Windows Weekly 922 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 Therod and Richard Campbell are here Coming up. We say farewell, we pour one out for dear old Skype, then there's never enough rust, and Google now has a way for you to remove yourself from search results. That and a whole lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people.

00:22
You trust this is twit this is windows weekly with paul thurad and richard campbell, episode 922, recorded wednesday, march 5th 2025. There's never a not okay button dot com. Hello, paulie. Hello, I see in mexico city. Still, that's nice.

01:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm jealous a little distracted today. Um, a little birdie told me about something, and now I'm just, you know all he wants to talk about now. He's laughing like a bond villain over there.

01:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have distracted me with different browsers over the years. I have switched. I was a firefox guy, I switched to brave. Then you got me to use arc.

01:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now I'm hooked on arc, but the browser company's abandoned arc nobody likes comeuppance and nobody likes to get advice, they just want to give it you know richard campbell's also here from runners radiocom.

01:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he's in his beautiful home in mad park, british columbia you want it's sunny.

01:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You want the view? Yeah, let's see the view wow, that is.

01:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is a beautiful day. Wow, how many sunny days do you get up there in bc?

01:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
both of them as opposed to mexico city, where there were more sunny days than there are days is that true?

02:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is it always sunny?

02:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's always sunny. Well, no, no, it's not true.

02:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But cmx, cd or whatever it's pretty damn sunny, nice. Well, you're at altitude, aren't you yeah? Yeah, it is six do you notice that? You?

02:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, you often puff when you go upstairs oh yeah, we talk about this all the time. We went up to 10 000 or 10 500 the other day, and that's not running up any stairs. There's not gonna be any rocky moments there, yeah, oh yeah, but you figure.

02:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you spend a couple of months there, you'll start to adapt, which means when you come down you feel a little supercharged yeah, like when I was in high school, you throw like a medicine ball around.

02:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They They'd pick up a basketball and throw it through the wall.

02:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know it'd be like that we did when we hiked Everest Base Camp. We met our altitude on the way down and it's transformative, like all of a sudden you're Superman. You just never get wind. Oh, that's not cool. Yeah, it was really an experience.

02:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it doesn't last.

03:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nope, no, how long it goes away in a couple days, yeah, your body quickly figures out you.

03:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have way too many red blood cells. I know what to do about this. Yeah, it seems like there'd be a way to like, kind of oh, they're training.

03:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's trainers to do that.

03:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That restrict your oxygen flow so your body makes more red blood cells and the us olympic team trains up at altitude in color yeah, a lot of marathoners will train in places like albuquerque new mexico which is like you know, 6 000 feet, or they'll run up and down the sandias, which probably goes up to, I don't know, 10 or so, because they come back to sea level and they're, like you know, super athletes.

03:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah well, we're glad you uh joined us for this edition of superhumancom.

03:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yes, the least athletic people you've ever met talking about athletics. I, I, I rode a bike yesterday. My butt is killing me. I'm not a. I did want to mention. I thought that was a horse, I thought you were.

03:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lisa showed me a picture of you as a cowboy, yeah, a caballero as we say Caballero, and I thought what the, that is, did he lose a bet Like what is that about?

04:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's what's going, so you know how. Like look, we've all seen that you're on social media. You see some photo of something and they'll say only in, and it's dot. Whatever the place is like, only in boston you know only, and you know what these things happen everywhere. Let me tell you something riding a horse through a city wow, that is kind of an oldie in mexico moment I have it's it was bizarre so you were in town, you didn't go we started in the city and rode out into the woods.

04:32
I guess we'll call it right. Yeah, so it started in a crowded urban area and it was just the weirdest. Yeah, it's very strange. It was like the us and the 1800s or something.

04:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was very strange I'm gonna just quickly pull up the uh, if I can find it here, the my morrissey photo you kind of? That's a good yeah that's a good one.

04:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I knew as soon as I was like I have to put this there and I know I'm gonna. Oh, you put it there. I thought maybe it was a trick played upon you by, your by stephanie, your wife no I was trying to take a concern though well, because I'm holding, so I'm on a horse, holding a phone, I mean, you know, that's the concern I'm trying to take a.

05:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You look like you're in handmaid's tale.

05:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know what's going on exactly no, I'm trying to take a picture of whoever that is behind me my son probably.

05:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't I think it's your wife. I think it's my wife.

05:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, maybe it's your daughter.

05:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no it's your daughter. Yeah, we were in a procession of the whole family got to go. I like the black ponchos too, you look, but we needed them because actually up there it did rain. You look like clint eastwood. Oh, look at this. Oh, look at this walk here you are walking through town. The dogs are going yeah, what the hell?

05:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's the biggest dog I ever saw. I just love the horses and then, uh, or some of them hate them. But yeah, you gotta go over the toe pace, which are the speed bump things well, they don't really.

05:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you don't really have to slow down, though, right on a horse. You're kind of you're already kind of suspension is excellent I mean, so we did this, this is fun.

05:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, there you are you got out of town. Yeah, we got into the woods. But so we're coming back and my apple watch makes a little burpy sound and I look down at it, says it looks like you're. It thought I was on a walk, I think, and so I, you know, as you do, you, you put your arm up to so you can see it. Then you're going to hit it. Yeah, and uh, that arm was holding the reins of the horse.

06:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, galloped forward and I was like all right uh, I need the watch, said it looks like you've taken a fall.

06:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's like you get it right except my feet are humongous, so they would have held in the stirrup thing and I would have like been hanging off the side of the horse like a jerk.

06:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So look how pretty this is, this waterfall. Wow, yeah, it was neat. It was a neat place.

06:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's nice your, your kids are visiting, huh yeah that's usually my wife and I stay in the apartment and walk around the neighborhood and then people visit. We guys should go do stuff nice makes sense.

06:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a. It's an amusing place, but I do, I have to say this picture of you. I know, I know. Can we make this the thumbnail for the show? I?

07:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
okay, I knew I was.

07:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I knew I was opening myself to mine. I don't know. I think I messaged him just a horse a horse, a man, panama.

07:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, all right, let's talk about, uh, the subject of the hour Windows Microsoft. Anything to report, gentlemen?

07:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So let's move on. Yeah, so a bunch of stuff actually. Actually, this is a fairly momentous week in some ways, depending on how you measure these things. The first one is that I've lost track and, honestly, I kind of lost interest as well. But Microsoft is updating the Cop-pilot app in windows 11 for what I'm going to call the 127th time. I just don't understand. I don't even understand what's happening anymore. The thing that's. But this is actually kind of interesting. Um, not because they're updating the app again seriously, what are you doing? But more because of the things they're not saying about what they're doing right. So a couple of months ago they updated the app. They're not saying about what they're doing, right. So a couple of months ago they updated the app. They said it was native. It's not. It's a native shell around the old web app. Sometime before that, several months earlier, they had gotten rid of that uh windows integration where you could ask it about changing dark mode or whatever. Remember that was one of the core features back in the beginning. That had disappeared, and now that's back, and so it's kind of hard keeping track. The old UI was tan. This one's blue. The old UI had some kind of a daily update thing where it would redo the news for five minutes. That's gone, but, by the way, it's probably coming back. It's written in XAML, right? So it's actually a native UI instead of being the old web app, which I think would have been easier to update, frankly, but I think it's because they went this way. Yeah, I don't know why they went this way, but okay, well, neither do I because they're not explaining it, but my guess is it's related to that Windows functionality, because they brought that back, and so I think the old web app wasn't capable of interacting with the Windows commands. Right, you were living in the sandbox. So I think that's why the previous version for some reason dropped the side panel that's that collapsible conversation history that you always see in chatbots, and it always had it, but then it didn't, and now it does again. Okay. So here's a couple of things, though, that they don't really talk about. If you go into these settings, there is a privacy section, and it has one well, a couple of options, but one is checked by default. It's called Model Training on Text. They're actually training their model now on whatever you type in there, unless you find this UI and change it back.

09:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, this is the same thing that caused so much concern, isn't it that that microsoft was going to send this information? Yeah, the home office, but they.

09:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's not what's happening, still right well, they're training their models on what you type.

09:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, it is, oh right so now all that moral panic is real yeah, well, that's what microsoft does, you know.

10:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They lull you into a sense of who cares anymore, and then they just, you know, turn it up a notch.

10:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they're training now on the content, on what you're by default.

10:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, they don't explain what they're training. They don't explain it, but well they do. Actually, there's a page, there's a fact that explains this on Microsoftcom that's linked to in my article. But by default they are training on what you type, they're not training on what you say. So if you use your voice, but you can turn those both on or off you can turn it off right.

10:30
There's also this kind of language that says there's an option called personalization. I believe it is off, Actually I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it's on or off by default, but it says it will let you use Copilot or you'll allow Copilot to use your chats, bing, comma and MSN activity and any inferred interest for personalized experiences. Inferred interest. I don't.

10:58
So there's a lot of things I don't like about the sentence, but if you've been in the Microsoft space for a while now, you understand that personalized experiences means tracking and inferred interest is inferred. Infer is an AI term, right. It's a good choice, because nobody knows what it means. You like mainstream users, right? So what they're really saying here is that if you use chats with, if you chat with Copilot, if you interact with Bing and if you use MSN which I would argue, are three things no one should ever do. Um, then it will infer your interest from your activity, right meaning what you type and what you do. And then it will use that, the combination of those things, as it's been doing all along. It's just that now we're adding ai to the bucket. Right to personalize experiences, for you.

11:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is a circumlocution, basically to say hey, good news, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're tracking you, we're tracking?

11:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, exactly, it's more. We've always been tracking you. Would you like us to use this tracking data to mess with what we say in copilot? Oh yeah, it's kind of strange. So my instinct now is to turn all of this on. Go to bing, yeah, which you never do, search on something weird like radial arm saws and then see what Copilot says about radial arms. Oh my God, yeah.

12:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's not what you want, is it? Well, that might be. Actually, that's not a horrible idea, just to kind of see what happens, right, it's almost a pain-free thing to do, because the reality is, once you've done it, you're never going to use those things again anyway. Who cares? So you could just, you know, just screw with it. I mean, might as well go take a look, right.

12:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and as long as this data is used to benefit you in the sense of you're obviously interested in this information, let me provide more information in that context.

12:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the question is a problem with Microsoft's web-based services. You know MSN, bing, et cetera, because this is, you know, it's advertising based, right, and they're adding Copilot too, which, you know, arguably is a web-based service, right? I mean, the problem is it's AI, and AI is you know, we keep talking about this it's becoming really powerful. So Microsoft might have had a pretty stilted idea of your interest before and probably didn't do much with it to any effect. It was probably pretty stupid compared to, say, google, but now they're using AI for it, so actually they're probably going to get pretty good at it. So it's a weird kind of an issue. Tomorrow, I'm going to be recording a couple of or two or three episodes of uh hands on windows, and one of them almost certainly will be about some of the new features that are coming in phone link right, the, the phone integration app on windows, which is much better if you have an android phone, and even better sounds like great when you have an android phone either.

13:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Ask me how I know?

13:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
right, well, that's yeah, yeah, um, yeah. Well, it's pretty terrible if you have an iPhone. So there's a, there's a. This is really kind of hard to explain, but there is a. I just love the way they explain this. There's a feature that is being exposed to this new copilot app, now called phone connection, and this is the thing I love about this.

14:01
There's a webpage about this on Microsoft support. It says we're excited to announce that the phone connection, formerly known as phone plugin, has been restored, with enhanced performance and refreshed visual designs. Exclamation point Microsoft. I have never heard of phone plugin in my life. I don't know what you think of me, but please know that I actually follow Microsoft pretty closely and have for a really long time, and I'm particularly concerned about Windows and also, I would say, with AI, and I have never heard of this thing and it warranted an exclamation point. So the point of this thing, regardless of its name, is that if you're using Copilot on your PC, it can now connect to your mobile device well, your Android device in addition to Windows and it will use that to personalize its responses based on data stored in the phone, which includes such things as your messages and your contacts and yikes. Is there a way to take my phone off the internet forever? What are you doing?

15:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is there a way to take my phone off the internet forever? What are you doing? Well, so it's like. This product we made to connect your phone to your PC so that you could move pictures around easier, is now being used to harvest as much information from you from your phone which, as you said that as a very matrix, the movie type term harvest, you know no, we're. We're harvesting your data. It's like the organs the we're harvesting your data.

15:27
It's like the aliens tendrils coming down and, like you know, suctioning your body. You're a battery.

15:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but that's what's happening. Here's what I've done with this, and when I say I've done this, I mean I've done it poorly, because it's terrible. I've used it to set an alarm no, I'm sorry, a timer. So in other words, I tell copilot I need a timer for two minutes, and it says okay, and the first three times it fails, but the fourth time it actually sets a timer for two minutes and it says okay, and the first three times it fails, but the fourth time it actually sets a timer. I don't have my phone here, I'm sorry, it's the wrong phone. It set a timer on my pixel and then it, and then the UI didn't do anything and I was like, okay, so I set it for two minutes and then I went back to whatever I was doing and all of a sudden my phone was like, and it was like the timer had gone off and I was like, oh, I see.

16:12
So according to microsoft, it will allow you to perform common actions on your phone. Well, through your pc on your phone, right? Uh, sending text messages, setting alarms and timers, uh, locating places using the map app on your device, etc. So yes to. So yes to Richard's point. It's using that phone link connection between Windows and your PC to interact with functionality on your phone, just as now it is once again doing so with Windows with features like turning settings on or off or whatever. So I got to you know, look'm not a not a conspiracy theory. We're going to talk about recall, for example, in a few minutes you know it's not a conspiracy if they're actually after you, right?

16:50
yeah it's, I'm a little, I don't know. This one's a little weird to me.

16:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The good news is a reminder that the the software, the rights you have to give the software to do the thing you want. Also lets them do all sorts of things that are beneficial for them rather than you yeah, they're um, yeah, it does.

17:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Harvesting is such a good word because it does feel like the tendrils yeah, you know, um, violating you in a way right, and I I am a little, I don't know. So we'll see how this evolves. And and the reason I say that is because the description that microsoft provided for this update was very vague. It was only through diving into it, and I also talked to Raphael, who uncovered some stuff that's uh, going to be bait or um is going to be coming soon as baked into the app. It's just not available yet, um, so there's more coming, but it's uh, I don't know, it's a little weird. So anyway, there's that.

17:46
In less controversial news, I just wrote this up this morning for no particular reason, but I've been using Recall on my Surface laptop for three months. Recall, you may recall, was a fairly controversial feature at launch. It was delayed in preview for I don't know six-ish months. It became available on Snapdragon, I think in late November and then on AMD and Intel-based co-pilot PCs in December. In preview it's been updated a few times.

18:16
Obviously, microsoft made a big show of all the supposed changes they made from feedback, but I argued, I think, objectively, most of it is not true the big change they made from feedback. But I've argued, I think, objectively, most of it is not true. The big change they made, the only really substantive change, was to make it opt-in instead of opt-out. That's huge. I mean, that is big. I can say, in using this thing, that there are still some controversies to it, and I'll just kind of boil it down to two things, well, and I should say. A third point, though, is I I've never actually used it Right, so this thing's been running the searching part like go, look, I mean other than just to test it Right.

18:54
In other words, the point of this is I did something on my PC but I can't remember. I can't remember like exactly where it was or whatever. Yeah, and then that will help you. You know, recall that thing. Whatever it is right. I use, use the green pants. I was searching for green pants and I I found a pair I sort of liked. I forgot where it was, and you can search, recall for green pants. We'll bring up that thing Right. So I made the case last May, I made the case last fall, I'll make the case now. I think recall is something that mainstream, non-technical users could actually find value and it's essentially a semantic search type of solution where except if you look for your green pants on your phone.

19:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's not going to show up anywhere in recall not yet, but yes, you're right.

19:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But that phone connection thing you have to wonder, right. So I don't know. But there are two controversies to recall that have been pretty persistent since I first started using it that I do experience regularly over the past three months. The first one is updating it. So recall is interesting because, like other copilot plus PCs, it relies on on-disk local AI models right, what I would call small language models. But we're just mixing up language. People call them large language models. Sometimes Microsoft is-.

20:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know how much of it is a language model for recall. This is really taking screenshots, right, and then interpreting the graphic.

20:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, once you hear the names of the models, you understand what that is, in a way, right. But yes, yes, you're correct, it is taking screenshots, but it's it requires four models. Those four models are not installed on the pc by default, so you have to install them. And when I say you have to install them, I mean you have to install them. Like when you run recall, it's like, yeah, we'd love to run this thing, but you actually have to install some updates. So why don't you go to windows update and install those updates to come back, and then we can play with recalling.

20:49
Okay, so you go there and you do this and, uh, you check windows update and sure enough, there's, there is, there is an update waiting there, and I'm going to see if I can come up with the exact name. Maybe it doesn't really matter, but the name is something to the tune of um, yeah, it's like image search. You're like okay, right, image shirts. I might have these out of order, it doesn't matter, it takes a long time to download, takes a long time to install. You do it. You're like nice, all right, go back to recall all right, here we go nope.

21:16
It says no, no, sorry, there's still more updates. Could you go to windows update again check? You're like, okay, then you go back. And then there's another one, and this one's called image extraction. You're like, oh, okay, stalls really slowly, installs really slowly. Finally you, finally, you're done, several minutes later, like all right, here we go recall. Nope, nope, sorry, this is more. Like, okay, fine, you go back. Oh, yeah, sure enough. There's a third one. It's called semantic analysis.

21:38
Install this thing. It must be humongous, takes a long time to install, takes a cetera. You're done. You're like, all right, surely this is it? No, no, not done. There's a new one.

21:48
A fourth one, this one you probably have heard of. It's Fisilica, right? This is the on-device AI model that Microsoft's had for a while. Okay, fine, so you download this thing. Same thing, slow, slow install, slow download, etc. You finally go in all right, yep, now it works. You're like, okay, cool, now I can use recall. So you, you turn it on and if you're me, it's on the whole time. You never use it for a single thing. You don't even know why you're using it. December comes, january comes, february comes every one of those months, not on patch tuesday, by the way. But on some other day, randomly, you wake up in the morning, you look down the recall icon has like a slash through it. You're like what's this? Recall is paused because it needs some updates. You should go to Windows Update and see what's there and you're like I think I played this game before and you have, and you do it one at a time, manually, times four, yep, and this thing you know, look in the context of life.

22:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Maybe 30 minutes or whatever it takes, isn't that long, yeah, but this is a totally automatable in fact otherwise automated process for everything else in Windows. What the what?

22:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. So 10 years ago this year, in January, microsoft announced something called Windows as a service, which we all mocked, because the notion of updating a legacy desktop operating system and all the convoluted layers you know, layers of code that are in this thing as if it were an online service is ludicrous. It's never going to work. Ironically, actually, they did a pretty good job with it, right. Not at first, it took a while, but they actually got there right. So there's all these different ways windows can update itself. It's really amazing. In fact, it got so good at it. They're screwing with it in Windows 11. They update Windows all the time. It's terrible. There is no day you couldn't check for updates and not find them somewhere in Windows either, in the store Windows, whatever. There's always updates. Somehow, in this world where Microsoft can update Windows at the drop of a hat, you, the peon, have to click and click and click and click and wait and click and click and click to update the stupid thing so you can use it a thing that runs.

23:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Really it's not going to be running when it's going to save something that you might need yeah, here's an idea.

23:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Why don't you do it overnight? But I'm not using the freaking computer and automate it because it runs in the background, okay, so that's one problem.

23:59
It's what's going to happen is you're finally going to need it for something and you're going to find out what has been running for the past four days because you didn't check it enough actually, you know what I'm going to call this the call of duty experience, because I play call of duty now again on a computer and not on an xbox although I think it's going to be the same on the xbox and I don't play every day, but three, four days goes by. Whatever it is, I'm like you know what? I got a couple hours to kill. I think I'm going to play Call of Duty. This will be good. I could. Yeah, you first need an hour to update everything 180 gig download what Please stand by.

24:30
Oh, my God.

24:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I'm not saying it happens. You need to plan to play for tomorrow, right? Yeah, I think I'll play Call of Duty tomorrow, I'll start the update process. Yeah, an impromptu experience. It doesn't happen every single time it happens but you know this used to be how xbox was it every single time you went to?

24:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
go use xbox, it just stops.

24:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, so you can actually set up xbox to update overnight, you'll you can.

24:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you do that, you literally just killed the brazilian rainforests. So your options as an xbox owner are do not do what you just described and update, update they come, which means you will turn that thing on, not be able to play the game you want to play because it literally won't play anything until you update the system. Until you update everything, and then you update, you go to the app or the game and, yep, you got to update that too. And hilarious. Now it's time for dinner. Sorry, I hope you didn't want to play today. Yeah, didn't want to play today. Yeah, or you can let it go into this power management mode, which is a mockery of the term power management, because it's bringing down the nuclear reactor streak. It's using so much power. But, yes, you can play when you wake up in the morning. So it's your choice. You can be selfish and kill.

25:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I set up the machine that the xbox was plugged into had an arc port and things, so it turned itself on when you turn the x on, which I always knew when the Xbox started, did its update because the machine lit up.

25:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yeah.

25:49
So there's that. Okay. The other problem with recall, which is also, I would say, user experience related, is Windows Hello ASS right. So when all those people complain back in May or June or whenever that was, that, oh, this is not safe, I put it on this PC, blah, blah, blah, whatever, I'm like, yeah, but you're not using Windows Hello ESS, you can't, you aren't, so you're bypassing the security that protects the thing. You have no idea how secure this is. Well, I've been using this thing for about three months. I know exactly how secure it is.

26:19
And when you talk about security, there's always that trade-off between convenience and security. Windows Hello ESS is on the security end of that spectrum and it is a pain in the ass. It's terrible. It's actually a pain. It's horrible to use. And the reason it's horrible to use is if you think about if you have an iPhone or an iPhone and you're using like facial recognition or like the fingerprint recognition, it's pretty seamless. You get a prompt, you put the phone up, it works, and that's how Windows Hello works too, by the way, on a PC it's pretty seamless, except when you have ESS. Then it becomes less than seamless because the dialog comes up. It does a little eyeball animation, right? Oh, there you are, boop, we found you. And then it doesn't go away. You have to click the OK button. Yeah, there you are, we found you.

27:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And then it doesn't go away. You have to click the okay button. Yeah, guys, guys work with me. Here's your seam, right here. Agree to the seam please oh. I mean so here's the thing there's never, there's never a not okay button.

27:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, like registry is corrupt, okay, there's also not a checkbox that says just never do this again, just just just make it. Yeah, so I'm not saying this happens every single time you use. Recall, like I said, I don't use it that much, but every time I use it I have to update the models first, and then I go to get into it and I have to wait to get in and then I'm wondering why it's not in. It's because that stupid dialog hasn't gone away and this is kind of a terrible UI. So yeah, anyway, all you people that complained about this last summer, you're silly and you're wrong. But there are huge problems with this thing and I wish you know. Look, the good news is it's still in preview, so maybe they'll fix it.

27:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Presumably, these are the things you fix coming out of preview.

27:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but remember, this was going to go into preview last June. Like, here we are. It's over six months later. June's just not that far away. Man, it's March. I know it's crazy, like this is nine months, 10, whatever. That is nine, 10 months later. Yeah, it's weird to me that this isn't better than it is. But okay, here we are. Okay, only one major set of Windows Insider builds over the past week. Uh, this is that beta dev thing where if you're on 24h2, you get the same build in both channels.

28:28
Um, there is something here that I'm super happy about, which is, um lock screen widget customization. So the since they added widgets, the lock screen remember, originally there was just the one, I think it was weather to start. Then they added the other three. They take up the whole bottom of the lock screen. They're fine, you know, people seem to like them, although if you use windows hello to sign into your computer, you don't even get to look at them. You never get to see them come and go, right, but, okay, fine, yeah, you know, I, my, my add logical brain looks at that and says, okay, this is fine. Is there a way to determine which of those appear? No, there is not.

29:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, they're either a lot of you Don't be silly.

29:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so they are adding that feature now, so in the insider program. So that suggests to me that, uh, we'll see it in windows by mid year maybe, and you'll be able to check, you know which ones you want, like a normal UI would have. So that's good. But that's how features get developed in windows now, right now, right, they add it, they change it, and then people give feedback and they're like, oh yeah, we should probably let people determine, in this case, which ones to show, which to me is just obvious, like we should have been there 1.0, and then they add it and by the time we're done talking about this, when this actually appears, I think about 18 months will have gone by. You know, that's how long these things take.

29:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's stupid I mean it is in the insider, so so are they leaving low hanging fruit for the insiders to pick Like? I don't know the answer to that.

29:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't see how you rush out widgets to a lock screen without this. To me, this is part of the package, like I don't.

29:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Some PM thought somewhere. You know people may not care. Let's just try it without and see what happens. You know what?

30:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
happens. When you do that, you find out about every single person that cares, which we're going to talk about later, when we talk about skype, uh, so I think, it's kind of useful to do it that way.

30:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like he's collecting empirical data, I'm a big believer in pms collecting external data whenever they can yeah.

30:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So every time microsoft updates any product, um, you'll find someone complaining, not necessarily about the update, but because they have a pet peeve about some other feature in that product. And they say, yeah, but what about? Whatever, this thing is Right and this is common. You know, in our roles, all of us we've we deal with this kind of feedback all the time. We don't have the answer. We're not the ones making these decisions, but yeah, we, you know, we, it's a fair question. You know how come you've added something no one asked for. But how about fixing this thing A lot of people have been asking for and you know, we don't know, we don't know the internal machination. So one of the things that to me falls in this category is something that actually I use all the time and really like, but I'm not really sure anyone else uses, which is Windows Share, right, that thing that debuted back in Windows 8. And, my God, they keep changing it and adding to it and and whatever. And so in this, fundamentally, it feels, like it should be a good idea.

31:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Why is it?

31:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
going so poorly. It is how I look. I can't speak for the world right, but I know for me. When I'm on mobile, if I read an article and I want to read it later, I it's share and and then I use Instapaper. But it could be Pocket, whatever you happen to use, very common right. Or you could share like a webpage to your messages, app and text messages, like I think people do do that all the time.

31:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean I do it on my Android device, like I go to Google Maps to look the location I want to go and I can share it to the Rivian right, and then the Rivian suddenly bunk uses the big screen. I don't have to bother with Android auto, I'm happy.

31:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, so Microsoft has applied. I mean, look, it goes back, like I said, to windows eight, so back in 2012,. They probably started working on it in 2010. Iphone had come out, ipad had come out. We come out, we're going to adapt windows for this new mobile world. Look, we all bitched and moaned about it, but whatever, but okay, we get it. And I would say, for mainstream users, it's nice to have uis that you know are familiar. Windows 11 has a kind of a mobile ux ui, whatever you want to call it. Okay, cool, I don't know, like I don't know, I don't think anyone's using this thing, but they keep screwing with it. Like I said, I think a week or two ago, I was talking about how they consolidated the UI and they hid nearby share.

32:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The other thing is it's still in the insiders. Anybody who's in the insiders is perfectly happily emailing stuff to themselves, I think everyone on earth is perfectly happy.

32:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the thing. No, I think that's the mind shift. I think that the trick for Microsoft and maybe this is just a psychological barrier, they can't get by is that when you sit down not you I mean but when you know like maybe a mainstream, normal user, they're like all right, I'm doing, this is a PC, this is old, it's old fashioned, it's. I have this way of working on this thing and I can't wait to get off it because all the fun stuff on my phone or whatever, and I don't know that we're making this transition along with Microsoft. You know, like I am. I mean I actually do use share on Windows, like I said, all the time, right, but you also use new browsers. So we know you're not known, that's right. I'm not change-averse necessarily, so I don't actually see this on my computer, even though I'm in the wrong computer. That's why I have real trouble with this.

33:21
So in the dev and beta channels now, if you right-click a file or group of files to share and there's a share option, obviously the share option in the menu will have a submenu of apps, so you can go directly from that right-click to the app. So if you have a compatible app on your computer you want to share whatever it is a document image, whatever you want to share it with, whatever app might be in that list, you could do it directly. And if you don't see the app you want I want to do something else you can just click share again and it will go to the old UI. So that's fun, and this is one I hope to hear from someone in the chat on, because I thought this was the dumbest thing I've ever heard. But they made a big deal of it. They're changing the way that task manager calculates cpu utilization in the processes, performance and user pages in task manager.

34:15
Okay, apparently there are standard metrics for this. Uh, microsoft was not using those I. This probably dates back. This is probably written in basic, quick basic 3.0 or something. I have no idea.

34:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, if it's not compliant with standards, hasn't been compliant standards for decades forever like, literally from the beginning.

34:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sure this is an nt. You know 1.0, you know 3.1, whatever you know thing. But there it is. If you want it to still do the old way, you can add an optional column called cpu utility and it will show you the old value. So I don't know who's looking at this thing, but I don't know. There you go. So anyway, yeah, this is what we're testing.

34:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, that stuff, okay I don't know how anybody would know if they change the calculation right yep, that's my.

35:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I use windows every day, all day long. I don't, I would never, no idea it could be an octal.

35:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wouldn't even guys like hey, these calculations have changed. I've been monitoring this for years.

35:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here's my spreadsheet yeah, that's what I mean. Like you know, there's going to be. Yeah, some developer, some technical person, was like excuse me, this is off by 1.7.

35:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know. This is the this. This is the kind of person who detected that exploit that changed the timing on the ssl. Oh, yeah, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah we need those people, right.

35:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We just need everyone not to be like that. That's the most people, not we need that guy. We do need that person, but we don't need to. Yeah, we don't need two of them, yeah, yeah, exactly, good news everybody's forgotten his name and he's back in his corner office.

35:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, somewhere his name is like and he's ready to help us again when the time, if it ever happens again on twice point you know who remembers his name kevin kevin speaking of adhd buddy.

35:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Geez, how did you know that kevin's also a?

35:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
one, did you ask co-pilot? Come on, tell the truth all right, let's uh.

36:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He says it's in his brain, pure memory, okay.

36:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's pause for a moment before you go on. We have some rusty news, but first I have a word from our sponsor. How about that US Cloud? You guys know US Cloud. I hope you do. I've been talking about them now for a while. I'm going to confess something. Uh, I had never heard of them and the name didn't really tell me what they did. So I called them, they filled me in, and now I think you should call them, because this is great.

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40:10
We thank us, cloud, for supporting our show. We appreciate it and I hope you will support us by telling them if they ask you. Oh yeah, I heard about you on windows weekly. Leo was talking about that. Helps us too. All right, paulie, back we go. Let's talk about uh rust. Yeah, we were actually talking about that yesterday with steve uh, and how important it was to use memory safe languages. Replace c and c plus plus with something that's much more reliable. No more buffer overflows, it's just a whole class of errors you don't have now.

40:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you know. What's consistent about this is the, the google. Google, I think, was the first of the major platform users to make the shift, with android, go figure, and then linux, famously a couple years ago, and then microsoft, right with windows and azure, and uh, at least two of those three have used the same figure, which is this this immediately eliminates 70 of a class of errors, which are all memory related you know, this is what steve was talking about yesterday.

41:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's just incredible, just gone.

41:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now there's a lot of pushback about this right and this is tied to you know, familiarity and people with expertise and languages and the history of things and so forth, and so this is all old people complaints well, if you hey believe me, if you learn c plus plus, yep, you put all that time into c plus plus you want everyone else to suffer as much as you have I, I, uh, I watched a thing.

41:34
You know mark razinovich uh, actually it's in the thing we're going to talk about in the video, but he recently said something to the effect of c is a great language. I can read c code, I understand it. I look at c, c, uh, plus, plus. I'm like what is?

41:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that like it's.

41:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's purposefully obfuscated like it's, it's it's purposefully obfuscated Like it's ridiculous. And that's fair, you know.

41:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it was all, I'm sure, an attempt to make it safer.

41:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Of course, yeah, just like McDonald's was an attempt to make food better, but it made us fat. I mean there's unintended consequences, right?

42:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So are you saying C plus plus is the Twinkies of programming? Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I was going to say Big Mac, but yeah, the Big Mac, the Big Mac of programming. It's so delicious, but really.

42:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just so delicious, so much extra bread that we don't need. So look, the C++ guys are coming out in force now. They're like, well, we could improve our languages to make them memory safe, like, why don't we just do that? Wouldn't that be better? You know, and rest is very sea-like, though I mean, I know I don't, I don't listen, I don't actually buy the the big. Well, let me just get into this story first. So, um, and because we could, he addresses all this.

42:43
So mark razinovich is the cto of azure. He is famous. You've probably heard of him. He reverse engineered the end of the nt kernel back in the 90s, wrote articles about how you could flip one registry switch and make NT workstation into NT server, et cetera, et cetera. He wrote all the Sys internals, win internals, tools, et cetera. He knows what he's talking about, right. So a couple of years ago he said look, I don't think we should have any new C or C plus code in the kernel, and he meant Windows and Azure. And in Linux this has been very controversial. We talked about this last week or a couple of weeks ago, or both. In Windows, based on what he's communicated publicly, because we don't see that development publicly not so controversial, actually at all. They've really embraced it inside of Microsoft and not just in the kernel groups, but across Microsoft, right Office and other parts of Microsoft as well.

43:37
So he gave a talk at a Rust conference about a week and a half two weeks ago maybe now, which is worth watching if you care about this topic. And it's funny in a way because he says, you know, he says I kind of I put out that tweet and then he got a call from Satya Nadella and he was like really, and he goes yeah, really, and he's like all right, you know, like, like, like I trust you, like I, you know what you're talking about, right. So that was kind of interesting. But he also said, like I don't, I wasn't even clear in my role as Azure CTO at the time, if I even had this power to you know, just kind of say this. And he's like, actually I said it and it just happened Like everyone was on board a hundred percent and so, uh, there's all this stuff that everybody knows why rust is great, right.

44:19
But the thing that's interesting about this talk is he discusses the things that are issues, right. He talks about, uh, the you know, the feedback they got within Microsoft over a period of years. And, of course, the big one is that thing that we saw in the Linux flare up recently, which is interoperability with C and C++. And this is that's going to be an ongoing issue, because the reality is, until some future thing and this is actually it's the future thing that I'm most interested in here we are going to be dealing with both code bases. You know, pretty much forever, right? I mean, the reality is this these things have to exist together. We're not just going to wholesale replace everything. There is, you know, testing and new bugs that get introduced and all kinds of things that happen when you not just refactor code but rewrite it right in a different language. I mean serious, he said that pretty universally people would adopt it or try to adopt it and be confused for about two months. Right, because it's so. You know the, because of the memory stuff that's just in your face, and then the spit flips and they're like I, I love this, I will never do anything, but this, like this is how it impacts hiring yeah you know,

45:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's a certain class of developer that's going to be more excited to work in Rust than in C++.

45:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a real. I mean it's not universal because, like I said, they're using it across Microsoft. In interesting ways, the Office adoption of Rust is actually replacing C Sharp. That was kind of fascinating to me, not just to replace C Sharp, but rather that there was this underlying code that, because of the time it was written, was written in c-sharp. It's used to cross office on all the different places. Office appears right that's very unusual.

46:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, crossing between garbage collected non-garbage collected is not a trivial thing, right so? And that's the idea that you could. This thing didn't need to be garbage collected means it probably shouldn't have been there in the first place. It either needs that or it doesn't. C sharp is a garbage collected language.

46:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep and yeah to manage language and so you get that kind of overhead of the runtime and all that stuff. So there's an instant performance benefit.

46:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It also means you're okay with non-deterministic memory behavior? Yeah, and in low level environments, that's just not acceptable. Right? You don't write drivers, you don't write microcode, like.

46:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's not how this works yeah, so no, it's completely different. Yeah and I, I. This is kind of fascinating to me. I just so the, the, the eufy, the um. The firmware that's in surface is written 100% rust and it is also the firmware they use in azure and in their in their data centers, so it has been open sourced. In fact, most of the stuff that he discusses has been open. It is also the firmware they use in Azure and in their data centers, so it has been open sourced. In fact, most of the stuff that he discusses has been open sourced by Microsoft. It's called Project Moo M-U. You can find it on GitHub, so they're encouraging PC maker partners to use this as well.

47:11
He didn't discuss whether any have or will. They've been a pretty resistant group to anything, frankly, forever, so I don't know that that's ever going to happen, but kind of interesting. In every case there's been a performance benefit. In every case the experience has been overwhelmingly positive for those people involved and they will never go back. That's been one truism of this, or a set of truisms, I guess. And then I'm trying to think what the other.

47:37
Well, tooling is an issue, obviously. I mean Microsoft has a rich body of programming tools, utilities, frameworks, languages, et cetera. So, you know, getting everything up to speed to work with rust is going to take some time. And, of course, rust itself is also still evolving, even though it's I don't know, 10 years old or so. There's some bits of it that aren't yet stable, that could change and we still have to deal with that. And Windows, of course, thanks to the architecture dating back to literally, I think, the first version 85, dynamic linking, right From when we didn't have enough RAM to run something as big and heavy as windows, dynamic linking, which is common in windows today, still is a problem with rust, apparently. So it's not, you know, it's not all perfect, but the way he says it is. Look, it's not all rosy, but it's rosy enough and we're all in is the way he said it.

48:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So well, and it does like. It looks like sort of these when you can define the API barrier, one side can be Rust and one side can be something else. Yeah, plus, there's excellent books on Rust.

48:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It has a crab and they call themselves Rustations, rustations yeah. So what you know I mean really.

48:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know why they call it that? Because they took the C out of the word.

48:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I get it now.

48:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
See, wow, because crustacean take away the C, which is what they're doing with, the language becomes a rustacean.

49:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't actually get that.

49:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just made that up. By the way. I don't know if that's true. No, I think that makes it go C. I think that.

49:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a rustacean. Yeah, that's my Adderall, because otherwise it'd be crust.

49:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, that's right. Yeah, we're crusty. Yeah, you sure are. We're waiting for you to retire.

49:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's not exactly C-like, but I mean all languages nowadays, all imperative languages, look just like C, but it is C-like, right, I mean, it's C-like.

49:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Most languages are C-like, I guess modern languages.

49:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think people uh resist. You know you spend a lot of time learning the language this is all I.

49:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All I deal with now is people resisting everything. You know nobody wants you, you couldn't like. I know I couldn't explain anything enough for someone not to be like. Yeah, but and then they say so I'd be like I addressed that like two hours ago. You know, like it, they just don't, they can't get past it.

49:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We did a whole thing on donette rocks about the c-sharp services being migrating to rust. It's like is microsoft abandoning c-sharp?

49:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like no, something like f-sharp the, the functional version, no so functional languages like f-sharp are never going to replace mainstream language. They're just they're very special use.

50:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're like they're global variables yeah, I mean g-sharp, maybe you know there's a group of folks who can think functionally like.

50:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a different way of thinking and it's very hard to hold both in your head. Yeah, and so the f? Sharp believers are a small group of very enthusiastic people. They're great at what they do. Their code is not obvious, indecipherable yeah well if you're used to imperative languages it's not but you can

50:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
get used to function and once you, once you grok it, I think it's. It's certainly safer right all right, so you don't have advantages you're eliminating these side. What?

50:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm about to say is going to sound super unsophisticated, but they're literally working on this. So when I first heard about rust a couple years ago, when this first came in the microsoft space, right, I heard that microsoft was working on rust. They're putting rust into the, the kernel. They've since shipped Rust in the kernel. You can go to the command line and see the components that are written in Rust, et cetera. Very exciting. And then AI happens. Right. These two things were kind of coincidental at Microsoft in a way yeah, time-wise, and AI. We just talked about this briefly, but AI is especially good with programming. And of course, in my dumb Cro-Magnonon brain, I think to myself, one of the first things I blurred out, without really thinking it through, is I mean, couldn't you just take the windows kernel and say, hey, copilot, no, you can't rewrite this in rust.

51:24
Okay, I'm just gonna say no, no, I know, no, I know, I know right there, no, no but hold on a second, they are actually working on what I just said oh so this is not happening tomorrow, it's not happening in this year, whatever.

51:33
There's a whole bunch of stuff that has to happen, but at the end of his talk, mark rezinovich discusses that aspect of this which is not. It's not going to be like flip a switch and public, you know, compile, you know, and it's also a very normal practice when you migrate, when you're switching languages like this.

51:51
You migrate smaller pieces yeah, you build up a repertoire of skills exactly and then it gets better and better, and then it accelerates and soon you're like oh wow, the thing that worries me is if you, if you use it depends how you use it.

52:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But if you use ai to code, often that means you don't really know what's going on. It's a little brittle, it's hard to debug, yeah you know, it's all well, and fine, until it doesn't work.

52:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, like I said, what I said is patently vague and super high level.

52:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't make sense and I trust Mark Russinovich, my God.

52:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so the way he said it is. Look, we want to automate the translation of C and C++ for us. Yeah, I think they can do that. We're using LLMs for this. They've created something called graph rag that uses a rag in lms to extract knowledge from raw text instruction forms, which is not how it's like what he calls, I think, a hierarchical rag, if you will. It's supposed to be much more precise for certain things, but especially for translating software that's a really interesting use of ai yeah if it can do that.

52:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's. That is really a proof of concept. That's yeah, and, and he, by the way.

52:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So his, his demo of it is as dumb and basic as it could be, which I think highlights how, maybe, how far away it is. But it's a text mode game written in Python, which is like a slight little side scroll thing and you know, you flip a switch and it's in rust and it's 100% identical. And it's one of those things where you know, you have to prove that you know everything. The output, or the, I guess, yeah, the output you receive on whatever input, is exactly what you. It has to be exact, right, it has to be exactly the same. It can't be like sort of the same, it has to be exactly the same.

53:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And so, yes, that's a silly example, but you know, that's like I said this is right after the show actually on intelligent machines, gary Marcus, who has been kind of very outspoken, in fact, about saying don't use AI to code, so I think it'd be. It'll be interesting. I got bad news for this guy.

53:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just you know. I'm sorry, but that ship has sailed. I mean, it's happened.

53:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is you know, brad, we are talking about what. You know, brad, we are talking about what? 50 million lines of code.

53:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, of course it has to scale. It's a lot. Look, it is being used to write code right now. It's not being used, probably, to write 50 million lines of code.

54:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're talking about window. If you're going to take on a window, yeah, yeah yeah, but the other side of this is the performance side, right? Yep, they went after C-sharp services because they measured how much it cost them to operate it in Azure, and anything that reduces the cost of operating in Azure is what matters.

54:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A net win yeah, and Rust is pretty performant, right, they have never seen anything but performance gains. And one of the bits of obvious feedback he addresses actually in his talk is he says I'm just going to get in the way of this right now. I know what you're thinking, but, mark, if you refactor this code in CRC++, you would probably get some kind of performance benefit as well. And he says, right, but if we did that, we would be doing it. For that reason, we were not doing it. For this reason, we have still, to this day, never done it. For this reason, but we still see 10, 20, 30%, whatever the number is, depending on the code. You just get it for free. Yeah, he's like we haven't even optimized for performance, that's just what we got. This is like doing it. Yeah, so sorry, you know, but that's uh. Yeah, so this is, you know, it's not the reason to use rust, but it is. It's a nice side benefit, right?

55:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, uh, so far at least, yeah okay, well, you know, that was why people used c, because it was as close to assembler as you could get, and so it was very performant.

55:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's why I used Quick Basic. You know it was the easy language compared to assembler. Like that was the fun part. That's right.

55:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then it became the assembler for the next generation of people who thought that that was too.

55:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was really just, I think in the earliest days just an assembly language pre-processor really. But yeah, more or less.

55:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it was pretty close and then when, when we went object oriented because it was memory efficient in the 80s, that's c++, that's what it really bogged. There's a very you need some ontological humility. They were making the best decisions they could make at the time with the resources. I think a lot of really smart people lost their mind on oop. You know a lot and microsoft definitely went too far and if you look at things like, yeah, mfc and they were going to do this object-oriented file system in cairo and oh yeah, object when it's our object-oriented ui, right.

56:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And so one of the big compromises they made when they went, when windows 95 came out, was, like we can't do this cairo thing, it's just too resource intensive, this has to run on a four megabyte pc or whatever it was at the time. And uh, what they came up with was, you know, the object base, which is like when a kid, when you put a kid's drawing on the refrigerator and you tell them it's great, it's like I don't even know what it is. But that was windows 95. And but then they used it in nt, right, and then we still use it today, right? So that it was good enough for that purpose, I guess. Okay, so there's that. Um, I wrote the way. I wrote this next thing in the notes is the way I was. I decided I'm going to turn into the onion of the tech world and this is how I write headlines intel delays ohio fabs until after the earth creens into the sun.

56:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So by the way, the sun will be coming to us, not the other way around.

57:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, that's good to know. Thank you for correcting me on that joke.

57:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's good, it's okay we have billions of years to prove them wrong.

57:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The earth is absorbed by the sun. No, I love it.

57:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You are my people, richard, absorbed by this. No, I love it. You are in the red. You are my people, richard, then, um, so no, yeah, I'm completely off track, because I know I'm thinking about that. All right, so only 2030.

57:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Man, that's five years from now, but they were supposed to open this year, yeah, yeah, whatever.

57:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So look I the funny thing. Well, that's not funny, but that, oddly enough, these fabs is two of them have, they've already started construction on both. You can? You know it looks, looks like chernobyl, but that it you know. They're part way there I guess.

57:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So there's not a lot of difference between a fab and a nuclear power plant. To be honest, yeah, they take too long and well over budget.

57:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like it's very similar so, right now, these things are big construction projects. Uh, they're slowing, not stopping. So the the claim here is like, look, if market demand increases and we need them more quickly, we're not stopping starting, I guess, restarting from scratch, we're still going to, we're doing it, but we're going to do it slow. I don't know that Intel as we know it today, will exist by the time 2030 or even 2032, right, because that's as long as it really could take according to this new schedule. You know, by the time that comes around, we'll see. So I don't know. I don't know. I guess I'm trying to remain positive, but it's hard to get out of the death spiral idea of for Intel.

58:32
And then Dell and HP, as I predicted shortly after last week, show issued their earnings um, not as um positive as Lenovo's in either case. One interesting point though uh, dell overall was up 7% revenue wise to 20, we'll call it 24 billion. Dell, like Lenovo, but not like HP, also has these other big product lines, like in server space especially, right, and so they've never stopped being that unified enterprise company that does everything. Um, hp is PCs and printers. Um, from a revenue perspective, they're PCs really, right, so I mean they're mostly PCs it's like, uh, there's no margin on printers. Well and it's well. Actually, the margin is not bad on the others because of the ink and everything, but just the amount of revenue is much smaller.

59:24
But oddly enough, if you look just at the PC businesses of both companies, dell's revenues are actually significantly higher than HP's and I can't explain that a hundred percent. I will say both companies are overwhelmingly serving the commercial PC market. Hp has a higher percentage of PC sales revenues whatever units that are for consumers than Dell does. Dell is I don't know the numbers off the top of my head.

59:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean. The question is well, this is what would be. Infrastructure group solutions is different from client solutions, right?

59:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
whether it's desktop pcs versus rack mount servers for cloud well, I mean, but I mean looking just at pcs um dell, so you're meaning desktop pcs yep is bigger than hp's right now, and that's weird because hp, if you look at market share etc, is actually a much bigger company in the pc space than dell. Hp was until a couple years ago the biggest pc maker in the world, at number two. Now dell is a distant number three, but if this trend continues, they'll be they'll be number two. Pretty interesting actually. Yeah, I don't know what's going on there.

01:00:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So um and yeah, and did they break out laptops versus desktops?

01:00:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I presume it's all laptop yeah, they don't do it that. No, I'm I'm sorry. Actually, they kind of do so. Yeah, it is almost, it's 80% to 90% laptop.

01:00:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't have those numbers off the top of my head or in front of me, I don't know. I think Dell makes nicer laptops and I think Lenovo makes nicer than any of them.

01:00:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but Dell's brands are terrible Like right now.

01:00:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Dell used to have those XPS. Well, they detonated their brands but that's not reflected in this annual report. That'll show up next year, when everybody knows how to buy their product. Yep.

01:01:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So I don't know, Maybe Dell is just benefiting more from that refresh cycle. We keep pretending is happening, but I don't know so.

01:01:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Dell. You know what You've now talked about. Three PC companies are all making more money. Something's going on.

01:01:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Fair enough, yep on. Fair enough, yep, fair enough, um. And then I probably should have added this, the intel story before. But intel today, at mobile world congress, announced the v pro slot, meaning commercial versions of their latest core ultra series 2 processors. Um, all of these are arrow lake designs, not lunar lake, meaning they don't have that 48 top mpu right, it's a 13, uh tops mpu like a little bit better than the one in meteor lake. So yeah, I mean so it's just the nature of their, the way they updated.

01:01:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So most of them are for lunar lake thing. Lunar Lake thing really went well for them, didn't it the funny?

01:01:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
thing is from the perspective of someone who buys one of those computers. It ended up fine. Yeah, if you were to buy one of those today, it's actually it's fine. It's not as good as the AMD stuff.

01:02:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, and I'm still in the market for buying a new machine. I don't know how many tariffs I'm going to have to pay to buy it at the moment, so I might want to wait a little while. Yep, so I would say, having always built Intel machines, I feel like I'd need to build an AMD machine.

01:02:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was my advice at the beginning of the year for acquire you know for admins, definitely go AMD, although of the whatever, it was four or five lines of updated vPro chips. They announced the last of those, the 200S, is a desktop chip, right? So they have desktop class AI, pc, great. But they don't have desktop class co-pilot plus PC because, seriously, intel, whatever. So if you were holding out on that, I was.

01:02:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Either change the co-pilot spec or make me a better chip. I ordered that cute little framework yeah, yeah, you got it as an amd and well, no, I won't get it till q3 it's oh, the framework, right? No, you got your um, I got my meerkat, my system 76, that's gonna be a that's a.

01:03:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Probably didn't need that, but but now I'm thinking does it come with dedicated graphics or did you just get it with the uh both?

01:03:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, yeah, but it's amd and they're say it's like this is a new system on a chip.

01:03:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm telling you, the amd chip by itself is gonna be awesome, it's and it's got.

01:03:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They say 50 tops, so I got 128 gig one, uh, with all the you know, as many gpus as I could and not even so I, I don't.

01:03:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want that to be my ai, my ai server I should be getting the latest gen that they announced at cs, a laptop with that chip in it soon. But using what was the top line for laptops as of last september, I can turn call of duty up basically all the way graphically and it does 110 frames a second at whatever 2800 by something like stupid resolution like it's I was like integrated, to make this a gaming machine.

01:03:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, but I'm just saying integrated graphics, yeah, like that's.

01:03:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's incredible. And then the ai stuff between that integrated gpu, whatever the name of it is, and the uh mpu, which is incredible. I mean some good stuff out there.

01:04:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's a 8060s radeon graphics, so it is an integrated, but it's a system on a chip. Yep, and and this is this is the one they say they claim 50 tops, which is decent for a home.

01:04:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I got enough ram enough well that, by the way, that's 50 tops. That's probably just the mpu. I mean, I don't know, no, it definitely it is yeah. So when I just got it because it's cute, yeah, well, but when, when intel talks about um, uh, tops, now they, they try to.

01:04:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like yeah, the mpu is only 13 tops, but if you add in the uh, the cpu and the gpu, which are also both integrated, obviously it's I don't remember the number but still not 40 or 50, it's like 20 or something one of the reasons framework is soldering this on, which is kind of counter to their original proposition, which was all upgradable and modular, is because they said they worked with AMD and there was no way to get the throughput unless they used unified memory. So this is 128 gigs of RAM. That is most, I think, 96 gigs of which are available to the NPU or to the GPU. Yep.

01:05:13
So that's good for that's a good thing for.

01:05:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
AI. This is common to well. Lunar Lake, the latest stuff, all the. Snapdragon stuff does the same thing. So the, the Ram is integrated somehow, either on die or, you know, with the die or whatever. And yeah, it's for that reason and that's why you buy a lot. You buy a lot. Most laptops, not a lot of laptops. Most laptops say they don't have a ram, they don't even have a dim slot. You can't add to it like it right, what you get at purchase time is what you get yes, this is all soldered in.

01:05:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can change the motherboard. That's all you can right. So this is an the amd ai 300, ai max 300.

01:05:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, so that is, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, is the latest one that they announce the cs, so that's a step above the stuff I've used very interesting.

01:05:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean does that? Does everybody need a home ai server? No, no, I wait till july? I mean yes, the answer will be yeah, that's about when I'm going to get it july or august. Uh, it's a pretty any.

01:06:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know this. That's that whole do. Do I really want to be calling out to open AI with everything I say in my house, right, so?

01:06:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
we're going to talk about this soon, because we're going to talk about this.

01:06:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's save it for the AI segment, which is still to come.

01:06:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not calling to open.

01:06:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AI, you're listening to Windows. Do you want to take a break now? I got lost track. No, we hit the end of that section? Yes, we're we're at a good place to take a break when we come back microsoft 365, ai, xbox and uh, we got a little, a little tease. We've got some a castle of whiskey coming up, a castle, a castle. It's from a castle castle. That's how good it is. Is it like a hectare of? They make it in a castle? I don't know, it's actually irish right I like irish somebody.

01:07:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Somebody gave me, uh, the size of something in hectares yesterday and I was like you know, I don't know what that means, right, right, you just talk.

01:07:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What is that in?

01:07:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
hands. How is that.

01:07:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Farthings. Perhaps it was like what is that in acres? I'm like what are you talking about?

01:07:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What everybody in the rest of the world uses right. We use acres, they use hectares.

01:07:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know. I got a hectare up here.

01:07:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is hectare in Canada. I have a hectare on the side of my face Like everywhere else in the civilized world.

01:07:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:07:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Trying to pick it up, it's just you and the North Koreans.

01:07:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
man, Little hectare.

01:07:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I blame Jimmy Carter. He wanted to go metric, but he backed down at the last moment. He was a nuclear submarine guy. He knew that everything had to be metric. Instead, we've got two by fours that aren't two by four. We've got socket sets that don't work with metric. It's, it's a.

01:07:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's insane I strongly recommend the nate bargatze snl skits as george washington for this oh, isn't that funny they're, isn't that hysterical.

01:08:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're sitting around a campfire.

01:08:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's like so so in the united states. Then you you say that your kids go to school for a dozen years. He's like what? What is wrong with you? Get off the boat.

01:08:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like nobody says that all right, let's take a break. We will come back. More of windows weekly, still to come uh, with paul thurot, of course, and uh, richard campbell, mr hector, richard campbell. But first a word from our sponsor, z scaler, the leader in cloud security. This is how you protect yourself. See, the problem is, enterprises over the years have spent unlimited funds on perimeter defenses right, firewalls, hoping that if you keep people out, you'll be all right inside the network, right? They also, of course, have VPNs so you can burrow through the firewall into the network. How's that working out? Not so good. Breaches are skyrocketing 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks. I predict, because we're backing off on investigating Russian ransomware groups that it's going to be worse this year. Right, last year, a $ million dollar record payout to ransomware gangs. Double that easy this year. You, maybe that's a little scary.

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01:12:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Microsoft 365 I'm ready for the wake is it over?

01:12:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is it over, so oh?

01:12:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
skype. Oh, microsoft announced this week that they're gonna, you know, kill skype uh, in may, pretty quickly actually, but then again, they they've been talking about this for about three years, so this shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody, but, and they've been neglecting skype for as long as, yes, they have there was a.

01:12:32
There was a bit of bad timing, um, when the pandemic happened, uh, for all of us, uh, but uh for skype in particular, because microsoft was all hot and heavy on teams and it was exploding in usage and teams, of course. Of course is part of Microsoft 365 commercial. It's a moneymaker, it's a big reason for customers either to stay with or adopt Microsoft 365, classic Microsoft bundling strategy, et cetera. They only made a couple of passing moves with regards to free usage during the pandemic and Zoom ran away with that right, obviously. I mean usage, uh, during the pandemic and zoom, you know, ran away with that right, obviously that I mean. So the pandemic was the best thing that ever happened to zoom, if you think about it oh, for sure.

01:13:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, they ran out of ideas. Now they've made it horrible, tried to desperate to be a platform, but I I, because that's what we want. Yeah, it was the height of skype, truly, yep and, but it was good this network wouldn't exist without Skype, paul, you and I, for years. That's what we used. That's what we did on Don Air Rocks too.

01:13:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There was a lot of back and forth with Skype over the years. My little tie-in with it is the original version of this app was written in Telify right.

01:13:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was it really?

01:13:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The client app.

01:13:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The front end? Yeah, really the client front end? Yeah, I didn't know that.

01:13:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, interesting and, uh, you know, it used a kind of a peer-to-peer um network.

01:13:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because instrument free, as the guys who wrote it had written. Was it kazaa?

01:13:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they wrote a period wrote it, or if they were like inspired by it, or yeah, but no I think they actually that was their first product, yeah, and so they use the same peer-to-peer.

01:14:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and which? And, by the way, that's what microsoft killed when they bought it, and that was when it started to go downhill.

01:14:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, so microsoft. I don't probably heard the term client server. They're kind of big in this, uh I know well.

01:14:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The other part of this was phones right, you can't peer-to-peer to a phone, not when people right, so you lost you lost that.

01:14:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, and that was one of the greatest things about skype. I remember my daughter did her junior year of high school in france for a whole year. I got for 90 bucks. I got her a skype phone number and we could skype together for free.

01:14:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can't period a period of phone, so so I mean first they did the kazaa super nodes. They put those everywhere.

01:14:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, that's right, yeah I, I, uh, when skype you get, you have to remember skype is 25 years old or whatever. The you's 20-something years old and the world of 20-whatever years ago is quite different from today. We didn't have pervasive broadband internet, we didn't have mobile phones or smartphones like we know them today, I should say, and the feature you just mentioned the ability to buy credits and then call landlines or cellular phones or whatever we would have called them back in the day was very useful. Skype out, which they did right away.

01:15:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:15:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Especially for international or long distance calls that were still very expensive in that timeframe. You know, today everyone has a smartphone, so there's much less of a need for that type of feature. If someone were inventing Skype today, that wouldn't even come up.

01:15:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and the pressure on the entire telco industry to go VoIP anyway. That's right, skype was part of that. They weren't the only ones. There was a bunch of services out there.

01:15:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I've been around long enough. I've been writing about Skype since the beginning and I kind of went back and kind of reacquainted myself with the history there and wrote up a very long thing about that if you want to read it. But to me the interesting bit is that, well, there's a couple of things. So when Microsoft acquired Skype for I think it was $8.5 billion in cash, by the way, it was by far their biggest acquisition at that time Super controversial An argument that would repeat itself later with Teams when Microsoft was I think they way overpaid for it.

01:16:17
Okay, they were trying to buy Slack 20 years later.

01:16:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I'm thinking in context of the reason that Ballmer paid 8.5 billion for Skype when it wasn't worth that. Is he just failed at the Yahoo uh slack, uh, 20 years later, and yeah, but I'm thinking in context of the reason that that ballmer paid eight and a half billion for skype when it wasn't worth. That is he just failed at the yahoo acquisition? Yeah, and that's right, and that was kind of wanted a mark to show he could buy something.

01:16:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, um yeah, but it was okay, right, so right, it was, you know, horribly overvalued, etc. But and was their biggest acquisition. But if you look at it, the thing that's kind of curious about that to me today is it's still their fourth biggest acquisition of all time, even today, more than they spent on GitHub, more than they spent on Nokia, which is the one I think a lot of us would kind of remember as kind of a big deal. Right, that was a huge deal, and that was many years later. No, it wasn't, that was many years later. Um, no, it wasn't, it was several years later.

01:17:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But this was 8 billion.

01:17:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They spent what it was 8.5, yeah, yeah, linkedin, though, 26.2 billion I, that's the thing the numbers have, really, they're hard. So, like nuance, uh, 19.7, that's crazy money. So you know, linkedin, nuance, uh, skype. Then smaller things that don't make the big list, like yammer, uh, etc. Are things that have been integrated into the kind of microsoft stack. Right, that was the first thing that they did after they acquired skype.

01:17:34
Skype started appearing all over microsoft's product, but the the controversy to me at the time was more just the same controversy that bill gates brought up about buying slack, which is we already have this stuff. I don't understand. We had whatever MSN Messenger by that time was Windows Live Messenger or whatever. They had Link by that point, which used to be Office Communications In the commercial space. There was I don't know if they call it federation, but there was the ability to communicate back and forth across that divide. What are we getting here? And yeah, I don't know, they got a really good brand. Um, they, like you discussed earlier, had to change the infrastructure, which I think they did twice actually um well, the immediate fix, which is we can't be caught using other people's machines yeah, that was to build out the super nodes and just direct.

01:18:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You continue to use the variation on the kasab protocol to direct through the super nodes and just direct. You continue to use a variation on the CASA protocol to direct through the super nodes.

01:18:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, Teams is still using this right. I mean they did keep.

01:18:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
the back end is still Teams, I think that to messaging at Microsoft or communications, whatever you want to call this. Skype is essentially what NT is to Windows. Right, when Windows 2000 came out, remember the horrible tagline built on NT technology. I think I made this crack when Teams came out. I'm like is there going to be a little thing in the dialogue? This is built on Skype technology Because you know, no, no.

01:18:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Pretty much guarantee, not the codec that Skype built is the one that Teams uses.

01:19:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's, by the way, why we use Skype. It was the best codec.

01:19:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was fantastic that, by the way why we use Skype.

01:19:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was the best codec.

01:19:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it was fantastic, that's right. And even today we were talking about this yesterday with Alex Lindsay. He says because that codec would use as much bandwidth as you had, unlike Zoom, which tops out at a few megabits a second. It would use 20 megabits if it could, and so you could get really amazing quality, that's right, and they offer that professional version, remember, for broadcasters.

01:19:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, quality, that's right, and they offer that professional version, remember, for broadcasters. Yes, skype tx.

01:19:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, or vx. Yeah, we tried. We tried very briefly, yeah, uh, it didn't work out, but remember, colin, you have, by the way, uh, kudos, a great history of skype as part of your. Yeah, you wrote a great piece there, paul.

01:19:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just loved it um, yeah, I didn't even. You can't really hit on everything. It would be a book, you know, but it was.

01:19:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah well, you left us out, but that's okay okay oh, look at you, young paulie. Oh, was that your first skype?

01:19:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
my first guy? No, well, this was that was probably windows live messenger or whatever.

01:19:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah we uh, we remember I don't know if you remember, but uh, in order to have multiple people on our shows, yeah, colleen built what she called skype-a-saurus. This is back. We were in the cottage, which was a bunch of mac minis. Each caller had one mac mini and each there were, so there were a bunch of skype calls then conference together. Yeah, I did it with old laptops I literally just had a laptop sitting on the stand side by side separate skype accounts for each one.

01:20:23
And exactly, you just hook up each person and you call into that one and then we put them all together in a mixer and, uh, we did that for a long time. And then we tried the skype tx. Uh, when it came along, biz rt offered that we tried it and we weren't crazy. Thank goodness zoom came along, because we actually get great results doing it.

01:20:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, yeah, yeah we're not on zoom now, by the way, we're on restream and we went over to riverside. We've tried zencaster, for those are so those are web rtc.

01:20:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a web rtc solution. So is riverside. It's all basically the same thing. And alex said you're going to regret it, he does not like web rtc. That's what? No, it's got his problems. He knows who he's about. It zoom is the best, and so, yeah, we do still use zoom. Uh, with ecam on some of our shows, like twit, but, um, I like to switch the shows. So, uh, we use restream for the shows that I. I'm sitting here switching, but I, you know okay, skype comes from from desktop land.

01:21:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It never really was meant for mobile.

01:21:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's probably the problem this was remember that we had those usb mics on a stick. You know they would sit on stand we've. You know it's. It's a different error. This is the you know, uh, and and this, like windows phone, you can't point anything and say that's why you know that's no, but I would say what you know whatsapp yes and it was phone centric.

01:21:45
Actually, before that, even there were things like apple did like I chat first on the mac, right, google did whatever google, you know it wasn't me to the google chat whatever g chat, you know, back in the day and yeah, yeah, they were very much um desktop based in the beginning because it was that era, but also these were companies that got into mobile and thus had to make that work. Yeah, so they just did the.

01:22:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think they just did a better job, yeah where whatsapp was mobile first and that, and it just had the biggest thing that whatsapp did right. That everybody else struggled with was because they made it phone number centric. Then your phone book was immediately available and anybody who had a phone number boom, like you. Your graph built itself yeah, so you could.

01:22:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you look at the timeline for this stuff, you know, so I chat is early days of Mac OS 10, right? So 2001, 2002, um, microsoft had, uh, msn messenger in the beginning. That actually dates back to the nineties and it evolved through the whole windows live phase, et cetera. Max, uh, or I chat, comes to iphones, as does facetime. Eventually, right in 2010, skype comes up in whatever. That time frame was 2005, 2005, so, but mobile messaging to me was like the divide, right, so it's like blackberry obviously was huge phone, not phone centric phone only, but blackberryberry only, Right, but then iPhone happens, android happens a year later, but that's when we started. Like you said, whatsapp is 2009,. Wechat 2011. Like you, start seeing these WhatsApp to this day. Calling it mobile focused or phone focused is a gross understatement. Have you ever tried to use WhatsApp on your PC? No, which I do On your Mac, your mac, right? Yeah, it's kind of a nightmare.

01:23:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's terrible. No, it's totally mobile, it's phone link for one app to be clear even today. It's audio and video stuff is not great.

01:23:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a group chat tool yep, yeah, but I think the final well, I I don't think it's pretty obvious the final nail in the coffin is slack, and, and Slack has its own kind of funny history because that company started, they were trying to make a game and failed. And he was like, well, maybe I'll do this completely different thing. And they came up with what was eventually called Slack and they changed the name of the company to Slack, changing the name of the company to Slack, and you know this notion of, like, a chat-based interface for real-time collaboration, right, and this is probably I'm trying to think I guess 2013. So same year, microsoft bought Nokia, if I'm not mistaken, or right. Within a year of that, slack occurs and is popular with the same kind of companies that would do Google Docs like, or today Notion, or, you know, smaller companies like startups and all this kind of stuff. And I, having used Slack like to reuse your joke from before, richard I can assure you it's freaking terrible and I hate it so much, but but the thing that Microsoft did that I thought was really innovative, with Teams. That I think was smart and is as much of a reason for its success as, say, bundling it with, you know, microsoft 365, also smart, by the way, unless you care about it and I trust is they understood like Slack was, this is how we do it.

01:24:59
Microsoft was like hold on a second. We have this installed base billion probably people using what are now, yes, old-fashioned tools like Office or, I'm sorry, like Outlook, where we're communicating and collaborating over email, or something heavy like SharePoint or whatever. So Microsoft reuses SharePoint right there it's what's on the back end of Teams but they put it next to Outlook and they allow these things to interoperate. So if you're one of the old school guys, gray beard, whatever you're like, nope, I'm never chatting teams. But they put it next to Outlook and they allow these things to interoperate. So if you're one of the old school guys, gray beard, whatever, you're like, nope, I'm never chatting.

01:25:37
I'm not a child. There's no emoticons happening here. You can do all your stuff through Outlook. The young guys, the forward leaning people, whatever adapt to this very quickly or love it, whatever they're familiar with it, and you're all communicating and collaborating together. Sharepoint's on the back end the great Satan. But you have these two different front ends and that was smart and that's what I think would allow this thing to kind of come forward. I had forgotten about this. By the way, the original name of Teams was Skype Teams.

01:26:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, of course it was Well, because they literally were using the same codec, but they had to tie to SharePoint.

01:26:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean Skype for Business took over for Link at some point, I don't remember the history there exactly.

01:26:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it started as Office or Live Communications Server, yep, right Going back into the Vista era, and then, as it got to R2, they renamed it to Link To Link. And then they renamed that to Skype for Business. Yeah, they renamed it to link to link and then they renamed that to skype for business. Yeah, we could throw a response point into the equation if you wanted, like the number of telephone efforts that microsoft had that ran into each other response points.

01:26:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was interesting because that was a solution initially for small businesses. Yeah, I actually had three. I had one in the house. I had three sets at one point, different versions, you know um versions. It was a good idea for that era, right, it was a different time. But the other thing I think I didn't. This is not in my article, but the other thing the teams did over time. So the pandemic happened.

01:26:59
That was the focus. They very rapidly upgraded it, but they turned, turned it into a platform which is always going to be controversial, but they, they made it extensible with. You know, you can call them apps, whatever, extensions doesn't matter, but you can run apps inside of teams, right, which was, you know it's a common model. I mean slack does the same thing, but, um, it's fascinating to me. I bet teams is a platform. Uh is certainly more active than windows as a platform as far as new app development goes, but it's uh, it's got to be in the terms of just number of users and whatever as a platform has got to be in the top five of microsoft, probably top three. Right, it's big, like it's. Uh, it was smart and plus, you get all the stuff you get with microsoft 365 commercial around compliance and policy and regulations that are.

01:27:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's good, you know it's that's where the yeah, the other piece that they got by Microsoft getting Skype out. Those became endpoints that actually turn Microsoft into a telco, which they still are Like. You could buy phone numbers from Microsoft.

01:28:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then yeah, so that Right which brings us Use. Twilio like everybody else. So the other day, when this was announced, or VoIP MS, but I do it through Teams. We headed out to lunch and I mentioned to my wife. I said you know, microsoft has killed Skype. She's like they still make Skype, you know, which, honestly, is kind of a very normal response. The same thing actually, so we watched this terrible tv show um that's on netflix called somebody feed phil. You might have seen this it's like a food travel show.

01:28:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know phil. He's like goofy guy.

01:28:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, he's a goof, but uh, everybody loves rain, that's right yeah and uh, and everyone would know that for some reason, I guess, guess, I don't know. So anyway, he's like whatever, he's a guy, he's whatever. But at the end of every show he makes a Skype call with his parents for some reason. It's terrible, it's the worst part of the show, but the Skype logo is prominently displayed in the corner.

01:28:59
And they're talking on Skype, so it's an next time, right? But um, and so I mentioned that to her, I said you know you, you watch a show that uses skype every episode. She's like yeah, I don't see that stuff. I'm like okay yeah it's a mary jo thing to say, right, like I don't notice that, like it's like okay, yeah why would they do that?

01:29:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, there's a whole episode now to be made about migrating to teams yeah, I hope they do they exactly.

01:29:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They'll do the teams. They'll probably just move to facetime, frankly. But, um, so microsoft paid for that placement? I would assume so, of course. But I mean I, but it's the only example I can think of is something like that, beyond the I, I think, was it? No, I wasn't sure. Like there was some show that used like windows phones, like years after they stopped making them, remember, and like, I'm sure, when windows phone was a going concern, they were trying to get windows phones and movies and tv shows and and every company that makes things like this has that effort. But you don't really see a lot of Microsoft product placement in the world and that was a weird example of it to me. But the other extreme response to Skype being killed is people have just woken up out of a funk or something.

01:30:00
And they're like wait, what's going on? I rely on this product. I use it to call phone numbers I need it.

01:30:06
I need it and it's like wait, dude, what? Where are you from? Are you from the Wild West? Like who? No, but I think I've heard from every single person that does this. They're freaking out. It's 2010 now. We've been talking about this for years. Yes, it's happening suddenly all of a sudden, but two years ago, jeff teeper was saying look, we're not going to do it suddenly, but we are transitioning to teams. This is the time you got to start thinking about this stuff and, of course, the problem in this particular use case is that there is no thing in there's no replacements for yeah, yeah so I I'm struggling to come up with a solution for these people.

01:30:43
The obvious one would be Google Voice, right? I spent 20 minutes the other day typing in zip codes no area codes and then names of cities in the United States to try to find a number, and there were no numbers. So I don't understand why they don't have a UI. That's like I'm feeling lucky and just give me a number in Des Moines or something I don't know. But I tried every area code I could think of in Pennsylvania and Boston area, A bunch of city names, and I never come up with a single number. But if you could get a number, if you already have a number, I assume that would be a solution that you could use Google Voice to call those phone numbers. Right, Like I don't know, it's a. That's a tough one if you're still using that, just like it's a tough one if you're still using like a chariot or a horse and buggy, I mean no, that's not fair.

01:31:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not fair. You can use google voice, though. Right, you could, you could, if you could get a number.

01:31:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, you can't, that's what I'm saying.

01:31:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can't I tried to I can't question it. Can you get a phone number?

01:31:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, because google's been kind of indicating that they didn't really want to do this anymore either. Well, you gotta listen.

01:31:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We sold the place to go, quitlam. I took the phone numbers that were, you know, dedicated to landlines there and I migrated them into teams yeah yeah, just ported them into teams and now they go, but you're talking about teams commercial, so this is a slight difference. Yeah, but it goes through an automated attendance so you actually have to. You know that's good, so that blocks a lot of the spammers.

01:32:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, it's up to Microsoft to convince people that this is a viable thing. Yeah, and.

01:32:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't think that it is. Oh, Try and set up a Teams account. There's no better example Start from scratch on a bare machine that doesn't have any Microsoft accounts on it at all. Example start short from scratch on a bear machine that doesn't have any Microsoft accounts on at all Set up a team's account from scratch.

01:32:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I would. I will never do that. What you just described, it's such a bad.

01:32:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, there's famous stories of guys like like Scott Guthrie took the whole Azure leadership team, gave me each like a hundred dollar credit card and said go build a website on azure with none of your existing accounts. Go from scratch. And in a weekend none of them could do it because the barrier to setting up accounts and things is just so freaking high. Yep, they make it impossible to get started. If you're already in teams, it's fine. If you're not, you ain't getting there.

01:33:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just too hard and if you just but if you're just an individual person, human being, whatever, listen you signing up for Google Voice today will assure you that they will kill that service tomorrow. Yeah, Google will kill that immediately.

01:33:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But normal people are using now WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or Signal or almost all of these will do phone calls Every person, every business, every everything in this country that I'm in now is on WhatsApp Everything, people, yeah. Mexico is all WhatsApp.

01:33:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They text their doctors in the middle of the night and get responses Like this is the way people communicate.

01:33:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is it in the US that we don't have any consensus on? We have blue bubbles and we have green bubbles, leo, and uh, never the twain shall meet yeah, I mean, if everybody were on an iphone, um yeah, iphone would be an apple world, right would be it.

01:33:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, and it genuinely. I have friends who are so iphone centric. The fact that I have an android means I can't chat with them the stupid thing is you can, but they're just being dicks I don't disagree but the bottom line is you have to go where people are, and I'm not buying an iphone for that

01:34:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, apple's support for rcs now at least gives gives it a decent connection to android devices. But there is.

01:34:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the most artificial restriction in the history of artificial restrictions. It's blatantly it's terrible yeah it's an example it's a beautiful example of how terrible that kind of really is.

01:34:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yep, but I do wish everybody would just give up, give in and start using iphones. Yeah, I do too. I do too you know.

01:34:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, submit to tim cook once and for all my daughter refuses.

01:34:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's like you. She says she's like you.

01:34:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
She says she's like you're rich she says I'm not in the Apple ecosystem, I'll never use an iPhone and why would I go into it?

01:34:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But her birthday's coming up and I don't tell her. But I bought her an iPad.

01:34:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh.

01:34:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
God, that's so funny. A little wedge, yeah, that'll do it A little wedge.

01:34:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you, using the iphone, you could uh text and call through that ipad. Yeah, what you're saying. Yeah, she insists on like doing meat or something. Some people insist on carving things into their arm with a knife. I'm not saying it's healthy, I'm just, you know. Yeah, we all have our little ideas. I don't know.

01:35:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry, I can love apple.

01:35:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Apple has an evil company from the discord.

01:35:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but google yeah, but google isn't evil, but google's great right like google's fine.

01:35:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, evil, but Google's great, right. Google's fine, yeah, google's good, google's better somehow.

01:35:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Google's just inept. There are no kinder, gentler tech giants, if evil is the bar.

01:35:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We just move to a farm and use the little.

01:35:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google and Apple both move to the same motivations. It's just that Google's so bad at it, right yeah, microsoft is just as evil as google or apple.

01:35:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was terrible at everything. They just like it's a combination of evil and inept, you know? Yeah, I guess. Is that better or worse?

01:35:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know at least, if you're going to work with an evil company, work with an inept evil company, because well, unless you want stuff to work, oh, you know, telling you the iphone so do we have a consensus on our skype replacement, because we know it's not no we do not that, do not.

01:36:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, no, no, no, I should say actually. So if you're an individual, right. So for a lot of people listening to the show, this advice is going to be complete nonsense. But if you're just a person, like a non-technical person who would not listen to the show, actually the consumer version of Teams, as I'll call it, it's actually a consolidated client that comes in windows 11. It's pretty damn good, yeah, which I say having hated it out.

01:36:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What does it do? I know, does it still have skype out, like I can still phone a landline? No, no, it does not, it's a no, it's a matter.

01:36:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's a modern cell number. No, no, it doesn't do that. It doesn't modern things but it's. But it. No, but it works well and it does support, if you the thing I.

01:36:45
One of the things I've been using it for, just in passing, is, with the switch to the consolidated client, I can use it for skype I'm sorry for teams calls that are work related. It will work for that too, right? So if I get a team's link, it just. That works fine. I can do teams meetings. It's great. Um, I don't use teams at work anymore, but if I did, it would work for that too. They don't have it as of the last time I checked, but any day soon they're going to have some import to get your Skype stuff into there and it will be there. So your history, your chats, your whatever.

01:37:23
But as far as like an app, it's actually pretty good. This actually pretty good. It's, it's I. This is an interesting comparison. Maybe, um, because I know this is controversial too it's further along than the new outlook. I mean it's nice, I mean it is, I think it's pretty good. So anyway, there we go, all right. Just one more quick thing. Um, speaking of incompetent and outlook. Um, outlook mobile. A week or two ago, we talked about a slew of updates. There's another one they're getting support for delivery and red receipts, which somebody on social media told me that fax machines had back in whatever year. Fair enough, but okay, so there you go. Anyway, for some reason, there has been a lot of activity on Outlook Mobile this year. Right, we're only two and a half, not even two and a half Newer interns. Uh, okay, so there you go. Anyway, there, for some reason, there has been a lot of activity on outlook mobile this year. Right, we're only two and a half, not newer interns. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, but there's a lot of stuff going on there.

01:38:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, uh, this is one of them, I guess I don't know there's many things going on and this is one is one of them. Yep, uh, we're gonna get to ai gaming. Still lots to come. I just I want to pause briefly, uh, to ask a favor. Um, could you leave us a review on not you, paul or rich, I already have our dear listeners. Could you leave us a review on, particularly on iTunes? Turns out people have been review bombing us A review. You know, I don't personally. I think you either listen to the show and like it or you don't. That's fine, but advertisers pay attention to the reviews weirdly. So if you could help us by leaving a good review for Windows Weekly or any of the shows you listen to and like, you know an honest review, you don't have to lie you you know, I think this show is great but don't don't lie.

01:39:11
But if you feel like the show is a good show and you want to support it, it's just another way you can do it is leave us a nice review, particularly on itunes. Uh, people pay attention to that. I'm just. I'm just mentioning that, you know whatever? Hey, thank you for doing that, though if you do Now, we do talk a lot about AI. On the next show, intelligent Machines is coming up. Gary Marcus, as I mentioned, our guest. He's a naysayer, he's a skeptic.

01:39:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He took Kevin Roost to task who wrote in the New York Times about AI coding Now it's easy to take Kevin Roost to task. Who wrote in the new york times about ai coding now it's easy to take kevin roost. I was gonna say that's a soft target. I you know you gotta go after someone who knows what they're talking about yeah, uh, but.

01:39:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But let's talk about uh ai for a little yeah some of you guys know what you're talking about now well, I actually I'm not even sure.

01:40:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would say that, but um, let's not get, let's not get crazy now.

01:40:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can almost not say enough.

01:40:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard knows what he's talking about.

01:40:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How fast this stuff is evolving.

01:40:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is incredible, isn't it?

01:40:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This past week. I'm only going to hit on some of the things. I mean, there's been so many developments. There was, just as we started the show, google announced they're adding an AI mode in experiment at first to google search, for example. So I have to go figure that out. You know, um, microsoft, uh, kev brewer put this up in the discord earlier, but I I just you know my kids are here, I haven't had time today yet, but uh, the uk cma approved microsoft's partnership with OpenAI after investigating it, et cetera. There's a lot of stuff going on. Microsoft, brad Smith, put up a public letter aimed at the Trump administration saying look, we have these AI export rules. They're hurting US companies. They're classifying a lot of our allies and partner countries as basically nemesis. What's the word? Nemesis is Nemesi.

01:41:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a weird one, right? That's a good question.

01:41:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nemesis is probably, by definition, one entity. Right, you have a nemesis, you don't have nemesi, but if we did, it would be nemeses, nemesis. Okay, there you go, and so that one seems like a pretty straight up. That's pretty obvious. You know, nvidia is making the same complaints, like they're going to start hurting us companies with these things. So they're asking for some changes.

01:41:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just get in line buddy, because I know the car manufacturers are ahead of you yeah, this, it's weird.

01:41:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a lot of yeah, there's gonna be a lot of complaints, uh, just policy things, I don't know, it's politics. Open AI announced their latest model, which is not ChatGPT-5, but rather 4.5. I'm sorry, gpt-4.5, which they're describing as their last non-reasoning model. So suddenly we have traditional models Like. This type of AI is about two seconds old and we're already moving on to the next gen. They will never make a model of this type ever again, which is kind of interesting. So, yeah, I mean, feel free to use it. It sounds wonderful. One thing I have been wondering about a lot and playing with a little and did so again this week is local AI, right, this notion that you can download some of these distilled, smaller models, as I think of them as small language models slms. By the way, microsoft refers to these things as different things, which I hate. Lolms is one, one of their. One of my favorite names they have is they call them local machine, local language models. Llms, right, like another llm.

01:42:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, okay, because it's not, it's not large, it's could they be triple lms it's lm squared, I don't know, so squared m look I.

01:43:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think the general term we're just going to use here is AI models.

01:43:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
L-cubed him.

01:43:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. Anyway, deepseek, as we know, came out a month and a half ago. Whatever that was kind of exploded onto the world stage. It was a big deal. Everyone's freaking out. Microsoft, you know, to their credit. You could imagine they would see this as a problem and they embraced it immediately. They put DeepSeek up in Azure. They made it immediately. They put DeepSeek up in Azure.

01:43:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They made it available AI Studio.

01:43:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's there, right. And so this past week they expanded on the single distilled model they had previously offered on Copilot plus PCs by adding two more that have more parameters, right? So the first one was 1.5 billion parameters. Now they have 7 and 14 billion parameter versions of this model. For the time being they're Snapdragon only, but they will be going to obviously to any copilot plus PC, so the x86 stuff as well.

01:43:56
And all right, you know, like I do, I'm like I have to try this out. You can use something called the AI toolkit for Visual Studio Code, which is an extension, and then from there you can browse their little marketplace of all the available models. You can filter that list by. I only want models that are local and only specifically work on the MPU, which nicely filters the list down. And these new models are there, and so I was like, well, what does this look like? You know, and what it looks like is using a chat bot, except it's in slow motion, right? So a reasoning model like this is we'll spit out, okay. So you're asking me this and, like I, you know, I, the way I would think about this is this and this, and so the way I think I would solve this problem.

01:44:38
It kind of talks through it, but when you do that on an LLM in the cloud, this happens very quickly, right, in fact you have to kind of scroll back to kind of catch up with it. It's a little hard to stay up with it when you do it locally against the MPU. At least the things I've done, which were all programming related, it happens slowly. I used this comparison earlier today, but the first time I ran Windows was on a 286, black and white, well grayscale, with two megabytes of RAM, maybe one, I don't remember. It was a stupid low-end system and you could watch it draw the menu, draw the lines between the menu items, draw the menu items and then it would do something and it would slowly go do that thing. That's the effect. I think it's kind of that effect, but for the stuff that I need, it's actually pretty damn good like it's.

01:45:30
It's, it's interesting. So if you want it, yeah, so if you want to experiment with llms, that could be in the cloud, or uh, sl slms as I would call them, but local models, it's not a horrible way to do it. I, visual studio code is obviously a developer environment, but uh, but we're talking about something kind of technically, I think, and once you get that thing in, you can run it in this little uh, they call it a playground because that's, you know, it's fun and you could just interact with this thing. There's a switch. You, you can use web results as well, if you want. Um, I've left that off. I'm just I'm trying to see what this looks like locally, but it's it's kind of interesting.

01:46:09
So that, to me, is interesting and it's something I want to keep going with. It's uh, similar to the uh, the work I did with the uh, what's it called? The windows copilot runtime, where you can do the local ai stuff, um, in an app like a windows app sdk, sdk app is another one of those areas where I'm kind of just trying to figure this out. Like you know, right now I would say, a lot of the advantages of a co-pilot plus PC aren't necessarily AI related. It's more about the battery life, efficiency, reliability, et cetera. But this was the promise and so I'm kind of curious to see. And then you know, builds coming and maybe, well, no, no, maybe right now you could. You know, richard, one of the complaints that he raises all the time, which is very real, is you have this really powerful system with a gpu? Yeah, 470 tops or whatever it is 1000, 1500, tops, yeah well yeah.

01:47:01
So one of the things you could do with this tool is down is look for those models that work off the GPU right, and I suspect you will see considerably better performance than what I'm seeing off the MPU with this one thing.

01:47:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and it puts some pressure on you know, if you want to make a serious MPU, go ahead, but you've got to make it better than an RTX video card for crying out loud Yep or make a system that, intelligently, will just flip between them and don't well nvidia, and nvidia had this pc sized machine at ces this year.

01:47:33
It was 3 000 bucks. Could run gpt35, right? People already dropped 2 000 bucks on a gpu. You can build a 2 000 npu that'll fit into a pcie. You know x16 slot for two grand. Yeah, and it should run full bore.

01:47:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This was a potential preview of an nvidia possibly nvidia slash mediatek coming line of processors and pcs for now and nvidia should be making that card right like it's a line of cards.

01:48:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That would make a lot of sense.

01:48:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's going to happen.

01:48:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think that's going to be a thing it seems apparent. And then, by the same way, you can get a video card running in a chassis that plugs in through a DPI port or any other particular interface.

01:48:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Same thing for that, for that NPU, and that's yeah, right, so I, I, you know I didn't include this in the notes, but this week is mobile world Congress, or whatever we're calling it now it's in Barcelona, like it is, and you know HP and Lenovo release PC makers there as well. It's not just mobile companies, but one of the things that. Well, two of the things that HP showed off were essentially external MPUs that run off of whatever USB-C connection you have. So Thunderbolt, obviously, is the best, but one of them is a monitor that has it built into the back of the monitor, so it goes through the USB-C plug, and the other one is just like a little doodad that sits between your PC and the monitor, or actually, no, the monitor doesn't have to be part of it at all, it just plugs inside, sort of like an external gpu, right, but it's a like an e-npu.

01:49:15
Um that this is not a product they're shipping this year, necessarily. They haven't announced it as a thing, it's more of a prototype. You can tell it's kind of a prototype because the, the little standalone stick piece was a 30 or 33 tops mpu for some reason when. So it's not a co-pilot plus pc but, um, and until we've made this shift, you know, to these pcs that have the stuff built in. Um, this is an interesting way. Potentially now I think they're trying to gauge interest, uh, to add mpu capabilities to an existing computer right um, it's not a bad idea, and again via pcie slot would be a fun way to do that yeah

01:49:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
for sure. Yeah, I mean one could argue, do you ever play with a google coral? They're a few years old now. No, they were a usb based um neural net model. That was something like five tops right right, which at the time was probably a few years ago. No, they were great and they were um. We were implementing them in in video, uh, in nvr, mvms, the, the network video machines that were monitoring security cam so they could do person recognition and vehicle recognition right. These days most of the cameras can do that, but back then, you know, this was a solution and it was a hundred dollar solution. Like the bus speed on a usb 3 2 port is high enough that you could build a, the same way you can stick an nvme in there. You could stick uh a, a neural processing unit. That could be pretty darn quick. Like you should, you should be able to get hundred tops in a in a USB-C slot.

01:50:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there you go, and so this is a, probably a temporary solution. As MPUs become integrated with CPUs, it will become the the way, right? Um? But even then you can make the argument you know, maybe you're a built-in CPU with integrated MPU is only 11 or 13, whatever the number is tops, and then you could go to a 40, 50, a hundred, like you said, whatever, that's a, that's an upgrade, right? And so if you're a developer or whatever, you need this kind of thing without you don't want to buy a new computer. It's an, it's. It's an interesting idea, yeah.

01:51:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We are in a weird interim phase right now.

01:51:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, we are, and just you know. Again, next week it will all be completely different. There'll be another one. It's just crazy. Microsoft announced a new co-pilot this week. If, with luck, this will be the last time I ever mention it. It's called Dragon Co-Pilot. I don't know why. I don't know why either. I like the logo, though, by the way. It's kind of a fun take on the standard Copilot rainbow-colored logo. It's for the healthcare market, right, and so Microsoft has something called Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. It's an AI assistant for that industry.

01:52:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So we're probably not going to talk about it again. I've done some work with some of the clinical businesses there and I mean there's a lot of transcription and such going on in healthcare across the board and more detailed record keeping is better. Most modern trauma centers now have multiple cameras and instrumentation on all medical equipment so they have full telemetry of everything that happened during a trauma event.

01:52:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a bad time to have a hallucination, but yeah, you know, it's, you know. Look, whatever I mean it's, this is it's mostly transcription right is what they want is.

01:52:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right now there are a lot of skilled people who spend a lot of time transcribing what doctors say and how more of that being automated will help interestingly, I don't remember how much detail I provided about this.

01:52:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I must have told the story about my how my wife used ai recently um her writing, and she writes about health and wellness and all this stuff. And so it says this new AI assistant will search for medical information from trusted sources, make the information easily digestible for clinicians and automate certain tasks, such as conversational orders and clinical evidence summaries. That's almost exactly how my wife we're talking about here. Yeah, I mean so it's really interesting, right, but but but grounded in trusted medical sources, for that organizations you know, it's seems smart, yep okay, uh stability word comes from the fact that dragging naturally speak nuance was there first, and dragon actually oh you think that's what it is?

01:53:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
oh, that's, I think it's a partnership thing.

01:53:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, with them yeah, oh, okay, yeah, all right, good, look at them reusing this brand finally. Okay, I was uh imagined one day this is how I'd write articles. I would speak, you know, and it would just do it for me, and it would be dragon, naturally speaking or something, and, uh, you can do it now, do you think? Is that you could? But I just I thought I'd have to because of you know, like I don't promise with my wrists and things. Yeah, yeah, it just never happened, thank god, but I, I was just always prepared for that, like I've known people who did that years ago.

01:54:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I remember who it was head carpal tunnel, uh. And david pogue always used uh dragon actually to do his indexes. He wouldn't do it to write the book. He wanted an easy way to kind of scan through the book and say, okay, page 122, right, right, right, right. And uh, it apparently worked well. That's how he did his indexes for years.

01:54:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was 20 years ago right back back in the 80s we combined a dragon naturally speaking board, an x10 controller for light switches and drapes and an African gray parrot named Timmy. I'm sorry.

01:54:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Timmy wants to open the curtains.

01:54:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry he did open the curtains. I was paying attention, but slow down for a second Timmy open the curtains?

01:54:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, but would you give the commands to the parrot?

01:54:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, we did the commands ourselves. Within a day. Day, the bird knew the commands, that's hilarious I love it. And then you found out the bird liked to go to bed early, would turn off all the lights and close the drapes at like six turn off everything. Yeah, good night well, we gave him control over a radio, so we left him by himself. He only listened to rush limbaugh. He was a right-wing parent, yikes.

01:55:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's really interesting.

01:55:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually our dog was a racist. Actually, you know, I don't know, I can't explain the animal kingdom, I can just watch the videos. But yeah, Rack.

01:55:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Timmy wants to go to bed. Rack.

01:55:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I saw a video of a guy trying to train a dog, like a golden retriever, to be able to hit a thing, and then the treat would jump through the air and he could catch it in his mouth and the dog was oblivious to this. All right.

01:55:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Remember we have a hard out.

01:55:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A cat walked over, moved the machine, hit the button and it hit the dog who was asleep. The cat figured it out while the dog. The cat was watching the whole time and the cat figured it out. The dog had no idea what was going on. Anyhow, okay, I'm just saying not AI, I guess is funny.

01:55:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So quickly To continue the gaming segment yes, just real quick.

01:55:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Stability AI has partnered with Arm Holding, to begin with on generative AI audio, but they're going to work on other things 3D and other. So Arm is finally getting into this and I'm not going to go through this in great detail, but at Mobile World Congress this week there's a ton of AI stuff being added across Android, pixel Well, I guess Android and Pixel. Apple's not there. One of the best reasons to own a pixel phone is the scam detection stuff on the phone. They're adding it to messages. This is the greatest addition possibly to a mobile phone this year because of all the crap we all know get. Yeah, um, this stuff's huge and it's they're bringing it to android proper as well. So that's just pixel.

01:56:40
So if you have google messages on whatever android phone, like a samsung, whatever you're going to be able to get that ton of Gemini things, including live features. Gemini, live features. You know the kind of AR stuff where you point the camera at the world and it tells you stuff about everything Incredible. So this is all happening, and then Apple, of course, continues to struggle and the joke there is if you don't believe it, just ask Siri. I'm just kidding. Yeah, um, yeah. So now Mark German is reporting that they might not have the stuff they promised at WWDC last June and for maybe two more years like it's, this is going poorly well, because they were afraid of missing a year.

01:57:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So they announced before they were the normal level of apple ready. They're going to miss a year anyway. I would just I'm doing it.

01:57:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The other day we're on the horse, that the horse thing we were up in the middle of nowhere. We were like 10 000 feet up in the mountains and, uh, no one had a signal and I triggered siri by mistake, which is the only way I trigger siri. And if you thought siri was useless when connected to the internet, I challenge you to try it offline.

01:57:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is hilarious if this phone could drool it would be drooling like it's unbelievably stupid.

01:57:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, um, just a couple of things in the gaming space this week which is, yeah, good, bad and different, depending on your perspective, I guess. Um, it is a new month, so we have some new Xbox game past games. I'm not going to make the joke about Activision Blizzard, because even I'm finding that to be tired.

01:58:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like it's done yeah, nothing there.

01:58:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've never heard of any of these games. Why would I know any of these games? This is apparently a big deal. I don't quite understand why. But Tony Hawk Pro games um, this is apparently a big deal. I don't quite understand why. But tony hawk pro skater three and four are both coming to all platforms.

01:58:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
God, whatever that means, um they were very popular games at the time.

01:58:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They were way back in the day. So if you have a nintendo switch, if you have an xbox one, if you have a playstation 4, I'll give you an idea.

01:58:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tony hawk is now hawking. Oh please yours.

01:58:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So tony hawk, who walks around with one of those walker things now?

01:58:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right, it's, uh, it's reverse mortgages next. We know that. Yeah, I know it's crazy.

01:58:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So if you if you're looking for 900 man, you'll be able to get a game pass whatever, and a nice guy too um, and then, uh, the playstation vr2 headset which launched a couple years back, remember this thing used to be more expensive than the console itself, which is kind of crazy. Like they did a pretty good job with the first gen on ps4, this one hasn't gone very well, so there were rumors, or news maybe, of them pausing production for a while. Um, they just dramatically lowered the cost still expensive, but in the us it went from 550 to 400. Um, which, by the way, uh, you could buy an xbox series s and maybe two or three games that I'm on. It's crazy, it's a. It's still expensive, but, um, you can play steam vr games on a PC using this with an adapter 60 bucks for the adapter, there you go.

01:59:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Alright, but I have a few more animal videos I'd like to discuss.

01:59:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The shortest.

01:59:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Xbox segment in history. I actually got up to take a walk.

02:00:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just been a lot of ai stuff. You should have taken a walk during the year I think it was I.

02:00:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I made a mistake. Hey, uh, we will take a quick break because, uh, the back of the book is just around the corner and I always like to do a little uh harangue before that to get people to join club Twit. If you like the programming here on our fine network, if you enjoy what you're hearing, I would like to invite you to support it. Now you might say well, leo, you've got ads. Well, ok, so here's the deal. The ads do cover, you know, 90, 95% of our costs, but that still leaves a gap and the club covers the rest. Thanks to the club, we don't have to scale down anymore. We've done a little bit of that, but we don't have to do any more of it. In fact, more people join the club, there's more things we can do. The other thing and I always hate this when you pay for something and then you still get ads If you join the club, ad ad free versions of all the shows available to you. So now, although I have to say some club members actually listen to the ads still uh, in fact, there was a demand that we put the ads in the club twit discord so that people could hear what we were talking about. But you don't have to and that's that's a very nice uh part of this. So seven bucks a month it's not expensive to get rid of all the ads. You get access to the club twit discord, which is a really great hang for anybody you know who's into the kind of stuff we talk about on our shows smart people doing interesting things.

02:01:39
Here's the club and a picture of Tony Hawk. This is the live chat. But that's not all that goes on in the club. We have all sorts. You know you could software development. You can talk about any kind of geeky subject. Uh, you want, it's all. It's all in here. The other thing I like, uh, that we do in the club is we do events. So thursday, tomorrow, uh, 1 pm, pacific, we'll be doing our photo time with chris marquart. We do that every month. Club members pay for that. Stacey's Book Club, micah's Crafting Corner lots of stuff goes on in the Discord behind the scenes. So you're invited to join that as well and you also get the satisfaction of knowing you're supporting a great podcast and the podcast community here and if you, if you all join, I can get that jacket. Um, everything you always wanted in a podcast network and more twittv. Slash club twit. Thank you in advance for joining the club. We appreciate your support. And now back.

02:02:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're ready to the show you know there were a couple of idiots in the chat I just want to address real quick. Um, I can't be ageist if I'm old. So you know I'm sorry, but you know I'm not. I'm not making fun of age, I'm making fun of a guy that was a skateboarder who was old when they started making these games. He's old.

02:03:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's just old it is an old game.

02:03:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a joke, it's not. We're not doing the overly sensitive about nothing thing anymore.

02:03:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's 56.

02:03:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How old are you? 58. Okay, yeah, sorry I get to make that joke and I'm 10 years older than and it's like, it's like a paul. So you know, if you make jokes about, like polish people or italian people, some religion it's like you know, if you're that thing, that's what makes it okay.

02:03:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it okay really, though, yeah it is okay, it's okay.

02:03:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, let's not be so sensitive um xbox. No, we did that no, we did that look your tip of the week yep, so uh. Google this week added the ability to remove yourself from search results, which is one of those kind of fun things that they only got in the eu before. So to do this, you have to go to myactivitygooglecom, and then you can point them to search results and say look, this shouldn't be if it's personal information oh, this is great news.

02:04:03
Yeah, so I haven't tried it yet, but it just just happened and it's one of the only google search related stories I've seen this year. That's been like, oh, there we go, good, good, this is what we're doing. Yeah, bravo, actually, so that's cool, so you can do that, okay. And then, uh, yeah, so leo really threw a wrench in my plans, uh, before the show started by telling me about a new web browser called zen, which is, uh, basically firefox based, but with the um arc browser ui.

02:04:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's like the best of both worlds.

02:04:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to add that to the top of my list of browser changes from this week, because that's actually super interesting to me. So I didn't know about that. Um, you might want to check that one out. I think it's. Uh, I don't remember. Do you remember what? The well, just google, it's zen browser dot app.

02:04:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, zen dash. It does look very interesting. Um, I'm, I immediately. It was andy and ako, by the way, who recommended it and I immediately started using it and it is. You know, it's fire. So arc is a chromium version. So this is arc, the arc ui, including spaces and a lot of the things we really like about arc. Um, on a firefox engine, on gecko, on gecko, and one of the reasons, uh, I think you might want to move from chromium based apps is that google is now starting to push manifest v3. So your, uh, your browser, uh, your and it's not going to work anymore.

02:05:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So well, yeah, okay, uh, you block origin especially the most popular, yes, but the they have a light version that will.

02:05:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That supports m manifest v3, but I don't know. I just I I feel like that's an anti-user move on Google's part, which they're blaming on security and and I want to support it. More importantly, I want to support a browser ecosystem that is just not one company.

02:05:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, if you want to stick with, Chromium Brave solves this problem out of the box. You don't have to worry about manifest anything.

02:06:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And as, as people are pointing out, the you don't have to worry about manifest anything. And, as people are pointing out and they say, when you install it, it doesn't support Widevine, so the DRM video will not play in it. But that's fine, who cares? Let's not support that.

02:06:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
For now anyway, yeah, right.

02:06:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There'll be a plug-in or something. No, this definitely. It doesn't support Firefox plug-ins.

02:06:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That is an immediately solvable problem. So yeah, the other two this week, opera is previewing their AI agent in the browser. So they were very early. I think they were the first, or one of the first to have any kind of an AI capability in the browser. And when you think about agents AI agents the point of it is you give it a task or some number of tasks and it goes off and performs that on your behalf and then it will come back and prompt you if it needs you to do something or it needs whatever help with something.

02:06:51
So what would be the point of an AI agent built into the browser? It would be to control the browser, right? And they interestingly differentiate this from things that take screenshots, like recall or like I don't remember the name of the feature, but Gemini has a feature like that as well. Right, that it's based on screenshots, because it doesn't have to see the browser. It is the browser, it knows how the browser works, it knows how the DOM works in a website, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So you can say something like I want to buy a pair of socks or 10 pairs of socks or whatever it is. They need to be whatever color, they need to be whatever size, I want the best price, et cetera, et cetera. We'll go search for that stuff and it will come back and prompt you when it needs you to do something like approve a purchase perhaps, fill out a form, whatever.

02:07:38
It might be something sensitive perhaps, and so this thing is still not broadly available. I don't think it's even in their developer um channel or their. What do they have? They have like an ai. They have some kind of an ai program for adding ai features to um, their browser. You can preview that stuff early. So that will be coming soon. Kind of interesting. So that's kind of interesting. And then firefox uh, they have a new version of that browser every four weeks in a really rapid uh schedule. A little wrench in the whole firefox thing. I think I don't know if this is before the show, but we were briefly, or someone was talking about the, the updated terms of use, the privacy things they have a.

02:08:16
They have a horrible way of just stepping on rakes all the time and hitting themselves in the face, and this is a good example of that. So they came up with the new terms of use, also, I think, an updated privacy policy where they removed some language which seemed to protect users against, you know, their data being used, uh, for whatever purposes. Uh, they tried to explain it uh poorly, I would say and then they kind of went back and changed everything. I don't think they changed it back, but they changed those documents again and steve gibson said he's fine, you know with what they said.

02:08:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But this is another reason why I picked up it was bad communication like I.

02:08:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like like when you, if you read their explanation, okay, you know it's like maybe, but I don't know. Come on, guys, anyway. Uh, firefox 136 I think it's the latest version is actually a major. It's the biggest update to the browser in a long time. So they've been working on an updated version of the sidebar for a while. That's available now in preview and this is no sorry in stable, and this is the one that has that AI chat bot, which can be any AI model you want, et cetera, and then all the normal stuff you get in a sidebar, including vertical tabs, right? So not the first time.

02:09:25
I don't think Firefox has had vertical tabs, but I don't know the full story there. But now vertical tabs are officially and formally back in the browser part of the sidebar. There's a control now where you can clear your browsing data and cookies independently of each other. Previously that was one thing HTTPS first, which is a fairly obvious browser feature, but if the site you're loading supports https, you'll get that automatically, and if it doesn't, it will fall back, and just a bunch of other stuff related to whatever platform you might be on or whatever region you might be in, including support for linux on arm 64 based systems, right? So if you're running linux on a I don't know what system that would be, but it's like I guess yeah, if you have an ARM-based PC and you put Linux on it somehow, good luck with that. But if you did it, congratulations. You can now run Linux on there natively.

02:10:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's pretty cool, yeah, nice Well, I guess this means, like it or not, we've got to go to richard campbell now.

02:10:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh no, find out what's coming up on ronald's radio uh published today my uh conversation with karen bisett about secure by design. So this was a reference to the us government's cyber security and infrastructure security agency, or cisa, which I believe is still in operation.

02:10:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but much restricted.

02:10:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just as far as the Russians are concerned, apparently.

02:10:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, fortunately, but they've got a big focus on making more secure security products. Yeah.

02:10:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, everything will be fine, I'm sure. Oh, it's going to be fine, yeah, it'll be fine. So this is as much a conversation about sysadmins you know, folks wearing tinfoil hats, talking to developers and trying to get into more of helping developers to not use super user privileges, which is hard because often the products they depend on don't have good security features, security configuration anyway, and they can't make their tools even run without super user privileges and it just sort of leads to this cascade where it's very hard to retrofit restricted security into place after the fact. So how do you get to it sooner and build them environments where they're working in normal security constraints? It was a fun conversation, but it's never easy to sort of set limits on folks, but the consequences of not having them are significant. So there's plenty of stories of the various exploits and problems. I'm pretty sure we said CrowdStrike at some point in this conversation yeah yeah yeah.

02:11:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that secure by design or insecure by design?

02:11:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that's the question writing code into ring zero is uh not exactly secure. Uh seems to want to do anything about it you brought along.

02:12:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I'm confused because it looks like well what?

02:12:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is that it's? It's a container for a bottle of whiskey called napo castle.

02:12:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is there any whiskey left? Well, yeah, there's a whole bottle of it, okay I thought just took the cork out of that.

02:12:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just wanted to handle it carefully because it's full now. You know what?

02:12:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this looks like it comes from middleton is it an irish whiskey?

02:12:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it is an irish whiskey. Napo castle is actually a castle, an old castle too. It's in clare county, which is the southwestern part of scotland. It's about 50 kilometers north of the shannon airport. That's about 10 miles in the net measures of the oppressors. Uh, the castle first built in 1467 by Sean McNamara which is now, we would shorten to McNamara the name means the castle in the place abounding with little hills, the McNamara family right through until Oliver Cromwell invades Ireland and it's confiscated and given to a roundhead named Arthur Smith. But a few years later, when the monarchy is reestablished in Ireland, mcnamara gets their castle back. So they basically have it for what? 300 or so years? In the 1700s they sell it to the Scott family, who then operated and maintained it as well. And in 1855, it goes to the Baron. Dunboyne was actually one of the leadership sites where their meetings for the War of Independence in the early 1900s. And finally, in 1927, it ends up in the Quinn family and becomes unoccupied for many years and in disrepair. And then it's bought by an American in 1966, a guy named Mark Edwin Andrews who was the assistant secretary of the U S Navy. He's originally from Houston, uh, but was doing somewhere again, apparently fell in love with Ireland and been working with what was then the, the brand new airport in Shannon. They call this the Shannon Free Airport Development Company and ultimately they do a restoration on the castle. The family lives in it and you got to think.

02:14:16
In the late 1960s the Irish whiskey industry was in a terrible state, like literally in 1966, there were only two distilleries still operating in Ireland. There was the Bushmills distillery up in Northern Ireland and there was Jameson cork distillers. And that was about it and that is when they sort of conglomerated work together to build the new Middleton distillery in the seventies and bought up a lot of the brands that were bankrupt, the Red Breast and the like. So in that time Mark Andrews was buying barrels of whiskey from effectively broke distilleries and very famously he bought a few good barrels from the old Tullamore distillery in 19, that barrels that have been laid up in 1951 and we're just sitting there and he bottled it in 87. So it had been in sherry casks for 36 years and it's called napa castle 1951. You can still find one of these bottles once in a while in auction. The last one sold for 2500 us and apparently there is a 1949 edition, also telemordue. Uh, 33 years in sherry, that's even rarer to find. I couldn't find any pricing on that whatsoever.

02:15:38
So that entity um, they the shannon free airport development company becomes just shannon development. And they have this group they call shannon heritage group and they've restored the castle and they operated for medieval banquets and events and so forth. It becomes a famous place to stay. Charles de gaulle stayed there, richard nixon stayed there, uh, and ultimately in the 90s and 96, shannon development buys the castle outright from the family. But in the meantime so that brings us to this edition of the whiskey, which is the son mark edwin andrews I launches a company called Great Spirit LLC and he actually takes the remaining bottles of Napa Castle 1951 and makes available to the public and then starts to collaborating with the Middleton distilleries to make their own whiskeys. So these are still again in Telemardu.

02:16:24
All these whiskeys come from the Middleton distillery. The Middleton distillery was built in the 70s specifically to have one set of stills and equipment that could make multiple kinds of whiskey, and so it's not hard to calibrate to make your own versions. And so the original Napa Castle from this new generation was a 12 that came out in 2010. And then they came out with this 16 as well, and I should wrap this up with a in 2021, irish distillers it uh, acquires them. That's actually owned wholly by pernaud ricard, so they're not part of the big conglomerates. So, yeah, new middleton and the middleton distillery is jameson red breast, red spot, green spot, blue spot, yellow spot, telemore do.

02:17:05
The whiskey itself is strictly malted barley. We know that's not a requirement for Irish whiskey. They do all kinds of crazy things with it. It does a triple distillation instead of a double. That's the way they like it. So they raise the alcohol level a bit higher. And then they age, and the 12-year-old is aged strictly in bourbon, the 14-year-old is bourbon and sherry and the 16 bourbon and sherry, and this 16 is 14 years in used bourbon casks and then 21 months in all the russell sherry.

02:17:33
So my first taste a big, strong alcohol note up front, which is always a surprise, like don't expect it to be, but not too sweet, very gentle in the mouth, though boy oh boy, that's too easy to drink, but for a 16 year old you would expect as much. This is a very drinkable first whiskey, sort of warms you up. You don't want to, you know, for it's a hundred dollars. So you ask if you can find it about 43. Uh, 43 abv. So it goes down real nice, but yeah, that's a fruity happy. This is irish whiskey, and it's march, right like st patty's day is upon us, so let's drink Irish for a while here.

02:18:07
And this is a nice one to have around. I'd have a nice three fingers of this off the bat and then you can switch to Jameson and not feel bad about it.

02:18:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is, if I'm understanding you better than Jameson.

02:18:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is a first drink whiskey. This is a very nice. This is your 100 roll. A bottle of whiskey, pure, you know, mostly, you know aged in bourbon and sherry. So you have this off the bat. Have a nice toast, right we, you know toast skype, thanks for all the calls. And then, um, we, uh, we switch, pour one out for poor old skype then.

02:18:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then you drink the 20 bottle, not the hundred dollar uh good, I need uh more bottles to buy for my brother-in-law who's an irish whiskey fan yeah, and then apple castle.

02:18:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a great name. It's just that those guys, they don't own a distillery, right, they just make their stuff in new middleton. But it's the same as writer's tears. And you know a whole lot of other whiskey makers. Sure, our whiskey brands just use the middleton distillery. It used to be called the new middleton distillery 60, 50 years ago, but now it's just the middleton distillery. It used to be called the new middleton distillery 60, 50 years ago, but now it's just the middleton distillery it's not new anymore, it's yeah it's like tony hawk it's, but you know it's 58, no longer new.

02:19:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How?

02:19:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
good, can you be at 58? My goodness right, uh, but this sounds really good. I love irish whiskey because it's not, it's never a thing, it's like smoky.

02:19:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's always a little sweet.

02:19:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's good, but they can get too sweet, like they can get a little weird right. This is very much a classic barley whiskey. Nice, you know, made the made a classic way with a triple distillation so it's a little smoother and a little less oily and stuff. It's light and you can't go wrong and so, yeah, well, great to show up with as a gift. You know you like someone enough to spend 100 bucks on them.

02:19:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's exactly that's why and you can get in the us pretty easily you can. I found it a total wine okay, uh, all right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for a wonderful show. Paul thurot, thurottcom, his book books leanpubcom. You can get the windows everywhere book and, of course, the field guide to windows 11. Uh, richard campbell's at run as radio that's where he hosts run as radio and dot net rocks. And uh, we always love getting together on wednesday and talking about the latest news and cat videos and mostly cats, tormenting dogs.

02:20:30
But always fun and gray parrots who are out of control oh, timmy, that was the showstopper for that sentence.

02:20:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
For me I was like wait wait, wait, wait.

02:20:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What gray's live? A long time did you give him away, or?

02:20:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
did he actually pass? He was my, my roommate's, uh, so he left with the roommate he did pass oh, he did but he lived a long life.

02:20:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they lived to like a hundred or something they live long.

02:20:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it's one of those things where they're one of the animals that lives longer in the in captivity they do in the wild because there's no threat.

02:21:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's except a little less stress.

02:21:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know the home automation threat well, no, he was very happy to be automated, and I think that's so cool the reality that we could give him control over his space so he could we eventually set up curtains around his cage, and uh, I definitely knew what he was doing. It wasn't I mean to be clear. He was parroting, but there is straight. Sorry, did I say? That you were serious yeah there, but was a stimulus response, without a doubt it was sure he knew something would happen when he went.

02:21:29
Yeah, yeah I know he didn't understand the word. It's like ai, he doesn't understand what he's saying he would go to the microphone right like he would. He would. He would go to the sm58 we had set up for him and he would speak into the microphone.

02:21:41
He was trained. That's hysterical. I'm not trained. He literally watched us do it. And then he learned, yeah, and then we learned to turn stuff off that we didn't want him to control. Like he can't turn off the television because he didn't like the television, he'd always turn off the television.

02:21:58
I'm glad cats don't have to do that, and he can't close the drapes anymore, like we gave him control of his space, not our space, yeah, but the funny thing is you could tell what he wanted to go to bed, because he would still give the command to close the the living room drapes even though it didn't work anymore, which is his way of saying I want to go to bed. People are annoying me. It's dark in the room.

02:22:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That sounds pretty smart to me. I think it's really cool he had it going on thank you, richard, always a pleasure.

02:22:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, paul. We do windows weekly on a wednesday morning for me, anyway, 11 am pacific, that's 2 pm eastern time, and next week, uh, we're gonna go to summertime now. You aren't, paul, right?

02:22:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
mexico no longer does, yeah, so we'll be saving time yeah, one hour off from the rest of the planet again, I don't know but, richard, we and I will be springing, we're doing our shift this weekend and then for better or worse.

02:22:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that means, uh, it will be at 1800 utc um, not because utc changes, but we do so. I know it's very confusing it is.

02:23:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, there's a law in the books in british columbia that says the moment that all of the Pacific time zone you have to follow, agree, everybody Stop.

02:23:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:23:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We voted in California. Washington and Oregon is signed on. It's just California.

02:23:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In a referendum to not go to standard time.

02:23:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, to stay on, but you can't do that.

02:23:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was going to say what you have to you. I was going to say what you have to you could say we don't want to do saving time, daylight saving, anymore.

02:23:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you want to only be on daylight savings?

02:23:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what the Californians voted for and of course, it takes federal approval, because you're basically changing your time zone.

02:23:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, interesting. Okay, yeah, how'd that work out? Well, nothing happened, yeah, okay.

02:23:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We voted for it, but I think it was a strong indicator that we would like to stop the madness, right, yeah?

02:23:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, well, and it sounds like both washington and oregon agree. Whatever, when california settles on something they can actually do, well, I'll do it, we just got to be in the you know gmt minus eight and live with it. No more minus seven the sad part now is like mornings are great here because the sun's coming up reasonably early and now it's about to get well and that's the argument, by the way, for this, because you in the great white norse have very long.

02:24:20
Oh yeah, dark mornings well, and I realized deeply programmed in my into my brain is if it's dark and it's it's very late at night, which became a problem when I started working in the tropics, where the sun sets at six o'clock and it's always freaking hot Like it's dinner time. I haven't eaten dinner yet and I can't keep my eyes open because programmed into my brain is it's dark and it's hot, it's late.

02:24:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So when does it, when does the sun come up after this time change?

02:24:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, it'll be up around 7 38 o'clock. That's not bad. Right now it's coming up at 6 30.

02:24:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's nice, yeah, well, I, frankly, if you wanted to, if the sun wanted to stay in bed till eight, I'd be happy with that. They worry about kids going to school in the dark.

02:24:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nobody wants that, yep except that's exactly what happens all winter long.

02:25:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They do anyway yeah you know, yeah, no, you can't make the day longer. This is just.

02:25:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The kids are more in danger because they, because the bus driver's tired, because you change the time zone, right, don't?

02:25:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, there are more heart attacks in the dark the next monday, there will be a uptick in heart attacks, auto accidents. Yeah, because people have lost an hour sleep. Well, we're going to do it anyway, so yep just logic be damned the truth is you don't have to watch live.

02:25:32
Obviously, we're a podcast. You can watch it whenever you want, uh, but that's only if you want to watch the live streams. There are live streams for our club in the discord. There's youtube, twitch, tiktok x, facebook linkedin and kick, so there are plenty of places you can watch live. Now, then, the real advantage of watching live, besides getting the freshest version of the show, is you can chat with us, and we watch the chat, as you probably figured out, for all of the different channels. So that's the advantage. If you really want to schedule it and ignore what time it is, just download a copy of the show at twittv slash. Www.

02:26:06
For Windows Weekly, there's a YouTube channel dedicated. You'll see a link at the Twit page, and that's actually good to know, because if you wanted to share, like the whiskey segment or whatever with a friend, it's easy to clip it on YouTube. And then, of course, after the fact, you can get a podcast client and subscribe and you never miss an episode, audio or video, no charge. Just just download the show. That's. We would love that. Thank you paul, thank you richard, thanks to our club members. We'll see you next time, you winners and you dosers on windows weekly bye on Windows Weekly Bye-bye.