Windows Weekly 924 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 Thorat and Richard Campbell are here. We have things to talk about. Indeed, we do. Why last week's Windows update removed Copilot for some computers Good news, they're bringing Copilot to the Xbox. So there's always that the FTC has decided to, yes, go ahead with its antitrust probe of Microsoft. And why Microsoft is no longer including the power supply with Surface PCs in Europe. All that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therata and Richard Campbell, episode 924, recorded Wednesday, march 19th 2025. No one wants to be plumbing. Hey, you winners and you dozers. It's time for Windowsers Weekly, the show where we get together with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell and talk about Microsoft. Theriot is here. He's at his domicile in Mexico City. He's, of course, also on the web at theriotcom. Good day, paul, good afternoon, I guess, or buenos tardes as they say.

01:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hello, I don't know.

01:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And from beautiful Madeira park in british columbia. Richard campbell of run as radio fame a you, hoser, try to say native languages of how's it going? How's it going?

01:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you want. You want the, you want the view.

01:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's cloudy day today oh, let's see the view. A cloudy day in madeira park.

01:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The ocean is flat and quiet.

01:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll be honest for them the cloudy and sunny days are pretty indistinguishable not bad.

01:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They, the sea lions, have moved on because the orcas were around, but the eagles have been active, so when the sea lions were there, was it, were they noisy?

02:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh very yeah yeah, the noxious critters they're kind of yeah, they're kind of yeah and they smell.

02:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm kind of grateful the orca is moving them along, so you can hear them for miles.

02:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The guy who lives below us has a baby and the baby's not always here, but he's probably here about half the week, we'll say, and he never wakes us up in the, which nobody here understands, but it's because of his bizarre screechy, whiny, scream thing that he does all the time. I'm like is there a bird of prey murdering something downstairs? What is that? It's a baby.

02:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I came out the door yesterday and there was a bird of prey on the stair railing right there, oh goodness, and it scared the crap out of me. I think was a uh, I think we have red tail hawks, but it was big, it was like big. It might have been a vulture, it was like, but you know, in fact, if it was a vulture, should I be worried? A vulture? What does it know that you don't know well?

02:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they hang around waiting for. I'm not kidding, I was on a walk back when we still live in massachusetts. I looked up and I could see the birds circling and I was like, oh, that's cool. And I walked five or ten more minutes and I looked and he's still up there and I'm like is he circling me? He's like go ahead, fatty trip, how dare you? You know? I'm like what's happening? I think he's over me. Yeah, that's all I can imagine. He was like he's going to come flying down, you know.

03:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I've survived 24 hours. Maybe I'll be okay.

03:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think you're okay and you've survived months we have black vulvas around our show, but it's typically dead seals on the beaches, right? Yeah, yeah, that happens. Yeah, they clean them up. Thanks for that. You know Speaking of more abundance.

03:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How's Windows doing these days, guys? I'm glad yes, it's doing great good opening line windows.

03:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is a good one, yeah it's a very special.

03:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a. I feel like I'm partying in the bunker at this point. I'm just trying to pretend reality isn't happening. You're ignoring the cans of gasoline. Yeah, exactly how close are the russians? No, that's a little too close to home right now. Okay, so, uh, how's windows? Um, it's okay. Uh, the best story this week possibly was that the patch tuesday updates from, I guess, whatever, that was a week ago, eight days ago, whatever um, apparently is uninstalling the co-pilot app on a lot of computers, not all computers. That is hilarious and beautiful and is is just the perfect microsoft windows moment of all time, you know. And so, of course, you get all this feedback on social media from people who see the, the headline, and they're like I see that as a good thing, or like what's the problem? It's like I'll tell you what the problem is they're gonna force install it next month. Yeah, you're not getting rid of it.

04:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like sorry, but anyway, just a reminder that we can take stuff away and we can put it back yeah, and you know this is god.

04:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This just is a an awful showcase for how terrible the quality is right now in this group, but anyway, any, so that happened and then I think after that it's pretty much an incredible run of insider stories, right?

05:11
So just to kind of put where we are in the schedule, like I said, last week was patch tuesday, so next week will be week d, and week d we're going to get the preview update for what will be the stable update that we get in patch Tuesday in April, right, and so there's a bunch of stuff around that. But we have multiple builds. Since last we spoke, including today, we got a canary channel build which has some minor changes to the security, you know, the windows security app and some other small things, not a big deal. And of course, canary nobody even knows what canary is. So, whatever, doesn't matter, um, but more I think more important was today, and then also I don't remember when, but I think late last week we got various release preview builds, and so these are the preview of the preview, if that makes sense, the last pre-release build before it goes to week D, if that makes sense.

06:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but shouldn't that be in beta rather than in the release build? Where is it going to go in week D? It's still going to be in the release build still going to be in the release bill.

06:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's a well. So there's conflicting language around this right. So what you're referencing is a much more I would call it engineer engineering based era, where terms and words made sense and meant something and we use them and they were accurate. And it's hard to say say so. The preview update, as I will continue to call it because that's the name, is sometimes referred to as an optional update, and so in some ways that's a better name because, well, they're both true. But yeah, you can get it in stable. You don't have to be part of the windows insider program. You can optionally go into windows update and say, yeah, I would like this thing. Now, it wants you to always get things, but if you wanted to, as a one-off, you could choose to do that, and so they don't really always follow this logical progression where it works its way from dev to beta to release, preview to stable. It's not the way, you know. I'm still trying to get comfortable with that. And then Richard's comment about beta of is giving me ptsd now.

07:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, but it's okay so order to all of these, right? Isn't there an order? Can't we expect to see a feature in canary?

07:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
there is an order, but it's over to dev.

07:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, then it goes over to beta.

07:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's random and it's also a flawed algorithm, because sometimes it skips things. So, uh, today we got a release preview build for 24H2. Last week, I think it was sometime, we got a release preview, two release preview builds, actually for 23H2, but also for Windows 10, right? So that's always hilarious. And then let me just see what's in these things, because we've already talked about most of this stuff, honestly. But the live caption improvements, right, voice access improvements, some task manager stuff remember they're recalculating, how, uh, they display cpu workload percentage, whatever it is. Um, some widget stuff not again, not major I. I think it was as recently as last week, it might have been the week before, but at some point I was like, I don't know, I feel like we're building up something. But then I look at this stuff and I'm like, yeah, not really, there's really not much going on here.

08:27
They did pull an update from 23H2. In 24H2, they added those labels to the context menu, to the little hieroglyphic icons, so that you could see that they were cut, copy paste, whatever the choices are. And actually they pulled that now and might not actually make it into 23H2, at least this month. So I guess we'll see, or this coming month, yeah, and then what was the is there. I'm trying to find out what's in Windows 10. Oh yes, so nothing. There it goes, actually Nothing important. So the last big update there was the inclusion of the new Outlook app, of course, which you know everyone loves, and no controversy there at all.

09:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got to tell you on this machine now the new Outlook app is, of course, which everyone loves, and no controversy there at all. I got to tell you on this machine now the new Outlook app is the full-time app. I've actually removed the other icon. I mean, yeah, I still have another machine over there with the old one on.

09:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was more impacted by Skype and I just, you know, I have like a WinGet script that I use when I blow stuff onto a new computer and I was just looking at that this morning because on this computer I'm reviewing, it seems like a couple things were missing and I don't know why. But I looked at it just today, literally, and one of the items in there is skype and I was like, well, I guess I can get rid of that still there, get rid of that little guy.

09:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's chance. I gotta tell you I I made a call on Skype like literally this week. You're just amazing, yeah, and you know, it looked and sounded great. Yeah, oh you're terrible.

09:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought you made a call. Like deleted it. You actually made a call using Skype.

09:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I made a call about Skype. He made a call on using Skype. We're going to call it is what we thought. We're calling it Exactly.

10:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's dead, jim, sorry, uh it does sound great, but the good news is the codex survives. So yeah, teams will say it's still yeah, it's still there, and I was.

10:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Admittedly, the client is horrible and filled with terrible people, right like it's been. It's been hijacked by all kinds of exploits. There's a lot of spam and stuff.

10:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's an incredible amount of spam you get added to groups that are like these Bitcoin groups or whatever they are. How do people think?

10:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that works, because it must work. Sometimes I'm in that group. I think I should buy some Bitcoin.

10:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just got lucky to get pulled into this so lucky.

10:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I saw this headline yesterday. I think it said Apple messages just saved me from the worst messages spam I've ever seen, and all I could think was if you had a pixel, you wouldn't have even seen it, you idiot. Yeah, you know like the apple doesn't do anything to protect you from spam. What are you talking about? That's crazy. But anyway, okay, not to get off topic, you can report it. Yeah, good luck I. So I let me see. Actually, I probably.

11:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's like the that's kind of like the head of the uh the hoa. I'm gonna report you how many?

11:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know it's like a fun. You know, remember the commercial with the the owl and it was the tootsie pop. How many licks does it take to get to the center like this? He's like one, two and then he eats it in these three. How many taps and swipes does it take to get into a message in apple messages and then mark it as spam and delete it? It's way more than you think it is. It might be double digit, like steps. It's crazy, it's stupid how hard that is. It's just horrible.

11:43
Anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to get off on a tangent. I just think I'm talking about bad software. I don't know, it just came up. I'm losing track because there's so many of these things. But dev and beta in 24H2 and then beta in 23H2. Both got updates as well last week. And the big thing, there is voice access suggestions. If you have snapdragon x co-pilot plus pc uh enrolled in dev or beta, which I do um, you can now talk to it, to um to run apps. But you don't. It's. It's not like a sierra game where you have to get the, or an old uh infocom game where you have to get the. The wording exactly right. Yeah, it will. Actually it's using ai to understand like you're saying something like this yeah which is a feature.

12:29
I have to say, this thing has needed, since this feature has existed right yeah, it almost makes me want to drag out colossal cave adventure oh, that's a chat gbt to it right right.

12:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, I just opened my skype and uh, wow, look at this. It says I have a subscription to unlimited calling in North America with my Harman Kardon invoke speaker. That is amazing.

12:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you have to know where that speaker is.

12:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is like archaeology going here. I wonder if I've been paying for that.

13:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is like a page of dead technology collected in one place. Yeah, that's incredible technology collected in one place.

13:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's all in one spot, and it's a pretty old picture of me too.

13:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I like it though. Yeah, it's like a mad magazine drawing. I think it is from mad magazine. Oh good, okay, yeah, because it looks like that style that was my one appearance in mad magazine what's that guy's name?

13:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um uh al jaffe I think yes, yes, yeah, I can't dick Al Jaffe, is it Al Jaffe? Yes, that's what I was thinking. Yeah, dick DiBartolo, who, of course, was on our show all the time, wrote me and Lisa into a Mad Magazine, so we both have mad images. I wonder how much I'm paying for. This Expires October 25th 2025.

13:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Except for that part where the whole thing goes away in May.

13:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
View purchase history. You haven't purchased anything yet, so maybe just because that came with a harman kardon which has long been reverted to its yeah, and like I said I, wonder if you know, where the base materials it's been yeah, it's been recycled. It's just a pile of microplastic now I'm going to delete all the credit cards they have on file credit. You gotta spell this right though being diligent, yeah, because well, I don't want to art what is? The auto recharge is not enabled, though.

14:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a harman kardon invoke was from 2017.

14:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you remember that you tap the head and they give you oh yeah, no, it was a nice little speaker, um I don't know where it is now.

14:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was there you know the their entry into the voice speaker unit. Last and it last, and it died first yeah, yeah right, oh well, exactly, oh well oh well, oh well okay well, and then just some app removed in windows 11. Oh well, there is.

14:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh well, oh well oh shucks, oh, these things happen. You know how does that happen actually, how does what happen remove an app by accident in an update I have really bad coding practices.

14:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know that's a good question.

14:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have no idea I'm wondering if, oops, I'm on the wrong side. There we go, I'm. I'm wondering, and so are you. How did this get? Did this? We got all that order. Okay, we're all back now. For those of you watching, I am in the left speaker. I'm thinking there was one guy on the build team who had uninstalled Copilot and they probably run a program that says what are the changes. And he's the build guy and they had all the changes and it got copied into the changes like they, like it had already been. It had been removed from the build computer or something.

15:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean I'm, I don't know, it's probably just a manifest, honestly, yeah, or maybe a line got deleted, and because it? Was deleted, it was uninstalled. If it was there kind of I don't, I mean, I'm just you're making me speculate I hate speculating. No, I don't know. I don't know wild, so wild.

15:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, I'm gonna disappear.

15:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You continue to talk a lot of times people will say to me do you have any idea why microsoft would? I'll just invent something like stop, get you know, get rid of the old outlook. And I'll be like, does it matter why? Or are we just gonna move on to what you know, like it doesn't matter why, like it's why it's gone?

16:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you're acting like this rationale. Why is there?

16:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
air you just, it is yeah, exactly um, okay, so they're also within these various um, uh, windows, insider builds, uh, and channels. There are various app updates occurring, so the paint app is being updated I would think it would say here, but I believe it is across all channels and if you have a Copilot plus PC and use Microsoft Paint, you have a feature called Co-Creator, and Co-Creator is where you can draw in Paint and then use a text prompt over on the side and it will use the combination of the two to create an image. And they're evolving that so that you can. It will do that try again thing, which is kind of the you know, when you're generating code you're like do it again, do it a little bit better, can you make it a little bit better.

16:49
You know, I just keep doing it like that. I haven't tried this yet, but I I I've never been super impressed by the local AI stuff, frankly, but anyway, that's coming. And then notepad and snipping tool are also getting new features, and this part I'm unclear on, because these features are in Dev and Canary. It's not clear if they're only for Copilot plus PC. So I actually haven't looked at it yet. Actually, I did enroll a normal, like a non-Copilot plus PC in the Dev channel to see what this is like, but on my Surface laptop. Actually, let me just do it here and see what this one.

17:26
This is not on Insider, but I just want to see what it comes up with. Yeah, no, it actually does have this stuff. So this is just a normal computer. All right, I think I just answered my question, and it does have the co-pilot menu. Now it has the Microsoft account avatar with a link so you can go see your AI credit balance. So this is telling me, then, that this is not a Copilot plus PC feature. So everyone's going to get this. So now you can paste text or write text in Notepad and you'll be able to use the rewriting tools right, summarize, make it shorter, make it longer, change the tone, make a poem. By the way, strongly recommend everyone uses the poem thing. It's hilarious, um, completely worthless, but hilarious, um, so that's cool actually. So I guess that's coming.

18:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess that's just coming to everybody we're gonna have somebody on intelligent machines on the next show who says that ai is a existential threat to humankind because it's going to become so smart that it's just going to eliminate us, and we won't. It won't need us anymore. Yeah, the super, the super intelligent hypothesis. Yes, yes, he's, I'm gonna, and I'm gonna counter that with future of life.

18:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Basically what this? What it can do is turn any writing into the lorex story from dr seuss. Yeah, exactly I mean, if you think that's existential.

18:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, maybe you're onto something yeah, we're not there yet, I'm guessing is what the yeah.

18:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what I'm saying. We're not there yet.

18:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly, not quite at that point.

18:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Irritatingly to me, they've also added a recent menu, a recent files menu, to file, you know, file like file, recent, and then you can see your recent files in Notepad. Right, that's a feature that should have been there for a long time. The reason that's irritating is because it's actually on my to-do list for my uh notepad replacement app and, um, now microsoft did it first jerks, anyway, it looks like you did it. Okay, microsoft, I'm not going to dump on it too much, but that's fine. Um, and then there's a new functionality in snipping tool called draw and hold.

19:23
It's fascinating to me that snipping tool has gone from being a very basic kind of screen capture utility to this thing that actually has a bunch of functionality. Now it's really good at taking an image that has text in it and just taking the text out of it. You know, text image to text recognition, or whatever you call it is kind of amazing. And so Draw and Hold builds on the kind of mini menu you get in there for drawing tools, like you get like a pen and a highlighter and some shapes and things and what it lets you do is freehand draw using the mouse or your pen or your finger, I would imagine, and if you on the final line of that thing, because of course what it looks like is a child's drawing that you would hang on the fridge but if you just hold it there for a second, it pops, it makes a line straight, which you know, yeah, and then from there you can resize, move, adjust whatever as needed. So actually that's pretty cool.

20:14
They're also making the snipping tool extensible, which is kind of fascinating. I haven't looked at this too deeply either, but there's now an API. So if you want to call the snipping tool from your own app, you can actually get at functionality from snipping tool. You don't have to bring up the whole app, you can actually just bring up the part you need. So you could, I guess, use it to make the basis of a I don't know your own screenshot app, maybe one that includes the mouse cursor right, which is one of the features snipping tool still lacks for some reason, although that includes the mouse cursor right, which is one of the features, snipping Tool still lacks for some reason, although you have to think that's coming and there's some documentation about that up on Microsoft.

20:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Learn if you're a developer and think that might be of use so Well, that's pretty darn exciting.

20:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I'm glad you think so. It is what it is.

21:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess I don't know what to tell you all right um before we move on to other equally thrilling.

21:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I'm hoping I'll catch your attention somewhere in this show. I'm paying attention no, no, I mean I'll, I'll interest you you will interest me I can't, I can't invent the news. Well, actually we're getting pretty close. Maybe I can, maybe I'll start doing that, I'll do my, that's something co-pilot be good at yeah, hey, it's boring today. Uh, co-pilot, could you make up some news?

21:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like it would be really cool if I could say to ai, and I'm sure you'd appreciate this too hey, check the week's uh windows and microsoft news and assemble a show rundown for us for a show that runs about two hours. Yeah, uh, with four ad breaks. And uh, put that up in notion and uh, let me know I could probably do it in notion.

21:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I could probably do it right now as we're talking, because this is a little nose thing down in the corner like whatever that is notion. Ai like no, then I get it notion is it a nose really? Well, it's a. It's a nose with eyes right, like it's a little face hysterical, I don't see, I've paid so little attention to it that I don't I have never clicked on it on purpose, but not when you're doing the ad.

22:14
I'm going to do that. Click it and see if you can write the show for us. Yeah, I'm gonna see what it does all right.

22:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
While paul is busy futzing around with ai, uh, this would be an opportune time for me to tell you about our fine sponsor for this show. These are actually great guys US Cloud. What do you think they do? They are the number one, number one, top number one in the world. Microsoft Unified Support Replacement, third-party support for Microsoft. In fact, we've been talking about them for a few months now, so I would hope that you understand that.

22:48
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23:50
But now US Cloud is excited to tell you about something that kind of lives up to their name, and this is something I don't think Microsoft would ever do. They have a new Azure cost optimization service. So I mean, I think this is the case with everybody. When's the last time you evaluated your Azure usage? If it's been a while and for most people it probably is just the kind of thing you just you know you add to it over time you probably have some Azure sprawl, a little spend creep going on and it's kind of like, well, we don't really know how would we find out? Well, here's the good news Saving on Azure is easier than you think with US Cloud.

24:41
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25:09
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25:36
Sam, the technical operations manager at Bead Gaming he gave US Cloud five stars. He said and I'm quoting quote we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know 10 grand a month not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure, but once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really starts to add up. It's simple Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance, and you can do it all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Visit uscloudcom right now. Book a call. Find out how much your team can save the best. Support US-based team smart engineers. Twice as fast, half as much uscloudcom. It's a no-brainer. Book a call today. Get faster Microsoft support for less uscloudcom. We thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly. That's the kind of support I appreciate. All right Now let's see. We did the Windows 11 hilarity. Is there more Microsoft news or should we just go home? There is more.

26:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, I did do a quick summary of our show notes. It just took a bulleted list and made a shorter bulleted list, so that's not particularly interesting.

26:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you have to ask it. Like to go out and check all the news sources, yeah, and say you know, here I'll do it with perplexity, because perplexity is connected to the today's internet, to the internet, and what? To the internet. Okay, let's just see what we get here in the meantime.

27:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm curious if you have heard anything about this. So this is the type of thing that looks on the surface like it's not nothing almost right. So short letter to employees from satchin adela that they republished on their website they, or he, has created a new office of strategy and transformation. This will be led by Kathleen Hogan, who was previously Microsoft's chief people officer and head of HR, which I kind of hate that title, but whatever that title, but whatever. She will be responsible for defining Microsoft's overarching corporate strategy and structure and lead its continuous transformation as a company.

27:54
So the reason this is weird to me is I feel like Microsoft, especially under Satya Nadella, has always been like a thing right. So in the beginning they were the cloud company, right, and we know that he did that thing like from office space, where he basically went to everybody and said what is it you do here? And wanted to make sure that they could justify their existence as a business, but also that they could fit within this strategy this. You know we're going to be a cloud company, right, and obviously the past two years-ish whatever it's been they've shifted the focus sideways a little bit and now they're an AI company which is related to the cloud, obviously. So you know, again, we go around. The company got to make sure everything makes sense. You're doing AI, right, you're doing AI, oh you're doing it.

28:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Good, you can stay. You stay, you know you're doing ai. That's why we have copilot.

28:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's been plenty of messages coming out saying if you don't have ai in your role somewhere, you're not out for this company. Yep, so I feel like this might be a formal move to almost um protect them against some future layoffs or whatever, where they say hey, sorry, you guys didn't have anything to do with AI.

29:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Read the right cue. It's the head of HR that's leading this group. Why? Do you think that is?

29:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. So the former head of HR, essentially, who is now in charge of Microsoft's strategy and transformation, and a formal accounting of what that means? This was presented as nothing, and the more I look at it, the more I kind of I guess you have to read between the lines there.

29:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You don't get to be a project lead on something reporting directly to SLT if it isn't important.

29:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Reporting directly to Nadella in this case, by the way, the senior leadership team.

29:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but she's part of that. Yeah, she's now part of that too. So I don't know. This thing is possibly as short as 300 words long. There's not much to it. A lot of it has to do with the woman who is replacing her as the new head of HR and a lot of it is just about that woman whose name I've already forgotten, kathleen Hogan, and her history at Microsoft and before, and there's this kind of vibe to it like we hired her for this, but actually we think she's going to be awesome at this. So I've been talking to her about it and she's on board and now we're doing it and I guess she's going to formally. I mean, you know, it used to be simple as, like, we would like to see a computer on every desk and then we would like that to be running Microsoft software, and then, when that became quaint, you know, we moved on to whatever else. But I feel like I think we might be formulating a new mission statement.

30:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a mission statement, yeah.

30:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, we've already seen plenty of evidence of it. You know, pre pandemic and even you'd have to give me a little bit further back than that, you know four decades getting a job at Microsoft was that life kind of job, right? Two thirds of that company employed by people who literally interned during from university and then this was the only job they had, both MBAs and comm psych grads, the other third being from industry. And even before the pandemic, where the pandemic was certainly an accelerator as there was a pressure happening, there were fights between the workforce and the leadership right, the Google walkouts, even Microsoft employees protesting movements toward unionization, like generally a sense of we're not all in this all together. The corporation is becoming more corporate. The people are becoming needing to defend themselves from the corporation.

31:37
Then the pandemic, and now we're coming out the other side of it. And you're right, you've got the AI wave. I think they're rethinking employment strategy as a whole. I think, I think, I think. So that's interesting. I and this is not a sick. This is only slightly a signal to the employees.

31:52
This is mostly a signal to shareholders oh okay, yeah right that's why it's a press release yeah, it's a very curious I.

32:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I have not been this confused by something this simple for so long. I can't even remember the last one of these, but you, I read it and I thought this something else going on. And actually you know, laurent, the guy. He said could you look at this Like, is there a reading between the lines version of this story?

32:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I'm like I think that's all it is yeah, I think that's all it is actually yeah is that they are formalizing the way they're going to think about careers at microsoft look going forward so leo has created his uh ai replacement for me, which is there you go?

32:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, it's not as good as you, I gotta tell you, you know, it will get there.

32:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It will get there.

32:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it's pretty good. It's it said weirdly based on the search result. So the prompt was I'm hosting a podcast about microsoft this morning. Please prepare a rundown for me with the most important stories from this week. Put the items in a bulleted list. Aim for a two-hour show it said, based on the search results, there aren't any specific stories from the march 12th through 19th time I was gonna say weird.

33:00
The first tour from last week. Yeah, I can provide you with most recent news from march. It would be relevant. Patch tuesday they didn't mention the co-pilot thing no, they probably didn't know about it yet.

33:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I know it's supposed to be up to date, but yeah, you would think that would have been something I melded together. Most of this is older yep, yep, um.

33:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is, I think, why you want a human, because there's more a human is going to give you personality, more in the choice there's also index.

33:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's also a bias issue which and I don't mean that in a negative way I mean there's a. You know there's a bias to it. There's a you could call it an opinion or that you know there's a. There's a whole range of stuff we could talk about and you know I have my little choices, you're making.

33:43
Yeah, I have my little focus and you know, sometimes, you know, because we've had weeks even when you said, oh, I'm surprised this wasn't there or wasn't the top story, whatever it might be, and it's like, yeah, that's part of that, by I bias, for lack of a better term, I don't know. Um, there is, yeah, the ftc thing we're gonna. That's actually the next thing we'll talk about. Outlook dragon, dragon graphics. This is making me realize how incredibly boring this world is, geez it's brutal.

34:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So anthony points out that I I don't do it for this show, but I normally go through the week's news every um constantly and put together a bookmark list for other shows I could put. If I were doing that, I could say, hey, pull from this list of stories and put something together, but then that's that. I'm still doing all the work. I don't want to do any work.

34:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like you should build a point in rss feed at it and say grab the stories from the past whatever seven days, yeah, well, that's what I would do, because I have my my raindrop rss feed of all the stories that I have said.

34:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is like we're right on the cusp.

34:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're so close, a bunch of overlapping bits of AI functionality that, like we sometimes will describe as grounding, but sometimes it's really just here's like I'm pointing you at a thing and it's like so, summarize this or whatever that thing is. That could be several documents, it could be a folder full of documents, it could be whatever it is. Whatever that thing is, that could be several documents, it could be a folder full of documents. It could be whatever it is, and it's kind of what I've from the beginning. I think for the one spark that went off in my dim brain when this started happening was I want to be able to point this thing at my archives and have it, ask it questions and say, yes, august, whatever, 2020 or 2003, a million years ago, you wrote about and this thing and then have links where you can go find those original documents. Right, like I want this so badly.

35:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I have done absolutely nothing to make that happen don't get too excited, because the next step is to feed it to notebook lm and have it create a podcast with in our voices genial hosts that sound a lot like paul and richard.

35:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah I know, I know I know, no, it's scary.

35:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, those bots already sound a lot like me yeah, listen anthony nielsen says feedly has an ai uh component that you could build, okay, and so you could take your feedly and then yeah, yes, you can take your feedly you can take, if I'll tell you what I mean you can do what you want to do with it.

36:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No um got your feed. Honestly, I'm not worried about being replaced by yeah, but the reason is we're all in our mid to late 50s or older we're done if I were 25. We're done. If the lightning struck today and they're like guys, you're out, we'd be like you know what?

36:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had a good run whatever yeah, that's why I worry about our kids because, yeah, they're growing up in this world where it really is kind of uncertain.

36:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's incredible and there's, unless you're using, unless you're using five years, and then it's you're still back in 2007, you're fine, yeah uh, you know, this is my brown liquor corner will be safe.

36:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the, I think, the consensus, yeah yeah, yeah, somebody's gonna have to taste it and tell the ai what it tastes like yep, I assume they'll just be a little taste strip thing that will come out of the computer a little, you know that the big thing this year in ai is and uh, jensen wong was talking about it on at his gtc keynote yesterday it's gonna be robots, because ai needs to get real world experience.

37:12
It has to have experience plus if they build the army that can defeat us, so that too that's gonna be everybody jensen invited a robot onto the stage with him. It was very cute, was it?

37:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
oh, sam altman, you mean no, no, no, I'm just kidding. Hello benson, I am a human, why?

37:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
70 billion dollar funding everyone stands like this.

37:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is normal now, have you seen the new boston dynamics atlas, the next generation? Yeah, that's self-contained and can break dance. Yeah we're.

37:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is in the next 10 years. What we're going to see is AI moving out into the world, which maybe there is reason to be a little worried. I don't know. Don't arm them please no.

37:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
the US military has made it perfectly clear they're ready for armed AI.

37:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's too late, you know. I mean, in some ways, if soldiers, all the soldiers, were AI fighting other AI and no human was getting killed in the matter, then that would be great. Then you could have kind of proxy war and then we wouldn't have to kill people. That would be okay. I don't know if the robots would go for that. Why is he crawling on his? I don't know.

38:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I find it vaguely irritating how agile this thing is, because I can tell you right now, if I got up and walked toward the bathroom, I would bump into something on the way With the wall, the doorframe, do something, you know.

38:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my God, I just did a somersault. We're watching the bus in dynamic Shoulder roll. Yeah, this is, by the way, owned by Google. This is part of DeepMind.

38:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Even the, even the name deep mind's a little terrifying, oh shoot now you're just showing off you just did that his head swirls around and he's like, oh, now he's doing break dancing he's like why didn't anyone tell me my ass was so big um like a oh boy, that's robots.

38:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Terrifying, terrifying, cartwheeling robots how crazy.

39:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right, I have lost track, so all right, no, no, no, I'm not that sorry, that was not a complaint, that's just a general complaint about my brain. That's fine, we're doing good. Um, so I don't know if you guys noticed, but there was a change in presidential administration a couple months ago and, yeah, I know it hasn't really been big in the news. But, um, because you know, just transfer power here is always so great, um, there's been.

39:31
They got rid of your enemy, lena khan, except oddly, the new ftc is pretty much going forward with a lot of her investigations, including the one apparently this is a report. Um, well, multiple uh publications bloomberg financial times, new york times uh, they're going to go ahead with a microsoft investigation, which, to me but when I say the microsoft investigation, this is actually several different things it's their licensing practices in cloud computing, which has been a big concern in europe, especially as everybody probably knows. Um, it's worked with AI, but not exclusively, but also including how it trains models, meaning, does it steal that data? Which, yes, of course, it's partnership with OpenAI, which we all kind of understand was specially formulated to avoid regulation, right. So, yeah, there is an element to our government which is kind of you know they don't like big tech any more than the previous administration, because in their viewpoint.

40:33
this big tech has been silencing their viewpoint, I guess, or something to that effect. So, anyway, how's that been working out for big tech? I think it's so much better when we know what they think. So that's been working out great. Now it makes sense to me, right? I'm like, oh okay, I didn't really understand what you were doing, but now it makes sense. It's something I would never say.

40:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want to say, richard, I love Canada. I don't want it to become the 51st state. I want your sovereignty to be preserved. I joked on a couple episodes ago about the 51st state and I had got a very. I forgot. I didn't realize how sensitive the subject is. Uh, in the great white north I got a hateful email from somebody says I'm canceling all my subscriptions, my club membership yep, how dare you call us the 51st state?

41:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
and I was. Oh, I got some something like that as well. I like when people feel the need to tell you this stuff, um I just want to say I love canada, yeah I appreciate that.

41:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've had a few people, americans, contact me saying you don't hate me, do you? And I was like, listen, I don't blame victims.

41:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We we met two people thank you, thank you thank you, richard.

41:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Two people of the weekend who felt the need to say we're from canada. We don't hate you, thank you, but we have hatred for what's it?

41:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, we don't want to be a 51st state and we don't want to be in a trade war with you. I don't I don't want.

41:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I had a guy who owned a restaurant tell me that they only bought canadian coffee and I said I'm not even sure it doesn't grow any coffee. I was was like I don't think Canada makes coffee. But listen, that's fine, I'm sure it's not a scam.

42:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I get my Kenyan coffee through Canada. How about that?

42:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so yeah it was. It was bizarre this weekend how often this came up, but anyway, so yeah, canada is great. I think we can all agree to that. Mexico's not too shabby, I love Mexico. That, uh, mexico's not too shabby, I love mexico too. Um, you know, basically most of north america is pretty good yeah, um, two out of three ain't bad.

42:28
Not crazy about venezuela, but that's not you know the poor venezuelan north america, north america specifically, uh, so yeah, anyway. So the fdc is going to move forward with this, apparently, and that's actually really interesting to me. So, and honestly, not entirely unexpected, although, yeah, I think anything that that Lena Khan touched I could see them distancing themselves from, maybe, but apparently not. And then this just came out today and I don't think it's universal yet, but apparently Microsoft is no longer going to sell Surface computers with a power adapter in the box in the EU, starting with the tablets, you know, surface Pro, etc. And then moving to laptops in 2026.

43:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it depends on where you're looking. These are the ones that are USB-C right.

43:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well no. So these surface devices all come with like a proprietary charger. So the way it works is you could unplug it and put a USB-C cable, then charge on the USB-C port on the computer. But they come with that little fin, the.

43:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Surface Connect fin. Yeah, the little magnetic pop-off one.

43:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

43:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's weird. It is weird, but they're going to ship that cable. You just have to put it into your own adapter, right?

43:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're not going to ship the cable either, because the cable is actually kind of pointless without the adapter. So no, the assumption here is that most people have a USB-C cable and charger. It will work. I found that even kind of lower power phone chargers actually can charge computers pretty well now, or at least can charge them to some degree. Uh, slowly maybe if they're smaller or lower wattage or whatever. But um, the nice thing that the nice thing about the service connect part, even today is sort of like the nice thing about the. Um, what's the apple thing called the magnetic uh charger?

44:17
max safe max safe is. It frees up the ports that you have for you know whatever for hard drives, mice, whatever it might be. So you know you have this proprietary thing, which isn't great. If you forget to bring it it's fine because everyone has a usbc charger. But if you have it you you're freed up the whatever number of ports you might have on that computer. So I guess the theory here is everyone has usbc now, so maybe you don't need it. Plus, I think these things are getting more expensive, so they're not lowering the price. I can tell you that.

44:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you know they're not going to use it. You're just going to toss it away.

44:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like I get that idea that's exactly what I did with the like when I bought the macbook. I threw that thing in the drawer. I haven't looked at it since because I'm never going to use the stupid apple thing. It looks like a like a fisher price toy from the 1970s. I don't know what the I don't know what the point of it is, but um, yeah, so it's kind of a weird one, I don't know. Oh, and I should. I'm sorry. The one thing I left that was the stated reason for this was to uh meet the needs in the eu, to uh not have waste, like to reduce e-waste, okay, and not to save money.

45:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just, we're doing this feel it's not for us well, they just don't have to lower the price, right, and they're not saving anybody any money. I don't think they're doing that, so it just means you'll have to order it separately, right?

45:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean.

45:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I tend to order a second power supply anyway, because I want. We'll leave one in my bag and one at my desk, of course. Yes, yes.

45:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You are a sophisticated traveler. You've done this before that makes I do you know I do the same thing.

45:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How do I not forget my power supply by having more of them? Yep, yep, although you know again need the expansion, then I pretty much don't. I mean, as long as you trust usbc pd right, like the I would, I'd want I'd have to. Is there a reason? Not to well, because the different implementations there.

46:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I stick with something that you know is going to work great, like an anchor product or whatever, and you should be okay, I mean.

46:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But but yes, fair enough, I mean yeah, I have an anchor charger with like five usbc ports and, yeah, 100 watt, you know delivery. That sounds great for for my laptop and yeah, that's all I need to bring. It's perfect. Yep, okay, affectionate, I think that's it Is it time for another ad.

46:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm super eager.

46:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was just nothing to talk about this week. Is that it, no, dear co-pilot?

46:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
can you make up some news All right?

47:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we still have more AI conversation to come. We're not done with that. We're going to, of course, do. The world-famous Xbox segment Back of the book has some picks and tips and run as radio and, of course, a brown liquor pick. I'm going to ask you. My brother-in-law came over so we ordered what was supposedly a snapped together wine rack, big, you know, six feet by five feet or whatever. Wow, to hold all our wine. Because we have a nice cool closet we could put it in. And you know it was not inexpensive. But they said easy, you could snap it together.

47:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I bought this myself. It's like a tinkertory set with a thousand pieces, yeah.

47:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like a Lincoln Log thing you. They gave you for some reason drywall screws to hold it together.

47:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yes, you know, I thought that's a little weird, because you don't want to shaky, shake and have the thing go flying off the so I put it, I assembled it.

47:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It had a little lean to it and I and I said lisa done.

47:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And she came down and said hmm, she's like why is there a pile of seven extra parts over there?

48:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, there were, oh, there were a bunch of stuff. She said let me call Joe her brother-in-law, Maybe he can come over.

48:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Joe is going to come over. The guy who is a real man yeah, let me call a real man in.

48:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that guy Joe comes, joe's got all the tools. He says you got an impact screwdriver. I said no.

48:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He said well, I brought mine. You were like, just throw it out like one of these.

48:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He took a look at it and said well, you tried Nice, so he reassembles it and it is rock solid, square, beautiful, right, great job, piece of furniture Right. Took him four or five hours, but anyway so I feel like this kind of thing.

48:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, this is. Oh, man Totally affirmed, if he wanted to know how to filter spam out of his email. He'd have to call you Right His life choices were fully affirmed.

48:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But he likes his Irish whiskey so I want to get him a nice bottle to thank him. So I'm going to richard to think about that as I do the ad, and maybe in the brown liquor pick I know you did one, the castle one, yeah, well, that was a pretty good one, right. Capon, I was great.

49:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, maybe I'll get a bottle spend on him. Well, how?

49:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
much is it worth? I need to do this. But since you since you just mentioned this go to our. We go to taco bar, right, the guy who invented the San Linceito cocktail. It's kind of quiet. I talked about this guy. I saw he ordered a tequila-based espresso martini, which I thought was crazy. And he says what kind of drinks do you like? And I said I drink a Manhattan. So what he made for me was a Manhattan made of Jameson because yesterday or two days ago it was St Patrick's Day and Mixta, which is a Mexican corn-based liquor which is terrible, and turned that into a Manhattan of sorts. And it was curious. It was a little different. Don't put Mixta in it.

50:03
It was a World's Clyde kind of a moment't put Mixta in it. It was a world's collide kind of a moment the Mixta is pretty sweet. Right, it is sweet, but it's also sweet in kind of a gross way. I like corn a lot and the sweetness of corn love it. And there's something about Mixta that's like the demon spawn of corn taste. It's just terrible.

50:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should really stick with the Sala, because his people, that's his trademark drink.

50:28
I know, I know it's delicious, I know anyway, you're watching windows weekly with a couple of alcoholics three actually paul thurot, richard campbell. Uh, we will have more in just a moment, but first a word from our sponsor, zscaler. It's a company you need to know about for sure. They are the leader in cloud security. See, here's the problem. Enterprises over the years have spent billions of dollars on perimeter defenses right Firewalls, in effect, and then, of course, vpn, so you can get through the firewall and get to work. Has that helped? Has that worked? Well, no, I think you know. Breaches are going up like crazy 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks last year, $75 million record payout in 2024, and it's only getting worse. It's because these traditional security tools actually do the opposite of help. They expand your attack surface with public-facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. So, in fact, we had this story on Security. Now, last week, bad guys used a VPN to get into a network and, of course, once they're inside the network, most networks just assume well, you're a good guy now because you got in, so they can go everywhere they're looking around. They couldn't get their malware on anything because there were some protections, except they found a camera that was running Linux, a security camera. It was an embedded version of Linux. They were able to put the ransomware on that and have it run and encrypt the whole network on that and have it run and encrypt the whole network.

52:05
Bad guys are bad. The worst thing, of course, is to let them in. But once they get in, even worse, to let them move at will. Right, vpns, you know, get them in. The firewalls aren't caring about what's inside, so if they've got lateral movement, once they're in, they can connect to everything in the network. They find stuff they want to exfiltrate, like your emails, your customer information. They send that out via encrypted traffic and of course, the firewall struggles to inspect that encrypted traffic. At scale, you've got a nightmare.

52:39
The fact is, hackers are exploiting traditional security infrastructure and they're doing it now faster than ever because they're using AI. It's time to rethink your security. You cannot let these guys win. Bad guys are innovating and exploiting your defenses faster than ever before.

52:53
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54:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
now zscalercom slash security I mean I might want to be that, no, you don't trust me, that was a wild story.

54:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They got into the camera? Yeah, they couldn't, they were. There were, I guess, some defenses against some things, but the camera was unprotected. They were able to put their software on and it was running Linux, which I guess is not unusual for embedded systems.

54:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, they say everything's in ESP32, right, they're so cheap and they're so powerful. And they almost all come with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and the Bluetooth is used for initial configuration. Then you get on the Wi-Fi.

54:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's exactly what happened. I can't remember the name of the company.

54:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll spare them the embarrassment, I won't mention it. But this kind of fascinates me because this is something that has come up recently for me, like outside of tech, where it's like the, it's like the unintended consequence of something like you. You go down this path. You're like we're going to use linux on this thing. It's going to be awesome, it's going to be super powerful, you can do all the stuff, but then you know the. The problem is it's linux, which means it's a computer, which means you can write everything's running code on it.

55:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the real thing my, my lights are computers. I can control by my phone. They've got a processor in them and, yeah, they're on Wi-Fi and they have Bluetooth, our mixers. Right, richard, these wonderful RODECasters? I'm sure they're running an operating system, likely Linux. Everything's a computer now.

55:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, because it gives you all the functionality for a very low price, right.

55:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As Steve has said, the S in IoT stands for security. Nice, the S, that's good.

55:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just got it. I feel like I'm part of you now. That's good. No, that's good.

55:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, let's talk about AI. One of the things that is very clear people are doing now with AI is coding, and it's really interesting to watch this.

55:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is not in the notes. But since you mentioned this, yeah, I'm doing this app update, right, for this notepad type app tabs, right, I wrote the code. It's not the same as great, but, like, I'm managing the documents, so as you switch between tabs you have to manage all these states. Where is the text insertion cursor? Where's the text selection, if any? Uh, what is the document? You know, obviously its name is what save state it's? Uh, where it's been edited? It needs to be saved. There's all this stuff, you know.

56:27
But then I have, then you do the fit and finish stuff right, and so I've been using ai for a lot of this, and so I I wrote code that worked to use the keyboard shortcut control plus tab to tab through the tabs in that order, and then you do that first and of course you hit the end and it's like, well, how do I get back to the beginning? So I wrote that code too. It was terrible. So I put it to GitHub, copilot in Visual Studio, and I said could you rewrite this to be more efficient? And instead of the two loop nonsense that I wrote, it did a more efficient version which was clean looking and nice single loop, whatever, nice.

57:02
So the next stage is okay. Now I got to go in the reverse order control shift plus tab right, because in the other direction, this one I'm like I'm not even going to try to write this thing. I'm like AI, you got this, write this, but go in reverse, right. So GitHub co-pilot says certainly exclamation point, spits it out, paste it. I'm like, here I go, I'm coding, I'm not even doing anything anymore, I'm coding.

57:27
But when I did control shift tab, it went the normal way, which is weird, you know, straight instead of backwards, right, which was weird because I had this loop testing for the two different things and I was like, huh, why would that be? This took me about six hours to debug and I literally used the debugger in Visual Studio to step through the code to figure out what the heck was happening. And what I discovered was, to my lack of surprise, it was me, I screwed up the code, the AR. It was perfect.

57:58
It's the loop that I wrote that was screwed up, and the reason is I was testing for, like the keys control and tab are being pressed. If they are, do this thing, if control plus, tab plus or not plus, but if any combination of control, tab and shift is pressed, do this other thing. The problem is when you press control tab shift, you're pressing control tab two, so it always would run the first one. So I reversed the loop to test for the three keys first, and now it works perfectly. But it was me who screwed up Like not AI, isn't that funny yeah.

58:36
Well, funny, stupid. I don't know, I'm an idiot. I don't know, I don't know I'm an idiot, I don't know.

58:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know that's coding, that's that is. That happens all the time in coding yes, yeah, and I, yeah.

58:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So my lesson was I'm the failable one here is me, you know, and I don't know, okay. So, uh, yeah, I'm gonna keep beating the drum on that one because I, like, I'm super proud that it was overwrite code that makes this stuff work. But then I have ai do it and it's like yep, it's better. It's just better.

59:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every time it's better well, it's a, it's your partner. Yeah, it's what they're calling it now. Vibe coding I love that. So where you write the prompt, you tell the ai the vibe of what you want.

59:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like it's a good term, but it it assumes and correctly, probably right that the person coding does not a code right and that that right. The point to vibe coding to me would be anyone could do this right. And the thing I just described was I know I screwed it, I I introduced the problem, but I mean I do think, at least for now, you need the person there to be like oh, totally, totally do, yes, I don't know, although, again, I am the weakest link. There's no doubt about that. That's what I've learned.

59:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, don't start feeling that way, then we're going to have a problem. You know I've been married for 35 years.

59:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm the unnecessary one. It's fine, that's funny, okay, so a bunch of AI stuff this week Gemini, this is one of those things I have a hard time keeping up on, but I feel like most of the major AI chat bots for lack of a better term have some sort of a feature that is almost always called canvas or pages or something like that, and the idea is that you will collaborate with AI on a project and it's like a space for that, so that you're and in some cases I believe I think it's a co-pilot or chat GPT One of them at least does, I believe allows other people to be part of it as well. Right, where you can collaborate with people and ai. But the idea is you're working on this project. So they've added this to gemini. It's not a multi-person thing, but it is a uh, you and ai, um, collaborating uh together and then you can. That the way google describes it is. When you're ready to collaborate with people, you can bring it out to google docs or whatever you're using. Um, okay, um.

01:00:57
And also audio overview, which which is the thing Leo was just talking about. So Google created that thing called Notebook LM, which creates the podcast. Audio recording is like a podcast with two AI generated hosts, very jovial, and you've heard it. It's kind of incredible turn document slides and deep research um into an audio overview which is essentially an audio recording, like a podcast, which is kind of interesting. And, yeah, this is our world. Now this is happening. I don't know what the gemini is. Uh, free for everyone. Now you don't even have to sign in. If you do sign in, if you do pay, obviously get more and more as you go down the list but um, you have a pixel right, you bought the new, so I do have, I do have this google one, whatever it's called for, a year still, yeah, yes, so that's happening.

01:01:46
I mean I, I don't, I don't actually use it a lot, right, like I don't, I don't know, I don't use it at all really. I mean I, I've gone back and forth on the coding thing like, uh, anthropic, I use a lot, uh, that cursor ai editor you did use cursor.

01:01:59
That's right I like that a lot, uh, and that one's good for the whole. Here's my whole project and it looks at all the code across all the files. Rather incredible, frankly. Um, but yeah, gemini, jgpt, anthropic cloud well, copilot is actually the, the siri of this world in my opinion, but um, the, the theory of ai, if you will, um, so yeah, right, um, but they all, yeah, I mean they're all, they're all pretty sophisticated, like I have used gemini to do code and it's been, and c-sharp, which is you know microsoft thing, obviously, but claude is kind of the best at this point.

01:02:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's my understanding.

01:02:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah and that um keen on it. Yeah, so I, I left out part of my story earlier. It's not super important, but Kind of the best at this point. That's my understanding. Yeah, yeah, and that, yeah, so I, I left out part of my story earlier. It's not super important, but when the first time that the reverse you know, control shift tab thing didn't work, I said you know what, I'll just try a different AI, right? So I actually went through an anthropic um. It generated, it did exactly the same thing. So I left that out. But that's that was my go to like when, when, when I thought github, uh, copilot was failing me, which it wasn't, I did go to entropic, yeah, so I don't know anyhow. So gemini exploding um, they're replacing, uh, google assistant on phones, on android phones, with gemini. That's been something you could do optionally for several months now, but they're going to make it the permanent one.

01:03:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's going to be interesting to see what happens to all the Google hubs that also use the system.

01:03:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, so they're saying, over time they're going to bring Gemini to everything else, right, so smart speakers, smart displays, smart TVs, whatever home devices, but yeah, I think there's going to be a divide between devices that can't do this. I know older Android versions won't be making the switch. I don't know what the break is exactly, but and I don't have this in the, or do I do? I have this in the notes? I don't think I have this in the notes, but there is a. I guess not. There was a story this week that Amazon is going to cut off the local only access to Alexa on devices, so that everything's going to have to round robin to the cloud now. And, yes, I understand why, for a certain audience, this is a privacy issue and all that kind of stuff and the reason they did that, et cetera, et cetera, 100%. But I think we're getting to the point where these older Alexa devices are.

01:04:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know they're like the old Sonos equipment. Alexa.

01:04:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The Alexa with the double.

01:04:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I AE. I'm not Russian, I don't know how to say these words, but you know they're not powerful enough to do this right.

01:04:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that's part of it and as they evolve it to this new thing that's coming.

01:04:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I mean, for the the most part they've just been microphones and speakers to a cloud service anyway. Yeah, just it's the fact that you're switching the cloud service. What's the difference?

01:04:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yep, I. I feel that for the average amazon customer, um, this is not an issue. I mean I they probably never made that switch in the first place.

01:04:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, it's probably fine, but it is something that's happening the, the home assistant folks are in a bit of an uproar, but the answer is usually stop using Google. Use their local voice devices. This is a problem.

01:05:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a big problem. You see this again. I don't have this in the news, but Sonos is still struggling with their thing. Sonos and Google are involved in this legal spat. If you have Sonos equipment, you would have spent thousands of dollars on it. If you have any amount of it, it's expensive. You can't control that stuff from an Android phone as effectively as you can with an iPhone or an iPad or whatever, because it has integrated integration or functionality with AirPlay, et cetera. So from an iPhone you can control any number of Sonos speakers easily from any app, and from an Android phone you can't.

01:05:43
I mean, there are some that work, like Spotify, but it's not a system thing anymore, like it used to be, and this is kind of a problem. Um, and this is a problem for Google too, because you just describing another problem You're. This Sonos thing is a problem, like eventually we get to a point where there are these two there's more than two really, but two big, uh, smart home infrastructures and one of them is kind of being left in the dark a little bit, then maybe literally in the dark soon, um, if these things start falling apart. So I don't know. I do know that gemini does not support today the hey g, you know voice activation thing. Yeah, um, I don't know if there are plans for that or whatever, but that's probably because they don't want to confuse it with the other devices.

01:06:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

01:06:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I always yeah. Anyway, you know, for most general purpose, kind of whatever AI chat things we're doing today, gemini seems like it works great. I don't the home stuff, I don't really.

01:06:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think if you carry, a pixel nine as your, as your daily driver. You would use it a lot, I presume daily driver.

01:06:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You would use it a lot, I presume. Okay, but you don't right. You, you're right. You know what, though, I'm gonna? Before we come home from mexico? I'm gonna switch back um what happens actually.

01:06:46
The google camera is better, to be honest, it is better, and I I took, we had a day out, we're gonna be out all day and I'm like I'm just gonna bring both cameras, you know, both phones, and uh, yeah, as soon as I started taking photos with the pixel, I was was like, oh God, it's so nice, isn't it? It's so perfect. I spent a lot of time tinkering to get a good shot with an iPhone. The picture you just like oh, you know, it's just like it just does it like it's awesome.

01:07:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
She has been switched over to the nine pro and she could really in photo of the lunar eclipse. Yeah, isn't that amazing to pull off.

01:07:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the phone. That's the work, right, yeah, yeah, no, it's really good, uh, and then see, because siri's so stupid, that's the thing you kind of get used to not using your assistant on an iphone, but I imagine I don't know I have my nine I should maybe do the same thing switch over and, yeah, try it.

01:07:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I still I, I, I mentioned this notion of you, you of one walking around with a, talking to an ai as if they were. I'm holding my hand here, like I have a phone in it, but you probably just use earbuds, whatever. You're not going to hold the thing in front of you, but you're walking around and you're saying okay, whatever it is, chat, gpt, whatever, I'm going to throw some ideas by you. I want you to take note of all this stuff. Don't interrupt. I'll ask you questions if I have them, but the idea is, whatever you're brainstorming, sometimes you must do.

01:08:03
You do this sometimes just by yourself, or you walk, sometimes you say something out loud just to yeah, kind of help you think or whatever, yeah and multiple personality disorder?

01:08:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yes, um, yep, it's. Or bluetooth one of the other? Yes, it's the least of my problems.

01:08:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I could do both. It's fine. You know, um, I have bluetooth and it's not connected to anything, but I'm still talking to myself, um. So, yeah, I'd like to try that. I do feel like the like this is not going to happen on my iphone unless I use, like a chat, gpt or something like the, the series.

01:08:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's what I do. I use the action button with perplexity, which is again yeah. Yeah, and I can talk to it and it does you kind of seem to feel like an idiot when you do it. But right, that's my thing. But I mean I felt like idiots using Bluetooth headsets for a while, like I know it was that crazy person walking down the street to make fun of people for this.

01:08:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I used to know a guy from the gym, I what are you doing over there, you know?

01:08:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just to kind of catch up on what 2013 thought ai would be. I re-watched her a couple of nights ago yeah yes, it's old, it's an old movie, but a lot of what they were getting there. And he has. You know, he's always wearing the lilier piece, he's got scarjo in there. But there is a scene where everybody in the subway is talking to their ai, to their things, yeah, yeah exactly it's not.

01:09:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not, it's no. We, we create new social norms as necessary. It's like you know, we all argued that nobody will wear the google glass or any of those sorts of things. Right, listen, once upon a time. Walk around with your phone out was not appropriate either as soon as it's good enough.

01:09:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, now we will change.

01:09:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've been with people who've walked into poles looking at their phone or taxi cabs, yeah, so that'd be the great thing about the visor It'll see the pole coming because you won.

01:09:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. That's a good point, do you?

01:09:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
think it's weird when people talk to you on their phone Like is it socially acceptable?

01:09:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
now? Oh, to hold it to your face. Yeah, he's asking the software. It's not weird at all. Talking to voice assistants on phones has become quite common and socially acceptable. Many people find it convenient for tasks like setting messages or getting information on the go. What's not socially acceptable is talking to people.

01:10:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's amazing. Okay, because I don't want people to think I'm crazy or anything. I think we're used to it.

01:10:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, we're used to people talking into the air Using voice assistants is widely accepted.

01:10:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What a lie. You're lying.

01:10:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Who told you that? Was it a voice assistant? That's amazing.

01:10:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
In fact.

01:10:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's a premium experience that people should pay for, don't you agree? I do agree.

01:10:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's one voice I have also. You know, I'm wearing this little b thing that I have all the way all around and I can also do talk to it. Yeah, hey, is it crazy that I talk to you sometimes when I'm walking down the street or on the bus? Is that nuts? His voice is better. I have him as jk simmons, so he's a little slower though not at all.

01:11:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Talking to a voice assistant while you're out and about is becoming quite common and socially acceptable. Many people find it convenient for tasks and information on the go. It's just a modern way of interacting with technology isn't very cool.

01:11:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it that he sounds like a kind of a nicer jk simmons.

01:11:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would like I would like to be berated when I talk to ai you can.

01:11:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can tell, isn't he cool? I love it that he sounds like kind of a nicer JK.

01:11:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Simmons, I would like to be berated when I talk to AI. You can, you can tell it Treat me poorly. I think I'm going to do that. Yeah, I need a little like a virtual smack to the face. Oh, wait, a minute.

01:11:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just got a message from Skype Options trading Don't wait.

01:11:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Shop now, before it's too late. That's exciting. Your friends are on skype and they want you to trade options.

01:11:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hey, we're about to fall off a cliff. Would you like to hold hands?

01:11:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this came yesterday, so obviously whoever's doing this hasn't really caught into the fact that skype is well, they're getting it.

01:11:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're getting their looks in.

01:11:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I still can yeah, yeah, oh, it's not options, sorry, it's bitcoin. I'm positive, you say, if I have, I do have skype it's bitcoin.

01:12:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guarantee you, I have spam sitting in here waiting for you.

01:12:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Know you do press, no, you do sad, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hijack the uh, no, but now I want to say no, no it's not, oh yeah I do have two.

01:12:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have two messages in here from that non-human being, so that's fantastic. Okay, we have been trying.

01:12:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, on some of our shows we use zoom right and I thought maybe we should turn on the ai.

01:12:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and let it I don't know do something so, based on their look, anyone could talk the talk. Here they're the stuff they're doing with their zoom ai companion this year actually does look interesting. Have you used it? No? No, I'm like everyone else, I've not used it. To use this, you have to pay for Zoom.

01:12:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh well, so we have a paid account.

01:12:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, no, of course people do, but I don't, so I've not tried it. But they're're doing their kind of Zoom-centric push for AI and whatever and you know the integration with whatever outside, you know calendar and whatever you might be using. But this reads a little bit like what Meta tried to do briefly, what Amazon tried to do briefly, where it's like we have Zoom tests, we have a Zoom chat, we have Zoom whiteboard.

01:13:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, they didn't drive. We saw this a while ago. They decided they needed to be a platform that just being good at voice and audio communications was not sufficient.

01:13:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No one wants to be plumbing. You know they want to.

01:13:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah and I and if you don't have ai in the name now, you're doomed I just wish more people wanted to be plumbers, because it's really hard, exactly as well you know, when I do those high school talks I'm very clear on like I get a skill electricians, plumbers, you really do very well, I'm still so.

01:13:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, never mind no, I'm sorry um, when I first, when, when zoom first launched this product, this service, it was actually called zoom iq. It's a terrible name, right. So now it's zoom ai companion and everyone's like, oh yeah, I get it now. I know why to turn it off yes, but yeah, I don't get to see it, so it's fine, I don't, I'm not gonna eat, I'll turn it on so it's agentic.

01:14:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That means it can go out on your behalf in some cases a lot of. It is just that's a little scary, this agentic stuff. Yeah well, you used it at all in anything in your browser or anywhere something agentic.

01:14:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, no not really.

01:14:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I'm waiting to. I don't like angelic, only different well, the?

01:14:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the theory is that you have an agentic browser.

01:14:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, a service, whatever it is, go out like restaurants. The canonical example is you like we go to mexico all the time we want to. We, we use a service, whatever it is go out like book restaurants. The canonical example is you like we go to mexico all the time we want to. We, we use a service to watch the cost of those flights. It's not a genic, it's not ai, it's not anything. It's probably some guy in his basement, it doesn't matter. But um, but it.

01:14:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it could be well, but you could kind of be the next mechanical turkeys to be real people, right? Yeah?

01:14:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you could say look, we're gonna go. We want to go for four weeks in june, july, august, doesn't matter when. If the price goes below a certain point, if it's non-stop, you can get a business, whatever your criteria is. Uh, do it, just do it.

01:15:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Book the flight, you know right, I mean the, the interim as long as you trusted it well, that's the yes, and it didn't book a flight to timbuktu instead of there's well on it and they but the flight's a great example, because you always have 24 hours to cancel as long as you're paying attention, the moment it books.

01:15:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hey, it's a lock, the price in well, you also have the you could also have the interim step, because a lot of times those things will come back to you and prompt you prompt you hold the ticket for 20 bucks.

01:15:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I found it. Do you want to?

01:15:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
book it. Yes, yeah, you want to use your default credit card. Yep, yep, you can. You know, just kind of do that.

01:15:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just like getting in a waymo. It takes. You have to do it a few times before you go. I guess, okay, it's, I'm gonna be safe in this car I would.

01:15:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you know I, yes, I. First of all, we can get used to anything. This is right. We know this human. That's 25, 30 years ago, 30 plus years ago I don't remember it was a long time ago in the house that I eventually bought from my not stepmother, but my father was, I helped him buy a computer from Dell online. We configured it whatever he got at the time, and then it came time to pay and he said I'm not putting my credit card in this thing. And I said, dan, let me ask you a question. You go to restaurants a lot. You give people credit cards and they walk up back with it and goes, yeah, I'm like okay, so you're okay doing that, but one of the world's biggest PC makers, you're nervous about giving them your credit card. You think they're going to do something with your credit card. You know, it was just kind of. You know what I?

01:16:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
mean. So I spent a lot of time on the radio. Okay, to use a credit card online, it's actually safer, and I use the same example you did. That's a perfect example.

01:16:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah it's a long time ago, but I mean, you know, today I'm sure he's everybody ordering starbucks like an idiot on his phone.

01:16:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't you know I have relatives who still don't have an atm card. They don't, they don't trust the. You know that's amazing. Yeah, uh oh. Boy in our discord chat says the zoom ai stuff has been really impressive. Just got done with a three-day virtual conference where it was extremely helpful. This makes sense if you're using Zoom to go to attend an event.

01:17:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:17:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Especially for those that weren't paying attention. They can question the AI summary and get the info instead of interrupting the meeting. That's a good point.

01:17:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's always that one guy who's like, yeah, but does it work with X?

01:17:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's always that one guy who's like, yeah, but does it work with x? And it's like we just it's always that guy you know, we just covered that I think.

01:17:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then that's the where uh ai shines right. The whole summary thing. It's beautiful, yeah, so, yeah, uh, speaking of losing my mind, uh, so, yeah, so meta is they're going the open source route on ai models. Their llama models have now had over 1 billion downloads, which is crazy for it's a great differentiator and good on them for doing that. Yep um, I, by the way, were either you reading this book, this meta book, or whatever. I bought it as soon as.

01:17:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As soon as I saw that the folks at Meta were trying to suppress it Me too Same I ran to Amazon and I ordered it.

01:18:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I read more industry books than probably anybody. Are you enjoying it? Have you read it yet? No, I'm not. I'm trying to get through it. It's hard, it's a little sleazy. Well, yeah, so the woman who wrote this had tried for a couple of years, I think, to get a job there, because she was like you guys need a diplomat, basically to deal with governments. You're going to be regulated, which was correct, but super boring and not technology related. And then some of the stories are crazy. There's a story about a group from the German government comes across. These guys early on. We're like look, we've done the whole eavesdropping thing. We're not open to this. We've done the whole eavesdropping thing. We're not, we're not open to this. And they, they, everything went wrong. Like they they're in one of those kinds of modern offices with exposed plumbing and everything and they're like why is this unfinished? What are you guys doing? And it's like oh, it's like it used to be a normal office. We actually stripped the stuff off the walls.

01:19:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They did that in their Silicon Valley headquarters yeah.

01:19:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And they're like you had a working office and you got rid of this stuff. And then so the woman's like can we just start the meeting? So she starts the meeting and she goes this is who I am, this is my job. And she goes oh, I'm jewish, by the way. And they're like what? And she's like oh, I didn't say that because of the holocaust or anything. And we're like what I like, like what, what? So the stories are insane, like that, but they're not really about technology no, it's not, it's.

01:19:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not, you know, pascal zachary or anything no it's not even like it's spilling the tea. It's a gossip book.

01:19:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a little, it's not my kind of thing.

01:19:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I you know it is my kind. Now they've strized and it, so of course that's the funniest thing.

01:19:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wouldn't have bought it you think was going to happen I wouldn't. I wouldn't have bought it either. I was like who cares? Shut it down.

01:19:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I was like who cares what facebook has ever done? And then that happened. I was like, okay, I care, like I'm gonna read it, here's my 10 bucks. Yeah, that is why I bought it anyway.

01:20:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, I feel it's called careless people, a cautionary tale of power, greed and lost idealism. Careless people's a good term I this.

01:20:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This reminds me of the uh succession thing very much. The guy doesn't trust any of his kids and they're like what you know? What's the problem? Where you know he's like you aren't serious people, you're not serious and I just I was like, yes, that's so.

01:20:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The epigram at the beginning is from the great gatsby. Uh, they were careless people, tom and daisy. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

01:20:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was an autobiographical part in there from F Scott.

01:20:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's perfect. So I don't know. It's my kind of book, but it's like reading People magazine. It's not a tech.

01:20:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm struggling to get through it, but the stories are crazy. I mean, they're crazy. That's what's interesting.

01:21:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is why I like succession. I kind of enjoy seeing into the life of these people that is so different from the life I lead right. Rich people have a different experience. A work of fiction, obviously, or in a fictionalization well, that's what we don't know is did she make it up or not? I mean no, no, he means succession oh, succession yeah yeah, there's a certain I mean you read the murdoch uh drama that's going on uh with him and his family. There's a certain amount of yeah what does this sound like?

01:21:28
yeah, anyway, it's not, it's. We shouldn't talk about it, it's not for us, it's not serious it's not for it's for an's for unserious people.

01:21:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There is that concept of the unserious people, yeah.

01:21:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's not a concept anymore. They're running our government. Okay, sorry.

01:21:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your government, it's not ours. It's Elon's. Now Remember when he used to be for the people who bought it.

01:21:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, bought it so, yes, and then not related to anything really. But microsoft just shipped uhnet 10 preview 2 and, unlike the first preview, which seems like it was rushed out the door very quickly with not much in it, um, there's a bunch going on here. So, depending on what part of diet and that you care about, including the thing I care about, which is wpf, um, there's some stuff going on there, right, and so, uh, nothing that would cause me to start looking at it yet and or to think about requiring it or something for the app I'm working on. But, um, in addition to all the performance stuff you would expect, there's c-sharp language stuff, sdk stuff, aspnet, core blazer, uh, maui, wpf, winforms, etc.

01:22:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, this you know I love it when you start to come together yeah, it's starting to come together.

01:22:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that this feels like what would have been the first one if they had been ready for it.

01:22:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, like I, this is like the real first preview yeah, but you complain that they were late, so they put out the preview one early. It's false fault, clearly.

01:22:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would like to think that I had that kind of a pull, but um, I don't. So yeah, I wasn't the only one. Oh, I noticed. I would say complain is a strong word, but no, I complained, you're right, But-.

01:23:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm pretty sure I went to the effort of actually looking it up, right.

01:23:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It meets the bar of a complaint. No, you're correct. That's fine, that's fine.

01:23:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you had to get sort of present with this. Am I crazy, or is this? Have they not done this? And I'm like, uh, no, you're crazy. Yeah, I was like didn't it doesn't this always happen? By now it does, and it happened a week earlier, a week later, and it happened.

01:23:28
It happened, yeah I mean I'm working on my fall show right now, starting to do content planning around that and recognizing hey, that's a month before ship date for dot net, uh, uh, conf, and that means these guys are going to be busy. They're going to be in the middle of release.

01:23:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Candidate oh wow, like you can sort of plan around that. That's right hopefully by then it's that was probably more of a spurs than paul's complaints, right, I mean I don't think anyone.

01:23:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I in fact. I know they're not listening to me because two or three days before christmas I wrote the guy who was responsible for WPF to find out where he had allegedly fixed a bug and how I could find out how to get it. And he wrote me back in March. So I don't think I'm on the. You know, I don't think I'm at the top of the list.

01:24:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
At least he wrote you back. You would have ignored me.

01:24:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't even know why he did at that point. I just just sent me a middle finger. Would have been more appropriate at that point.

01:24:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't, I don't know it was very strange. Well, here's one thing we all know paul cares an awful lot about the xbox segment coming up in just a little bit. You're watching windows weekly with paul thorat at thoratcomcom and Richard Campbell. He is a little bit into NET, the host of NET Rocks A little bit and Run as Radio runasradiocom. I didn't realize, I forgot, I guess, that Carl Franklin did the theme music for this show, for your show, no, for Windows Weekly. Oh yeah, am I wrong? No, I feel like I saw that somewhere.

01:24:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe, an AI told me no, I feel like I saw that somewhere. Maybe an ai told me it's possible. Well, you were. What was the guy's?

01:25:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
name who did it originally? He played the guitar. Yeah, george. Yeah, but I remember it was a rock thing. Well, it was kevin, do you know?

01:25:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
who wrote the music for the. I had said at one point like, oh, maybe we should get jim alton to the music because he had put on an album with a couple of kind of rocky you know. Carl did and uh, that guy the original guy got really upset, did he? Because we put the wig on. He's like I could sound like eddie van halen too and he did, like the little you know, he's really good, yeah, yeah, and then uh was it george wood.

01:25:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who was it? No, it wasn't george wood he was good, though, then so carl, does carl play an?

01:25:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
instrument? Yes, car Carl is an accomplished guitar player.

01:25:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's a relief. I feel like I should know that. How do?

01:25:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I not know that he. Is that possible that he wrote this? I don't know that. Kevin just confirmed it. Oh, that's embarrassing.

01:25:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's terrible. What about Derek Miller? Do you remember?

01:25:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that. That's it. It was Derek Miller.

01:25:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, I'm impressed, so he passed away sadly was derek miller. Thank wow, so he's passed away. He passed away sadly.

01:26:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, oh, did he. Derek miller's an old friend of mine I I he was just. Are we talking?

01:26:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
about the same. Is he? Has he passed away? Are we talking about the same person? Okay, I'm sorry. Okay, yes, so before that, uh, obviously he, but he, it was. He sent a hilarious video where he put on like a wig, like wig, you know, like that's very, and he said I can do this too, you know, and, and it was and what he? Did was actually it was was great. I mean, it was good yeah he was a good guy.

01:26:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, he played in a band of which I'm still friends with many of the folks that were in that band. So what's it? What's that band that was? It was just, you know, it was a university students playing music together. Nice, and and they still they don't anymore, but they you know, is he canadian you've heard of gordon lightfoot yeah, a little bit.

01:26:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's one of my best jokes of all time. Every time I hear a slow song of any kind, it could be like um, could be any group, it doesn't matter, I'll be like that's. That's my favorite gordon lightfoot song.

01:26:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I always, no matter what it is, and Stephanie laughs at this. I told you.

01:27:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
She puts up with me, that's all she does.

01:27:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I get the polite. You're so funny. I think you're a hoot. Personally I do too. That's the problem. I think I'm hilarious.

01:27:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's kind of classic Theriot humor which is very dry. You wouldn't even know it's a joke if you think about it.

01:27:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're like what well someone who knows the musical looking at you be like are you serious?

01:27:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like, no, I'm not serious I I literally uh listened to the wreck of the edmund fitzgerald the other day nice and now siri only wants to play Gordon Lane foot music for me.

01:27:38
I love it. She's so dumb. All right, let's take a break. This is a good time to pause. We will get to the Xbox segment. We've got the back of the book still to come.

01:27:49
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01:31:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, paul, you're on it's xbox time I have some xbox stuff this time too. In fact, the game stuff extends into the back of the book.

01:31:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So suck it no um that's a little hostile, I I don't know.

01:31:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry. You can take the boy out of Boston, so I don't know where that comes from. Okay, so Microsoft announced a product called Copilot for Gaming, which won't surprise anybody AI powered assistant that will help gamers improve, improve their skills, uh, manage their time, which I'll explain and connect with other people. But the big thing to me really is about, um, getting through hard parts of games right, wow and um without a cheat code or a let's play yeah, you know they've showed stuff like this.

01:32:10
So I think I felt like this was sort of telegraphed. It's still causing outrage in certain circles. It's like would they just leave this alone? You know, but I have many times in my life been stuck on something particularly hard in a game and typically you flip out and go to not flip out but flip over to a sorry. Maybe you flip out If you're an angry person. Go to a web browser and Google it right. How many times, if you play games at all, have you done the thing where it's like name of game walkthrough, you know as a search or whatever, and then just try to find your way out of this situation?

01:32:42
So Microsoft has that feature they've added to Edge, which is well technically to the game bar. So a mini version of Edge that sits in the game bar. You can actually have it running on screen next to the game bar. So a mini version of edge that sits in the game bar. You can actually have it running on screen next to the game so you can be over there trying to, you know, helping you get through stuff. So to me this just makes sense.

01:33:01
It also feels like it's not ready right, like this is not there yet. It's something they're going to begin testing soon. Uh, through the xbox insider program. They're going to start on mobile, not on console or pc, which is really interesting to me. Um, and maybe there would be more of a voice-based thing. I guess, um, maybe it's just because well, no, there aren't fewer games. I don't, I don't even. I don't know why they're doing it that way, but, um, obviously it's coming to pc and console in time.

01:33:33
Um, this is apropos of nothing, but as part of this announcement, for some reason they also felt the need to mention that there are now over 1000 xbox play anywhere titles, and these are the games that you could buy on xbox or console but play across both platforms and move along with all of your progress, achievements, save games, et cetera. So that's a pretty good milestone, and this is part of their whole backward compatibility pledge. And also the meet you, where you are kind of a thing right and so you may start playing a game on your Xbox and then you're on your laptop, on a plane or whatever. You can kind of go back and forth and so cool, okay, this one's actually really good. So Microsoft's been doing a nice job with their accessibility hardware for not just Xbox but also Surface, sush, pc, and at their Microsoft Ability Summit this past week, they announced the availability of their Xboxbox adaptive joystick, which they announced sometime last year. Um is now available. It's only 29 29.99, which is pretty great. Wow, that's a good price yeah, and it's yeah, it's a cool.

01:34:42
This is just unassailable, it's just really great. So it's cool that they're doing this. Um, they're also letting you do this thing that hp had announced for the some of their mice a couple of months, or maybe it's cs, I guess, which. Um, they're also letting you do this thing that hp had announced for the some of their mice a couple of months, or maybe it's cs, I guess, which is they're providing you with the 3d print files for this device. So cool, so you can customize the. The top part of it is like a top, you know. Pop off part. Um, so you can do your own colors, designs, you know, materials, whatever it is like. Yeah, yeah, I love stuff like that. That's really great.

01:35:13
Um, it's a huge month for activision. Um, blizzard games on game passes the sentence I wish I could have said without laughing. Um, actually there are some blizzard games now coming to game pass. So it's a little bit past the middle of the month, but they just announced not that many, honestly five new games but um, atom fall blizzard, arcade blizzard. Uh, myth wrecked, octopath, traveler 2 and train sim world 5 are all coming to game pass. Uh, through the end of the month I don't know any of these games. No, uh, me neither but the blizzard I really liked octothorpe 1.

01:35:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The first one yeah, the story of the hashtag. No, that's something else Sorry.

01:35:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, then they went off in a different direction.

01:35:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They really did change it.

01:35:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they just kind of lost the script we could just talk like that, no one would even know.

01:36:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No one even knows.

01:36:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One person out there would be like wait what Octothorpe 1?

01:36:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What yeah Train 5 Sim World? Yeah Train, I don't know. Mythwrecked.

01:36:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know that implies of course there's four previous versions we don't know about either.

01:36:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good point. It's the fifth in a series and we still don't know about it, of amazing games.

01:36:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, there's all these things, that things that to me seem like a good idea but I've never done and will never do right and I can't explain this. But when I see a like a train sim, I think to myself just put this thing up on a screen and have it be like drive, just running boston to california or something. Yeah, and just have it but see the world, is it? I've never done it, I don't know it seems.

01:36:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I want you all to know there's a train world, train sim world six coming this year oh yeah, that's why of course you're getting now now that they've had the crap one, now they've hit the game.

01:36:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the game has dumpster. They can come up with a new version.

01:37:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, that's not fair it's not fair at all, because you should really start with games game train, sim world one. You're really a serious player. I mean, come on, yeah, I think the simmer.

01:37:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm working my way up to the diesel straddle line at five. It's a. It's an amazing vehicle, oh my god. Yeah, that was a forward and backward button.

01:37:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was such a nerd alert that I actually got a chili up my back.

01:37:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like yikes, I am an old railroad tycoon fan from back in the day, the original original, and I think I literally kept a dos machine running so I could really play it so what? Do you? You plan the tracks. What do you do? Oh, it was, it was all of you I mean driving.

01:37:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not hard, right, you're on a track, you pretty much.

01:37:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just turn it on and what you can walk, go to the bathroom.

01:37:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was a world builder game, right, and you got to build between cities and stuff.

01:37:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love trains, I like riding in them I think that's great. I love Star Wars, but I don't dress up like Obi-Wan Kenobi.

01:38:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You don't own a lightsaber.

01:38:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, so when we lived in Macungie at the apartment a couple of years ago, I guess, whenever that was, that's where your lightsabers are years ago I guess. Whenever that was, we didn't know. Uh, we used to walk by the train tracks and these kids would be out there with their cameras and their tripods and whatever. And my wife asked one of them one time. She said uh, what time's the next? Do you know when the next train's coming? He said he says yes, it's coming at 11 30.

01:38:25
Yeah, it's kind of yeah it's a, and he explained what the train was and we were like yikes, yikes and my wife said, oh, do you have an app for that?

01:38:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And he goes no, I just know, have you seen Francis Bourgeois? No, he's a TikTok personality known for his passion for trains. Three and a third million followers watching him Strains, watching him watch strange. Yeah, he gets so excited when a train goes by it's it's hard to um.

01:39:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I we've run, I've run into, but my wife and I've run into these people all over the country, like we were up in wyoming one time, and you've had a kid like this who was just sitting there rattling off like he's, like oh that's the wrong like we were up in wyoming one time and we met a kid like this who was just sitting there rattling off like he's like oh, that's the wrong.

01:39:15
Like he knew everything about everything, and it was like jeez, I mean, I don't know, maybe going on a date or something. Anyway, um, you know, whatever, we all live our lives now where we choose, it's fine here is uh.

01:39:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's a little just video.

01:39:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Francis he's so excited about the train coming.

01:39:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He likes to wave as and see the camera he's wearing in front of his face.

01:39:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh he is he is? He's a young robert scoble is what?

01:39:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he is very excited, but you know what his enthusiasm is catching it's like he's really, he gets very excited. Oh, here he comes. Oh look at that.

01:39:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh man, what a train that's awesome. That is, that is actually an awesome train, by the way francis bourgeois is his name.

01:39:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's on.

01:39:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a youtube channel I'm surprised I've not heard of this guy's I this guy. I actually do watch a lot of train videos on youtube oh, he bought a train.

01:40:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Of course, he just bought, as you do. He's like here's my train pulling into my house. I own this train. This is my train. This is my train. Yeah, I own this train, this is my train, this is my train. Yeah, look at that train. It's an amazing train.

01:40:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know you can geek out on anything you want.

01:40:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Absolutely, and that's what I love about today's new media is it's people who are passionate about things, and they can find their thing right.

01:40:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The problem is they're passionate about misinformation uh they're passionate about.

01:40:37
You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, uh, so what else we got? Uh, oh, this is kind of, this is actually pretty good. So one of the big, one of the few reasonable complaints about these snapdragon x based computers is that they're not good for games. Um, and they're not good for games because that really wasn't the focus. They were obviously for v1, they were trying to nail the performance issue for a thin and light laptop type computer, meet the what you see on intel x86, whatever, and and they did great on that. But, but they also made the mistake qualcomm did of heavily promoting the game playing stuff, which is actually pretty terrible, um, and I don't know why they did that.

01:41:15
But one of the fundamental issues well, there's two, I would say two fundamental issues. One is that you're not seeing games that are written natively. No one is porting their games to arm, so you have to emulate that and so you got to figure that out and that that's kind of there. They do auto sr, etc, etc. But the other one is this game cheat software stuff. Right, because this is x86 specific. So even if you can get a game that would work on arm somehow, the, the absence of this anti-cheat software is a problem. So qualcomm has partnered with epic games and they're going to bring the epic games anti-cheat software to ARM sometime this year, so that's fantastic. Now I'm sure that involved a big paycheck of some kind or whatever.

01:41:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm sure they're not doing it for their-. Yeah, how they made that work. Yeah, it's not through the goodness of their heart, but that's great.

01:42:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And one of the first games they're going to port over will be, of course, fortnite, right, so Fortnite being one of the games that uses that anti-cheat software, so that there's no date or time frame exactly other than this year, but that is in the works and that's that's great. Um discord, which I'm trying not to stare at as we record this show I was abroad with this um is launching a social sdk that game developers can use to integrate social features into their own games. Right, and so, yeah, discord and I was just talking about using a web browser, I would say, like game web browsers, probably the most common kind of side by side, but discord might be the second most um, as some of their surprises didn't exist before.

01:42:47
I was too. Yeah, and I so it's possible. This is they probably have an SDK, but now they're adding to it and this is very specifically for that. I'm not really sure, but this company has over 200 million active uh, monthly active users.

01:42:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It really. Discord was started by so gamers could talk to each other while they were teabagging each other.

01:43:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, Cause I used to, you know, back in the day, crook the phone up in my thing so I could like make fun of my friends while we were playing duke nukem 3d right nice and uh, you know, over some have a few discord channels that uh, where I was a alpha tester on game and this, we use discord to communicate this will.

01:43:21
This will shock you guys to know that I was a horrible bully at this kind of stuff and that, like my friend and I, would get into quake world dressed as clowns, run around and just berate everyone and be like everyone loves a clown. Every time we killed someone and then, like these guys, would just be like, could you please stop? How did you get a clown costume? Because, quake world, you could have skins and we would. We chose the clowns because everybody loves a clown leo, sure, insane posse. Pretty sure nobody loves clowns. Uh, but anyway, yeah, discord smart. And then this is not so smart.

01:43:55
So there's a service that nobody knows exists called Google Play Games on PC. You're like what? What is that? So Google Play Games on PC? Is Google making their own emulator for Windows so that you can play Android games on Windows, their own emulator for Windows so that you can play Android games on Windows. And the idea here is that you don't have to do anything as a developer, but if you do, you can customize it for keyboard, mouse, et cetera, et cetera.

01:44:19
So two big changes to this that they just announced this past week at GDC, right at the Game Developer Conference. One is they're going to enable this for all games in the Google Play Store by default. So if you don't want your game on the PC for some reason, you can opt out, but they're actually just going to turn the switch. So they've I guess they've made some progress on this, um, but the other thing they're doing is they're introducing uh, I guess I'm going to call it an SDK, I'm not sure what's to call it a way to put your native windows game into the Play Store for play games for PC. So, in other words, everything that's in there now is a mobile game. Right, it's an Android game. Some of them are customized to work with keyboard and mouse, some aren't. You know, if you have a touchscreen, you can do the touchscreen stuff, et cetera, et cetera.

01:45:05
But they're actually going to open this up to developers who create native Windows games, so that you know, in other words, you've already done it. You're not just gonna, you don't just show up. You're like oh, I think I'll make a new game, I'll use this. For some reason. You've already made your game. Maybe you're already selling it through steam or wherever. Um, you can add it to the um, the play games for pc platform, if you wanted to for some reason. I can't even imagine what the point of that is. Um, this thing supported x86 generally, but intel specifically. Now it supports amd, works on desktop pcs and laptops, etc. Um, there's a lot of customization you can do.

01:45:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Playing android games on windows seems reasonable to me, honestly it's kind of hysterical that google had to write this, didn't? They didn't have to. Wasn't there an android?

01:45:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, they didn't have to. In fact, when they first started promoting this, google went out of their way to explain to me at least that. I just want you to know we're not doing any of this microsoft stuff.

01:46:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We did this all by ourself, it's not that code using that used amazon store it's they were so anti.

01:46:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think these might be interrelated. And, by the way, the Android subsystem stuff is going away right this year, soon, I think. Maybe, or I think.

01:46:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I thought it was already gone.

01:46:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, they announced it, but I think they're actually chopping it off at the legs pretty soon. And then Amazon announced recently they're getting rid of the Amazon App Store outside of their own Kindle tablet devices or whatever, and I think Fire TV as well. Anyway, I don't really care the Play Store thing for native games, whatever, but actually bringing. Now they're going to turn on this funnel. That might make this interesting. There's probably a lot of great games. There are are. I would like to play call of duty mobile on my computer.

01:46:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually that'd be kind of cool. Yeah, yeah, like. But there's all.

01:47:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The problem is like the screens are well, some of them remember like they're a big screen, they're tablets, there are prom books, these things run on those. So this is kind of the next logical step and uh, yeah, some games are gonna look like crap, it's just not gonna work. Good, they're gonna run, you know, maybe they run, uh, in portrait mode, whatever, but um, I don't like a game like holiday mobile, honestly, but right pretty great, um, so we'll see.

01:47:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's scaled up. It's just gonna be a bit bigger for you to see with your old eyes yeah, it might be my ideal call of duty.

01:47:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
As we move forward in time, we'll see hi get you, you rat all right, we're gonna pause readers first.

01:47:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're gonna.

01:47:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was thinking, by the way you know, you're talking about how you would buy a bunch of stuff to make sure you didn't run out, and that was always my strategy with readers you just buy so many that you saw this is the environment and you can never lose them.

01:47:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We used to be, when we were younger, made fun of a friend. Well, a friend's father passed away and he had. I think they found 37 pairs of glasses in this guy's house.

01:48:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're cheap, and now we have 37 pairs yeah, put them everywhere because you're gonna need them. Yeah, every restaurant should have a pair of readers at the table.

01:48:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly. In Mexico they have these tables that have legs that have like a circular kind of holder on the thing, and so if the table is full of stuff you can put a bottle of whatever you might have down there on the leg. Very smart, it is smart. You're sure that's not a purse holder? Yes, oh, no, they have those. It's a cylindrical thing. It's designed to hold a bottle or a glass.

01:48:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Smart.

01:48:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But, like you said, what it should have and it should be on one of those rosary chain. Things is like a pair of glasses. Yeah, exactly Because everyone you look at the menu you're like what is this? It's in one point type.

01:48:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so funny when you go to a restaurant with people over 40 and they all have their phones and their flashlights on the phones, on camera mode on and zoomed some people are just taking pictures and zooming in, you know yeah, what does that say?

01:48:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
getting old. Getting old is the best.

01:49:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's no fun. Okay, it's the best. Paul says it's the best. You know what else is the best? Our fabulous club twit. We'd like to invite you all to join the club. Uh, it is seven bucks a month. I don't think you could get any less expensive than seven bucks a month and for that you get, I think, a lot of benefit. You get, of course, ad free versions of all the shows. That's kind of, you know, obvious. You, you're paying us, you shouldn't need to have ads, but you also get access to this discord thing that paul was talking about, this amazing club twit discord. What a great hang. I mean, it is really a lot of fun. Uh, people are, people are very funny in there. There's a, there's some readers're going to have a lot of readers in there.

01:49:52
We are doing a bunch of events in the club. Micah's Crafted Corner is tonight, 6 pm Pacific, 9 pm Eastern, if you want to. There really is nothing to it. Micah's going to be building his little cozy, tiny kitchen and you bring your own little craft, whatever it could be Lego or needlepoint or whatever uh, and you can do it along with mike and it's just a fun little hang. Our ai user group is on the fourth friday. This is something anthony nielsen started. He's our ai wizard here and I'll be in there too, because it's really interesting to see how people use ai tools and share our tips with one another. We've got stacy's book club coming up. We're going to book another coffee show with Mark Prince, the coffee geek. So a lot of fun things going on in the club.

01:50:44
I tell you that the discord is a lot of fun, but you also get the warm and fuzzy feeling that you are helping us make content. Uh, it's not cheap to make the content that we make. We love doing it. We think it's important. Yes, thank you, advertisers, for supporting us. We started the club because we realized that we didn't want to be fully 100 dependent on advertising. We really want I mean I don't want to do a show just because I can get an ad on it I want to do a show because you want to hear it. So this is your way to kind of support what we do, to let us know what more you want to hear and see and that kind of thing. If you're not yet a member, scan the QR code in the upper left-hand corner of your screen if you're watching on video or go to twittv slash club. Twit twittv slash club. Twit twitter tv slash club. Twit again. Seven bucks a month, it uh, it's.

01:51:34
It's less than a venti latte at starbucks now uh, which is kind of saying more about starbucks, and it's about the club we invite you to join and be crafty with us. Twittv slash club twit all right back of the book time. Uh, paul, you want to do some more xbox stuff? Go right ahead yeah, why not?

01:52:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
why, um, if I I've made a weird transition from console gaming to back to pc after whatever number of years I was close to 20, I bet and I noticed this morning that, all of well, most of the Call of Duty games for PC are on sale in the Microsoft store up to 67% off. If there's a particular game you're looking for, you don't see it in the link that I have search for that, because actually I found like even the first game is actually on sale. The one caveat here is that on sale, um, the one caveat here is that a lot of the older games are not multiplayer enabled on pc. If you play this on console, I believe most of them actually still have the multiplayer stuff built in and I think it's like an infrastructure thing, because on console that probably goes through xbox live or whatever you know playstation, um, and I think on pc it's. It's something like activision had to do or whatever. But uh, if multiplayer baddest, you make sure the game you're getting still supports it. Obviously, the most recent ones do, I think through.

01:52:57
I want to say Infinite Warfare, whenever that was something like that, something like that, but some of the prices are pretty good. I might actually get a couple of these, and then just during the show, I just discovered this. So Starduck is also having a big sale and Stardock makes games, but they also make Windows apps and they have a storefront inside of Steam. So if you just look at their Windows apps like Start 11, windows Blinds 11, et cetera, they have. These things are for sale, typically 25% off, but some of them are actually more than I think.

01:53:36
Windows blinds is 50% off, so I can't see I'm stuck in, not stuck. I'm in Mexico, so I can only see the Mexico prices, and so they look really like $167, that's crazy. Oh wait, that's pesos. That's actually pretty good, that's cheap. But yeah, if you're interested in any of this stuff especially like a Star 11, groupies, window blinds, whatever this is worth checking out. This is as far as the app goes. This is something I've avoided for years, and part of the reason I avoided is because of the nature of what I do. I have to kind of use and understand what Microsoft provides in Windows, right.

01:54:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sure that, and you deeply enjoy suffering, but one or the other.

01:54:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hate myself, so it's kind of the perfect nexus. You hate yourself.

01:54:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I used to run my own Exchange server. Yeah, exactly that's self-hatred.

01:54:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's masochism.

01:54:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not a contest, but yeah, I, I I'm the type of person who would complain about, like, say, file Explorer for years, and then people always be like, why don't you use dot dot dot dot? You know, and every once in a while I would use a file Explorer replacement for a specific purpose. You know some of the digital decluttering stuff or whatever. But I think I'm going to start, I'm going to go down this path and try to figure this out. And so somebody had recommended randomly on social media something else and I was like this is stupid, this is complicated. And so I just went down to the well, to the one thing I'm familiar with or I've heard about, which is an app called Files. So if you go to filescommunity, you'll find this thing. It's available in the Microsoft Store. It's free, it's open source, it's a gorgeous, modern looking app. It looks a lot like file explorer.

01:55:15
I can't say that it's like super fast compared to file explorer. Actually, that's that would be a goal. So it's probable that I will have a. A future pick that's related to this will be a different app, but for now this is a. This is obviously people who care about this thing. They, they want it to look good and run well and all that stuff. It passes through everything that you might have an Explorer. So if you use something like Google drive, which has extensions to file Explorer, so you can, you know, mark things for offline, offline, whatever it, that stuff all works too. So, you know, tab based, gorgeous design. It's not super fast, right, it's not super slow, um, but it's not any. It doesn't feel faster to me than file explorer. I'm kind of surprised by that. On the other hand, it does not badger you to backup uh folders to one drive.

01:56:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, um, something to look at like it's a beautiful app, like it's well, you think they they I mean now that they have all these features that they'd work on optimizing for speed a little bit is it doesn't feel slow, it just is, it's not as fast as explorer.

01:56:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah well, it's hard to say so. One of the computers I'm I'm gonna review, so it only has 16 gigs of ram. It's in lunar lake, it's the lowest end lunar lake and it's not great on that. In fact, it was problematic enough that I looked at it on the snapdragon computer and actually there was a native arm version right, which is always appreciated too, and it runs great over there. It's fine. It's not faster, but it's it's not noticeable. I I would say this computer might be wheezing a little bit. Uh, between the, it's a lower end processor, it's actually a lower integrated graphics, which is intel, uh, and just 16 gigs of ram. You know, it's just not it's not great.

01:56:52
So, maybe that's that might be part of the problem, but it's a beautiful app. It really is a beautiful app.

01:56:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's worth it's worth looking at. It certainly doesn't cost you anything. It's free. So I completely understand, though, why you don't use it Cause you've got to write books. You can't, cause you might accidentally put that in a screenshot and everybody's saying hey what's that version of it? What's that beautiful looking thing?

01:57:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That is not the piece of junk I use every day. Yeah, if you can. One of the switches you can make and I think other file Explorer type apps would do this is you can you app right? Yeah, so, so you never see explorer right. So to the point where I mean it's, you know it's explorerexe, it's running, but you, when you do the windows key plus e keyboard shortcut, it launches this app, not file explorer, which is nice.

01:57:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess there's a lot of these, because the chat rooms come. I think there are a million, a bunch of different names, yeah, yeah and a lot of them will.

01:57:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, like directory opus, so like there'll be these um, uh, you know, really kind of power user complex ui. It's like I, I get it, but I, I this is this to me is what this is. Microsoft should just use this like it's. It's much nicer looking than explorer. I'm sure that's what its authors had hoped.

01:58:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's the same on apple, on max, there's a lot of alternative.

01:58:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, choices none of which I end up using because I just, you know, it's like okay you get all the good markdown editors on the mac. We get all. We get a bunch of file explorer replacements. It's like a different you know, different worlds, different needs. I don't know all right rich.

01:58:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you're up Time for your runner's radio for this week.

01:58:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, sonia Cuff's been a regular for many years, shadow Australia and works for Microsoft.

01:58:40
Knows her way around the things, certainly a strong IT person.

01:58:43
And we end up with these broader conversations most of the time and talking about managing AI costs, specifically just helping people understand how they're billed, how it's different, this concept of token costs and so forth, and why you might want to try different models and manage the costs that way and understand the billing and effects. And, especially when we get down into the cloud infrastructure it's, can I assign these AI costs to the apps that are using them and to the users so that we can see the where utilization is happening? Trying to get that breakdown of all the different pieces. And we also ended up on the carbon footprint side too, because there's that's an ongoing conversation for a lot of organizations as to where is your power coming from for these kinds of things, and then also sort of played against the FinOps model of how you cost your infrastructure, how those costs work together. So a bit of an accounting show, but it's a necessary part of the equation. You know, being responsible. Sysadmin is also understanding where the money's going.

01:59:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody wants to save money. Richard, it's not a.

01:59:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and for many years now on RunAs, I've been doing that once a year. Hey, this is your old uncle telling you to do the right thing.

01:59:52
It's you have a working relationship with your CFO. Yeah, and the better granularity can apply to costs and then potential return on investment, the happier you're going to be. And I get some nice emails every so often from someone saying, hey, you know, I got to tell you, I took your advice and I have a quarterly with the CFO and I can get my my budget through pretty easy now. Nice like because you're having an ongoing conversation of what's important. What isn't that kind?

02:00:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
of thing. I think that's really important for it because a lot of times, especially cyber security, it's not a profit center.

02:00:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's hard to justify the spend because it doesn't make you money and well, it's a conversation you've had where it's like how do you, how do you differentiate between you? You're between it and the cleaning service of the office. Yeah Right.

02:00:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, because there is just another line. Yeah.

02:00:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because if you're just equated as an expense, then it's all about cutting it. Yeah, and so when you associate it with risk for the company, when you associate it with efficiency for the company, when you show returns on things, all those things are true, you know. It's just that it's super easy when people don't understand what you do to, you're just taking out the trash for us all right.

02:00:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Finally, I get to say after how many episodes of whiskey hundreds I get to say it's suntory time we can.

02:01:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I really am doing a suntory whiskey and I did pick this up at the local shop, the Toki. We have talked about Suntory time before right. Oh yeah, suntory is one of the big conglomerates, one of the big four, and so they bought Beam. So they're now for a while they were called Beam Suntory and I went back and watched the movie.

02:01:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I love that movie.

02:01:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We did this recently did an extremely young scar joe, looking quite exploited I might it does feel that way, but sophia coppola directed it, so I feel like I'm with you.

02:01:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She probably wasn't exploited.

02:01:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It certainly made her a star, it was a lot of inappropriate underwear shots.

02:01:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're right at the beginning she's jumping around on her bed in her underpants. It's like we're talking about uh translation. What is it?

02:01:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
uh, yeah, lost, lost translation. Yep, that's what it is, it's really it's funny.

02:01:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We, we just had this conversation, uh, my wife and I.

02:01:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's amazing it's funny how movies that you remember one way age differently when you look back on them.

02:02:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Times have changed and well yeah, like you didn't know who she was when this happened. Obviously you know, and Bill Murray's Bill Murray, whatever. But yeah, no, I.

02:02:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, I didn't know she was going to be this phenomenal star and all those sorts of things you know. It also falls on the Edmund Fitzgerald too, because without that song nobody remember that shipwreck Like there's plenty.

02:02:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true, and lots of, lots of sailors have died.

02:02:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you know, Gordon Lightfoot Might everybody remember one of them Put them in the same league as the Titanic.

02:02:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe Gordon should sing a song about Scarlett Johansson, I'm sure there's plenty.

02:02:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So we've gone over Suntory a little bit. Before 1899, shinjuro Torii starts a wine importation business in Osaka. He was only 20 years old when he did this and is quite successful. The name Suntory is actually a play on his name. His last name was Tori and so when you refer to him you'd say you'd call him Tori-san and so Suntory. The big product for him that made him all his money was a thing they called Acadama Wine, which is actually blending Portuguese wine with sweeteners, and by the early 1900s he has 60% of the market.

02:03:12
He falls in with a guy named Masasaka Takaturo in 1920, who'd been in Scotland studying whiskey, and they set up the very first whiskey distillery in Japan in the Yamazaki distillery in a location between Kyoto and Osaka. The whiskey is very bad and Takaturo goes back to Scotland to try and figure more things out. They, they, they're. They finally get an addition out in 1929. They call Shirafuda. Then people don't buy it because it's bad.

02:03:43
After ten years of working on this problem, taketsuru left Yamazaki at the end of his contract. He believed that the distillery was in the wrong location and could not make good whiskey. So he then, you know, puts his money where his mouth is, and creates his own distillery up in Hokkaido called Nikkei, the second distillery, which trained much more like Scotland. He believed that was an essential part of Nikkei. It's also a successful distillery and that was a story I told previously. We were talking about Japanese whiskey and then focused on Nikkei and so forth. We didn't really get into where Suntory went from there, because by 1937, the famous Suntory whiskey becomes huge with the Japanese soldiers. It's a big contract with the military and so that does extremely well and even after the war continues to be popular, to the point that by the late 60s Suntory is a very successful, wealthy company and Shinjiro's son, keizo, who's also working in the business, now opens additional distilleries. He opens two, and one in 72 and one in 73. The first is the Cheetah distillery near Nagoya, actually on a peninsula called the Cheetah peninsula, where they're actually making grain whiskey, they're using corn and so they're making industrial alcohol products as well as drinking alcohols as well. And then in 1973, the Hakushuu distillery in the Japanese Alps. Taking a cue from what Takasuru had said, they moved to a more mountainous, cooler region. They made this additional distillery, although otherwise operated very much like Yamazaki.

02:05:16
The single malts don't become popular until the 80s. So that's when they first of the yamazakis come out. There have blend habiki in 89 and then the second, that new distillery they built in 73. Hakushu makes their first production single malt and it was famously in 2003 when lost in translation came out was also the first time that japanese whiskey ever won a world whiskey award. They won gold for the yamazaki 12, sending a 40 a bottle whiskey to 400 in a matter of wow days, because why wouldn't you cash in? Yeah, uh and they. This toki first comes along in 2016. So it's almost 10 years old.

02:05:55
It is a blended whiskey, but it's what's interesting about it. Unlike the other blends which typically bought from many different distilleries, this is actually a combination of the three distilleries that Yamazaki owns. So Hakushu uh, not that you know, the original Suntory whiskey was also a blend from the Yamazaki distillery. This particular edition is primarily the Hakushu malt with a little bit of the older Yamazaki blended into it and then a bunch of the cheetah grain whiskey added. So the Yamazaki and Hakushu distilleries are quite similar.

02:06:27
They don't do their own maltings anymore. Nobody does for the most part so they buy malted and gristed barley from all over the world most of the time not peated, but you occasionally find a Yamazaki with a little bit of peat in it. They don't use a ton of it. Their setup is large. They have a pair of gigantic mash tons for their initial mashes and then they use both Oregon pine and stainless steel wash packs big ones. Their fermentation is of sort of medium length because it is warmer there, so they don't go into the hundreds of hours, somewhere between 60 and 80.

02:07:00
One of the interesting quirks of both the Yamazaki and Hakushu distilleries is that they continue to use direct fire on their wash stills now most and then they use steam heat for their spirit. Still Now they switch to spirit. The reason to switch to steam heat is to stop explosions. Right when you're evaporating alcohol you're creating an explosive environment and having open fire in that space is dangerous, and so as soon as steam made sense, most most distilleries switch to it. But there is a side effect of using direct fire on the wash still, which is that you're roasting some of the materials left from the wart. That gives an additional flavor, and so the Yamazaki folks decided that was important, and so they've kept it in. They use natural gas, although apparently there are experiments with hydrogen flames now which are extra double dangerous. Oh my God.

02:07:58
If you ever take a tour of a still, of the still building on a distillery site, you will find that the buildings are heavily vented there. Roofs are open to open air. There's often big openings along the bottom and it's to keep the alcohol concentrations down to open air. There's often big openings along the bottom and it's to keep the alcohol concentrations down, limit the amount of explosions. And even if you do have what's called a flash, it's not. The building's not holding any pressure, so it's easy to dissipate the pressure and it won't blow the building apart.

02:08:22
But you know their argument is sound that you get a lot. When you're using steam under minimal pressure you're really not going to get much more than 100, 120 degrees centigrade onto the still. That's all arguably too hot as it is because you want lower than that for the alcohol evaporation rate. When you're using direct fire you get hundreds of degrees and so you do get that toasting effect and it builds new flavors. Part of the effect of that particular Sounds like it's worth the risk. Well, and you know, just do it properly.

02:08:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hundreds of years they've been using direct fire and and not blowing up very often and not usually blowing up.

02:09:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, um, interestingly, and again, both the yamazaki and hakushu, uh, they are using only pot stills, fairly big ones, 15 to 20, 20 000 liters, but a variety of shapes ones 15 to 20, 20, 000 liters, but a variety of shapes. They, you know, had their. The stills comes in pairs, uh, and they have like eight to twelve sets, depending on which dealer you're talking about. But they're not uniform, they're not all the same, because they make a variety of whiskeys and so they have different stills for different purposes. Uh, they have warehouses at their both distillery sites plus a number of other sites. Uh, they build them their own way. They tend to be out of stone but they stack tall. They use mostly third-party barrels, so largely ex-bourbon, especially for Suntory, now that they own a whole bunch of the bourbon industry. They're owning beam. They also use sherry casks and, of course, the famous Mizunara oak, which is the Japanese oak. It's extremely hard to make. Barrels from.

02:09:54
The Chita distillery is a completely different creature. It's in a different location. It's at the Chita Peninsula, which is actually a big food processing area, so it's in the center of the big agricultural brand in Japan and a lot of foodstuffs come and go from that port and there's stills right in the middle of it and because it's made for grain distillery, they use column stills. They actually have four of them, named the wash, extraction, rectifying and purifying distilleries, and depending on what they're making, they'll use two, three or four of those columns. So your strongest tasting spirits only go through two of the columns, like the wash and rectifying column, and then there's a medium where they'll add the extraction column, go to three and then, if they do all four, that's your lightest, uh high. If you're gonna really make like rubbing alcohol and get to 99, you need all four.

02:10:37
So that's where toki is made, is it this cheetah? So toki is actually made at the is blended at the hakushu distillery, primarily made from hakushu, but as is typical with blended whiskeys, you add little grain because it's inexpensive, right right. So your flavors are going to come from those single malts that you've combined, but mostly this is going to be grain alcohol because it's cheap, but it's also the. All of their grain distillation is done with corn and so it's going to be sweet as well. So if I give this a taste and notice how pale this is, it's quite a straw color like not not real dark uh whiskey. But it's not particularly old. It has no age declaration on it they call it modern.

02:11:20
It's their modern whiskey, and it is, without a doubt I mean japanese whiskey I've always thought seems rather clinical. It's very precisely made, very Japanese style. This is nice and sweet and fruity up front. Not a big alcohol hit, which is impressive, for it is a 43%, so they're not just going to the minimum 40, but it's gentle and it's got a little bit of heat coming out at the end. So and it's we're talking less than $40 US, you can find this it's a blend, and it's we're talking less than $40 US, you can find this it's a blend, and it's Japanese at 43%. So don't feel bad about making this into a cocktail. It's legit, but it drinks perfectly fine on its own. This is, I would argue, the most approachable of Japanese whiskeys. Right, this is the Jack of Japanese. Yeah, hmm, you know if you've got a family member who throws coke in it, I mean they're brain damaged.

02:12:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you're not actually, we do, we do. And I caught him with the angel's envy and I said stop.

02:12:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh no, I said stop at least use tab for that, come on fresca, if nothing else uh yeah, no I.

02:12:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I stopped him and then he god, he was going. Oh then he was a klana kilty.

02:12:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I said no, you can't put coke in klana kilty so that should explode if you just want to have a japanese whiskey around, have a bottle of toki this is a good idea.

02:12:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You buy some and say, here's for your, you know, here you go right, it's from the original japanese distillers in japan.

02:12:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's one of the largest companies in the world, for better or worse in the in the booze business.

02:12:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um yeah, and reasonably priced, and it's still distinctly, distinctly a japanese whiskey and nobody's going to look at it and say, oh, you got me in cheap whiskey yeah, no, no, it's.

02:13:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The bottles are always beautiful. Yeah, and this is the problem. If you sat this beside the yamazaki 12 which you would, if you could find one, and that's very difficult you would have paid hundreds for right? Arguably, the bottle's not even as nice looking as this thing, right? No, this is a good looking square bottle.

02:13:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very pretty.

02:13:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's distinct it's but you know, what else? It's got a screw top right, no cork or anything like it. Is an inexpensive bottle, like it's been done very efficiently, but good it uh, yeah, no, keep this one, you'll be you, you will. You will have a nice Japanese with you and arguably the one of the least expensive Japanese made.

02:13:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now did you? Uh, for a hundred dollars, let's say what would be a good Irish whiskey? Maybe that cat Kapok castle would be good.

02:13:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you can find like a personal request, like you're trying to use them as a personal shopper kind of a thing, exactly and, to be honest, I get messages I don't say at least every week.

02:13:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Somebody says, hey, I want to get, and when you're a whiskey expert, people are gonna want to know and if you're gonna go last day like 100, which file?

02:14:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
explorer should I use?

02:14:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he liked, I bought him a bottle of the middleton that came in though a nice wood box.

02:14:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He liked that yeah, those are nice. Uh, I would get the red breast 12, or, if you want to spend a little more of the red, rest 15. We've gotten them red breasts before I think he likes that. How about the yellow?

02:14:17
spot, then I don't think we've done the yellow spot go to the yellow, so the green spot's the base one and it's less than 100. The yellow spot's going to be in the 150 range and then, and then you know there is a blue spot in a red spot, but those are very hard to find and pricey.

02:14:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just an aging thing.

02:14:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I believe the green is eight and the yellow is 10. And it is genuinely nicer. It's a nice bottle. I'll look for a yellow spot, Green spot all day long too, friend.

02:14:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't remember where we got them. I mean mine are bottom. I mean Lisa got it for him so she might have If you like the red breast, he'll like the green spot.

02:14:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He did, he likes it a lot. Thank you, sir, if you can find the Cabo Castle, get it. It's just unusual. It'll be tricky to find. Yeah, and it's just one of the many Middletons.

02:15:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Although, to be clear, both red breast and they're all Middleton all the way, mr. Uh, wonderful, richard campbell, it's so great to have you on and you're, you're, multi, uh, ferris multimodal. There's a multimodal polymathic expertise in so many areas.

02:15:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He is at run as radiocom of podcasts and I can't forget any of them.

02:15:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so he's got a memory. I mean, while I'm submodal, yes, um he is.

02:15:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, that is riches at run as radiocom and, of course, dot net rocks with carl. Uh, all at res radiocom. Great to have you, you, you're going on the road pretty soon, I think next week in redmond for the mvp summit.

02:15:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I'm going to try and secure one of uh channel nine studios.

02:15:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, as I've done and if you want to bring a guest, don't, don't hesitate I don't see who would you like me to bring there I?

02:16:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
don't know, paul who should he get?

02:16:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh boy, I don't know, but you could confer offline. You don't have to make any enemies now. Um, although that that is always fun, uh like, uh just talking off the top.

02:16:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My brain has always worked well. Uh, no, I'm just saying.

02:16:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just saying we could put an extra window in if you needed another.

02:16:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, well, it'd probably be a side by side with the smart cameras.

02:16:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we'll do something thank you, richard paul thurot, thurotcom. His books, windows everywhere and the field guide to windows 11 are available at leanpubcom. You should really get both of them and, uh, anything you want to. I noticed on the front page of thurotcom yep, there was a, there was a comment. Somebody said what's going to happen to first ring?

02:16:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
People get nervous. Nothing's going on. Nothing's going on, brad had to go up to Michigan for work. This week. Oh, okay, I was away Monday.

02:17:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tuesday. So there was no first ring daily for the week yet, but there will be when you reunite.

02:17:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Fear not, you're getting what you pay for with this podcast. I don't know, no, uh, it's no. I don't know, no, no, there's no problem good, that's a relief.

02:17:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, become a premium member at throtcom for even more of paul's goodness okay for more of the nuggity center as, as we say it's that chewy yummy goodness says it on the front page of the uh of the site.

02:17:31
It's podcast, paul, and premium content all the way down the three p's, the three p's. Thank you, paul, thank you richard, thanks to all of you, uh, special thanks to our club twit members who, of course, make all of this possible. We stream windows weekly every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern Time, that's 1800 UTC. You can watch those streams in a variety of places. There's eight different places you can watch it. Of course, club members get to watch in the ClubTwit Discord and chat along as they watch. But we are also on YouTube for open to all Twitch, xcom, tiktok, facebook, linkedin and Kik. So that's eight different places you can watch. If you want to watch live, you don't have to, because we have this new technology. We got a wire recorder and we record everything and then we deliver it to you via pony express within the next six to eight weeks. No, we don't, don't know. You can get it later today at twittv slash www.

02:18:35
Just download a copy, or go to the YouTube channel dedicated to the video of Windows Weekly or, better yet, subscribe. You won't have to think about it, you'll just always have the latest version. Choose audio or video, or both. Just find your favorite podcast player and I'm sure they'll have Windows Weekly. Thank you Paul, thank you Richard, thank you all for watching. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.