, what we're calling mp. They say together this thing is an AI engine and they work hand in hand and yada, you know, like a, like the die on a, an A series processor. Like when you see an Apple, an apple,

Richard Campbell (01:17:19):
I'm trying to think who's, who's got enough cloud the same way that Cutler forced Intel to the table on the X 64 extensions. Like who's got the clout in our industry to say, Hey, it should be an npu and it should more or less look like this. It's probably Nvidia.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:35):
Oh, there you go. I was just, I was gonna say, Microsoft absolutely does not. Right.

Richard Campbell (01:17:40):
But if Nvidia decided to say, here's an open specification we're gonna build to this, you guys feel free. We're calling the neural processing unit going forward. I just don't see they have any reason to do that. That's an

Paul Thurrott (01:17:50):
Interesting point because NVIDIA's offerings, if I'm not mistaken, aren't they? I don't mean to say just, but aren't they GPUs

Richard Campbell (01:17:56):
Essentially? They're cuda, which was originally gp, but it's, it's almost simplified. They've taken a bunch of the other stuff off. Okay. In an effort,

Paul Thurrott (01:18:06):
What do they densify? What do they call these chips?

Richard Campbell (01:18:08):
They've, they're all codenamed. Yeah. Right. Like that's, that's basically where they're going. And they're, and they, and they don't have to talk much cuz they essentially have two customers. Right? Like Right

Paul Thurrott (01:18:18):
<Laugh>.

Richard Campbell (01:18:18):
That's right. For the most part, everything looking right. Big customers <laugh>. Well, everything they're making is going to Microsoft and Amazon right now. Like that's sort of the reality. And you know, I've got a show coming with ceviche. We didn't really talk about this online, but offline it was like, oh no, we're we're buying quarters worth of production.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:35):
Yeah, yeah. Yep. That's why they're working so fast to try to come up with their own chip sets because that stuff is expensive.

Richard Campbell (01:18:41):
Well and it's also, you know, there is more, there is optimization to be had like for what it takes to run G P T four. Why wouldn't you make dedicated hardware for this?

Paul Thurrott (01:18:52):
That's a good point. Right.

Richard Campbell (01:18:53):
But one, but one would argue in general, what you're really talking about is generative processors process designed to do generative models. Who

Paul Thurrott (01:19:01):
Made the Voodoo cards? The 3D fx. 3D 3D fx. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So they used to at one point sold a card that was just for Quake <laugh>. That was the whole point of it. Wow. Wow. You buy this thing, put quake on it. That's how, that's really more a statement about how big

Richard Campbell (01:19:14):
Quake was back in

Paul Thurrott (01:19:15):
The day than anything else. Well, but I mean, wow. Or the point where you do the same thing for ai. I mean Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:19:22):
Well but see that's the virtue of what Apple's doing is, so you describe, I think it was you who described this last week, that there's cpu, gpu, and np, we'll call it N P U. The, the n P is not as fast as a gpu, right? Was Richard

Paul Thurrott (01:19:39):
Maybe? No, I don't remember that conversation. But maybe Richard. It was Richard. It just, it's just optimized for these particular workloads. It's the

Leo Laporte (01:19:46):
Same kind of thing though. But because it's what, what it is, is well, right, I mean processing a chunk of data,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:51):
Right? It's so go back to like window a long run at the time, right. And long run, one of the big deals was we're gonna have hardware accelerated graphics mm-hmm. <Affirmative> now to do hardware accelerated graphics. At the time this became not true later on, but at the time you literally needed a dedicated gpu. So the natural reaction is, well, hold on a second. You're telling me that I'm gonna put a g a dedicated GPU into a laptop in this case and this thing is gonna run that UI more efficiently. And that somehow the combination of these things will make the system more efficient overall. Cuz it seems to me that adding a GPU to a system will make it less efficient. But you take workloads, for lack of a better term, cause I'm not a harbor guy, but you take workloads off of the cpu and that actually does a lot to help that thing run more efficiently because now the CPU's not running gangbusters the whole time to get everything done. And I think the mpu is, you know, again, I'm super high level here, but I think it's kind of the same thing. It's more way more efficient than a CPU and more efficient than a GPU for those

Leo Laporte (01:20:50):
Workloads. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:20:51):
I think the GPU and the m p have a lot more, they're both scaler processors. Like the math is simple, but Exactly. A lot of it. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:20:57):
Yeah, they do block operations, right? Yeah. It goes back to the what was it, the mm s or Mm. Yeah. process. Yeah. Multi on the multi

Paul Thurrott (01:21:08):
Multimedia extensions. Yeah. Yeah. The mm, MMX X,

Leo Laporte (01:21:10):
That's it. Mmx, yeah. On the Intel processes, the same thing you were processing had

Paul Thurrott (01:21:15):
Processes back in the day too, right? Mm-Hmm. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:21:17):
But that was,

Paul Thurrott (01:21:18):
That was different. Special chips for match

Leo Laporte (01:21:20):
Coke processors were so you could do floating point, and so they could have the radix and the prefix or whatever it was separate mm-hmm. <Affirmative> registers. But I honestly think a GP and N P U are close, but MBS slower, but it's slower, right?

Richard Campbell (01:21:36):
Not necessarily. I mean, it depends.

Leo Laporte (01:21:38):
It's not about clock speed,

Paul Thurrott (01:21:41):
Right?

Leo Laporte (01:21:42):
Well,

Richard Campbell (01:21:42):
It still is because you are adjusting values

Leo Laporte (01:21:45):
Quickly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want to process this quickly.

Richard Campbell (01:21:49):
Yeah. But it's running very parallel and parallel.

Leo Laporte (01:21:52):
Yes. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:53):
So there's a, there's a session at build, which is Markovich and

Leo Laporte (01:22:00):
Lost

Paul Thurrott (01:22:00):
His name and someone else. Jesus, I'm losing it. The

Richard Campbell (01:22:02):
Closing session with

Paul Thurrott (01:22:03):
Hanselman? No, it was the Hansman. Sorry. Thank you. Scott Hanselman. Yeah. And it was like, let's code with Mark and Scott kind of thing, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And they, they make a JavaScript based asteroids game, multi-player, whatever. It's doesn't matter. The whole point of the thing isn't to make the JavaScript game, which is stupid. It's really for that part in the middle where Mark explains how these NPUs work. And I had the same experience watching this. I did when I learned about quantum computing, which is like, I'm sure what you're saying makes total sense. I'm an idiot. I have no idea what you're talking about. <Laugh>. he explained it, you know, as clearly as one could. I think. It's complicated. I mean, it's just it's,

Leo Laporte (01:22:38):
These guys look, it, these guys are big brains. I mean, we're humble mortals. They are in another world,

Paul Thurrott (01:22:46):
And no, as far as I'm concerned, they're up in the heavens bowling. And that's what thunder is like. I don't know.

Richard Campbell (01:22:50):
<Laugh> thunder. It's thunder.

Leo Laporte (01:22:54):
Yeah. So you could use, in fact, do use, I thought you were, I thought it was you maybe Richard, to explain this to me. You could use GPUs to do those kinds of loads. In fact, that's kind of what Nvidia does with their TPUs.

Richard Campbell (01:23:07):
And, and, and they absolutely do. Yeah. but, and there's a, there's a significant significant similarity between array tracing problem for graphics and a a generative back propagation problem in, in machine learning. Like they're very similar. They're propagating values across multiple nodes.

Leo Laporte (01:23:28):
Okay. Now I'm also looking at an explainer that says that nmps are optimized for matrix multiplication, which is interesting. Well,

Richard Campbell (01:23:39):
And the same thing, a array trace is a matrix multiplication. Yeah. And a and a transform is a re is a a matrix.

Leo Laporte (01:23:45):
So they are related.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:46):
This is a glorified tip calculator, is what I'm hearing. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:23:50):
You just look at, here's what I do, double the amount and move the decimal point over. That's, but anyway, that's another matter. Another day. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:58):
I,

Leo Laporte (01:23:59):
I I have a TPU in my brain. A tip processing unit. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. so GPU is too general purpose to be efficient for AI workloads. So Google, maybe it was Google, maybe it was a Google IO description. So, but this is why Google, the CPU architecture is based on the Von Noman architecture,

Richard Campbell (01:24:24):
Right?

Leo Laporte (01:24:25):
Every calculation of the CPU is stored in L one cash memory. And Google get a pipeline.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:31):
You're talking about data center trips chips or chips for

Leo Laporte (01:24:34):
The chips. All chips. This is all truth True of all chips. All chips. So that was Von Newman's insight was you can create kind of like a, a pipeline, a assembly line that would pr and you'd have memory, you'd have a CPU and you'd have storage, the A L U a arithmetic logic units, a circuit that controls memory access, executes each this might be too complicated for the show, but I'm looking at an interesting article about this on

Paul Thurrott (01:25:00):
Visiting. I like that. I'm probably the limiter on this one, not the audience.

Leo Laporte (01:25:03):
It's I don't wanna hurt Paul's brain, so I'll save this for some other time. No, this is a I'll, I'll I'll put a link somewhere in this article. I was just doing, I, I did a search and I found AI chips, gpu, tpu, and npu. Interesting. This is it. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:25:20):
Yeah. There was a little diagram similar to this at the the build session. I was,

Leo Laporte (01:25:27):
I feel like, yeah, I feel like I saw this on one of the keynotes recently,

Paul Thurrott (01:25:31):
And I knew I was in trouble and he explained the math and I was like, oh man, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna walk, walk.

Leo Laporte (01:25:35):
Not to be out on Microsoft has design their own AI architecture based on field programmable gator arrays, f PPGs. They call their hardware the neural processing unit, N P U, and it powers Azure and Bing. Right? They scale the F P G A architecture for deep learning workloads. That's project brainwave. Yeah. So

Paul Thurrott (01:25:55):
They, they point out that Microsoft came up with the name. That's what Qualcomm told me as well. It was the

Leo Laporte (01:26:00):
Microsoft. So that's why nobody uses it. I get it now. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:03):
Yeah. I, I just think it's a good term. I, I, I, it's just, I don't mean it because I, I didn't know Microsoft came up with this. I think this is a good term for it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:26:11):
Unfortunately. Encumbered, as we say, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it is an encumbered pattern.

Richard Campbell (01:26:19):
We talk about Microsoft breaking surface because this is, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:26:22):
Speaking of, speaking of brick in the hardware, it's not HP alone, boy, whoops. They fixed it now though.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:29):
Mm, no. Sort of. Oh, not exactly. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:26:32):
What happened?

Paul Thurrott (01:26:34):
So the seven people that own a, actually it's two, I forgot this. The other Surface store, the seven people that own a Surface prox woke up one day and found their camera wasn't working anymore. <Laugh>. Yeah. Nice. There's lots of theories about why that might have happened. So Microsoft put out a temporary workaround that you can use the integrated camera on, and doesn't, it doesn't completely work. I mean, it's, it, it, first of all, <laugh>, it, I guess the quality of the camera is lower. Now <laugh> through this, when using this workaround, I can't even imagine how that's possible, but maybe it doesn't. Turns off all the AI stuff. Cuz remember, windows and Arm devices are the only ones that can access today windows Studio effects, which are those AI background, blur, camera tracking, et cetera features. So anyway, there will be a fix a driver update that will fix this. That will come out as soon as possible, obviously. But in the meantime, you can use an external camera. You can have really crappy quality on the built-in camera. Yeah. Cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So someone in discord has pointed out the other surface story, which I meant to whoops. Forgot. Yeah. Which was that Microsoft issued a security patch. And now these devices are randomly rebooting. I mean, the Surface

Leo Laporte (01:27:53):
Duo is randomly rebooting, including the Duo two and du Duo one.

Richard Campbell (01:27:58):
Yeah. Spend two grand on a folding phone just to have a reboot. Re or

Leo Laporte (01:28:02):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:03):
Yeah. It's not great.

Leo Laporte (01:28:04):
I'm disappointed. Cause I really had high hopes as, you know, for the duo. Hmm.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:08):
It's all about quality and reliability. So don't worry.

Richard Campbell (01:28:11):
And wandering and crowds

Paul Thurrott (01:28:14):
And wasn't right like a homeless person. That was really weird. Can see

Richard Campbell (01:28:19):
Around here, I used to have a

Paul Thurrott (01:28:21):
Keynote doors, you know, there was keynote. All I could imagine, all I could imagine was like, you're in the audience, you're anonymous, you could be snoozing, whatever, watching a video or something. And you're like, is that guy walking toward me?

Leo Laporte (01:28:32):
He's coming this way.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:33):
Am I gonna be on the video now? Do I have to pay attention?

Richard Campbell (01:28:35):
I don't understand why. No. I, the perverse jumped up and didn't tackle him. You know, like, how do you resist that moment?

Leo Laporte (01:28:41):
But you, if you look back at the video, there were people stoically sitting, facing straight ahead as Panos went by. I am not gonna look, not gonna look

Richard Campbell (01:28:51):
Like a homeless person's ranting in the eye. Not,

Paul Thurrott (01:28:53):
I do not make, just give him a dollar. He doesn't have to clean the windshield. Just keep moving. Flick. Don't look at the VP

Richard Campbell (01:28:59):
Looking at VP as a mistake. Look, it's

Leo Laporte (01:29:01):
Kinds kind of funny because you, that's exactly what's going on in their mind is like, I know

Paul Thurrott (01:29:06):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. No, you can see it. It's the total dare in the headlight thing. And I dunno, one time he took my, we were in an audience. He took my laptop out of my hands. I was typing on it. And then he used it as some kind of example and he handed it back to me, closed. It was like, thanks <laugh> <laugh>. I was kinda in the middle of using that. But

Leo Laporte (01:29:24):
He, it's, you know, it's like a method actor who's so entranced with his own method that he thinks everyone else is just gonna be equally entranced

Richard Campbell (01:29:35):
And everybody's entrance to get pepper sprayed <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:37):
That's great. It's,

Leo Laporte (01:29:39):
It's

Paul Thurrott (01:29:39):
Like, that's what I need for him.

Leo Laporte (01:29:41):
This is so profound and deep that when I, you will, so I will take Paul's laptop and use it to make a point, close it and give it back to him. And you will be as equally enthralled by this move as I am. And the fact is, everybody's going to

Paul Thurrott (01:29:54):
Where I was like, it's at the flip sweat. The bit flip flipped. And I was like, I,

Leo Laporte (01:30:01):
Somebody at Microsoft does, obviously, right? I mean, the, the right thing to do would've been said, Panos, we took away all your content. Why don't we just skip this time.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:10):
Sure. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:30:11):
Hey, you know what, two minutes at the top. I hope you're really excited about the announcements from yesterday. You've done that. I want, I really want to introduce you to my team. They've really kicked ass. There you go. They have lots of good stuff to talk about. Yeah. Like you, you could have been a really great leader right then and there. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:24):
And just moved along. Well, great

Richard Campbell (01:30:25):
Leaders. They were gonna go 20 over anyway, so you might as well take that 10 minutes. And, and

Paul Thurrott (01:30:30):
Exactly. That was the thing. They were supposed to have breaks in there.

Richard Campbell (01:30:32):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:30:34):
Wow. Wow. Oh, well, okay. Oh, well. Okay. Let's take this sour taste out of our mouth.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:42):
<Laugh>. Exactly.

Richard Campbell (01:30:42):
Talk about Xbox

Leo Laporte (01:30:43):
And talk about Xbox.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:44):
Refreshing Xbox. So it's

Leo Laporte (01:30:45):
Time for the spearin refreshment built in to Xbox.

Richard Campbell (01:30:51):
I read these notes from Margarite.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:53):
Yeah. Did you, what do you think?

Richard Campbell (01:30:55):
I, I really want your take. Cuz I thought they were very in like, that is a smart person. Okay. I was

Paul Thurrott (01:31:00):
Gonna say because I you, you're not, you're not no, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. Leo will remember this. I would leave my wife for this woman <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:31:08):
No, you

Paul Thurrott (01:31:09):
I am. I would you're talking

Leo Laporte (01:31:10):
About Margaretha Vester who is the competitions. Yep. director, whatever for the e I was

Paul Thurrott (01:31:17):
Really nervous. You're gonna go in a negative direction there cuz I gotta tell you I love that.

Richard Campbell (01:31:20):
No, no, no. I was blown away. I I it's the between the line stuff. Like she is so elegantly telling Yes. Everyone. Well, telling the uk Well, you screwed this up so bad.

Leo Laporte (01:31:31):
Oh, that's interesting.

Richard Campbell (01:31:32):
And giving and giving them an out, showing them the way out

Paul Thurrott (01:31:35):
Of it. That's right. The, the two, the two things that well she is come

Leo Laporte (01:31:38):
Into, I don't want to be sexist, but she is a handsome woman.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:43):
I'm telling you. I

Richard Campbell (01:31:44):
Love her. So, so smart. Holy man.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:46):
She's, no, she's fantastic. But see we've

Leo Laporte (01:31:48):
Had complaints about Steger as well. Happy

Paul Thurrott (01:31:51):
Me. Well, right. So you got the, the context here is the EU is kind of top heavy with bureaucracy. Yes. they're obviously are are making a career out of going after big tech, all of which is from the United States. So you get that kind of competitive thing, which, you know, we don't like here, you know, we don't like to see that. But they are very quick to go after companies very slow to finalize the process. So, you know, charges come and then eight years goes by and nothing has happened. I mean, so there's, there's that kind of weirdness. I can't put that on her shoulders. Right. This was the case with her predecessors. It's not her, it's the, it's the whole, it's the system process. Yeah. It's the system. On the other hand, <laugh>, they approve this deal and the EU has far greater concerns about possible competitive ramifications of gaming in general, or any particular gaming market than does the uk.

(01:32:44):
There's just way more companies in the eu, way more, there are way more people <laugh>, you know, it's a, this is a bigger thing. And this was, this was almost a, I don't wanna call it a masterclass, but I thought it was a very good example of giving someone an out. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I had this person I worked with a million years ago. I'm almost afraid to say this out loud cuz there is a small chance he's listening. But I, you reach a point sometimes with people where you have to say, look, you're either an idiot or you're wrong. It's your choice. You tell me which one it is. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then we'll move, move forward because nothing you say makes sense. I can hear

Leo Laporte (01:33:20):
That. You know, so just hear you saying that to somebody,

Paul Thurrott (01:33:22):
<Laugh>, I mean, no, at some point you just stop. You're like, stop talking. You're not you. You're, you're not. They're what that person needed. And what people need when they're wrong is we all make mistakes moment. Like they need a look. You did the right thing, the

Leo Laporte (01:33:36):
Wrong thing for the right. Don't double double down now. Now stop

Richard Campbell (01:33:39):
Digging a hole.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:39):
Yeah. Yeah. You need to, you you need to be more political than I am. You know, like, you, you need to give people that out. Yeah. And I feel like she, like Richard said, I, I feel like she did that. How do two smart people or two, you know, smart groups of people, however you wanna say it, look at the same problem and come away with completely different conclusions.

Leo Laporte (01:33:57):
So she was speaking to this, I'm not gonna pronounce this right, it's very long. The studios tel, why don't they, you know, just speak English. Okay. <laugh> for <laugh>, all these, all these European long words, weird words. Come on. Just, you know, speak the speak, speak the language as it's written.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:18):
I bet she nailed it though when she said it.

Leo Laporte (01:34:19):
Oh, I'm sure she said it perfectly. <Laugh> check against delivery is the title of her talk. Yeah. On simplification. The effort to cut red tape. So what did she say? I mean, can you summarize this? She's got

Richard Campbell (01:34:31):
Mi you got miles ago. This is very long. That's a

Leo Laporte (01:34:33):
Long bite

Richard Campbell (01:34:34):
Piece. You know, the, the, to me the brilliant part was saying, Hey, we care about cloud gaming, but Activision doesn't, Activision never put any of their games into the cloud, but Microsoft says the will this is actually going to make cloud gaming better. Right?

Leo Laporte (01:34:55):
Well, she says first, firstly, some people think, some people as in the <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (01:35:00):
Some people the

Leo Laporte (01:35:01):
Prince, you know, those people, that agency should either block or clear mergers, nothing in between. Right. She says, that's not our policy. We cannot, as a matter of principle, dismiss remedy proposals. By the

Paul Thurrott (01:35:12):
Way, that's not antitrust policy almost anywhere. I Right. The point is, well, you can say yes or no. I mean, ob obviously that that is one thing. But what, what you're looking for are, you see a deal of this size and you think, okay, look, Microsoft's gonna have to make concessions. Yeah. What might those concessions be? When everyone thought it was all about Call of Duty, they came out and said, look, we'll put Call of Duty everywhere for 10 years. We'll make an agreement with anyone. And did mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, they made agreements with everyone. The only company that didn't sign it that was offered it was Sony <laugh>, which

Leo Laporte (01:35:41):
Stewart

Paul Thurrott (01:35:41):
Complaining doesn't want them to get the, you know, the company. Yeah. Yeah. So I,

Leo Laporte (01:35:48):
It is interesting though, I have to say that. I mean, she's the head, the lead on this in Europe

Paul Thurrott (01:35:56):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>.

Leo Laporte (01:35:56):
Right, right. Some, and they've already signed off. They think it's a good to go. Yeah. I think maybe you said this last week, Paul really think the e the British did this as just a, a up yours to Europe. Like, we're not Europe.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:10):
See? Yep. Yeah. Great. No, you have shown that you're separate. You're, yes. You're the dumb part. <Laugh>, you know, and it's just, I I she, no, she says this very well. It, it's she, first of all 80% over the PA of their conditional clearances relied on structural remedies. Right. In other words, you can't just dismiss remedy proposals. That's the part where she, she gets as close as I think as she ever gets in this is to saying, you screwed up. Yeah. Like you have just dismissed the proposal. When Microsoft kind of says, we offered them this mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, they just didn't, they, it doesn't appear anywhere in the CMA documentation. They just said, no, no, we're not doing because of this thing. Yeah. met, which is, which is

Leo Laporte (01:36:57):
Not a thing.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:58):
Right. So it's it Microsoft this is not in her letter, but, or her talk. But Microsoft has since come out and kind of said, you know, the UK looked at this cloud gaming as if it were some kind of a market. They're like, Microsoft dominates the market for cloud gaming. First of all, if that were a market, it's the tiniest market in the world. It's nothing but whatever. They're like, cloud gaming is not a market, it's a delivery system. Yeah. So if you're saying we dominate a world in which games are delivered in this fashion, okay. But most games are not delivered like that. Like 99% of games are not delivered in that fashion. So calling us dominant in this little area is one of those, what's the term when something's technically true, but it's completely irrelevant. <Laugh>, you know, it's just, that's all that is. And that's yeah's a great way of putting this drama in. Yep. Crazy.

Leo Laporte (01:37:50):
But I'm a, if anyway, if I'm the UK regulator, I'm saying Yeah, thank you Margarite. This exactly why we have Brexit. So you can't tell us what to do.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:59):
Yeah, that's right.

Leo Laporte (01:38:00):
Right. She has no, I like she has no standing. I, I

Paul Thurrott (01:38:02):
Love that we're all being victimized by this attitude problem. You know? And by the way, listen, we get that you wanna be separate. One thing you could do is communicate with each other, <laugh>. You know did the UK have anything to offer to the EU that might've changed their minds? Apparently not. Right. and is the, what about the reverse? I don't think they were listening.

Richard Campbell (01:38:26):
Yeah. I, I thought

Paul Thurrott (01:38:26):
Wonder, this is just

Richard Campbell (01:38:27):
An interesting, I'm surprised she came out and did this cuz she didn't need to. They'd already approved it. I, I don't know that it gives any option. Yeah. Or not.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:35):
I, so I'm not saying I, I have no knowledge of this. Why would I? But I have to wonder if this isn't a response to the fact that when the EU announced that they had declared this thing conditionally, the UK C M A felt the need to go into, like, to unleash a tweet storm defending their decision <laugh>. Right. Like, just shut up. You don't have to reply. No, they're not in your jurisdiction. Yeah. Nobody cares what you think about it, but it just came off as petulant. Yeah. So now she responds to that and she looks professional and it kind of helps that she's right. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:39:10):
Right. And, and really did without, there's no effort to humiliate in this, but to genuinely say you can give them that out. Right. There's a way forward on this. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:39:19):
All, cause you can see this in, you could say this in so many, it's almost like a, a talk about ta toxic ma a masculinity. It's like, yeah. If you block a arr, you're a enforcer. If you clear, you know, let's just say that you're not perceived as tough, because what I want to really say is, if you clear, well, you're a wimp, you know, <laugh>. And it's like, that's, and then she says, that's not our policy. Right. Love for, we cannot, as a matter of princip, there's

Leo Laporte (01:39:42):
A little human, a humor. I didn't realize she had a, a sense of humor. She says, I am told that Call of Duty is a very popular shooter franchise. Yes. <laugh>. But we found that Microsoft would probably not shoot itself in the fort by stopping sales to the much larger station base. Mo, I made a funny mo

Paul Thurrott (01:40:04):
Click the glasses. That was a good one. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:40:08):
This is a very, actually I'm being silly cuz this is, you're right, I'm reading. Brilliant. That's great. It's really well spoken. Yeah. It makes a very strong case for the Brits to shape up. I know. Or ship out. Well, it's too late for that. Oh, wow.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:27):
Oh, well. Huh. Anyway, I'm glad she did it. I love her. She's great.

Leo Laporte (01:40:34):
Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:40:37):
And, and she's Danish Leo. So you gotta work on your Danish accent. I

Leo Laporte (01:40:40):
Don't have, I don't even know. Yeah. I don't have, well, I don't, all I know is, is the Swedish chef. I can do that. Dutch

Richard Campbell (01:40:47):
Not, not the same

Paul Thurrott (01:40:48):
Thing at all. That's what, it's the nexus between Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands. It's kind <laugh> <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:40:58):
By the way. She ends her speech. Our mission is to accompany the transition to our mission is to accompany that transition. One merger at a time is to find solutions that keep the game, get it fair for all players and working closely together with sister agencies as we do Sue. That is our Call of

Paul Thurrott (01:41:18):
Duty. Call of, oh man. Nicely done.

Leo Laporte (01:41:21):
Nicely done. Margarita Fish

Paul Thurrott (01:41:24):
Throw the microphone on the floor, mic dropped. And then they were like, they were like, did they just re did she just refer <laugh> to the CMA in, in, in feminine terms? Is that that what she just did? Oh, was that a little

Leo Laporte (01:41:35):
Put down? That's just a language difference. It's Venus.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:37):
Yeah. <affirmative>.

Leo Laporte (01:41:41):
Now I thinks it seems clear that she says the shifting sands of crisis and transition will set the agenda for mergers in the coming years. Since the pandemic disruption has become the norm, there are shifts in how consumers shop, work, relax and socialize. We should expect that in the years to come, this will lead to consolidation in traditional SEC sectors, but also m and a in emerging sectors. Our mission is to accompany that transition. I don't know if a company's the right translation there. Right. accommodate maybe would be better. One merger at a time. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:13):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:16):
Not be dumb.

Leo Laporte (01:42:17):
Not be dumb about it. You Brexit cities, <laugh>. Yeah. They, they're trying to spread Brexit all over us. Stop it.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:26):
Right, right, right. Exactly. To yourself. The

Leo Laporte (01:42:29):
We don't need, just thinking Brexit, we're all gonna

Paul Thurrott (01:42:31):
Suffer. Funny. Anyway, I thought she, I thought, I thought that was

Leo Laporte (01:42:37):
Fantastic.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:37):
Now the problem is, if I write about this, all I'm gonna do is I should, I could just quote what she said. I she doesn't, there's nothing you can add to it, really. It's perfect.

Leo Laporte (01:42:44):
I mean,

Paul Thurrott (01:42:44):
Yeah. It's really, it almost, it's, it's almost quite well said.

Leo Laporte (01:42:47):
I

Paul Thurrott (01:42:47):
Thought. Yeah. Editorial free.

Leo Laporte (01:42:50):
Yeah. I mean, she's basically saying, no, you made a mistake. And, and, and we didn't make that mistake because this is why, you know, and so, I mean, there's nothing she can do about it.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:03):
Well,

Leo Laporte (01:43:04):
It's a new month. One month New month. One one day from today, June. So do we have new games for Gold Titles? Mr. Paul Throt?

Paul Thurrott (01:43:13):
Yeah. And I think we might have a first here. So, games with Gold, remember used to be four free games a month for people who have Xbox Live Gold. And then eventually a Game Pass Ultimate as well. They ran out of legacy Xbox Games to put in this program. So now it's newer Xbox One slash Xbox Series X and S games. So there's only two per month now. So there's one that runs the entire month. And then there's one that runs for a month that goes from the middle of the month till the middle of the next month. I, I don't know why they stagger them. Anyway, the first of those two is something called Aios, which curiously does not take place in a Spanish speaking place. But it's a first person kind of cinematic, thriller adventure game. It looks to me a lot like one of those telltale games.

(01:43:54):
It's not though, it's actually a first person game. So you walk through the areas, but the, the style of the graphics is very familiar to, are very similar to telltale games, like those Walking Dead games and so forth. It looks pretty cool, so, oh, so, but the thing that's unique about it is, I think, I could be wrong, but I believe this is the first games with Gold title. It is also available free on Windows. So it's not just the console. And maybe it's just because it's a cross-platform game. And that's, that was its nature. But it looks, it actually looks pretty interesting. The other one is called the Veil Shadow of the Crown, which I read is Veil Shadow of the Corn, which I liked better, but it's

Leo Laporte (01:44:29):
<Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:44:31):
In the shadow of the corn. That's pretty fun. Fun,

Leo Laporte (01:44:35):
Funny. What's in Your

Paul Thurrott (01:44:36):
Veil? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then also Microsoft is announced because yeah, new Month. The first batch of Game Pass titles is coming in the first half of June. This's a big list. I don't know that I, none of these, this happens to me a lot. I don't really recognize many of these. There's a, there's kind of a cute little watercolory game look looking game called DK like in as in France, which I think looks kind of cool, but it's

Leo Laporte (01:45:06):
Probably Rayman. It's a Rayman clone Cuz Ray Man's also French. You know, I don't think it is. No <laugh> Let Rayman feel to it. I don't know. Does it?

Paul Thurrott (01:45:16):
Okay. I've

Leo Laporte (01:45:17):
Never, I mean, I'm the game, I'm just looking at the, but there's Amnesia on the list and Amnesia is like this horror game series that I would never play. Ooh. That's not my thing at all.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:28):
Yeah, the Bunker. That's a good, yeah, I guess

Leo Laporte (01:45:30):
That's one of the set Stacking amnesia. The Bunker Car Mechanic Simulator. Oh, how fun. 2021.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:39):
We're running outta stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:45:40):
Yeah. What is, I can't even read that. Hypno Outlaw Hypno

Paul Thurrott (01:45:46):
Snake. No. Space Outlaw.

Leo Laporte (01:45:47):
Hypno Space Outlaw.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:49):
Yep. I know this happens me a lot these days. I don't recognize a lot of these

Leo Laporte (01:45:52):
Games. And the Big Conk, you like that cuz it's got a French name.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:58):
Yep. I like the game Slayer's X because it, his two colons in the name, which is I think grammatically Impossible. Double Colon, you know, whatever.

Leo Laporte (01:46:05):
Wow. Wow. It's okay. And to gamers, anything's possible.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:11):
Slayer's X Terminal Aftermath Vengeance of the Slayer

Leo Laporte (01:46:14):
Double Colon.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:15):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:46:16):
And what's, what's this last one I can't ruin. Ro Factory Special Room

Paul Thurrott (01:46:21):
Factory four Special

Leo Laporte (01:46:23):
<Laugh> Factory four Special.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:25):
I know. Which

Leo Laporte (01:46:26):
Looks like it's an anime. It looks like a

Paul Thurrott (01:46:28):
Japanese kinda animat. Everybody's

Leo Laporte (01:46:29):
Got big eyes. So

Paul Thurrott (01:46:32):
Next month we'll have dishwasher Mechanic Simulator 2023 <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:46:37):
Vacuum

Paul Thurrott (01:46:37):
Simulator in 2022.

Leo Laporte (01:46:41):
I'm looking for a Grease Trap. Inspector

Paul Thurrott (01:46:44):
Dog, groomer Simulator 2021. Hey,

Leo Laporte (01:46:47):
They're the, these are the big titles finally coming out. That's for your game pass.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:54):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:46:55):
There is an update to the Xbox app.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:58):
We are, what is, it's, it's gonna be June tomorrow, so let's see, March. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> April May at sometime in the next day or two. I am gonna hit the third month anniversary of the last time I turned on my Xbox console. And I have been playing games on the pc. And the way I've been doing it, mostly, not entirely, but mostly is through the Xbox app on the PC and the Xbox. I dunno why I just said it like that. The Xbox app the Xbox app is kinda like a software console, right. It's, it's like the Xbox console. Right. It's, it's kind of a similar ui and you obviously, you don't get

Leo Laporte (01:47:29):
Exactly the sentence. So what, this is kind of stunning news.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:33):
Yeah, I

Leo Laporte (01:47:33):
Know you, so you will play Call Duty that way. You have Call of Duty running on the Xbox, you're playing on your pc. No, I don't

Paul Thurrott (01:47:38):
Play Call of Duty. I haven't played Call of Duty since March 2nd, I think. Oh, I see. Yeah. So this,

Richard Campbell (01:47:43):
This is just a side effect of moving, like, you have an unpacked

Paul Thurrott (01:47:46):
Xbox. No, it's right there. I can see it. I can turn around if I wanted to. I'm like, I'm, I'm making the effort, you know. I get a lot of criticism for only playing Call of Duty. I can't understand that. It's obviously the only game that matters and I've been verifying that over the past three months. But I've been trying different things and you know, older, the games, obviously you have to play like you would back in the day or as people do on PCs, you know, keyword Mouse. But I prefer to play with the, I still like the con the controller if I can do it. I've been playing the, that Halo Infinite game. I gonna tell you.

Richard Campbell (01:48:17):
Ooh, it's gonna catch on one of these days.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:19):
It's no it's not. And I don't know how you fix that. It's I think Halo has kind of played out. I I I appreciate that it's Halo. You know, it's Halo, the music. It's perfect. You know, I'm, you're getting Halo musical

Richard Campbell (01:48:32):
Gonna happen. There's a

Paul Thurrott (01:48:33):
Path. Yeah. It's like bba ba boom, bba ba boom, you know, the music kicks in. It's, it's nicely done. But it's the same damn game. Like it's sys you know, the same thing over and over again. So yeah. I'm kind of, I don't know what to do with that. I, I think they need to, I think they need some new blood there and go in some different directions. Well, the

Richard Campbell (01:48:50):
Team's been dispersed. Like, there's never gonna be another hell of game. Like say the same re that you're, there's never gonna be another

Paul Thurrott (01:48:58):
Like half Life or Half

Richard Campbell (01:49:00):
Life or any of those. Right. Like, those teams don't exist anymore. They make something new. There's no point.

Leo Laporte (01:49:06):
You know what I'm loving by the way. And you recommended this ages ago. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and I'm just now getting around to reading Masters of Doom.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:14):
Yeah. Oh my God. What

Leo Laporte (01:49:15):
A great book. The story of Carmack Romero,

Paul Thurrott (01:49:17):
If I'm not mistaken, the audio book is read by Will Wheat, will Wheaton Think?

Leo Laporte (01:49:22):
Well, I'm not, you know, he's a little arch in his style. He's not my favorite. You know, it's some almost, he's doing a comic reading of it a little bit.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:29):
He does ready,

Leo Laporte (01:49:32):
Ready for Ready

Paul Thurrott (01:49:32):
Player one, I think. Right? Yeah. That was okay. He's okay. And does, does he do the new version of the the Martian? Is that him? No, because you know what it used to be? It was oh,

Leo Laporte (01:49:41):
You're right. I think they got Will Wheaton to do it.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:45):
I think so. Oh, that's true. I like the original guy. Original guy escaping. Perfect. He was perfect. I I he must never forget Right. Listening to I, I was laughing out loud so much. We were in Barcelona and I kept read like quoting from it to my family. It was probably like, seriously, but I was, I I just thought it was the funniest world. It was so funny world. Yeah. And they did a movie version, which was okay. It was fine, you know, but it just, nothing can compare with the original reading of that.

Leo Laporte (01:50:09):
Yeah, because he had the, the voice. He was, he was perfect.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:12):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:50:13):
Yeah. But I guess, I don't know, maybe you can't. He

Paul Thurrott (01:50:15):
Does the Mountain man books. RC Bray. RC

Leo Laporte (01:50:18):
Bray. Yeah. Am

Paul Thurrott (01:50:19):
I weird for just reading the book? <Laugh>? Yeah. It's just the 19th century. What do you re like, read by a candle? What's wrong with you? Yeah. No, I don't need you have, I have a, yeah, no, I, I kind of go back and forth depending on the book. I'll listen to, if there is an audio book version, I'll listen to the clip to see if I like the guy's voice or the person's voice. And if I don't, I'll read the book.

Leo Laporte (01:50:37):
You know what sometimes I'll do is buy both Cuz you get a discount if you buy both. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. And that's a nice handoff. You

Paul Thurrott (01:50:44):
Gotta do it in the right order though. Oh really? I, yeah. I, yeah, you gotta look at, you buy the

Leo Laporte (01:50:48):
Audiobook first and it's

Paul Thurrott (01:50:49):
Cheaper. I think it's the other way. I could be wrong. I think

Leo Laporte (01:50:51):
It's cheaper. Look at that. Will Wheaton is now reading it. It is

Paul Thurrott (01:50:54):
Wheaton. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:50:55):
Boy. It's okay. I'm glad I have the library. The RC gray version

Paul Thurrott (01:50:59):
RC when you want. Yep. Classic.

Leo Laporte (01:51:00):
That's a little disappointing. Yeah, they must have RC must have moved on or something.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:05):
It wasn't his fault. He had, he addressed this on his blog back in the day. I can't remember the reason. I I think it was a, a licensed thing with the publishing companies. It ran out or some, it was some weird reason. Yeah. But

Leo Laporte (01:51:17):
I'll have to, you know, I, I've had Andy on the show a couple of times. Andy Weir, I, I'll have to, we ask him. Held him on three times I think. May not, I may

Paul Thurrott (01:51:26):
Not have been involved. Publishers are funny that way. Right?

Leo Laporte (01:51:28):
Like, well he Project Hail Mary did not have RC Bra. It had Ray Porter who was also very good as the

Paul Thurrott (01:51:34):
Reader. Does that guy do his other books too? Cause I feel like they might have moved on to

Leo Laporte (01:51:38):
Rosario Dawson did the Artemis <laugh>. Interesting. Okay. And then Will Wheaton does The Martian. There are other older stuff, but I don't think any of that really really counts. Cause it's short story because RC Bra did a book called The Egg, which I'm not familiar with.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:54):
So he does That was a short story. Yeah. Actually you would like this Richard.

Leo Laporte (01:51:58):
Yeah. Safement is Long

Paul Thurrott (01:51:59):
<Laugh>. It's a Canadian zombie series called Mount Man The Mountain Man. Which he does those books. Those are fantastic. There's a free one. You can just listen to. The, the first one is free of the, it's called

Leo Laporte (01:52:09):
The Hospital. Do you not do audio books at all rich or

Richard Campbell (01:52:12):
Nah, I read

Leo Laporte (01:52:13):
Fast. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:14):
I,

Richard Campbell (01:52:14):
I plow through

Paul Thurrott (01:52:15):
My Kindle on flight flights. Two or three books

Leo Laporte (01:52:17):
In a long flight. I just bought the I'm gonna do it on Ask the Tech guys on the Saturday do a review. I bought the Kindle Scribe. That's the one with the pen that you write on. Right. Cool. And it's, I like it cuz it's big. It's like a, it's like eight by 10 mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So I mean, yeah, that's a disadvantage cause it's heavier and stuff, but I kinda like the bigger page. Yeah. Anyway, I have I,

Richard Campbell (01:52:37):
I one hand my, my Kindle

Paul Thurrott (01:52:38):
Paper white on, on lots of flights and if

Richard Campbell (01:52:41):
If I am dragged off

Paul Thurrott (01:52:43):
Vacation, then I'll typically Kindle in one end phone in the other. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:52:47):
Taking notes,

Paul Thurrott (01:52:48):
You know. Right, right. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:51):
Interesting. Anyway,

Leo Laporte (01:52:52):
Anyway, where were

Paul Thurrott (01:52:54):
We? We went, we went off on a tangent. Six degrees of Kevin Bank in there. But the reason I talked about the Xbox, the reason I didn't talk about the Xbox app was <laugh> that it's been updated. So as it may update out, none of this looks really like a big deal to me. But this is a new discovery interface. New accessibility options, new social stuff, which I never look at anyway. So not too much. But if you do use the Xbox app on Windows you'll get an update soon. So not a big deal, it's just that it happened. And Google is also working to bring their own kind of PC game store to the PC, obviously. And it's called the Google Play Games for PC app. It's not streaming. It is some form of virtualization. Basically not the one built into Windows, by the way, which is goofy, but you know, Google and Microsoft don't work together. It is now available in two more countries New Zealand and, oh actually two more countries, sorry, New Zealand and then 40 European countries. So I guess 41 new countries. So it wasn't available previously in Europe, obviously it is available already in Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea and the United States.

Leo Laporte (01:54:04):
Is this functionally equivalent to the crappy Kindle store that the official Android apps come from or

Paul Thurrott (01:54:11):
Yeah, I think it's comparable from a technology perspective. The question is whether the quality of the selection is any better, it would have to be <laugh>. Right? Right. Anyone who has looked at the Amazon app store in the that comes with the W S A Right. The Windows subsystem for Android will know that it is horrifically bad. And God, I'd give anything from Microsoft and Google to get their ax together cuz it would be a really neat thing. Even if you had to pay for it. You know, you pay for like a Google Play license or whatever to get it. I think millions of people would do that to be able to get access to Google Maps and Gmail and whatever other apps on their Windows devices.

Leo Laporte (01:54:50):
Do you think Microsoft is would do that, is blocking them from doing that or is it a

Paul Thurrott (01:54:53):
Google? No, I think it's Google. I I think Microsoft would do it. I it's, this is all coming from Google,

Leo Laporte (01:54:57):
But, but Microsoft clearly doesn't wanna pay Google the license for the

Paul Thurrott (01:55:02):
Google license. I don't. I I, I actually, I don't know that, I don't know. I will tell you what, that when Google reached out to me when they first announced this, they sent me a little like, preview version of the press release and then they came back and they said, Hey, hold on a second. There is a new version. And I, I looked at it and I said, I don't understand. These look identical to me. What's the difference? And they said, oh, we wanted to make it clear that we are not using the Windows subsystem for Linux for for Andrew Android now. I was like, okay. Why wouldn't you use the thing that's built into Windows? They don't, they don't work with Microsoft. They hate each other. Well, some, some groups do. Yeah. Right. No, of course. I mean the, you know, the browser teams right? Are are partnering. There's little generally get along, but at very high

Richard Campbell (01:55:43):
Level that's cuz they can both hate Apple together.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:45):
That's right. <Laugh>. Yeah. But there's a, I think there's a big chunk of Google's identity is built around the notion of we do not trust Microsoft. They came up in that age when Microsoft was getting destroyed by all the NHS stuff and they were like, yep, we're not, we are not. We just don't trust them. And it's 20 years later, you know, it actually doesn't make sense anymore. Right. But it's, it's like it's built into their dna. N they just don't trust Microsoft. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:56:11):
That's spoils

Richard Campbell (01:56:12):
Too bad. You gotta get over it over. It's a different Microsoft, it's a different world. They're the kinder, gentler tech giant.

Leo Laporte (01:56:17):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:56:19):
Yeah, yeah. I

Richard Campbell (01:56:21):
Now they're making Google repeatedly run into a doorframe over search is hilarious for us anyway. But, you know, <laugh> Right? Okay. I I get you're a little

Paul Thurrott (01:56:29):
Annoyed actually.

Leo Laporte (01:56:30):
Yeah. That's the battle now, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Bing versus Google search. Yeah. And G P T chat. G p t versus Bard. Yeah. Right.

Richard Campbell (01:56:39):
We Okay. You know, I don't think so. I don't think

Leo Laporte (01:56:41):
We're Okay. No, we're not. Okay. Red Red Alert. Red Alert. Right. Klingons off the Starboard bow. I I will say that one of the things reading Masters do made me want to do is download Wolfenstein 3d Yeah. And play it again.

Paul Thurrott (01:56:58):
I have played through all the, the, they're three big games. Right. The Wolfenstein Doom and Quake. And they're Last,

Leo Laporte (01:57:04):
Last Quake. Loved

Paul Thurrott (01:57:06):
It. I have played those games each possibly easily dozens of times, but possibly hundreds in some cases. I, I, I go back and replay those from time to, it's just a, they're just classic. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:57:19):
Classic. And they launched the era of first person shooters mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So you know, oh my God. Yeah. If you like Call of Duty, that, you know, it's like a direct descendant of Wolfenstein 3d. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:57:29):
Right. That's yeah, that was kind of the transition. I mean, there were a couple of games in between. There was middle of honor right before there was Call of Duty when the Call of Duty team was largely based on the team that made Medal of Honor. Well, and

Leo Laporte (01:57:40):
You knew they grew up playing, playing Wolfenstein and Doom. Right. They also

Paul Thurrott (01:57:44):
Grew up watching those time life commercials. It was like, the plane goes by and it's like he was a monster. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:57:50):
So

Paul Thurrott (01:57:50):
They learn, you know, they're like, man, this will make a great game. Well

Leo Laporte (01:57:53):
It's fascinating to read how controversial it was. I mean, they really were the first extremely violent game, the game that showed Blood, for instance. Yeah. Well, I

Paul Thurrott (01:58:02):
Told you this very early when we first started doing the show a million years ago. I was saying, you know, killing Nazis is, is almost victim free. Like it's, it's, it's almost as close as you can get. But then they came up with the zombie game and it was like, zombie Nazis. And I'm like, they nailed it. Nailed. There's no guilt. <Laugh> no guilt

Leo Laporte (01:58:19):
Here. Well, and, and so I I'm at this chapter right now where they're getting a lot of complaints. Not cuz you're killing Nazis or cuz it's bloody, but because you're killing Nazi dogs and and people don't want you to kill animals. You

Paul Thurrott (01:58:30):
Kill, that name was banned in Germany cuz they can't have the Nazi

Leo Laporte (01:58:34):
Iconic Yeah, yeah, yeah. Comper, they said cuz remember it was a shareware, so it was a download copy, save banned the download because, because of that mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:44):
<Affirmative>, I'm reading a book about Sheer right now. And it's just gotten into the Apogee stuff and there you John Carmack Yep. That this is this, this model. You know, how do you make money selling software when there's a lot of stuff is free. And this notion that you could give away the first part of the game Brilliant. Saw the other two thirds they solved. It was, it was a guy from Aje, I'm can't remember his name, but it was brilliant, just brilliant mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And and it just worked for so many companies and for so many people it was just a great model.

Leo Laporte (01:59:13):
It was before Apogee, there was soft disk mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and soft Disk was a shareware company. Most of their titles were were, but a lot of it

Paul Thurrott (01:59:21):
Was like, you would, you would ship 'em a dis and it would say, Hey, send me some money, you know, donate please. Right. Please pay for this. Right. And some people would, you know Right. You'd make like eight or 16 bucks a month or

Leo Laporte (01:59:30):
Whatever. It's like Club Twit, you know, it's like 1% would pay for it. Some

Paul Thurrott (01:59:32):
People would do it,

Leo Laporte (01:59:33):
It's fine.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:35):
But the the Shareware model was, it's just genius. Right. So smart. I I got the first doom. I wasn't Wolfenstein, but I got the first set of Doom, the, the original Doom Free from Mesquite, Texas. Right. Yeah. In the mail. Cuz I sent him a check. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how you got it. <Laugh>. They mailed him a check and they mailed you a floppy disc back.

Leo Laporte (01:59:55):
Apogee didn't have a computer network, so they would take the order on a piece of paper and put it on a spike. No,

Paul Thurrott (02:00:00):
This was like 1993. There was no like internet to speak up. I mean, there was, but yeah. Oh, this is how that worked. How a thing yeah, we

Leo Laporte (02:00:09):
Got an order for from were you in New Mexico then? Or were you in Dem already?

Paul Thurrott (02:00:14):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:00:15):
We got an order from this guy Paul Throt in in

Paul Thurrott (02:00:18):
That was in Phoenix by the

Leo Laporte (02:00:19):
Phoenix in Phoenix. We're gonna all gonna send us a check, but put that on this

Paul Thurrott (02:00:25):
Spike. That was, so that was that, that was the first time I was on BBSs at the time. And so what of I, you've

Leo Laporte (02:00:30):
Downloaded from bbs? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:31):
Well I had to, I had to find, well, here's the, there's why I mailed the death. So I I they would charge you for it. Like, so you, you could get on for free, but you could only be on for an hour. So what would happen is I would start game down. Like I would download things like, oh, shoot Jill of the Jungle and all these Ms Dos games and they wouldn't complete in an hour. Yeah. So I'd have to come back after 24 hours and, and it would remember it, it would actually have part of it. Resume finish it. Yeah. Some of these games would take two, three days

Leo Laporte (02:00:57):
Z modem, which would resume.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:59):
Oh, I, yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:01:00):
I don't remember my, my watch thinks I just hit myself. I did not fall. I Phoenix

Paul Thurrott (02:01:04):
Slammed developers, dbs, I think it was the name of one of them. Yeah. But you, you know, I just couldn't afford to pay for it. So I,

Leo Laporte (02:01:11):
How far we've come, I, the other day I was, I was looking at this, I going, we've come a long way. It was like a 278 megabyte download and it came in in seconds. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, tho in the back in the day, I would've been calling back the next day to get the second half

Paul Thurrott (02:01:26):
Right

Leo Laporte (02:01:27):
After an hour. That's, it's a, we've come such a long way and we take it for granted. It's a Sure. Those instant downloads, we honestly, a lot of what we do today if we didn't have bandwidth would be very difficult. Mean all this stuff that

Paul Thurrott (02:01:42):
Remember, like if you you would print something out and it would kind of print like one pixel line at a time. Yeah. Had to go back internet. Right. So you watch this kind of image like slowly here. Yeah. I was in a computer lab in Scottsdale. It was, we, we were downloading off of Usenet and it was, these guys just, I'm like, what are you doing? They're like, oh, we found like a pornography thing. I'm like, okay. And we're watching this thing come out, like one line of the, and it's like, guys, come on. Like <laugh>. You know? And then eventually you'd see the person's face. You'd be like, oh, what? Stop <laugh>. So like, we stood here for 43 minutes and then canceled it, you know? And it was just stupid

Leo Laporte (02:02:19):
<Laugh>. It's not that

Paul Thurrott (02:02:21):
Stupid. No. We can get the stupid quick. It's nice.

Leo Laporte (02:02:23):
Yeah. You get stupid instantly. Here's the, you're

Paul Thurrott (02:02:24):
Still waiting for stupid.

Leo Laporte (02:02:25):
Somebody has linked this in our discord, the official Apogee FAQ featuring 3D realms and pinball wizards. This is from 10 years later though. That's the thing. It's 2005.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:37):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:02:38):
So Aji Aji, you know, doom and is a big deal and all that. That was, that was huge. It was really huge.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:45):
Pretty realms.

Leo Laporte (02:02:47):
Yeah. Pretty amazing. What a wor. And we were happy <laugh>. We had,

Paul Thurrott (02:02:52):
Oh, listen, I, I, the, the genius of John Carmack was that he made a lowly PC output graphics that were impossible on an Amiga, or, you know, later they did. But, you know, I he just knew you were watching something amazing happening. Yeah. You know, one of the best minds and genius when he had to write that letter to say to Z, you've wasted a tremendous amount of money and I won't be party to it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you have to take the man seriously. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> know I had some of the best software ever made in the world. He knows about running teams. Yep. And he's like, boy, oh boy, past seven years dealing with your bureaucracy. And I'm telling you, it stinks. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. What's happening here? He is not

Leo Laporte (02:03:25):
Good. Let's be fair. Carmack was always a bit of a maverick.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:29):
He's a curmudgeon and

Leo Laporte (02:03:30):
Kind of a dick. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:32):
That, that doesn't make

Leo Laporte (02:03:33):
Him wrong. Doesn't make him wrong. <Laugh>. I agree. That's right. I agree. That's right. Hey, let's take a little break. That is the extended now enhanced, expanded Xbox Edition <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (02:03:47):
I'm happy to say now. Including audiobook picks. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:03:50):
All sorts of, of stuff. Our tips and picks of the week coming up in just a little bit. Plus a brown liquor pick of the week. And Mr. Red Flannel shirt here has, has got a tip for you. But first a word, if you don't mind, if you gentlemen would allow me from our fine sponsor, those great folks at C D W and Lenovo Lenovo orchestrated by the experts at C D W, the helpful people at C D W understand that as the world changes, your organization needs to adapt quickly to be successful. So how can CDW keep your business ahead of the curve? Baby, with Lenovo think pads like these, I love my think pad. These powerful devices deliver the business class performance. You're looking for thanks to Windows 10 and the Intel Evo platform. With your remote teams working across the country around the world, collaboration not a problem.

(02:04:47):
Because Lenovo ThinkPads keep your organization productive and connected from anywhere. Plus C D W knows your workforce has differing work styles needs flexibility. Right? That's why Lenovo ThinkPads are equipped with responsive tools and built-in features that lay your team works seamlessly across their favorite tools. Now think about that for a second. Oh, let's not forget about security. These high performing machines protect at the highest level with built-in hardware to guard against modern threats without slowing your team down. So when you need to get more out of your technology, Lenovo makes seamless productivity possible. CDW makes it powerful. Learn more at cdw.com/lenovo client. That's cdw.com/lenovo client. Let's not forget that address. If you use that address, they will know you saw it here. Now, little Polly Throt has a little tip he'd like to share with you. Pauly, tell the people about your tip.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:53):
Oh my, yeah. My, my tip is if you want to get started on what's coming next for Windows 11, you need to get into the insider program somehow. I

Leo Laporte (02:06:02):
Just got outta the Insider program.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:04):
I know, I know <laugh>, but there's some interesting stuff coming. You know, windows 11 wasn't super interesting for a while there. It's about to get really interesting.

Leo Laporte (02:06:11):
Oh

Paul Thurrott (02:06:12):
Okay. I mentioned earlier in the show that in the dev channel they have dev drive, the Windows backup feature, which we may or may not have talked about. The never combined functionality in the task bar that's available today. Sometime in the next two weeks, you're gonna get Windows Co-pilot. So if you want to get that as soon as it happens you might want to, you know, get going on that get going. Microsoft, yeah, Microsoft did release an ISO of the latest build for the dev channel. They don't always do that. In fact, it sometimes it goes months and months. But this particular build is available in ISO forums. So if you want to do it a little more, well, I dunno if that's quickly or not, but if you wanna put it into a a virtual machine, it will certainly be quicker than, you know, installing Windows 11 and then upgrading it. So grab the i o if you want that. The way to find that, actually I have the url, but it's, what you're looking for is Windows Insider preview iso. Just Google that and you'll, you'll get the U url. It's easy enough. Cool.

(02:07:08):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:07:08):
I wish to do it. I guess you've talked me into it won't be the first thing you've talked me into <laugh>. Well,

Paul Thurrott (02:07:16):
Huh. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm worried about the legal responsibility of that

Leo Laporte (02:07:21):
<Laugh>, but Okay. No, no, no. I won't hold you. Cannibal, although we do record,

Paul Thurrott (02:07:26):
There have been multiple times over the history of the show where you've come back later and said, but you said, you told to me

Leo Laporte (02:07:30):
That you told me what you said.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:35):
<Laugh>, it's okay.

Leo Laporte (02:07:36):
Devra is very interesting to me, actually.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:38):
Yeah, yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:07:40):
Me too. The backup. That's cool. You can now back up windows like you would to your phone, which is great. Yep. Cloud backup. Yep. Lovely.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:48):
Which is weird because, you know, in Windows 11 they took a back step from the setting sync stuff, but I think maybe this is, maybe this is why maybe they always intended to do something like this instead.

Leo Laporte (02:07:57):
All right. So I I am already on Windows 11, so I just have to go into you

Paul Thurrott (02:08:02):
Could do it through window, the Windows updated interface.

Leo Laporte (02:08:04):
Yeah. Just say, hey, okay. You had me at, at refu. How do you pronounce that? Refs? Rf. Rufus. R e F s. Rufuss.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:16):
Oh, Ru Well, we can't say Rufuss cuz. Rufuss. Oh yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:08:18):
There's a Rufuss. Yeah. Rufus. Yeah. Refu re refuse. So

Paul Thurrott (02:08:23):
From an Apick perspective, I actually kind of have three I these are K they're gonna seem a little goofy in a way, but there're these functions that I have to use all the time that I just find to be really slow using the tools built into Windows and or inadequate in some fashion. Right. And they are sting tool photos and media player. I don't like these apps. I keep giving 'em a shot. They keep betraying me <laugh>. So I use alternatives. So for the Sting tool, which is the screenshot replacement, and by the way, as of moment three, it becomes a screenshot replacement. The print screen replacement. I use a tool called Screenshot. It's free. And all of these are free, I should say. It's a great tool. It's super customizable. You can capture the most cursor, which is something I do need.

(02:09:04):
Or not, you know, it's your choice. For image viewing, I use something called Image Glass. This is a wonderful minimalist application. I use it full screen and without the toolbar. So basically when I double click on an image, it pops up full screen, hit escape, it disappears. It's, it's awesome. It's just like a, it's like the MAC preview, image preview function on. It's just really, really nice. And then for the media player, I use V VLC obviously. And VLC has an added bonus. I have occasionally we'll review a laptop, which this doesn't make sense. This is like one of those, it goes up to 11 moments. But it, you can actually put the volume up above a hundred percent. And I know what you're saying, I know what you're thinking. <Laugh>, the volume can only go to some percentage, but it actually does play media louder.

(02:09:44):
And I feel like they're, some apps just, I dunno if they have volume limiters or whatever, but sometimes I'll play a movie in movie sorry, media player and it just isn't loud. But if I play the same video in YouTube, it's louder, even though the quality's less. So I, I don't know. There's something about V L C that just seems to handle volume really, really well. We talked on past shows about things like winget, which is a command line tool, and Winget ui, which is a kind of a front web based front end. You can install all these things in one whack, just create a little install script and pump it through the command line and bump up, up there it goes. And that's how I bring up my machines. Now. I've been doing that now for probably at least a month, month or two. I have a big install script for all of the apps that I use. And it just, it just becomes part of my, it it, it just makes my day one kind of thing much quicker and easier. But you could download 'em from the web too, obviously. What's your time? Tv. When, when, what's your time to a usable machine then? Right? When about an hour? Yeah. To the Lord. I gotta, yes. A vendor sends you a machine to explore. You fired this up within an hour.

Leo Laporte (02:10:50):
The only's

Paul Thurrott (02:10:51):
Ready. It's, it's not bad. The, the one piece that's missing is that thing we were kind of talking about earlier. It's the the config bit. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So obviously all of these apps you have to sign in and, you know, some of them require manual configuration. It'd be really neat if we could do some kind of a user state something, something that, aren't

Leo Laporte (02:11:08):
They in Winget? Maybe. I mean, I'm sure they're in shock. They're

Paul Thurrott (02:11:11):
All in Wget. But they don't, but they don't, they don't maintain your, it's not on a match. Oh, you mean not your configuration. Like I still, you know, if I go into Visual Studio Code set up, sign into GitHub. Yeah, yeah. Get signing into GitHub will sync all my settings and my right extensions and all that. So that's kind of nice. But that's like a, an app by app basis. I sign into very even that brings online my That's

Leo Laporte (02:11:29):
True. True of all

Paul Thurrott (02:11:29):
The on machine versions of office too. You have to open each one of them. Yep. In the finish configuring, it's like seriously, like yeah, there's gotta be a better way to do this. But yeah. Anyway. Where's the step in the right

Leo Laporte (02:11:39):
Direction? Maybe this new one. Nobody's incented dev config to it. I can I ask a question? Mr. Mr. T mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, which channel? Insider channel. Should I be Canary dev, beta dev or release? There's four.

Paul Thurrott (02:11:53):
Well, this is, so this is the thing. So I'm assuming it's gonna come on in Dev.

Leo Laporte (02:11:58):
It says dev channel recommended.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:00):
No, I know, but

Leo Laporte (02:12:01):
Canary is for highly technical users. Like it would be a little buggy maybe. Yeah. You

Paul Thurrott (02:12:06):
Like your machine to crash all the time. Here's Right. So there's Microsoft. Yeah. It's impossible to tell. So, so far since Canary's been a thing, Canary's only been a thing since I think January maybe. A lot of new features actually pop up first on Dev. For some reason I, you would think it would be that way. But it is the new Windows 11 features they were talking about at Build, they appeared in Dev, not in Canary. Okay. They're actually not in Canary. They're not in both. They're just only in Dev. So, okay. My, we have to guess and my educated guess is Dev is the right place

Leo Laporte (02:12:33):
To be. All right. It is recommended. Beta is ideal for early adopters. Release preview is ideal. If you want to preview fixes in certain key feature. Yeah, Def sounds good for me. I want it to be stable enough cuz this is the machine I use for the show that I can, you know.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:49):
Yeah. I mean just, you know, if I just be comfortable with the notion that if I'm wrong and I'm never wrong, but if I am <laugh> that you might have to wipe

Leo Laporte (02:13:00):
Rough edges and low stability.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:04):
That's me. Oh, you mean the death thing? Yeah. <laugh>. Yep, that

Leo Laporte (02:13:09):
Too. All right, I'm going for it. All right.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:11):
Bye. You'll be away from me. I'm clear. I did not explicitly recommend that you do this.

Leo Laporte (02:13:16):
Yes, you did. It was Paul's thoughts falls.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:18):
I'm just asking some questions. And you went to the logic and one <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:13:23):
I always do it. You tell me too. Paul <laugh>. Okay. No, but I, but you've made a compelling case. There was no reason for me to be in the insider channel for moment three. Right. A week ahead of time. No,

Paul Thurrott (02:13:33):
Exactly. Can you imagine if you were testing seconds in the clock? That's what you did. That's the test. What a waste of time. But I'm

Leo Laporte (02:13:39):
Very interested in these newest tools they announced. Right? so including the, maybe

Paul Thurrott (02:13:43):
When we have an npu, we could displace seconds in the clock and have an not effective battery. Maybe that's the reason we're getting an mpo It's for seconds in the clock. All right.

Leo Laporte (02:13:53):
All right. This is my, I don't,

Paul Thurrott (02:13:54):
Don't understand how AI works. I hope that's clear by now.

Leo Laporte (02:13:57):
Yeah. No one does. But maybe that's the point. Maybe the whole point of AI is nobody knows, right? It's a mystery.

Paul Thurrott (02:14:03):
We accept that there are smart people out there and we hope they know what they're doing.

Leo Laporte (02:14:07):
Run as radio, run as radio time. Let's see what Richard's got coming up on r a r

Richard Campbell (02:14:16):
For the end of May on one of our five show weeks. I have Aiden fin coming back. I called the show Azure Sticker Shock <laugh>. So in, in the story arcs of we're coming outta the pandemic, let's clean up our mess. One of the mess you have is a lot of lift and shifted VMs getting out of the on-prem servers and into the cloud. Cuz we needed more computer resources for one reason or another. And they're finding out, boy that stuff's expensive. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And you know, that's the sticker shock part. And so part of the conversation with Aiden was a, being able to find out before the bill arrives, how much you're spending mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So getting into some of the dashboards around cost management and, and being able to set rules. So it's like, hey, this stuff normally costs this much. If it jumps up for some reason, I'd like to be notified. But then also to get into more of the cloud is architecture that if you've just hauled a bunch of VMs into the cloud, you're kind of buying it the most expensive way. And here are some tools and approaches to, to moving up the stack where you're reserving fewer resources from Azure so your bill actually goes down.

(02:15:28):
Okay. And that that sort of combination of, of better tooling to measure your pricing, breaking it out by resource area or different areas of responsibility. And then being able to show where modernization makes a lot of sense. Where even taking the VMs are just turning them down a couple of notches cuz we tend to provision for peak when we're OnPrem the, the process of installing a server is so arduous. You might as well overbuy the server where the process of selecting a VM in Azure is trivial. And if you simply match your hardware to the VM in the cloud, you're probably over provisioning it. So just turning those things down. Nothing is what I just

Paul Thurrott (02:16:05):
Heard. Yeah. You know, we're gonna go to the cloud to save money. Oh no. I need the best vm.

Richard Campbell (02:16:09):
Yeah. But I'm gonna jack it all up. And just the little ones like, oh, we like that feature. Turn it on without any assessment of its cost. And so, you know, setting cost monitoring up in cost, the cost management tools, you suddenly flick a feature on and the price per day doubled. And so within a couple of days you get a warning saying, Hey, you know, this thing you said was costing us only X many dollars a month. Well it's costing twice that just thought you'd like to know. And maybe you can go back and say, hey, you turned on a feature you didn't understand the cost of Yeah. And that those are all part right of it. So, I mean, Aiden's one of those guys that's in the trenches. You know, he works for in a factor Norway with a Azure Infras Pro infrastructure projects all over Europe. And these are the conversations he's having with his customers in exactly the help he's providing. So, you know, he was just a someone who's like, here's how I deal with this with my customers. And you can do it too, Ron as radio. He's Irish. So he is in the eu, not the uk. That is correct cuz he is in Dublin. Yeah, he's very good. He's really a great guy.

Leo Laporte (02:17:14):
Is Aiden fin, does he have a nice Irish accent?

Richard Campbell (02:17:17):
He sure does. It's very mild actually. Yeah. Nice. I like it. Very soothing. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:17:22):
Soothing Irish accent. Speaking of Sooth, I think we should go to Canadian

Richard Campbell (02:17:28):
<Laugh>. Yeah, I think it was time. It was time to, I mean I've mentioned Canadian whiskeys on the show before, but I thought, you know, in part of our understanding whiskey series, and we've talked, obviously we spent a lot of time, although I understand the videos just about ready on Scottish whiskey, they're gonna yay. Actually put up that playlist. Yay. and then I talked about American and the differences there and we talked about Japanese and the differences there. And then we talked about Irish and the differences there. So we should talk about Canadian because Canadian whiskey has been around for a couple hundred years. It's distinct. It has some some very unusual attributes I think you'll enjoy. But I don't know that you can really grapple with Canadian whiskey if you don't really grapple with Canada <laugh>. So I that's, that's why I put the flannel <laugh>.

(02:18:16):
So if we go back a bit, you know, I I mean I'd be remiss not to start with the indigenous peoples, right? Like Canada's been the First Nation has been populated. First Nations we're now finding archeological digs. Yeah. Millennia of people living on the land even before the bearings straight at the end of the, as last ice age. Now we found even older people peoples that were on the land. That's so cool. That, that's very cool that there were, there were cities built in North America before Europeans arrived. They di they collapsed for various reasons. Famously in the 1960s we found Lanta Metos. This is that little part in northern new Newfoundland where the Vikings actually established a, a colony for a period and then discovered, hey, there are very capable indigenous people and they don't like us very much.

(02:19:01):
And they moved on. At least that's the proposal. I remember reading a translated document of the, the Viking efforts working their way across the North Atlantic getting to Greenland Iceland and Greenland and so forth. And they just, they describing an Inuit. And at the time, of course the Inuit are the seafaring people using kayaks and whale mostly Sealskins and so forth. So an Inuit in a, in a Kayak is all one piece. And the, and the Vike didn't quite understand that's a guy in a boat. He's just like, this was a funny looking creature. <Laugh> he head, head in arms. But that's interesting. But it ends with, I poked him with a spear and he brought it a lot like a person, but not the same, you know? Wow. Because that's how you communicate with people. Oh, great strategy. They're like the, like Harley Davidson guys from like, you know, foot with boats.

(02:19:50):
Exactly. So fast forward the 15 hundreds, the French and the English are, are exploring and colonizing and, and interacting with the native peoples. In fact, the only walled city in all of North America is Quebec City at the end of the, of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which this on that side is all salt. All, even though it's a part of a river, the first choke point where it gets narrow enough and really becomes the St. Lawrence River, that's where they built the, their very first city. And it was defending the entrance to the St. Lawrence Seaway. And so much production and development. The English controlled more of the upper part of the waterway. And they were big on taking sugar out of the Caribbean. And they would bring it up to those lands to actually process into rum.

(02:20:42):
And you know, things come to a head in 1755 with what is known in the, in Europe as the seven years War. But in North America it was known as the French and Indian War. And this is the war by the way, that trained a lot of American military for getting ready for the Revolutionary War if few years further on. Are you taking credit for this? No. Is it, is that what I heard? Just letting you know that this is the, these, these histories are intertwined as are the whiskeys. Right. famous Sue. This is also as the English win are, are winning in the, in these conflicts, they start trying to push the French out who were refusing to to acquiesce to George the second, which you folks didn't want to do either. Then that's the Acadians that get pushed out in the, in the chunks of land that are Maine and Nova Scotian and so forth. Some of which will, most of 'em will be sent back to France. And then when the French didn't want them, cuz it sucks to be a refugee, they actually made a deal and shipped a bunch of them to Louisiana. Those become the Cajuns, my family of

Leo Laporte (02:21:44):
Both, yeah. My family stayed in Quebec, the LA ports and that we were the original part of that group.

Richard Campbell (02:21:52):
And that really gets to the reality of, you know, at the end of that war, in the Treaty of Paris, the end, end of that war, you have both French and Canadians French and English living together. Even if they're nations don't get along particularly well, they're just trying to survive. Colonies is a tough environment. And in the midst of all of this, it comes a young man named John Molson and yeah, it's that Molson <laugh>. Yep. he's a fifth son. His parents have died, although they were very well to do so he has a trust fund and as Fifth Sons do, he goes to the colonies. He has an education in brewing and he starts working he immigrates to Quebec City and he starts running an existing beer operation, ultimately takes it over by 1785, creates the Molsen company, which is now the second oldest company in all of Canada.

(02:22:42):
Predating Confederation itself. The oldest being the Hudsons Bay Company. Yeah. Wow. By, by 1791 we're now we've split what will eventually be Canada. It's still not Canada into what's called Upper and Lower Canada, lower Canada being further north because directions are hard. And Upper Canada being further up the Ottawa River, we eventually we'll call these Ontario and come back, but we're not there yet. And in one of the many trips that John Molson being a successful brewers involved in, he starts bringing, he brings some whiskey in from from England and decides that this is pretty good stuff. And so decides to repurpose a British rum still to make whiskey from grain wheat primarily. At the time wheat crops were bumper, this is 1799. And so they were literally going to rot and rather let them rot. They fermented them and made them into pretty harsh whiskey.

(02:23:40):
But it's the beginning of that. And that's in the Kingston, on Ontario area, which is basically when you get to the end of the St. Lawrence River and it opens into Lake Ontario. That's where Kingston is. And so by 1801 they have a, a steady whiskey production. Now whiskey is pretty successful. So a bunch of other companies jump on board. By the war of 1812, between the English and the Americans, the Canadians are happily selling beer and whiskey to both pretty quickly. Molsen gets more focused on beer than, than whiskey. The big whiskey makers in Canada and the early 18 hundreds for groups like Haram Walker which you'll know by their product Canadian Club and Joseph Seagrams, who famously makes the Seagrams Vo, although by the 1930s they will make a very well known whiskey on Crown. Are you, are you saying Hira Walker and Seagrams are both Canadian?

(02:24:32):
They're Canadians, yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. The Liquor Barrels. Yeah. Yeah. And in 1861, when the Civil War breaks out and you're all distracted from making your own booze, we happily sell it to you cuz that's the business. And by the time the Civil war's over around the time that Canada actually becomes, Canada Confederation doesn't come till 1867. Our first set of rules for making whiskey come in 1875. And this is when they define Canadian whiskey. Now, at the time, Canadian whiskey was primarily made with wheat and corn cuz it's inexpensive and they would add a little rye to it cuz it tasted good. And so most whiskey Wizard returned to as either Canadian whiskey, Canadian rye whiskey, or rye whiskey, even though the Rye only made a small portion of it. And to qualify as Canadian whiskey, it had to be mashed distilled and aged in Canada and be at least 40% alcohol.

(02:25:25):
Barrels no larger than 700 liters and I'm gonna stick with liters cuz Canada get over it. Although they didn't have any requirement for charring or anything like that, you could use raw wood and a minimum of three years. So the specs are pretty loose. You could do 'em, pretty much do what you want with Canada and it would get crazier from there. One of the distinctive aspects of Canadian whiskey, which persists to this day, is that they would tend to distill and barrel each grain independently. So where the Americans with bourbon will make a mash bill, right, where they'll actually combine corn and rye and and barley together, the Canadians would tend to do them separately and then use different barreling for them to combine. Before they would actually combine them. They did of course use American bourbon barrels because the Americans like crazy people would only use their barrels once.

(02:26:17):
And why wasted good barrel that the Canadian line was bourbon? Is the leftover stuff in a ma in a, in a ma barrel now mature enough for Canadian whiskey <laugh>. The other technique that Canadians to this day still do is they'll actually do split distillations and barreling. So they'll use their grains, typically corn today, although more wheat back in the day, and they'll do a high distillation with that, get it up into the seventies, eighties, even nineties, then cut it with water and put it into the used bourbon barrels. That's that old 64% trick we talked about where just slightly stronger what American bourbon would use to pull new flavors out. But then they'd also use a low dist distillate only 40 or 50%, a little more flavorful. And they put those in newer barrels. Cause if you put the high dis distillate in new barrels, you get very harsh flavors.

(02:27:05):
But if you put low dis distillates in new barrels, you good flavors and you mature the barrel as well. And then afterward they would combine them together. And that is one of the things that makes Canadian whiskey distinct is that they do the separate barreling and then combining, although there are many ways to get about this, that the Scotts do and so forth with their combined bearings. But the split distillation is a little more unusual. We gotta talk about prohibition. We're into the 1920s now. Canada flirted with prohibition as well. You know, coming out of World War I, everybody's a little upset. Something about a pandemic and so forth. And so a lot of drinking going on. Canada never had a national prohibition. Different provinces had different rules, but one of the things we never got around to was banning, making booze. Even when we did have prohibition, we just couldn't buy it ourselves.

(02:27:55):
But we'd happily sell it to somebody else. And even when prohibition largely went away in Canada, it was still going on the us And so being neighbors with the largest undefined border in the world, we supplied you a lot of booze. Is that true? Really? The largest undefined border in border in is Canada as an enabler. Oh, a hundred percent. And so can't No, no. All these No, no. It's like my neighbor who's rail fin, but bakes cookies every week. Yeah, they're pushers and 'em all out. They're pushers. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It looks like you're having a little civil war. How would you like some whiskey? Yeah, yeah. We can help. We're here to help. We got 'em. We make it here and in. But in the early days of prohibition, when pretty quickly, you know, the US came to Canada and said, Hey, you really have to stop by selling whiskey down here.

(02:28:40):
So we made it illegal to sell whiskey to Americans and did not wanting to break the law. What we'd do then is we'd load up ships full of our whiskey and we'd take them three miles offshore, which eventually got to be known as the rum line, cuz now it's in international waters. And then Americans would come and buy it. Perfectly legal from the Canadians. What'd they do from that? Not our problem. So eventually they put a squash on that it said it. No, it has to be on foreign exported only. You can only sell it foreign export. Well that leads us to St. Pire and mito. So there's these two islands about 16 miles off the south coast of Newfoundland that are French. They're still French protectorates to this day. You get a stamp on your passport if you take the ferry across to them.

(02:29:21):
Oh. And so during the period of prohibition, the Canadians would ship all of their whiskey to France, they'd ship it. And, and, and they built these huge warehouses on these teeny little islands. Exported all the booze to France, totally illegal, taxed and everything. The French of course refused prohibition in any respect. Cuz that's insane. Why would you do that <laugh>? And then the Americans would buy to do something with it. Nobody really knew. Medicine mostly would go somewhere. The in, in 1930 alone, they figured 2 million gallons of whiskey flowed through St. Pierre. Wow. This tiny little island off the coast of Newfoundland. That just was his. And for 10 plus years everybody quit every, it used to be a cod fishery, right. Everybody just was in the booze import export business. It's the economy like there now. Little rough, you know. And the funny part from home destination, they went through a pretty serious depression.

(02:30:17):
Of course it was a depression also. Yeah. then they did well in World War too, because they were a good port. They're a good deep water port. And so they were needed for a bunch of things. But it took a while to get back into the fishing industry. It's mostly tourism there today. And by most standards, and I think the the walker folks still celebrate this Canadian club, the number one most smuggled whiskey during us prohibition. Love it. So post prohibition, everybody's getting back into the business again. Apparently there was a period, there were American distilleries that were being rebuilt, actually started bottling Canadian whiskey and calling it American cuz the Canadian stuff had more time to mature. And as protectors protectionism came in in the 1950s and they started making more rules about importing booze. They made an exception for the Canadians. They called it the one 11 rule. So this was a U US Congress law that said, yes, we are gonna tax, tax imported booze unless one 11th of it is American booze <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:31:19):
One 11th.

Richard Campbell (02:31:20):
One 11th. Right. What a

Leo Laporte (02:31:22):
Strange number.

Richard Campbell (02:31:24):
And so what did the Canadians start doing? Well, the Canadians started buying inexpensive bourbon and tipping in a little bit of it into their barrels. And then they would have that tax exemption to sell into America. It's incredible. Fast forward to 2009. And they recodified that rule. It's now called the 9 0 9 rule, or 9.09% rule, which by the way is one 11. The exact description is whisk. Canadian whiskey can be called Canadian whiskey if it's being exported. You're not allowed to use this for domestic co consumption if at a limit. And it's allowed to have up to 9.09% of imported spirits in it. But those spirits must be at least two years old. So you can't just dump corn grain grain alcohol into it. You can't dump mezcal in it. Although there are some age mescals that now qualify. And a couple un nu Canadian distilleries have done this.

(02:32:22):
But here's the thinking. If I'm making a whiskey and I decide to age it in a bourbon cask, that bourbon cask is still wet with the bourbon in the wood. Oh, how much bourbons in my whiskey. Oh, anyway. Right. Or if I age it in a sherry ca Hmm. So let me introduce you to a whiskey you cannot buy. I'm just leave with that not to upset you called Alberta premium dark horse rye. I would've been my whiskey of the week if I could have laid my hands on it. It has not been available in ages. 90% of it, standard Canadian rye whiskey. They do that split aging. So the, the high, the high distillate was 12 year the low distillate with six year, and then they added 8% bourbon. It was likely old granddad that they bought in bulk and added to it. Huh. And then 1% Sherry. Wow. So rather than buy the sherry cast as expensive that is and do a finishing in a sherry cast like everybody else did. Just took a little sherry in it. Yeah, there you go. You made yourself now a sh the equivalent. You

Leo Laporte (02:33:30):
Said something interesting. You could, you as a Canadian, you can't buy this

Richard Campbell (02:33:35):
Now as a Canadian can't buy it. And as, and it was only made a few years ago. I've looked for exports. It's not available either. Yeah. If 9 0 9 whiskeys are for export only

Leo Laporte (02:33:44):
Thing, so they don't bother If it's in, if you're buying it in Canada, it's a hundred percent Canadian.

Richard Campbell (02:33:50):
Yes. They don't, they don't do the 9 0 9 thing. It was all about for taxes, sports. Yeah. But it's weirdly American. Oh, the tax rules are gone. Like tax rules don't even exist anymore. This is the, this

Leo Laporte (02:34:02):
Is, I think alcohol is the

Richard Campbell (02:34:03):
Source of the weirdest.

Leo Laporte (02:34:05):
It's Appalachians in general. Appalachians and these arcane rules around Yeah. What makes champagne. Champagne. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> And what, what makes bourbon bourbon are so they're, they're now because those tax laws are gone. And it's weird that you can't buy these in Canada. Would you want to, I mean, would you prefer to buy 9 0 9 in Canada or

Richard Campbell (02:34:27):
Yeah. Yeah. If I, why wouldn't you wanna try this? Right. I mean, I just love the idea of, hey, you know, if you finish this whiskey in a little, in a, in a sherry, get a little flavor of Sherry, but a little bit, why don't, why do you wanna spend all that money on that cast? Let's just, Sherry put some cherry in it. <Laugh>, thanks for playing

Leo Laporte (02:34:43):
<Laugh>. I'm sure there is a difference, but, okay.

Richard Campbell (02:34:48):
Needless to say, Canadian whiskey is very popular in America and it's the primary market for Canadian whiskey. In fact, the, in the iri I reports from 2019, which is short of the standard for, for this business, said that the nu the number one whiskey in America. Jack Daniels obviously the number two Crown Royal,

Leo Laporte (02:35:06):
Huh? Yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:35:08):
So, you know very

Paul Thurrott (02:35:09):
Well for cocktails. I mean, it's just, yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:35:12):
Number three was Fireball.

Leo Laporte (02:35:14):
Fireball, fireball. Jesus.

Richard Campbell (02:35:16):
Which originally,

Paul Thurrott (02:35:17):
If you've given up totally <laugh>, might we recommend Holy cow

Richard Campbell (02:35:21):
Fireball. I would, I also, you know, it was some shame admit a fireball originally made by Seagram's in Gimley, Manitoba acquired by the Saac distillery in Frankfurt, Kentucky Nice. Is now made in Frankfurt. Although they still use Canadian whiskey to make it. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:35:39):
You have to hold the standard. What Fireball.

Leo Laporte (02:35:42):
God damn. That's whiskey with fireball number three. Case you're cim one. It's cinnamon whiskey. Oh, so gross. And you know, I love it because if you go to the Fireball site, you know, all the other sites, they say, well, what's your birthday here? They just go, are you 21? Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:35:55):
No, it's like the circle's not even centered.

Leo Laporte (02:35:57):
Yeah. There's, this is, this is how they brand Fireball crazy.

Paul Thurrott (02:36:00):
I see you. Yeah. I I bet 90% of the sales of this, like the little bottles you get at checkout. Yeah. You're like, I don't want anyone to know I'm drinking this <laugh>. Just gimme like a

Richard Campbell (02:36:10):
Little

Leo Laporte (02:36:11):
Embarrass. I bet you number five is that peanut butter whiskey you drink, Paul, to be honest. Geez.

Paul Thurrott (02:36:16):
Sure.

Richard Campbell (02:36:17):
Listen, so Canadian whiskeys don't go after awards. They go after their reasonably priced good tastings whiskeys. They're not,

Leo Laporte (02:36:25):
However,

Paul Thurrott (02:36:25):
About, they're not about awards season.

Richard Campbell (02:36:27):
Nothing.

Leo Laporte (02:36:28):
Not boot awards. It's so Canadian. Yeah. It's not about boot. The awards so

Richard Campbell (02:36:32):
Good. But in 2016, Jim Murray, who's one of the most respected whiskey specialists in the world named Crown Royals, Northern Harvest, rye, the World Whiskey of the Year. Wow. and by the way, a very nice whiskey. And when you're gonna go shopping for Crown Royal, either buy the original or buy this.

(02:36:55):
Yeah. Leave all the rest alone. There's like Apple versions and maple servers, like some really bad things. Right? there's a dark that's pretty good. The traditional Crown Royal, you cannot go wrong with it. A little ginger ale. You feel good about it. But here's the funny part, <laugh>, when Yamazaki won the gold medal in, in 2013, Yamazaki 12 went from a $40 bottle of whiskey to a $400 bottle whiskey. If you could find one right when Crown Royal started making Northern Harvest Rye, it was 30 bucks. They won that award. You know how much it is today? 30 bucks. 30 bucks. <Laugh>. Yeah. Good, good for them because they're

Leo Laporte (02:37:35):
Canadian. We're not going, we're not Abbo awards <laugh>.

Richard Campbell (02:37:39):
Yeah. I tell you again, food taste, good taste and whiskey that you don't feel bad throwing in a cocktail or drinking on its own. They're good either way.

Leo Laporte (02:37:47):
So this is, this is you what you would probably use for mixes mixing rather than

Richard Campbell (02:37:52):
Be only, but not because it doesn't taste great because it's just so inexpensive. You don't feel bad about it. Yeah, yeah. Right, right.

Leo Laporte (02:38:00):
It's ironic cuz when you're adding ginger whiskey, you're actually making it costless by, by stretching it out. <Laugh>

Richard Campbell (02:38:07):
Well,

Leo Laporte (02:38:09):
Oh my gosh, I've, I've lost them both. Well, thank you everybody for joining us. That is and concludes our fabulous edition of Windows Weekly. We, maybe our internet went down, I don't know, but that's all right. We got every bit of it out, including the Northwest, Northern Harvest Rye, our whiskey pick of the week. We do Windows Weekly. What did you lose? Did the Zoom ISO collapse? We do Windows Weekly. Ev Oh, the Mac rebooted. Okay. That's all right. You know what? Honestly, I think we're done. We do the show every every Wednesday at 11:00 AM Pacific. 2:00 PM Eastern. That is 1800 utc. If you wanna watch us do it live, you can live, do twit, do tv. If you're watching live, you can chat live in our irc irc TWI tv or in our club Twit Discord. If you're already a Club Twit member, thank you. Club Twit members for all you do. We appreciate it after the fact on demand versions of the show at twit tv slash ww. Or you can just make sure you tell those guys I didn't hang up on them. Okay. <laugh>, it wasn't me, <laugh>,

(02:39:20):
Or you can go to the YouTube channel. It's a great way to share little clips, but it would be my strong e encouragement, strong recommendation. Easiest thing to do to subscribe, get your favorite podcast player. We have links at Twitter tv slash ww to the Google and the Apple one. But there's, you know, and there's many I use PocketCasts. A lot of people like Overcast, that's audio only. We do have audio and video versions of the show. But get your favorite podcast client and subscribe that way. It's just a no-brainer. You don't have to think about it. You'll just have Windows Weekly whenever you've got a moment you wanna listen, you got it. And we have the feed for that at the webpage, TWIT tv slash ww. But frankly, if you just search for Windows Weekly, almost all those podcast clients have a directory and you can find it very quickly. Search for Twit. Maybe you get some other shows too. Subscribe to 'em all. You don't have to listen to him. Just subscribe to him and that way you have him. We thank Paul Throt. He is a th Oh, wait a minute. You're back. I did not hang up on you guys. I just want you to know <laugh>.

Richard Campbell (02:40:25):
We know. Yeah, that was we know what happened.

Leo Laporte (02:40:27):
Leo, the McIntosh. Just like what

Richard Campbell (02:40:31):
Macintosh went around my neck. Yankee

Leo Laporte (02:40:34):
Realized, wait a minute, this is a Windows show. What am I doing here? <Laugh>. And then when, so anyway, I'm glad to, to get you back. Mr. Thro is@thro.com. T H u r R ott.com. Subscribe to the premium version and you will get some additional lots of great additional stuff including chapters from his Windows Everywhere book. That book and the field guide to Windows 11 are available@leanpub.com. Thank you Pauly. Richard Campbell is run as radio.com. He has run as radio, but he also has.net rocks. If you're a.net fan, that's a must listen to every week. Anything else, you know, we plug those, but do you have anything else you want to promote? Richard?

Richard Campbell (02:41:17):
No, I'm good. We, we, we've got our fall show coming up for Dev Intersection in the Azure AI show. That'll be the first week of December. I'm, I was supposed to have some announcements in the Del Build timeframe, but politics got complicated. But as soon as I can announce the things we're gonna do, we will. Good. But yeah, the show's coming up. It'll be a, it'll be a great fall

Leo Laporte (02:41:35):
Show. See him in person. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, for sure. As I know from our Alaska cruise, it was great to have you aboard.

Richard Campbell (02:41:41):
Yeah, thanks. I had a lot of fun. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:41:43):
It was, you know, I just got a mailing from a company that does small boats, that does the, like the inland passages through Alaska. And I thought, wow, that might be the next step. You know, we've seen Ketch Cannon and Anchorage and Juno and stuff, but wouldn't you like to go on the inland passages? There better be kind.

Richard Campbell (02:42:00):
Interesting. Yeah. To see, see the way they saw it from the water, right? Like, not these

Leo Laporte (02:42:04):
Big ships. It is a little 76 person boat. They're tiny.

Richard Campbell (02:42:08):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:42:08):
Awesome. Yeah, I'm thinking about it. I'll let you know if we do it. Actually, you know, it'll be fun to take over the whole boat. We could easily have done that.

Richard Campbell (02:42:15):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (02:42:16):
<Affirmative>. And just say, Hey, it's gonna be a windows Weekly cruise, which means Crown Royal for everyone <laugh>.

Richard Campbell (02:42:24):
Yep. Go to Quebec City.

Leo Laporte (02:42:26):
Yeah. They still now is that, is that big fortress the, or that's not the original fortress you were talking about

Richard Campbell (02:42:33):
The, the old walls of the Wald City yesterday. Yes. Those

Leo Laporte (02:42:36):
Are still there. City. Nice. Yeah, it's still

Richard Campbell (02:42:38):
There. Yeah. No, it's a nice big hotel. It's fun. It's lovely. It's a Fairmont. Is it? Is it

Leo Laporte (02:42:43):
Fairmont? I'd like to stay there. What is, what is it, what is it called? The, the

Richard Campbell (02:42:47):
Fairmont. Just the Fairmont Quebec City.

Leo Laporte (02:42:49):
Yep. Oh, that's it. Okay. <laugh>. Thank you everybody for I want to go to Montreal too, cuz I want to try the bagels.

Richard Campbell (02:42:57):
Rich has got me promoting Canada. I don't know what they

Leo Laporte (02:42:59):
Is going on. Welcome to the Canadian show. Hey.

Richard Campbell (02:43:02):
Yep. Yeah. Smoked meat and the Bell Center. Yep. Habs. Yes. Mushroom Grill Hockey.

Leo Laporte (02:43:10):
I told you I'm now you're in Ontario. I'm a cobe quo. My my four Bears Jacque de George came there in 1693. I'm also

Paul Thurrott (02:43:22):
French Canadian. Well, are you, my name is French Canadian.

Richard Campbell (02:43:25):
You

Leo Laporte (02:43:25):
Look French Canadian. Actually, it's

Paul Thurrott (02:43:27):
From Newfoundland.

Leo Laporte (02:43:30):
Leo Laport was such a common connect name in Providence that when I was a kid growing up there, I looked it up. There were 21 Leo LaPorts in the phone book.

Richard Campbell (02:43:39):
Wow. Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:43:40):
I presume, you know, somehow all related.

Richard Campbell (02:43:42):
But if you watched any letter, Kenny <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:43:45):
I don't even know what that is. So clearly. I,

Richard Campbell (02:43:47):
Letter Letter Kenny is a TV show. It's like the Canadian version of Trailer Park Boys.

Leo Laporte (02:43:52):
Right. Oh, I thought Trailer Park Boys was a Canadian version.

Richard Campbell (02:43:55):
Yeah, this is even more Canadian. This is like interior Ontario. It's hilarious. And they had, and they recently did a spinoff called Shorey, which is literally just about the hockey players and that. Yeah. If you've, if you've ever, you ever seen like low budget hockey playing in Canada, shorty nails it <laugh>. Where the tickets, where the tickets are. 10 bucks. Cuz it comes with a beer. So it's like a rodeo,

Paul Thurrott (02:44:20):
But it's on ice.

Richard Campbell (02:44:21):
It's on ice. Except more, far more violent than, than than any other rodeo

Leo Laporte (02:44:26):
Could open. Good news letter. Kenny is on Hulu, so I guess I'll be watching

Richard Campbell (02:44:30):
That. Watch letter. Watch letter. Kenny

Leo Laporte (02:44:31):
Watch. Oh, it looks at too, doesn't it? Wow.

Richard Campbell (02:44:33):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:44:35):
All right. <Laugh>, the residents of letter Kenny belong to one of three groups. The Hicks, the skids and the players <laugh>. Oh

Paul Thurrott (02:44:46):
Boy. So it's just like the British, the French and whatever else

Leo Laporte (02:44:49):
Was over there at that. That's a, I guess that's constantly feuding with each other over seemingly trivial matters that often end with someone getting their ass kicked. Wow.

Richard Campbell (02:44:58):
That

Leo Laporte (02:44:58):
Looks like entertainment galore.

Richard Campbell (02:45:01):
You

Paul Thurrott (02:45:01):
Know what you do when you, you're watching that you drink some

Richard Campbell (02:45:04):
Canadian whiskey

Leo Laporte (02:45:04):
Canadian club

Richard Campbell (02:45:05):
Look. Canadian whiskey and a little letter Canadian. You're good.

Leo Laporte (02:45:07):
Yeah. Royal Crown. A Crown Royal. Let's get

Richard Campbell (02:45:11):
It right.

Leo Laporte (02:45:12):
Yep. Thanks Paul. Emily,

Richard Campbell (02:45:14):
Manitoba,

Leo Laporte (02:45:15):
What was it? But, but what was the one that they made for the king when he was coming? George to,

Richard Campbell (02:45:20):
That's Crown Royal. That's Crown Royal George to six in 1939. Elizabeth became Crown Royal

Leo Laporte (02:45:24):
Father. That's right. Yeah. All right. Thank you. May our supply, as they say, be endless. And this is from Patrick Delehanty, who's in the honorary Canadian because he grew up in Maine, which is Canada South. Close enough. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:45:41):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Way up there, huh?

Leo Laporte (02:45:44):
Yeah. <laugh>. Thanks everybody. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-Bye.

Ant Pruitt (02:45:49):
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