Windows Weekly Episode 764 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley's here. Stand back mainstream users. There are 1000 new Android apps on Windows 11. We'll tell you how to get 'em and why you don't want 'em new Windows 11 dev channel build today.net celebrating its 20th anniversary. It's back to work at Microsoft Redmond campus and the Halo TV series is coming. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly, a reminder to all our TWiT listeners. It's our annual survey time. Once again, that help us understand our audience a little bit better. We wanna make your listening experience better and also helps us sell advertising. We don't want to track you so it's completely voluntary, but if you can take a few minutes to let us know a little more about you, we sure appreciate it. Go to TWiT.tv/survey 22. And thanks in advance.

... (00:00:58):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:01:07):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley episode 764 recorded Wednesday, February 16th, 2022. The rat from punks Tani Windows Weekly is brought to you by hover. Whether you're a developer photographer, small business, hover has something for you to expand your projects and get the visibility you want. Go to hover.com/TWiT and get 10% off your first purchase on any domain extension for the entire first year and buy hacker rank. It's time to reboot your technical interviews with hacker ranks, easy to use tools with a premade question. Library, code playback, and built in whiteboard. You'll be conducting better technical interviews and instantly identifying the right talent. Go to hacker rank.com/ww to start a better tech interview for free today. It's time for Windows Weekly. The show we cover the latest news from Microsoft on the line, on the horn on the zoom with me right now, Paul Thurrott, I think it's Paul Thurrott. Not somebody offering me a updated IRA auto warranty. Paul is, is at Thurrott.com. Spoke are lean pub.com. Good day, Paul. Good day, sir. Good day. Good day. Good day. Also a good day to Mary Jo Foley, all about microsoft.com or eating net blog. Now a red ventures.

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:41):
Yes,

Leo Laporte (00:02:41):
Joint. Great to see you both. I hope you had a good link. We are kind of it's a national holiday today. No, not Lincoln's birthday. No, not Valentine's day. It's the end of mask mandates in Northern California. Right? I took a while. I just walked in the door. No, man. That,

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:02):
How did it feel? It feel weird. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:03:05):
It feels really weird. And I, and I'm not, I'm not burning my masks. I'm keeping, 'em no keeping 'em around just in case. Cause we haven't gotten through the Greek alphabet quite yet. Yeah. It's think we have a ways to go. Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know. No one knows. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:22):
Let's hope not.

Leo Laporte (00:03:23):
The CDC thinks we're crazy. They think put your mask on. What are you doing? Well, you know, their advice has always been rock solid. So that's the problem. I think we're all just punch drunk at this point. And just everybody

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:34):
Is

Leo Laporte (00:03:35):
We're reeling. We don't know what to think. And you know, watch the sea watched the super bowl and it looked like

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:41):
No one had a mask on happy

Leo Laporte (00:03:43):
Her again, you know?

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:45):
Yeah. I, I didn't see a single mask anywhere at the super

Leo Laporte (00:03:49):
Bowl, but, and I think you might find this a shock in the New York post report. It apparently Snoop dog smoked a joint before his song.

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:57):
I'm stunned.

Leo Laporte (00:03:58):
Stunned. I tell you

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:59):
Stunned.

Leo Laporte (00:04:01):
I love

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:01):
It. The, you know what though? They miss not having Martha Stewart in that show. Have

Leo Laporte (00:04:06):
You seen the ads now for this big lighter?

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:08):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:04:09):
It's bizarre.

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:11):
Right? It's

Leo Laporte (00:04:12):
Bizarre. I feel like we're living in the timeline that I was hoping for as a teenager and someday you'll be able to buy marijuana in the Stu. No you would. Oh dude. Sunday, Snoop dog. And Martha Stewart will be selling lighters for your B. No, exactly. It's wild, but that's not what we're here to discuss. We're here to warn mainstream users. Oh no,

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:38):
Here warn here

Leo Laporte (00:04:39):
They come here. Come 1000 plus Android apps coming at you. Tell me all about Mary and Paul

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:48):
Minutes. Okay. So up until this week, insider testers were testing the Windows subsystem for Android and the new app store for Android apps. It was gonna work on Windows 11 as of this week, Microsoft starts rolling out a preview of this to customers. And between last week, and this week they've added a thousand apps and games to the store, a thousand like, I'm like, wait, you just added a thousand. Like, what are these apps? Like, tell me names. And all they could tell me were names like subway surfers and this and that. And I'm like, no, like what apps did you add? And you're like, we'll have to get back to you. We D so you don't even know what apps you needed to the store. Okay. Well, there's new apps anyway, in the store. And again, this is a preview. There's a lot of different steps. You have to go through if you want this to run. But so I, I have a lot of users in my TWiTtter feed who are excited about this. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:05:46):
Who decides what apps are available? Does Jeff Bezos decide? Does who? Well, no. I, I think it, they have to meet some kind of compatibility bar. I think they do, but right. And this is the, this is the Amazon app store. This is the fire store. You gotta, it is. Listen, if you guys missed the days of the Windows eight app store, when everything was just garbage and like all these like farting apps and stuff, you're gonna love this store because the

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:09):
Back okay.

Leo Laporte (00:06:10):
It is, this is the weakest collection of mostly games I have ever seen. It's horrible. No, it's horrible.

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:17):
Although there's two things, right? There's the Kindle app is there.

Leo Laporte (00:06:22):
Yeah. Great. But that's made by Amazon. No, but no. Yeah, yeah. There are four or five decent apps, but most of this stuff is like Dr. PDA to cars, fluffy ice queen salon, my little pony coloring. I think Mike is Dino world. Mike is figured it out. He says, Snoop dog chooses what apps are available. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:42):
No, that's crazy. That makes sense actually.

Leo Laporte (00:06:45):
So the thing that's weird about this is when they tested it, they only had 50 apps and games. Yeah. And at the time there were four or five good apps and then a bunch of really crap games. And now there's a thousand and is still only four or five good apps. And it is an astonishing collection of garbage. Like, yeah. I don't even, there's actually no value to this. Like it's okay.

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:05):
It's horrible. Good. Because I, I didn't wanna go through the store and look for anything that might be good or productivity app or something. And so that's why I asked Microsoft to do it for me. I'm like, can you guys just gimme a list of five and the, I couldn't give a list so, well, I could

Leo Laporte (00:07:20):
Give you a list of five. I mean the Kindle, like you wall street journal. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:24):
Oh, wall street journal. Okay. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:07:25):
Well final fantasy three. I use 15 game. No. Okay. And the Washington post is in there. Groupon is in there. Is there an advantage to using the Android app then, then to say opening the wall street journal on your browser though? That's the question? No.

Leo Laporte (00:07:40):
Right. Kindle app, I guess. I mean, you can use the Kindle web reader. All right. So look mostly. No, I, I, for those few people that use Windows 11 as a tablet that, you know, it works with touch that I realized the web kind of does too, but a little bit, not as well. That kind of thing. Yeah. That's reasonable. I think it was bar Bowman on TWitter. Cause someone said there was literally nothing in there that you know, matters to me. But she said, look, there's a lot of like smart home apps that are only on mobile.

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:10):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:08:11):
Right. None of them are in the store, but no, you know, they could be, that's

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:15):
What everybody was waiting for. Right. Like that. When you ask people, why do you want Android app? Some Windows. A lot of people said, I want home automation, smart home apps. I'm like, okay. Are they in there though? Are, are any of those in there at

Leo Laporte (00:08:27):
All? Not that I can see.

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:29):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:08:29):
Not that I can see. Yep. Yep. It's an astonish. Like I said, it is astonishing how bad right. This list is it it's, but it is 950 items of complete uselessness may

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:42):
Wait also. But this is us only, just so people know. But,

Leo Laporte (00:08:46):
But, but wait, I think I understand now. Okay. Yeah, because the question I ask is JMA those games you can't play in the browser. So the bulk of it is stuff that is not replacing an ex browser experience, but something unique. And that makes sense. I mean, you don't need the wall street journal app. You don't even need the audible app cuz you can play it right from Windows, but you can't play my little pony and Windows at least in win a web browser. Right. So that makes sense. You don't have any knowledge of a, my little app. I'm not really sure, but maybe you can, I don't know, whatever, you know what I'm talking about. They, I think most people with, so it's about gaming are throwing an iPad at 'em or something. Well cuz gaming is, is something you need the app to do.

Leo Laporte (00:09:35):
So I get that. I get that. Yeah. Well, I mean there are high profile Android, mobile games that are very good. Including some shooters. Yeah. none of those are in there. Well not, they're not, they're also, those must be hard to port. Right. So they poured what they could and the category makes sense because yeah, that's placing a web app. Okay. But you know, Microsoft, I realize it's like riding a bike and everything, but they already did that. We have a crappy app store thing and it's kinda weird to me. It's the default. It just goes right back back to that. You just go right back to that. Like it's crazy. But is that really crappy? Just, I mean you don't, those are bad games. Oh Leo.

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:19):
It's just kinda, You know, I, I, what I, so we're I have this in the notes, but I wonder what they're gonna do about managing this. Right? Like okay. Consumers on their home PC, go ahead. Download all the Android games from the store that you want put 'em on your PC. If you're at work, how like, can somebody block this for their users? Like, is there a way oh

Leo Laporte (00:10:42):
Yeah, there must be a way to block Windows happens. Stallon

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:45):
I asked Michael often they, they said, well, this is just a preview right now. So we have no comment. I'm like, wait, so there isn't a way there. Isn't a way

Leo Laporte (00:10:53):
There's. So I don't know. I,

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:57):
Yeah, cause I think the manageability question is important, right. That even though this is aimed at consumers and, but

Leo Laporte (00:11:04):
Well, but, but what, what do you mean by that? Like, what's the problem. So someone has a work laptop and they put a bunch of my pretty pony games on it. Who cares? Like they're not accessing active director or anything like

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:13):
No, you know, no, but then they have all this on here. What, if any of those things get act right?

Leo Laporte (00:11:19):
Yeah. Oh sure. Or what if you, or

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:21):
What, if you have a company who says, we don't want people putting games on there cuz they're gonna play games during work hours and we don't want that.

Leo Laporte (00:11:27):
Oh, don't worry. The quality of these games ensures that's never gonna happen. I don't care how bored you are. This is not, this is not it there's nothing good here.

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:36):
Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:11:37):
It, it, it makes me wonder what the point of this is. 

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:41):
Just to say they did it. That's what it is, right?

Leo Laporte (00:11:45):
Yeah. I, geez. I don't know the look the one, I don't know. I guess if you're on a traditional computer, you'd be better off using Amazon's cloud reader honestly, to read Amazon books. But the one sticking point we've had for a few years now is we don't really have a high quality Kindle lap of any kind. Right. And you know, obviously we have the Android version now and it's it's okay. Like it's that's okay. This is not a reason to have an entire rep store going on or anything that, but it's, it's fine. Like that it is fine. But this thing, I just it's clear

Mary Jo Foley (00:12:18):
This. Yeah. It's gotta be for gaming. It's like, now that Leo said that I'm like, yeah, I think it is mostly obsess with mobile gaming, right. Act vision. When they made the bid to buy act vision, a big part of that was mobile gaming. And I think they're just like, okay, like the, a gaming is our entree into the consumer space. So we've gotta have mobile games everywhere. Right? Pretty much.

Leo Laporte (00:12:41):
I was curious to see, and, and based on the wording they had in their blog posts, I was curious to see this thing live because last June, when they first introduced this, they were talking about stores within stores. Remember this was the big concept. We epic game stores gonna be in there. Other GA other stores. This is not a store in a store. This is an app you download from the store, so to speak the Microsoft store. And then from then on out, you do everything from that store. There's no real integration with the Microsoft store. It's a separate entity. When those apps are updated, they're app updated through the app store for Android, not through the Microsoft store. So it does become like another thing to deal with. It's not, you know, I'm not saying there's a lot of overhead to it, you know, for you as a user, but you know, you'll see little popups when apps are getting updated and things like that. And I kind of wish it was a store in a store. I think I, I, I don't like there being too many different places where updates can happen. My computer here, I mean, there's at least four, you know, that I can think of.

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:43):
Yeah. I was gonna say, well then you better not run Windows 11 because there's a lot of places things can update from, right? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:13:48):
Yeah, yeah. No, but I mean like, you know, Windows update and the store kind of known quantities, but most PCs come with some kind of software Lenova advantage or HPO HPO, HP support center or whatever yeah. That where you can download drivers and other things like that. And now we have this fourth thing, here's another store, you know, I guess if you have the epic game store installed or you know, steam, you have another store there. I guess we just, we're just drowning in stores. I guess that's what this is.

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:14):
Yeah. Pretty much

Leo Laporte (00:14:17):
Stores are money makers. Is that the thing? No. Well they not for Microsoft. I mean, they, they, they are for Microsoft, not for Microsoft. Yeah. Not for Microsoft. It's really interesting to me. It's very, yeah. I think it's an appealing. I think people, you know, you know, people want this, right. They're excited about it.

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:36):
They, I think they had false hopes about what the,

Leo Laporte (00:14:40):
Well, what else would they be getting that they were hoping for?

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:42):
I think they wanted the home automation stuff. A lot of people

Leo Laporte (00:14:45):
I,

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:45):
That makes sense to anyway, like that was one, like when I asked people, what do you want from Android apps on Windows? It kept coming back to home automation stuff. That,

Leo Laporte (00:14:53):
That's what I don't think most we should define who people is too, because you know, in the sort of enthusiast community. Yeah. I mean, this is exciting cuz it's like, oh my God, the Windows is getting like this major new feature. It's interesting. And it is. But I also think just for normal users, they don't understand Amazon app store for Android at all. And when they think about Android apps, they think about Android apps. They think about the billions of apps or whatever it is you can get from the play store. That's not what you're getting here. This is, these are technically Android apps, but they're mostly crap. Like I said, they're mostly really bad. Yeah. It's I don't, it's not much, it's not really adding a lot of value. They would've been better off curating something, putting them in the Microsoft store. You don't have to worry about what the origin is of the thing. You're right. It could be a webs app. It could be a, you know, a win UI app. It could be an Android who cares, but now we have a Kindle app. Awesome. You know, most people would've seen that for the win that it is. But I, I, I just feel like this this is, I don't know, it's less, it's less of a win, you know, because most of it is kind of terrible.

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:02):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:04):
It's kind of hazy. I don't know. Interesting.

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:05):
It's still considered a preview at this point. So it'll be interesting to see what happens when it is no longer considered pre

Leo Laporte (00:16:12):
Oh, let me make a guess. It's gonna ship with 2000

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:15):
Some more and

Leo Laporte (00:16:16):
1990 of them will be crap. I think that's how it's gonna, I, I feel like

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:20):
This is that we've already been through this with

Leo Laporte (00:16:22):
Chrome

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:23):
OS. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:25):
Yes. But at least with ChromeOS you actually get Google play apps. Right? So there there's an inherent confusion on Chrome OS between mean what apps are cuz you, they, they do come from different places there as well. Right. They have two stores essentially or two PLA two avenues, I guess. But there's also that added weirdness of, and this is an out date example, but it's just a good one. You know, as a Chromebook user, you could use like word on the web, if you wanted, or you could use word for Android and now you actually technically, you kind of can't, but that was the story for a while. And each of them had different little feature sets, right? One of them wasn't a super set or the other, it wasn't always obvious which one you had to use. And that's a little bit, that's a tough thing to throw at normal people.

Leo Laporte (00:17:06):
You know, you have two versions of a zoom app or a, a teams app or a Skype app or whatever the app is. I'm just making stuff up. But you have to kind of do the work, you know, which one of these do I like better which, you know, does do they both work offline? Does, you know, and they don't by the way or whatever, whatever the situation is. So there's some complexity to it as well. And then it's Android, right? So Android, hasn't done a great job or Android developers, I should say. Haven't done a great job of tailoring their apps for larger. This is something Google's been trying to push hard. They're pushing it hard again with the 12. Well, do all

Mary Jo Foley (00:17:39):
These apps work well with large screens?

Leo Laporte (00:17:41):
I mean, is that why there's only a thousand of 'em too? I mean, they they're they're yeah. So I haven't tested all a thousand of 'em, but yeah. I wouldd assume that's part of the criteria. Yeah. I would think so. Yeah. So at least like Kindle, which I have looked at a lot works well, full screening size the window. That's why there's a thousand.

Mary Jo Foley (00:17:58):
Yeah. It's curated set. Right. It's a subset. So

Leo Laporte (00:18:01):
I can see I'm just imagining, but I can see some of the criteria being one it's to working a larger screen, at least not doesn't look like it's a phone app too, right? Yeah. There's no analog in the Windows world for it. So you can't well, okay. You know, I mean the wall street journal

Mary Jo Foley (00:18:19):
Center, that isn't a criteria. No, no.

Leo Laporte (00:18:21):
The thing is as far as like, it doesn't look like a phone app goes, honestly, I don't think that would throw too many people depending on the app. We were talking about the home snap. So if you had an Android handset and you were using your phone to connect to it, I suppose you could run some of those apps in a little window. It would probably look like a phone, like a, you know, aspect ratio wise and you could control your smart lights or whatever you're doing. And that would probably be okay, cuz it's like a little, dashboardy kind of a thing, but by the way, there's yet another way you can run some Windows looking it's another stupid, additional way to, I it's just, it just, I feel like they just throw in spaghetti at the wall at this point, you know? Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:18:58):
It,

Leo Laporte (00:18:58):
What are we gonna get you to do to like this thing?

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:01):
Don't you think part of it can be Chrome compete. Like that's why like if Chrome has it, we're gonna have it, right? Like that's, that's a motivating factor.

Leo Laporte (00:19:09):
Yeah. I, yeah, I do. I do. It, it, it, it certainly looks bad when a, when a lightweight OS like ChromeOS can run Android apps and Windows can. Right?

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:19):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:19:20):
It's very, it's all very exciting. Well

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:25):
It's well, that, that, wasn't the only exciting feature that she, I

Leo Laporte (00:19:29):
See. There's more on your article. My goodness. I feel like it was the only exciting feature.

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:35):
The weather icon on the task bar, Paul, which I saw you were having trouble getting to look like a weather icon on

Leo Laporte (00:19:41):
Your I and yeah, I, so, right. This is the one and I'm not alone, fortunately, I guess. But this, this is, this is like E OUS territory for Microsoft. I was telling this to saying this to Brad this morning, like in Windows 10, there was something called, what was it called? News and news and weather or news and information or something. Anyway, it was like a little, it was like the widget thing is in Windows 11. And because of the way that that task force is different than the one in Windows 11 could have a little preview on it with a little graphic, it would show like the sun or some clouds. Could you, the weather forecast, whatever. It's kind of nice. And people like, oh, I like having that right there. It's kind of a nice little thing. Like at the time I get the day to get the weather it's it's they kind of go together.

Leo Laporte (00:20:24):
Yeah. The problem with it was in the beginning, like you would Mo over it as one, would you just Mo around and it would pop up the, what we now call the widgets interface. Some people hated that, but you could configure it not to do that. So whatever they, they reached some semblance of nicety with that. And then they got rid of it. They went to Windows 11 and they added the widgets interface. And it's just an icon. They don't have that little preview with the weather anymore. Yeah. So now in this update, they've added it, but this is what they did is classic. They put it over in the far left of the task bar. So over the next year or two hundreds of millions of people are gonna upgrade from Windows 10, one way or the other they're gonna buy a new computer maybe, or they're gonna actually do the upgrade. And now instead of a start button in the corner

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:05):
And a weather, they're

Leo Laporte (00:21:05):
Gonna have this widget center face, which they're gonna click. They're not gonna be able to help it. Yeah. This thing

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:10):
Usage

Leo Laporte (00:21:11):
Of the widgets interface is gonna go up like 1100%, you know, because people

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:15):
Are, they think that's the point. That's,

Leo Laporte (00:21:17):
That's my point. It's an evil, that's what mean by evil genius. Like, it's really smart now it's still Microsoft. So of course they screwed it up. So like I woke up this morning and it had the weather and it, this is like 8, 8 30 in the morning. And in instead of a round sun or a sun little clouds on it, it was a Crescent sun. It's like, is there a,

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:35):
Like a moon,

Leo Laporte (00:21:36):
An eclipse happening today? Yeah. Like, you know how the moon is like off at a, a Crescent. The sun is almost never a Crescent because usually there's no planet in front of it. But the morning on my Tasker, it was a Crescent. And then later in the day, it switched to the, you had Crescent son, a Crescent son. Yeah. Does that mean partly sunny? No. It meant there was, they were screwing it up. It was a mistake. Crescent sun. Come on, man. I know, I know there's gonna be an eclipse. Right. That's

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:07):
Now IREC on, I have the Crescent son is my icon for the what do you call it? The notification center. Cuz it has focus. Assist has focus

Leo Laporte (00:22:18):
Assist. Oh yes, yes, yes. Yeah. We gotta talk about that.

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:19):
So it always looks like a moon, right?

Leo Laporte (00:22:21):
That's right. That's the focus assist thing, which by the way, is now on by default. And when does 11, for some reason. It's interesting. Yeah. We spent three years getting notifications working in Windows 10 and now we're just turning 'em off by default and Windows 11 because we don't know

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:34):
What we're I keep forgetting the check. Yeah, my

Leo Laporte (00:22:36):
It's a, yeah, it's a multi click process, as you might imagine to turn that off, but you can't turn it off. Yeah, that's what that is. That's focuses says. So, but this widget thing later in the day, it's switch to like the widget's icon, like it lost the live preview thing or the weather forecast. So I started re stopped it and I, it just wouldn't come back. So I turned it off. So, you know, congratulations, Microsoft. Great job on that. I'm glad you tested it for months and months. What else we got? What else did I, I feel like I shoot Paul up. I just, I feel like

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:10):
Microphone,

Leo Laporte (00:23:10):
The microphone

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:11):
House bar. That's a good one. I

Leo Laporte (00:23:13):
Used that this morning in a, in a teams call that works fine. Only works in teams though. It doesn't work in.

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:18):
This's supposed to work in other apps. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:23:19):
You click it in mutes and yeah. Clicking in unmutes what does it do? So here's yeah. Yeah. That's what it does. So here's the problem in Windows 11. So first of all, they showed that feature off in June last year. They

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:29):
Did.

Leo Laporte (00:23:30):
Yep. They ship Windows 11 without it, except there is a microphone app icon in the task part. You should see it right now. Cause we're using zoom. This is a microphone you do down there. Yeah. Can't use that to mute and unmute zoom. No, if you click on it, the settings app launches, so right. And then they said, oh yeah, yeah. We're bringing this feature back. Don't worry. We're still gonna do it. Asterisks. It's only gonna work in teams, but if third parties want to add it to their apps, they just have to support some API. They have to actually add support for it to work. Okay. That's cute. And I think you, Mary Jo asked them about Skype and if I'm not mistaken, they had no comment about Skype. That was my memory of that. Yeah. Yep. So, so I know what a waste, because really that icon is in fact on your screen in right. This is about to get way better. You think I'm done ranting on this? I'm not here's what's classic about this. It only works for the commercial version of teams. Oh, like right. A version of teams that ships inside Windows 11 that does not allow you to connect to a work account. If according to Microsoft dope icon then who needs it, it doesn't work with that. It doesn't work with the version of teams built into Windows 11.

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:38):
You know what they're saying? It's for other apps. So I'm like, okay, you should have just said right now teams only, but they announced it again. This week re announced it. They said for all apps, right? This is, this is

Leo Laporte (00:24:50):
The beta version though. This is not a release version. No, this is it. This is public. This is the real,

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:55):
This one's public

Leo Laporte (00:24:55):
Public. Only, only the Amazon apps start think it was in preview. The rest of this is just so this widget thing that can't work right on my computer, this mute icon, which on my computer hilariously just turned it to a different icon as I'm looking at it. That's crazy. Anyway, does it work with anything is a mic icon? No, it turned, the mic went small and it was like a location arrow. So it was, I guess they're combining location and Mike in the same space for some reason

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:21):
From here.

Leo Laporte (00:25:22):
What else we got married? John? I'm sure some of this is good. What else is in

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:27):
This update? Share Windows more easily. Isn't that part of this one or not?

Leo Laporte (00:25:30):
Yes it is. It

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:31):
Is. Yeah. Do you like that feature?

Leo Laporte (00:25:35):
I don't use it. So I don't know. I'm actually not even sure what it does. So

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:40):
I think it's when you're, when you wanna show a window like in a teams meeting and yeah, you don't, oh, it's wanna show the wrong thing. You can, you can more easily share just the window that you want.

Leo Laporte (00:25:57):
Yep. So when they announced this feature last June, I thought was

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:00):
It was, they announced

Leo Laporte (00:26:01):
Be right. There's another one that didn't ship the original version of Windows 11. I thought what it was gonna be was sort of a, a share pain share panel replacement. Almost like I want, I'm doing something on the web maybe, and I wanna share it and a share thing would come up and you can say, I wanna share it to pocket to yeah. The mail app or something like that. That's not what it is. And yeah, you're right. It's for sharing a screen. Since I don't see it right now, I think we can guess it probably only works of teams. That's gonna be my guess. Right? Like it's not working now. It's not, I've never seen it. I've never actually seen it work. So

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:36):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:26:37):
I don't know. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:39):
Okay. What about the new notepad app though? How about that? That, one's

Leo Laporte (00:26:42):
Pretty good. How about that? I like that. I like that.

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:46):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:26:47):
I would like to know more about how they made it dark.

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:49):
Right. More dark mode, dark mode, round a corners. For some reason, a lot of space at the top where you have file edit view and the settings button, it's just like a ton of white

Leo Laporte (00:27:05):
Spaces out there. Yeah. What that really is is, or so oddly, I was just writing about this because I'm, I'm trying to update my own notepad app to take on some of these features. Yeah. You can kind of fake this effect in a desktop application. If you keep the, the title bar area, the next thing down, which is the menu, the same color they blend and you have no border between them. They kind of blend into one kind of a, it looks like one panel. Yeah. And there's a, there's a way in Windows. It's hard in Windows forms, but there's a way in Windows to actually remove the title bar. And then you can have kind of a header at the top, but you have to worry about implementing the window and all that kind of stuff. And it, it gets kind of messy, but they're do. Yeah. They're trying to make it look a little modern, I guess. And I think, honestly, I think all it is is they've just added white space. I think that's the bigger fonts. That's

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:58):
What

Leo Laporte (00:27:58):
It looks, looks like. I think that's all it is. Yeah. But it looks, it looks, it looks nice.

Mary Jo Foley (00:28:02):
It looks fine. It's still no pet, which is all I care. It works.

Leo Laporte (00:28:06):
Yeah. Well they've updated some of the dialogue boxes. Yeah. Don't mess with my notepad man. It's it's a good one. And actually I have, yeah, no, I like, I like the, I like the way it looks. Did I hear Paul Thurrott say

Mary Jo Foley (00:28:19):
He likes it. He did.

Leo Laporte (00:28:21):
I mean, it still doesn't have all the features of my app, but it's, you know, for like, you know, when Anne amateur your first try it about that. It's,

Mary Jo Foley (00:28:27):
That's why he wants to know how they did it so he can steal the source.

Leo Laporte (00:28:31):
Are you attempting to keep parody, feature parody with the yeah, well, I, I already have feature superiority Leo, but I am, but of course I would, but I would like to, I would like to match the look and feel of it. I think the it's possible, but not elegant to do this in Windows forms, which is the version of the app I'm scrolling around with right now. I think in WPF F it will be easier and better like dark dark mode support is clergy, clergy. What's the right clergy, I guess for Windows forms. So I'm not, I, I, it won't, I'm not gonna be able to make a look exactly like this. But I can certainly head that direction. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:08):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:29:09):
I do like it. I like the new note.

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:11):
Yeah. And then there's a new media player. I have not looked at that at all. Cuz I don't really need it completely

Leo Laporte (00:29:17):
Pointless. Yeah. It's just a yep.

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:22):
Yeah. So you know what, my biggest question about this role out and kind of the, also the implication, this is not the only time they're gonna do this. There's they're gonna keep doing these kinds of feature updates to Windows 11 going forward at various intervals. They didn't say how often. So to me doesn't this well, to me, this feels like they they're breaking their promise of one feature update per year. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:29:50):
Okay. So here's my theory on that. I, so first of all, I, we had this discussion maybe back in December ish timeframe where I sort of took this post and said, look, this means they are doing this and it's and, and you and others correctly pointed out, no, it, what they're saying is we may do this or we are reserving the right to do this. Right. Right. And this being update Windows 11 outside of that feature update release once a year. So what they've basically confirm did in the blog post about this release was Microsoft intends to ship features and updates and improvements to Windows 11 outside of that annual feature update. And we know now, cause we just got it. This thing is just a, it's a cumulative updates, this a standard update. Right. It, it, it happened to fall actually. When did it fall? Was it the B week,

Mary Jo Foley (00:30:43):
Week C? This is week

Leo Laporte (00:30:44):
C actually week C. Right? So week C is usually previews and optional. Yep. Updates. Right. It is right. I suspect, and I don't know this for a fact, but it seems reasonable that they would allow, or that businesses managing the way they, their users get updates would be able to block these updates and prevent

Mary Jo Foley (00:31:06):
Them from not, not take them right away. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:31:09):
And well, up until the feature update, you know, in other words, yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:31:13):
Just

Leo Laporte (00:31:13):
Keep, at some point, you'll have to take the feature update on whatever schedule that is. Right. But these particular updates are outside of that and can be blocked. Okay. I think that's my guess.

Mary Jo Foley (00:31:25):
I bet. You're right. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:31:27):
And look, most ones, 11 users, like individuals are gonna want this stuff. I mean, this thing ships incomplete, you know, and look, there are problems. Like I pointed out, but these thing, not the widgets thing, but the, the mute, the mute on mute thing, the task bar sharing, those are features they promised last June. Now I'm not saying anyone lined up to get Windows 11 because of task bar sharing or whatever. But I think it's important for them to come through on that, on those promises that they made. So yeah. It's, you know, it's mostly good. I think for individuals,

Mary Jo Foley (00:31:59):
Yeah. It just felt kind of jarring when you see them say, and by the way, this isn't the only time we're doing this, there's gonna be a, a number of feature updates throughout the year. And I'm like, wait. Yeah. All the it pros wanted was one feature update a year.

Leo Laporte (00:32:12):
Oh, they cheered it. They cheered it. Right? Yeah. Yep.

Mary Jo Foley (00:32:16):
So, but you're right. Consumers and enthusiasts, people who like care about is the line on top of something, X of centimeters versus not people like you, people like you.

Leo Laporte (00:32:30):
Okay, sure. How you gonna say that? Okay. Yep.

Mary Jo Foley (00:32:32):
Yeah. who are a little obsessive about the look and feel and such perhaps

Leo Laporte (00:32:38):
Who noticed it anyway,

Mary Jo Foley (00:32:40):
Who noticed it? I think you, people, you, people will care about these kind of updates, but me I'm like, yeah. If I don't get any of these until October when the feature update comes, I don't really care.

Leo Laporte (00:32:54):
Yeah. Well, the other thing is, this is how mobile operating systems are updated to right. Apple and Google, both have the facility to update system components to their app stores and provide what are basically new features midstream over the course of a year. And they both do that. Right. And so I, I think this just puts Windows into that normal, what is now considered normal for platform updates? You know, Chrome OS gets an update every month basically. And those updates could almost always are new features. Right. Right. They may not be major. Yeah. Like feature updates, like we have Windows, but they do update it every month.

Mary Jo Foley (00:33:33):
Yep. Right. Yeah. Again, this comes from the, the weird position Microsoft always is in, in that they wanna do one set of things for consumers, but businesses want something else. And when you have one operating system that's supposed to be the platform for both. Then, you know, you have to make choices that may not please both sides. Mm

Leo Laporte (00:33:55):
Yeah. Right. Yeah. So who wins business? Business

Mary Jo Foley (00:33:59):
Businesses should

Leo Laporte (00:34:00):
Win historically businesses avoid. But I think, like I said, I think they're gonna have that out that they, you know, if you're in a managed environment, whatever it is, Ws system center tune. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:13):
Yeah. I think you're, that's a good point that you're making that, that might be how

Leo Laporte (00:34:15):
I think, I think, I don't know what the policy is, but it seems like those C week updates you could, you could block 'em right.

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:23):
So yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:34:25):
Just to I'm I'm not keeping score, but Mary Jo, you were right. There's a February. There was, there's a February feature release. That's true. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Paul, you were wrong. What, what didn't you contend that some,

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:42):
No, he, he, he was thinking that they would, they had promised that they were gonna do it, but then he went back and looked at the wording and he's like, okay, they didn't promise

Leo Laporte (00:34:49):
It. They haven't said definitely

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:51):
Implied,

Leo Laporte (00:34:52):
But now they've said it now they've said it explicitly. We are now they said it doing this. Yeah. Yes, we are doing this. Okay. Yeah. Yes. They, so you were right to Paul. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:58):
Everybody

Leo Laporte (00:34:59):
Was right. Everybody was right. We're all winners. I just, you can, I have a sticker please. You all get stickers, you all get stickers. So, but when they say one feature release a year

Mary Jo Foley (00:35:11):
Yeah. What does that even mean now? Right. Does that

Leo Laporte (00:35:13):
Imply like they would've rolled up all of this stuff and then released all at once. I think it's better to dribble it out. Maybe not. I think, you know what I think it is for now of the way,

Mary Jo Foley (00:35:22):
What is the one feature release? Is it just the cumulative update of all the cumulative updates?

Leo Laporte (00:35:28):
The roll up of roll ups. Yeah. Yeah. What this unprecedented, what they're doing. I mean they had to what two feature releases updates a year, but didn't they every once in a while put a shout stuff in between or no, this is so app updates. I, I it's possible someone could pull out an example of that. I mean, they certainly have been working on this, you know, different method of update updating the system. But no, I mean, it was basically two updates a year. I, I, my guess is that, you know, October, whenever month arrives, we get the first feature update for Windows 11. It will consist of a roll up of all of these updates and some other things that are unique to this update. Right. Because the way they're testing things in the dev channel, they might wanna just reserve some collection of that stuff for October and call it, you know, and just to make it something that people want to get. Yeah. You know, if, if, if all it is is another roll up, then it's like, well, you know, we just, we're just getting these months to month anyway, what's the difference.

Mary Jo Foley (00:36:32):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:36:35):
But they've, they've not said anything about that. Okay. As they wouldn't. Yeah. And there's, and as you say, there's a way that it could certainly turn off the spigot. I believe. So I'm not an expert in that area, but I I'm sure. Yeah. I believe if you're always in that environment. Yeah. There always has, you

Mary Jo Foley (00:36:55):
Know, what, it would be great for them to add a throwaway line into that blog post saying, and if you're an it pro freaking out about this, don't worry. You can just not apply these updates. That's right. Maybe everybody knows that maybe they feel like they don't have to say it, but I've had several it admin type people ask me, like, how do we manage this? Like, I, I don't see how we manage this.

Leo Laporte (00:37:18):
Yeah. I seems to,

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:18):
I don't

Leo Laporte (00:37:19):
Know, ever since the B Y O D era, I wonder how much it pros can stop it. You know, if you're a notepad user and you're so excited about dark mode or whatever

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:32):
It is, you've gotta get the note. You

Leo Laporte (00:37:34):
Gotta have it. Yeah. Isn't the it department gonna look like a Grinch. If they say we can't have that because we haven't tested it.

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:42):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:37:43):
I, I think it's gonna be hard. I think if I, anything, that's what I'd be upset about, not the ability to stop it or not, but just now you're making me look like a jerk,

Leo Laporte (00:37:52):
Right. Like, I, I don't work at a big company. I don't know what these things are like anymore. I, the last time I was at a big company that people were super gluing, USB ports. So you couldn't plug my pods in time. I mean, I, you know, I, I, I feel like the, the, you know, bring your own computer, whatever model that we've had for a long time has been used, searched by hybrid work. And now a lot of people just using their own computers, you know, and I'm sure that's not true of these giant managed companies. But I feel, I feel like we're almost at some new point in history where maybe the majority of computers out there are maybe not managed, you know, they, they have like fine grain management. If you install word and sign into a corporate account, you can let your work, manage the computer, or they just manage teams. Those are the options. And you'll see that a lot with applications where you sign into your AAD account or whatever, and you'll get that option. And maybe that's just the world now, you know, like Mary Jo was asking about all these games on a computer. It's like, maybe a lot of places just don't care.

Mary Jo Foley (00:38:57):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:38:58):
Maybe, you know, they can remotely wipe teams or your outlook store or whatever it is, or your one drive for business access and not touch the rest of the computer anyway. So who cares?

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:09):
Hmm. I like with conditional access and stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:39:12):
Maybe,

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:14):
Maybe I just, I I'm, it's a topic I think is gonna be interesting to watch, like how businesses react to this way of getting updates into

Leo Laporte (00:39:23):
People's hands. Well, now that the mass mandate is over those guys can come out of their holes like that, that rat from Pani, whatever it is. And they can, we can see what's going on in 19. I don't know,

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:34):
Rat Whatever that like the New York pizza rat. It's

Leo Laporte (00:39:39):
The guy who, the guy who predicts, oh, the ground hook. Is it a ground hug? Yeah. It's a ground hug. That's why they call it rat ground hug. I mean, Groundhog, right? Yes. Huns the, to Phil, Phil. There you go. Yeah. You live in Pennsylvania. You should know this stuff. Don't they require for citizenship. I instantly thanks to Marcy in our club, TWiT discord who tells us bill gates has arrived in Barcelona. He just left Palm Springs, flew to Barcelona in his 2018 Gulf stream. They left, they stayed for two hours, probably refueling and to get fresh stewardess. And now they're off somewhere else. Okay. But you know, this is that Jack Sweeney kid. Who's also tracking. Oh yeah, yeah. Bezos and Elon Musk. Well, he must be on his like 20th anniversary do net tour. You know,

Mary Jo Foley (00:40:30):
He must be,

Leo Laporte (00:40:32):
It's kind of cool. I mean he's got a TWiTtter handle for are all of the above just to, you know, so this is

Mary Jo Foley (00:40:41):
Bill in, in case you wanna know where they are go gates,

Leo Laporte (00:40:43):
Jets, gates, jets. I hope though, Jack, you've got a a domain name as well. I'm saying Jack, you should get jacks, jets.com or something like that. And let me tell you where to go to get that hover.com is where I register are all my domain names. It's time to make plans, let hover help you achieve 'em our sponsor. And our registrar of record. If you're a blogger, if you're creating a portfolio, if you're building an online store, you know, maybe you've got a podcast. I registered for my Leo on the line podcast, which is my, you know, fantasy down the road podcast, L O TL. I registered lale.fun. Lale fun. Good name, right? Hover. Thank you. Hover. They've got 'em all. Even if it's just a more memorable redirect to your LinkedIn CV, hover has the best domain names, the best email addresses just for you.

Leo Laporte (00:41:40):
Yes. Email now email's important. I think certainly any business should not be@hotmail.com or@aol.com, but I even in an individual, I think it's really important to have your custom domain. I have several email domains from hover.com. Email. Your domain name is key to connecting with customers, building trust for your brand. Of course we have@TWiT.tv, hover has domain based emails for all your needs, smaller, large. So if you're wondering, where do I host email hover, do it for you. It's easy to set up. You can add as many mailboxes to your domain as you need. When your domain renews, it's automatic, your mailbox renews as well. Very convenient for people are saying, well, it's a little complicated. What could I makes it so easy? And man, the prices are unbeatable and their most popular mailbox, just a no brainer solution for business owners. You can get access from anywhere.

Leo Laporte (00:42:32):
Of course you can use the email you're already using it's standard IMAP server. Or if you don't want to use an app, they've got a web mail interface. It's great. Be accessed wherever you are at your domain, you know, at Pete's hot pockets.com or whatever it is they, and once you have your domain name, it's easy to renew who is privacy part of the, you don't have any upsell on that. They have great pro-level tools. I use the, you know, the fancy DNS tools. They've got both for domain and email management. They're intuitive, they're easy to use, but they also have hover connect. So if you don't know that stuff, don't worry, push button connection to most web hosting companies. So it's very simple just with a couple of clicks. And of course, because they ensure your privacy, you're gonna have less spam.

Leo Laporte (00:43:22):
You're gonna protect yourself from unwanted solicitations. Hovers, just great. They, what, I guess this is the bottom line at hover. You're a customer, not a source of data. All right, you're not there. So they can ups sell you with a million things. They're just a quality company helping you take back control of your data with a reliable tracker free email hovers, trusted by thousands, hundreds of thousands of customers who use their domain names and their email to turn their IDs into reality. I'm one of them, a very happy hover customer, whether you're a, I always keep a tab open at hover, just in case you never know when a great idea will hit you. I, I, that's where Leo FM is registered. I really like that because that's such a short, nice domain name. I'm I have a lot of them, whether you're a developer photographer, small business podcaster, or just an individual hover has something for you to expand your projects, get the visibility you want. Look more professional, gain control. That's the big, most important thing for me, gain control of your email. Go to hover.com/TWiT. Get 10% off your first purchase at any domain extension for the entire first year, H O V E R hover.com/TWiT. Get that 10% off your first purchase and hover. I love you. Keep up the good work. Couldn't be happier. I just got some ideas for new domain names. I wanna register hover.com/TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:44:52):
Now back to this show, dozers.com.

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:58):
I like it. I

Leo Laporte (00:44:59):
Like it. I'm thinking, I'm thinking I got we got TWiTt am. Yep. That's a good one. Whoop. I think we might have a little DNS issue with that. Thank you J at I will check. Make sure. Yeah. Okay. I will check with the engineering team on TWiT.am and our Wiki. They are not KA put as far as I know. But you know what, the best way, if you want the audio go to TWiT.tv/live and you get links to there's two audio streams and you can get links. Maybe it's at, maybe yours is outta date. I think we might have moved stuff around JT. All right, moving along, Paul, Mary Jo talking about Windows there is a new Windows, 11 dev channel today. I couldn't be more excited. Really? No.

Mary Jo Foley (00:45:58):
Well, well, this is a really, it is big in terms of number of features in this, because there hasn't been a new dev channel build for two weeks for various reasons.

Leo Laporte (00:46:08):
But I think this might be the biggest one ever.

Mary Jo Foley (00:46:11):
It's one of the ones for sure. Yeah. So a couple things about this build, it came out this this afternoon, it's bill 2, 2, 5, 5, 7 dev channel. It's from the nickel branch. If you're following along with the periodic table of code names. But then they, they quickly say at the very top of the blue, okay, we're gonna stop talking about what branches these things come from. So I think this may be one of the last times where we see them say, okay, this is the first one in the nickel branch, right. I don't, I don't know if they'll totally try to stamp out those code names in some way or, and just move to like 22 H 2 23 H one or whatever ever. But the at least today's we know this is nickel. What's, what's the biggest thing in here probably the full being able to create folders, right. And, and pin them to your start menu. That's a pretty big feature. And something people have wanted. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:47:14):
I really like the new gesture thing. Thank you. So you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen to get the start menu. You swipe up from the right side to get the notifications, you know, they have different there's a new grab handle from like the right side, which we used to call charms and Windows eight. I mean, I think it's, I, I I'm interested to see them doing that kind of work. No, no, I

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:34):
Don't. You use gesture? No, you don't. Okay. No, I was gonna say, wait, you're using gestures.

Leo Laporte (00:47:39):
No, in fact, I, I turn off a lot of gestures. Yeah. Just because I, I, I don't use touchscreens a lot anyway, but I mean, right. One of the things that's kind a need about Windows 11. Yeah. I was trying to remember who was 10 as well. I think it's just 11. Is they duplicated the multitouch gestures through the touch pad. Right. So they're, they're identical, which I think makes a lot of sense. They're not talking about that here. So I don't know if You know, that's this, I don't have a track pad for front of me, but I'm, I'm curious if they're gonna do something like that. But I think this is neat because this answers some of the questions or some of the compliance that people have had. Right. Well, frankly, since the beginning of Windows 10, which is that it's just not as friendly as a tablet OS as Windows eight was, it was one of the few things that people kind of liked about that. So I think it's kind, yeah, I think it's kind of cool.

Mary Jo Foley (00:48:28):
And if, to me it felt like Windows 10 had some touch stuff and then they kind of took it all away with 11 right now they're bringing it back gradually.

Leo Laporte (00:48:38):
Well, but these are new. Like these are, these are gestures

Mary Jo Foley (00:48:41):
I've

Leo Laporte (00:48:41):
Never had before. Yeah. I think that's kind of cool.

Mary Jo Foley (00:48:43):
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, they have gesture, new gestures. They have the folders, they have the drag drop to the task bar pin, pin, your apps to the task bar by dragging them there. Yeah. They've got a lot of new stuff around, do not disturb. And the whole they're trying to re-engineer the focus experience. So what we were talking about before the show started, I think that's right.

Leo Laporte (00:49:04):
Yeah. So focus

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:05):
Mode

Leo Laporte (00:49:05):
Is focus, changing to focus. Our focus is changing to focus.

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:08):
Yeah. Right. So you, there's gonna be a, do not disturb option. That sounds like it'll be a little easier to use. I, I find focuses, says very hard to use in terms of when I wanna just not be bothered, like during a podcast or something, I'm like, oh, there's so many things you have to set. Why is it so complicated? It would just be nice if there was a button do not disturb. Okay. It's

Leo Laporte (00:49:28):
Off. Yeah. Like the microphone button, but have it be a little, a little, a moon thing,

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:32):
Right. It's and have it work. Yeah. Have it work with everything. That would be good. Yep. Okay. file Explorer. Quick access view is getting a bunch of changes. Like things are being reorganized in there. Yeah. I

Leo Laporte (00:49:46):
Don't like that, but yeah, you don't, I don't, I actually advise people to turn that off, but yeah. They're adding re recent documents to it. There's some changes, which I think is kind of cool. Like that's a, that's a cool feature from Windows left. That

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:58):
Is so you can drag, you're gonna be able to drag something up to the top of the screen and it'll help you snap into the right. Kinda layout.

Leo Laporte (00:50:05):
I love that. I use that all the time. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's nice. And it's just a neat thing, cuz I don't think most people ever knew that this feature existed. We've had it for 10 years now. I think actually, no, it probably goes back technically. No, we had a snap feature in Windows seven, I think. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:22):
So let's talk about the old snap versus the current snap snap and Windows seven and eight was horrendous

Leo Laporte (00:50:30):
So hard. Well, especially at eight, eight was eight

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:32):
Was eight was the worst miserable. It was unbelievably bad. Like I, I can't tell you how much time I spent trying to snap apps and Windows eight. I'm like, is it just me? Is it like, I don't know,

Leo Laporte (00:50:43):
Like forget this, but yeah. The initial version of Windows eight would not allow you to have two apps side by side that were the same size, but a thin channel that was affixed with and your app had to explicitly support this special snap mode. Yeah. And if you had that, you could have like a thin like column and that was it. And then finally in eight one they started adding the, I think they 50 50 split and eventually they just went to variable split. Yeah. But yeah, it was so it was just, it was, yeah, it was really bad.

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:10):
Yeah. It was, it was pretty terrible. So now I like that you can go up in the corner and use it.

Leo Laporte (00:51:16):
Yeah, no, I mean, if you know the keyboard shortcuts, you can sit there with a window and move it all over the screen and yeah. Have it occupied different parts of the screen. You can maximize it, minimize it, you know, it's, it's actually really nice. This again, how is this different from Windows snap? I mean, isn't this what you've had all along? No, no. So it's, it's a little, well, the big difference to me is well, they've, they've, they've evolved it over time. Right? So one of the things they, I don't remember which version this came in, but if you snapped a window to the left they, you know, in 50% of the screen, they would have, I think it was called snap assist show you thumbnails of all the other Windows, and then you could choose one and that would fill in the space.

Leo Laporte (00:51:52):
Yeah. So with Windows 11, they've kind of evolved at where you have different snap layouts, where it could be like a grid of four or one tall one and two small ones or whatever the different layouts are. And you know, the trick is you have to most over something to see that these are possible least it's there. And I think what they're trying to do now is make more of those layouts available for one thing, cuz right now it's kind of a, a, this is not too many depending on your no screen size and resolution and all that, but they're also making a little easier because now you just drag out. If you drag a window toward the top of the screen, you'll get this kind of a, a grid of layouts and then you can that's are, oh, I like that. That's that's way better. It's it's more discoverable. Yeah. Now. Yes, exactly.

Mary Jo Foley (00:52:36):
Yeah, it is.

Leo Laporte (00:52:38):
Cause it gives you a little indication. It gives you like a preview. Like if you, you know what you're gonna get, if you start moving a window around a little thing will come down and you'll, it will you'll naturally go kind of go to it. Oh, that's a big improvement.

Mary Jo Foley (00:52:49):
I think it's much better.

Leo Laporte (00:52:51):
It's it's an evolution. Its it's good.

Mary Jo Foley (00:52:53):
It came from power toys, right? The snap layout.

Leo Laporte (00:52:55):
Oh did it? Okay. Oh snap did. You're right. The snap snap layout did. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:02):
I, I think like as trivial as that may sound as some people, like, I just remember so many times on my laptop trying to snap two things side by side them. I give up, I can't, I can't do it. No, it's

Leo Laporte (00:53:12):
Not. It really isn't trivial. You, you we're all used to these little devices like phones and tablets and, and we, and yeah, they actually, some of them have ways to do this as well, but you don't really do that too much on a small screen, but we have a big screen. Like we would on a computer.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:26):
You wanna have things side by side.

Leo Laporte (00:53:28):
Yeah. You wanna take advantage of that? So,

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:30):
Yep. Yeah. Anyway. Okay. So there, I don't know if you caught this, but Michael Reinder who sometimes does work for pet and is a, I think Windows Weekly listener he saw and like these notes for today's builder. Huge. Right. But buried in there, there's something that says, by the way, as of this bill Windows 11 pro is going to start requiring an internet connection and will require an MSA if you're going to sign in for personal use. So that remember that was something they introduced with Windows 11 for home users. And there was some outcry about that and they said, don't worry, it's only for home and not for pro. And now it's coming to pro

Leo Laporte (00:54:10):
I thought this was gonna be the biggest problem in the world. I know you did. This would make people crazy.

Mary Jo Foley (00:54:15):
You did. You told me that you're like, this is the biggest thing in the whole release. And I'm like, I don't think people are gonna be that mad. And some people are mad, some were mad, but yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:54:25):
Here's the thing. I, I, I, I just I'll talk about this later, but I was just playing with a Chromebook thing and you know, when you sign into a Chromebook, of course you sign with your Google account. Of course you do. Right? The true. I'm not as familiar on the iPhone, but I know on Android you could skip signing in with your account when you set up a phone, if you want to, I don't know why you would do that. I suspect if you, I don't. Cause I never do it. But I guess if you ran the play store after that, probably gonna ask you for your account at that point. I mean, at some point you're gonna have to get your account in there. I think people are just comfortable with this notion that if I sign into an iPhone, I have an apple account.

Leo Laporte (00:54:58):
If I sign into a Google or an Android phone, I have a, a Google account sign into a ChromeOS machine. I have a account. I, I guess we're just kind of there. I mean, I guess the acceptance level is just high of this. I know. I, I still maintain this will freak out a certain part of the population. I'm sure they're yeah. And there'll be work arounds. Like there always are. Yeah. Yep. But I, I have to, I, I didn't, you'll be surprised given the things I've ranted about today. I saw his tweet and I had a, I had a moment of, you know, contemplation about it and I thought, you know what? The, the, the outrage I thought was gonna happen. Never happened.

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:38):
Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:55:40):
Yeah. Maybe it's time, you know?

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:42):
Yeah. I feel like the reason I don't mind signing in is I feel like I get more a, of my customizations and, and the things that I want if I sign in. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:55:53):
Yeah. If you're at all in the Microsoft ecosystem, if you use one drive, it's just a really super basic, but big example. Yeah. I mean, just the past two authentication stuff is great. 

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:06):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:56:06):
It goes to the browser, you know, especially if you're using edge. I don't, I think this is just what people expect. I, I,

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:14):
I do too, you know, that's why I wasn't freaked out about it when they first announced it. I'm like, you know what? I feel like many people now just expect, this is your experience. Like, this is what you're gonna have to do.

Leo Laporte (00:56:25):
Yeah. I don't like you. I, I also sign in, I don't really, you know, there was a time, I would say the first we call first half of Windows, tens existence. One of the tips I had in my book was don't sign in with that account. First sign in with a local account. Remember, there's a bunch of stuff you wanna do first cause, and now they kind of do the stuff in the background they didn't used to do. So for example Windows will apply a, a kind of a gross name to your computer automatically. It's a stupid name. Windows 11 gives you the chance to actually get change the name, but whatever, if you change the name of that thing later, it wouldn't always push that change up to everywhere where you manage your like concept microsoft.com or whatever. At some point they fixed that.

Leo Laporte (00:57:07):
So it wasn't really a big deal anymore that you had to do this before you had the Microsoft account sign in. And of course, if you have a, you know, you also get like a, a pin is a very simple way to sign in, or if you have a facial recognition thing going on or a fingerprint reader you know, it's not like you're typing in a big complex password every time you have to sign in and unlike, you know, my iPhone or my Android devices, it doesn't occasionally say, oh, you gotta enter your password or whatever for security or whatever. Like why, what is like, that's crazy. This other thing is more secure anyway. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm guess maybe I'm just resigned to it, but I, I think based on what happened with the original release of Windows 11 and Windows 11 home in particular, I didn't really, I can't think of any major incidences of problems and I, there's certainly not a class auction lawsuit going on right. To try to get them a reverse course or any thing like that. So, right.

Mary Jo Foley (00:58:06):
Yeah. I think right after they announced Windows 11, I had a few pings from people saying, did you see that they changed this? And now you have to sign in. I'm like, yep. I did. I saw that. I announced it in their, in their posts, you know, blah, blah, people, like, I don't want that. I'm like, yeah, well, that's it. That's the way it is.

Leo Laporte (00:58:21):
That's it. I am gonna write an article called MSA gate tomorrow. But, but you know what, don't worry about that. That's you

Mary Jo Foley (00:58:27):
Tomorrow I'm I was kind of thinking, and that happened today, but I know It's Susy night, so yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:58:33):
I'm gonna be like laying awake in bed tonight, staring at the ceiling, thinking about this and the rage is gonna build

Mary Jo Foley (00:58:41):
And then tomorrow we'll see it MSO.

Leo Laporte (00:58:44):
No, I just, I think the world is preside to it. Maybe I'll hear it differently. I don't know. Yeah. Oh, listen to my radio show. You'll hear differently.

Mary Jo Foley (00:58:52):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:58:53):
Yeah. So, okay. Lot of people don't wanna do this lot of people also,

Mary Jo Foley (00:58:57):
This is pro versus home. And so a lot of people contend like pro is more expensive. I sometimes have to upgrade to pro. So if I'm paying, why can't I choose if I sign in or not like those kind of arguments come up a lot. Right. 

Leo Laporte (00:59:11):
It is the case that you've had to have an MSA account for, for a few months anyway, on home for home. Pro was your escape hatch.

Mary Jo Foley (00:59:20):
It

Leo Laporte (00:59:20):
Was, but now it's not your escape hatch. So, but you know, I, I, I think what I would say to these people to keep using that phrase is the thing they need to understand is an MSA is safer and is more secure and it will keep your data safer, right. Safer than a local account. Yeah. That how so? Cause passwords can be broken. And most of those people, honestly, let's be serious. A lot of people probably not even using passwords, you could, you could put two factor authentication on your Microsoft account. Yeah. But no, it's not. I don't understand what you're saying. If I have, look, if I have a computer in, in my house and I log in with a password that's secure as secure as I need it to be. Even if I don't use a password, cuz it's in my house now you're expecting me to go to a third party for a login and connect a bunch of stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:00:17):
No is outside my house. I don't see how that's more secure you're heater has biometrics built into it that require you to sign with a Microsoft account, for example. So even for people who think it's more convenient, like if that's their game or whatever I either have a very short password or I have a very, or no password or whatever you could just say, well, you have a fingerprint or you could log into your face. Yeah. And this is a very secure way to log in. And it's just, I don't know. I, I, this is just a, so you're only using a right. Is that all or do I have to use what? I only need it to activate Windows. I can then go back to my local login. Yes. It's not even used for activation. It's just no, it's just, no, I'm not in words.

Leo Laporte (01:01:04):
One more reason. I will never use Windows. That's awful. No, that's horrible, but okay. Well hold on a second. So what do you, I mean, you sign in with your apple account on your iPhone. Yeah. Because I have to, well, okay. I'm gonna use an iPhone. Well, yeah. It's the same thing. Why I use Linux on the desktop. I'm the that's ridiculous. People will be. You have no idea. I'm glad they did it. Oh no. I'm cur I'm actually curious, like I, I clear what their goals are. Yeah. It's like, Google's saying you, well, it is exactly like Google's saying you have to a Google account or Facebook saying you have to use a Facebook account. Right. It's now

Mary Jo Foley (01:01:40):
They look at all these. No, they look at all these other companies and like, if they, if they're doing it, why shouldn't we do it? Like they're getting away

Leo Laporte (01:01:46):
Because they are not because they're not selling a free service, not giving away free service. They're charging me to give them my information. I that's ridiculous. That's

Mary Jo Foley (01:01:55):
Really, you knows is free if you buy a PC though.

Leo Laporte (01:02:00):
So, okay. I, I, I, I think they do have of, and I guess apple and Google would make the same argument. I mean, there is, you know, the security argument to be made and just think about the point of Windows 10, which they've really pushing harder with Windows 11, which is they want to get everyone on the same version of the software because it makes the whole ecosystem safer because it's so much easier to upgrade one or two versions of Windows versus, you know, 11 or 12 or whatever it is. And this is kind of an extension of that. I mean, they want the whole audience to be using a managed account of some kind, whether it's unique identifier for everybody. Okay. I wonder why they would want that. I can't understand why. Look, I don't understand why you can't pull the trigger on Skynet. Just accept

Mary Jo Foley (01:02:48):
It.

Leo Laporte (01:02:51):
I don't know. No, I mean, I believe me, Paul, you don't have to write the manifesto because you will hear the hows. Did,

Mary Jo Foley (01:02:59):
Did you hear, did you hear from a lot of people when they did this on home outta curiosity, you did. Cause we didn't. We

Leo Laporte (01:03:06):
Did not. I didn't. I really didn't. Yeah. I expected to, I expected this. I thought this would be the big controversy.

Mary Jo Foley (01:03:12):
Yeah. I heard people.

Leo Laporte (01:03:14):
Yeah. I didn't think I even heard from that name people. I mean, yeah. I obviously with Windows 11, the big controversy ended up being the TPM 2.0 and the eighth gen processor requirements, which they hid from the public for months, basically miscommunicated. And I think, I feel like that overpowered, the, the natural outrage we should have had over the, the MSA requirement. But I, I, but it never, I don't, you're saying, but Leo's, who's seen it. So yeah. And I want, you know, I'm trying to think it is the case that usually when you set up a Mac, you, you create an apple account or you have one and you log into well, but a Mac actually don't have to. No, you don't. And the Mac is still old fashioned in that way, in the sense that you actually create a local account, it's the first thing you do.

Leo Laporte (01:03:59):
Right? You tie it that's to apple account. That's the way Windows seven used to work. That's right. Actually that goes back all the way to actually that goes back all the way to XP XP was local accounts and they had a, a.net passport thing. You could tie into your account. It didn't really do much, but it would work with, you know, messenger account. Well, and this was your advice in the early days. And I, I followed it, which is sign in for the local account and tie it to a Microsoft account because you've already synced everything else with your Microsoft account. And it makes it for a very nice. So here's what thinking. And I, I, I agree. Yeah, there were a lot of, yeah. And they, so here's the workaround for these folks. There are, and I, I'm not gonna be able to tell you the method right.

Leo Laporte (01:04:39):
At the top of my head, but you can circumvent this in initial setup. So if you want to create a local account during setup, you actually can, and you don't have to create, you don't use a Microsoft account. The other thing you could do is no, I thought that was not true. It's true. You can, you can circum UI, you have to, you have to do a couple things on a, on a win on a Windows PC. Yeah. Yeah. You can, you can get around it really. Cuz it used to be that you would say I have either you'd UN UN disconnect from the internet or I thought that you had the MSC account. No, there's different. You, this, you can get around it. If you have to. The other thing you can do is everyone probably has a Microsoft to kind of write everyone probably has a Hotmail account or something. You could just log into that account for the first time you pass through, go into settings, create a local account, make it an admin reboot, log into the admin account and then kill the other account. Now you just have a local account. Like you can, there are ways around it now, Windows 12, you know, maybe they start turning some of that stuff off. I don't know. But as of today you can't, you can work around it. For sure.

Leo Laporte (01:05:42):
But yeah, I saw that and I thought of course they are, you know, like of course they're and by the way, as we were talking, this is good to know that there's a way around it. Cause I thought there was no way around it. So you, yeah. That's what your

Mary Jo Foley (01:05:55):
Story should be. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:05:56):
That's your story. Here's how you get around that. I mean, I don't mind having a Microsoft account. I have a Google account. I have an apple account and all that stuff. Yeah. But there should be, I feel if you're paying for a desktop operating system, a way to use it without phoning home, I know there's no way to use Windows without phoning home period. So right. Yeah. I mean, right. That's well, the one of those things I thought in the lifetime of Windows 10, they were gonna resolve, they would slowly back away, slowly back away. And instead they waved their hands a lot and there is still literally no way in Windows 10 or 11 to not have Teleme two J to send to Microsoft, I think for good. I think for good reason, unless you have an enterprise account, maybe it may be enterprise.

Mary Jo Foley (01:06:40):
Yeah. Or long term servicing branch or

Leo Laporte (01:06:42):
Something. I mean for individual, but for people like for individuals. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:06:47):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:06:52):
But you know what, not as evil as apple and Google, that's the messaging. So what's not to like to sign in and except that warm bass, we're not evil. That's good. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We were like the machines at the end of the matrix that made a pact with humanity. We're still the machines, but like, you know, don't so, so as long as you can still get a local on the account, even if you have to jump through hoops, as long as there's a work around yeah. Have a removed local account support from Windows like that, it's it has not. So you disconnect from the internet, you set up and it sets up fine. It's a little, I don't think disconnecting from the internet will do it. I actually in Windows 11, I think in Windows 11, something else, they, they enforce that.

Leo Laporte (01:07:32):
But there's some, there are some ways around it. Yeah. That was my understanding. I didn't know about the other ways around it. Yeah. So you have to go to the dark side of the next for a normal person. Who's calling into your show. I would just say, look just that last thing I said, sign in with a, with a Microsoft account, create a local account, make it an admin, log out, log into the local account and then kill the Microsoft account. You'll be, that's not the end of the world. Yeah. That's not that bad. It's not great. But it's, and, and it, even as every time I say it now, it feels like such a temporary thing. Like I, I do feel like in the future, they're gonna not allow that or something, but for now you can do that. It works.

Leo Laporte (01:08:14):
All right. I guess I'll take it. What choice do I have? Oh, you'll take it. No, you don't have a choice and you'll like it. Yep. The 20th anniversary, it's not just the 20th anniversary of.net. That's true. 20Th anniversary. Well, I'm not sure what you're getting at, but it's the 20th anniversary of C sharp and the 20th anniversary of visual studio.net, which is now just isn't it. The 20th of is it NT tomorrow? There's a big, I mean the challenge NT is no, no. The first version of NT was 1993. Oh yeah. So no, so no. What else? The chat said it was the 20th anniversary. Maybe it was the 30 was the Ann something Windows Windows 2000, 2000. That's what it was Windows 2020th anniversary. Does that make sense? Be the 20, be the 22nd anniversary, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:09:11):
It did come out in February. So.Net, it's complicated. Like a lot of things for Microsoft. I just to give it a, a mile high overview I've been writing about this stuff and that programming window series that I'm doing on the site. I've, I, I think in two months I wrote about 20 years of history. And then in two months I've written about one year of history, cuz it really down in the early two thousands cuz a lot of stuff happens. And one of those things that happens is.net and.net was Microsoft's response to the internet and trying to make an internet based platform basically. And they really did not. They, they, you know, they did it as Microsoft of that era. Would've done it, which is they based it on Windows since. So there were like client components that would sit in Windows and in other smart devices, running versions of Windows.

Leo Laporte (01:10:03):
And then there were these internet services that would be running up in the cloud, but they were running on Windows servers. Right. And this is you know, it was a response to Java. It was a response to job, you know, sun suing of a Java, but a lot of good things came out of it. And one of those good things was the Shar programming languages language rather. And then eventually you know, Microsoft changed they went the open source route and plus we had Miguel de Kaza. We cannot understate overstate how important he is. He took the ECMO version of.net and created his own do net run times for other platforms, including Linux and that product that is a very small team from Boston made, became the basis for what we now, well now it's just do net, but it became.net core and became.net.

Leo Laporte (01:10:55):
And now.net is this open source platform. Multilanguage thing. That's actually kind of awesome. So it's a long history, but you know, it's the pandemic and they had an online event and it was terrible and I feel bad and I wish there was something better for.net than what they got. But you know, here we are. So what I would recommend to anyone interested in.net or anyone who's just curious about Don net is listen to the podcast.net rocks, which is our buddies Richie Campbell and Carl Franklin. And in recent weeks they've interviewed Andrew Helberg who created C sharp as well as turbo Pascal and much of Delhi. And he contributed a lot to.net and he created type script. He's awesome. He's my hero. And also Miguel DECA, right. Who did Moo and Samin and, you know, Zaine is about to be relaunched in something called do net Maui sometime in the next couple months. So that's kind of cool too. Oh, Maui is Zarin. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. That's the first name change, is it? No, no it I'm losing track of the names. It's almost like they're trying to hide it's origin.

Leo Laporte (01:12:10):
Yeah. So we'll see. I za was always a little messy to me, but it's, it's if you're familiar with fluter, it's kind of like Microsoft fluter cross platform framework. So you can create apps for iOS and Android and iPad obviously. And Windows in the Mac in this version. And then Microsoft has a separate solution for the web, but you can have web components in Maui as well of laser on it. So this kind of a, I dunno, it's hard to even explain what.net is anymore, but anyway, you should listen to dot Iraq's. Yes. They know some great stuff there. They know all that, they know this, they know their stuff mono was created to make a cross platform.net. So that's right. Yeah. Yeah. It is literally, it, it, it's funny cuz Microsoft is enormous company, billions of dollars of resources and all stuff they threw at it. And the sky from Boston, well from Mexico city originally, I think but in Boston, small team created a cross platform version of it. And that's the basis for everything that is do net today. Yeah. You know, so it was, was for a while it was mono then it got, oh, let's see, the company was Simian Zien, Simian. There you go. Simian. Right. Right. And then it

Mary Jo Foley (01:13:20):
Stuff was fighting that Zi. Do you guys remember that?

Leo Laporte (01:13:22):
Yes. Oh yeah. Yes. So I do, they're

Mary Jo Foley (01:13:24):
Like, Nope, we don't want you to do this. Nope, Nope.

Leo Laporte (01:13:27):
There was, there was some ugly. So Donette almost died a million deaths like in when Longhorn was a thing they were creating dot net bay APIs, Avalon and indigo and win Fs. And they didn't talk about.net at all. They were gonna, that thing was gonna be called win FX. And eventually so many people complained. Plus Longhorn was delayed for so many years that they back boarded it to XP cuz they had to, they had this thing that no one could even use. So they're like, well I guess this the.net framework three. I know we'll just call it, do net again. And then Windows eight happened years later, same thing. They, they did all these managed APIs. They never talked about.net. Even it wasn't do net. It's still, it's not.net. It's true. And that, that period that could have been the end of.net.

Leo Laporte (01:14:13):
But around that time, right shortly thereafter, that's when the whole dot the open source start stuff started happening at Microsoft and suddenly Linux wasn't a cancer anymore and things changed. And so it's a different world. So basically it's the compatibility layer for.net that lets you run on other platforms. Right? That's is that, is that SDK compatibility layer? I would say it is a basically they, they port the run time to different platforms got because.net compiles to got it. And intermediary got it. Non execute. So it's can be cross platform. I mean there are so it's still Windows specific Pascal guys. P machine it's the P code. Yeah. Yeah. P code. Remember that? Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah, it might actually probably it could have its it's well, it's like the Java Java, Java. You do a Java run time for every different platform. Well, the point of it though, is it does it's safer, right? It does garbage collection. It does it is strongly typed, you know, it it's, it supports multiple languages. That was the big innovation over Java in many ways. Although realistically speaking, 20 years later, we're talking about C sharp really? Right. I mean visual basics, still a thing, but you don't hear a lot about eclipse dot or cobal.net or whatever. I mean, those, some of those might still exist, but they're not major concerns anymore. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:15:41):
And you liked developing for do net or did you just do it? Everything I've done is basically.net. Like the yeah. Windows forms is.net. The Windows presentation foundation, which originally had its origins and Longhorn is.net. Do you prefer working with that? To the native API? Yeah. Oh yeah. Because native APIs and Windows are terrible. Right? These are, these are flat APIs with no hierarchy. The C base the date back literally to the 1980s. I mean this, this horrible, in fact, one of the one worst decisions anyone ever made at Microsoft, although it was understandable why they made it was to port the, what we now call the win 16, the original Windows API 2 30, 2 bit for NT and just keep it exactly the same. And they did that because at the time the only thing that was 32 bit was NT and they knew no one would've adopt it if they didn't do this.

Leo Laporte (01:16:35):
So it allowed developers to port their applications over to 32 bit and then eventually to Windows 95 and to the rest of the world or whatever. But they didn't, they did it. I mean, it was, you know, good job everybody, but they didn't improve it. Like they didn't make it cleaner or nicer. They just took the ugliness of the API and brought it to 32 bits, ensuring we would be stuck with that for the rest of our lives. So it succeeded, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, definitely. But you know, 1 32 IOP is huge. It's important for fluter that's one of the big features in fluter. If you want a feature that's not available in the fluter frameworks, you can run, you can oh, interesting. Run, win 32 code. It's also a feature of.net. Same thing. In fact, Mary Jo just asked me about the header of the notepad app and blah, blah, blah, whatever. And the thing I will publish tonight or tomorrow is about this very topic. It's colleague wind 32 APIs from.net because the framework in this case, Windows form doesn't natively support some feature that the operating system supports. So you have to call into win 32 to run that code. Exciting. Huh? The like full circle now. Yeah. I love this stuff. I'm the wrong guy.

Leo Laporte (01:17:49):
Yeah. So we were talking earlier about mask mandates being dropped in Northern California. Google, I don't think Google has announced a date to bring employees back or apple, but Microsoft is yes. Yeah. Anyway, this is kind of weird. Isn't it? Like? This is we've gone from a year and a half of. Okay. Okay. Oh, okay. Okay. And then they're like, you know what? We're not even gonna guest anymore. And now they're like, okay, we're coming back.

Mary Jo Foley (01:18:14):
I mean, it was very, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:18:16):
This came outta nowhere.

Mary Jo Foley (01:18:18):
It did to me. So they announced this week that their Washington state campus, which is where headquarters is Redmond and their California campuses also are all gonna start going back to work permanently February 28th. So yeah, people get a month to make adjustments to their schedules. And after that it's fully open to employees, to visitors customers. It's like, okay, we've we've, we're not gonna postpone it anymore. We're open.

Leo Laporte (01:18:47):
So let me ask you this, cuz I've heard from multiple people now who work at Microsoft who are not happy about this. Not happy at all. Yes. Me too. Like there are okay. That's yep. Yeah. And I guess, you know, looking at it from the outside, I sort of thought, well, I mean, I dunno, so the way the world's going, right. I, I, we can yeah. Sit in a restaurant. We can go to a, or, you know, go to a sporting event. No one's wearing masks, you know? Right. Yeah. Like why couldn't we go back to an office?

Mary Jo Foley (01:19:18):
Right. You know, I, I think Microsoft's gonna be, even though they set a hard date, I think they're gonna be somewhat lenient in terms of the whole work from home options. They've already said like, if your manager says you can work from home, go at, go ahead, work from home or work from home half time or whatever. They're not, they're not saying everybody has to come back into the office. They're not saying that. 

Leo Laporte (01:19:41):
Yeah. So maybe, maybe this was more designed to appease those people who do want to go back to the office and maybe there are certain teams or just groups of people who feel that they collaborate better in person wanna do that. And because

Mary Jo Foley (01:19:54):
They have a situation with family at home, they're like, I'm not being productive. I can't do my job. You know, I've got kids. Right, right. You know, I've got other, other met family members there. So yeah. The campuses have been open partially up till now. Like there are some people who have been working on campus certain days of the week or like even almost fully full time, but this is more like, okay, like it's time to move on everybody. Let's go. And, and if you look at the maps for COVID right now, like the New York times runs one on every front page. I mean every day Washington, state's not one of the better states right now in terms of the infection rates, you know, like right now, New York for and Massachusetts and new England is very like, are all doing really well. And the other

Leo Laporte (01:20:39):
States, well, we, we kind of rode that wave we did earlier. We did. I think that's why. Right.

Mary Jo Foley (01:20:45):
Yeah. Right. But yeah, it's, it's interesting to see there's the date, but that, you know okay. So that, this opens up a question, Paul and I get a lot, which is what does this mean for their shows? Because okay. If campus is reopening, does that mean build and ignite and all these shows they're gonna be in person now since the campus is reopened. So what, what I'm hearing so far ex excuse me, is we know, we know the partner show in the summer inspire, which is usually in Vegas, that's gonna be a hundred percent virtual. So build is gonna be before that. Right. So build is usually like may. So my guess is build also is gonna be virtual. I mean, at, at this point, if they haven't S it

Leo Laporte (01:21:26):
Has, it has to be speak yeah. This, this right. Has to be

Mary Jo Foley (01:21:30):
If they haven't got a, if they haven't got agreements in place with the Washington state convention center right now build is going to be virtual. Like, there's no way that they're gonna try to bring everybody on campus or something. Right. the other show is ignite. And so the past two years, I think they've had, or at least last year they had this springing night falling night kind of thing. I hear no spring night this year, like that's not gonna even happen at all virtually or not. I know. And instead there is the

Leo Laporte (01:21:57):
Fall. I don't even know why they did that. Yeah. Yeah. I, I,

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:01):
I know it was a little weird yeah, that they did split it like last year after they split it, we were like, yeah, there wasn't that much for spring. So I think they're back to one ignite towards the end of the year, like October, November, and by then maybe there'll be at least a hybrid event

Leo Laporte (01:22:19):
I'd like to put in a request. If it could be in person, I want it to be in new Orleans please. I feel like I was ripped off from new Orleans in 2020. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:28):
Yeah. Well, let's see how they look.

Leo Laporte (01:22:32):
Not Orlando because Please don't go to Orlando.

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:36):
Yeah. I would guess it's either gonna be new Orleans Orlando or where else would, I guess they might put it. Who else have they done? The Dallas,

Leo Laporte (01:22:45):
Chicago baby,

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:47):
Maybe Vegas. Think

Leo Laporte (01:22:48):
It doesn't seem, doesn't like a good place either, but yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:51):
Well, neither are those other two. All those three have been pretty high COVID areas. So I don't know. I like, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:22:58):
It's not gonna be in Boston.

Mary Jo Foley (01:23:01):
It's not. Oh yeah. Remember that that was a fiasco

Leo Laporte (01:23:04):
And probably not. It's got right. They haven't improved the T since then. So don't, don't think that's gonna get any better.

Mary Jo Foley (01:23:10):
Yeah. I I'm, I guess I'll be surprised if they have any true in person, big events this year, right?

Leo Laporte (01:23:18):
Yeah. Yep.

Mary Jo Foley (01:23:19):
They are gonna go to M WC though. Mobile world Congress. Like they are gonna do something there. It's crazy.

Leo Laporte (01:23:24):
That's when March,

Mary Jo Foley (01:23:27):
Yeah. Right. It's

Leo Laporte (01:23:28):
Of March a couple weeks. Yeah. It, it used to always be in February, but it's, I think it might be March late,

Mary Jo Foley (01:23:32):
February, early March. Huh? Yeah. I know a couple journalists going to MWC, but I'm like, Ooh, that, that seems

Leo Laporte (01:23:40):
I'm so torn as much as I want everything to be back to normal. I also don't want, want to do it prematurely. I mean, I'd love to go to Barcelona, but yeah. Yeah. I, I don't want to go to a convention center. Oh, bill gates was bar Barcelona for two hours today. That's right. So there that's right. Okay. How about see, I'd like the a honestly I like the all online events, pure selfishly, cuz it makes it easier for us to, well, it's more and it's better for more larger audience. I mean, yeah. It's just, except I think that's gonna be

Mary Jo Foley (01:24:15):
Really watching, like I think people turn it on, but do you pay attention when you're there? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:24:20):
But it's, I just like having that option, you know, I do too, a lot of events in the past, you, the keynote be up on the web or something and then the rest of it would be this sessions you had to be there and later you could watch the videos. That's fine. But I like the ability to watch 'em live and be able to ask comment, you know, questions, if you want to. I think, and I, the way they've done it, I guess they'd ignite last couple of nights where they do the same set, so to speak for different time zones. So if you can coming from like Asia or Europe or something, you can be awake at a normal time and actually ask the speaker questions. I, I just think that's really cool. I know it's a little harder than the speakers are much harder maybe, but yeah. I just think it's a nice, it's nice. It makes it more open, you know,

Mary Jo Foley (01:25:01):
They've saved a lot of money doing it virtually I would imagine as well.

Leo Laporte (01:25:05):
Yeah. I'd like to see 'em do both. I mean, I'd like, I'd like it to be a, a both kind of situation, like a hybrid thing.

Mary Jo Foley (01:25:11):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:25:13):
What's the next one. Is it build what is the next

Mary Jo Foley (01:25:16):
Yeah. Build should be the next show. Right? Okay. The next big

Leo Laporte (01:25:20):
Show usually in may. Yeah. So yeah. And I think for developers, they would like to get together. If it, I think they would prefer to get together plus the opportunity to sit down with experts from Microsoft and ask, you know, I wanna sit down with concept actually, you know, it's a good point though that it's one thing to get together with a bunch of people, like a sporting event or something. It's another thing to bring those people in from every corner of the planet. Yeah. You know, and then this out, maybe there's some variant that, you know, wasn't gonna catch a lot of steam, but now it's got this giant pet dish full of victims. True. CES was okay. CES. I don't think there was any Splashback yeah. But smaller event though, right? It was a much smaller event. Yeah. As far as attendance, but bigger than build would be yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:26:08):
Yeah. Build people. Yeah. Build is probably more of a 5,010. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. This is, this is, I don't know is really the bottom line on all of this stuff. Yep. Don't know. Yeah. I know. I don't know. That's exactly right. I know maybe, maybe, yes. Let's take a little break and talk about our sponsor hacker rank. Paul. You, you would be so good at this. I think what is it? Is it a Wordle for hackers? Yeah, basically. Well, that's, that's so funny. Hacker rank. I go to hacker rank to take to do programming challenge challenges. And if I were looking for a job as a coder, that is a great way to kind of let people know about your skills or in a hacker rank and so forth. Hacker rank also has support for people who are trying to hire between, you know, if you're, you know, hiring doing technical interviews, that's a lot of work and you gotta, you know, between deadlines and frustrating interview tools that just really aren't designed for the technical interview, conducting a tech interview is probably not something you're looking forward to.

Leo Laporte (01:27:14):
I mean, you have to spend the first 10 minutes trying to set up an environment to share code from a dozen documents, especially nowadays, you know, when we're remote this wastes your time waste, your candid it's time. Nobody's happy. Fortunately, hacker rank has developed an IDE for the tech interview process. You'd appreciate this, Paul, it's an integr, you know, IDE you use an IDE integrated development environment with a set of easy to use interview tools. You'll quickly find the best developers for your technical projects. If you were gonna design an IDE for technical interview, what would you, what would you put in there? Well, you might, you might put in a, a pre-made question library, 2,500 questions. You can quickly find the right one for your coding needs, cuz you don't have to make up your own problem. Right. A code playback feature. Oh, that'd be nice.

Leo Laporte (01:28:00):
So you can watch the candidates, coding approach score their skill levels. How about a, how about a built in whiteboard? So you can brainstorm with a candidate collaborate in real time. Cuz what you're really interested in is how this candidate's gonna collaborate, what their problem solving, you know, approach is and all of that stuff. And this is all part of hacker ranks, new IDE for the tech interview process. And you know what? It's free time to reboot your technical interview process with hacker rank click interview done start using hacker rank free today. See how much better at technical interview can be. It's time to reboot your technical interviews with hacker ranks, easy to use tools, premade question library, code playback built in whiteboard. It's exactly what you, you design. If you wanted to make the perfect technical interview IDE you'll be conducting better technical interviews instantly identifying the right talent. You'll be happy. Your candidates will be happy. Go to hacker rank.com/ww. Start a better tech interview for free today. Hacker rank.com/ww. I've I've always been a big fan of hacker rank. I don't have to do technical interviews though. If I did boy, I think this would be a really great solution. Hacker rank.com/ww. We thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Couldn't do it without you. Microsoft 365 formerly known as office.

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:38):
Yeah. We're throwing a little of everything in here. Linkedin part of this too. Right? So nice.

Leo Laporte (01:29:42):
Get it all in.

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:44):
I don't know if you all saw this, but LinkedIn is allowing us users to, to eliminate politics from their LinkedIn feeds.

Leo Laporte (01:29:53):
Ah, good, good. Well,

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:54):
Yeah. So this, the way this story came about was very interesting. Joanna stern at the wall street and I got an interview with the CEO of LinkedIn Ryan Lansky and somehow it came up like, oh yeah, we're doing this because you know, they're trying to portray themselves as a different social network, a good social network. And he said, yeah, well there's, there's actually a setting that some people are getting in their, in their LinkedIn now where they can actually just hit a button and they'll say, customize your feed. Do you wanna see politics, political content in your feed? Yes or no. And you can put no.

Leo Laporte (01:30:32):
Is there a way to punish people who post things about politics?

Mary Jo Foley (01:30:35):
You know, that would be kinda interesting. Right. But this I, I was like, do I, do I have this? And I went into my references and, and I'm like, oh yeah, I have it. Everybody has it. I guess it's been around for a few months, but they hadn't really talked about it. There's still things they have to work out like right now us only the questions come up like was one person asked me, he goes, so I work in politics. What does this mean for me?

Leo Laporte (01:31:01):
Yeah. That's it. Well, okay

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:03):
Buddy. That's an interesting question.

Leo Laporte (01:31:07):
Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:08):
But yeah, I, if you, I, I have to say in my LinkedIn, I don't see a lot of political content unlike Facebook or

Leo Laporte (01:31:15):
No, it's all about business, you know?

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:17):
Although not all about business, you do see some kind of random stuff sometimes. You're like, why is this on LinkedIn? You know,

Leo Laporte (01:31:23):
Let me see here. Oh, take the TWiT 20, 22 survey. Yeah. That's good. That's not politics. Twit do TV slash survey 22.

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:32):
That's a good thing to see.

Leo Laporte (01:31:34):
So you said with a little bit like an ad. Oh, so you said you go into, you go into the settings and 

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:41):
You go into your account preferences. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:44):
Site preferences and then feed preferences under

Leo Laporte (01:31:48):
Preferences. Okay. Do you want to see political content? Yeah. No, actually

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:53):
I don't care. I was like, actually,

Leo Laporte (01:31:55):
No, there wasn't that much in here, but

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:58):
I agree. And there hasn't been that much. Although every once in a while I'm like, okay, why is this on LinkedIn? Right. Like 

Leo Laporte (01:32:05):
What is political content, parties, candidates.

Mary Jo Foley (01:32:08):
It's a nice

Leo Laporte (01:32:09):
To see ballot initiatives. Yeah. So they're, they're, they're grappling with that issue too, of what they

Mary Jo Foley (01:32:14):
Are. It's, it's an experiment, right? Like they're trying to figure out like, how do you do this in the right way to the right level? And, and you know, a lot of people from other countries are saying to me, when do we get this in our country? And I'm like, oh, I don't know. You

Leo Laporte (01:32:27):
Know, you must be used to the fact that Microsoft doesn't do things like that us first and then we'll see. Right. Yeah. Well, it's also, what is, I mean, if, if you're not familiar with the Paula of a country, you may not know if it's political or not. I mean, you gotta have local, local moderators doing that. Right.

Mary Jo Foley (01:32:48):
Right.

Leo Laporte (01:32:49):
Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:32:49):
But yeah, I just, I put it in there because I'm like, you know what, I'm always ragging on LinkedIn and saying how they're not doing this and not doing that. But like, here's something good. They did. So, Hey,

Leo Laporte (01:32:57):
I, LinkedIn I've always liked LinkedIn it, so, I mean, I'm not looking for work, so yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:33:03):
Mean either. So I use it more like to kind of keep up with what's going on in my world. It's good for business. A lot of people put, yeah. A lot of people put interesting things in their business feeds on LinkedIn.

Leo Laporte (01:33:12):
A lot of my interesting things. She means things that are potentially dumb to put their feeds and Mary Jo was happy to find it. Yes,

Mary Jo Foley (01:33:18):
No. Like things where they quit their a good job and they, they start a new job and you're like, oh wait, look who left Microsoft. That's interesting. Right. Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:33:32):
Let's see. Microsoft offers. Oh, this is because Google decided if you have GCs legacy, that free account is the free email. No more. I feel like Google suddenly woke up one day and realized these guys were skating around for free for some reason. Yeah. You know, but free, that was before there was something called G suite, which became workspace right before that you could get a Google account and you could add a custom domain to it. In fact, I, us back in the day, in fact, I think, well, I don't, I don't think I don't, I guess I don't have a Gsuite legacy, but you didn't have to pay for it. You know? So as things evolved, obviously Google had these paid options, but they, they allowed these people to be grandfathered in. And then recently they said, yeah the free rides over guys, you're gonna have to do something else.

Leo Laporte (01:34:23):
So I've actually got a lot of complaint from these people. Interestingly you know, this small business, they might have five employees and they're like, I can't pay 60 bucks per user, per year. And I have to say, I, I, I hear you. I work for very small company. We, we pay for Gsuite per user. We, we actually do. Do we do too. Yeah. I don't, I, I kind of don't understand, not paying for a work account, but okay. But whatever, but if you know, this is mostly like individuals who wanted to have a custom email, a custom debate. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, again, I, I guess you have various options for that. If you have a Microsoft 365 family or personal account, you can do this kind of thing. You have to have your domain hosted through big big daddy through go daddy.

Leo Laporte (01:35:12):
I don't know whether that came. I was, well, I haven't, this a video game has a big daddy. It doesn't matter. The point is gonna say, I know exactly where your big daddy came from. Exactly. It's gonna be, it's gonna be a movie. It's gonna be Netflix's movie. I know it. So is funny that you said big daddy. That's so weird. I was literally just thinking about this. Yeah, so big daddy is literally that character can see right there. It's the bad guy. Yeah. The bad guy, although he turns into a good guy and that too, so that's right. Yeah. Which hopefully they'll make a movie that too, anyway, game, the beginning of Byock is one of the greatest video game experiences of all time. It's gonna be fantastic in a movie anyway. So sorry. So I've lost track here. So basically Google and beginning was like, Hey guys, you're gonna have to pay for this.

Leo Laporte (01:35:54):
And so it's, it's 50 or $60 per user and, you know, okay, whatever Microsoft of course has Microsoft 365 commercial accounts and they start at $5 per user, per month. You have to pay annually. So it's probably what it says, $60 a year. And what, so what they've done smart, you know, is basically made an announcement and said, look, if you're a G-Suite legacy free addition, CU customer come to, so we'll give you 60% off for the first year. So the cheapest account, which is very, is equivalent to that kind of G suite type of thing where it's all online and everything is like I said, is $5 per user month or $60 per year. I think 60% off of that is probably what, $25 ish. So, you know, it's, I know it's still not free, but it's, it's still a good deal.

Leo Laporte (01:36:38):
And it's not just the cheapest account. If you want to go for a business standard account, which is normally 8 25 per user per month, or a business premium account for 1250 per month, same deal. You can compare the plans online. You can get the 60% off for the first year. It's smart. Good through August. August 2nd. Yeah. Smart. Yep. This is why we like competitive. It's good for consumers. Good for prices. Yeah. Yep. Microsoft, are we back to mic? Oh, when we did Microsoft 365, now we're doing yeah. Surface laptop five. What, so this is a little weird because, well, this is a leak, right? So Microsoft last September, I think it was basically refreshed all of their major products for service products. The only one they didn't was their, what I assume would always be their best seller, but their most mainstream product, the LA service laptop was not updated at that time for some reason.

Leo Laporte (01:37:35):
So obviously this update's coming soon. You know, we just went through CES Intel sort of announced the 12th gen what used to be called use series processors without providing a lot of detail that detail I think is gonna come very soon. A bunch of PC makers announced products based on 12th gen stuff, without talking anything about model numbers or modeled names or whatever. It's been very strange on the Intel front, like what they're doing there. And so this supposition here is, well, obviously they're gonna be using this next gen Intel thing. But the other thing that's interesting about service laptop, this is pretty real by the way, this spec sheet, no, this, this is I can, I, I can pretty much verify this is a hundred percent real. Yeah. So the surface laptop line, let me think about this is the only X 86 based surface product that doesn't, that also offers AMD chips.

Leo Laporte (01:38:28):
And the weird thing about that is for surface laptop three and four, they were one generation behind. So for of this product, they're gonna be with the current gen. So this is a significant advance in a way, because honestly, surface laptop is awesome anyway, but now they're gonna be up to date on both Intel and AMD at the same time. And maybe this is why they waited. They were waiting for 12th gen to land on the Intel side, also three ports for the first time. It is the weird thing to celebrate. But remember, this is the product that's shipped originally with one us B a port, when they went USBC, they added the USBC port. So you have two, according to this thing, there's gonna be three ports. So two USBC, which yes, we'll have Thunderbolt for and USB four capabilities surface has finally gotten over that hump and one USB, a port, and also that service connect thing. Cause you surface whatever. So hopefully this will be announced soon. I don't know anything about that, but 

Mary Jo Foley (01:39:23):
So anyway, should Windows central window, Central's Zach Bowden who does a lot of surface leak stuff. I saw him tweet and say, I don't even think this product's coming till the second half of the year. So I don't know.

Leo Laporte (01:39:35):
Okay. Oh great.

Mary Jo Foley (01:39:36):
I'm like, where did this come from? Right. Although, you know, surface surface lately is announcing things kind of throughout the year, right? Like there's always a spring surface announcement. Then there's sometimes things

Leo Laporte (01:39:47):
In the summer. I think this thing is necessary. I think this couldn't happen quickly enough. So I hope it, I hope it's. Did you buy one? Mary Jo?

Mary Jo Foley (01:39:55):
No. I'm done with buying surfaces. Well

Leo Laporte (01:39:56):
She that anymore, huh? Oh, you're done. You're done. You said, yeah. Even the last, what do you have? A three or three or four

Mary Jo Foley (01:40:03):
Surface? Laptop. Three. It's been great. Except for when my warranty ran out and then the motherboard died and I had to pay 400. Okay. But it's been great.

Leo Laporte (01:40:11):
So if it wasn't for that one disaster.

Mary Jo Foley (01:40:14):
Yeah, no, you know, I, I like, I like surface laptop, but I just feel like I say a lot, like Microsoft is still learning how to be a PC maker. And there are people who have been in that business a long time and I feel like they have an advantage,

Leo Laporte (01:40:28):
But how could you live without the rich feel of El Canara?

Mary Jo Foley (01:40:31):
That's one thing I'll never get. I hated the Elara.

Leo Laporte (01:40:34):
Oh yeah. We've saddled poor Micah. Withs AARA blue. No surf. It

Mary Jo Foley (01:40:40):
Gets so easy to get dirty. Dirty.

Leo Laporte (01:40:42):
I'm gonna have to get him like a Del XPS now or a yeah. Something good, right? Yeah. Something better. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:40:48):
Now mine is holding up. I mean it sometimes overheats as you guys have seen in the summer in the show that's right. I have to like, hold it up. Otherwise

Leo Laporte (01:40:58):
You need to live someplace colder. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:41:00):
Yeah. That's the truth.

Leo Laporte (01:41:01):
Yeah. Laptop surface laptop. Older owners must live in cold crimes.

Mary Jo Foley (01:41:06):
They must,

Leo Laporte (01:41:09):
Oh boy. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (01:41:10):
It probably doesn't help. There's probably a tough a cat hair in my laptop,

Leo Laporte (01:41:14):
But yeah. Right, right. Yeah. What, so what would you, what's the dream laptop? You guys Windows laptop. These days?

Mary Jo Foley (01:41:21):
13 inch with like real battery battery life.

Leo Laporte (01:41:27):
The one I want to try is there's a, there's a specter X 360 16 inch. Ooh. Yeah, really, totally about that. They don't really use so big. I really love spec. I do like specs a lot. They paper thin. Are it still very thin? They're pretty thin. Yeah. And they the elite book. Yeah, elite. Book's actually 60 14. Very, very nice. Who was raving over the X? PS 13, the new one. Somebody. Oh, the new one looks beautiful. It's beautiful. And I, I asked, said, you know what scared me is, it looks like it has a touch bar. You know, it's got the pseudo function row. That's right. And he said, no, no, no, it's fine. It works. It's good. It's well thought out so right. I'm not gonna buy it. But I, I look, I'm looking, I look at, it looks pretty. I I've had many I pieces in my time. I love them. Yeah. Yeah. I've had a few. Yeah. I, the a 15 inch version of that is interesting to me.

Mary Jo Foley (01:42:17):
I just, I want something with good battery life. I just feel frustrated that every time you see a Windows laptop, they never really have good battery life.

Leo Laporte (01:42:25):
Yeah. Right. You need to apple Silicon in there. You get some, you know, maybe, maybe now that Nopa has been modernized, it will be more power differe.

Mary Jo Foley (01:42:36):
Maybe.

Leo Laporte (01:42:37):
I think Dell is, I mean, not Dell. HP is often considered to be the best battery life. I don't know what the spec is. They

Mary Jo Foley (01:42:44):
Come in like six hours, six.

Leo Laporte (01:42:46):
See? Yeah. I know you want more. You always have brutal battery life results.

Mary Jo Foley (01:42:51):
You always think I'm doing it ragged. You know, like some of your battery reports I, I do. And you're like, Nope, you're right.

Leo Laporte (01:42:58):
The problem is the, the ones I'm looking at, laptop magazines, the one ones they like are like the, all these big Dell latitudes, you know, these big clunky courses got good battery life, you know,

Mary Jo Foley (01:43:08):
Gotta be light.

Leo Laporte (01:43:09):
It's a battery. Yeah. You know these a battery battery. Yeah. It's a battery,

Mary Jo Foley (01:43:14):
A battery. I want to, I want the perfect trio. That's impossible to achieve. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:43:19):
Right. So, well,

Mary Jo Foley (01:43:20):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:43:22):
We'll see what the next Qualcomm stuff looks like. I mean, you never know.

Mary Jo Foley (01:43:26):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:43:28):
Yeah. You never know.

Mary Jo Foley (01:43:30):
You know, it's gonna be bad.

Leo Laporte (01:43:33):
Okay. Oh man. All right. I'm sorry. We're gonna cheer Paul up. You know how you cheer Paul up?

Mary Jo Foley (01:43:41):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:43:41):
Yeah. I'm talking about Joe

Leo Laporte (01:43:45):
It's bio time. Actually. Let's start with the they're. So you mentioned Netflix is making a bio movie, but what about the Halo TV show? Yeah. So's Halo TV series is gonna debut. There was a super bowl ad if you didn't see it. I did. Looks great. Yeah. It's gonna debut soon that chief paramount plus I guess I already subscribed into that cuz of 1883. I mean, honestly, when they announced this, I thought I, I was like, yeah, what we need is another network app, you know, but honestly there's a lot of stuff on it. I it's turning into something I'm gonna have to get. Yep. So it hasn't debuted yet, but they've already renewed it for a second season. So apparently they're pretty happy with the results. Anyone who has played Bioshock or Halo would tell you this should be a movie or now a TV series, cuz that's how we do things these days. But they're great stories. Yeah. They're very cinematic. I mean, if you think about these things alongside any superhero star wars, you know, whatever it's, these are, these are good for this kind of thing. So, and I think we pretty much rung the superhero movie genres dry as it can be. So why not move on to video games? So Halo's a good choice.

Leo Laporte (01:44:54):
Yeah. I think it'll be interesting is the star master chief. Yep. Yeah. It's master chief. Yep. He's not the most emotive person in the world. Here's the, but here's, what's really cool about it. The woman who played Cortana's voice in all of the games is Cortana. Oh perfect. Yeah. She'll sound right. Any anyway. Yep. Yeah. Cool. But it's her like, it's literally her like it's her, she's the, she's the, is she in that outfit? No, it's they outfit they've yeah. What outfit? That's the right answer. They have, they've toned that down. Okay. Actually one of the controversial things about it is that she's not like in the game, she's kind of bluish usually some purple for some reason, but she's not in the show. She just looks kind of normal. She's like a little hologram, you know, like little OB wine, you have to help us kind of thing.

Leo Laporte (01:45:42):
Help me OB one can. You're my only hos whatever. Anyway, Jen Taylor, I think is her name. So there's that there's it is the middle of the month. So we've gotten an new list of games coming to game. Passe is a really good selection actually. Alice, the madness returns. This is the love that this is name of American McGee game sequel. I love that galactic civiliz civilization three from star Brad. Wardale like, this is the, the game. Series's that dates back to OS two in 1993, I was thinking Madden 22 where they correctly put Tom Brady in front of Mahomes. And the biggest game of the month lawn mowing simulator, lawnmower simulator finally. Yeah. I just, I don't know these, that was the most boring. I used to have a writing mower. I thought this is gonna be great.

Leo Laporte (01:46:31):
It is gonna be so much fun. It's really loud. It really vibrates. It's really loud and you're driving around and it's like, okay, I'm I've, I've had my fun. Nope. Someday three more hours someday. When I, when I retire, I'm gonna just get into like train simulators and I'm just gonna ride virtual trains around. Yeah. You know, I can see it simulator. I know. It's crazy. Did you like crop circles probably there's that I don't, I, I can't profess to have looked into it that much. I'm really sure what you do with it. Hey, it's on game pass. Might as well try it. It's right. It's free. It's free included with your cost. Nothing to mow other people's phones. That's right. That's right. You should get paid for that. Yeah, I dunno. And this is only a minor note, but Microsoft has rolled out the February, 2022 update for the Xbox one and Xbox series X and S and there really is not a lot going on here.

Leo Laporte (01:47:27):
Really minor update. The edge browser runs on the Xbox. Now many people probably don't even know that, but one of the cool things you could do is load an image in the browser, right. Click, and then set it as your dashboard background. Like you can on Windows. Okay. I know I'm stretching here. And then the other thing, this is, so I don't even know what to say to this. They've added a comma to your gamers score. What? So in other words, easier to read, which is good. It's easier. Right? So in other words, if your gamers score was like 60,000, it would just say 6 0, 0, 0, 0. That's no fun. So yeah, 16 years later they finally edit a comma. Wow. So we got comas. Wow. Is right. Incredible ladies and gentlemen and Mary Jo, that concludes Our Xbox coverage for the week. Oh, thank God. Thank you very much. Next stop the back of the book.

Speaker 4 (01:48:29):
Thanks for listening to podcasts. If you'd like to take it up a notch, you can get all of our shows without ads by joining club TWiT, whether you're a loyal fan or once city of your employee, something special with our corporate plan, you'll get the bonus TWiT plus feed with extra behind the scenes, outtakes and access to a member's only discord all for just seven bucks a month. It's a great it way to get just the content support TWiT TV and be a part of the tech community. Learn more and join club TWiT at TWiT.tv/club TWiT

Leo Laporte (01:49:02):
Back of the book time with Paul Thurrott and his tip of the week, actually this one is gonna come to us for Mary Jo. What I know, wait a minute. It up, change all the lower thirds. I have to press the buttons. You are a, you are a professional broadcaster through me. Wow.

Mary Jo Foley (01:49:22):
Now I, I really want people to chime in here because I, you can either look at this as MJF had a beer too many, and this is her tip of the week, or is she right? And this is crazy this week I'm in notepad typing a story and I was poised to type a word and I saw notepad change the word ahead of what I was gonna type. What I thought, I thought

Leo Laporte (01:49:48):
It's reading your mind.

Mary Jo Foley (01:49:50):
No, no. I'm like, is there autocorrect or like auto complete in notepad now? And I asked Paul, I'm like, is there autocomplete, notepad? And he's like, no, there is not. So then I, I, so then I just thought, okay, maybe I just imagine

Leo Laporte (01:50:04):
I still haven't seen this by the way. I I've done everything I can to try to duplicate this and I can

Mary Jo Foley (01:50:09):
No. So it happened to me again. I, I sitting here typing and I just watched a word change just while, while I like typed the first two letters and then it auto completed it. And I'm so then I got scared cuz I'm like, did they gimme a special version of Nopa and

Leo Laporte (01:50:30):
Prehistoric recorder edition?

Mary Jo Foley (01:50:32):
No. So I started, I started Googling it and I'm like, is there auto? There is no auto complete notepad. And so then I looked and I saw, I said, is there auto complete in Windows 11? There is. And so I went to settings and then I typed and the search box and settings auto complete. And yeah, it's on by default. So ever since I shut it off, this stopped happening.

Leo Laporte (01:50:56):
That's okay. Here's the thing though. So if you actually, you can do this yourself, go, go, you know? Yeah. Auto, I think it's called auto correct? Auto autocorrect misspelled world where it's it's am in language and then typing. And there's an option called, correct? It's in a

Mary Jo Foley (01:51:11):
Typing setting.

Leo Laporte (01:51:12):
Yeah. So it's misspelled words. This is what's weird because the thing you told me it was, it, it contracted a, a, a, a series of words into like a, an acronym, right? Yeah. Is that what you experienced? Yeah. I don't want it to do that. That's terrible. But my, I don't mine's on too. I don't, this is on by default. I don't know. I have never gotten this to work. It may, Mary Jo may have a spec, her own personal.

Mary Jo Foley (01:51:37):
I don't know. You guys

Leo Laporte (01:51:38):
Dictionary. No. Might have learned from Mary Jo.

Mary Jo Foley (01:51:41):
It's super strange. Right. Because I true. I have never ever noticed it till this week. And then it happens to me, to me TWiTce in a row. And so I shut it off. Like Paul said settings, then the typing settings. Yeah. And it ever since I did that, it stopped doing it. And so I, I don't know what to tell you. I don't know if they're doing AB experimentation, if it's something with AI. I don't know. But I'm like, okay. I didn't imagine that it happened TWiTce.

Leo Laporte (01:52:06):
I will. For the 17th, thousands time ask you why you don't actually just use a word processor, like a normal person, but cause

Mary Jo Foley (01:52:13):
It's overkill for what I do.

Leo Laporte (01:52:16):
OK. All right.

Mary Jo Foley (01:52:18):
Anyway, my tip, my tip is if this starts happening to you run and also go to settings and typing settings and change it. So it's off.

Leo Laporte (01:52:29):
Hmm.

Mary Jo Foley (01:52:30):
Okay. I wonder, I do wonder if it's AB testing, you know, sometimes they just start doing something like through Microsoft editor or like there's some setting they're trying out on some people, I don't know.

Leo Laporte (01:52:43):
Yeah. I was curious if I would get it with the new notepad, but no,

Mary Jo Foley (01:52:47):
No me neither. No. And then you said to me, did you get the new notepad early? I'm like, come on, man. Do you know who I am? Of course I didn't

Leo Laporte (01:52:54):
Do. Do you think there are people who do want this kind of proactive auto correction? Well, a system level autocorrect is actually not a horrible feature, I guess

Mary Jo Foley (01:53:05):
Though. I don't.

Leo Laporte (01:53:05):
Yeah. I don't want it writing my words cuz exactly. You know how bad correct. Is it often is wrong where it does this? No. And you hit tab to, you know, keep it completing. It works like in inte sense actually in visual studios. Yeah. If you hit tab that's okay. It sounds like Mary Jo wasn't doing anything. It just said no, no I wasn't. You don't mean that.

Mary Jo Foley (01:53:24):
Like I was typing the word update, I believe. And I put up and then it did upside or something. Like I saw it,

Leo Laporte (01:53:32):
You know what? Oh, but you keep typing D and then it says, oh no, no. And then so yeah, but I think typing Leo might be onto something here. He said, are you suggested, I think you might be seeing this cuz you use Nopa a lot. Might actually be true. I use Nopa a lot, but not like you do. It's learning. It's learning. Yeah. Like I, I well for instance, you often shorten an acronym and so it might mean, oh you mean to do it this way. But of course, as like you've done enough in an app that is controlled by Windows 11 or whatever that it actually to you have awoken the AI, what is wrong with that?

Mary Jo Foley (01:54:07):
That might be what happened. I know

Leo Laporte (01:54:10):
You can't allow you to type that. That's right. You're like, Microsoft's wrong again? I'm sorry, Mary Jo. I'm sorry. Mary Jo. You meant to tell, I

Mary Jo Foley (01:54:17):
Don't know. It was pretty spooky. You guys, that's all I'm gonna say. And I, I really, when it happened once I thought, I just imagine that. And then when it happened like a couple hours later again, I'm like, Nope. I didn't imagine that that's happening.

Leo Laporte (01:54:31):
I would love to see this happen in real life tip of the week. Watch. I'm not saying you letting you hallucinated it, hallucinated it. I'm just, I'm not saying that well, well, for as an example, as a good reporter, when you first use an acronym, you probably type it out thereafter. You use the acronym. Right. But it doesn't know. And so it's, every time you try to type out the acronym, it says, no, no, no. You must mean you must mean

Mary Jo Foley (01:54:55):
Andy, Andy T in discord saying there's a setting show tech suggestions, but I,

Leo Laporte (01:55:01):
Well that's text, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. But they

Mary Jo Foley (01:55:04):
Have that on anywhere.

Leo Laporte (01:55:06):
Well, I think that also on, on the hardware keyboard, actually, that's not on by default. Interesting. Here's what he says. It looks like. And I think, but you didn't see that. It just typed it.

Mary Jo Foley (01:55:20):
It just put it there.

Leo Laporte (01:55:21):
It did it in place. He did it. It there's an in place suggestion. Oh, that is which you can override obviously. Oh yeah. I've never seen that idea there, but now I do see that. Oh, I don't like that. I don't like it either. That's yeah. A lot of, because they're, you know why cuz so many, so how the kids today, they think a computer is a phone and they don't have all the features of a phone in their computer. They're very confused, but this is a bad, this is a bad you have in order to select one of those words, you have to use the mouse. Yeah. No it's it's not typing. I I'm typing. Why would it? Well, that's why it's doing what Mary Jo's one was doing, which was it just does it in place and you keep typing or if you like it, Mary Jo, I bet if you hit tab at that point, just like in tele, tele, whatever completely tele it, well, no, I mean, I, the text suggestion feature doesn't work with tab.

Leo Laporte (01:56:10):
It actually just puts a tab in the text. Oh, I wish it did. Not that way. No, that's what I mean. You have to select it with the mouse. It's kind of yeah, no, no. But I'm talking about Mary Jo's. Whatever's having to Mary Jo, there must be some way to signal after you type I N and it says inside, there must be some way to signal maybe a right arrow or tab that that was correct. That's right. I'm used to that lot of command line you know, oh, really? Shells do. Yeah. I, I really like that. That's honestly auto complete on a UN shell would be smart. That's not a, oh yeah. Mine does. Phish does that? She a bash does not, I don't think she's got the 1970s anymore. That's really good. No, it's really nice. In fact, it autocompletes, you're telling it to the last scary. Yeah. I wish I I'd like didn't like

Mary Jo Foley (01:56:56):
It.

Leo Laporte (01:56:57):
I didn't know. I've never seen that text suggestion thing. I don't like that. You get used to it. You just, if you don't like it, you keep typing. Yeah. And if you, you like it, at least in the shell, you hit right arrow. And he goes,

Mary Jo Foley (01:57:07):
I haven't turned on. I have text suggestions on, on my phone and I don't like it either. I should shut it off. I don't know why I don't, but

Leo Laporte (01:57:14):
So there's, but, but again, there's two different ways of doing it. One is that auto correct? Where you would have to use a mouse to indicate that's the word I want. Yeah. That's forget that. That's for a phone where you're already using your fingers, but it does make sense. Well but there's a shortcut there too. Don't you hit space or something. Maybe get it to, yeah. There's some, I can't remember what, but how does it, oh, we just picked the most, I think common one. The, the one in the middle, one in the middle. Yeah. That sounds right. I think you're right. Yeah. I'm very used to doing that in shell where you type, because is a lot of long commands you type over and over again. So as soon as I type GI space, it goes, oh, I love the, oh, I know what you were thinking. And then you can use the up and down arrow to go through all the get commands you've used. And when you find the one you want right arrow, and you're done saves a lot of typing, saves a lot of typing.

Mary Jo Foley (01:58:02):
Everyone's like, did you use the right arrow? I'm like, guys, I never use the, I don't use tab. I don't use any. How

Leo Laporte (01:58:08):
Do you move? Just forth in the text.

Mary Jo Foley (01:58:11):
I move my mouse and put it

Leo Laporte (01:58:13):
A somewhere. Oh no, no. Mary Jo, Mary Jo, Mary Jo never take your fingers.

Mary Jo Foley (01:58:18):
Everyone has their weight. Everyone has their ways.

Leo Laporte (01:58:21):
No, you're right. It's just that your way is wrong.

Mary Jo Foley (01:58:26):
I can't change the way I work now

Leo Laporte (01:58:28):
Is to keep the yeah. Well don't cause it make you self conscious. Yeah, yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (01:58:33):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:58:34):
Oh, that's interesting. All right. Well that was Mary Jo's tip of the week.

Mary Jo Foley (01:58:38):
My crazy tip of the week.

Leo Laporte (01:58:40):
Now. I'm crazy. I don't know what to do you wanna do an app? Pick Mary Jo? No. All right, Paul, I guess it's on you dude. All right. So I don't remember when this happened last year, sometime Google bought cloud ready, which was a third party company that was making ChromeOS available on laptops of yeah. Anything they did never wear to it. Yeah, that's right. Neverwhere sorry. And so this product is gonna become something called ChromeOS flex it now available in an early preview. Yeah. So I gave this a shot. I think I did it last night actually, but I was playing around with it today and I, I used an HP laptop a couple years old and it's, you know, it's very similar to the never ready product. I mean, it's, in fact it still says cloud ready in some places, but basically it's a way to repurpose a computer that maybe is getting a little out of a date or maybe it doesn't run Windows 11.

Leo Laporte (01:59:31):
It's kind of interesting. Right. so it works pretty good. I, I it's, it's kind of weird what works and what doesn't. I mean, basically it works fine. The, the laptop, I tried it on doesn't have any sound, which is kind of a bummer. But a lot of the basic stuff like multi-touch works, the keyboard back lighting is automatic. It works excellent. It's yeah. It's probably gonna be hit or miss, depending on what kind of hardware you have. They do have a list of approved PCs and it'll show you what works and what doesn't or ever, or how well it works. I didn't consult that list. I probably should have before I installed it, but it's still actually pretty good that I, I, since I wrote it up I've I've been able to see the power management works. I have no idea what the battery life is obviously, but, you know, ChromeOS is a much smaller, lighter system than Windows.

Leo Laporte (02:00:18):
So the potential is there the one unfortunate bit, depending on your perspective is there's no Google play store and that means you can't install Android apps. So whether that's a problem or not, whether that's something maybe that changes in the future, you know, I don't know, but they just announced that and I thought this was kind of interesting. I'll keep my eye on this. I like the idea of repurposing an older computer like this. It's kind of a, NICE's nice idea. And you can do it with Intel max. I think, you know, this has been an issue. What do I do with these old computers? And I think it's a great solution. I really do. Yep. I often tell before friendly put Linux on it, but that's not as user, not as friendly as chromes. It's quick too. The the total install process took under five minutes.

Leo Laporte (02:01:06):
Wow. And I think, I think it took me a couple minutes longer just to make the USB key that you used to install the software. It was so quick. I was, I was actually really surprised by that. So that's kind of nice. I used cloud ready way back when, when it was an independent company and it didn't work on a lot of machines, but I guess Google's been making it more compatible. So that's good to gonna look this up. I did too. And I don't remember what the experience was like per se, but yeah, I love the idea. It's great. Yeah, I do too. I try it schools. Yeah. You probably have a few old surface laptops lying around. I, I

Mary Jo Foley (02:01:38):
Have one old acry machine that I had trouble with and I'm like, you know what? It's just sitting here.

Leo Laporte (02:01:45):
It might be an interest. Say phone book, user. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you could. Perfect. I really do. That's a really good point. Here's a way without any risk to try it and see, oh, I should actually, that's a good point. I should, I should mention that I installed it. You don't actually have to do that. You can make the installer and like with Linux distributions, you booed off the installer and instead of installing it, you just run it from there. Yeah. So you can test it without even installing it, if you just wanted to see what it was like. So you could do that on any laptop. Really? Yeah. Yeah, I didn't do that. I do. I do a lot of things wrong. Not cuz I'm Jerry Parnell, but because I'm an idiot. I installed it. The other thing, just a note this isn't so much a tip or a pick or anything, but apparently Google pixels will soon be able to stream apps to Windows PCs.

Leo Laporte (02:02:32):
Now this is another. Yeah. Yeah. So Google is starting to do a lot of integration with computers. Now, obviously they make Chromebooks, but they know that most people on Windows PCs. And so they're starting to do more stuff on the Windows side as well, notably not doing it with Microsoft, right. Microsoft has their own thing. Your phone that does this sort of thing. It only works with certain phones I believe. And it's, you know, not necessarily all that great it's, it's pretty buggy. But if Google is they're doing a thing with Google play store games on Windows also in early preview this is gonna be an interesting year for Windows users and Android on a multiple levels. And I think what Google is trying to do through all these things is provide Android users with the type of platform integration that, that apple uses get between the iPhone in the Mac. But on the Windows slash Chromebook side. So kind of interesting. Kind of very interesting.

Mary Jo Foley (02:03:30):
Really wanna try it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:03:33):
Yeah. Enterprise pick of the week with Mary O holy.

Mary Jo Foley (02:03:38):
Yes. So this may be the begin of the end for ADFS. ADFS is active directory Federation service. Do you, sorry, you know, it's funny, I wrote so many articles back in the day about ADFS. When I saw this article, I was like, oh man, really? This has been around forever. Yeah. But as a, of this week, there's a new public preview of something called the certificate based authentication for Azure ad C B a for Azure ad, just because you don't have enough acronyms there. So, you know, as ADFS is a Windows server role for federating with Azure active, but if you had the certificate based authentication, you wouldn't really need ADFS. Right. CBA will let companies authenticate using X do 5 0 9 certificates without a Federation service. So Microsoft is pitching this as, you know what, you're gonna be able to directly authenticate against Azure ad. That means no management cost, no management overhead. And here's the key, no complex on premises deployments. So, you know, Microsoft wants everybody to go to the cloud. So yeah. They want you to, to go cloud authentication instead of using on-prem. So yeah, the, the enterprise pick is if you're interested in possibly finding a way around using ADFS, check out this new public preview of Azure, a D C B a. So that's a, a D C B a.

Leo Laporte (02:05:16):
Now I know why auto correct was trying to re that. Wow.

Mary Jo Foley (02:05:21):
I'm like, I'm not playing word right now.

Leo Laporte (02:05:24):
Holy cow. It is a five letter word. Yes. Wow.

Mary Jo Foley (02:05:29):
That's funny. I know acronym soup.

Leo Laporte (02:05:33):
Man, enterprise pick number two is SRA the cat. Oh

Mary Jo Foley (02:05:37):
Yes. There's two virtual events next week that might be of interest to people who care about the enterprise. One of them is in this what's next for series that Microsoft did a lot of last year. You know, what's next for Windows. What's next for the cloud. They were supposed to do an event called what's next for security last year and they never ended up doing it. Well, now we know they're doing this on February 24th. They've got a full, basically a full day event with all their cl with all their security experts. It's free. You can register now online, just look up what's next for security and from Microsoft it starts at nine in am. Pacific it's covers like all the bases. I don't know if they've got any news announcements around this. I would guess they may have some because that's how they did this last year, but they're gonna talk about market trends and customer stories, but also about products and roadmaps and where they're going with security.

Mary Jo Foley (02:06:36):
So if you care about security, you probably Don on one to tune in for that on February 24th, also on February 24th, if you don't care about security and, but you do care about Azure, high performance computing and AI, you've got your own event. You could attend virtually. This is Microsoft's very first Azure HPC plus AI day. So if you wanna find out about this, go to the Azure blog by Microsoft and you can get all the details on this. It's actually a two day event. There's AI swag, whatever AI swag is. I don't know what you get for AI swag. Maybe you get like a notepad bot that helps you auto, complete. I don't know if that's among the, a swag. But there's lots of cool stuff. There's if you care about high performance computing, if you care about how to create a software as a service solution using AI on Azure there's stuff for you some also some customer stories and partner stories. So yeah, another free virtual event that you might be interested in, if you care about those topics.

Leo Laporte (02:07:46):
Excellent. Now Mary Jo it's time for your version of the Uber eats co we're gonna it. You can't drinks this beer of the week for Mary Jo fully,

Mary Jo Foley (02:08:03):
Right? So not all my beer picks are beers. I love sometimes they're warnings.

Leo Laporte (02:08:08):
Remember last,

Mary Jo Foley (02:08:10):
Last week was a warning about the Western VA Western, Maryland vacation package. I have bread pudding in it this week. There's a little warning about a beer from fin back called orange puffs. So I like fin back fin back makes like a, a lot of beers that are dessert beers, where they use lactose and they make beers that taste like cake beers, that taste like creamsicles. So I'm like, this is gonna be a amazing it's blood orange and vanilla. How can it be bad? Sounds

Leo Laporte (02:08:38):
Great. Sounds like a creamsicle. Sounds wonderful. Terrible, terrible,

Mary Jo Foley (02:08:42):
Terrible, terrible. So terrible. So beyond terrible. If, if you, unless you like orange soda, if you like that artificial orange soda tastes that's exactly what this tastes

Leo Laporte (02:08:52):
Liket. It tastes like Tang

Mary Jo Foley (02:08:54):
Tang. It tastes exactly like right. And I was expecting something to taste kind of more like, I don't know, ice cream or something fun with vanilla, but no I'm not, I'm not the only one you should go by. If you go on untapped and look up the spear color, orange puff. Yeah. A lot of people like it. Yeah. But I, I took a sip of it. I'm like, that is absolutely horrible. And I had to pour it out. 

Leo Laporte (02:09:19):
You gotta wonder like this, you know, fin back probably said, well, it seems like a good idea. Let's try it. They've got this. It sounds good. They've got 50 bats of this stuff,

Mary Jo Foley (02:09:28):
Right. Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:09:29):
You know, even if they go their beer master goes, whoa, that's terrible. They're still gonna try to sell it. Cuz someone will drink it. Somebody will drink get. And in fact, if you look at untapped, quite a few people.

Mary Jo Foley (02:09:41):
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I just was, I was very sad because I like so many of their beers where they try interesting combinations of fruit sours.

Leo Laporte (02:09:50):
It's with experimentation. You never know. Yeah. You never, you never know. That's why I never leave those. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (02:09:56):
It was just a big, no, I immediately have to open a bourbon barrel beer and rest my mouth out immediately.

Leo Laporte (02:10:05):
Yeah. Space beer.

Mary Jo Foley (02:10:07):
Not good. Not good guys.

Leo Laporte (02:10:10):
The for restaurants it's good enough for beer.

Mary Jo Foley (02:10:13):
Hang. You know what Hangang is the right word. That's what it was. It wast

Leo Laporte (02:10:18):
A beer. So not like a cheesy puff. It was more liket no, see there's a whole generation of people, actually people your age, Mary Jo, who grew up with Tang,

Mary Jo Foley (02:10:26):
I drank Tang as a kid.

Leo Laporte (02:10:27):
Yeah. Fine. Yeah. That's why you, you don't like it now. Well, there's a lot of things I ate as a kid that I wouldn't go near now. Right. Yeah. You know? Right. But I would be interested in trying tan. I haven't had tan in, you know, must be a, maybe it's a Boston thing. You both grew up with tan. How do you feel about oval team? Was that a thing OV I malt that's oval and then also strawberry quick. Yeah. Not so much much. I grew up with it, but not so much. Do you remember Fizzies no, no. There were tablets that you put in water. It turns it into soda. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. Huh. I, you know, I tell people about this, just giving you like those those hangover cures. It's really pep though. But you know,

Mary Jo Foley (02:11:13):
Alka salsa.

Leo Laporte (02:11:14):
It's a, I think the, I think that's what it was. People made Alka salsas thought, you know, you could put root beer flavor in this instead of asking. Yeah. Why not? Yeah. That's actually, that's kind of fun. Yeah. okay. I think we've had enough.

Mary Jo Foley (02:11:29):
I think we, it all went downhill after the notepad tip. It just kept going downhill.

Leo Laporte (02:11:37):
Right. ladies and gentlemen, I hope you've enjoyed today's episode of Windows Weekly and I hope you will be back for more. We record every Wednesday, 11:00 AM Pacific 2:00 PM. Eastern time, 1900 UTC live.Twit.tv has live audio and video streams. They run all day and night. So you know, you could tune in anytime and hear something there. People listening live often chat live. There's two places. You could do that in our free chat room, irc.Twit.tv. And for members of club TWiT, there's a discord. Actually our discord is so much fun, not only channels for each show, but for every topic, you know, I spend a lot of time in the coding channel. We've got a let's play channel. We've just started letting people into the TWiT Minecraft server. If you're a club TWiT member drop in, let's play, give me your your Java handle.

Leo Laporte (02:12:27):
And I'll add you to the server. They're building some really cool stuff in there. So the server is back to life club, TWiT member also get ad free versions of all the shows they get special shows that are only in the club discord Stacy's book club, the untitled Linox show the GIZ fizz. I think we've got a Octa fireside chat coming up this week or maybe, yeah, I think it's this week. We just did one with George and Dow. It's just really a lot of great content. All of that also adds up on a special feed, the trip plus feed also our new space show this week in space with rod pile and te Mallek from space.com and it's it's the way we're doing that one. And this is again, thanks to the club members who $7 a month kind of subsidizes this we're we're, we're, we're in the workshop phase for this podcast.

Leo Laporte (02:13:20):
So we're doing it in the club once we've got it you know, to a state where we really like it, we'll do it make it public. So that we'll be a public feed. Eventually audio only though. So again, this is something that club TWiT makes possible. Thank you. In advance. You can join by going to TWiT.tv/club TWiT there's corporate memberships, as well as individual memberships. We just got a new corporate member. Thank you. It's anyways, just I think something you might want to check out after the fact, of course, we still offer everything for free on-demand versions of this show available@TWiTt.tv slash WW. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player. And if you do, please leave Paul and Mary Jo five star review. Let the world know Windows Weekly exists. Paul. Yes, it does. It does it exists?

Leo Laporte (02:14:10):
That's all I can say it exists. It is. It is. It is. Paul is@Thurrottdotcomthurrott.com. Are you, is your do net, are your do net articles under the premium banner? Yeah, so it's, it's really the it's called programming Windows. It's the history of Windows, but I mean the.net era now is what I've been doing for the past month. So that's been a great series. Lot of do net stuff well worth joining the premium feed for that. His book is the field guided Windows 10 that's at lean pub.com and automatically updates new one coming out for Windows 11. Paul's working on it. Mary Jo Foley is always writing on her blog for ZD net all about Microsoft dot calm. Thank you both for being here. Thank you. And we shall return next week with another gripping edition of Windows week. Bye bye. I was ripped. I got, I was, I was, I had some stomach issues this morning. I was kind ripping the creep. All right,

Speaker 5 (02:15:16):
Don't miss all about Android. Every week. We talk about the latest news hardware apps, and now all the developer goodness, happening in the Android ecosystem. I'm Jason Howell also joined by Ron Richards, Florence ion, and our newest co-host on the panel. When, to who brings her developer chops, really great stuff. We also invite people from all over the Android ecosystem to talk about this mobile platform. We love so much. Join us every Tuesday, all about Android on TWiT.tv.