Windows Weekly 870 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.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Therade and Richard Campbell are both here. They're both in Mexico, but they're both here in spirit. We'll be talking about the latest versions of Windows 11. We're also going to talk about new hardware shown at Merlbal World Congress this week in Barcelona, and Microsoft adds four new GPTs to Microsoft Copilot. That and the Xbox segment and more. All coming up next on Windows Weekly. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therade and Richard Campbell, episode 870, recorded Wednesday, february 28th 2024.

00:47
The Return of the Copilot, windows Weekly, is brought to you by our friends at ITProTV, now called ACI Learning. You already know the name ITProTV from our network. Well, now they're a part of ACI Learning and ITPro has expanded its capabilities as a result, providing more support for your IT team. Aci Learning covers all your team's audit, cybersecurity and information technology training needs. Provides you with a personal account manager to make sure you aren't wasting anyone's time, because you know there's nothing worse than sitting and watching a video about something you already know. Your account manager works with you to ensure your team only focuses on the skills that matter to your organization, so you can leave unnecessary training behind.

01:34
Aci Learning kept all the fun and personality of ITProTV While amplifying their robust solutions for all your training needs. Let your team be entertained while they train With short format content and over 7,200 hours to choose from. Visit goacillearningcom slash twit and, if your team fills out the ACI form, you can find out how much you can save up to 65% off and get a free trial. That's right. Fill out the form and save up to 65% on an ITPro Enterprise Solution Plan at goacillearningcom slash twit. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft with these guys right here who are, coincidentally, both in the same country.

02:23
It doesn't happen that often, especially because the country's Mexico? Paul Therese in Mexico City and his casa, where he lives half the time, I think Richard Campbell on vacation in Puerto Vallarta.

02:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Where Liz Taylor and. Richard Burton used to sojourn Love in the sun. I literally heard that the section just north of here they call the Beverly Hills of PV.

02:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go Back in the day. Well, we missed you, richard, last week.

02:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm really sorry about that. They changed my flight on me a day earlier and it just sort of find out. It's like oh, by the way, you have to go to the airplane tomorrow.

03:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not a big deal. I mean we missed you, but you know, things happen this is life.

03:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I want everybody to know like the boondoggle it is me. Racing to a recording location is one of my favorite things. I love the panic. You know I should really take a picture of the mess I made to set this rig up. It's like my flight's leaving in 17 minutes. I better leave the house. I do. I do enjoy. Somebody said that the other day is like most people bring guests in from all over the world. Here the hosts go all over the world.

03:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I do. I remember once early when, back when Google first started doing the pin in the map, that you could see how people were, how close they were getting. We had a guest on one of our shows who was driving up and we were watching him. I think he's packed Norton, drive up the highway at high speed yeah. We are here to talk about version 23 H2. Is that the current version?

04:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Even though the confusion and actually, richard, I'm curious what you think about this the confusion here is that 22 H2 and 23 H2 are both on the same code base, so they get the same updates. Yeah, so what's the current version of Windows?

04:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a little strange. Well, and you know, underlying that there is a version number that's like five digits long. We could go dig around and look for that.

04:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, there is. But I have seen on my own computers and I hear this from people routinely where you'll have multiple PCs ones on 22 H2, ones on 23 H2, but they both have exactly the same features. They all have co-pilot. They've got the new widgets. You know it's.

04:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this possible? I'm on 24 H2 and it's only for the very Well.

04:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You have to be in the. You must be in the inside, yeah, or?

04:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you're an Australian. Oh you're an Australian. Oh, you're an Australian. That's a little odd frankly yeah.

05:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It also says my evaluation copies expire September 15th.

05:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, that's because, it's Insider, that's Insider, you're on the Insider. Yeah, so that's coming in the fall and then, before then, we're going to get a moment five not that Microsoft ever actually calls things by their names, you know sometime in the spring, sometimes soon. Cool, in fact, we already missed the first milestone yesterday, or, yeah, yesterday was week D, tuesday. That should have been the preview. Non-required update version of moment five. I'm sorry.

05:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Are you still counting on the same numbering system from last year? Is that what you're doing?

05:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm clinging to this, like Leonardo DiCaprio at the end of Titanic, knowing that I'm just going to die on this door.

05:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you know, I just let it. You should just be a pair of shoes on the bottom of the ocean. I think I am a pair of shoes. You'll be better off, oh man, oh I am.

05:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I had a meltdown last week because of hands on windows actually, but not really because of windows, you know, and I was telling Benito, my producer, how much I said. You know, I don't think you understand. You couldn't understand how much time I take preparing for this show. Make sure everything's great and then everything's set up. I got multiple cameras going. I was doing this really special thing and then we connected on zoom and everything crashed. Of course, I wasted probably 45 minutes of his life trying to fix it and he's correct answer.

06:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Correct answer. Just reboot the machine.

06:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh no, Listen, I wish it was this simple. I. I, of the course of that podcast, had three different computers going I it's not worth going through. I wrote about it. It's not worth going through all the problems other than to say Benito is the nicest guy in the world and, aside from my wife, I don't think I've apologized to anyone more than him. And it's weird because of the amount of time I may I take ensuring what I'm about to do is going to be perfect, and how often it is.

06:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

06:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And anyway, I'm trying to get the reasons behind your control.

06:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and you know, and I have multiple computers here and all of them are screwed up, so every booted era reset one over the weekend, which is what I'm using now, cause you know, I'm trying to like it to be stable and working and blah, blah, blah. Time to pay right.

07:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So everything I have. At least you've got a box starter. Like you're pretty quick to reboot, Rebuild, yeah, I mean.

07:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Andrew Cunningham's piece in the arts technique on how he does a clean build.

07:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I didn't appreciate that at all, cause I wrote that article eight years ago and I've been updating it ever since. I had people forwarding it to me. I'm like yeah, no, you know, I've been right. This he copied me. Like what it's in the book, you can read it for yourself, okay.

07:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just, oh yeah, I saw it and I'm not impressed, not impressed.

07:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's a good guy, but I mean, I mean, do you follow the same pattern?

07:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not, exactly the point of his actually piece was, I think, in response to Elon Musk over the weekend, asking Sacha Della for a tech support.

08:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
To which I offered him my book for free, because if you that would be, here's an idea, google it so the answer to your question is out there.

08:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Elon's complaint, though, was widely heard around the world, which is that you need a Windows, a mic and MF, mf, msa, microsoft account in in order to set up Windows 11, to which people in the community got you know notes said no, you don't, but it isn't exactly. I mean, it's a command line.

08:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why I mean I don't understand not taking 10 seconds to Google this problem.

08:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he would have found it, but as Elon Musk, he's a billionaire, he doesn't have to do that. He's got Sacha Della's home number.

08:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but he has a. I don't know if you guys noticed this, but he has a habit of making these kind of bold, stupid proclamations, only to be proved wrong two seconds later by half the planet and maybe take a beat and, you know, look it up.

08:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

08:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's any views more in need of a friend, you know, just a friend, I think you're right. He could yell at first, before he tweeted like Twitter's not your friend, do you?

09:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
want either of you. Do you want Elon to call you next time? No, okay, just checking.

09:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I mean, he's not going to be next time. This is just the one off. He's, he's, he's thrown his grenade, he's done. We're never going to hear him talk about Windows, ever again. Yeah, you're probably right. The irony that you need a Tesla account to use a Tesla or a Once a start.

09:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, twitter account is exactly.

09:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's a good point. You do need a Twitter account to use Twitter, don't?

09:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you. I guess the sheer hypocrisy of this is just laughable. It's just astonishing. Yeah, except that it's him and that's what he does. Yeah, I don't know why I'm acting.

09:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Andrew begins his article with that. First bullet point is how to do it without creating a Microsoft account, and it isn't something Microsoft wants you to do. It's very much a work.

09:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Except Microsoft actually documents this.

09:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They do Sort it out there.

09:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, it's not in the product.

09:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why do they make it so hard to do?

09:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because they want you to sign up with a Microsoft account, and they're they're at. For most normal mainstream users, that's what they want to do.

10:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There are very good reasons to do it.

10:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you get the password authentication stuff, you get automatic full disk encryption, and it's the long list of stuff.

10:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And you get a hundred gigs of one drive and like you can get a bunch of stuff for signing up an MSA account, yeah, yeah. And now I would also interest you like go try and sign up. Sign up an MSA account today. Why, that's not trivial anymore either. You have a MSA account, I would argue in 20 years and nearby.

10:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, right, so I, I, I sign up for a new one for every book, and actually this book I actually signed up for two. But what do?

10:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you name it? Do you name it like Paul's next book? No, do you have a special name for it?

10:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That worked once. The book account is just the ROT 11 book. And then I did one called MSA. What is it called Testing MSA? Dash account, msa go away yeah Sure. Well, because you know the the issue is actually. Richard just alluded to this because, you know, starting back in December whenever that was I started looking at all the security stuff and most people like 90, 90, you know something, huge percentage of people already have a Microsoft account and they probably have had it since Xbox went live with Xbox live and 2002.

11:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
2002, like I did, is hotmail or any of those things.

11:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. So this thing has been sitting here gathering dust and if you were to start a new account you would probably do it, right, you know. But because you have this account sitting there and don't really think about it too much, you might use it for the one thing, for you play games on Xbox or, you know, as a secondary email address or whatever it might be. I don't think people think about it too much.

11:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Should I create a new MSA?

11:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, you should just properly secure your existing MSA, which is, you know, something I added to the book and something I wrote a standalone article about. Because of all that work, I did a couple months ago.

11:51
In short, folks go to lean pubcom and buy Well it's going to throw outcom is free, it's just, you know, to a phase your friend fill out all your personal information, make sure it's up to date and revisit it about once a year, if not more frequently, which you won't do because you lose your phone number or you lose your secondary email address. Whatever it is, you want to make sure that stuff's up to date. But again people don't think about this.

12:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, msa is just simply a Microsoft account. It's not yep nothing.

12:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Technically, it's called the managed service account. The reason it's defined that way is, as opposed to an Azure Active Directory account or an now known as an Entra ID.

12:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But let's not talk about that. I did a very special episode of Hands On Windows which dealt with the types of accounts, of accounts that you can have in Windows and all the different. It's one of those.

12:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Listen. If you really, you know, have a deep list, like for your time and your happiness, take your MSA account and make it into an Azure Active Directory account. Oh, dear God, please don't.

12:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Don't do not. Can we erase that part of the show?

13:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Also don't do the reverse.

13:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
either Take your Entra ID account and turn it into Microsoft. I'm making it, then get fired and watch what happens while you're purchasing.

13:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard needs to do a new show on the club to it called Hands Off Windows, and he can do all the things you should never, ever do.

13:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would call it more like sticking us something between the spokes of a wheel of a moving bison.

13:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you know, have you not endowed a bike lately? Let me tell you how to do it.

13:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I haven't lived until you've flown head first into a concrete wall. I'm just saying.

13:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hands On Windows is the wonderful show Paul does which, I'm very happy to say, is now available to all. It was club only, with select episodes put out in public, but now we put all of the episodes out in public as audio. If you want the video, join the club. But some of them are really do want. You want video to watch? I was going to say a lot of them are. But, this one. You wouldn't, you could, because you're just describing the various accounts.

13:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The accounts.

13:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true, yeah, so if you want to hear it, it's available.

13:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is it's high comedy. You'll enjoy it. Okay, I did one episode in the dark. I tried to do a hands on thing with a folding laptop last week.

14:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's when my setup blew up, so we got to get you that new transparent laptop from Lenovo.

14:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That piece of science fiction at Lenovo showed up Imaginary. Yeah, we'll get. We'll get to this. Anyway, I forgot what we were talking about. But basically, windows has entered this new rollout phase, which whose technical name is you're getting it, whether you want it. That's the name of the phase or not, and what that means is if you qualify, your PC qualifies, you're just going to get it. You can't stop it. It's coming.

14:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and you don't. You're getting the real point here, which is that they've decided, you're no longer qualified to decide, which is probably correct. Well, and they're just going to do stuff.

14:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now I think it's tied to that thing we talked about earlier where you're on 22 H2 and you could just get 23 H2, and when you do, you're not going to notice any difference, because if you're still running 20 H2 today, you certainly have all the features already. So it's not that big of a deal. No big deal, anyway. That's just, we always discuss this phase.

15:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When it happens, it happened, whatever, I don't know the canary build looks compelling like they're actually building stuff.

15:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So my continued problem here is that when you look at the features that end up in certain builds or channels, I guess they're kind of all over the place. They don't follow that logical order. So the you mean like 16 new actions for Windows Copilot I should have written compared to the 13 that are available today.

15:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, you get a new refrigerator put in. What's going on?

15:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what's going on in there painting and new lights.

15:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do they? Do they wait until Windows Weekly to do that stuff?

15:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You have what time we have here and this is all we have, so that's fine. Um, anyway, so they're adding Wi-Fi seven support to Windows. We've been on that for a long time. I think I got a laptop with Wi-Fi seven last December. Hilariously, does not work with Wi-Fi seven because Windows doesn't support it yet. Yeah, but it will soon. It will soon.

16:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, of course, in order for that to all work, not only do you have to have a laptop that has the hardware and Windows that has the support, you need a router that has the support. Are people selling Wi-Fi seven routers?

16:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have heard from more than one person that they bought two of those three things figuring the third was already in place and we're disappointed.

16:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and ubiquities got a lot. If you think structure okay, and the ubiquities got Wi-Fi seven once. If you can find them, they sell out pretty fast.

16:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bet they do. Thanks, it's just not built into Windows. Oh wait, I don't need it right now.

16:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean you need the radio in the device bringing your laptop. You need the OS to actually have the feature and you need it. And you need an AP that understands Wi-Fi. Seven also has the.

17:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, so it's in Canary now. That means we'll probably ship and stable in about two seconds, based on the new schedule. So who can say but you?

17:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
won't know when it happens. They're not going to tell you. Well, no, when it happens.

17:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No doubt You're going to anticipate. It will just be there and then remember when Co-Pilot first shipped in Windows 11 last fall, sort of ahead of 23H2, but we'll call it part of 23H2. It was Co-Pilot as we know it on the web, but it was also a limited set of Windows features turn on dark mode, that kind of stuff. So they're adding more of those actions, so this thing will become a little more sophisticated, hopefully.

17:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So more hooks into Windows for Co-Pilot.

17:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I think that's going to be. That's going to happen a lot more quickly. That's not going to wait until 24H2. That will be, in fact. I'd be surprised if either one of these features waited for 24H2.

17:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So we will see but that's why I guess I don't know why they're not shipping this with every build, Like why did they wait? Build up 13 of them?

17:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're going to talk about a Co-Pilot feature that launched with literally zero testing in about 10 seconds. So dark questions I have, or many, let's put it that way. And then that's oh, and then remember, for a little while there, but a month, canary and Dev run the same build number and they've separated out again for some reason.

18:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, oh, because there shouldn't be the same build number, for obvious reasons.

18:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I honestly, they spun the wheel and I guess it came up snake eyes, I don't know.

18:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm still waiting for the new blog post that says hey, this is what Canary means now. Yeah, right, yeah, wait three months. That's what the moment means now. Oh, they're learning, right, they're experimenting, okay Are they learning, do you think I?

18:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
don't know you probably you guys don't have much to do with normal people, but do you see?

18:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, Not if you could help it. So I mean I've seen them. I mean I think I know what you mean by that. I saw some walk by the other day, the normal. They make me vaguely queasy.

19:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Has any idea about any of this. I mean, I was surprised to see that I'm on 24H2, because I don't even remember pressing the button that says insider. I think we just use it and then it updates, and you know the only time.

19:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So let me throw out a random compliment to a different product, and this is going to come out of nowhere, but I think it's kind of relevant. Interesting. Microsoft Edge, which I freaking hate, is on a four-week release schedule. Right, there are different channels. You can go Dev, beta, whatever the names of them are, and every four weeks is a new version of Microsoft Edge, and it's predictable and advanced what the new features are going to be. They never really surprise us. They never come out early randomly with new features. They never come out late randomly with new features. They just ship to a schedule.

19:50
Maybe Windows could do that, and so I don't mind. I don't begrudge Windows the desire to continually innovate, as they would put it, and ship features, but I do think it should follow a logical testing pattern that actually ensures that those features get tested to whatever degree. It doesn't have to be every six months, it doesn't have to be every quarter. They can ship new features every month, but I don't understand why it has to be a slap in the face surprise every time. So like this stuff we just talked about Wi-Fi 7 and these new actions for Windows Copilot guarantee. I would bet big money we will absolutely see those before 24H2 and well before 24H2. And there's no way to know when, because Windows.

20:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah. So I don't know if that's why Wi-Fi 7 is important to this old Right, like it's been around for a while. You would have thought they would have got that out ahead of the products.

20:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this might be tied to what Leo just kind of asked, which is there's probably no real consumer need for it.

20:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no rush.

20:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, although I agree that for those people that do want it, and for enthusiasts or business users that want to maybe evaluate it, yeah, I mean throw it out, and I guess that's all they did. They said canary, so I guess you can test it that way.

21:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, If I'm a Broadcom or any of the other radio makers, I'm like dude, I need to sell products here. Like what the the thing?

21:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's interesting about that is in the old days when Wi-Fi was still kind of a new thing and they were competing standard. Well, Wi-Fi wasn't even Wi-Fi, it was just wireless Late 90s. You would buy some solution from one vendor. You'd get a card for each of your computers. They could talk wirelessly and it was kind of a wild west type situation and I think most people would agree we don't want to go back to that system exactly. But then again, yeah, why can't? Why can't Broadcom or whatever ship even beta drivers for Windows that are based on the Microsoft work?

21:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean I mean these days Microsoft basically doesn't trust any vendor to make a driver anymore. So they're doing it, but to that point and only because empirical data is shown them. When they allow that, machines get a lot less stable and they get a lot of flack for it.

21:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think my machines could get less stable, richard. So I'm curious about that argument. But I hear it logically. I mean it makes sense to me.

22:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it would make sense. But my point is, you knew what the specification was going to be well in advance. You had the chipsets a while ago, Right? This driver's not that complicated. It just isn't especially when you talk about a WDL driver like a standard driver, not even trying to use specialized features in any way, Right?

22:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I agree. What's the difference, though? But Wi-Fi 6E to 7, what's the throughput difference? What are we talking about here?

22:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't use more more antenna simultaneously.

22:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's better. It's an additional bandwidth range. Is that part of it?

22:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It just, by the way, it was only officially ratified last month. I mean, it's not, it's super new, yeah, yeah but we've often adopted for Wi-Fi 7, I think, is it's no longer collision based. So that's going to make, for instance, we always tell you guys, hardwired right, get on a wire, because if there's other Wi-Fi signals the Wi-Fi is like Ethernet will pause, and 7 apparently doesn't do that and that's partly because of the more antenna.

23:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, that's interesting. That's a long exit. Interesting, I would say.

23:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so there are people who would want it. I mean, we would certainly encourage our hosts to use it.

23:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We have, I'm sorry, I just there are multiple examples of computers. Apple did this shipping with USB standards before they were completely ratified and I think the idea there was that they could do a firmware update if they had to. If there were differences.

23:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the iPhone does not have hardware support for Wi-Fi 7. So nobody cares. That's a good point.

23:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, In the end it's not iPhone. It doesn't matter, it's not an iPhone yet. This is the joke, right?

23:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not real until the iPhone has it. Yeah, no.

23:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm too. I don't understand how the hardware vendor can beat the software guy, like the software supposed to be the fastest ship thing. Yeah, yep, I agree. How do they have hardware in the field when they don't have software out there? It's curious, yeah.

23:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also, you know it'll be faster theoretically, just like Wi-Fi 6E was faster than 6 and 6 was faster than 5. It should be, they say. The standard says up to four times faster.

24:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, up to 46 gigabits. I don't believe that one. Yeah, yeah, sure, maybe in a lab. Yes, Right. The three-feet of distance between the two nodes. Yeah, didn't they tell me? That's what 5G was going to get me to, like it's just 5G has slowly started to suck less.

24:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is that fair, I mean?

24:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I see 5G more often, but does my phone still hold on a routine basis? Sure.

24:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will say those. This doesn't happen a lot and I so, and it hasn't happened in a while but those rare instances where connectivity is tough and I will actually take the moment to screw out my phone and turn off 5G and just do 4G. It's faster and I don't know if that's just because of whatever type of infrastructure is in that area, but this is true over by the gym I go to. It was actually happened once here. It depends on which carrier you're connecting to too. That's a big idea with this.

24:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One of those interesting truths in the IoT space where it's like you know what's awesome 3G, because nobody's using it anymore. The antennas are still out there, the cost is incredibly low. It's not super low latency, but the latency is totally consistent. So for telemetry gear and IoT over 3G, it's freaking magic because nobody's bothering with it anymore.

25:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, there must be time for the wireless charist to tear it all down.

25:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, that sounds like it's too good to be true, absolutely on the road, because they tore down the 2G stuff. The 2G stuff is gone.

25:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bring back YMAX. That's it, that's the solution.

25:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We don't have enough weapon in our lives All right, well, this was a curious digression for a canary belt that isn't really that notable.

25:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, we've given it some heft. That's what we're here for Take those featherweight stories and give them heft. Okay.

25:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The White Staff would do it in the show. It's like I mostly read Paul's articles and make fun of them.

25:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, oddly, that's also what I do, so somebody's got to write them.

26:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think, richard, we have you here for contextual heft. I think that's really your job. I'm happy that.

26:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I bring a little IT angle to this too.

26:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, actually, we love that in all seriousness. That's the. That is really that and whiskey.

26:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But teaching Paul truly is one of my favorites. I do, I enjoy it.

26:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway for Paul.

26:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Given that we've had this capability on Pixel phones and, I guess, on Samsung phones recently for some months, although I will say the Samsung equivalent of this is terrible they're adding a kind of magic eraser type feature to the Photoshop in Windows 11. And you'll be shocked to discover that your $3,000 computer can erase things from a photo just as good as your tiny little phone can. But that's good. I like to do stuff like that on the big screen, so that's kind of nice. So you know again, drag or drag or circle, whatever.

26:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it outpainting or no?

27:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's erasing, it's erasing and using its generative erase is what they call it. That's actually really interesting. Is that better than?

27:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have you tried it?

27:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I haven't tried it yet, so in my experience, the Google feature works very good to magical, and then the Samsung is like laughably better. You kidding me? You actually ship this. I know it's. It's horrific. So that will you know. Eventually I'll be reviewing that phone. That will be a fun little part of that.

27:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, I just like the full loop back of I can have AI create pictures for me and have AI create industries, just like a God.

27:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly, yeah, so that's it. That's all we got for Windows. There wasn't that much this week. We only have the one bill last week.

27:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we both love Jeff Wolsey. I think that was the total qualifier.

27:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We do both love Jeff Wolsey.

27:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you did not say his name, so I'm glad to hear that you were talking about.

27:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Jeff, yeah. So Jeff is a long time Windows server guy and when I was at Windows IT Pro I used to deal with him regularly. I used to see him all the time and I have not. I mean, we chat like on Twitter, which is not the same thing, but it was really neat to see hearing you guys talk and I felt I feel bad. I haven't talked to him in so long. You're such a good guy.

28:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I hope and I hope folks heard last week we run out with actually show about Windows server. Sorry, I was in the air, I wasn't supposed to be 920.

28:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's show 920. Run as go to runasradiocom. Go get it now.

28:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I think I would also just sort of say I cover consumer stuff. Obviously this version of server is interesting and I haven't been able to say that for a long time, honestly.

28:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, well, and we and we're getting, we're starting. I feel like I think we talked about this on the show. That's like we're finally seeing a version of server that was built in the cloud and brought to the local machine.

28:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't remember if you said this or I thought it, which is the sign of a psychopath, but I it occurred to me or to you and I heard it, that this, this kind of cloud versus on-prem thing, has perhaps almost evened out and now we understand the coexistence going forward, yeah, and that this hybrid cloud thing, we have a better understanding of what those workloads might look like or maybe should look like, on server right on the on-prem part.

29:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And you're dancing against a show I'm really looking to make right now, which is when do I take a workload back out of the cloud, which is fascinating, right, that's great. Now repatriation, yeah, repatriation, what they're calling it. Oh boy, that's good, I love it. It's a that's. We could digress for an hour on that. It's not. That's not a Windows conversation. It is very much a yeah, tea conversation.

29:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's very interesting. It's, it's interesting, yep, anyway, it's a good show. I recommend it. Love Joe. Thank you, okay, there you go.

29:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Boy, this love fest must continue. But first a word from our sponsor. You're you're watching Windows Weekly? Paul Therrat, richard Campbell, I really missed you guys, this one should not.

30:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, we missed you too. This weekly fix is really good for me.

30:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's how long flight you went from Sydney to PV. Is that I don't know? You went home first, yeah.

30:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, yeah, I went home. First I literally stayed in an airport hotel, my wife joined me, and then we flew to PV. Oh, like I did not even try and go home, you just went to your home airport. I went to the home airport, that's exactly it. Okay, I mean, I'm back. That's wild. Stayed, go out the next day. That's the weird. So I have not set foot in my home for, oh, three weeks now, and then some stolen things away from setting foot in my home.

30:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But this is, and then I'll for a day. This is not a work trip. This one, your son, fun. Oh, this is.

30:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I'm working in the morning. There's a lot of writing to do and some and the hanging out with you guys and so forth, and then mostly by the pool or Nice, nice.

30:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nice Hard to be unhappy. I also not been home three weeks, but I have not done anywhere. You're in your home. Some days, literally, like literally, have gone nowhere.

30:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're in your home, by the way. I really I really love the the drop cloth work that the guy is doing yeah.

31:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's sort of dropped clothed things.

31:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I pushed it aside. It's not necessary, okay.

31:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And, to be clear, I I will if, on any of the circumstances, I would have stopped through Mexico city, either going into this or coming back. Yeah, of course that.

31:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm literally back to back, like I, it's pretty good that you didn't, honestly, because our little volcano here is exploding right now. Yeah, no, no, now my neighbor was supposed to be home last night and he got diverted and is hopefully coming home today. But we got our kids flying Saturday and you know we'll see but Power classic volcanoes are no fun. Yeah, Plus, I think there's an ancient God living in there. I think that's the story. I don't understand Spanish very well, but this it's. It's more than just a volcano. Yeah.

31:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So like we've destroyed cities before, we can destroy yours too. It's not a big deal. It's a feast about something.

31:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, wow, but all the. I hope that doesn't affect my flight into Cabo. No, you're on the way. I think I'm for Bailey, we're in.

31:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Baja's not. Yeah, yeah For Bailey Windsor in your favor, yeah.

32:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul, you should stay down there. You should go to Mazatlan for the eclipse April 8th. You might as well just stay down there.

32:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we were originally. We're planning on doing that and we just we can't for a variety of reasons. Oh, I'm sorry.

32:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, you've seen one, you've seen them all. Sun goes out eight minutes later comes back.

32:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Comes back. Well, this one feels historic in some ways.

32:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Short nine yeah, yeah, you sacrifice a virgin to make the sun come back. Everything works out.

32:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The next one's not till 2045. Yeah, I don't know about you. I don't plan to be here in 2045.

32:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What am I? 50? Yeah, I'm going to say, if I am, I'm not going to even know it. I'll make it. I'll make it, but I won't know, I'll be drooling all over a commoner 64 or something.

32:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's only 21 years from now, paul, you'll be. You'll be my age. Don't let's like, let's just chill, let's relax.

32:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, what's 21 years in dog years? I mean, I don't know. I'm not feeling good about it.

32:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By then you'll have Elon's neural link in place, making you cheerful whether you want to be here, it is a race right now at least for me, because I'm 67, between dying and getting my brain in a jar and I'm just, I'm praying.

33:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love that you're shooting for brain in a jar Brain in a jar.

33:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the best outcome.

33:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I think you get up to a certain age and you're like just take me. You know, I don't need it. Oh, I know.

33:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My mom's at that age she's just and my dad too. He said you know, it's fine, I've had, I've had a good life. Yeah, I've done enough, I've done too much. I'm really tired now and and uh, I was like that this morning and I'm only 15.

33:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, I know I feel like it's like, oh my God, I'm like I'm out of bed. I'm like I can't do it, get me out of here.

33:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know what's happening. All right, somebody asked me what do you miss from your youth? And I'm like not hurting. All yeah, I miss you right in this youth. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

33:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let us talk about some hardware, because, of course, mobile world, yeah yeah. Congress is going on right now in Barcelona. Wish I were there. Yeah, yeah.

33:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wish I was in Barcelona. I don't really care about mobile world.

33:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I'm WC, I could care about that.

34:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But, yeah, barcelona, absolutely yeah, a bunch of stuff here actually. So just from a high level, I would say obviously. Back in December Intel released its first Intel Core Ultra chips, which are kind of out of band with the whole Core 13, 14, 15, whatever. Ces, we got a second round. We also got the non-Ultra 14th gen, which can do a lot of people, and now we're getting another round of these computers and including, I should say, the V Pro versions for Businesses, right, so we've kind of I guess that's full circle.

34:27
I don't know what that is on this kind of one-off mid-generation thing, I'm a jig with the MPOs and whatnot. But the big news to me was Clawcom posted one of those comparison videos. Remember my Microsoft used to this with Edge and they would compare it to something Chrome, probably Firefox, and they'd have the counters going and Edge would always win and know how we laughed. Well, they did one of those for AI, accelerated tasks using Sable, diffusion and GIMP generate one image and then generate multiple images, depending on the Thanks. We'll call them a benchmark or the test or whatever. I think it was like three Snapdragon was three to ten times faster Separate from this, if you're. And again, look, there's some caveats here.

35:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The, the, yeah, I mean you're comparing two totally different chip architectures Like it's a stable, stable diffusion has been optimized for the call-come-chips set. For a long time they did go to the effort of making sure each piece of this was as Could be, but arm is also short instructions that, like, you're literally saying hey, I was gonna make an apple pie and I'm just orange and it wasn't that good look.

35:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All I'm saying is it is. It may not be the most common real real world word test, real world test. You know, we we use browsers and word processors and things like that and we'll see what that looks like, but but it is a. It is a workload that is comparable and I Part of it is no doubt that they've had this lead, but and Asterix, asterix they used an Intel Core 7 I 155h, which is not the highest end version of that chip is 165h.

35:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But wouldn't have made a difference for these numbers? Really probably not.

36:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, I know I think optimization is gonna occur. Intel is still the world's largest producer of PC microprocessors by far, so that will happen. Now those things are out and mass. I think they were talking about hoping to have over a hundred million AI PCs out in the market by the end of the year, which seems great, but I just you know, for those people out there who are fans of Windows on arm and really want this thing to succeed. I also would point out that there have been leaked benchmarks for geek bench and, honestly, this chip sets looking pretty good and the way I describe it cuz I just kind of went like that, numbers is Whatever.

36:38
Their scores are single and multi-core. They outperform the Ryzen 9 7940 HS and the Intel Core Ultra 7 Wow, 65, you, by the way, just barely, but. But they're not. They're not just sort of in the ballpark, like if you said, well, if there was 80% of the performance, that'd be great. No, no, they actually outperform both those chips. So it is very close. It's a single digit percentage close, but it's interesting. Comparing it to the Apple Silicon chips which we have to, I would say that or I did say I am saying Single core. They're comparable Higher end M2 and M3, not so much, you know, the M3 max. I would scores it by probably somewhere in the order of 30% single core and I'm gonna call this 50% Actually multiple.

37:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Also the mean again your other apples, oranges and bananas. Comparison though yeah, I'm tuned in three of these highly integrated chips with all those different processor units inside of one bay, but I don't see to me.

37:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think Intel does All right. I wasn't what I thought you're gonna say, but I would say those are, those are high-end, very expensive chips and without a doubt, snapdragon Exile targets thin and light laptops, right. So this is the first of what will be a family of chipsets, will be higher in versions. It in some ways is not fair to compare them head-to-head in that way. But then again, I Bet the most M3's out in the world today are in laptops, right, I mean I. I know they're five, six thousand all laptops or whatever those things cost. But but you know it's still interesting and you know for some we don't know what these are gonna cost. I unfortunately the Qualcomm stuff has been premium PC so far. But send in light.

38:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But the brilliant you play for Apple in the scenario is oh, it's a scalar workload for a large language model. I got a processor for that. Yeah, oh, you know, and that's the thing. Right is it has the advantage of it has dedicated Workers for different kind of workloads, where Intel's still essentially a long instruction set pipeline Insert. Workloads run brilliantly on it and the hip and sexy ones for the moment don't.

38:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, but again to customers. I mean those kind of arguments like whatever, I just want the thing that's best. And the thing that's best doesn't always mean the thing that runs fastest in a benchmark. In fact it almost never means that. But now there'll be a number of factors and we'll see. Yeah, I do think it's a good, competitive, brilliant piece of marketing.

39:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I want Windows arm. I'd love to have that machine. I don't know. I think it's the windows team that's struggling to really go deep enough on Getting all those instructions mapping. Well, they really have arm running. Great, it's a long it's.

39:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think yeah, and I think part of it is. It's a different world today. It's not like Microsoft can say we're doing this thing, everyone's standing line behind us and app makers like we're good you know it runs an inflation.

39:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fine, you know yeah.

39:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We shall see, I am curious. Yeah, so, like I said, intel rolled out the pro versions Corral to. There's not too much going on there. Uh, lenovo shut off a transparent display on a laptop. That was pretty. It was pretty. Um, it's fake fake by sci-fi.

39:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't feel like yeah why would you? Want this.

39:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I People listening to show might remember. There was, very briefly, a Cortana Wall mounted thermostat that had a glass screen like that that you could see through. It was kind of neat because I am the display would appear to hover Above whatever the the wall looked like, right, sure, it kind of reminded me of that, but of course that gives you my limited life view and that's what we also would see.

40:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, we had a few big transparent TVs there too, right, yeah, and yeah, yeah, that makes more sense.

40:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You might want to see your fireplace behind it, or whatever, but you're coming.

40:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I do. Yes. Well, no, I think there's a well. So I don't think it makes sense for a productivity laptop necessarily. Oh, I do think there's a market for TVs, and I would call them desktop displays. Where here's my, here's an argument thing.

40:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, one of the things I was dealing with when we were working at hard end product teams. He said whoever was on the laptop sitting in the in the meeting room wasn't effectively in the meeting. They were behind their laptop. Oh, you're saying, okay, right, it was kind of isolating and so you've got folks debating, but the person on the machine is sort of somewhere else. And so we went, we started using tablets. We laid the machine flat down so you could draw on it, so that it was less in your face, and I wonder if the transparent screen is the in between of that well.

41:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The problem of the Tablet, though, is you're. You're also got the people who were doing this thing where they were like, yes, you know, I draw into the thing, and it was transparent.

41:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was sitting and was sitting across your view and transparent screen in front of me, like am I?

41:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Transparency would come through the back and you can be like Bob. You're what? Looking at porn during the meeting. What are you doing?

41:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, no, absolutely that's. I see that as a feature Taking notes of how much of an idiot you are, and you have to read backwards. You'll be able to read them well.

41:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I, oh. So I do think there's a market for this kind of thing, because I do. I think there's a place for ambient Surround imagery around if you're watching a movie where maybe it's lights, that kind of play on the wall, that bleed into the picture. Same thing with video games on on computer displays and maybe this kind of thing, you know it's, maybe it's in that area. It's interesting. I don't know how far we are away from actually having something like this that makes sense as a product. I don't. They'd also did the thing where they had the. The transparent glassing on the the keyboard deck and the keyboard was sort of virtual and Guys, no, like absolutely not. I think we've all. We all know that ship is sailed, yep. So it was, it was. I think they just wanted something. Now that you can make them.

42:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We look for the device like we. You know what about? What about the phone phone? So the bottom part of it maybe has the hard gear in it.

42:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that was also my remember. Microsoft used to those office of tomorrow demo videos, but the woman would run it, you know, from the futuristic car to the futuristic hotel and those demo those videos. The phone was a slab of see-through glass like literally.

42:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was the and I would speak to the old Cell phone. I can remember that who made that particular one that was the folding one that looked like the communicator from Star Trek, like yeah, the danger Danger phone, whatever was called danger was one of them? There was, I think it was a Motorola version of it.

43:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like yeah.

43:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's right, they were emulating sci-fi and this is emulating sci-fi, but you know what? It's cool.

43:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hey, we got our best ideas from Isaac Asimov.

43:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is all good, yeah, yeah and Star Trek, and you know there's a reason for this stuff. That would be cool to have the transparent phone, I guess.

43:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, okay, I guess it depends on give up. You know it's not gonna be as beautiful a display.

43:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know the answer to that, but you know it's Certainly it makes a are easier.

43:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hey, you thought you lost your phone easily. Now wait until they're a transparent dark bar it is fallen into, you know anyway. So they're actual announcements. We're not so exciting. A new thing? Pads not that new thing. Pads aren't great, but they these are the AI PC, so elder core based think pads, all very good. And they know some software for with the Motorola Mobility right, the that part of Motorola they still own and it's just another version of let's interact between the PC and the phone, like we have with phone link, like Intel has with whatever that Intel thing is called. So they're doing that too and okay, fine, that's fine. I think I guess PC makers want to have some kind of different I'm. I don't know that it will be limited to their PCs, but I bet it will. Dell did that when they had their thing.

44:23
You know, you know, yeah, you well, you want to have a differentiation. Yes, that's what they're doing. Hp brought the Intel core ultra to their pavilion and envy lines, which is their consumer lines, consumer and consumer. I would call it consumer pro simmer in the case of envy. So good, you know, whatever. 60 by 10 displays, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And then the Samsung Galaxy book, for which was announced that CS is now available in the US. You can buy those.

44:50
Now that this is series of computers, it's actually, I think, four different models. These are the ones that were the first to come up with the co-pilot key remember, that was the big announcement. And they have the Unique because it's Samsung, right, they have a unique co-pilot feature that no one else gets because of their partnership with Microsoft. Now, to use that you have to have other Samsung devices, which I think a lot of Samsung guys might. But In the same way that Samsung flagships get additional you know features in phone link, they also get additional features in co-pilot if they have a Samsung flagship phone and a Samsung book for series laptop.

45:26
I Know, I don't know how I feel about that. Not good, basically, I don't like that kind of thing. And then, oh, so this is not even slightly related, but I'll call it semi related. Microsoft today, out of nowhere, announced they're kind of events schedule for the whole year. We already knew that build was coming in May to Seattle. Still don't know if press is gonna be invited, but Microsoft ignite will be held in Chicago November 18 to the 22nd. This is the first time ignite has been held in person outside of Redmond area or Seattle area since 2019, when it was in Orlando right so, and there was one ticket in Chicago and, as I recall, it was a train wreck.

46:18
One of the weird Facts of history here is that Microsoft ignite is an annual show. Right, this used to be tech ed. When the pandemic happened in 2020, they did a show that November, like they always do, but then it is second ignite in the spring, I think, in March maybe or April. Yeah, they did ignite, nor again normally. I don't know why they did that.

46:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was pressure to have one brand of event Okay, and they decided ignite was more important. To build like there's. There's always competing interests on all of this right. Yeah, sure, every used to be PDC and tech and PDC Used to be for professional developers and then it became more of a futures conference, you know, going all the way back to To dotnet.

47:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, they rolled in a bunch of them are mixed used to be a separate show just for web developers.

47:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Then it was web, that's and phone, and then one up later, right, like okay, the old PDC was older than that, right, and then it. Then they did dotnet before dotnet was shipped, and then they did long horn whoa, and then they. Last PDC was 2010. The first mix was oh six, but that was them trying to figure out how do we be open web people, and that's where they did all the web related stuff and change culture that way.

47:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do everything in Redmond.

47:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's nowhere to put them, there's not a lot of structure. Yeah, okay, and even the Seattle conference center is not that big.

47:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do think there's a nice case to be made for rolling back things to the way they were before, because they consolidated down to basically three major shows because insiders, the partner show and I they used to have a lot of smaller shows.

47:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They would have exchange or SharePoint specific shows when heck yeah, I think I used their eye Well, now was your argument could still make sense. Ignite was the consolidation of tech head and a bunch of other smaller Microsoft shows.

48:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah maybe business travel, since it's dying off, except with you two no, except for him, you mean I. Maybe they realize that they can't have too many. You know, they just not gonna get the attendance that they would like they have too many.

48:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's gonna be a while. I mean, I do think it's gonna. Yeah, I think it's gonna be a slow boil, we'll see.

48:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I say Chicago has Goldie is like Goldilocks zone, you don't, you really don't want to be there in August, I know, because the McCormick's well, okay, so I'm late.

48:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
November may not, might not be great. They were supposed to do two nights in a row there and the first of those two was so bad they broke the contract and left. And and how people got food, food poisoning oh yeah, it's just really bad. The infrastructure was terrible, like everyone was staying at hotels downtown. But to get out to that conference was it my core? No, what's the? Is it McCormick? Yeah, yeah, to get out there it was like 30 plus minute ride in traffic.

49:04
I got into an, a yelling argument with a cab driver who I explained what I was doing and he was, and he took the fare. And then he asked me if it would be okay to you know, it's sort of going through the madness of the half circle in front of it If it could drop me off. And I said, of course. And then he just yelled at me because he now we, he had to drive home for 40 minutes in traffic and he wasn't gonna get a fare. And I was like I just gave you a huge tip, I don't. I mean, I know I, but that's it. It raised a lot of anger, you know, at the time, and it became really hard to get a cab right.

49:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, my god, of course, yeah, yeah, oh, my client wrong. Yeah, it was quite astonishing.

49:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Chicago can be awful you know what the global warming is. Solve this problem.

49:50
Maybe you have a beautiful spring like weather. The charred blossoms will be a, or will have a hurricane. One of the other, or yeah, or the volcano we don't know exists is gonna explode. No, yep, we'll see. Yeah, I'm just glad to see this stuff winding up. Winding up again. I guess I'll call it. But man, seriously, what is it? We're closing in on the five-year anniversary. Oh, I guess it's the four-year anniversary, the COVID thing, and then you know five. It will be five years since the last major in Non, you know, microsoft backyard in person ignite.

50:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's exciting last year was above freezing in cloudy most of November, so okay but freezing, but above freezing.

50:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just, you're speaking as a Canadian.

50:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I'm doing that, so I don't have to explain it. Freedom unit freezing.

50:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Alright, do you want to move on or do you want to talk?

50:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
more about the good old days. No, I'm good.

50:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, I know that was mean. You're watching Windows. I enjoy the. I enjoy the, the, the history, the context, the reminiscence, the fights with the cab drivers Our show today brought to you by. Well, I don't know, we'll find out. Somebody said you know there was a hefty garbage bag ad that sounded like the worst AM radio ever. Yeah, I apologize, you know, if you don't like it, there is a way around it. Join the club. You won't hear any of this, not any of the inserted ads, not any of our ads. You won't even hear this plug for club twit.

51:28
It's all edited out and and really, and the other advantage of it is there's no trackers. You know, I was talking about this the other day. Big agency won't say the name, but there's a big agency that has said to us Well, you got to use we. Why are you using, though? You know why are you doing it this way? You got to use our trackers in your feed. They call them pixels, but they're really just pixels. Pixels, but what it is.

51:52
The feed goes through a variety of servers on the way to you. We already do that with one company and provide that for advertisers. We know, because we know this company. We know there's privacy forward. They're not sharing information with the advertisers or with us, etc. So we do one of those and then we have our own and we go through advertised cast. So they want more. They say, well, no, you got this one and this one, this one, and there are come by the way, there are podcasts you can listen to. I won't name names, but they'd have maybe half dozen of these or more. Every one of them Is, you know, kind of gathering information on you. So we said no and they said we're gonna pull. We're gonna pull at least one of your big advertisers. So we said okay, but our.

52:35
The truth is, every time you add a tracker, we have to tell our audience not to block it, because a lot of them are blocked by ad blockers. We have to explain our audience doesn't like it. Uh, we're not gonna do it. So we do have a minimal number of trackers, but we have trackers in them because we otherwise we'd have no ads. But the best way around all of this, and the way that helps us, because we just lost a bunch of advertising from this agency Is to join the club. Seven bucks a month, that's all it is. You get great stuff like paul's hands on windows. You get the full in color video Of hands on windows, hands on macintosh, ios today, all of those are available for audio in public, with ads, but Ad free in video if you want it, plus the great club twitter discord wonderful place to hang.

53:23
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53:49
Uh, you have a chance to uh join either monthly and, by the way, monthly is probably the way to go. Doesn't cost you any less to go yearly, and with monthly you can cancel at any time. You're right, you just go. Well, I don't want to pay for it anymore. So if you're at all worried, try it monthly. There is a yearly plan. You can give more if you wish. Um, it's not a charity, you can't put it on your taxes, that's a deduction. But if you wish to make it 10 or 20 bucks a month, you by all means we'll be glad to support that. There's a company of corporate plans and family plans too.

54:19
Twittertv, slash club twitter, if you like this show, and and, by the way, the money doesn't go into my pocket, it goes to paul the richard, goes the gas company, the electric company, the rent for the studio, the staff. That's where that money goes. So you're supporting, directly supporting the ongoing production of these shows. And thanks in advance. Paul the rot, richard cambell, they're both in mexico. It's a co-ing, amazing coincidence. Uh, let us continue talking about AI and I want to assure you, before we get into this, all three of us are mostly real, so just, yeah, I have no feeling increasingly less so, but yeah, I'm more, some more, digital than others, right?

55:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I I felt like this next thing warranted a major announcement from microsoft, and I'm a little bit confused by this, because microsoft has talked about co-pilot. Of course, it's talked about how we're going to be able to make our own custom co-pilots at some point using this co-pilot builder or gpt builder, whatever they're calling it.

55:17
I'm putting those sessions together right now for devint and may, for exactly that reason but they never really talked up this aspect of it, which is that you could go to copilotmicrosoftcom and interact and say I want to draw me a picture, make me a story, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

55:34
But you can actually make this different language. Here Microsoft is using the, I think, the copilot language, I believe, and I guess they're saying GPTs. Yeah, they're not saying custom GPTs, they're calling them copilot GPTs, right, which are the equivalent of open AI chat GPT, custom GPTs, right, which is a sort of an LLM that's trained for specific purposes, right, and in many ways, this is our first peek at what I'll call for lack of a better term, an AI app, if you will, right. So they have one for travel, right, or one for cooking, one for images, which was already around, and then one for a fitness trainer, right. The idea here is that this GPT slash chat bot or whatever you, instead of going right to copilot, you go to this other thing and then, hopefully, the results could be more accurate slash, reliable, because you're not going across the whole body of.

56:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, fewer hallucinations. Right, I don't like the term, I know, I know what's the upside to reducing the language set Less weird responses, fewer bugs and less cost for them to operate because it's smaller.

56:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think this is the. I think this is kind of the future of this stuff. It's weird. Ai has followed a weird trajectory, Like we got the Holy Grail first, you know, and then we start. Now we're moving it down.

57:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because it was an accident, right, like they did basically stumble onto this thing. They were still experimenting with it in November, november 22, and then they put it out to the world because they'd run out of money to do more testing themselves. It's like let's go test on the public. What a great idea. Now they're tuning it Like. I've seen this everywhere. We're seeing this in Home Assistant now, where folks are coming up with ways to run it on a Raspberry Pi by reducing its set and its language, and it's over, really Okay.

57:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I believe it. But I think this is we won't really think in these terms in about three months, but for now, there's this notion that we're going to have these very specialized LLMs that will do a specific thing and we'll be better at it than this overlord AI, For lack of a better term. This is fascinating to me, and I wish they had talked about it more.

57:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is exactly the same thing that happened with data analytics. Back in the day, you made the great cube of doom right. You combined all the data. It cost a fortune to run, it was slow and it was odd, and then you learned to shave down relevant data sets and the smallest model units that cost less to operate and ran faster, and you're seeing the same essential effect that we've hit that tipping point on how to make a language model work and we're finding reasons to narrow it for applied places. But it also speaks to, because this isn't a path to AGI, this is a path to language modeling, and so let's get specific on the models of language we want.

58:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right Right. That's very interesting and this was discovered through a tweet. You know they didn't announce it, Not advertised. I'm shocked by this. To me, this is one of the biggest evolutions or improvements or whatever to this product since it was released. I think this points very much at where this is going. I think it's fascinating.

59:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's what maturation looks like you build and you build until you have something useful, and then you shave away the fluff to get to the point that matters.

59:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just that this time it happened in real time, I guess.

59:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, I mean they've been worried, they've been talking about this for a while and so they're getting smarter about building narrow models because you get better quality and it costs less to operate. If you're going to build a tool that depends on language specific to travel, and you have a choice between running you know, open AIs, big chat, jpt4 plus engine at 20 cents a transaction or you could run the travel bot at half a cent a transaction.

59:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, I know which one are you going to buy? That's exactly. That's the right, right, right, right. But you know what it's not? We don't have to be cynical about it, because it actually benefits everybody. It is maturation.

59:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you look at every technology after you get to discovery, then you tune. It's pretty normal. So the nice thing here is like we're not racing to a GPT-5. We're going the other way. We're picking the most valuable parts and narrowing in, and that is healthy.

01:00:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah right.

01:00:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then, I guess in the same vein of smaller LLMs or SLMs or whatever and you know, google last week, remember, came up with their GEMMA kind of open, lightweight AI models. Microsoft, this past week, has well, microsoft has their own too, by the way, but Microsoft has partnered with Mistral. I assume it's Mistral, like that French-based AI company, to bring this stuff into Azure AI Studio, azure Machine Learning, et cetera. It's that will be one of the AI models you'll be able to choose from as a Microsoft customer. It was also probably done to head off regulatory criticism of their partnership with OpenAI. Frankly. But again, partner with more people. Yeah, yeah, it would not right. We're not exclusive, although I would say a $13 million multi-year investment in Mistral, mistral AI is not quite $13 billion, but I'm not gonna zero here zero there.

01:01:13
They have similar numbers Anyway, so that's cool. And then, as soon as they announced it, the EU said okay, thank you for doing that, we're gonna investigate this now. So, which you know, we've talked about this. They should be doing that. Yes.

01:01:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes For scrutinizing. Look for exclusivity clauses Like what don't we know? Yeah, look for anything anti-competitive.

01:01:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Github announced GitHub Co-Pilot Enterprise. So this is their third skew of GitHub I'm sorry, co-pilot right. So they have GitHub Co-Pilot your original Co-Pilot, your original Co-Pilot. The first Co-Pilot Yep $10 per month. Co-pilot for business is 19 per user per month. And then this one, you know, obviously offers everything from the other two and expands on that is $39 per user per month. And this also speaks this notion of, in this case, kind of institutional knowledge and again, training it on the company's data, one would also argue, institutional standards.

01:02:16
Yes, yes, exactly Coding standards, everything, yes, the whole thing. Yeah, so interesting.

01:02:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I mean I've got a couple of angles on this, Both as a dev and in my IT roles as well, which is in A. You definitely want your enterprise architects having an overview of how Co-Pilot's using the organization. What we tend to present, it's code styles that we want and so forth, so it tends to lead people the right way. So you're not resisting Co-Pilot's output in your review, so it'll slow you down.

01:02:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I'll say I will just fix it after you leave it anyway.

01:02:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just submit it and we'll just yeah. Ai can't help you if your standards suck. Yep, exactly yeah. Also, in general, microsoft needs to push towards more enterprise features in this space. The move towards.

01:03:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Although I have to say I mean I don't know what the market is for individual developers, but 9.99 a month is such a good deal for that product. 39, yeah, inside of a professional organization of multiple developers working in teams.

01:03:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's probably fine. It's probably. If you save one dev one hour per month, there's your $30 million paid back as many times over.

01:03:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep. And then Because on the outside that seems expensive but you get a member of who's using it now.

01:03:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and what the effects are like? I'm talking to PMC. States are just saying like a 30 to 40% performance improvement in encoding once they get familiar with Co-Pilot Right. It's more code of higher quality, less remediation, less bug fixing that sort of thing and quicker fixes when they do need to make a difference. So yeah, the math is pretty compelling there, and it doesn't. It could be much more expensive than that. It'd still be worthwhile for a lot of places.

01:04:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Google continues to step on the rake, which I sort of appreciate. It also annoys me too. It blows my mind yeah, this two size this one. So they have a product obviously called Gemini, which is also the name of their LLM families or product lines, whatever. Is there a third name for it now? Well, they've rebranded around. So Bard has rebranded Gemini what used to be called oh God, I already forgot the name. Duet Is also everything's Gemini, or so they've gone Gemini. That's good. They've had their Co-Pilot moment. Yep, gemini, like Co-Pilot, has image generation capabilities, which actually it doesn't now, because, in an attempt to be responsible and ethical, they overcompensated and their image generation capabilities were creating horrifically bad images. I'm not sure how else to say it, but I would also say look at the prompt.

01:05:03
Well, yeah, there's always that aspect to it. But I've been, you know, I've tried to have Co-Pilot generate certain imagery where it's like, yeah, we're not doing that. You know nuclear explosions, all that.

01:05:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
These are not obvious words that you just say no to yeah.

01:05:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, in this case, though, it was like show me some historical pictures of the Pope, and they were black and I think honestly and it was trying to be inclusive. I think honestly this is the right wing, getting upset about wokeness in a weird way.

01:05:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, they obviously are overcompensated, but yeah, but so what I mean?

01:05:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know you didn't say show me a picture of the current Pope. It was just some popes or this, or I can't remember what the other ones were.

01:05:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But no, and they literally said if you said I want a picture of a black woman doing you know, running through a field or whatever, it would not have created an image of a white woman because you specifically asked for this right. So it's trying to be diverse and they're trying to over.

01:06:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they overcompensated for the idea that it would only be white people that it would show Exactly.

01:06:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They didn't want to look like a thing made by middle-aged white guys, right.

01:06:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't attribute wokeness or anything. I mean. This is. I don't know I don't know it's the same mistake that people make about AI in general, the anthropomorphizing it. It's just a generation machine and yeah.

01:06:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Okay, well, I don't. I mean, I Honestly, the thing to me that's interesting is Google. Ever since Microsoft exploded out of the gate with what we now call co-pilot, google has been saying excuse me, we've been doing this for several years. Yeah, we see the ethical issues here. We were going to do this responsibly and this is not. You know, it's weird how these roles have sort of reversed, in a way. It's weird Because this gives them a teaching moment where they can say I mean, it was their product, but they can still say look, this is what we were warning you about. You know, we knew that this was possible. We tried to overcome it.

01:07:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we never. Open AI came from Google Brain for the most part. Right, yeah, but spawned open AI was what was happening in Google Brain and a lot of talent, including Susquebar and others, was pulled into open AI in the process. So you know the funny thing, they could respin this. They say this is what you were warning us about.

01:07:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is why they made it go up the podium. That's not very good marketing, richard, I know. Yeah, so it's interesting. I mean, obviously we'll come back any day now in two weeks, whatever it is. They can't not have this capability, yeah, but yeah, there's going to be a lot of road bumps like this, and yeah.

01:07:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And how did they miss this? And how did Microsoft not miss it? Like, really, is it just better the test results like really there are insane versions, one of the.

01:07:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a cottage industry now and people trying to get just the right prompt to make one of these things go nuts and there's a great. I wish I could find this right now. But there's a great conversation where the guy says listen, I have PTSD If I see an emoji, it's going to set it off. And then the thing goes, it goes bonvillain on them. He's like oh, I'm so sorry, I would never do anything to hurt you. Oh, I put an emoji there. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean that. I'm not trying to hurt you, I'm so sorry. Oh, there's another one. I don't know why they keep appearing like that. Actually, I'm doing it on purpose. I'm evil and I don't care that you have PTSD. Like it goes down this like crazy. It gets nuts, like immediately.

01:08:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And you're anthropomorphizing a piece of software again. But OK, ok.

01:08:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But that's the point, is these safeguards that are being built in, they're going to. It's a constant battle because people anthropomorphize. I mean people, it's people who are coming up with this, like it's people who provide the data in the first place. How far did you? I mean, I don't mean to say they pushed the AI, but I mean because you know, but you see this in the comment sections of blogs and things like, where people goad and goad and goad and then finally the guy explodes and like, see, you're a jerk, you should be kicked out of here. And it's like hold on a second. Like, hold on a second. And yeah, I think a lot of this stuff is people who are like, let's be a little devious here and see what we can make this thing do, and then we can talk about the evil of AI, even though we're the ones that went down this path very explicitly.

01:09:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, poked it. If you keep poking it hard enough and immediately, it should be able to resist. Yes, yes.

01:09:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And since Google never learns the lesson, they also help me write write into Google Chrome. So now we can all use AI to write our product reviews online or comment on blogs, or do what write emails. Whatever it's going to be, it's still an experimental feature.

01:09:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it always open with the sentence.

01:09:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know, normally it's against my programming to write a review like this, but no, usually what it says is it looks like you're trying to write a ransom note. Would you like me to help Something like that? I don't actually get to see it because I'm in Mexico. It's not here, so I can't even access any experimental features right now.

01:10:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Where's your VPN?

01:10:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have tried, I feel like I think I, yeah, anyway, I've tried, but I haven't gotten it to work. And then, you know, in the opposite end of the spectrum, brave, which is busy trying to create their own AI out of their own, you know, non-gigantic company. Stolen dataset will not be the good guy. Yeah, trying to be the good guy, small, they're slowly evolving, bravely in their browser. And this is something like I don't turn on sidebars, I don't usually use these in browser things but I actually started using this and I have to say, if you agree, maybe that one of the best uses of AI for normal person these days is like summarization, you know, pulling out the big points and kind of creating a belated list. Honestly, for that kind of thing it's not horrible. And now it directly supports PDFs and files in Google Drive, right, and this is the start of some you know series of integrations that will come out, wow, yeah interesting.

01:11:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I've got a set of docs I was supposed to read on Google Drive right now. If I fired up bravely, I could literally just say give me a summary of that doc.

01:11:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I was just playing with this capability last night. I was looking at like chapters of the book, for example, or documents or longer articles I've written. You know what are the big, the key points here. Honestly, it's pretty good, it's pretty, you know.

01:11:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
As we said, it's not just writing summaries. Paul is angry at something.

01:11:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Paul's ranting again. Skip forward to 37. This will joke there you might like, and then you're pretty much done. A lot of it is just fluff. Yeah, I used to word has long had a document summarization feature and I used to joke that if you took a Soch and a Della speech and put it in there and had it summarize it down, it would just come up with a blank document because he never really said anything. It's terrible.

01:11:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The world could be great. It's going to be great, it's going to be great. We're all great.

01:11:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, he's proven his worth, that's for sure. I don't know that GDC was not in person last year, but it is going to be in person this year. This is the game developer conference, so it's coming to San Francisco in late March. Microsoft or Xbox will be there. In fact, they have dozens of people speaking at the show. You should look at the list of some of the talks. Really interesting Like, if you want to. He was in Moscone last year, so oh, it's okay. So maybe I'm not sure if this represents like an escalation of their presence, but they're going to have a lot of speakers from across Xbox, so Activision, blizzard, king, zenimax, et cetera. So interesting. The one I'm going to keep my eye on is there's a DirectX State of the Union which includes information about that DirectX SR feature I think we talked about last week, which is Windows will soon have the ability to upscale games using AI older games Really really interesting, so that might be good. Also, there's a bunch of Diablo 4 sessions, which is kind of funny because it's been out right, but they're going to be talking.

01:13:01
You can go and learn how developers did different parts of each game or whatever. It seems like kind of a fun show. Actually. I don't remember when this was, but sometime last year Microsoft was talking about game hubs in the Xbox interface. This was on consoles and the idea there is you have kind of like you would have in the store, like a landing page for a game, and then you see all the add-ons and it's like a central place If there's a community around that game, et cetera, et cetera. That's been around for a little while now, but now they're adding it to Xbox app on the PC. So that's still in pre-release but it doesn't seem like a very difficult computer science program. So problem rather. So they'll probably get that going quickly. And Age of Empires, which is a game I've. Well, it's a series of games.

01:13:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Around.

01:13:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
for ages it's been around for 30 years, maybe, I mean I, maybe not 30. Well, maybe 30 years, maybe somewhere there. Not my kind of thing, but this is going to be a big year if you're a fan Some of the stuff they've announced before. We have a little more details, like there's a new game called Age of Mythology. We're told it's coming out and will ship in 2024 on Xbox consoles and PCs.

01:14:11
There's an immobile version of Age of Empires coming out which makes tons of sense to me. No exact date, but coming soon to Android and iOS. And then a bunch of DLC for most of the previous games two, three and four coming out at different times. Lots of sales, you know. Blah, blah, blah. And because it is the, because they're celebrating the milestone of having reached 50 million players worldwide, which I assume they mean across games, across time, right? So 50 million people have played some Age of Empire game over the past, whatever number of years. Through the 29th, almost everything Age of Empires related is on sale, and that's true in both the Microsoft Store and Steam.

01:14:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And you've not been a big engine. You didn't get into Age of Empires. You're not an RTS guy, not your thing. That's interesting Because it's basically building a world, right? Yeah, sometimes with some historical context, sometimes not, it's not even important.

01:15:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The last game I played like this was the Seven Cities of Gold. It was all like a guards game for the Commodore 64 that probably came out like 1985 or something.

01:15:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know any mobile games you play, but mobile games are most part of our free to play. Pay to win. Yeah, like they. They're so big and this is why I've been saying all along, like Microsoft's going to have a tough time in the mobile market, because it's creepy, right, it's exploitive.

01:15:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Have you looked at Windows 11 recently? I think they're going to be fine. Yeah, I think they. I think they got it.

01:15:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, don't care, it's like you know. It would be cool if they sold the PC version of Gave of Age of Empires and you could have the mobile version as well, oh, and have any pay things in it. And it wasn't multiplayer, like you could just play the game on your phone. It'd be a good game on your phone.

01:15:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't, yeah, I don't know if that's what it is or not actually.

01:15:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I don't really, I don't know, because we're all about recurring revenue, and so I'm going to use Skinner Boxes to deceive you into needing things you don't really need to play a game.

01:16:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So they're. Hypothetically, if this company produced a product that was repetitive and drew you in and you got kind of an addiction to it and then they sold you the cure to that addiction, would that be bad? Is that a problem?

01:16:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, it will be bad for them because once you cure, I'm sorry it wouldn't actually be a cure.

01:16:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It would just be enough to keep you going like a drip.

01:16:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If I could have played your moment so you could buy again.

01:16:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:16:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and that's the Skinner Box mindset. Right, it's the gambling addiction.

01:16:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
To the industry's credit, I would say different companies have tried to sell games. To sell games, you know, just do it the old fashioned way, and I, I. This is, I think, tied to the problem we see with advertising everywhere, and you know, people just expect everything to be free now. Yeah.

01:16:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And so you can't you can't charge $30 for a mobile game.

01:16:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which thanks, right, because if you have an iPad or probably an Android tablet, I don't know you have this machine that's as powerful as a PC in some ways I know, not everywhere, but super high resolution screen, right, you can take it with you. I mean, there's so many advantages to it, but we're so used to. This, you know, is that they're playing the game in a tiny window by a bunch of ads.

01:17:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know. I've been, I've been playing a mobile game. Now that's very much a pay-to-win kind of game and it's got a PC client, tablet client and so forth and I'm just exploring the culture of it and trying to figure out, like how sick is this? Like you know it's sick. I think it's pretty thick and it's like how can a kinder gentler tech giant just dive into this one? Oh wait, you're. You know you're selling tracking information, so I guess you're. You know what's one.

01:17:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean. No, I think it's in their warehouse.

01:17:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think reverse is another.

01:17:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They've been building to this moment. You know plus.

01:17:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's legislated against it, right the way they get with FIFA, or kids at least, sure.

01:18:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no right. There have been attempts and and success is getting rid of the loot box syndrome thing and doing that kind of thing, but I don't know even something like so I do. I use Duolingo for language learning. We pay for Duolingo pro, whatever the hell it's called, you know for annual, whatever it is, and then sometimes you run out of. You know there's all these stupid little gamification things. Like you, you don't beat the timer and you'd have to stop off, but you can spend some money and get some gems and continue, and I if you're not learning well enough, you could pay to keep learning.

01:18:33
Yeah, so I've paid, I've done that. I mean it's, you know, even do it. It's like being able to, you got to see in class. You're like his 10 bucks All right, and you know, like I, I don't know, I mean I, I, I, I very interesting.

01:18:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the drive for recurring revenue. I know, I know.

01:18:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you know, microsoft seems some success with that stuff and also seen some issues right With games like maybe C of thieves. I'm not saying this has been a problem necessarily, but they support it for a long period of time and there isn't necessarily an ongoing revenue model there. Unless you're talking about people are in game pass and yeah.

01:19:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If they gave us a flat, if it was just a flat rate, if it was game pass and you got mobile games, they could wipe the market out.

01:19:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They could own it all. Yeah, You've just invented Apple Arcade and Google Play games. I mean. Google both Android and iOS have that.

01:19:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, except for one thing Xbox. Well, xbox, at least. By the way, playstation 2, though. They don't do this either. They have the games right. If you ever look at our Apple Arcade, like a normal fully grown adult would look at this selection of games and be like what is this nonsense? Or, you know, play Pass, whatever it's called on the Google side, same thing. It's like what is this Like? I don't want to play these games. Now there are people who do, right. I mean, obviously, everyone likes different things, but yeah, but the age of empires on a mobile device Play it'd be fun.

01:19:56
We must have talked about this at some point of the past two weeks Maybe it was last week when you weren't here but it is inconceivable that Microsoft is not right now working on a game pass mobile. It's inconceivable.

01:20:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is the one good product they could make from that stack and not be in the exploitative model Right.

01:20:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, we'll see. We'll see if that works. But as part of like Game Pass Ultimate subscription, we've had everything right PC, console and mobile. That's where it gets really exciting. I mean, I think that's very interesting and mobile devices can play really modern games.

01:20:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, they've got the horsepower for it and the idea that you maybe are building a world. You play on your PC for a while, and then you've got to ride to school and so you flip over your mobile app and do play another part of the game on your mobile phone, right, and it's like, oh, I'm going to worry about building that new wing on my civilization when I get back to the big screen. There you go, yeah.

01:20:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's all kinds of models there. You could have side quests that made sense on that device in a game that you know.

01:20:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and it's an even better idea that there's aspects of game that can only be played on mobile Right.

01:21:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We will see that kind of innovation and people are going to try it Like they'll try things. That's a good idea, yeah, and, as I said it out loud, so it must be genius. And then, finally, we've probably heard of GeForce now, which is a series of tiers of game streaming services. These are PC games that you can play on different devices. This has been a free version for a while. Obviously, you don't get bumped at the top of the list from this time to get online. But now, because people are sitting there waiting to play who aren't paying, they're going to start showing them ads and you know, taking that face value, you don't really have a problem with that. What do you expect for free? But there are already charges of people. Like you know, it used to take me two minutes to get into a game and now it takes six minutes and there are ads the whole time. It's like seriously, and so I don't know what to say to that. I haven't used this. That's a good pre-roll, yeah.

01:21:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're not incentive to get you into game fast anymore. No, they are not, honey, when you're not in the game. Yeah, I don't know.

01:22:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Top of the first incentives, all right, all right we got a big back of the book coming up in just a bit. You're listening to Windows Weekly with Mr Paul Therat. He's in Mexico City. His website, theratcom, continues on. By the way, I don't know if you're seeing on the Discord. I love them, all of the things over your shoulder that they're putting.

01:22:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm actually kind of over the shoulder things, honestly.

01:22:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just put a hook there Put the hook back Pause it. I don't know how we, how we an hour 20 at the back of the book. What's going on?

01:22:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what happened. It's amazing. We want to get you to the beach. Is what we want to do? Yeah, that's Richard.

01:22:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Campbell's. I live in an art park In Port of Viara. Yeah, it's a short show.

01:22:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's okay, it's not unheard of. It's been a while, though Not in this decade, but yeah, it's not unheard of. Yeah Right, remember back in the day we used to do audio only.

01:23:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Probably don't remember that.

01:23:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Back of the book time. Let's get started with Paul's tips and picks.

01:23:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, One of the issues I was going to say a little issues. It's a big issue that I run into updating the book because it's hard to know when things happen in Windows. Now you know you stay. There's a bunch of new features. I just don't really like that anymore. So now things just happen.

01:23:32
So at some point, for example, they were testing Microsoft was the let's move the co-pilot button to a different part of the taskbar and then one day it was just there for everybody. And, unlike the year and a half ago when I was complaining about the three different versions of OneDrive, which continued to be a problem for a very long time, this one seems to have just sort of happened. It's just out there. And tying to this is a very exciting feature. That has nothing to do with co-pilot, but rather with widgets. The original co-pilot because this piece of junk. If you ever go in there, they have this Microsoft Start feed and it's all these horrible stories and you could spend, you could make a career if you could get paid doing it out of trying to fine tune this thing to only show you good stories. You can't do it, it's not possible and it doesn't matter what the stories are, because Microsoft is licensing the content. We click on it, microsoft Edge loads, it goes to the Microsoft Start website or MSNcom or whatever it is. You get Microsoft advertising and tracking. It's like the most horrible thing on earth and from day one people have said why can't I just turn that off and just have the widgets? It only took three years. But now it's there and you should, if you're going to use widgets at all. I leave widgets on because I like having the temperature thing in the corner there.

01:24:46
I changed two features now I've always changed one. The one I've always changed is open widgets on hover. I turned that off. I don't want my mouse to go down there and have widgets just open on me. I never want that. But now there's a new option show a hide feeds and the Microsoft Start feed is the only one in there and you can turn it off and now you just have widgets, just like you would think of something called wait for it widgets.

01:25:08
Someday maybe there will be third party feeds. There's a link to it. It will bring you to an empty store in the Microsoft an empty page, rather, in the Microsoft store. But third parties can plug into this and maybe someday we'll have a good third party news choice, but we don't today. But for now the tip is you just turn those things off. When you do the widgets get bigger, they take up more space. It's kind of nice. I can see that my air quality is very unhealthy today. That's good, and I'm going to turn that off because I don't need to know that. So that's in there.

01:25:43
And then for the app pick, based on the events of the past week especially, but just really the past three, four weeks, because I've been using this now for over a month is Microsoft Co-Pilot Pro Right? And so when I first experimented with this, my goal was to just kind of use it for image creation, because the higher quality and the preference you would get as a paying customer was better, and that stuff never ceased to amaze. I am so impressed and so happy with the quality of the images I make with this thing. But since then I've been experimenting with more stuff and we just we briefed over this or we talked about this briefly a few minutes ago, but I've been looking at its integration, especially in Microsoft Word, but across Office, things like document summary, and I've been pushing my book chapters against it especially, but also some of my longer premium pieces just to see.

01:26:34
Okay, what do you make of this?

01:26:37
And you know what.

01:26:38
It's not bad.

01:26:39
It really isn't bad.

01:26:40
We joked about it, but it's really not bad at all. The thing I'm really looking forward to, of course, is the GPT builder, which isn't out yet. So people who pay for co-pilot whether it's co-pilot pro or co-pilot Microsoft 365, will get some sort of a I'm sure it's called a GPT studio or whatever the name of the thing is and you'll be able to train this thing against your own data, right? This is basically the one drive co-pilot thing I've been kind of looking for, and that's what I really want to do is set this thing loose on my entire body of work over 30 years and then have it come back and tell me it might be time to retire. Paul, I don't know what year or why you're still doing this. I don't know. We'll see how smart it is, but I've been really happy with Microsoft co-pilot and pro and kind of surprised by how happy I am with it, if that makes sense, like it's. I keep waiting for some kind of major fail and it's honestly it's doing. It's doing pretty great Nice. It's worth looking at.

01:27:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's give her some Pope pictures, see what happens.

01:27:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually I'm going to do one riches. I'll do that while Rich is talking. I'll tell you what. I get Some pictures of the Pope and incidentally, campbell as the Pope.

01:27:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a nice segue into this week's run as radio.

01:27:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I think we've already plugged last week's enough times that Jeff will be talking about the next version of server.

01:28:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let me say real quick.

01:28:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I love that guy. I love his great guy. That was a great show. Martina Grom is a great friend of mine, rd Austria, and one of the ladies I go to routinely to talk about governance related issues, and one of the ones we talked about this time around was M365 governance, the catch phrase that we sort of let off with.

01:28:22
I'm like, listen, I've been reading about what I'm going to need to do for my organization to really let M365 co-pilot into the organization and they kind of had this casual statement it seems harmless, make sure your data estate is in order. And here's the reality Nobody's data estate is in order. How would you even measure that? How would you know? So the conversation really dove into. Well, what are we talking about here? And it's really about understanding what is sensitive information in your organization, what should be available to everyone, creating some tiers and essentially organize that data.

01:28:58
There are great tools around this now stuff like Microsoft Perview, and it really will help you go down the path of starting to recognize what you want co-pilot to make available to everyone and what should only be made available to certain folks, because if there's one thing co-pilots are good at is summarizing data and if they go across your entire organization and summarize data. They're going to summarize all kinds of things that you might not want to actually hit their showing. So a great conversation really drove into the tools and techniques and things you need to do to at least have some confidence that as you start to roll out M365 co-pilot, it doesn't become a problem that they concern you know. Which you don't want is that reaction from leadership saying turn it off, turn it off now, and that's a risk, without a doubt, with a tool like this. Awesome, I only get to say about that.

01:29:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, let's talk about something else.

01:29:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you like I was trying to make a picture of you as the Pope, but it's not coming out right.

01:30:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Pope Richard the first thing, things might burst into flames. Nothing good could come.

01:30:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'm thinking we didn't have a brown liquor pick last week. We did have a very nice cocktail.

01:30:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you talked about cocktails, which is cool. I've been, I've been hitting to public to do the whole talk about the origin of the cocktail and stuff like that. But oh nice, I keep drinking whiskey in different places and then they wanted to tell stories and that's this week's whiskey is a whiskey that I had on one of my stops. I've been trying to stop at friends places and between all the other places that I'm going, and so on my way to London I swung through Houston because it's kind of on the way, and some friends of mine introduced me to this Isle of Sky whiskey. Now, you've heard the term Isle of Sky before. It's part of the Hebrides chain, not a big deal in the Northwest of Scotland. Isle is part of that chain, as is Jura, all the ones that have distilleries on it, and Sky is no exception. There's many other islands you haven't heard of, but that's because they don't have distilleries. The main distillery on Sky is called Taliscare and we're not going to talk about Taliscare today because that's a whole other conversation. It's one of the ICOs big distilleries and I would be remiss to say it's the only one. There's another one called Torivhag, which is a newer place, but the main thing is this is where the Clan McLeod is from. So remember Highlander? Yeah, the Clan McLeod. In fact, when Taliscare was building their distillery back in 200 years ago, they bought land from the Clan McLeod. But this is not a segment about Taliscare, so we're actually going to talk about a different McLeod in McLeod. Ian McLeod distillers was actually he was from the TV series actually yes, yeah, and there can only be one whiskey when it back in 1933, so not that old. But they were not a distillery then, they were a bottler, and so they were buying whiskey barrels from various places and doing their own blends, and their original blend was called Isle of Sky, and that's not the whiskey we're talking about either, because that's an older version which has gone through many iterations. They were acquired by the Russell family in 63, who's now bought up a bunch of other distilleries. They became McLeod distillers only in 2003 when they bought the Glen going distillery, which is the first time they actually owned a distillery. They're also known for making a whiskey called Smokehead. That was back in 2006. So this was an attempt, when whiskey was becoming hit in the early odds, to make a younger, targeted whiskey, and so they're a little bit sweeter, but still very smoky, very peaty, as the most Isle of Sky whiskies are. They also have merch. It's the first time I've ever seen the word merch on a whiskey distillery website. So, yep, they sell merch. They've also bought some space sites. They own the Tamdut distillery and recently, about 10 years ago, they acquired the Rose Bank distillery, and that's a whole other conversation. Arguably, rose Bank was one of the very finest lowland distilleries ever made. It sits between Glasgow and Edinburgh and it's like a whole other conversation.

01:33:14
Let's talk about Isle of Sky, and we're going to talk specifically about their blended edition that they released in the US only last year. June of 2023 is when it first started coming in. So they've been making Isle of Sky editions in the UK for quite some time, but they made a separate release in the US. Some of them can be very hard to find, but they make an 8 at 12, an 18, a 21, a 25, and a 30. What they're doing is they're blending highland and space sites and a little island whiskey as well. So the whole thing with Isle of Sky as long, with Isle and so forth and we talked about this in the Scottish whiskey series is that they don't have a lot of trees to dry malt with. They have peat to dry malt with, which is why their whiskeys are peaty. And then, as peaty whiskeys became hip, they got better at creating peat flavors and whiskeys, and they actually made stronger ones. And so you know Smokehead was an example of them sort of contemporary versions of peated whiskeys. The Isle of Sky whiskeys are lightly peated, so they're blending different whiskeys together Because it has an age abolition on it.

01:34:21
You know, these are not whisky blends with green alcohol in it, because green alcohol is obviously not aged. They are bledded through multiple sets of barrels, the youngest in it being 21 years old. And so, boy, this drinks well, holy man. But for any 21-year-old it would, and some of the experts have said this is the stuff of dreams, which is a good line. Now, this is not a production quantity sufficient to be found in a total wine or a Bevmo.

01:34:56
You're going to have to go to a specialty whiskey shop to get this stuff, and so it's going to vary in price. I found as low as 120, us as high as 200, depends on where you can find it, which is a lot for a whiskey, a lot for a 21,. In fact, for a 21,. It's a bargain. Most 21s like if you could find a downmore Portwood or a Belveny Portwood 21, probably 300 bucks. So from a 21-year-old perspective it's a pretty good price at $200 or maybe 175 if you can find it for that. But 125 bucks for a blended whiskey holy man, that's a lot. But you can buy a Chivis 18 these days or a Chivis 12 too, and they're also a little bit more expensive. Unless you like spending money on whiskey, then you should definitely try this at drinks grade.

01:35:52
The main thing I'd buy this for is someone who loves whiskey and has never had a 20-year-old, and so you're opportunity to buy a reasonable, a better priced older whiskey in a 21,. That's a fine and you will be delighted. It's not so much Pete that you feel like you're looking. A dirty ashtray Certainly has those sweet notes that you know. It's a spay and hyaline in there. They've done a great job of making exceptional whiskey and it's for what it is. It's an extraordinary value.

01:36:25
I'll have Skye.

01:36:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's from.

01:36:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ian McLeod Distillers and what's the website?

01:36:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Why did I do with that?

01:36:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry, I could probably find it. I'm looking at it. Ianmcleodcom M-A-C-L-E-O-Dcom slash Isle of Skye. They have a lot of different.

01:36:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was looking at my notes. Yeah, yeah, ian McLeod makes a bunch of products. This Isle of Skye line is their original name, going back to 33, when they were making it with you the different way. But this US edition and I come to appreciate it really is a US edition is fantastic. I'm just blown away by it and it's cool to have older blends rather than just generic blends. Famous Grouse is a blend of Pylon Park and McCallan, but it's also 50% grain alcohol, which is why it's $20 for a bottle and, by the way, a good drink Like my god, nothing. You put a famous Grouse in front of me. I'm going to drink it, no question.

01:37:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul was unable to pull up a.

01:37:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I wouldn't refuse to make a picture of Richard as the Pope. He got confused he did so I had to go in a different direction. A Jim Beam kind of a Are we?

01:37:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
worshiping or worshiping Jim. Beam I think a monkey's worshiping Jim Beam.

01:37:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Some of the other images were less suitable for work. Oddly, wow, there was one that had like a Christ imagery in the background on a cross, yeah, which I thought was maybe inappropriate, but yeah, that was curious, yeah.

01:38:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, I don't know how poppy I want to be.

01:38:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm totally I mean, I imagined a gold throne flying through the sky, maybe like the dotnet logo on the bottom of the throne or something.

01:38:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have done a project with Thaddecan, but that's. That was mostly working with cardinals. We never did meet the Pope, yeah.

01:38:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's about it, for this week's. Windows.

01:38:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Weekly. My friends, I thought this was going to be long.

01:38:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have plenty of time for gas station sushi. Today it looks like.

01:38:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, that's too bad. Yeah, sometimes I've had gas station sushi in Mexico, and if you thought it couldn't get any worse, I don't know.

01:38:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You want to have time to savor the flavor.

01:38:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, if you dip it in strong enough alcohol before you eat it, you might survive.

01:39:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They do add spicy sauces to the side. It's not just soy sauce, but not good.

01:39:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You get really spoiled on sushi in Vancouver because we have very, very good sushi and a large diversity of fish and so forth.

01:39:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we buy the ocean. Yeah, no, we actually here in Mexico City same thing.

01:39:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's actually rather unbelievable, which is puzzling because you're not by the ocean. Yeah, yeah, but it's the.

01:39:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Paris of Mexico, right Everything, and they have the stuff going in. Richard, you're in a smaller town in New Zealand and you get sushi. Yeah, you get it between tuna, salmon and chicken.

01:39:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chicken sushi, no Chicken.

01:39:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Chicken in the sea or just chicken? No, it's chicken.

01:39:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, chicken sushi. You don't want to see that. It's cooked chicken. It's cooked.

01:39:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think raw chicken is ever a good idea.

01:39:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, that's probably not a good idea.

01:39:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard, you're going to be in PV another week or are you going home?

01:39:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I got another week here Awesome and then. So we'll do another PV and then the week after that is the MVP summit, so I will be in Redmond Nice.

01:40:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very nice, we got that. I have to go back to reality. Traveling man and Paul's going back to reality. Are you going to be in Makanjida?

01:40:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I'll be here next week. Okay, after that.

01:40:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the kids are coming down.

01:40:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You got to stay a little bit Yep, yeah, then there'll be the volcano evacuation.

01:40:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We thought the earthquake scare was bad enough, but now we're going to have an ash raining down like snow, oh lord.

01:40:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What's a pyroclastic volcano between friends?

01:40:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, sir. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm, eastern time, 1900 UTC. You can watch us do it live. It's not recommended, but you can.

01:40:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I wouldn't you know.

01:40:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
honestly, I really wouldn't if I were you. I mean, roll your on, but I stream it. Youtube has it YouTubecom. We also, of course, stream it in the club, at the club to a discord. What else do we do? We put it on the website, at twitchtv WW, for your delectation. After the fact, you can also do a little post podcast Delectation at Twitter, at YouTube, youtubecom Windows Weekly that's a channel dedicated to the video versions of Windows Weekly or, of course, subscribe in your favorite podcaster so you get it the minute it is available. Paultheratsattheratcom that's his website. Become a premium member and get all the goodness. He also sells his books at leanpubcom, including Windows Everywhere and the field guide to Windows 11. Always being updated constantly, it's awful.

01:41:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's his own personal moment.

01:41:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly, I was thinking Sisyphus too. He pushes the rock up the hill and it rolls right back down.

01:41:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just went and looked this up. Originally I thought this thing was going to be about 400 pages long. How long is it? It's 1,100 pages. Wow yeah it's not even it's not done, it's not like it's done.

01:42:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Can you bind that? I don't think you can bind that. It's going to have to be a multi-part series. He made the Lord of the Rings of Windows. Yes.

01:42:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And now volume is five.

01:42:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I actually often quote Tolkien. He said the tale grew in the telling.

01:42:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Well, it was supposed to be a short story.

01:42:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They invented the trilogy because of that book.

01:42:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did they really? Is that true?

01:42:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the original trilogy is the Book of the Rings, because Tolkien wouldn't make it any shorter. Yeah, it was originally going to be one book, just refuse. Yeah.

01:42:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bless him.

01:42:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, he originally did. He had that one first. You know what Maybe?

01:42:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll separate them out. The first part, the fellowship of the rings the fellowship of the inside of program or something.

01:42:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Two towers, and then the return of the co-pilot.

01:42:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nice, yep.

01:42:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard Campbell does Run as Radio the podcast at runasradiocom. He also does NET Rocks that's there as well. Joins us every week as Paul for this episode, this wonderful thing this podcast is show this I should have called in from the airplane.

01:43:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You should have you should have. I'm surprised you didn't. That's for the boondoggle.

01:43:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're like guess where I'm calling you from.

01:43:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The person in front of me keeps looking back.

01:43:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
For some reason it's like what I'm calling.

01:43:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's been like eight hours in a plane.

01:43:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
From the airplane. What Thank you everybody. We'll have a great week and we'll see you right back here next week for Windows Weekly Goodbye.