Windows Weekly 958 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell are here. There's a new start menu came yesterday on Patch Tuesday. We'll talk about that. The Wall Street Journal finally get mad at Microsoft for not disclosing everything it owns with OpenAI. We'll talk a lot about. Net.net conf is going on right now, and, you know, Richard's an expert. And introducing the newest video game console from Steam, if you believe it.
Leo Laporte [00:00:28]:
All of 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 Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 958, recorded Wednesday, November 12, 2025. Personal Turkey. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you winners and a few dozers.
Leo Laporte [00:01:00]:
This is the show. We talk about the latest from Microsoft with the two premier journalists in the Microsoft space.
Richard Campbell [00:01:07]:
Oh, goodness.
Leo Laporte [00:01:09]:
Coming to us, Taranga, New Zealand. It is Richard Campbell.
Leo Laporte [00:01:14]:
Hello, Richard.
Richard Campbell [00:01:15]:
I mean, welcome here from the future. It's Thursday here. Thursday morning.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:20]:
How's the weather in the future?
Richard Campbell [00:01:21]:
It was very stormy overnight, like, just blasting away. Found a trampoline on the, on the, the milk truck road blown over from some neighbor's place.
Leo Laporte [00:01:33]:
You know, that always happens to trampolines.
Richard Campbell [00:01:35]:
Yeah, they fly. They're big sails. So they, they, the trampoline up here is held down by like six big spikes, so it stayed in place.
Leo Laporte [00:01:44]:
Somebody else take ours down so that, that wouldn't happen.
Richard Campbell [00:01:47]:
But the sun's out now. You can see it, you know, speaking through the window here and washing me out a bit.
Leo Laporte [00:01:52]:
Anyway, the kids have something new to.
Richard Campbell [00:01:54]:
Play on, so that's it. Well, my main thing is we got to get out of the way because they got to, they got to unload milk today, so they got to get that.
Leo Laporte [00:02:01]:
Oh, that's right. You're on a dairy farm.
Richard Campbell [00:02:02]:
We're on a dairy farm.
Leo Laporte [00:02:04]:
How much milk? Well, babe, before I ask that question, let's say hello to Paul Thurrott, who's in Mexico City from thurrott.com.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:11]:
I feel like we've been talking for 30 minutes, but. Hello.
Leo Laporte [00:02:14]:
Been on camera. So how much milk does that farm. You're on produce, Richard.
Richard Campbell [00:02:20]:
150 heads. So they pick up milk every, every couple of weeks. And it's a big tank, thousand liters. Like it's, you understand, to get up.
Leo Laporte [00:02:31]:
At dawn or milk.
Richard Campbell [00:02:32]:
I, I don't. There, there are professionals. Goodness knows, you wouldn't want to count on me. But I, you know, I go down There every so often. We're actually been. I've redone the network here at the house with ubiquity stuff and they want to put a relay to the milk shed, so.
Leo Laporte [00:02:46]:
Yes, they do.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:47]:
To the milk shed. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:02:48]:
Nobody.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:49]:
There's your. There's your podcast title. They.
Leo Laporte [00:02:51]:
They have machines, right?
Richard Campbell [00:02:52]:
Well, they're. Well, then, yeah, there's machines for doing the actual milking, but they're ready to go Iot on these cows now in artificial insemination season.
Leo Laporte [00:03:01]:
And so they have that time of year.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:03]:
Oh, yeah, no, we sure are.
Richard Campbell [00:03:05]:
You should really, really not ask me about the details of how you artificially inseminate a cow, because it is not.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:11]:
No, nobody. Nobody wants.
Leo Laporte [00:03:12]:
I think I saw it on Yosemite.
Richard Campbell [00:03:14]:
But you do not exactly. But they're now starting to put sensors for the cows to figure out when they're in cycle so that they. The insemination will take.
Leo Laporte [00:03:23]:
Do they have to wear a little pouch? What do they. Or do they got a call?
Richard Campbell [00:03:26]:
It's a collar.
Leo Laporte [00:03:27]:
It's a collar.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:27]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:03:28]:
Wow. They have a little aura ring for both.
Richard Campbell [00:03:31]:
Basically, he says, I'm ready.
Leo Laporte [00:03:36]:
Come and get me, boys.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:37]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:03:38]:
Well, funny. They have four bulls. They do have four bulls here right now on Rent. Oh, so.
Leo Laporte [00:03:45]:
So they do it the old fashioned.
Richard Campbell [00:03:46]:
No, they do not. They're just there to get the girls riled up.
Leo Laporte [00:03:49]:
Oh, they're just there for show.
Richard Campbell [00:03:52]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:03:52]:
Oh, my God.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:53]:
I don't know if we want to.
Leo Laporte [00:03:54]:
Know any more about this.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:55]:
I just literally, absolutely do not. People tune in. They don't expect clear about this. Yeah, I think we're good. I think we're good right there.
Leo Laporte [00:04:03]:
I mentioned for Windows information.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:06]:
Instead I got Windows tmi.
Leo Laporte [00:04:08]:
TMI for breakfast.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:11]:
Paulie. Yes, sir?
Leo Laporte [00:04:12]:
Patch Tuesday was yesterday. Have my.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:15]:
Just. Since we're on this topic, though, I just want to say I get my milk from the abirotes down the street and I'm pretty sure no cow was ever involved in the.
Leo Laporte [00:04:22]:
Do they have a little sound that they play as they walk around with their milk?
Richard Campbell [00:04:27]:
Do you see milk in the oats? Are they milking the oats?
Paul Thurrott [00:04:32]:
It's a place where I could buy like a ham and cheese sandwich and a curiously fresh fruit thing, but I don't know the milk. Some of the mass produced stuff here is a little off.
Leo Laporte [00:04:41]:
It comes in a box. Right. It comes in a septic packaging. Or is it.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:46]:
It goes bad in like three days. As soon as you open it, it's sour. You're like, what is it?
Leo Laporte [00:04:52]:
Okay, well, that's the dairy segment on the show.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:56]:
Sorry.
Leo Laporte [00:04:58]:
Okay, so yes, for you lactose intolerance winners and dozers. I am sorry now. Yes, Patch Tuesday, yesterday. What happened?
Paul Thurrott [00:05:08]:
Well, number.
Richard Campbell [00:05:10]:
Everything went great. Everything was fine. It was fine.
Paul Thurrott [00:05:12]:
Yeah. So far so good. 24.25H2. Got a pretty good update.
Richard Campbell [00:05:18]:
Maybe not.
Paul Thurrott [00:05:19]:
Well, one of the things that's in here, which is the new Start menu, might be the biggest UI change to Windows 11 in a long time, that people actually. Yeah, like people will notice it. Like it's real or whatever. It's good.
Richard Campbell [00:05:33]:
It actually happened.
Leo Laporte [00:05:34]:
What's changed?
Paul Thurrott [00:05:35]:
I don't know. I don't use the Start menu. No, I actually really. I pretty much skip it. But in the past it had the two sections pinned and recommended. Recommended could be a mix of documents and apps and then now ads, you know, recommendations, literally. And now there's a third section which is basically apps and that's at the bottom. And by default it uses a very iPhone like Library View, which is not called Library View, but what is it called? It's called All.
Paul Thurrott [00:06:05]:
Well, all is the name of the. No, I know, but the View style is category style, Right. So similar to the app library.
Leo Laporte [00:06:13]:
Oh yes. Apple added that to the iPhone a few.
Paul Thurrott [00:06:17]:
So this used to be a subscreen, right? You would go in the top right of the menu, click more, and then you would see this list. But the list view is the one that is identical to the old view, except it's on the front of the Star menu now. I mean, that's the biggest thing, honestly. You don't get layout options anymore like we used to in Settings, which is fine because it was pointless anyway. There's a little phone icon up to the right of the search bar, so you can turn that side pane thing on and off the slice, as it's called, I think, for your phone. And then after that it's pretty much the same. Other than the ability to change the layout, the customization is all the same. So if you want recommended to only show apps and not documents or whatever, you can do that.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:09]:
You know, that kind of stuff. So.
Leo Laporte [00:07:11]:
And this for 24 and 25 HD?
Paul Thurrott [00:07:14]:
Yeah, if it's a supported version of Windows 11, you'll get it. Also, the thing you can't really get from the image is it also scales according to the size, resolution and scaling of your display. So if you have a really big display with a small like a hundred percent or you know, 125% scaling, maybe it will be really big, you know, like you'll get additional horizontal space. I guess I've never really seen that, to be honest, but that's because I'm using laptops here. That's all I got. But anyway, I would say a 27, whatever, 30 whatever inch screen, probably going to get some good. Some good additional space there.
Leo Laporte [00:07:56]:
So that's nice because, I mean, screens tend to be wider than they are.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:01]:
Yeah, exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:08:02]:
Microsoft's. Because they like the.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:04]:
No, but the external displays we buy today still pretty much 16 by 9 for whatever reason. Right. You don't see 16 by 10 in that space too much. I don't know why, but that's where we're at. So. Yeah, I mean, you could actually use that space, so it's good.
Richard Campbell [00:08:17]:
Cool.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:18]:
Yeah. So beyond that, everyone gets, you know, the Start menu, like I said, the battery icon change where it's going to be different colors based on the state of the battery. So if it's charging, it will be green. If it's the battery, if it's in battery saver mode, it'll be yellow. Critically, low will be red. You can optionally display the battery life percentage like you can on a phone. That's kind of cool. Administrative protection, that kind of.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:44]:
I mean, not controversial, but really aggressive. Locking down of the admin of your admin account, which is your account. It's off by default, but you can enable it. In my experience, it's very disruptive. Maybe that will get better over time.
Richard Campbell [00:09:01]:
But yeah, it reminds me of uac, which was really bad, you know, initially, and then gradually eased off.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:08]:
Yeah. So remember. Yeah, so when UIC was first announced especially, and maybe the way it was implemented in Vista, in the beginning, it was annoying, you know, and then in Windows 7, they kind of streamlined it. They did a nice job. And so this is them going in the reverse direction because now it's a Windows hello experience and it's slow and you still have to acknowledge the prompt. You know, it comes slowly. It's like. It's like it's you.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:34]:
And then sits there and you're like, okay, it's me. Can we move on, please? And no, you got to click the button. It's something that needs to be streamlined. So I'm thinking they'll get that one right eventually. But also the primary problem is that it comes up so much. I'm sure what they're trying to avoid is a situation where something you're doing requires permission, elevation, and it just happens and you're not aware of it.
Richard Campbell [00:09:59]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:00]:
And I'm sure that's what it is. I would like the option to turn it off because I do not care, you know, if someone is physically holding me in front of the webcam and forcing it to do something I don't want to do. I have bigger problems than Windows.
Richard Campbell [00:10:12]:
Hello.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:12]:
Moving a little slow, but anyway, there's that kind of stuff. And then if you have a Copilot plus PC there's a bunch of improvements across click to do File Explorer voice access and Windows search, which I think of as semantic search at this point. So that last one is if you are an AMD or Intel based PC. I think it was only available in preview before, now it's there, so you should have that. The File Explorer stuff is that escalating right click menu, which interestingly I saw, I think it was on Twitter or something Microsoft was talking about. Oh no, no, no. I watched a Windows app SDK community call and they were talking about how they're going to work to fix that problem. So instead of.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:57]:
I'm not sure how this fixes it to be honest. But instead of like a giant menu with a bunch of stuff on it, you'll have submenus now like, like in the Windows 95 Start menu. So you'd have to like, you have to be super accurate. You know, if you like you remember you used to go like you'd go off at like one pixel.
Richard Campbell [00:11:13]:
Yeah. The whole menu would collapse and you get.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:16]:
It was like eight things in and they'd be like, oh, I lost it. You know, that kind of thing.
Richard Campbell [00:11:21]:
Websites like that these days. I don't go there anymore.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:25]:
Yeah, right. And then a bunch of stuff with click to do just you could do on screen language, translation of text, which I think is pretty cool. Unit conversion of things. I don't know. But I don't want, I don't know how other people use their computers, but I look at this stuff and I always think like, I'm like, yeah, this is fine. Like it's absolutely sort of productivity focused. It's. I don't have a problem with it.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:48]:
I'm like, I will never use any of this stuff. I don't quite understand what the point.
Leo Laporte [00:11:51]:
Of it is, but somebody must.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:54]:
Right? Right. I don't mind that it's there. That's my point. Like it's fine, it's fine. That's fine. Yeah, so that was that. So we'll see what happens in December. Microsoft usually bails mid month, so January will probably be pretty late.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:13]:
But I bet we have another pretty good update coming.
Richard Campbell [00:12:16]:
And yeah, everybody's working on Ignite. So they definitely lose two weeks in November.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:22]:
Oh yeah, right. That's a good point. So. Right. Actually that's a really good point. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:12:28]:
So I always look at the November. December is effectively like lost.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:32]:
Yeah, it's like, yeah, Microsoft, like Windows is operating on a like a 10 month schedule basically. You know, honestly, after this year and all the updates, I think we could all use a break. You know, I don't think I. I.
Richard Campbell [00:12:44]:
Got to tell you, I talked to lots of blue badges that are in that mood too. Like they've run so hard this year, you know, that October tour talked to a lot of them and it's like ready for this year to be done.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:56]:
Yeah, yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:12:58]:
And they were all, they were all on Ignite. Like everybody was on Ignite this time, right?
Paul Thurrott [00:13:04]:
Yeah, they've been, they've been kind of previewing Ignite a lot all over the place. Like if you follow Microsoft's blogs or their social media presence or whatever it is, they're, they've been, they're, they're, they're sort of giving little hints about things and then saying, well, there'll be more at Ignite, which is usually the way I kind of approach things where it's like, when do you think this is going to happen? I'm like, well, let's see what happens at the next show, which in this case is Ignite. But they're kind of doing that as well now.
Richard Campbell [00:13:34]:
To me, a show that is next week, that is still. And it's a Microsoft show and it's still not sold out says a lot.
Paul Thurrott [00:13:44]:
Yeah, it does. But then, I don't know, given the lack of expense of just doing this, virtually the premise behind going to a show like that is that you get to interact in person with the expert in Ignitescape or Microsoft show, often the people on the product team. Which is awesome. Right? This value.
Richard Campbell [00:14:03]:
Yeah. And I'm interested to see how many of them were actually shipped to San Francisco.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:07]:
Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, so I got to think about this. Maybe, you know, since the Pandemic, they've stayed pretty close to home. You know, they have the live shows. Right.
Richard Campbell [00:14:16]:
And that was why being in Seattle was so great. Because you could have a lot of the team there because they were there.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:23]:
Right. Yeah. That picture that came up in the Discord and we brought it up last week, I think too of you and I is from Orlando, from possibly ignite 2019.
Richard Campbell [00:14:33]:
Probably.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:34]:
Probably. Right. And you know, which was the last one before the Pandemic so. And that was also my last work trip before the. And then for the next year or whatever. But I, I don't know. Obviously it's good for kind of networking purposes which you know, for me is just get your keeping touch with people you haven't seen in a while. But.
Richard Campbell [00:14:56]:
Yeah, go to a lot of in person events. Like people want to be face to face. Right. And they want to learn that way. So. Yes. It's just interesting to see how Microsoft is rethinking all of this with. And I would also say like the team leads for these shows keep changing so clearly they're feeling around for different approaches.
Richard Campbell [00:15:16]:
I don't know how important moving to Moscone was because last time I heard they were complaining about Seattle's homeless problem.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:22]:
I know, I don't know, I don't know if you've been to San Francisco, but they might also have a problem with that. In fact, they might have perfected that problem.
Leo Laporte [00:15:29]:
Was it the homeless or the protesters they didn't like?
Richard Campbell [00:15:32]:
Well, both. And goodness knows there's no protesters in San Francisco, so that'll be fine.
Leo Laporte [00:15:37]:
But there are fewer apolitical places in San Francisco.
Richard Campbell [00:15:40]:
Right?
Leo Laporte [00:15:40]:
I mean most of the protesters or.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:43]:
Many of them were Microsoft employees.
Leo Laporte [00:15:44]:
Right, right.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:45]:
Well. Well look, I'm sure we'll have protests. I mean I wouldn't worry about that. But I actually wonder, you know, as you, you kind of asked or I don't remember how it was phrased but Richard said something that made me think, I wonder if this isn't like an AI fatigue kind of a thing. The point being not that what Microsoft is or isn't doing with Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, whatever it is. Right. It's not that it's not necessarily good or useful or whatever, but it might be that for these guys who are IT admins. Like, you know, this is going to be the whole show.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:20]:
Like, you know it's going to be the whole show.
Richard Campbell [00:16:22]:
You got to imagine it will be.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:24]:
I have more kind of bread and butter problems than whether or not some employees like summarizing an email or whatever. So maybe we can skip this one. That might have something to do with it. I just pulled that one out.
Richard Campbell [00:16:37]:
You hit on an interesting point because I'm talking to several other AI related shows that are getting a lot of lash back. So people are pretty burned out.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:47]:
It's too much too fast and then too disappointing.
Richard Campbell [00:16:51]:
Plus, plus there's also this whole era of we know this is a bubble and it's ending. Why are you still pretending it's not?
Paul Thurrott [00:16:57]:
Right. Right. Yep. Yeah. So, interestingly, this is a coincidence. I only have one item in the AI segment of the show today, which is.
Richard Campbell [00:17:07]:
I love that this is a two year low.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:10]:
That was not. I know, I'm serious. It was not by design, but it's just kind of the way it worked out. But we'll see, we'll see. I haven't, you know, we'll, it's sometime before the show. I'll. I'll see what they're going to do and then, you know, we'll talk about it next. Well, well, actually we won't because.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:27]:
Oh, no, maybe we will. When does night start? Is it Tuesday or.
Richard Campbell [00:17:30]:
Yeah, something like that. Next week. But I'm going to be in still New Zealand or moving, heading to Australia. So. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not terribly unhappy to be missing this one, but should.
Leo Laporte [00:17:41]:
We cover the keynote?
Paul Thurrott [00:17:43]:
You know what, let me, let me talk to you about that offline when I know what's happening and then, yeah, you can decide.
Leo Laporte [00:17:51]:
Help us, help us decide. We'd like to cover keynotes, but only if they're substantive. If it's just satya, kind of.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:01]:
Yep, yep. I can't, I can't. I'm gonna want to read a transcript of that part of it. I can't, I can't. I know, I can't even.
Leo Laporte [00:18:07]:
It's too much business speak.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:08]:
I think that's the issue.
Leo Laporte [00:18:10]:
It's like.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:10]:
And it's always new. Like, you know, I've said this before, but when it comes to AI, there's so much new language. It makes me feel like, I think other people feel it when they hear like me and Richard talking where there's like normal people and they're like, what the hell are these two guys talking about? You know, and it's, it's, there's that aspect to it. But then you listen to like the Microsoft earnings stuff or whatever it is, and they're using all these, like it's a fungible fleet, you know, and it's like, oh, why are we introducing new words? Like what? Let's, like, can't we just use the words we already have? Like, why do we have to, you know, everything has to be new and it's just weird. Oh, by the way, actually, yeah, Someone, Kev Brewer says he's correct. Sacha is not going to be doing the keynote, by the way.
Leo Laporte [00:18:52]:
Good. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:54]:
And I don't know why, but if.
Richard Campbell [00:18:56]:
They'Re going to do it On Tuesday. That means you. We can talk about it on Wednesday.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:59]:
Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right.
Leo Laporte [00:19:02]:
Yeah, that's really the choice is, should we cover it live or is it.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:04]:
Yeah, I'll let, I will reach out to you when I. When I know. Yeah, that's the way I will say that.
Leo Laporte [00:19:09]:
That's how we, that's how we like to do.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:11]:
Yeah, we'll see. And then, you know, if Twitter announcers are going to cover it live, you know, it's going to be something good. That's right, I guess. Which is, you know, I'm not really violating an NDA per se, but it's.
Leo Laporte [00:19:22]:
I have covered so many not so good keynotes.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:25]:
Tell me about it.
Leo Laporte [00:19:26]:
And I don't.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:28]:
I'm going to reference one of them at the end of the show, actually.
Leo Laporte [00:19:30]:
I know exactly which one.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:32]:
Yeah, yeah. I will never forget it as long as they live. Okay, so in keeping with what I just said about Microsoft sort of talking about things ahead of Ignite, they have an initiative called the Secure Future Initiative that is about security first at Microsoft. You know, it's like I thought it was AI. Yeah, we're going to say it's security.
Richard Campbell [00:19:53]:
SFI came first. Right. That was Midnight Blizzard that really got.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:57]:
That running and then there was a renewed kind of interest and push with it because of CrowdStrike. Right. And then now Windows has its own initiative that's part of that. But so ahead of Ignite, they were just Microsoft. There's nothing actually new unless you're just not paying attention, I guess. But they have added the. They've made some changes to Windows 11, including that admin protection thing we just talked about. But quick machine recovery which we've talked about, some improvements to Windows Hot patch phishing resistant, Multi factor authentication, which I would hope.
Paul Thurrott [00:20:37]:
All. Which we should be.
Richard Campbell [00:20:38]:
All.
Paul Thurrott [00:20:39]:
All is it. Yeah, that always helps. And then the passwordless sign in stuff using passkeys and FIDO 2 credentials. So Windows 11 has had basic passkey support, I want to say since 23H2, I think it was. It didn't do anything basically except some pass through authentication for your Microsoft account, basically. But now it's more full featured. The Password manager built into Edge does this now as well and it supports third party password manager. So you could go into Windows 11.
Paul Thurrott [00:21:09]:
I think they just announced today during the beta it was one password. Now it's one password. And oh, I can't remember if it's Bitwarden or Dash Lane, but one of the two can now integrate into this interface in the Settings app. So instead of, you know, using the built in Windows slash edge password, you know, slash passkey management capabilities, you can use the one of your choice, which is great because you could create a PassKey on the PC and then it will be available to you on your phone. And if you've already done a bunch of passkey stuff through whatever the system is, just by signing in, you get it in Windows too. Right. So this is. That's.
Paul Thurrott [00:21:46]:
That. That one to me is a big win. That's good. Oh, and I should mention too, Surface is part of it and we've talked about this in the past. I'm not sure there was new news per se leading up to the show. There might be next week at the show. But Surface has really. You don't give them a lot of.
Paul Thurrott [00:22:01]:
I don't think people think about it this way, but Surface has really pioneered the use of Rust in rewriting UFI firmware and they have open sourced it and it's available to anyone who wants to use it. Right. And I'm not aware of any PC maker that has taken them up on this, but this thing is, you know, it's memory safe and more secure etc. And so all the modern surface PCs have this. Interesting. Yeah, it works well in my limited experience, but it does seem to work okay. So yeah, that's a little. I mean this is the type of stuff they're going to be talking about Ignite.
Richard Campbell [00:22:35]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:22:36]:
We're not going to be talking about the Xbox game bar. It's going to be like this kind of stuff, you would presume.
Richard Campbell [00:22:41]:
I haven't seen any content plan at all. Net Conf is going on this week so I think the devs are focused on that, but I presume they'll be at Ignite. Like we keep thinking Ignite is a replacement for Teched and was really focused on more administrative stuff. But this just hasn't been true.
Paul Thurrott [00:22:57]:
Yeah, no, it's, it's. It's definitely admin, you know, it heavy. But there's. There's been a developer component to it since. I don't know, maybe the beginning really, I don't remember but pretty much. It's not as big as build obviously, but it's, it's still a place where they could make some announcements there. So we shall see. Last week Microsoft, after we got some rumors to this effect revealed that indeed there will be a 26H1 release of Windows 11.
Paul Thurrott [00:23:24]:
They haven't said anything about it. The rumors are saying that this is really for this Snapdragon X2 line of copilot plus PCs that's going to come out sometime early next year. And I can only guess at this point, and I think I did last week, there might be a handful of new features that are specific to those machines, but I think it's going to be pretty much what you see everywhere. So this time they're just using a different name. Remember when they did 20? I forget when things happen. I guess it would have been 24H2. They released the initial release only for Snapdragon first in June or whatever. May, June.
Paul Thurrott [00:24:09]:
And you could get it through the Insider program if you had an x86 computer. And then it came out again in October for everybody. Right. And so even if you got it through Snapdragon, obviously it had been improved over the. Whatever, the six months or whatever. So they're doing the same thing, but this time they're just going to call it something different. So that, to me, is pretty straightforward. There's nothing, you know, we'll see how this turns into.
Paul Thurrott [00:24:31]:
But after prepping us for the fact that Dev will be moving to this new version of Windows again, they didn't say it that way, but that's what's happening. They released the first 26H1 build to the Canary Channel.
Richard Campbell [00:24:46]:
The Canary channel.
Paul Thurrott [00:24:48]:
And it's like, what?
Richard Campbell [00:24:51]:
So when's the last time we had anything? Release of the Canary channel?
Paul Thurrott [00:24:55]:
Yeah, like, first. Exactly. I know. I mean, like, literally. Well, I mean, are you trying to.
Richard Campbell [00:24:59]:
Use Canary like it's a Canary?
Paul Thurrott [00:25:01]:
Yeah, exactly. Right. And they're like. And I love the messaging around, like, don't worry, there's nothing new in here. You don't have to. Don't even think about it.
Richard Campbell [00:25:08]:
It's like, what, the thing that Canary is supposed to be.
Paul Thurrott [00:25:11]:
Yeah. And the other thing is like, I didn't try it, but I mean, if you're on Canary and you have a x86 computer like a normal person.
Richard Campbell [00:25:21]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:25:22]:
I'm guessing you can get 26H1 right now. So it's like, what is. What's this schedule? Exactly. This is bizarre, you know? So if you thought this was going to introduce any clarity to anything, it's just. Don't worry, it didn't. So anyway, I. There's not. There's no.
Paul Thurrott [00:25:39]:
There are no new features. Allegedly. Yeah, we don't know.
Richard Campbell [00:25:41]:
Okay. And you don't have a machine configured for Canary right now?
Paul Thurrott [00:25:43]:
No, I would never use.
Richard Campbell [00:25:45]:
Why would you.
Paul Thurrott [00:25:45]:
I don't see the point. Yeah. Well, now it's like, okay, maybe, you know, but yeah, Dev is going to get on this path as well.
Richard Campbell [00:25:51]:
It'll show up in dev anytime.
Paul Thurrott [00:25:53]:
Yeah. And it's probably, I mean, maybe. Yeah. I don't know if it'll be this month or next month or whatever, but.
Richard Campbell [00:25:58]:
I'd be really interested in knowing how many people are configured for Canary. Like that's an interesting question.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:03]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:26:04]:
So it's always been an orphan, right?
Paul Thurrott [00:26:05]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [00:26:06]:
Never really become.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:08]:
It's also, and I say this, please take this with the ignorance with which it is intended because I don't install these builds. But when you read the posts about them, you're not getting a cumulative update that updates whatever you have to the new build. You're getting a full build. It's like a full install.
Richard Campbell [00:26:25]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:25]:
And so they don't really spend a lot of time with no indication there'll.
Richard Campbell [00:26:29]:
Be a way out of it, right?
Paul Thurrott [00:26:30]:
Oh no.
Richard Campbell [00:26:31]:
You're supposed to pave your way out of a Canary belt.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:33]:
Exactly. You're going to nuke this thing from, from orbit. This is the only, the only way. Yeah. So I don't know, I don't know what's going on there. And then, you know, earnings are still kind of dribbling out.
Richard Campbell [00:26:47]:
Boy.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:48]:
Yep. So Qualcomm actually reported a net loss, oddly on revenues of $11.3 billion.
Richard Campbell [00:26:55]:
I'm very hip.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:56]:
Yeah. But it was because they took a one time $5.7 billion write down charge from the US government's one big beautiful bill act. So congratulations everybody.
Richard Campbell [00:27:09]:
So that means they were in line to make two and a half billion.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:12]:
Yep. Yeah, they were doing fine and they expect this quarter to be great and going forward should be great. They seem to think they're past this problem, so I guess we'll see. But I, in the context of Intel, I've been saying lately, you have to remember, intel, when they report their earnings, doesn't include Intel Foundry revenues in their earnings. It's treated like a separate company. For the past, I want to say two, maybe three quarters, Qualcomm has been reporting their revenue, excluding the money they get from Apple because they want to show that the business is healthy without that business. Because at some point Apple's gonna drop them like the bad habit that Apple believes they are.
Leo Laporte [00:27:54]:
Do you think they also don't want to tell people how much it is? I mean, Apple doesn't. Refuses to tell people what they make from Google.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:01]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:28:02]:
But no, that's just licensing money though, right? I mean it's, it's.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:05]:
Yeah. Well, well, no, it's chips, right? Because they are making modem chips. Right. So, you know, they don't want to.
Leo Laporte [00:28:12]:
Tell people how many chips are selling.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:14]:
To Apple and Apple is replacing Qualcomm cares. I think that, honestly, I think this is, I don't think that they ever said, by the way, this quarter we sold 17 chips to Apple. I don't think, I don't think this is them. Because Apple would not want them to.
Leo Laporte [00:28:27]:
Say that, by the way.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:28]:
That way, of course. And Qualcomm would probably say, yeah, well go to your other alternative and get the modem from who that other Apple's making them.
Leo Laporte [00:28:36]:
That's.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:36]:
No, I know. Now they are. I mean, now they are. Yeah, that's why it's going to get.
Leo Laporte [00:28:39]:
Some point zero soon.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:40]:
That's right. So I think the reason they're doing it is for Wall Street. Right. In other words, there would be a lot of questions for this company about their viability going forward if they lose this big business. And what they're trying to demonstrate is that we're still seeing year over year revenue growth.
Richard Campbell [00:28:55]:
We're still a successful company without Apple's numbers in here at all.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:57]:
Just don't worry about it. We're going to be fine. Obviously they make most of their money from Android phones, of course, Android devices, whatever. And yeah, when you look at what I say was 11.3 billion, almost 10 billion of that was from the phone chips. Right, of course. I mean, of course it is so not just processors, but they make other chips as well. And they make chips for, you know, Iot automotive piece, well, PC of course. And they do have a licensing business, but that one's been declining for a long time.
Paul Thurrott [00:29:26]:
It's 1.4 billion in revenues, down 7% year over year. I don't know, I don't think people or companies want to license anything from Qualcomm any anymore. But anyway, they'll be fine.
Richard Campbell [00:29:39]:
But yeah, their CPU business is the thing that's supposed to save them. Right? Like this is the play.
Paul Thurrott [00:29:45]:
And yeah, this didn't come up in my write up or anything, but like a lot of companies, you know, we saw this with amd, they're making a sort of data center push themselves as well, which makes sense. You know, when they acquired Nuvia, those chips that became Snapdragon X started off as chips for data centers and they had really good graphics capabilities. Right. And that was the point. And then they bought that company and they did what they did with it. But, but they're, you know, they're, they're trying to diversify, I guess. Is it so.
Richard Campbell [00:30:18]:
Yeah. Smart. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:30:21]:
Well, folks, I hope you've enjoyed this.
Paul Thurrott [00:30:24]:
Yeah, that's all the windows I got. So I'll see you next week, everybody. Thank you.
Leo Laporte [00:30:28]:
Look at the quarterly results of some of the biggest industries in the world. We're going to take a little break and then we will talk about Microsoft. We will, I promise.
Paul Thurrott [00:30:40]:
Oh, yes. Oh yes.
Leo Laporte [00:30:43]:
And AI. And we've even got some developer stuff, Xbox stuff and brown liquor stuff. All of the stuff coming stuff. But first, let's talk about our fine sponsor, this episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by my personal choice for password managers, Bitwarden, the trusted leader in passwords, pass keys and secrets management. By which I mean. Well, I mean in my use, I store everything that I want to keep private in the Bit Warden vault. Because it's properly encrypted, it's not visible to anybody but me. So I keep my passport in there, my driver's license, images of those.
Leo Laporte [00:31:24]:
I keep my Social Security number that amount, my family all in there. So that's my personal secrets. But also the kinds of secrets developers accidentally send to GitHub sometimes and are embarrassed. API keys, you know, those secrets that GitHub and others give you. Your SSH private key. In fact, Bitwarden. I love Bitwarden. They recently made it possible to generate, store and serve SSH keys right from Bitwarden.
Paul Thurrott [00:31:52]:
Nice.
Leo Laporte [00:31:54]:
Keeps you from accidentally syncing it up with your GitHub. Bit Warden is consistently ranked number one in user satisfaction, not just by developers, but by businesses. G2 number one software reviews number one. More than 10 million users, 180 countries and yes, over 50,000 businesses trust Bitwarden. And there's a good reason. In fact, I would say there's in a more compelling reason for businesses to use it because you don't really control your employees hygiene and unfortunately employees sometimes do things like use passwords like monkey123 or reuse the same password on many, many sites. There are more than 19 billion, 19 billion passwords out there on the dark web right now. If you look at Troy hunt's pwned to own 19 billion.
Leo Laporte [00:32:48]:
Here's the scary thing for any business, 94% of them, almost all are reused across accounts. This is an epidemic. Infosteeler malware threats surged by 500% in the past year because you know, smart hackers these days, they don't bother trying to hack, you know, like in war games. Let's try some different passwords they just, you know, look for the post it note. In effect, they log in with the weak or reused passwords that they get from these password breaches. If you reuse a password, they use credential stuffing attacks to try that password on every other site. They've got your email and passwords, they're going to try it on your bank, they're going to try it on Amazon, they're going to try it on GitHub, they're going to keep trying. And you know, if you reuse passwords, it's going to work.
Leo Laporte [00:33:36]:
This is why you need Bitwarden's new access Intelligence. This is a new business feature, new enterprise feature that enables enterprises to proactively defend against these kinds of internal credential risks. Weak or reused passwords plus external phishing threats. Two ways it does this. Risk Insights helps your team, your IT team, your security team, identify, prioritize and remediate at risk credentials, bad credentials, right? Then they have an advanced phishing blocker which alerts and redirects users away from known phishing sites in real time. Bitwarden's using a really nice continuously updated open source block list of malicious domains. So half the time they don't even get to that malicious domain. More than half.
Leo Laporte [00:34:22]:
That's fantastic, right? You don't want to even give them the opportunity to click on that bad link or to fill in the credentials on that bad site. The other thing, that's fantastic and Bitwarden's been right on this from the beginning, passwordless authentication. It's transforming digital security and as always, Bitwarden is at the forefront, offering support for both Passkeys and other FIDO2 standards to strengthen and simplify the login experience. I use Bitwarden with passkeys. I far prefer it to using a device passkeys, you know, the phone's passkeys because Bit Warden's everywhere every device I use, so my passkeys are everywhere. Bitwarden's enhanced passkey support goes across web, desktop and mobile platforms. Means you can store and sync pass keys with end to end encryption. They're absolutely secure.
Leo Laporte [00:35:10]:
They also, and I do this because I really trust Bit warden. I use bitwarden's two steps. So I put my two step, my totp passwords in bitwarden, which really simplifies the login two step login with fido2webauthn, it will work with your Yubikeys and other hardware key authentication. You can use those as a second factor. You can use them as a Primary method for supported logins. And of course you can use your Yubikey to log into your Bitwarden vault as well. Nowadays we've got biometric unlock enhancements on mobile and desktop windows. Hello, face id, touch id, that kind of thing that really streamlines access.
Leo Laporte [00:35:48]:
It says without compromising security. I would submit it's enhanced security because it's biometric. It's also great for convenience. Sometimes convenience and security can go together. Improved autofill experiences for passkeys, cards, identities. They're designed to work seamlessly across modern browsers and apps. I turn this on everywhere. It's not on by default, by the way, but you could turn it on as an administrator or as an individual.
Leo Laporte [00:36:12]:
So I use my Touch ID and my Windows hello to unlock bit warden to unlock sites everywhere. If you want to move to Bitwarden as an individual or as an enterprise, you'll be glad to know Bitwarden's setup only takes a few minutes. It supports importing for most password management solutions. Steve Gibson and I both moved to Bitwarden roughly the same time. Just like that, just took the whole vault, put it into Bitwarden and we're done. And the best thing, the reason I even considered Bitwarden from the beginning is they're open source. I think anytime you use crypto it should be open source so you can inspect it, so third parties can audit. So you know there's no backdoor, there's no.
Leo Laporte [00:36:52]:
It's not badly coded, they're not using. Roll your own encryption. Bitwarden is regularly audited by third party experts. You can inspect it by anyone. The source codes on GitHub bitwarden meets SOC2 type 2 GDPR, HIPAA CCPA compliance, ISO 270012002 certification. It is absolutely the best. Get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan. And don't forget, if you're an individual, because it's open source, it's free forever with no limitations.
Leo Laporte [00:37:25]:
All your devices, as many passwords and pass keys as you want. It's hardware key support as well. Individuals free forever@bitwarden.com TWIT that's a good thing to know to tell your friends and family, Thanksgiving's coming. You know they're going to come to dinner, you're going to ask them, hey, how do you store your passwords? They're going to tell you, you're going to be shocked. And then you can tell them, hey, you know, you really should use Bitward, no I can't afford that. It's free. Bitwarden. Free for individuals.
Leo Laporte [00:37:54]:
Bitwarden.com twit Think of it as a little Thanksgiving gift you can give to all your friends and family. Bitwarden.com TWIT and if they don't use it, hey, it's on them now. It's on them. You told them you did your best. On we go with Windows Weekly, Paul Thurat and Roma Norte. Richard Campbell.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:19]:
That was a pretty good roll of the R there.
Leo Laporte [00:38:22]:
I'm trying. I'm still working on Tanga Tanga.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:26]:
I can't. I'm not. I'm never gonna do the rolling. The R thing. I get people who like that. They, like, literally grab.
Leo Laporte [00:38:34]:
I can't.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:34]:
My.
Leo Laporte [00:38:36]:
Everything I know I learned from.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:37]:
It's not the ratio. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:38:40]:
We went up to the beach in Fakatane, and Fakatane is spelled wh.
Leo Laporte [00:38:45]:
Okay.
Richard Campbell [00:38:49]:
Yeah. WH is an F sound in. In Maori. So right.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:53]:
Home in Pennsylvania, where they don't.
Leo Laporte [00:38:54]:
Whk. They're yelling, they're swearing at me.
Richard Campbell [00:38:58]:
It could be, yeah. They don't say those sorts of things.
Leo Laporte [00:39:00]:
They're nice. They're nice. Do you. Have you ever done the nose thing?
Richard Campbell [00:39:04]:
I have not, no. But, you know, when I. Living with Amari here in the house, so.
Leo Laporte [00:39:09]:
Oh, really?
Richard Campbell [00:39:09]:
She's good. Fun.
Leo Laporte [00:39:11]:
I love that. I think that's so cool.
Richard Campbell [00:39:13]:
Well, we. We watched the All Blacks on the weekend, too, which is very dramatic.
Leo Laporte [00:39:18]:
They get very serious about that.
Richard Campbell [00:39:19]:
They were playing Scotland and went out and lead early, and then the Scots tied it up and they sneaked a try at the very end and won it. So it was great.
Paul Thurrott [00:39:28]:
I mean, I find that pickleball is just about as exciting.
Leo Laporte [00:39:33]:
I mean, we're talking rugby.
Paul Thurrott [00:39:34]:
Different strokes for different real game, a real war.
Leo Laporte [00:39:40]:
Becky Worley, who, of course was a regular on our shows, was on Good Morning America, worked with me@Tech TV, was on the US women's rugby team. She had multiple knee replacements.
Paul Thurrott [00:39:51]:
Many, many.
Richard Campbell [00:39:52]:
Tough sport. It's a tough sport.
Leo Laporte [00:39:54]:
She's a tough lady, man. And gorgeous. She looks good doing it, too. It's kind of very impressive. Anyway, on we go. Let's talk about. Oh, Microsoft. What do you think?
Richard Campbell [00:40:05]:
How so strange.
Paul Thurrott [00:40:06]:
Yeah, so I, you know, dating back to the Mary Jo Foley years, been complaining about Microsoft's increasing lack of transparency, their earnings reports. You know, it's come up some couple times lately.
Leo Laporte [00:40:19]:
Last week we talked about Wall Street.
Paul Thurrott [00:40:21]:
Journal is beating this to death. It's beautiful.
Richard Campbell [00:40:24]:
This is John Wheel Right. Like, yeah, he's decided this is a campaign for him.
Paul Thurrott [00:40:27]:
Yep. He's like, he's like, this is. You're not meeting your legal requirements. Like, it's like, thank you. Exactly. Right, right. And he explains why. He's like, this thing, OpenAI, this investment has a material impact on your revenues.
Paul Thurrott [00:40:41]:
And you have to disclose that to current and potential investors. You have to. It's the law. It's the law and they are not doing it. And he really spells it out pretty well. So he knows a lot more about this than I do, obviously. But anyway, smart, but. But separate from this.
Paul Thurrott [00:40:59]:
And amusingly, I don't think this was the same reporter, but let me try to find it a different person. But the Wall Street Journal got a hold of internal documentation from OpenAI that says that their expectation is that they will lose more and more money every year and that the furthest out they go is 2028, at which time they will be losing $74 billion a year.
Leo Laporte [00:41:26]:
So Ed Zitron has taken a.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:29]:
You think? Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:41:29]:
Taking a lap on this one. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:41:31]:
Oh my God.
Richard Campbell [00:41:32]:
Jeez.
Leo Laporte [00:41:33]:
He's been saying this, but now bubble's.
Richard Campbell [00:41:35]:
Not going to be around in 2028. Like clearly the, you know, the jig's going to be up before these guys projections become.
Leo Laporte [00:41:41]:
Just tell me when I should get out of the stock market.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:44]:
It was like six months ago.
Leo Laporte [00:41:45]:
Oh, crap.
Richard Campbell [00:41:47]:
Well, isn't that, what's his name, the big short guy just taking a billion dollar short position.
Leo Laporte [00:41:52]:
Saw that.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:53]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:41:53]:
On Nvidia and.
Leo Laporte [00:41:55]:
And Sun Son. Masayoshi Son just saw. Sold SoftBank's entire $5.8 billion.
Paul Thurrott [00:42:01]:
Yeah, I know, it's crazy.
Richard Campbell [00:42:03]:
Well, 5 trillion is a lot.
Paul Thurrott [00:42:06]:
I assume he like put it into like Hobby Lobby or some other big growth.
Leo Laporte [00:42:12]:
It's got to be hard. And I really feel for him when you have that much money to really find an investment.
Paul Thurrott [00:42:16]:
Yeah, no, that way. It must be terrible. I feel so bad. I put this in the notes because my wife brought this up because we have these little businesses, right? And so like our Eternal Spring thing, we actually have to report like our revenues and everything. And the way this works is if you post a loss three years in a row, it's a hobby.
Richard Campbell [00:42:37]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:42:38]:
So I mean, what the hell is OpenAI then?
Richard Campbell [00:42:42]:
Like, I mean like multi billion dollar hobby.
Paul Thurrott [00:42:45]:
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, like Apple TV used to be a hobby at Apple.
Richard Campbell [00:42:49]:
You know, I would argue, I mean, how many years did Amazon lose money?
Paul Thurrott [00:42:54]:
I don't know. I mean, forever really.
Richard Campbell [00:42:56]:
Decades.
Paul Thurrott [00:42:56]:
Right. So how come they can do it? Is it because they have investments or whatever? I mean, they can. I don't know.
Richard Campbell [00:43:01]:
As long as you're publicly traded, you can make anything up you want.
Paul Thurrott [00:43:05]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:43:06]:
As long. In the end, like, why haven't shareholders held Microsoft to account? Well, it could be because they're just making lots of money. Like. No, that keeps going up.
Paul Thurrott [00:43:14]:
This is my. This is my. Everyone's complicit in the complicitness is, you know, no one wants to be the guy I would be because this would be me, like, back.
Richard Campbell [00:43:25]:
But this is how Bernie Madoff got away with it for so flipping long. He just keeps telling you you were making 10% on this, and then one day it's like, well, you never were. Why would you believe that?
Paul Thurrott [00:43:36]:
Yep. Yeah. I mean, it helps if you're just like a liar, I guess. I mean, you know, I mean, God help us if these people ever actually believe their own nonsense.
Richard Campbell [00:43:46]:
Yeah. What's the difference between a liar and shared delusion?
Paul Thurrott [00:43:49]:
Yeah. I don't know. It's like the difference between the House of Representatives and the Congress. No, in the Senate. It doesn't matter. Okay, so there's that. And then this is interesting to me. I just take this from the opposite angle.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:08]:
Mustafa Suleiman came to Microsoft about a year and a half ago.
Richard Campbell [00:44:12]:
Right. He was supposed to do the consumer thing for.
Leo Laporte [00:44:15]:
Yep.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:15]:
And he is. He is running an organization called Microsoft AI.
Richard Campbell [00:44:19]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:20]:
And. And I don't. I don't. I didn't know anything about this guy. I mean, much like everyone else in this industry, frankly, whether it's the guy who co founded and is now the CEO of Anthropic, or, you know, I. All these people. I don't know any of them, you know, and so Microsoft hires people like this and, you know, and I'm like, okay, I don't really. I don't know.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:38]:
I don't know.
Richard Campbell [00:44:38]:
They all seem to come from a pretty small club, but, like, they all know.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:41]:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They all went to the same Mensa College or whatever. You know, like, it's. It's. There's something. Yeah. These guys are all Google DeepMind backgrounds, you know, that kind of stuff.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:51]:
But I have to say, I. In that I've been so critical of a lot of stuff Microsoft has done in this space specifically. I like this guy. The more I. The more he talks, the more I think his head's in the right place. And I appreciate. I don't think that about anyone else in this space, like maybe literally.
Richard Campbell [00:45:11]:
Well, and we sort of agreed with Satya that if they're going to do anything consumer, it should be totally separate. And that's what they offered. I just don't know that I've seen a product from them.
Paul Thurrott [00:45:20]:
Right. So, I mean, his. Well, his products, so to speak, are. Well, there's the foundational model stuff they're working on. Right. So they're doing that. And he's been very explicit. Like, our goal is to be independent.
Paul Thurrott [00:45:33]:
We're going to build these models so that they can run everything. But how do I say this again? Going into this knowing nothing about him, and if I'm being honest with myself, predisposed to think that anything this guy and anyone in this industry has to say is going to be complete nonsense. Honestly, I think I referenced this maybe last week or two weeks ago he did that video. I think it was tied to that Copilot announcement, probably back in October, where he went back to his hometown and he just went around to different shops and talked to people and look, yes, I know this thing was produced. It's, you know, a big budget probably, whatever. But it felt human and real. And, and I was like, okay, okay. Like, I didn't, I didn't watch that and think, oh, this is gross.
Paul Thurrott [00:46:19]:
You know, like, you see some of these videos, you're like, oh, geez, come on, man. But I was like, okay, this one. Okay, cool. And he has just created. So Microsoft, we should just back up a little bit. Sorry. Microsoft just redid their agreement yet again with OpenAI. Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:46:34]:
OpenAI is restructuring. Right. So they're going to have a nonprofit. Well, I guess they do already. I guess they've done it. They have a nonprofit parent company and then they have the for profit company.
Richard Campbell [00:46:44]:
They'Re now set up to IPO if they ever get an sec.
Paul Thurrott [00:46:47]:
Yeah. And you know, they're going to, because they insist every time it comes up, they will never have an ipo. But of course they'll have to at some point. But part of the clarity that came out of that, because there was a little bit of clarity, was that we had previously learned that Microsoft and OpenAI, for purposes of their partnership contract agreement, had defined AGI as something that has nothing to do with science.
Leo Laporte [00:47:16]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:47:16]:
It was literally at the point where OpenAI crossed some revenue figure which has nothing to do with the quality of the service or the models or whatever. So now they've said, actually there is going to be a standard for this. We're going to have an independent third party. Come in. And if OpenAI says, Look, we've done it, we've hit AGI, which you should know, because the satellites will destroy the Earth. This party, the third party will verify that or not. And if they do, that's when the relationship changes. Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:47:50]:
And so we'll see what happens, if that ever happens. But, but Suleyman has repositioned this and I think has given some insight into how Microsoft views AGI. Artificial General intelligence. Right. So this is the, the point at which AI can match human performance at all things.
Richard Campbell [00:48:07]:
Pretty much.
Paul Thurrott [00:48:07]:
Right. There are people who believe very strongly we're on the cusp of this. Maybe it's already happened. There are people who think this can never happen. OpenAI is very clearly on the positive end of this. They believe it's real and it's going to happen.
Richard Campbell [00:48:20]:
It's been their primary recruiting tactic. So of course they have to.
Paul Thurrott [00:48:23]:
Their whole, yeah, the entire mantra of this company, really. And Suleiman's basically saying, yeah, we're missing the point here, this isn't really a thing. And what he wants to do is create something that he calls super intelligence, which is not really a new term in the scope of AI, but it's essentially AGI, but without the we are going to replace humans bit. Right. The idea is that AI should always be a helper for humans. It should advance our goals. And that part of that requires constant vigilance to ensure that the AIs we're creating are made in that mode. In other words, very much like an Asimov, you know, the robot, the three laws of robotics, of robotics.
Paul Thurrott [00:49:07]:
Yeah, yeah, he doesn't say that, but he should have, would have appreciated that. But, but it's touchy feely.
Richard Campbell [00:49:15]:
I'm always concerned when you equate anything with science fiction.
Paul Thurrott [00:49:18]:
Right, like, of course, I mean, I mean, I know, but look, science fiction predicted lots of things like submarines, bombs, you know, whatever. But yeah, I mean, to be clear, we're talking about the book, not the Will Smith movie, but anyway, it would be very easy to look at this post where he talks about the creation of a team that will be looking for, are looking to create superintelligence and AI, what he calls humanist superintelligence as being kind of marketing drivel and kind of touchy feely, whatever. But you know what, it really tracks with what I see in this guy so far in the couple of times he's been, you know, public talking. And I, I get the vibe from this guy, which again, completely different from the rest of the industry that he is sincere. He's. He's one of the smart guys in the room. He's one of those guys. Like you said, he's part of that star chamber thing mostly from Google DeepMind originally.
Paul Thurrott [00:50:12]:
Right. And you know, he had his own AI startups after that as well, and then came to Microsoft, et cetera. But. But I feel like maybe alone in that whole group. Like, I think he's in the right frame of mind. So we'll see what at least comes.
Richard Campbell [00:50:24]:
At least saying the right thing.
Paul Thurrott [00:50:26]:
Yes, it could just be really good marketing, but it's Microsoft. They don't do good, really do good marketing. So.
Richard Campbell [00:50:32]:
Because there's been a lot of argument around this idea that the whole making the model bigger isn't working anymore and that it wasn't that good an idea and that you narrow the scope to specific capabilities so you get more precise results. And what you really want is an orchestrator across an array of smaller models.
Paul Thurrott [00:50:52]:
Some of which are local, some of which.
Richard Campbell [00:50:54]:
But also to comprehend a large enough set of data for you to call it a super intelligence. Right. Like this is just about what data sets are available to you through this orchestrator. And that is a useful tool. Right. Like right off the bat, let's strip out the science fiction that somehow amorphously, you know, in a counter to all, everything that entropy teaches us, that an intelligence emerges out of this pile of electrons and that it has intent. We've never had any software that has intent.
Paul Thurrott [00:51:24]:
That's right.
Richard Campbell [00:51:25]:
It's right. It's just. Just a bit silly, really. But again, it's been steeped in science fiction. You've watched too much Ultron.
Paul Thurrott [00:51:31]:
I think, first of all, you can never watch too much Ultron. I don't know what you mean by that.
Richard Campbell [00:51:36]:
I'm not going to disagree that James Bader was the ultimate voice and laid. That's such a phenomenal character of a movie.
Paul Thurrott [00:51:45]:
Okay.
Richard Campbell [00:51:46]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:51:47]:
Such nerds. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:51:51]:
I. But, you know, at least Suleiman saying, what is the practical thing, which is these are automation tools for increasing productivity of people.
Paul Thurrott [00:52:00]:
I have to tell you, the nerdiest thing I've ever done. And I did it knowing it was going to be the nerdiest thing I ever did, which is we're in a bar a week and a half ago, whatever, talking to someone we know really well there it was quiet, so we had a lot of time. And my wife said, oh, what's that brooch you have? It was like a leaf thing. And I said, oh, I know exactly what that is.
Leo Laporte [00:52:17]:
But.
Paul Thurrott [00:52:18]:
But there's no way you're nerdy enough to have bought it. She's like, what do you mean by that? And I'm like, that's the Lothlorien leaf that the Lembas was wrapped in in the Lord of the Rings. And her eyes are like. She goes, that's exactly what it is. And she's like, what? Why didn't you think I was that nerdy? I'm like, well, now I do. Geez. Now we spent the next 30 minutes talking about the Lord of the Rings, and my wife's over there going, jesus, what have I done? It's like, what happened? She's like, complimenting this woman on jewelry, and it turned into the nerdiest thing that's ever happened to you.
Leo Laporte [00:52:46]:
Co host a show with a guy who lives near Hobbiton and it's going.
Richard Campbell [00:52:49]:
To be all over. She's down the road.
Paul Thurrott [00:52:50]:
I was like. She's like. She said something like. She's like, oh. She's like, you know, your. Your Lord of the Rings or whatever. And I'm like, no, my Lord of the Rings. I'm like, I'm a Tolkien scholar.
Paul Thurrott [00:53:00]:
What are you talking about? It's actually the thing I know the most about, you know, like.
Richard Campbell [00:53:06]:
Anyway, okay, here's what I know. It's a 20 bucks a head to go into Hobbiton.
Leo Laporte [00:53:12]:
What?
Richard Campbell [00:53:13]:
Yeah, I would pay that. They're banking. I don't know.
Paul Thurrott [00:53:18]:
It's.
Leo Laporte [00:53:18]:
It's not. It's not. We. It's not.
Paul Thurrott [00:53:21]:
Well, they left it there on purpose. I mean.
Richard Campbell [00:53:25]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:53:25]:
Somebody probably bought it.
Richard Campbell [00:53:27]:
Yeah. Has built a business around it now.
Leo Laporte [00:53:29]:
I'm gonna make it an amusement park.
Richard Campbell [00:53:30]:
Apparently. We can. We can book a private tour to our own Design starting at $3,000 if you wanna put a package together. You know, we could have an experience.
Paul Thurrott [00:53:39]:
A bunch of the character actors that were the hobbits are still there in character. Like the guy who makes the face every time the younger people do anything. Like they're all just there being themselves, you know. Wow.
Richard Campbell [00:53:49]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:53:51]:
We will be talking about AI, of course, in the next show on this network, Intelligent Machines. And I'm really thrilled that our guest is. And a guy I'm sure you both know is Kevin Kelly, who was one of the founders of Wired. He was one of the founders of the. Well, and he is. He's got a whole thing called, you know, for AI he thinks of it the future. He's an optimist about AI I was curious.
Paul Thurrott [00:54:15]:
I was. I was. I was when you think about people who've been in the industry a long time and have a good perspective, like the kind of like he really does.
Leo Laporte [00:54:23]:
I mean he's been there since.
Paul Thurrott [00:54:24]:
Well, like him. Okay. Yeah. I'm curious. Like, you want to hear from those guys? Yeah, I'm just. I'm curious.
Leo Laporte [00:54:28]:
I can't wait to talk to him. We're really excited about this. And he has some, I think, kind of different opinions about AI, but he's very positive about it. He thinks of it though. He says, don't think of it as human intelligence. Think of it as an alien intelligence, which will be useful for our human.
Richard Campbell [00:54:43]:
I'm just finding a product. It's a productivity tool. You know what Heck of a. It's a re entrant code generator. When you use it for development, it's.
Paul Thurrott [00:54:50]:
Like a spell checker that you can ask about the lump on your neck. You know, it's like a weird. But don't.
Leo Laporte [00:54:56]:
Tells you.
Paul Thurrott [00:54:57]:
It's like, oh man. I would just put something over that. You'll be. Be fine.
Leo Laporte [00:55:01]:
Yeah. Kevin wrote the book 15 years ago, what Technology wants, and he was pretty prescient then. I think it'll be very interesting. Anyway, that's coming up right after Windows Weekly. I just wanted to mention that. Should we take a break now or. What would be. What would work for you, my friend?
Paul Thurrott [00:55:19]:
Well, thank you for asking, Leo. I. No, I don't care.
Leo Laporte [00:55:23]:
This is fine. Let's do it now. It's. It's a good time to do it. And we'll continue on. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat from thurat.com and leanpub.com where his books live. And of course, Richard Campbell of.net Rocks & Runners radio fame. Our show today brought to you by our friends at Outsystems.
Leo Laporte [00:55:45]:
Speaking of AI, this is. This is brilliant. They are the number one AI powered, low code development platform. They've been doing this longer than anybody. Organizations all over the world are creating custom apps as. As you were just talking about, Richard and AI agents on the Outsystems platform. With good reason because Outsystems is all about outcomes, helping teams quickly deploy apps and AI agents and deliver results. And man, if you go to the website, you will see the success stories there.
Leo Laporte [00:56:17]:
They're endless. They helped a top US bank, a name you would know, deploy an app for customers to open new accounts on any device. It was huge success. 75% faster onboarding times. They helped one of the world's largest brewers deploy a solution to automate tasks and clear bottlenecks, which delivered a savings of about 1 million development hours. They even helped a global insurer accelerate development of a portal and app for their employees, which delivered a 360 degree view of customers and a way for insurance agencies to grow policy sales. The Outsystems platform, it's truly a game changer for development teams. With AI powered low code, it's a perfect match, right? Teams can build custom future proof applications and AI agents at the speed of buying.
Leo Laporte [00:57:06]:
With fully automated architecture, security, integrations, data flows and permissions all built right in. It really solves the buy versus build conundrum. You can do it as easily as buying, as quickly as buying, but you get a custom solution and you don't have to worry about security and integrations because all that's built in, all of that just comes with Outsystems. Without systems, it's so easy to create your own purpose built apps and agents. There's really no need to consider off the shelf software solutions ever again. This is the last solution you'll ever buy. OutSystems number one AI powered low code development platform. Learn more at outsystems.com TWiT that's outsystems.com TWiIT this is to me, this to my mind, this is exactly the marriage you want.
Leo Laporte [00:57:55]:
It's. It's not vibe coding, it's AI supported low code. It's Chef's Kiss. It's perfect. OutSystems.com we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:13]:
As we speak here on Wednesday we're at the midway point of. Net conf 2025. This is the three day Microsoft conference for. Net. They launched net 10 on Tuesday yesterday. But also Visual Studio 2026 which has some really cool changes. I've been using the Insiders version they used to. I can't remember the language they used.
Richard Campbell [00:58:34]:
Before, but the Insider edition of 2026.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:36]:
Yeah, yeah. So this is a much better application than the previous version. They made some real nice like kind of foundational changes to it. So you know, if anyone who's used Visual Studio knows, I'm sure you click, you know, compile or whatever or debug or whatever it is and the thing hangs, it just hangs.
Richard Campbell [00:58:59]:
It's a bit of a battleship.
Paul Thurrott [00:59:01]:
Everything was running on the same UI thread basically. So now it doesn't do that. It's actually much more performant. It's also better looking. It's got a nice swin UI kind of user interface. Now color themes and stuff, which I don't really use, but it's definitely better. But the bigger change may be. Well, no, that's a big change, but as big maybe is they're going to change the way that they update Visual Studio going forward and they're actually to going, going to follow the Visual Studio code model.
Paul Thurrott [00:59:27]:
That app is updated every month. I believe it's the first day of the month they released an update named after the previous month. So November 1st you get the October 2025 visual studio code update.
Richard Campbell [00:59:41]:
Whatever they were doing quarterly updates to Studio, it was getting a lot of updates. If you were keeping up with them.
Paul Thurrott [00:59:47]:
There is only one app that gets up. No, that's not true. Well, there's one major app that gets updated more than Visual Studio and I am absolutely going to discuss that later in the show. It drives me insane. But Visual Studio, yes, a lot of times I will use it and it will say, oh, there's an update. Do you want to install it now or do you want to install it? Like when you close the app, you're like, all right, I'll just do it when I close the app. And then you think you're done. And of course the installer app comes.
Leo Laporte [01:00:16]:
Up and it does this thing.
Paul Thurrott [01:00:17]:
It's like, jeez, now we're going to do this every month. Maybe there'll be smaller updates, I don't know. So net 10 is out. Net 10 has updates across the stack. Of course, the big one always is performance. It's always double digit performance. Somehow.
Richard Campbell [01:00:31]:
Stephen Taub is a genius, but this is really a byproduct of them using. NET inside of Azure. Where performance equals money.
Paul Thurrott [01:00:39]:
Exactly. That guy, every year. Yeah, he writes a book home and I watched several hours of this event yesterday, including his talk, and he did a neat demonstration of this. It's literally like, here's an app it's running on what do you call it? Net framework 4.8, whatever. Here's whatever the benchmark. And then here it is running on 9. Net9 and then here it is on 10 and it's like it wasn't as big of a jump from 9 to 10 as it was from 4.8 to 9, but it was double digit. You know, it's really impressive.
Richard Campbell [01:01:14]:
Substantial. Yeah, yeah, that was true 8 to 9 as well. Like, they've just been consistent. They've even done case studies of Microsoft Internal products getting significant performance boost just by switching Framework versions.
Paul Thurrott [01:01:28]:
One of the big problems for Microsoft, honestly, with. Net as it was originally envisioned, like the. The Prenet core. Net, I guess that makes sense. Was that adoption internally was really low. There was a point where the Vista team was like we're not shipping any net in this product. We're not doing that now. And I think it was Scott Hanselman.
Paul Thurrott [01:01:51]:
But one of the presenters, it might have been Steven, it was one of the guys. But they brought up here's all the places we're using it and then here are the benefits we saw. And actually one of the biggest benefits was also to Bing. Right. Which is one of the things you might not think about too much. But same, same idea as Azure. You know, it's like this cloud or a plant scale, cloud service, whatever. You know, every percentage point matters and, and it's.
Paul Thurrott [01:02:16]:
It look, it's depending on the complexity of your app. I assume Bing is slightly more complex than the Notepad app that I write. But for a lot of people, not all people, absolutely people have problems but they have Upgrade Assist. I think it's just called an Upgrade Assistant wizard or whatever. But you can often just go into Visual Studio and say it's using.net9 now, use.net10 and then recompile and it's just you're off and you're good to go.
Richard Campbell [01:02:41]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:02:42]:
So they've done something really good there.
Richard Campbell [01:02:44]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:02:46]:
Where they haven't done something good is not. Net but is the Windows app SDK which is a steam pile of terribleness. And this past year I've been trying to work, you know, my app out to build it out to support multiple tabs, etc. I basically figured out there's no good way to do it with WPF because those controls are antiquated and they haven't.
Richard Campbell [01:03:08]:
Gotten the same level of love.
Paul Thurrott [01:03:09]:
Oh, they're just not the modern. You know, if you want something to look like modern apps in Windows look like the ones that Microsoft makes, you have to pretty much much use. Not always, but you pretty much have to use the Windows app SDK. It's terrible. And I've been approached several times by Uno Platform. So Uno Platform is one of the many kind of. NET adjacent companies they're actually partnering with. NET on a bunch of stuff like Avalon's another one where Avalonia.
Paul Thurrott [01:03:37]:
Yeah, Avalonia. But I say Avalon. I'm sorry, Avalonia.
Richard Campbell [01:03:40]:
Avalon was the code name for wtf.
Paul Thurrott [01:03:46]:
Where there's this kind of feeling that Microsoft landed on something really special with wpf. I wish I could go back in time and understand it 20 years ago the way I do now, but it must have seemed like Technology handed down by aliens. It's amazing. And so a lot of these companies, as Microsoft has moved off of that and tried to do the Metro thing and, and then the Windows runtime from Windows 8 and then what became the universal Windows platform in Windows 10 and then what became the Windows app SDK today is like, yeah, but this other thing is actually kind of perfect. Why don't we just keep doing that? And so Uno platform is one of a few and probably the biggest and best maybe of the kind of third party WPF alternatives, but open source and cross platform. Right. And so I met with them at Build and they were like, hey, look, just give us your GitHub repository address and we'll put like a junior engineer on it. Because I was having all these struggles with this thing and I was like, oh.
Paul Thurrott [01:04:50]:
I'm like, oh no, I appreciate it. I'm like, I felt worried about that. Right? And then they just reached out to me and they're like, hey, we got this big announcement coming on at. NET Conf, but we have to talk to you before Monday. I was going to Oaxaca that day. We were delayed two hours. So literally the second I got to the hotel room, opened a laptop and met with these three guys. What they showed me was my app, which they used this AI bit.
Paul Thurrott [01:05:19]:
It has an AI agent and these MCPS built into the 2.0 version of the Uno platform Studio, which is their integrated ID that does the visual designer stuff that Microsoft. It doesn't do, by the way. Yeah, among other things. And you know, hot reload, but also hot design, really powerful and excellent. And they, they wrote a prompt that said just basically modernize this thing and make it run on all the platforms that we support, which is like Linux, web assembly, Mac, you know, Android, whatever. And they show me a video of it and it's like it took it, it took it three minutes to make this. And I was like, my whole life is a waste of time. I don't even know what I'm doing anymore.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:00]:
But it's beautiful. So you'll be able to see this demo for yourself tomorrow. One of the guys from Uno Platform is presenting tomorrow at dotnet Conf. It's community day, is the third day, so.
Richard Campbell [01:06:12]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:13]:
You'll be able to see this for yourself. And I was just like, I have spent. I can't believe I have any hair left. I can't even tell you how hard this is. Has been for me. And like, it's like you just, yeah, just did it in three minutes. It's like that's nice.
Leo Laporte [01:06:30]:
So anyway, how come you're not at Net Conf?
Paul Thurrott [01:06:33]:
It's. Oh, it's ver. I can't. It's all virtual.
Leo Laporte [01:06:35]:
Oh, so you can.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:36]:
I've been watching it.
Leo Laporte [01:06:37]:
I've been watching while you're making. Milking the cows.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:39]:
You can? Yeah, yeah. Yes.
Richard Campbell [01:06:40]:
Yeah. Well, no, I mean, I. If I was in town, if I was home, I would be a host. I would take a four hour block at the studio, which I've done before. Before.
Leo Laporte [01:06:50]:
But I'm not daily Wick. I mean, this is your thing.
Richard Campbell [01:06:52]:
Yeah, absolutely. And I love doing that. It's so much fun to work with those guys. It's really a ton of fun. But hey, your grandbaby's only this size.
Leo Laporte [01:06:59]:
Yes.
Richard Campbell [01:07:00]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [01:07:00]:
I'm so proud of you. That's really true. This is what counts. This is.
Richard Campbell [01:07:03]:
And we're having such a good time. She's going to come back a toddler. She's learning to crawl like right now. So it's, it's happening.
Leo Laporte [01:07:10]:
How do you compare Pulp Uno platform to something like Visual Studio? Is it.
Richard Campbell [01:07:15]:
I mean, it's the UI layer, right. Like they've done. They approach the way to do UI really openly, you know, so you still use it with.
Paul Thurrott [01:07:27]:
Well, there's a tool that is. Well, you, you actually, you could, but they have their own tool which is like a Visual Studio quilt.
Leo Laporte [01:07:35]:
But you do the design first in.
Paul Thurrott [01:07:37]:
Well, the Zuno platform and then the platform studio is the, the code that, you know, the design editor.
Richard Campbell [01:07:42]:
And this is their new tool. Like they, they're showing one of the better integrations of using LLMs as part of your coding process for.
Leo Laporte [01:07:49]:
Oh, yeah, it's really powerful.
Richard Campbell [01:07:52]:
And. Oh, it's. And it's Jerome that's doing the demo. Yeah. And he's the cto. That guy's great, man. Yeah, it'll look fantastic.
Leo Laporte [01:08:00]:
So you, you liken it, Paul, to your, your old friend Delphi. And is it in terms of ease of use or.
Paul Thurrott [01:08:07]:
I mean, it's such a different era. These things are kind of hard to equate to. What I would say is we had Visual Basic back in the day. Right. And that evolved and then we had Visual Studio. They integrated that kind of underlying Visual Editor into Visual Studio. We had Windows Forms and that was like. The last one was kind of like a pixel perfect designer, like Grot.
Paul Thurrott [01:08:32]:
You could just like drag a control and move it around on a form, that kind of thing. The problem is we have, you know, even when at the time it came out. We have resolution independent displays, or you can scale displays, and we have big displays with giant resolution. But, like, this app would look like really tiny, et cetera. So, you know, when they move to wpf, they address that and it works great, but you can't. They've never successfully made a visual design, and it works really well with it. They did that. Was it called expression or whatever that visual.
Paul Thurrott [01:09:03]:
They had a visual. They briefly had something, but it just never happened, you know? So I think people who write in whatever WPF or newer whatever it is, writing XAML by hand, for the most part, I would imagine, you know, oh, my God. Which I don't actually mind. I feel like a lot of these people would just be used to that. Just. They don't care. It's fine.
Leo Laporte [01:09:22]:
But it's just the way that. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:09:23]:
So. But these guys figured it out. You know, that was one of the big things. And so Hot Reload is a. A feature where you don't have to stop an app that's running. You can change the code. And just the best. That's how it should be.
Paul Thurrott [01:09:35]:
Visual Studio does it code does it.
Richard Campbell [01:09:39]:
It's a feature of the. NET Framework, so anything that runs can.
Paul Thurrott [01:09:42]:
But they also added the notion of what they call hot design. So it's not just the code. It's like you can change the visual design, you'll rerename it, and it changes it live as it's running. It speeds the process up. Dramatic. It's really nice.
Leo Laporte [01:09:55]:
There's a Great story on folklore.org about the early days of the Macintosh, where Steve Jobs, Chris Espinosa, who's still at Apple, by the way, the longest Apple, which is incredible.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:06]:
He's got to be like 70 years old now.
Leo Laporte [01:10:07]:
He started when he was 14. Anyway, he was tasked with designing the calculator, the desk accessory calculator for the year, for the first Macintosh. And Steve would look at it and say, no, no, no, I don't like it. You got to fix the buttons. And after four or five times of Steve going, no, that's not it.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:22]:
He's like.
Leo Laporte [01:10:23]:
He said, okay, you do it. He designed basically what this is, a UI designer with sliders and menus. And said, Steve.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:31]:
Yeah. Like, it was the Visual Basic type of thing, where it's like.
Leo Laporte [01:10:35]:
I think that must be the first visual design tool, because before the Mac, everything was command line anyway. Right. This has got to be the first one.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:41]:
Yeah. I mean, HyperCard came later.
Leo Laporte [01:10:43]:
Later. Yeah. No, but in fact, HyperCard used the same idea.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:47]:
Yeah. And Then of course, what became Visual Basic, which was. What's the guy's name? Cooper.
Richard Campbell [01:10:52]:
Yeah, Alan Cooper.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:53]:
Alan Cooper, who lives just another. James.
Leo Laporte [01:10:56]:
Yeah, he's great. I love Alan. He's quite an iconoclast. I've hung out with him a little bit because he lives in this area. But see, I think that that's really cool. I mean, so Here we are, 1983. 82.
Paul Thurrott [01:11:07]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [01:11:07]:
And because Steve Jobs is such a PETA, Chris says, Fine, you do it. By the way, jobs in 10 minutes got it just where he wanted it. And that's the calculator.
Paul Thurrott [01:11:17]:
So the, you know, the original Mac was something like 512 by 384 or whatever. The screen was black and white, easy. So it's simple to target a UI for something that is static and small. Excuse me, low resolution. But over time. One of the things I distinctly remember in the build up to Longhorn or, well, the build up to what became Vista, I guess, was you'd go to a windhacker or whatever and they would show off apps you could kind of stretch out to make them bigger in real time so they would look better on a high resolution or high DPI display, which no one normal had at the time. And we were like, oh my God, that's incredible. And they don't really.
Paul Thurrott [01:11:59]:
To this day, you still don't do that. We don't have this notion of, I want this app to be this size and I want this one to be. You don't really do that. But that was what they were showing. Because it was just showing off the capability, basically. But that really put the wrench into the flywheel because once you can have an arbitrary screen resolution, dpi, whatever it is, I mean, you can't, you can't do a Pixel Visual Editor anymore. You can't. It's just impossible.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:26]:
You know, they tried.
Richard Campbell [01:12:28]:
Makes it very difficult. Without a doubt.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:29]:
Yeah, well, right. Nothing, I guess.
Richard Campbell [01:12:31]:
Nothing. Well, and one would argue Visual Basics Form Editor was the anomaly. You know, we haven't been able to do this on the HTML side either. Right. It's just not that simple.
Leo Laporte [01:12:44]:
Yep.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:44]:
And Microsoft tried and failed with that.
Richard Campbell [01:12:46]:
You know, and we tried with lots of other different environments. And creating visual designers is stunningly difficult. And so you have this one weird reference point that everybody wants to go back to and it's like, can we.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:57]:
Just have Visual Basic again? It's like, you can.
Richard Campbell [01:12:59]:
Well, you can.
Paul Thurrott [01:13:00]:
Except CGA is the top resolution. Well, it'll be an official.
Richard Campbell [01:13:04]:
That you're working In. Right. It was a multiple document interface design with a file over here and a help over there. Like, it's archaic. We don't make sites like that anymore. Make apps like that anymore.
Paul Thurrott [01:13:16]:
Yeah, that was early on, before we had MSN or whatever. There was the Blackboard Blackbird tool, Internet Studio, and then they did inner dev, which brought it back to the. It was just code, you know, visual inner dev was code. You know, there was no real. I mean, there was.
Richard Campbell [01:13:30]:
They tried.
Paul Thurrott [01:13:32]:
Well, they had the HT. There was an HTML ActiveX control. I don't remember what it's called, but instead of. You would have an active X control and on that surface you could put ui.
Richard Campbell [01:13:41]:
Yeah. And you know, it was a workaround for an actual dynamic user interface. So.
Paul Thurrott [01:13:48]:
Yep.
Richard Campbell [01:13:49]:
You know, we've had this battle over and over again. You want a pixel perfect, you have to live within constraints of the. Of the viewport. If you want flexibility, you have to deal with. Not pixel perfect.
Paul Thurrott [01:13:58]:
Right, Yep. I feel like. Well, like I said, I don't mind writing the XAML code. I just mind how much of it there is verbose. It is unbelievably long.
Richard Campbell [01:14:15]:
The Enugu has done such a good job of bundling that up for you so you don't have to look at it.
Leo Laporte [01:14:19]:
Reminds me of the early days of podcasting when I was handwriting the RSS feed for the shows in xml.
Paul Thurrott [01:14:26]:
Right, right, right.
Leo Laporte [01:14:27]:
I don't know what XAML looks like, but I can imagine it's not right. It's.
Richard Campbell [01:14:30]:
No, you think about too much XML and you're right there.
Leo Laporte [01:14:33]:
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Paul Thurrott [01:14:35]:
Wait, XML was definitely my point. Like, as a pseudo developer, it's like, yeah, I give up. I'm just not doing this. I can't. I just don't.
Leo Laporte [01:14:43]:
You know, I mean, it makes sense, but it is a pain to do by hand. I mean, it's a little bit. It's like, well, HTML times 10.
Richard Campbell [01:14:51]:
Yeah. It's just proof that not everything Tim Berners Lee does is perfect.
Leo Laporte [01:14:55]:
Wow. But it wasn't. I think he never thought humans would see it.
Richard Campbell [01:15:00]:
He actually described it as a human readable markup language.
Leo Laporte [01:15:03]:
Oh, he did?
Richard Campbell [01:15:03]:
That's how he described this is.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:05]:
You know, Microsoft has these various tools. We can dump something into XML and for that purpose, it's human readable. Then you open, you're like, what? What is this thing? It's like, it's like, you know, I don't know what human could read this, but it's not this Human.
Richard Campbell [01:15:18]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:18]:
Anyway, yeah, yeah, he said.
Leo Laporte [01:15:21]:
I remember interviewing him and he said, I never thought the URL scheme would be visible to humans. I thought machines just handle that. Yeah, but it's so. It's kind of ironic that he thought that humans would want to read X.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:32]:
We said there's price of people who are like H T TPS slash, slash, actually type the whole thing out. You know, for tech.
Leo Laporte [01:15:41]:
On tech TV they would do that. They would say HTTPs:///www. Actually, it wasn't Google. That wasn't around then.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:51]:
Yahoo, Altavista or something.
Leo Laporte [01:15:53]:
And I said to them, you know, you don't have to type that.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:57]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:15:57]:
They said, what? Really? So we took that off, but they were still typing w putting www.yahoo.com and I said, probably don't have to type that either. Just say Yahoo.com.
Paul Thurrott [01:16:08]:
Yeah, right.
Richard Campbell [01:16:09]:
Isn't that nicer?
Paul Thurrott [01:16:11]:
Yeah, I mean, it wasn't until the last, I don't know, 10 years or less where browsers just start to hide that stuff by default. It's like it's going to give you a simplified version of the.
Leo Laporte [01:16:19]:
I actually turned that off. I always want to see the full.
Paul Thurrott [01:16:22]:
I do too. But I mean, you can, you can imagine they probably did it on phone first because of the space limitations and someone was like, you know, this would be good for normal people on like a computer. Like, no one needs to see this. But actually, yeah, I agree with you. I don't turn it on either.
Leo Laporte [01:16:37]:
Yeah, because you, I mean, that's how you know that you're not going to a fraudulent site, among other things. Okay, I've lost track of what's going on.
Paul Thurrott [01:16:49]:
Well, we're done with the dev bit.
Leo Laporte [01:16:51]:
You're done with Dev.
Paul Thurrott [01:16:52]:
I've ranted enough.
Leo Laporte [01:16:53]:
Can I show you my new Aura, Inc. And then you can.
Paul Thurrott [01:16:57]:
I was telling my wife about it. I'm really excited about this.
Leo Laporte [01:17:00]:
Yeah, this is cool. This is our sponsor for this segment of Windows Weekly. You know the name Aura. I know you do. Because consistently they're picked as the number one digital frame company. But now they have something new. Imagine if you know, you've got. First of all, I love having family photos on the walls.
Leo Laporte [01:17:22]:
One of the things we like to do is going, you know, going up the stairs, you have the photos as you go up the stairs, you know, in the living room, you have the best photos. But wouldn't it be nice if those photos could be updated? Like I've been looking at the same picture for five years. Wouldn't it be nice if you could change them every day. Let me show you. This is it. And it's so cool. You can with the Aura, Inc. This is Aura's.
Leo Laporte [01:17:47]:
Aura's new all new cordless. Look at no wires, kids. All new cordless color e paper frame. Let me give you a nice close up look. This is a picture I took at Herald Square in New York City of old Horace Greeley with the pigeons all over him and the beautiful modern skyscrapers behind him is one of my favorite photos. But this just came up this morning, right? Meet Ink, Aura's first ever cordless color e paper frame. Featuring a sleek 0.6 inch profile and a softly lit 13.3 inch display. Ink feels like a print, but it functions like a digital frame and perhaps most importantly, lives completely untethered by cords.
Leo Laporte [01:18:36]:
With a rechargeable battery, lasts up to three months on a single charge. Unlimited storage and the ability to invite others to add photos via the Aura Frames app. It is the cordless wall hanging frame you've been waiting for. And this would be a great gift for the holidays. You know, I can't wait to send.
Paul Thurrott [01:18:52]:
One to my mom.
Leo Laporte [01:18:53]:
She loves the digital frame, but it has to be plugged in. And it's emittive, right? It's a screen. It's just another screen. And I don't think anybody wants another screen, especially hanging on the wall. This is e ink. It's e paper, so it's reflective. It's just like a photo. They have put a lot of work into this.
Leo Laporte [01:19:14]:
This is Aura has really done some interesting work with this. It's kind of a breakthrough in e paper technology. Ink, that's the frame transforms millions of tiny ink capsules into your favorite photos, renders them in beautiful vintage tones. I mean, this is something I'm proud to have hanging on the wall. It's hard to see here because there's so much light. But even with all the light in the studio, if I can get the reflections off, you could see that it really, it's beautiful. It holds up in all kinds of light. But to save battery when nobody's around, when it's dark at night, it turns off.
Leo Laporte [01:19:53]:
There's a lot of innovation, a lot of design in this. This bezel looks like a real frame. It's graphite inspired. The matte is paper textured. The glossy glass front makes it, you know, look like a piece of decor. Not another screen in your house, not a device. I love the app. The Aura app has always been best in class.
Leo Laporte [01:20:11]:
Unlimited free photos. You can Download the app, you connect it to wifi. You give this to somebody like a grandparent like my mom and I can now send her photos that automatically show up. It's a perfect gift for anyone who appreciates innovative design and cutting edge technology. There are a lot of little touches that I really like. This can be landscape or portrait. You choose. And they.
Leo Laporte [01:20:35]:
You can hang it, of course, but they also comes with this really nice magnetic metal stand that attaches super easily, doesn't fall off. Oh, I'm putting it upside down. Super easily. Doesn't fall off. And so you can also put it on your desk or on your dresser on your bedside table with a stand. In either portrait or landscape, it just looks great. Sleek, subtle and stunning. Ink blends the warmth of a printed photo with the versatility of an epaper frame.
Leo Laporte [01:21:04]:
No chords, no fuss, just your memories beautifully displayed wherever you want them. Head to auraframes.com to see for yourself. Support the show. By the way, mention us. Say I saw it on Windows Weekly at checkout. That'll help us a lot. That's auraframes.com Inc. A U R A frames.com Inc.
Leo Laporte [01:21:28]:
There's buttons on the top. You can change it manually. You can actually have the photo change every other hour if you want. I like it overnight because a. That saves battery.
Richard Campbell [01:21:39]:
You don't.
Leo Laporte [01:21:39]:
If you know the more you change it, the more it's going to use battery. Like I said, I haven't run out and I have been doing a lot of manual changing. But the other reason I like it overnight is I wake up in the morning and I gotta. I have a new picture from Mark. You know, thousands of pictures. So it's always kind of a fun surprise. This is a. Actually, this is an AI generated image of me playing chess.
Leo Laporte [01:22:02]:
It's just finishing up the page turn. There it is. I think it really does a nice job. I really like that. Auraframes.com Inc. Keep it right here on my desk and we've got lots of family photos in it. And I hope my mom's not listening. It's going to be a great gift for the holidays.
Leo Laporte [01:22:21]:
Auraframes.com Inc. Xbox time.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:26]:
Mr. T. I feel like it's a pretty good bet that your mother's not listening.
Leo Laporte [01:22:31]:
I think you're right.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:33]:
Just kind of throw that out there.
Leo Laporte [01:22:35]:
Are you on now? Now she. You know how we know? Because she calls me during the show.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:38]:
Right, Right.
Richard Campbell [01:22:39]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:40]:
Is that the right guy? Gonna talk about AI Again?
Leo Laporte [01:22:43]:
He loves the AI he loves it. Just loves it. I've switched this to the. The portrait mode which it does automatically.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:50]:
That's so good because I think that's.
Leo Laporte [01:22:52]:
Kind of nice too if you have the right. If you take a lot of portrait mode pictures that hang out.
Richard Campbell [01:22:59]:
It's gorgeous.
Leo Laporte [01:23:00]:
Yeah. Drool worthy Xbox. I was thinking of sending mom an Xbox for Christmas.
Paul Thurrott [01:23:06]:
What do you think? I mean I don't know actually you.
Leo Laporte [01:23:10]:
Know what she wants a Steam machine.
Paul Thurrott [01:23:12]:
Right. So this was just announced as I sat down to do the show so I don't know too much about it but Steam Valve has announced a new Steam machine which is a cube shaped Xbox Series X looking.
Leo Laporte [01:23:30]:
Is it my. Am I wrong? Didn't they have a Steam.
Paul Thurrott [01:23:33]:
They did, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:23:34]:
Machine. We're not talking the Steam Deck, the handheld. They had that one U console, right?
Paul Thurrott [01:23:38]:
That's right.
Leo Laporte [01:23:39]:
Wait a minute. Does it come with VR helmet too?
Paul Thurrott [01:23:41]:
No, that's going to be an optional thing they're going to do so also by the way working with AMD as are Sony and Microsoft on a custom chipset for this thing, you know x64 obviously.
Leo Laporte [01:23:57]:
Will it run Linux or Windows?
Paul Thurrott [01:24:00]:
Well it's going to be that. It's going to be Linux, right. It will be the version, you know the Steam os right.
Leo Laporte [01:24:05]:
Which is. They have a really nice OS actually.
Paul Thurrott [01:24:08]:
Yeah. So this thing is billing is like six times as fast as the Steam Deck. It's like yeah, so is my grandmother's carriage but whatever. But you know this will give you look in our space and Xbox. We're debating whether Microsoft should be doing what they're doing. I think they're on the right path. I know that Windows today is not necessarily ideal on a dedicated gaming machine but I feel like they can get it there. I mean that's basically what an Xbox is anyway really when you think about it.
Paul Thurrott [01:24:35]:
But you know this is also. It's a PC essentially. Right. I mean the thing I like about.
Leo Laporte [01:24:41]:
It, it's really good for gaming on Linux. The Steam deck was too because yeah developers want their game to run on a Steam deck and they'll want it.
Paul Thurrott [01:24:49]:
To run on a Steam deck. That's right. And then now you just get it it you know like it's. Yeah, it's starting to. Yeah they, they, they. I don't remember the number but I, I think it was 80% plus games like I supposed to run great on Linux. My experience has not been great but I've been using Zorin OS recently on a. Maybe a non optimal laptop as far as gaming is concerned but it you know Whatever.
Paul Thurrott [01:25:11]:
Anyway, it does work. I mean, it's just not, you know, same frame rates or whatever, but this would probably be pretty good. And you know, you see this thing and you're like, okay. So they have a controller, obviously the box. Okay. And then they're doing like the VR headset thing and it's like, okay. It's like all the stuff Microsoft can't do, make new hardware and then get people excited about it. So we'll see what happens here.
Paul Thurrott [01:25:36]:
But I'm kind of surprised.
Leo Laporte [01:25:37]:
We don't know pricing, we don't know availability. There's a lot of questions.
Paul Thurrott [01:25:41]:
I don't personally know anything about it. I mean, they announced it in a tweet and then there's a video, I think on YouTube.
Leo Laporte [01:25:46]:
I'm running the video right now.
Paul Thurrott [01:25:47]:
Yeah, okay. I'm sorry. Yeah, I was reading the article. Yeah. So I, I think, I'm sure it'll be pretty good. Huh. Huh. Now they have a.
Paul Thurrott [01:26:00]:
Now they do have a.
Richard Campbell [01:26:02]:
Well, anything that drives more business into Steam itself, right?
Paul Thurrott [01:26:06]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [01:26:07]:
Do you think that this is a precursor to dumping Windows entirely? No.
Paul Thurrott [01:26:14]:
I mean, there's no reason.
Richard Campbell [01:26:16]:
So my throwaway customers.
Paul Thurrott [01:26:18]:
Right. When I think of like what Microsoft is doing with Xbox right now, what goes through my brain is they're going to have to adapt Xbox as a platform so that developers are essentially required to ship games that will work on a dedicated console, a handheld gaming device or just a PC, you know, which is not a hard sell. You know, it's just, you know, but you're basically making it the same thing. And I think from, if you look at it from Steam Slash Valve's perspective, you know, they're going to want you to target both. Right? I mean, because they, I'm sure, well, I'm not sure actually, but I assume that some large percentage, like majority percentage of their sales is still from like Windows PCs. Right. But, but bringing more and more of it in house makes some sense, right? I mean, I don't know. This is also in a sense a comparatively small enough business that they can do something like this and it makes sense.
Paul Thurrott [01:27:16]:
Like one of the problems we keep talking about with Microsoft is this whole billion dollar thing. And it's like, I'm sure the financial people at Microsoft look at what Xbox wants to do with hardware and they're like, explain to us when you made a profit on hardware again, you know, because, you know, they just, you know, they're nervous about it. I'm a little surprised there isn't a, like an upgraded Steam deck To kind of accompany this, but it might come later too.
Richard Campbell [01:27:45]:
Do you see how this thing takes off? And do they need the horsepower?
Paul Thurrott [01:27:48]:
It just felt like it sat still for a while.
Richard Campbell [01:27:51]:
But these guys don't need to make money off this hardware. If it pays for itself, everybody who uses this becomes a Steam customer. And let's face it, the. The who's got a better collection of emails of gamers than Steam.
Paul Thurrott [01:28:04]:
Yeah, I mean the thing is like, they're playing cooperative. I have a lot of games in Steam. I. I actually don't really like Steam as an app. Like, it's pretty terrible. It's like malware. It's always running in the background and.
Richard Campbell [01:28:17]:
It'S always trying to sell you something. Right. It's not just being your.
Paul Thurrott [01:28:19]:
Oh, it's always a bit. Yes. Stupid announcement and a non standard window popping up in the middle of the screen. But, but, but whatever. Okay, so my opinion is whatever it is, who cares? But super popular, right? I mean this is obviously the, the big platform on PC.
Richard Campbell [01:28:33]:
So yeah, you kind of don't want to buy a game that isn't on Steam because Steam takes care of that for you, right?
Paul Thurrott [01:28:39]:
Yep, yep. Yeah. So yeah. Anyway, it says.
Richard Campbell [01:28:44]:
I would argue it's a natural monopoly.
Leo Laporte [01:28:46]:
You can install another operating system on it.
Paul Thurrott [01:28:49]:
Yeah, because people could do that on Windows. On it.
Richard Campbell [01:28:51]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:28:51]:
And you can do that on a Steam deck. Right? You can install Windows.
Leo Laporte [01:28:54]:
Interesting.
Paul Thurrott [01:28:55]:
Yeah, I mean, look from their perspective. Whatever. You're still playing our games. Who cares?
Leo Laporte [01:28:59]:
Yeah, she's a streamer. She's got her stream deck in front of her. She's probably running obs. Because you can install apps on it too.
Paul Thurrott [01:29:08]:
Yeah, there you go.
Leo Laporte [01:29:09]:
It's interesting.
Paul Thurrott [01:29:10]:
Yep. Boy.
Leo Laporte [01:29:11]:
Yeah, says great for streaming.
Paul Thurrott [01:29:13]:
So I just want to collectively watch the industry rally around this, talk about what geniuses they are and, and just remind everyone Xbox is doing the same thing and you think they're idiots. Like they're doing exactly the same thing. But it's. Whatever, it's fine.
Leo Laporte [01:29:27]:
It just. But. So consoles aren't dead.
Richard Campbell [01:29:31]:
Well, they might be pining for the fjords.
Paul Thurrott [01:29:34]:
Yeah, I feel like consoles have hit their natural plateau, maybe is the way to say it. Although we're about to talk about another console.
Leo Laporte [01:29:45]:
16 gigs of RAM.
Paul Thurrott [01:29:47]:
Yeah, that's interesting. But I think you can. I bet you can upgrade it.
Leo Laporte [01:29:51]:
You know, maybe.
Paul Thurrott [01:29:53]:
Yeah, I would be surprised if you couldn't. But I mean, I know you can upgrade the SSDs. Like there's two slots.
Leo Laporte [01:29:58]:
It's a Zen 4 chip.
Paul Thurrott [01:30:01]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [01:30:02]:
It's using their rDNA 3 custom GPUs.
Paul Thurrott [01:30:08]:
So Zen 4 is not the current generation. No way.
Leo Laporte [01:30:11]:
It's not the high end.
Richard Campbell [01:30:12]:
If you look at producing the price.
Paul Thurrott [01:30:14]:
Yeah, the. The legion go to. That I'm reviewing is a Zen 5 based. Whatever that's called, like a Z2 chip or whatever, Z2 extreme. So it's probably. I'm sure it's better in some ways and I'm sure it's maybe even more efficient in some ways. But. But yeah, but this is probably just, you know, broadly, you know, broadly compatible.
Paul Thurrott [01:30:35]:
I don't know what they're targeting. I wonder if this isn't a, like a 1080p, pretty much experience, you know, for the most part, maybe on like a, you know, like a modern game.
Richard Campbell [01:30:44]:
But what's the price when this thing's a slam dunk? Is it 200 bucks?
Paul Thurrott [01:30:47]:
Yeah, well, 200 bucks would be an absolute slam dunk. But do you think. How could they ever get that?
Leo Laporte [01:30:53]:
The PlayStation 5 by 50 bucks, right?
Richard Campbell [01:30:56]:
400 bucks?
Leo Laporte [01:30:57]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:30:58]:
Well, PlayStation 5 is very expensive, right? I mean, that's.
Leo Laporte [01:31:03]:
That's the competition.
Paul Thurrott [01:31:05]:
Yeah. I mean, I feel like the PlayStation is probably a lot more powerful, frankly. I mean.
Leo Laporte [01:31:11]:
Yeah, they're not trying to. You're saying they're not trying to compete with it?
Paul Thurrott [01:31:14]:
I don't think so.
Richard Campbell [01:31:15]:
I mean, not.
Paul Thurrott [01:31:15]:
I'm not sure how many people would be like, PlayStation 5, Steam something, you know, but I don't know. This is, this is the. Well, like I said, this is what Microsoft's trying to do. We want to turn a Windows PC into an appliance.
Leo Laporte [01:31:32]:
That was an inadvertent rim shot. I wasn't commenting.
Paul Thurrott [01:31:35]:
I was like. I didn't say anything funny. I'm sorry. Sorry. No, it's okay. I expect random sound effects at any time. It's. It's perfectly fine.
Paul Thurrott [01:31:45]:
There it is.
Richard Campbell [01:31:46]:
All right, here we go.
Paul Thurrott [01:31:47]:
Yep. Oh, it's just like I'm in Mexico again. Oh, wait, here I am. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:31:51]:
Oh, I do want a recording of the Gas man so I can play it. That would be fun to have on my Steam Deck. Stream deck.
Paul Thurrott [01:32:00]:
That would be easy. It's probably going by right now anyhow. Okay, so there's that. That just happened. So I still need to wrap my head around it. But yeah, there's no pricing yet. It's wish list stuff. I don't.
Paul Thurrott [01:32:10]:
Is this going to happen before the holidays? I mean, it's already.
Leo Laporte [01:32:12]:
They say next year, don't they? I mean.
Paul Thurrott [01:32:14]:
Oh, is it next year? Okay, so I don't, Yeah, I haven't had a chance to really digest this.
Leo Laporte [01:32:18]:
Yet, but that HDMI 2.0 so. And display 0.14, so presumably it could run 4K.
Paul Thurrott [01:32:27]:
I don't know. Yeah, but those two are not the latest specs of those things. Right. I mean, that's fine. I mean this is not like an OG Switch level thing, but the Steam deck has done well with kind of lower than average specs, I would say. And it's kind of sat still for a long time too, which is a little weird to me. But this is all like you said, it can run other things, but most people are probably, probably just going to run the game, you know. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:32:56]:
In which case it's probably fine. And Linux has fewer resource requirements than Windows right now, so that should be okay.
Leo Laporte [01:33:03]:
The VR play is interesting too. I'm kind of surprised to see that.
Richard Campbell [01:33:07]:
A friend of mine that I know is involved in the space. I said, so what about this thing? He says, oh, you mean the Gabe Cube? And I'm like the best name ever.
Paul Thurrott [01:33:16]:
Gabe from his super yacht. He's like, make a box, box, make.
Richard Campbell [01:33:20]:
A box, make a Gabe Cube.
Paul Thurrott [01:33:22]:
I got a TV with nothing attached to it. Let's go.
Leo Laporte [01:33:27]:
Do you think they'll, will they offer TV capabilities? They don't have a pass through, so I guess not.
Paul Thurrott [01:33:32]:
I, no, I think that I look at this as like a kind of play console. Right.
Richard Campbell [01:33:36]:
Like there's no reason it couldn't run a Netflix line of course, but you know.
Paul Thurrott [01:33:39]:
Yeah, but this is the thing like so whether it's Windows as that evolves or Linux in this case, like yeah, you can run the apps, you can bring up a terminal, you can run appget and you can do all that stuff, but I think most people are going to just run the stuff, you know, like they have these big Steam collections. They spent, Steam has spent the past several years making those games pretty much all work on Linux.
Richard Campbell [01:34:02]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:34:02]:
And you know, we'll see and you.
Richard Campbell [01:34:05]:
Know, by that context, if this is all running Linux, maybe this is enough performance to get good results. Yep, you know, we'll see what game, you know, let's go fire up a crisis, fire up a cyberpunk. Like let's put it to the wall and see how it does.
Paul Thurrott [01:34:21]:
Yeah, I think it's probably going to be fine. I got to try to figure out, I got to figure out like Call of Duty on Linux. I don't really. Well actually I'm not sure you can.
Richard Campbell [01:34:30]:
You know the great thing, if you buy one of the GameCube is. You don't have to figure it out, you just click on it.
Leo Laporte [01:34:35]:
Nice EQ Cube.
Richard Campbell [01:34:38]:
It's the Gabe Cube for me from now on. That's the best name ever. I love it.
Paul Thurrott [01:34:42]:
With a crowbar. I'll be like the guy in Half Life 2. Just nothing.
Richard Campbell [01:34:48]:
Yeah, the Gabe Cube is good.
Leo Laporte [01:34:53]:
Love it.
Paul Thurrott [01:34:54]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:34:55]:
All right.
Paul Thurrott [01:34:55]:
So that happened. That just came out of the blue for me. So I didn't see that coming. Backbone today announced a new version. Well, just a new kind of a color scheme for the Backbone Pro. This is that phone controller that I reviewed probably three, four months ago. So now there's a version that's the Xbox Edition. So it's got the OG Xbox.
Paul Thurrott [01:35:16]:
Got a see through glass. Well, it's plastic, but the green effect. So it's basically the same thing. But this one, this control is kind of unique because you can connect it directly with the phone, obviously clip it in. You can connect it with a cable, like a USB cable. Uses a hardwired controller, but it also works wirelessly. So it's. The compatibility is super broad because it works not just with phones, but, you know, tablets, consoles, PCs, et cetera, et cetera.
Paul Thurrott [01:35:41]:
So if you like the Xbox aesthetic, you have that option now and then I guess. Apparently it is the, what is it, 20 something or 30th anniversary or whatever it is of fall, or keep it that many years. But. But Fallout 4, they just released a new anniversary edition, I guess ahead of the second season of the TV show. Right. Because that's coming soon on Amazon prime and it has some additional stuff. But the big one is if you bought this game on say the Xbox, you now have it on PC too. Right.
Richard Campbell [01:36:17]:
Nice.
Paul Thurrott [01:36:17]:
And it has Crossplay, so you can do the Xbox play anywhere stuff where you play part of the game on the console, play part of it on the PC, it's the same game, etc.
Richard Campbell [01:36:25]:
This is the Boston edition of Fallout. Right? Three was the DC. Yeah. Three was DC, New Vegas is Vegas. Four is Northeast. Yeah, it's Boston.
Paul Thurrott [01:36:35]:
Okay.
Richard Campbell [01:36:36]:
And then 76 is the one nobody wants to talk about because. Ew.
Paul Thurrott [01:36:42]:
Yes. Microsoft recently announced Halo. Sorry, I almost said Combat Reloaded. What's it called? Campaign Reloaded. Right. Evolved, Whatever the name of it is. I don't know. It's the og.
Paul Thurrott [01:37:00]:
I know the names. I'm too old for this, for these very similar names. But anyway, it's the original Halo single player campaign, only it's going to be on PlayStation 5. That was the Big story. But it's going to be on everywhere. It's just the 4K, you know, all that stuff. So that's, that's cool. But as you would expect, you know, they're switching to the Unreal Engine, latest version of that, I think, I think it's the latest version of the Unreal Engine previously, well, Bungie literally, I mean Halo, dating back to Bungie, they had their own rendering engine.
Paul Thurrott [01:37:32]:
And so one of the problems the Halo team always had was bringing in talent because they would waste weeks or even months just learning the new to them rendering system.
Richard Campbell [01:37:46]:
So what happens when you're slow on shipping too is that suddenly a new rendering engine comes out. It's like, do we bump back another year and shift to this new engine?
Paul Thurrott [01:37:54]:
This is like the Daikatana thing where they were working on the Quake one engine and then Quake two came out and they were like, oh, I gotta start over again, you know. So look, they switched. And I know that was controversial for some people, but honestly it was the right thing to do because now you. No problem. Everyone know, everyone in this space knows that engine. So it's great. The stuff we've seen from that game looks awesome. And there's other Halo stuff happening.
Paul Thurrott [01:38:19]:
There's this kind of a rumor of a Halo online service where it's just Halo multiplayer, but all the maps, all the thing I always wanted for Call of Duty. And I'm sure other games like actual new games. But not surprisingly, this kind of leaves Halo infinite in the lurch. Right. So this is the last game made on the old system. Didn't really have the uptick that anybody wanted. Part of the problem, of course, at lunch, day and day on game pass. So it's like they don't get that big boom revenue bump on the first month like they used to when they would sell the game.
Paul Thurrott [01:38:51]:
And you know, Microsoft started off pretty good. Like they, they were doing these major updates regularly. Like they've supported a lot of games like that, like Sea of Thieves, Gears of War, the latest Gears of War or whatever version we're on now, et cetera. But you know, they announced, I think it was sometime last year. Like, yeah, we're not doing this anymore. You know, we're going to have smaller updates and then the last of those just came out. So they were basically. Obviously we're focusing on the new thing.
Paul Thurrott [01:39:17]:
It's like not, we're not giving up on it. Like we know there are people who play it and obviously people like in Forge making maps or whatever people are doing but it's just Halo needs a fresh start, so I hope they can make that happen. And then the biggest game ever in the gaming industry, Grand Theft Auto or GameStop series, maybe even bigger than Call of Duty.
Richard Campbell [01:39:41]:
GA5 is a monster, man. Just a monster of a game.
Paul Thurrott [01:39:44]:
Yeah, I can't say I've ever played it other than kind of casually just jumped in to look at it and see what it was like. But I, I, yeah, it's not my thing.
Richard Campbell [01:39:53]:
Committing crimes. You got a problem with that?
Paul Thurrott [01:39:57]:
No, but I, I, no, I don't know how to explain it. Maybe it's the third person thing, I don't know. But Grand Theft Auto 6 is the most eagerly awaited game maybe of all time. And it's now been delayed twice. So it was originally supposed to come out, I believe this holiday season.
Richard Campbell [01:40:16]:
It was originally 2025. Yeah, yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:40:18]:
So then they delayed it to May. Yeah. Now they delayed it again to next November.
Richard Campbell [01:40:24]:
So fully a year from now. That is a long time.
Paul Thurrott [01:40:28]:
And that worked out great for Halo Infinite, didn't it? Which is the reference that I made earlier to Leo, which was that we watched that event where they showed off Halo Infinite gameplay for the first time. And it was like I was, you know, it's like, what is this thing? Like I, I will never forget my reaction, which was as like it went into the second or third minute and it was just the same looking thing as ever. And I was like, they must be doing a, they're doing like a Wizard of Oz thing, right? It's gonna go from black and white to color. Like it's gonna go from this crappy looking 20 year old engine to 4k wonderfulness or whatever. And it never did, you know, and there was a lot of criticism of some of the characters that were in the game that you could see, you know, the guy in the ship and then the, I guess he was a brute or whatever that looked like a eight bit drawing that a child would make and hang on a refrigerator. But they ended up delaying that game for a year. Right. And then the thing that.
Richard Campbell [01:41:27]:
Did they actually ship after a year? Because no, I don't know anybody who can bump out a year and actually nail that. I mean by bumping out of beer means you don't know when they, they.
Paul Thurrott [01:41:36]:
Did ship something called Halo Infinite in a year, but it didn't have a bunch of the stuff that people were expecting, like co op, you know, single player. And Forge was not there in the beginning and over time they added most of it. But they also canceled like, couple things they originally said they were going to do, you know, didn't get off to a good start is all I'm saying. I'm sure this will be better than this. The other big comparison here, of course, is Duke Nukem Forever.
Richard Campbell [01:41:58]:
N. It's not the ultimate.
Paul Thurrott [01:42:00]:
I know, I know. It's not. We're not. We're not quite there yet.
Richard Campbell [01:42:03]:
We're not in the decade league here. Come on.
Paul Thurrott [01:42:05]:
Yeah, but I mean, this is, you know, at the time.
Richard Campbell [01:42:08]:
Next you're going to say Half Life three and then what are we going to talk about? Half Life 2 Part 3.
Paul Thurrott [01:42:15]:
I might give anything for Half Life 3 right now. I. When. When we first learned that Duke Nukem Forever was coming, Duke Nukem 3D was still a big game. Like, it was really. It was one of the biggest games ever at the time. And then several years went by and it was like, whatever. You know, there's.
Paul Thurrott [01:42:32]:
That's a problem. That can be a big problem. I do feel like if Valve and I think they might. There's a lot of rumors about this, but if they ever did come up with a Halo. Sorry, A Half Life 3 right now, they could be pretty good. So we'll see. So I mentioned we flew to OAXAC on Friday. Two hour delay, by the way.
Paul Thurrott [01:42:54]:
So I was orchestrating this call with these guys from UNO platform and I literally got to the hotel, opened the laptop and I made it with a minute to spare. When we flew home from Oaxaca, two and a half hour delay. Lost the whole day. It was horrible. And all I could think was like, I just need to. I need to zone out when we get home. I told my wife, I'm like, you're gonna. I'm gonna disappear for three hours.
Paul Thurrott [01:43:20]:
So I'm gonna close the door, I'm gonna lay on the bed, I'm gonna play Call of Duty. I'm like, I just need to kill something right now. And I got home here and I laid on the bed and I opened up this thing to play Call of Duty on and there was a 180 Giga update and.
Richard Campbell [01:43:39]:
And there you are with your 56k modem saying, how is this going to happen?
Paul Thurrott [01:43:43]:
Oh. So two hours later I played two games of Call of Duty and then we went out to dinner. But leaving that aside. So here's the problem. I. It was pretty obvious what's happening here, right? So I think it's tomorrow. Yeah. Thursday, Call of Duty Black Ops 7 is coming out.
Paul Thurrott [01:43:58]:
So the way Call of Duty has I don't want to say evolved, but devolved or changed or whatever is that there's like basically a launcher and you can go into different games. So today those games are Black Ops 6 and Warzone, which is their, you know, the battle royale thing. But also, if you have them installed, the Modern Warfare games that, you know, the recent ones, because these things are all somewhat of the same generation or something, but they've added Black Ops 7 to this menu. So if you played it during the beta, you could go into the Call of Duty game and then select 7, play the 3 or 4 levels they offered at the time. And that was fun, actually. It was terrible. But whatever, you could do it. And as of tomorrow, I guess we're going to be able to do it again.
Paul Thurrott [01:44:44]:
Anyway, this thing took. So I literally connected it to a Ethernet cable to speed it up. Took over two hours on this stupid little.
Richard Campbell [01:44:53]:
Anyway.
Paul Thurrott [01:44:55]:
180 gigabytes, guys. Come on. Like, what is that?
Richard Campbell [01:45:00]:
And of course, it really makes you want to kill something.
Paul Thurrott [01:45:03]:
Yeah, yeah. I was a little frantic by the time this thing finally. By the way, if you're listening to this or watching and you play Call of Duty on a PC and you know this, you know, when you install a big update. Now, a big update typically is more like 12 gigabytes or, you know, maybe 30 gigabytes. You get into the game and it has to render the shaders. So you don't. You could start a multiplayer game, but you really want to wait for that to happen. So the whole time this is going, I'm watching it, and I'm like, this is never going to finish.
Paul Thurrott [01:45:35]:
I'm thinking to myself, hours are going to go by, I'm going to start this thing, and it's going to be like, yeah, hold on a second. We got to do the shaders again. And it's like, is there a better system somewhere than this?
Richard Campbell [01:45:47]:
Is there a better solution to this?
Paul Thurrott [01:45:49]:
Yep. So this morning I had an hour to kill because I. Well, I'm going to talk about it in the back of the book, but the thing I'm going to talk about is a lot of downtime, because it just was taking. So I had like an hour, probably. I'm like, all right, well, this thing is doing its thing. I've kind of written what I want to write about it. Let's play a game. You know.
Paul Thurrott [01:46:07]:
No, I had like a 6.7 gig update to go through again. This time it didn't run to the shaders. So that's good. But you Know, it didn't take that long actually, but it's like. Like you start the game, it's like, yeah, no, you can't start it. Gotta install the update. Like, so if you're wondering what the point of an Xbox console is, I'm not saying it's only this, but it is kind of only this, because this would have installed overnight for me on a console. Why we can't figure this out on a PC is unclear to me, but I've never figured out a way to make that work.
Richard Campbell [01:46:39]:
It's the funny part is like, you never notice your browser being updated, but it's updated all the time.
Paul Thurrott [01:46:44]:
Yep. Or if it. Well, I mean, I notice notion updating all the time, but I'll tell you, it reboots and it's done. Like, it's pretty quick, you know, I know every time.
Richard Campbell [01:46:52]:
I know Edge is updated because Edge says, let me show you what's new. And I'm like, hello? No, and move on. Right?
Paul Thurrott [01:46:56]:
But otherwise, what the Frick is a 180 gig? What the what? Like, what is that? That's crazy.
Richard Campbell [01:47:02]:
Anyway.
Paul Thurrott [01:47:03]:
All right, that was just really irritating.
Leo Laporte [01:47:05]:
That's how big games used to be.
Paul Thurrott [01:47:06]:
Oh, it's so. It is like, I didn't. I just reinstalled the damn thing. My wife, I said something to her about it. She goes. I mean, she goes, well, it's better now, right? I'm like, no, it's the same game. I waited to play the same game. How? How is it not? I don't know.
Paul Thurrott [01:47:26]:
It's crazy. It's crazy to me. I never agreed to preload, like, Call of Duty, Black Ops 7. I mean, I would have, but, like, I just wanted to play the. The game you have now, the same game. Anyway, it was terrible.
Richard Campbell [01:47:39]:
It's not your game.
Paul Thurrott [01:47:41]:
Okay. And then one of the primary drivers of this game, Sony, just did their earnings announcement. And as part of it, they, I think they sold, yeah, 3.9 million PlayStation 5s in the most recent quarter. Small bump from the year ago quarter. You know, this thing is obviously peaked and is on the way down, but they've now sold 84 million PlayStation 5. There's three console versions, right? The OG, the Slim, the, you know, the one without the drive. The one with the drive, you know, they have a pro. Yeah, they've been.
Paul Thurrott [01:48:11]:
Yeah, they're going good with it. And. But this is the thing, you know, when you look at, like when you look at Sony and this part of their business, like the. The game and network services business, which is PlayStation, right, is the biggest business they have. You know, it's. The numbers are in yen, so I can't tell you what they are, but like just Sony overall, like, like profit, operating profit, 2.8 billion in US dollars and then 20 billion in revenue. So the part that is games is about a third of that, I guess, or maybe a little more than a third or a little less than a third, maybe a quarter to a third. You know, this is a good size for this business.
Paul Thurrott [01:48:56]:
But the big thing, to me, they're doing great. Like obviously they've already kind of given us a little peek at what they're thinking for what will be called PlayStation 6. I'm sure it sold more than every Xbox ever made. Like this one, which by the way, at 87.4 million units I think is what I. Is that what I said it was? Yeah. If I didn't say it, I'm sorry. 84 million units. The PlayStation 3, which just barely eked out a win over the Xbox, Xbox 360.
Paul Thurrott [01:49:26]:
From a unit sales perspective, that's 87.4 million units. So they're going to surpass that now. They're never going to surpass the original, which is 102 million units. They're never going to surpass the PlayStation 2, which is the big one for them, 160 million units. And they're not going to surpass the PlayStation 4, which was like 117, which is amazing. Right. But this thing's doing really well. Like they have a pretty consistent record of success is how I would say this.
Richard Campbell [01:49:56]:
84 million of anything is a lot. Except maybe like sand, but.
Paul Thurrott [01:50:01]:
Sand, right. Or a smartphone app or something like a Friday app or something. Yeah, no, I mean it's really kind of impressive. And then of course their game, the game, the selling of software is going great. 72% of the games they sell are digital now. They've roughly 120 million monthly active users on PlayStation Network, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, it's going gangbusters, you know, and you know, as an Xbox fan, we can relate. Okay.
Paul Thurrott [01:50:29]:
And then separately from their earnings, Sony also announced this kind of came out of a blue, but actually the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. A 27 inch gaming monitor which is coming out in the US and Japan early next year, it's 2,560 by 1440. So 1440p, as we would call that. 240Hz refresh rate, HDR, VR, variable refresh rate support, it Has a little hook on it for the PlayStation controller. But this is a good example of the type of thing Sony should be doing because Sony is this kind of conglomerate that does other things. And one of the many other things they do is consumer electronics, like TVs, which by the way, they're pretty good at. And so having a, like a PlayStation gaming display to me is like. Yeah, no, that makes sense.
Richard Campbell [01:51:19]:
I think it's very bang and Olsen kind of, you know, all up thing. You know, if you love the PlayStation, you should have the Pro with the screen and that and the.
Paul Thurrott [01:51:27]:
It's vertical integration.
Richard Campbell [01:51:29]:
Yeah. Sort of sell this many things to the same customer.
Paul Thurrott [01:51:33]:
It's going to be 325, 350 somewhere in there.
Richard Campbell [01:51:36]:
And anybody who could afford the Pro would probably buy the screen. I mean the real, only real problem screen is only a 27.
Paul Thurrott [01:51:41]:
I was just going to say the same thing. Maybe a 32 as well should be 33. I guess at that point maybe you just get this, you just use a smart TV or whatever, but something. And I believe Sony makes one of those too. But anyway, it is a fun little hook for the thing. So that, that to me is what sells it. Apple would sell the hook for like $350. But they're going to.
Leo Laporte [01:52:00]:
Did you see.
Paul Thurrott [01:52:01]:
Yes. The sock things that we're going to say, the $300.
Leo Laporte [01:52:05]:
What is. It's more than. It's a couple hundred bucks.
Paul Thurrott [01:52:07]:
Yeah. I think it's two iPhone sock. An iPhone sock.
Richard Campbell [01:52:10]:
Everybody needs an iPhone.
Paul Thurrott [01:52:11]:
So I read that as iPhones suck. And I was like, yeah, no, I get it.
Richard Campbell [01:52:15]:
But yeah, I don't know who that.
Leo Laporte [01:52:18]:
What that. You know what?
Paul Thurrott [01:52:20]:
Apple, first of all, they know their audience. Right. This is some people who have too much money on their hands and too much time and they're just looking at an excuse to break out the credit card and help Apple because, you know, they're struggling. Apple has been not doing it.
Richard Campbell [01:52:33]:
Yes, I haven't bought any Apple stuff lately. What can I buy a sock?
Paul Thurrott [01:52:36]:
A cut of sock. Does it come in different colors? It does, it does.
Richard Campbell [01:52:42]:
Then I need more than one.
Leo Laporte [01:52:44]:
It's a crossbody sock.
Paul Thurrott [01:52:46]:
Oh, well, there you go. Crossbody is everything these days. The sock's a good idea because if a thief grabs it, it will probably stretch out to like 20ft and then when it comes back, you'll get hit in the face by the phone.
Leo Laporte [01:52:57]:
I'm gonna ask my mom because I bet you she could knit me one of these for less than a couple hundred bucks. I think so.
Paul Thurrott [01:53:02]:
Pretty sure. Don't let her know that she could charge those numbers because you should have.
Leo Laporte [01:53:07]:
Looked for this in Oaxaca. I bet there's some craftspeople right now.
Paul Thurrott [01:53:10]:
Oh, God, there definitely are.
Leo Laporte [01:53:13]:
Making the iPhone crossbody. Apparently it will be sold in France, which explains a lot. China, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and the UK and the US But I think they expect it to sell mostly in France. It doesn't look like something a French.
Paul Thurrott [01:53:29]:
Why would you expect it to sell? It looks like a pair of like women's leggings.
Richard Campbell [01:53:34]:
To start this in a mankini in your set.
Leo Laporte [01:53:37]:
It looks like a mankini for your phone.
Paul Thurrott [01:53:40]:
Do you have one that has more of an Audi? This is a little too. I don't know what the word is I'm looking for.
Leo Laporte [01:53:46]:
It is designed by Miyake, I guess that's. Sure, sure. He's the guy who did Steve Jobs. Black turtlenecks.
Paul Thurrott [01:53:54]:
Yeah. And those were distinctive.
Leo Laporte [01:53:57]:
One of a kind. Oh, look, you don't have to put it on your body. You could put it on your purse.
Paul Thurrott [01:54:01]:
Yep. Yeah. That way you lose everything in one swipe. Smart.
Leo Laporte [01:54:06]:
Here's one that works as a bib.
Paul Thurrott [01:54:08]:
In case I saw an ad for. It was an iPhone wallet. You know, you attach them on the back of the phone with your magsafe thing. Yeah. And the guy, he's like, yeah, he's like, look how cool, convenient this is. And he goes up to the pump at the gas station, he pulls the card out of the back of the wallet, he puts it up to the machine. I'm like, your phone could do that? Like, what? Why. Why are you putting your actual credit card and the phone that has your credit cards in it in the same place?
Richard Campbell [01:54:33]:
Funny.
Paul Thurrott [01:54:33]:
You know, it's like, what are you doing?
Leo Laporte [01:54:35]:
Anyway, all right, I believe we are prepared for the back of the book. If you have no objections, I would like to tell us about our sponsor. And then you will get some wonderful content designed specifically for you in mind from Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell, including the tip of the week, the app of the week, the run is radio pick of the week, and a delicious iPhone sock style whiskey.
Paul Thurrott [01:55:06]:
Wait, actually, could you put a bottle of whiskey inside the iPhone Sock.
Richard Campbell [01:55:09]:
Nice.
Paul Thurrott [01:55:10]:
Nice.
Leo Laporte [01:55:10]:
You could?
Paul Thurrott [01:55:11]:
I bet you could.
Leo Laporte [01:55:13]:
It's one sock fits all.
Richard Campbell [01:55:15]:
It's funny because this particular bottle has bro. A kind of brocade on it too.
Leo Laporte [01:55:20]:
I thought maybe there was a tie.
Richard Campbell [01:55:22]:
In, but maybe there's a tie in.
Leo Laporte [01:55:24]:
Let me first tell you about our sponsor, a company I love and use and have used for years. Zapier. Zapier allows me to get my work done. I've been using Zapier workflows at TWIT since, you know, for, I don't know, five years, ten years, long time. One of my favorite workflows is something I use every single day. But I don't even think about it. I don't have to think about Zapier. When I bookmark a story for a show, Zapier automatically takes it sees there's a new bookmark.
Leo Laporte [01:55:53]:
It automatically takes it because it, by the way, Zapier has integrations for thousands of the apps and SaaS apps and desktop apps that phone apps that you use. So it's automatic. It automatically sees that I've bookmarked it in Raindrop IO, it then posts it as a toot on our Mastodon instance. And it also at the same time crafts a single line in a Google spreadsheet just in the right format so that our producers can then take that and paste that into the rundown. I mean, it's just wonderful. But now here's the coolest thing. Zapier has added AI. So now all these workflows I have, you know, I have Zapier workflows to, to, to make my hue lights change color when the sun sets.
Leo Laporte [01:56:36]:
That kind of, I mean, for everything, all of them can use AI. Zapier is integrated AI. One of the things, you know, I notice with AI is that everybody says I want to use it, but, but then they sit down at the prompt and know, now what? You know, let's, let's make it more efficient at work by using AI in a way that makes sense. Zapier is how you break the AI hype cycle and put AI to work across your company. You can actually deliver on your AI strategy now, not just talk about it. This is the, probably the best use of AI, taking a workflow you've already got and introducing AI. So for instance, and by the way, they support ChatGPT, Claude, all the AI models you might want to use. So I think I would use Claude for this.
Leo Laporte [01:57:22]:
So I can add, take the existing workflow and just in Zapier makes it really easy to add one more step and in the middle add a step saying, oh, and take that story that I just bookmarked and run it through Claude to get me a bullet pointed synopsis, you know, 4, 4 line synopsis of the story that I can also put in the spreadsheet or maybe make a briefing book for me and for Our hosts. I mean, the sky's the limit. The sky's the limit. And you can add it to, you know, workflows you already use or create all new workflows. And as always with Zapier, they have lots of examples so you never kind of wondering what to do. You can put AI wherever you need it. AI powered workflows, an autonomous agent, a customer chatbot, or something like what I do. In fact, I just thought of something because when we add a guest to our worksheet, we have a wonderful Claude skill that I could use to automatically make a briefing book.
Leo Laporte [01:58:14]:
Oh, man. On this guest, I just. Every time I talk about Zapier, I think about another great way I can use AI. Zapier is for everyone. You don't have to be a coder, you don't have to be a tech expert. Teams have already used Zapier to automate over 300 million AI tasks. Puts AI into your business in a way that just makes sense. Join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI.
Leo Laporte [01:58:38]:
Get started for free by visiting zapier.comwindows that's Z A P I E R.comWindows well, I, I have always loved Zapier. I've always used Zapier and now they're even better. Zapier.comwindows thank you Zapier, for all you do for all of our shows. Now to Paul Thurat, the back of the book and your tip of the.
Paul Thurrott [01:59:08]:
Week, Mr. T. Yeah, I think a couple weeks ago, probably I was talking about the Cory Doctorow book and certification. Great book. A lot of good examples. Some, some of them are like, cherry picking is pretty easy. But the one thing that is a valid criticism of the book is that it's in the subtitle too. He doesn't actually explain what we can do as individuals to work against insuredification.
Paul Thurrott [01:59:37]:
So it occurred to me that this is something that I just kind of do naturally. I was thinking back to when we used to write the windows secrets books 20 plus years ago, whatever. Or if you can go back even further, when it was just Brian Livingston and he was writing these books in the 1990s, you would uncover things, or someone would for you or whatever it was, but you'd uncover secrets about Windows or whatever, put them in a book, people could find that out. And later we would do this on the web, whatever. But I feel like most of the tip type stuff that we have today is like, how do we just make Windows not stink anymore? How do we get rid of the things that make it terrible. Dave Plummer did a video, very short one, about does Windows suck? And he's like, yeah, it does in some ways. But it's mostly for people like us, like people who are experts or pro users, whatever you want to call us. And it's because they're designing this thing for people.
Paul Thurrott [02:00:32]:
And it's like, could I just have a switch that turns off all the nagging and nonsense and whatever? And the answer is no. But there are third parties that do that. And so this is something as I work on the next version of the book, I distinctly remember it was Windows 10, but I had to add a chapter to where it's like you're personalizing. It's like, here you turn off all the stuff that's annoying. Then sometime in the Windows 11 time frame, I was like, well, there's this Edge chapter. Here's how you turn off all the stuff that's annoying. It's kind of turned into that. That's the job.
Paul Thurrott [02:01:08]:
And on that note, I think it's been roughly six weeks now. I had used Tiny 11 Builder, which is a PowerShell script, to install a stupid, clean, minimalist version of Windows 11. It doesn't have OneDrive, doesn't have Edge. Because of the timing of it, I was able to install that month's Patch Tuesday update after the fact, the recent preview update from a couple weeks ago, and then this past all yesterday, the November Patch Tuesday, and of course every time I'm looking for that thing where like, oh look, Edge is back or they've turned on the nags again or whatever and it hasn't happened yet and this will probably be it for me with this laptop because we're going home at the end of next week, but since then, and actually this morning, and this was the thing I was talking about where a lot of downtime because this script takes 20 plus minutes to run and then the install process for Windows takes 20 plus minutes to run because now it has that feature update thing it does right in the middle of the out of box experience. But I customize the script to kind of lighten up on some of the stuff it gets rid of because there's some stuff in Windows I actually do use and I found myself going to reinstall those things later, like Clipchamp and Paint and Terminal, and I don't remember the full list, but I'll be writing that up soon. So I was working on that article today, but I've now put a tiny 11 based, a tiny 11 builder based Windows 11 install on a second computer, which I'm actually not going to bring home with me, so I'll have to do this again when I get home. But that's okay. This is good practice.
Richard Campbell [02:02:43]:
It just takes more practice is always better.
Paul Thurrott [02:02:46]:
Yeah, so. But I. But, you know, the big question here is with anything, like, if you use something after the fact where it's like, you know, D clutter Windows or whatever the term you want to use is, will Microsoft silently flip a switch at some point and turn this stuff back on? You know, and it is. That's a concern because they update this thing, you know, all the time. And so far, so good. Like, I have no promises, but I will say if your goal is like, I don't want this thing nagging me. I don't want suggestions, I don't want recommendations. I don't want it sending telemetry home to Microsoft.
Paul Thurrott [02:03:17]:
I don't want Edge and I don't want to click on. Well, you have to use another utility. But I don't want to. To click on widgets. Have it on and a story and have it launch or Edge or want to launch Edge. Like, I want to use my browser like a normal person. You know, this stuff is out there. So I will still have all the stuff I've had before in the previous couple of books.
Paul Thurrott [02:03:36]:
But I think this kind of. I think this is going to be like a new little push. This is like the D and certification of Windows. I don't know what to call it. I'm not going to call it that in the book. But like, you know, it's like there are different levels. Like, how clean do you want it? You want it really clean? Because we can make it really clean. You know, it's a good tool.
Paul Thurrott [02:03:53]:
It's free, obviously. It's a PowerShell script, so you can read it, you can look at it, so you can edit it. Right. Which is what I've been doing. So I think the next step after that is that's just a list of apps it doesn't install. But there's also other settings it makes or settings changes. And you know, that gets into the weeds a little bit because you have to really know what you're doing. But I'm going to play with that too because I get plenty of free time and it's all good.
Paul Thurrott [02:04:14]:
Good. No problem, you know. So anyway.
Richard Campbell [02:04:19]:
Awesome.
Leo Laporte [02:04:20]:
Yeah, Very nice. How about an app? You got an app for us?
Paul Thurrott [02:04:24]:
That's the app. I'm sorry.
Leo Laporte [02:04:24]:
Oh, that is the app.
Paul Thurrott [02:04:26]:
Yeah, sorry. I combined them.
Richard Campbell [02:04:27]:
The Two kind of go together.
Leo Laporte [02:04:28]:
Yeah, that makes sense. How you. Yeah, it's a good thing to solve. Well, if that's the case, then I think it must be time for Richard and run as radio.
Richard Campbell [02:04:40]:
Yeah, if episode 1010 or in binary, that's 10.
Leo Laporte [02:04:46]:
Well, that's confusing.
Richard Campbell [02:04:47]:
There you go. That's not confusing at all. This is Azure Resiliency with Chris Ayres. Chris works for Microsoft specifically on the resiliency of Azure itself. So he's usually not interacting with customers so much as he's improving how Azure runs. But his advice about what Azure does to keep making things more reliable and how you can configure to build out is really interesting because he fully goes into that spectrum of you need to sit down and do a cost benefit analysis because you can create something that's incredibly resilient. But at what price? A price you're going to pay every day in maintenance and configuration and services versus what the cost of an actual outage would be. So we ended up with this back and forth because I've gone through this back in the days of building out in data centers where it's like, how much is a redundant data center cost? You know, how much does it cost to be down? You know, we used to do the math for down for a day, down for two weeks, down for three months.
Richard Campbell [02:05:43]:
Because I've literally had a data center burn to the ground. And let me tell you, rebuilding from that. First off, make sure your, your disaster recovery plans not in the building.
Leo Laporte [02:05:55]:
Don't have it burned down.
Richard Campbell [02:05:56]:
Yeah, that's not good. Oh, and the backup tapes were sitting on top of the machine that burned.
Leo Laporte [02:06:01]:
No, so.
Richard Campbell [02:06:03]:
Oh yeah. So you know, they can get dramatic. And so what was fun going through that process, recognizing, yeah, you can keep going up this path, but the price goes up and the maintenance goes up. Like it's not just paying for services, even when you're dealing with cloud, it's work you have to do on a routine basis as an administrator. So he gave us a huge raft of lakes, especially talking about what they call the Azure, well, architected framework. It's just a great starting point for. So you want to think about building a reliable app. And I've been pitching this to administrators because, you know, development is in such a rush these days.
Richard Campbell [02:06:39]:
They're really not thinking about these things very often and they'll get deployed on a single instance and you've got some reliability issues there. Like you'll have regular outages in that configuration just because of the nature of the cloud. So pushing back on these frameworks that it's just not yet you complaining but are actually. This is what Microsoft recommends. Here's how we could do this. Here's where the automation lives. Here's the telemetry parts so that you can get a full feedback look understanding where you're at. So I could have called this a DevOps show really.
Richard Campbell [02:07:08]:
Because in essence, that's what DevOps is about. But it was about building really resilient systems in Azure. And Chris knows his stuff. I included even one of his talks because he. He knows it's so cold and his explanations are lovely.
Leo Laporte [02:07:20]:
Nice, nice, nice. Okay. Rennesradio.com kids, you know where to go now. I don't know about you, but I need a brocaded bottle of something delicious.
Richard Campbell [02:07:34]:
This is a. This is another one from that party in Norway.
Leo Laporte [02:07:38]:
What a party that was.
Richard Campbell [02:07:39]:
It was quite a party. This is the Kyoto whiskey, the Kura obi, otherwise known as the black belt. And I had. And I.
Leo Laporte [02:07:47]:
It actually has an obi on it.
Richard Campbell [02:07:50]:
Yes, it's literally wrapped in an obi and it is from Kyoto. So I did not know going into this how unusual this whiskey was and not necessarily in a good way. Oh.
Leo Laporte [02:08:02]:
So.
Richard Campbell [02:08:02]:
But it's one of those things where I don't want to keep talking about weird whiskeys all the time. I like to make stuff that's much more approachable. This turns out to not be that expensive, but as I dug into it, the story is insane. So starting out, let's talk a little about Kyoto, because Kyoto is an amazing place. This is in the southern portion of Honshu island, which is the largest of the Japanese islands, sitting in a valley in the Yamashiro Basin, the eastern part of the Tamba highlands. And it's surrounded on three sides by mountains. Higashiyami, Kitayami and Nishiyami, which sounds very impressive to translate them. And they're the east, north and west mountains.
Richard Campbell [02:08:37]:
So it's Japan. So very hot summers, very cool winters. This is called humid subtropical. So it's kind of challenging for making whiskey, although a little more contained there. And this is old school inhabited land. They have evidence going back to the Paleo period. Humans have been there a long, long time. Although we don't get real documentation about humans living there until they start talking about Shinto temple somewhere around 600 AD.
Richard Campbell [02:09:03]:
By 794, at the beginning of the Hainan period, the imperial court moves to Kyoto and was the capital of Japan for a thousand years.
Leo Laporte [02:09:17]:
Yeah, it's lovely visiting Kyoto and it's amazing. Imperial palace and oh my God, it.
Richard Campbell [02:09:23]:
Doesn'T move to Tokyo until 1867. 69 during the Meiji renovation. And of course, famously, Kyoto was never bombed in World War II to.
Leo Laporte [02:09:31]:
Because Harry Stimson, the Secretary of War took it off the list. The military wanted them.
Richard Campbell [02:09:36]:
Well, they. They had a set of cities they didn't bomb because if they were going to try the atomic bomb, they wanted an unbomb study to test on it. So it was actually on the atomic bomb list.
Leo Laporte [02:09:45]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [02:09:46]:
That's why they avoided it. And the apocryphal story is that Stimson had honeymoon there and that turns out not to be true, but he had visited it multiple times in 1920 and.
Leo Laporte [02:09:55]:
He understood its cultural.
Richard Campbell [02:09:57]:
And that's what his argument was, right. That that was the thousand year capital. There was so many things there that it would actually galvanize the Japanese because they were still concerned that they would have to invade the Japanese islands.
Leo Laporte [02:10:09]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [02:10:09]:
That was his argument. And I mean, he's not wrong. There are 17 UNESCO World Heritage sites in Kyoto. I have tried to visit them all. You can't. You can't do more than two addition day. It's just impossible. And even then you're racing into two a day.
Richard Campbell [02:10:26]:
So it's like 10 days, eight, nine days to even try and you'll be exhausted.
Leo Laporte [02:10:32]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:10:33]:
So, yeah, Kyoto is an extraordinary place. And as the Kyoto distillery will tell you, they're the first whiskey distillery in Kyoto. Except that's a lie.
Leo Laporte [02:10:45]:
Oh.
Richard Campbell [02:10:45]:
I mean, right away when I first started reading about this bottle, this is first distillery Kyoto. Wait, the original Yamazaki distillery was like right on the border of Kyoto. Like, are you kidding? And in fact, then I start looking up Kyoto distillery and I find another Kyoto distillery, although admittedly focused on gin. So I'm like, oh, is this the same distillery? Because then I go, look again. It's like, well, they also make gin, but the bottles are different. No, it's different than the whole thing is kind of mysterious. So this distillery we now call the Kyoto Miyako Distillery, only founded in 2020. So it's pretty new.
Leo Laporte [02:11:21]:
Not the oldest five by any stretch of the imagination.
Richard Campbell [02:11:23]:
No, you know, it's just the whole thing is so strange. Right. And let's you. We've talked about Japanese whiskey before and Yamazaki really Suntory and Nikkei being sort of the originals from those for those two splitting up and so forth. So I'm just trying to sort it out because of course there's a lot of stuff in Japanese which doesn't translate well. And I run across this site, which I've read before, called nomakation jp as in communication, but nomacation. And this is a site dedicated to whiskey from Japan and cocktails and news around that. And it's run by a pseudonym, Whiskey Richard, which I do not understand why he picked his name.
Richard Campbell [02:11:59]:
Not because I'm a famous Richard and whiskey at all. Like, there's a guy named Richard Patterson, which is literally like obe, worked at Dalmore, one of the best whiskey guys on the planet. So there's a lot of, you know, famous riches whiskeys. He's a band called the Whiskey Riches, for crying out loud. And the stupid part is his name's actually, actually Liam McNulty. Okay.
Leo Laporte [02:12:17]:
Whiskey Liam would be just as good.
Richard Campbell [02:12:19]:
Just fine, I think. It doesn't translate well in Japan. That's what it is, that those are difficult words in Japanese. And so he picked an easier one. Now Liam's done the work. He was concerned about this thing too. And so he really dug in. He looked up domain names, he looked up trademark registrations, so forth.
Richard Campbell [02:12:38]:
And he found out that actually the companies called that owns it is called Kyoto Shuzo, which is a hint because there is this group called Matsui Shuzo, which owns the Matsui Whiskey distillery, which is very notorious in Japanese whiskey circles. And so he. In Liam's digging, he finds out that, hey, they. The trademarks are registered through the same company at the same time. They also host the websites for both the Matsui Distillery and the Kyoto distillery on the same website. Then he finds out they're literally using the same Google Analytics code. So the sites, you know, show up in the same registration. Then he found a job listing for Kyoto Miyakayo, which included training at the Matsui distilleries.
Richard Campbell [02:13:19]:
It was like, this is Matsui who's doing this. And so what's this about? So Matsuzi Shuzo is a. Is a very old company. They've been making shoju since 1910, which.
Leo Laporte [02:13:32]:
Is what it's like.
Paul Thurrott [02:13:34]:
Which.
Richard Campbell [02:13:35]:
This is the Japanese whiskey that we talked about that's made from rice.
Leo Laporte [02:13:38]:
Okay.
Richard Campbell [02:13:39]:
Right. And it's a legit product all its own. It does. It's not popular outside of Japan, mostly because it's natural alcohol levels about 30%. And that means it doesn't qualify for a spirit. So it's really hard to import because you need to be over 40% to be a spirit, and it's too high to be anything else.
Leo Laporte [02:13:54]:
Not a beer. It's not a spirit.
Richard Campbell [02:13:56]:
No, it's lost just because it's unfortunate. Right.
Leo Laporte [02:13:59]:
But.
Richard Campbell [02:13:59]:
And shoji is beautiful. Like, if you're in Japan, drink some shoju, like you're really. You'll enjoy it. It's lovely.
Paul Thurrott [02:14:05]:
So.
Richard Campbell [02:14:06]:
And Matsui got into. Into whiskey distilling only in 2015. And he built. He had these two distilleries. Well, first he had the Yurikoshi Distillery. And he started selling distillery. Started selling whiskey right away. His first whiskey almost within a year was the Yurakoshi 18.
Richard Campbell [02:14:22]:
I don't know how you do that, except that maybe you didn't make the whiskey. And if you ever look up a bottle of Yurikoshi 18, you know, it looks exactly, exactly like a bottle of Yamazaki 18. Same label style, same layout. Like, if you don't look carefully, you would not realize these are actually different, different whiskies. And of course, here's the kicker. There's actually no Japanese whiskey in that bottle at all. Oh, right. Because how could there be? He hadn't been open long enough to actually make any whiskey.
Richard Campbell [02:14:50]:
It's a minimum of three years, it'd be called whiskey. But he's good at buying whiskey. So if you read again, the label very closely, it says. Doesn't say distilled in Japan. It says Made in Nippon or made in Japan. Because they're not lying. That would be illegal. What they're doing is they're buying barrels from other locations, mostly Scotland or other distilleries in general, and building things together.
Richard Campbell [02:15:12]:
In fact, it wasn't in 2017, two years after that Distillery, Distillery opened, that they announced that they bought stills.
Leo Laporte [02:15:23]:
My God, they're going to make some.
Richard Campbell [02:15:25]:
Well, and this is the thing is, the Japanese whiskey business for a long time had to buy from other sources. It takes time to mature and so forth. That's why they're also often into gin and things where they can sell whiskey right away or sell booze right away, or you can run those stills. You can make gin in a let in a few months. Where you can't be. It takes years to make whiskey. And so it's not that unusual for Japanese whiskey to be a combination of a lot of different things. Right.
Richard Campbell [02:15:52]:
Even Yamazaki or some Centauri owns Ben Nevis, and they put their things in there, but they label that. They do. And we talked about this originally in the Japanese whiskey store, where in 2021, a group called the. The JSMLA, or the Japanese Spirits and Liquors Makers association, which they originally formed in 2016 set out a set of rules. Now it was done kind of close handed, right? This was Suntory and Kieran and Humbo, Shizo and Nikkei and Venture whiskey, Whiskey that were really involved in writing a specification. And the specs were what you'd expect. That the spirit must be fermented, distilled and aged in a distillery in Japan. But notice the grain doesn't have to come from Japan because there's such little grain grown in Japan, they have to import that it must contain multigrain, but it can also contain other grains.
Richard Campbell [02:16:38]:
It has to use Japanese water, has to be three years in wooden cast, no bigger than 700 liters, but they don't specify oak. You can use what you want. No distilled, no higher than 95, can't go below 40 bottled in Japan. And if it breaks the rules, you can't call it Japanese whiskey, but you could call it world whiskey. And also if you're not compliant, if you're not qualified Japanese whiskey, you cannot use a Japanese proper noun like a city name. You cannot use Japanese flags, any of those things. That's the rules. Now that's not like they're laws.
Richard Campbell [02:17:10]:
These are just the rules. And Matsui Shujo is a member of the jslma, right? And so their whiskeys over there are supposed to comply, but the Kyoto Mikayako Distillery is not a member. Now nominally, because it's owned by the same company, they're supposed to comply with the same rules, but they're not. Now we got his light. The license for that distillery was in 2020 and they have two pot stills right off the bat. But in 2021 they released three whiskies. A year later, 2021, all wrapped in what's called shinji ori, which is a, a specifically a Kyoto style of brocade or fabric that they wrap the bottles. It's, the bottles are beautiful and so there's a red belt, a purple belt and a black belt.
Richard Campbell [02:18:00]:
So the red belt of the Akiobe is a blend of malt and grain whiskey with no age declaration. And they even say it's for blending. And it's supposed to be inexpensive, but it's really not that cheap on its retail price was about $70. And then the murasakiori or the purple belt, which is the most expensive of the bunch was straight malt whiskey. All third party of course, because they didn't have time to make any and generally is the most like of the bunch. And it's like almost $200, which is pricey. And then the one that I got to try, which is the Kurobe or the black belt, kind of the middle child, A blend of foreign and domestic whiskies, but done very much in a bourbon style, where they have aged in both virgin oak, but then finished in bourbon casks. So it kind of tasted like a bourbon, like it was not that adventurous.
Richard Campbell [02:18:50]:
And the retail price from them is about $120, which is pretty steep for what this is. But I found it on total wine for 65 bucks because clearly it's just not selling that well. 46 ABV.
Leo Laporte [02:19:05]:
This is.
Richard Campbell [02:19:05]:
You know what, the bottle's gorgeous. And I think that's the best thing I can say about is.
Leo Laporte [02:19:12]:
Although if you're just going to buy for the bottle, I kind of like the purple belt, but. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:19:15]:
But, you know, it kind of. They want. They often sold as packs of all three. Right. So I think this is the Kyoto Kyoto distinct distillery trying to come out big, but they're years away from actually making a product. We get back to you, like, what are you trying for here? Like, what's your. What is your experience? I really feel like. And it sounds like most of Japan understands this.
Richard Campbell [02:19:38]:
Even the rest of the world doesn't. This is a company that's diminishing the quality of Japanese whiskey. That when Yamazaki won the gold award back in the day and put Japanese whiskey on the map, a lot of companies have tried to ride those coattails. It's worth a lot of money, and hence the illusion bottles and things like that for people who aren't paying close enough attention. But in Japan, they don't buy this stuff because they know it's a lie that there is good Japanese whiskey. It's just not from these guys.
Paul Thurrott [02:20:07]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:20:08]:
Now, look, drink whatever you want. If you like it, you should drink it. But if you're after a bourbon, buy a bourbon for less. And I think you'd have a good experience there, too. And I really don't like encouraging people whose business models seem to be deceptive.
Leo Laporte [02:20:24]:
So there's no corn in this.
Paul Thurrott [02:20:26]:
No.
Richard Campbell [02:20:27]:
Corn's pretty rare in Japan. Right. You'd have to import it. And if you're going to do that, import barley.
Leo Laporte [02:20:32]:
So it seems like really the reason it tastes like bourbon is because of the barrels.
Richard Campbell [02:20:36]:
Yeah. It's basically been aged in a bourbon cask. Right.
Leo Laporte [02:20:38]:
And it just really imparted that strong flavor to it. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:20:42]:
And it really not that strong. I mean, it's quite mild. Yeah. Corn tends to make things very sweet. Yeah. This is More your sort of fruity.
Paul Thurrott [02:20:50]:
It's.
Richard Campbell [02:20:51]:
Again, none of the grain declarations are on there, so it's hard to know exactly what's in there. But, yeah, yeah, it's. Yeah, it's. It's a beautiful bottle that landed in this roster of extraordinary whiskeys. And it looked great and it didn't taste bad, but just wasn't batting at the level of the things we were drinking.
Leo Laporte [02:21:10]:
Not for the price.
Richard Campbell [02:21:12]:
Well, exactly. And. And the fact that it's been so heavily discounted already sort of speaks to. This was a failed play. And, you know, I'm gonna sit on with Liam McNel to here. Like, I prefer my. I prefer my customers to be informed when there's a bad actor in this business that I think is doing harm to the business overall.
Leo Laporte [02:21:31]:
Oh, that's too bad.
Richard Campbell [02:21:32]:
Yeah. So it was a surprise. This is not the story I thought I'd be telling. And then you start digging in and digging in and you're like, holy cow, look at this.
Leo Laporte [02:21:40]:
Look for the ob on ebay. Somebody will have sold the ob and you can just get the obvious.
Richard Campbell [02:21:45]:
I bet you there's an ebay of the empty bottles if you just like the broken. I could get the bottles.
Leo Laporte [02:21:50]:
Yeah, probably. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:21:53]:
That's my ride today. And now, you know, I'm going to be in Australia next week, so there'll probably be an Australian whiskey on the list.
Leo Laporte [02:21:58]:
Nice. I look forward to it. Mr. Richard Campbell. He is in New Zealand right now on the dairy farm where the cows are milking any minute now.
Paul Thurrott [02:22:09]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [02:22:09]:
Or is.
Paul Thurrott [02:22:10]:
I don't know, are they milking or getting milked?
Richard Campbell [02:22:14]:
They milk about 5am and then again at 2:30 in the afternoon.
Leo Laporte [02:22:18]:
That's why I always laugh when they say the farmers wanted daylight saving time. Because the farm. If cows don't know.
Richard Campbell [02:22:26]:
No, the cows don't.
Leo Laporte [02:22:27]:
Cows don't care what the clock says.
Richard Campbell [02:22:28]:
No.
Paul Thurrott [02:22:29]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [02:22:30]:
So anyway, so what? Farmers still have to get up at whatever time the cow is ready to get milked.
Richard Campbell [02:22:38]:
Yeah. Well, the cows generally, in this farm particular, the milk shed is up the hill and the cows don't really want to go up the hill. So you have to go down in your ATV and encourage them to come up. Oh, yeah, just encourage them. It's not really hurting. It's like, come on, girl, let's go.
Leo Laporte [02:22:51]:
Some Australian ships.
Richard Campbell [02:22:52]:
Let's go.
Leo Laporte [02:22:53]:
Yeah. Nip at their heels.
Richard Campbell [02:22:55]:
Yeah. They don't use dogs here anymore.
Leo Laporte [02:22:57]:
They don't really.
Richard Campbell [02:22:59]:
The cows follow where. Sure, the gates are open. They know what they're Doing cows are plenty bright.
Leo Laporte [02:23:05]:
They are. Especially if there's food at the other end of the chute.
Richard Campbell [02:23:08]:
Well, it's more relief than food. They're actually walking away from the.
Leo Laporte [02:23:12]:
Yeah, they're walking. The food is.
Richard Campbell [02:23:13]:
The food is grass.
Leo Laporte [02:23:14]:
They just get. Get me out of here.
Paul Thurrott [02:23:16]:
Here.
Leo Laporte [02:23:17]:
All right, Richard Campbell. Runnersradio.com that's where you'll find Runnersradio and dot net rocks. We'll see you in Australia next week. Paul Thurat. He is at thurat.com t h u r o double good.th u double r o doublegood.com he all. That's where his. His blog is.
Paul Thurrott [02:23:39]:
It's not a blog.
Leo Laporte [02:23:40]:
His site is. And all also all that great content as the premium members get is also there. Become a premium member. Highly encourage it. He also lives his books due@leanpub.com where you can get the field guide to Windows 11 and Windows everywhere. You're going home next week or you're going to be in Roman Norte.
Paul Thurrott [02:24:01]:
We'll be here for the next show and then we go home and then next Friday, Thanksgiving. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:24:06]:
Time to get the turkey. Are you in charge of cooking this year?
Paul Thurrott [02:24:10]:
So my wife is always in charge of cooking the Thanksgiving to the tune of when we moved to Pennsylvania the first year we hosted, you know, two sisters and all their families and they were both like, this is way better than anything anyone has ever made. You're doing this every year.
Leo Laporte [02:24:23]:
Oh, dear.
Paul Thurrott [02:24:24]:
So even though it's like going to be at my sister's house, my wife will be cooking. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:24:29]:
Will you next week give us some of Stephanie's secrets? Because I am responsible for cooking this year and I watch.
Paul Thurrott [02:24:35]:
Yeah. I mean, it's pretty straightforward, but it involves a lot of brining. Brining. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:24:40]:
I think I'm going to dry brine this year.
Paul Thurrott [02:24:42]:
Interesting.
Leo Laporte [02:24:43]:
Going to use the Ken G alt Lopez dry brine technique. He puts a little bit of baking soda in it to skin.
Paul Thurrott [02:24:50]:
So we do. We get two turkeys. So one's probably going to be like 27, 28 pounds. The other one will be smaller. But the big one we bring Thanksgiving. The next one we cook the next morning because we let everyone just have all the leftovers.
Leo Laporte [02:25:01]:
Oh, nice. And then you get your own.
Paul Thurrott [02:25:03]:
Then we have our own. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:25:05]:
Yeah. I think everyone should have a personal turkey.
Paul Thurrott [02:25:08]:
I am kind of the family turkey mascot or whatever.
Leo Laporte [02:25:11]:
But that's why I like those Cornish game hens. It's like having your own little turkey.
Paul Thurrott [02:25:15]:
It's like a little turkey.
Richard Campbell [02:25:16]:
Get a Bite of everything. Right.
Paul Thurrott [02:25:18]:
It's like when you get a quail egg and you're like, I would like a huito. You know, and then.
Leo Laporte [02:25:24]:
And does she do. What are the sides that she likes?
Paul Thurrott [02:25:27]:
Yeah, So, I mean, she does all the classics. So it's, you know, mashed potatoes. The stuffing is unbelievable. Which. Yes. We put in the bird and, you know, as much of it as we can. And then she makes pies. She makes it unbelievable.
Paul Thurrott [02:25:37]:
The other thing, she's, like, completely masters, like, pie crust. Like homemade pie, pumpkin and apple pie is. And then, you know, other family members make other stuff, but nice.
Leo Laporte [02:25:47]:
I'm gonna do mashed potatoes, but I'm thinking of doing a. Amish dinner roll. Rolls. And they have one cup of mashed potatoes in them for moisture.
Paul Thurrott [02:25:55]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:25:55]:
So I thought that might be kind of fun.
Richard Campbell [02:25:57]:
I think I mentioned last week's show, my. My aunt had gone out and shot a deer and then retrieved it, because she does that. She was the one who shot the pig, like, last spring. So last night, anger issues, like the.
Paul Thurrott [02:26:08]:
Governor of Texas or something. What's going on here?
Richard Campbell [02:26:10]:
She's nearly nine.
Paul Thurrott [02:26:11]:
Whatever.
Richard Campbell [02:26:12]:
She's nearly 90. She's a dead shot. And the whole neighborhood knows that when you have a problem with an animal, animal, you call her, and she'll take care of it for you.
Leo Laporte [02:26:20]:
Oh, my God, nearly.
Paul Thurrott [02:26:21]:
I mean, unless it's like, the problem is, like, you lost your kitten. Right. You don't want to. You don't want her on that case. No.
Richard Campbell [02:26:26]:
Yeah. You know, no.
Paul Thurrott [02:26:27]:
She's like, I found it.
Leo Laporte [02:26:29]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:26:29]:
So she. The neighbor called her, saying, hey, there's deers. Deer eating my. My garden. Can you help? And she's like, sure. Pop down. Took one of them, scattered. Scattered the others.
Richard Campbell [02:26:40]:
And then she fetched it the next morning because it was a bit too late to go out that far. She's now so small, she couldn't carry it. So she got enough to get it in. And last night, we got the rump roast off of it and had venison stew.
Leo Laporte [02:26:50]:
Was it good?
Richard Campbell [02:26:51]:
Delicious.
Leo Laporte [02:26:52]:
It's a little gamey maybe, though.
Paul Thurrott [02:26:53]:
No, no. That kind of stuff's actually really good. Yeah, We've. I have a friend who hunts, and we. The.
Richard Campbell [02:26:58]:
The little.
Paul Thurrott [02:26:58]:
Like, the venison stuff is amazing. Like, it's actually really good.
Richard Campbell [02:27:01]:
But I know I told you that story last spring where it was a boar that came out of the forest and was harassing animal. He killed an animal. Yeah. And she didn't realize how big it was. Came down with a 22 rimfire.
Paul Thurrott [02:27:14]:
No.
Richard Campbell [02:27:14]:
Realized how large it was, shot it once, so it looked at her and then shot it again through the eye to kill it.
Leo Laporte [02:27:18]:
Oh, talk about a dead shot. Oh, my God. She's like Annie Oakley.
Richard Campbell [02:27:23]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:27:23]:
Holy cow. And then with this. But I will shoot it in the eye.
Richard Campbell [02:27:28]:
Through the eye. Take it down.
Leo Laporte [02:27:30]:
Yeah. Holy.
Richard Campbell [02:27:32]:
But for the deer, she had the 222, which is a little hotter round. So it did the job. First shot.
Leo Laporte [02:27:37]:
Unbelievable.
Richard Campbell [02:27:38]:
Shot through the heart. Dropped it. He says good. I don't.
Leo Laporte [02:27:41]:
That's like cruel.
Richard Campbell [02:27:42]:
Yeah, well, it's very quick. And it does. It doesn't take the meat, which is what she was really concerned about. It's like I'm shooting the deers because we're eating it. Although I did have some of the boar sausage too, which is outstanding.
Leo Laporte [02:27:53]:
The blind boar sausage.
Richard Campbell [02:27:55]:
I got to tell you. Yeah. My. My, my. My aunt is awesome.
Leo Laporte [02:28:00]:
She lives there. She lives in.
Richard Campbell [02:28:02]:
She lives next door. Right next door. The farm.
Leo Laporte [02:28:04]:
Nice.
Richard Campbell [02:28:04]:
It's the family farm.
Paul Thurrott [02:28:06]:
What a life.
Leo Laporte [02:28:07]:
What a life.
Paul Thurrott [02:28:09]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:28:10]:
Let's see. I guess I should mention that this show is made possible not only by our fond sponsors, but to a great degree by our fine listeners via Club Twit. And I do want to encourage you, if you have not joined Club Twit to. To do so. It is 25% of our operating expenses covered by the club. And that's really a big deal for us. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without your help. It also gives us a chance to, you know, give you ad free versions of the shows.
Leo Laporte [02:28:42]:
We have the wonderful Club Twit Disco, which is where you can hang out. It's a discord, but I call it the Disco. With other Club Twit members and talking about not just the shows, but everything, you know, geeks are interested in. We're getting ready for the advent of code. Coming up December 1st. We talk about 3D printing, we talk about Elon Musk, everything. It's all in here. Even some of the games we play.
Leo Laporte [02:29:11]:
So if. Oh, and there's special events too. In fact, speaking of games, we're going to re finish our DND adventure. I hope you're ready, Mr. Hammerholm. Helm hammer. What is it? Helm Hammer. Hold on.
Leo Laporte [02:29:26]:
Paul Thurat's character will join me. I'm Sag Bottom, the cheerful, our Dungeon master. Micah Sargent, Paris Martineau, Jonathan Bennett from the Untitled Linux show. And Jacob Ward. As we complete the horror in the cornfield. Monday, 2pm Pacific Club members. Next time we do this. We're going to invite you to, of course, photo time with Chris Marquardt the end of the week, Friday at 1:00pm he'll look at our balanced submissions.
Leo Laporte [02:29:55]:
Mike is crafting Corner next week. Oh, we've got some great interviews coming up. The Q A for Scott Wilkinson is in next week. There's a lot of fun stuff that happens in the club and again, it supports what we do. It makes it possible for us to bring you all this great programming. So if you're not a member, do me a favor, join the club. TWIT TV Club Twit. We would very much like to have you in the club.
Leo Laporte [02:30:27]:
Thanks to the club, we were able to stream this show every. Every Wednesday, 11:00am Pacific, 2:00pm Eastern. Hi, Paul. I don't know what you're doing here, but welcome. It's good to see you. No, Paul comes every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, Eastern. That's 1900 UTC. We stream it live on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn.
Leo Laporte [02:30:51]:
Actually, I don't think we do TikTok anymore because it's too complicated and Did I say kick X? Anyway, six different platforms. Also in the club Twit Disco after the fact. On demand versions of the show available at our website, TWiT TV WW. There's audio and video there. The video also lives on YouTube. There's a dedicated Windows Weekly channel. Great way to share clips with friends. You know, stuff that you think they'd be interested in or your boss.
Leo Laporte [02:31:18]:
And of course, the best way to get any of our shows, including this one, is to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Leave us a great review. We'd appreciate that. We have links on the website to Pocket, Casts, Overcast, all the. All the big ones, Apple. But you pick the one you like and subscribe. We will see you right here next week, next Wednesday on Windows Weekly. Thanks, Paul.
Leo Laporte [02:31:42]:
Thanks, Richard.
Paul Thurrott [02:31:43]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [02:31:43]:
See you next time.
