Windows Weekly 842, 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 Richard Campbell are here. We've got a lot to talk about. We're gonna talk with our winners and dozers in the chat room, get their questions, plus some new releases. The Canary Build just came out no closer to Windows 12, the dev home preview Windows 365 Switch Edge for business. We'll talk about the trouble with streaming fatigue and Xbox finally does something to address toxicity, but is it enough? All that and more. Coming up next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love

Paul Thurrott (00:00:34):
From people you trust, this is to it.

Leo Laporte (00:00:44):
This is Windows Weekly with Richard Campbell and Paul Thurrott. Episode 842 Recorded Wednesday, August 16th, 2023, eight strikes, and you're out. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by Cash Fly. Literally cash fly delivers rich media content up to 10 times faster than traditional delivery methods, and 30% faster than other Major CDNs. Meet customer expectations 100% of the time and learn how you can get your first month free@cashfly.com. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft with Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell. Hello Richard.

Richard Campbell (00:01:28):
Hello, friend.

Leo Laporte (00:01:29):
Paul, before the show you were, you were, you were talking, Paul would, have you lost your home? Are you unhoused?

Paul Thurrott (00:01:37):
No, no. I we moved earlier in the year Right. To an apartment. And so the kids have now both visited here and we we went to DC together. I saw your lovely intas.

(00:01:50):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> from the District of Columbia. Yeah. Lemme tell you something though, Leo. You kind of forget how expensive things are because in the real world, we go to Mexico for two years, and when we go to Mexico, my wife and I eat lunch for $3 and 50 cents, and we go to Washington, DC with the kids, and it's $400. Yeah. What the, wow. What just happened? Yeah. You know, every time the, we was like, is, am I on a, a camera or something? Like, <laugh> three, $3 50 cents is the small soda <laugh>. You can't get anything for in DC for $3 and 50 cents cents, isn't it? No. I mean, you kind of forget how much expensive plate, you know, obviously like New York, Paris, London, whatever. These are expensive places, but, right. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I, I think I bought four iPhones while I was there.

(00:02:39):
Basically the equivalent <laugh>. It was just expensive. It was great. I mean, DC's is literally my favorite. Yeah. City, the United States, but I, that's awesome. God damn <laugh>. So very expensive. It's awesome. Yeah. Well, welcome back. Now here we are gathered to get together today. We're gonna do a Windows Weekly, but with a little icing on the top. Hmm. after the Xbox segment, we're gonna open up the stage in our club Twit Discord. So, I hope you have been, I told you we were gonna do this last week. You didn't believe me. Yeah. But we are. So I hope you did your homework. It's up to you guys to be cream cheese icing and not that crap you get at the supermarket. Yeah. None of that whipped cream icing. We want dense, rich, sweet, condensed questions. Right? So, if you are not in the discord head, head over to the stage and we'll tell you when to raise your hand.

(00:03:34):
But think, get your questions ready and you can ask for anything you need. A question that gives you an angioplasty afterwards. <Laugh>, that's really a thick question. A thick cholesterol, rich question for all of us. There's nothing wrong with cholesterol. Nothing. Cholesterol gets a bad rep. No pressure. So what's up, <laugh>? How's the Windows thing going for you now? Huh? Yeah, it's going pretty good for me just generally as a career, but for the rest of you, probably not. So good. Oh dear. What's the matter? That's actually, so one of the, quite a week we were, one of the weird things about the notes is I go through the stories of the past week and I look at them and there are a, there were a cure. At first, I was gonna, like, I have a bunch of mobile stories. I think some of these are relevant, you know, maybe one could be a pick or something, you know?

(00:04:25):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then I was like, you know, there's a lot of AI stories, but they're all mobile stories. So it's actually, it's kind of a big mobile and AI section, which I think speaks to, you know, in the heightened timeframe in which AI is occurring this year, if you will. I hate to use this word, the maturity <laugh> of, it's such a stupid word to use, but of these things like coming to mobile, are these features coming to mobile? So this, there's a bunch of that. But we'll do the windows stuff up front. And honestly, there isn't too much <laugh>. Nothing to say here for some reason. Nothing to see here. Well, we didn't get any new builds late last week. Just as the show is starting, Microsoft announced a new Canary build. Canary is the one we suspect will be Windows 12.

(00:05:09):
And we're always looking for evidence of that. And there never is any, and that continues. It gets a few features that previously debuted in the dev channel. We talked about that kind of thing happening. That's kind of normal. There, I mean, it's, there's just really not much in the way of new features that will impact most people. That's all. So there's not really a lot, you're not excited about changes to divid, to, to domain controller location mappings. <Laugh>. That's why I said normal people <laugh>. So I'm excited. I don't strong word. Yeah, I don't know. They will, yeah. DC location would no longer use NetBIOS or winds. Yeah. Prior discovery. You're not prioritizing winds anymore. What will I, you with my wind server? Oh, no, I, yeah, exactly. <Laugh>, right? My N NT four wind server. Yes. Crazy. Anyway, yeah, that's fine.

(00:05:59):
They're just deprecating legacy technology. But as far as like, actual changes, it's a very small thing. It's like a, there's a few more fields added to the details pane or the, it's actually the details. View and File Explorer. You can sink your windows accent color with the devices around you to match the accent color. If you have a dynamic lighting sensor in your device, which is kind of it, or di I should say, dynamic lighting devices that interact with Windows, you can kind of sync the desktop accent color to the devices around you, I guess, which is probably fun for gamers or whatever. But yeah, not much. So, yeah. And that's pretty much it. I was pretty sure when we saw that, that I'm like, okay, here we go. There's gonna be like, new builds elsewhere. And no, that's it.

(00:06:45):
So not 12 ish to me. No. Not even so yet. Yet. Yeah. But I, I mean, the best I could argue is cleanup to get ready for something 12 ish. Yeah. I think that, yeah. I mean, I thought we were gonna see it before now, but now we just get, you know, this, welcome to my life, Richard. This is what happens all the time. We've been doing this for years. You just keep readjusting your expectations. It's kinda like, as you get older, it's like, I wanna be able to dunk a basketball. Now. You're like, I just wanna be able to stand up. You, it, it just kind of switches over time. So my new guess, and that guess will change again in September, is maybe as Windows 1123 H two comes to fruition later this month, and then is released, maybe then we'll start getting the Windows 12 stuff starting.

(00:07:27):
Look, look in October 21, right after Windows 11 ships mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, there's a new folder in my side of Microsoft called Windows V next. Like, that's gotta be true. Right. Right, right, right. So there's lot, there's been more than a year, you know, nearly a year of more than a year of things tinkering around in that space. Yep. But I think it all got derailed in January this year. Why wait, because of the ja of chat G p t, because of the being ai, because of the Scha announcement that thou shall copilot all the things. At that point though, v next folks look at their stack and go, well, this isn't the right direction, and I think we're gonna be delayed. Yeah. And, and unfortunately in Windows case there's not a, a bountiful basket full of features they could add that will be meaningful in time for Windows 12.

(00:08:15):
And may never be really Right. Although, actually, I shouldn't say that. We, we talked about this a little bit, this notion of you know, you could be truly helpful to users and not just an annoyance, or you could be a funny looking icon <laugh>. Yeah. Right. Or you could just be, can't you be both a yellow bar that appears in Word? You could be, yeah. Both, you could both dropping and a floor wax. Is that possible? It's only, what's Wednesday? Twice this week, I've started a meeting in teams and been blocked by a, a popup telling me about other things I can do with teams, which I find to be really irritating. Hate that my favorite. And, and I, I'm getting a little tired of people defending this behavior because the stock response is always like, well, what would you do to tell people?

(00:08:59):
I do. I can tell you what I wouldn't do is interrupt a meeting. I'll just put that one out there. And I think there are examples of good UI for this kind of thing. Sure. For example, when you update Chrome oss, and probably Chrome, I guess, you know, the thing comes back and says, look, here's a what's new thing if you wanna look at it, and if you don't, good, we don't care <laugh>, we're not gonna keep throwing stuff in your face. You know? I don't know why Microsoft keeps doing that, because it probably, I'm guessing 'cause it works usage or something. Yeah. I don't think it do. I, I suspect it doesn't work, but they, I don't know. You know, the great thing is if you don't measure the response, then you don't have to worry about it work. We think it works.

(00:09:32):
It might work. Yeah. No one knows. It's impossible to know. Well, it's just a mystery. More importantly, I haven tried my promotion number times that I think gets popped. Right. So as long as it's popped a lot, that's good. How the maneuver times it's popped. And I've immediately said no to it. You know, so you learn anything from that, and then now you're drilling too deep into the data. We don't want to go there. They're, they're not the only company that does this. I mean, it's one of the real annoyances with the Amazon's Z Echo is that often you'll tell it to do something and it says, did you know I can peel potatoes for you as well? And it's like, no, no. I, I don't, I I won't remember the exact query, but we were in the car and I said, I wonder what the question was, whatever it was.

(00:10:11):
And I'm like, Hey, whatever. I'm like, Hey, g blah. What's the, it? It's like, it's like you ask it, I'll just make something up. What's the temperature in Washington DC right now? Yeah. Mm-hmm. And it says that what temperature in Washington right now is a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, because it's August. And did you know that The Washington Mind And on my Google, shut up. Stop. Stop talking. Stop talking. I just, I'm asking you a question. I I'm not, I'm not beginning a dialogue. Yeah. You know, that's my big pet peeve. I don't like that kind of stuff. I don't know. Anyway, AI's gonna be a whole new generation of terribleness with regards to that kind of thing. Hopefully someone will figure out a way for it to be seamless and helpful. You know, this is the thing Google always talks about actually, like the Pixel is like the helpful phone or whatever they say.

(00:10:58):
Hey, I'd like Windows to be helpful, not annoying. Hey, echo, how do I get to the Exorcist steps from here? Did you know Linda Blair was spitting pea soup when she threw up? Yeah. My fun fact about the Exodus steps, by the way. Yes. Is that and we just literally rewatched this movie last night because my son wanted to I bet. Because you were at the Steps and the house. I mean, I could, I could, I could do a six part podcast series on this movie. But my favorite fun fact is <laugh> famously in the movie, I hope we're not ruining it for anyone. It came out in 1971 or whatever. But you know, the, at the end of the movie, the priest takes the demon into his body, jumps through the window and falls down the stairs. Yeah. The window in that house is approximately 25 to 30 feet from that.

(00:11:40):
Yeah, exactly. Staircase <laugh>. So what they did in the movie was they built a, a cardboard extension to the house that made it go out to the no to the wall. So if you look at it, all the long shots and the close shots, it looks beautiful. But the house is l-shaped in the movie. And the house is just a straight front to back rectangle in, in real life. Terrible. There's a huge space there. That's very funny. That's how they, that's how they reached the staircase. Pazuzu coulda had him go 30 feet. I mean, that's true. You know, you got the help of the demon. Yes. But, but there's, remember there's a crime earlier on with the the producer of the movie, the director of the movie is killed. And they describe it and, you know, the, they look out the, and you know, the cop and the priest are both like, you know, I, you, it seems like he would have to have been thrown from here just to make it, I mean, like, you couldn't make that a normal crime if it was 25 or 30 feet from the stairs like that, you know?

(00:12:28):
That's right. Yeah. You're right. Anyway, they made a fit though. The cardboard house. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Yeah. Very nice. Something to look at. You can look at it. The opening scene in Georgetown. They show it from afar. You can see the house in the distance. What hotel did you, did you stay a nice hotel? Did, did you land? No, we didn't. We stayed in an Airbnb. Oh, okay. All that's not funny. Yeah. That's the other thing. Every cab or what do you call it? A Uber ride. We take in Mexico City. Two bucks. Three bucks, maybe four. Oh God. Uber is, the airport is eight to $10. Yeah. Every time we stepped in that Uber and we had to go back both directions from Uber. Uber, it was 20 to $25 every time. And we took the, we took at least two trips back and forth every day.

(00:13:09):
Yeah. It's incredibly expensive. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible. You could have rented a car and paid for parking in DC 'cause that's cost effective. Oh. Where we stayed in DC we had a little tiny garage that was the size of my car, plus one inch in each direction. And we had two cars, and we had to find a garage that we paid for, which was really far away. There is no street parking in a city. I mean, there is, if you're like a resident and pay for it, but you cannot park a car on the street. Like Right. I'm not saying you can't like, literally anywhere. I'm saying I never saw it anywhere. We looked everywhere. There was nothing. It is expensive. Yeah. Crazy. Look at Jesus. Look at Jesus. So much better. I know. It's a beautiful place though. Yeah. It's fun. Okay. I think there's an excitement going to the nation's capital.

(00:13:53):
Sure. I enjoy it. Yeah. Just visit. It's like Ottawa, when you go to Ottawa. Don't you feel the I've always. You feel electricity? Well, I, I, well, you know, when it's on <laugh>, because it's Ottawa. I'm sorry, I shouldn't her former Royal Highness, queen Elizabeth stated of Ottawa. Well, at least they don't have to worry about being invaded. Nobody will find this place. <Laugh>. Nice. Nice. well, I'm sorry. I, I love our Canadian. I got sidetrack from the north. I shouldn't mock them. In fact, that's why, honestly, that's why it's okay. As long as they know it's comes from a place of love. How about a quiet Nation's capitals probably a good thing. I mean, you didn't, it, it's the feature. The truck drivers were there. I mean, it's nice to be, to be quiet. That was problematic. Yes. Yeah. You wanted quiet.

(00:14:42):
It's peaceful. Is that's where the castle is. Like the, the, what they call it. What do they call that? The front knock? What, what is it? No, that's in Quebec City. That's in Quebec City. Yeah, that's right. That's right. The only walled city in North America. Pretty cool. Yeah. Beautiful. That's a beautiful place. Pretty cool. Yep. It's all about the Beaver Skins <laugh>. They have a waterfall. Everything I know about Canada, I learned on jeopardy actually. So, yeah. Nice. Lots of French food. It's good. I am surprised. You want to talk about Dev Home? 'cause I'm just not sure anybody uses this. There's nothing to talk about. So this one will be quick. What is, what is, what is Dev Home? So, dev Home is a feature coming in the next version of Windows 11 that will, honestly, I, I don't think the first version is going to reach the aspirations here, but the idea is you're a developer and you can sit down and immediately have like this dev environment, including all the tools you use, set up the right way, et cetera, et cetera.

(00:15:39):
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, anyone can do this. I don't believe this requires a infect, all this. Look, I don't think this requires a, an insider version of Windows. I think if you go to the Microsoft store and type in Dev home, you'll see the preview there. If this computer could move any faster, I would actually prove that point. I believe, I believe it's in stable, but as a preview and yeah, it is. So, I mean, you can check it out for yourself. They, it's just that right as the show was starting, there were the two announcements that Canary build and this, and I, and I, so I threw it into the notes and I looked at it later and it was like, okay, there's nothing, there's no new features, really. It's like accessibility improvements, which obviously are important. And then some some bug fixes improvements and bug fixes.

(00:16:16):
Yeah. Nothing. But I mean, you know how, you know, most information workers I know either start out look or they start in teams, and that's, you look at your calendar, what have I got today? Right. Right. And I guess guess the I dream. Yeah. The idea of this is what's my issue list? You know, what are my warnings from GitHub? It makes sense. Test finish. Yeah. Yeah. It just makes why it isn't just integrated into like Studio. Like, that's the thing you normally do is just open studio. Why is, is this a Windows feature? Right. So there should have home plugin for Studio. How about that? Mm-Hmm. There, maybe that's the plan. Yeah. Right. Yes, I agree with that. And, and I, Microsoft has this kind of vague mission to make Windows the best possible OSS for developers. Which I, I, you know, I appreciate That's fine.

(00:17:04):
It's, it's a good idea. You know, terminal is there because of this the Windows subsystem for Android in some ways you could argue is really about this getting, you know, one machine where we can do everything. Maui speaks to this a little bit, although in some point in the chain, you'll need a Mac, you know, frankly. But they have cloud-based max you could use if you wanted to use a service. So yeah. I, I, okay. I mean, that's fine. I don't know. It's just Microsoft tends to kind of half-ass things, especially under the first release. And I feel like we're gonna land right there on this one. So it's a good question. The, the team behind it, folks like Kayla and Clint, like they're great people. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, this is an, an odd project in my mind. Yeah. Right.

(00:17:45):
We'll see if it turns into anything. I would say this, you know, just looking at the open source, there are plenty, there's plenty of community folks contributing to it, so it's not, yeah. And, and actually, right. And that's actually a big part of the communications. I think it will get shaped into something potentially useful, because the folks that are So, Kayla, you mean Kayla Cinnamon is a Kayla, Kayla Cinnamon is, is p I feel like a lot of these people were, and I don't mean her specifically necessarily, but I feel like a lot of these people were kind of on the visual Studio Code train kind of deal, and are like, but I'm using a Mac <laugh> <laugh>. Like, what, what do you, I don't understand what I'm, what am I doing? You know? So anyway, it's fine. I I it's not a, it, it's not a bad idea.

(00:18:28):
I just feel like it's, they just announced it right at Bill. Yeah. It's gonna come to fruition pretty quickly. I guess it's possible Windows 1123 H two will ship with it in preview, you know, and maybe it's something that occurs over a year, I guess. I think it's gonna need that time. Yeah. And, and, and Clint Rutkin is one of the folks behind Windows Power to toys. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So, I mean, he certainly knows his way into add-ins in Windows. So you can see, yeah. A combination of those two, how this, why this product looks the way it does. Okay. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. This is the, one of the ways you get the R A F Ss drive. Right? You can you can configure that in Dev home. It will partition the disc and do all that stuff for you.

(00:19:08):
It's just, yeah. It's some good stuff. I just, I, I mean, I'm not a professional developer. I just feel like I'm, I'm, I am so particular when it comes to these tools. Mm-Hmm. I, I'm just a little, I, I feel like a lot of professional developers would look at this and be like, yeah, I know this is a good idea. I'm just gonna do my own thing. But, but yeah. That's cool. It's cool what you're doing, you know? Yeah. It's, that'll be the challenge to get it to a point where someone Yeah. Who already has a configuration. They like says, my configuration may be better by this. Right. That's right. This looks like it's open source too, which is kind of cool. It is. Yeah. Yeah. This is contributing to it. That's right's. The new Microsoft, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. It's good. It is good.

(00:19:43):
Yeah. and then just moving on from that non-event <laugh>, the we mentioned Windows 365 switch last week. This week. It has moved into, I don't remember where it landed last week. It was in one of the channels. It is now available in Dev and beta. So if you use Microsoft sorry, windows 365 you can test it in both of those channels. Now, I assume the rules are still the same, meaning that the cloud PC you're using has to be on the same insider dev or insider channel as the O pc Hmm. For this to work properly. So whatever. But that's one little minor update. And just completing this <laugh> quadrant of terrible non-new stories Microsoft Edge for Business is launching this month. I feel like almost no one knows exactly what it is.

(00:20:31):
And once you find out what it is you'll be slightly disappointed. But it is a, you know, Microsoft has long supported this notion of profiles in their browser. Just like, you know, Chrome does the same thing or whatever. And if you configure two profiles, and one is an M S A Microsoft account, and the other is worker school account, meaning what used to be an a a D account, I refuse to use its real name. <Laugh> A D still works just fine. You can still Yep. Thank you. <Laugh>, they would appear as separate windows slightly different icon in, in the task bar. You could pin both separately, right. If you wanted to do that. But there really wasn't much in the way of integration between the two. And so this is kind of a formalization of what that might look like.

(00:21:12):
And it is centrally managed by your, I, you know, your organization's IT staff, which is was always the case with the worker school account browser settings and so forth. But it gives you like a personal and a work half. You, you can, as a user, which is kind of strange, I'm, I'm sure the the settings that are available to the, it will allow for this as well. But you can, as an individual, say, when I open this particular site, I always want it to go to Edge for business or regular edge. So that if you're in regular edge and you type in a work U R l, the other window will pop up and never the twin shall meet, so to speak. Interesting. Yeah. I assume that's also centrally manageable, but it is interesting they're letting users do that as well.

(00:21:55):
Well, and it, it's almost a swing back to towards the shared use machine concept. Yeah. which may be just a response to more work from home in general, be the, the yeah. The IT folks I've been talking to lately in, I mean, the past few years, it started with phones where it's like, you know, it's easier than trying to figure out how to split use on a phone, give 'em another phone. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. well, I, I mean, so <laugh>, there, there are obviously more elegant solutions to that, but they're more complicated, right? So you could do like selective wipe where your work data could be wiped, but your home data is not touched. That kind of thing. But people do or do not trust that, or people implementing do or do not do that correctly. So, yeah.

(00:22:37):
Turns out to be given a two year old Android phone that you have complete control of as assist admin, is that, that's your work phone? All is well, yeah. Right. Yeah. I I, I maybe do you need to get it back if they depart on less favorable circumstances. I have a friend who he just continues to be confused by this, but his, the workplace will give him a new iPhone every two or three years mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And he doesn't use iPhone. He doesn't care about iPhone. So he buys an Android phone and he uses that for himself. And he's like, I don't understand, like, everyone I work with just uses the iPhone. I'm like, you don't understand that. Really. You don't understand not spending a thousand dollars on a new phone and just using the thing they gave you for free. Really. He's like, why would I wanna mix my work and home stuff?

(00:23:12):
I, because nobody caress Jeff. Yeah. You know, like <laugh>, like, because most people just don't care. Nobody cares until the legal discovery. Yeah. Right. But but the idea that, I mean, this is really interesting 'cause I think it's actually a political statement that we're getting back to partially controlled devices that you'd want to have this separation in your browser. Yeah. Well, it, yeah. It, it's, we are coming out of a, I don't know, three year period here where we've all been using whatever we could scrap together to get work done on. And you know, there are indications that's gonna start changing back for a lot of people, unfortunately. But I feel like there's still gonna be a sizable audience. We'll continue doing this. I mean, one of the presumptions here for Edge for Business is that you're also using Edge for Personal. And I don't know that that's actually an issue.

(00:23:58):
They've, if the business wants to control Edge, it's like there are other browsers to use. Yeah. Actually, right. And that's, that's been kind of a long term strategy for people use one browser for one thing and the other for another. Yeah. Which is totally, I do it every day. This is, I, you know, be, bring your own device started a long, long time ago, and it was Yeah. About phones, you know, and I think the pandemic kind of made it more about computers as well, I guess. Yeah. Well, suddenly we didn't have enough machines to send home, or we didn't wanna send the machines home. Yeah. So you had to use your own machine. I've gotta be careful with that though. I like one example, if you install Teams is, and this is not the only app that does this mm-hmm.

(00:24:36):
<Affirmative>, but you sign in with a work or school account, you get this dialogue box. I think a lot of people just kind of click by, don't really pay attention to it. Says, Hey, do you want us, let, let us manage the whole pc or just this app. And the default is the whole pc and it's like <laugh>. Yeah. Do not, do not, do not give control. Yeah. That's not smart. No, and you're exactly right. You're asking people questions they don't know the answers to. Right. Right. You're like, I, I mean, obviously it must have to control the whole pc. What if I have to download a file or something? And it's like, yeah, that's not how that works. But yeah, I would be, I would never give control of my own PC to my workplace. Well, that's not true. Now. It's the same, but you know what I mean?

(00:25:10):
Back when I had a job, like, have you seen your employer? I don't know exactly that guy. I mean, he was drunk all weekend. I don't know. <Laugh>. <laugh>. Anyway, so that sorry. So edge for Business is coming, I believe in the version of Edge, it will be released any day now. I think it's version one 16. It's the type of thing that gets activated. So you'll see it. There'll be like a little Yeah. They'll be, they're almost certainly gonna have to do a run as on the whole policy controls over that. Like, I think what you're gonna find, I'm not an expert in this area, but because all of the policies come over from whatever you had before, I'm sure that, I just don't dunno anything about this, but I'm sure there is a Wealth of Edge policies and group policy.

(00:25:48):
Oh, yeah. They already exist. It's just now pushing to a device that's not yours. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So to the user, it's just a small UI change. I think for businesses, this is probably gonna be much more problematic. A fairly elegant thing. Yeah. Well, it's also gonna be a policy conversation is do we want to insert our stuff on their machines and have rights over it? And how are they gonna respond to it? Like, there's definitely a governance issue that, yeah. That's okay. Yeah. That's, you know what, it's all fun and games until the F B I shows up your employees placing thesis, the machine <laugh>. That's right. Right. Like that's, this stuff happens. Sure. You know, and, and working from home, like, the consequences are gonna be serious. Right. It's true. All right. It's Microsoft. We got this. Wow. Who was not the most exciting?

(00:26:33):
Windows Week for sure. <Laugh>. I know, I know. I, I just, I really thought we were gonna see more this week. I don't know. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Well, this will excite you more then. No, but that's, hold on, because Oh, sorry. Save the excitement. I don't want to miss mm-hmm. A moment of it, but I think this might be a good time to mention our sponsor. How about that? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, this fine Windows Weekly program is brought to you quite literally by Cash Fly. That's our content delivery network. And Cash Fly is the best. They've been doing it since 1999. It was about 2008, maybe 10 years later, 1999, 2009 that I called. Well, actually, they called me. I was moaning about how hard it was to get our content delivered to our global audience. It was just bringing the servers down as it just wasn't working.

(00:27:25):
Matt Levine, one of the founders, called me up, said, Leah, we can help. And I have been a Happy Cash Fly customer ever since. Cash Fly for more than 24 years now has held the e-track record for high performing, ultra reliable content delivery. 3,500 clients, including us in over 80 countries. Organizations like ours consistently choose cashflow because it offers scalability, reliability, and unrivaled performance. Now, there are a number of ways cashflow can help you. Lemme give you one for website owners Cashflow's, new Smart Image optimization. It is a remarkable solution for enhanced image processing. The service allows dynamic transformation and optimization of all the images on your site, which means you're gonna get faster loading times, you're gonna get improved user experience and reduced bandwidth consumption. But most importantly, on any size screen, smart image optimization enables configurable predefined image transformation at specific path prefixes.

(00:28:31):
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(00:29:44):
And I could tell you the best support ever. We love these guys at Cashflow and the billing. Now, this was a really important thing for us. They offer flexible month to month billing for as long as you need it. Because initially, you know, our traffic, and I bet yours too, is kind of spiky, right? All of a sudden there's a lot of hits, and then it's quiet for a while. Then there's a lot of hits. Cashflow smooths that out. So you don't pay for the peaks. You pay for, you know, what you need. And once you've got it all figured out, you can work out a contract and get a discount for a fixed term. You de the bottom line is you design your own contract when you switch to cashflow. We wouldn't have it any other way. We've been using Cash Fly for more than a decade.

(00:30:22):
More, oh, it's almost 15 years now. Learn how you can get your first month free cash fly.com. How many times you've heard me say it. Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cash Fly at CAC h e f l y.com. Thank you. Cashflow. We appreciate it. Now share the excitement, Paul Ott, you're gonna really let everybody down when you tell 'em how exciting this news is. So share it. It's so exciting. It's very exciting. Oh, I'm thrilled. So, back in July, I think Microsoft announced the new default font for office. Yes. We were so excited. App Aptos. Now there's something more. How much Ready Default theme arrive in September and is literally the combination of a changed color palette, updated default line weights, and the new font that we just discussed? Well, so it's about time. Yeah. do you have been a picture of it here?

(00:31:25):
Oh, yeah. There it is. Yeah, there's some, you can see the theme change. They've gotten rid of the yellow. It was in the theme now it's kind of a, a dark green color. And they've shifted a bunch of the other colors as well. So it's, it's supposed to look more modern and Yeah. I like kind of, the teal for a hyperlink is nicer than the bright blue and the, the whatever that is plum for the followed hyperlink. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Mauve. So, I mean, if you have a corporate style you're using in your presentations or documents or whatever this will not impact you that much. But if you're just using the, you know, the, the apps like we all, most of us are you will see this difference. Like, I think, well, Mary Jo might not have seen it. She didn't really notice too many things' this, but No.

(00:32:08):
Yeah. But I think most you will see it. So Matt, I'm actually struggling to deal with that. This is Paul's excited voice. Yes. He's <laugh> He delivered this in his mashed potatoes, wondering. Yes. This is it. <Laugh>. Yeah. This is, I I I can get excited when you're talking about lunch and prices in the nation's capital. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I can get animated if I have to. Yeah. this is not one of those moments. But yeah, I don't, I I'm still not a fan of Aptos. I, I, I don't, I I don't like it. I'm trying, it's when I just installed, I'm using, it's just a font, right? Like, it's just a font. It's just a font. <Laugh>, it's just a life partner. You know, I, I don't know how to explain it. It's well, I mean, I write obviously a lot and I, I, for example, I just installed or started using word on a new computer.

(00:33:01):
So Word has not updated itself yet, and it still has Calibri as it's the fall font. And it's like, ah, <laugh>. You know, like, I really do notice it. And I, there's something off about Aptos to me. And I don't wanna be that person that has to manually change the default font. 'cause You know, I'm gonna have to do it every single time I use, like install the new version of Word or whatever. But I, I, but I'm really, I'm, I'm struggling. So we'll get there, I guess. <Laugh>, yeah, it's, you're gonna have a good tip of the week on how to configure it to automatically Oh, I know. Calibrate. I don't want to do that, but you're right, you're right. It's just a fun, I do have a, I I, my, I probably do have an article I wrote at one point, like how I configure Word, because I do configure it very specifically.

(00:33:47):
And I'm, this is, will be used as evidence in a future trial to prove my insanity. You know, like, look at this thing. Like, look at what this guy does. He's crazy. Obviously he's crazy. So I don't know. Hopefully none of you suffer from this mania. Alrighty. and that's it for Microsoft 365 default theme in office coming in September. Look forward to that. You'll know it when you see it. Yeah. So as I mentioned upfront a lot of mobile stories this week, which, you know, depending on the week, we have busy weeks. Obviously, I'm not gonna start talking about Amazon, Google, whatever stuff per se, apple. But actually this stuff's kind of interesting. 'cause Literally, I, there's at least six of 'em that are five or six of them that are all kind of AI based. And I think that is, that's the, I think that's where we're going, right?

(00:34:36):
Everything's gonna be AI based. So I thought it was kind of an interesting collection of things to occur in the span of five or six days there. Right. so we'll just start off with the first one, I guess. This happened just yesterday, I believe, or the other day Google announced a new memory view in Google photos. Like, okay, who cares? But it's AI based, right? Like everything is <laugh>. This will be, I think it's the US only for now. That will change you know, over time. It should be, let me make sure before I say this. It's possible it is on the web too. So actually, this one's on the web, so you could get it from Windows but also iOS and Android. So if you use Google Photos for your photos, which I do, and I think is probably one of the better ones, honestly you probably get these constant memory popups.

(00:35:22):
I'll, it's probably one of my phone right now. No, there isn't actually. But you know, when you go and it's like you know, remember 13 years ago or like, you, here's some pictures of you and your wife, or remember the trip to Mexico, or whatever it is, you know, similar shots, which is kind of fun. But obviously when you think about photos and, and other imagery, like using AI to kind of figure out not just what things go together, but also you know, layouts and kind of fun ways to combine information in ways that would be fun. So you can share these things. You can save them and do all that kind of stuff. So if you don't use Google Photos well screw you, but no, you should <laugh>, you should check it out. It's actually very good.

(00:36:04):
Opera added its own chat, g p t based AI feature to its new desktop browser, which is called what Comp It's called opera one, I believe. Right? Opera one, yep. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, then opera for Android back in a couple months ago probably. So that's available now on iOS, which I looked really hard to figure out if io a lot of people use iOS to mean, I, and, and I'm sorry. Ipad and iPhone. Right? And if you look at the screenshots for this particular app, and because you could switch back and forth between the iPhone and iPad view, it does not look like the iPad version was updated. So it's possible it could only be iPhone. So that's the why I wrote it. I couldn't be sure. But so the thing that's interesting about Aria a chat, G p T based, right?

(00:36:52):
So it's not mm-hmm. You know, again, they have their own collaboration with Open ai. They're doing that kind of stuff. It's generative AI service. They do all those things you kind of expect you know, ask it questions, follow up. It's personalized, you know, it's, it's, yeah. All, all those things, right? It's free. Right. which is kind of interesting for now for Yeah. <Laugh>. Yep. Apparently 1 million people have used it. It can generate not just text, but also software code, right? Nice. product comparisons, I mean, all that kind of stuff. So it's I, I don't know that this is gonna make anyone switch to opera per se, although it's gonna be interesting to see how all the browser makers kind of line up when it comes to AI capabilities. But it, it did sound like an excuse not to switch.

(00:37:38):
It's like, well, they don't have AI capabilities, so it's, it's worth looking at. I would just put it that way. The opera mobile browsers are kind of unique in this space as well, but that's true of a lot of, a lot of browsers are trying different things. It doesn't include mm-hmm. Built in ad blocker. You want that kind of stuff. So there's that. And what you do is the AI in a browser, I mean, what exactly, I think it's about you just walking around, you ask it a question, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, like, in other words, like we're, we were just in DC to keep beating that topic to death. I am in front of the Washington Monument. What other things are fun to do near here? Oh, that's cool. Yeah. You know, that kind of thing. And it, and it was useful.

(00:38:17):
Good stuff. I mean, no, I wouldn't say that. No, it's <laugh> it, no, it, it is No, wasn't hallucinating. It gave you real Yeah. That kind of stuff. Yeah. I, it, it's, I always, I always use the same example. 'cause Yusuf Medi, when they introduced us back in February, said that he was going to Mexico City for a wedding, and he wanted to know some stuff to do. So he had to generate like a five day li you know, list of things to like an itinerary. And I'm like, that's interesting. I know a lot about Mexico City, so that's, I can use this example all the time and see how good it is. And I've, you know, depending on which thing you're using and the date it can be pretty unsophisticated. You know, I've seen in fact that the Bing one early on, and I think it's still in the video, if you look at it and if you know anything about Mexico City, it recommends two locations that are nowhere near each other to do one the same day.

(00:39:04):
And Mexico City is a big place, and that is a really dumb thing to try to do in one day. Yeah. And, and known for its great traffic. It's <laugh>. Yeah. We're very well known. And and, but at least the streets are in terrible quality too, so it works out great. <Laugh>. the that stuff has gotten a lot better. And this works pretty well with that regard. I mean, I only used it a couple times to try to, you know, simple things like that, but it's it's worth, I just, I would just say it's worth looking at. I, it, this is gonna shake out where everyone's gonna have these capabilities, right? Yeah. These are gonna be just, I think it's starting to feel like table stakes. Like Yeah. You ha have to have this so you're not credible. Yep. Do you use Aria as your day to day iOS browser?

(00:39:43):
No. No, no. I don't. Just brave guys. I recall just trying it. Yeah, just try. But I, I like to try you. I don't wanna, you never know. Try it out. Yeah. You never know. I, you know, I, I've actually always liked opera. I don't know why I don't use it. Yeah. Opera sits in a weird place. 'cause Now it's another chromium based browser. It's chromium. Okay. It is. Yeah. I want, I'm supporting Firefox just for the diversity. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I guess you could be a better Chrome most and actually on, on iOS, it's not chromium, it's WebKit. That's right. 'cause Everything is Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's why, honestly, like if you wanna stick to the same browser across desktop and mobile, it gets a little weird. Because the capabilities are so different. And it depends on the browser.

(00:40:30):
It adds ad blocking, Firefox, cryptocurrency, mining protection. They would probably know this. I believe that Firefox is bringing, is it Firefox is bringing desktop extension support to mobile? Does that sound right? Ooh, that's interesting. I think it's Firefox. It may be because down the road, I think we're all pretty clear that Firefox is gonna be Firefox, not WebKit. Yeah. That Apple's mm-hmm. <Affirmative> kind of gonna open it up a little bit. Right? So where is Aria? Where is Aria and, oh, maybe it's not here. Oh, yeah, here it is. Browser ai. Yeah. Oh, you have to enable it, right? Right. That's the thing. So, and you need an opera account, I should mention I book. Oh, okay. Yeah. Prompt yet. But yeah, you'll have to do that stuff. I, I'm gonna, I'll, I'll go off camera for that. Yeah. It's worth, yeah.

(00:41:14):
All right. Yeah, so there's that. And then last week, two weeks ago, sometime recently, Amazon announced that they were going to start bringing AI generated review summaries to their, you know, e-commerce site. This raises some interesting issues, you know, because has a big problem where a lot of their reviews are generated by AI or by robots, or by whatever, <laugh>. So the, you know, like <laugh>, they're summarizing themselves, I guess. It showed up on mobile first. I, it has now expanded, I believe, to more users. Again, us only in the beginning. It, they're basically just testing it. I'll just say in general, forgetting the nonsense about reviews being, you know, fake or whatever they might be, in many cases, using AI to summarize reviews on whatever, like an e-commerce site, if you're on Google Maps, looking at restaurants or whatever it might be.

(00:42:08):
I think it's a good idea. You know, I think this is gonna be a, a normal accepted and possibly good use of ai. You could pull out little quotes from people, like a lot of people said the whatever item at this restaurant was fantastic. Like, that will be near the top. And you can be like, you know what? I want that kind of item. So I will go to this restaurant. Like, I think it's a good idea. Yeah. AG aggregate, getting that context of an aggregation of comments. Yeah. Is ultimately when you think about what, what, what are you doing when you're scanning a bunch of five star rated comments. It's like, what are the common themes here? This <laugh>, we, it's kind of a tangent, tangential thing, but the exact opposite of ai, which is a non artificial lack of intelligence.

(00:42:49):
Oh, natural dumbness. Okay. The local community. I'm part of a Mackenzie Group up on Facebook, right. So the questions and the pe things that people posted, classic. They're just classic. Does anyone know what the noise was that occurred at the corner of Third Street or whatever? Yeah, I see that a lot. Yeah. <laugh>. Yeah. I, the best one, I, I posted this on Twitter at the time. This woman actually said, Hey, I saw a something about a tornado. Should I bring my kids inside <laugh>? They're like, are you kidding me? Yeah. Don't worry about it. They're somewhere else now. Anyway, this is where you came for that answer. Anyway, <laugh> someone asked the question, I just moved to the area. Does anyone know of any good Chinese restaurants in Mckenjie or the area to which there were 73 answers or whatever? And they're all wrong.

(00:43:27):
'cause There is no good Chinese food in this entire valley. There is none <laugh>. It's no, there, there isn't <laugh>. And so this woman wrote, wow, I'm never moving there. Wow. There's, I know. It's, this is, this is the one thing we haven't figured out here. It's bad. Got hot dogs and so that's good. The hot dogs are fantastic. The pizza's good. There, there's only three or four restaurants in Macon. One of 'em is a place called China Moon. It's terrible. It's a terrible restaurant. Even in the, even in the scope of Chinese restaurants in my area, it's terrible. This, there's nothing more disapp this woman disappointing than like a bad Chinese. This woman answered Chinese restaurant. It's like, oh. So this woman said, she said, China Moon. And I responded to it like an idiot. And I said, no, China Moon is terrible. And she said, well, I don't know why. You have to be so mean about it. Everyone has an opinion. And I said, no, you're right. Everyone does have an opinion. But he didn't ask you about, he didn't ask you what the, about Chinese restaurants. He asked you about good Chinese restaurants. And on that, objectively, we have to agree that China Moon is terrible <laugh>.

(00:44:17):
It has like a three point something rating. It's not good. You know? Sorry. Anyway. Yeah. It's, it's even speculating that it's not good. This is not, you know, it's like, look at that number. I don't understand. Asking people who are flawed for their opinions things when there are objective places to go to find out this information, you know? Mm. And like, does anyone know when a comet's gonna appear in the nice guy in this area? It's like, you don't ask Bob on the corner about this. You Google that, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be a Wednesday 3:00 PM Pacific. Or it's like does yeah. Does anyone know what time the whatever fair opens? And then you get 23 people who say, I heard it was go you, you heard, you heard. Or it is <laugh>. Yeah. Just seen the link. You know. Anyway, stage AI solve this problem.

(00:44:59):
I think ai, well, no, I shouldn't say it's gonna solve, I think AI will be the next step in making those kinds of questions a little more definitive. And I think AI would agree that China Moon is garbage. I just, yeah. I just finished recording a Donna Rocks episode where we're, we literally are talking about LLMs in that sort of capacity of like Yeah. Skimming the 80% most common questions and answering 'em automatically. Yeah. Just do it, you know? Yeah. And, and you don't need AI to know that when I ask you what the capital of Canada is, I don't need a, like a 300 word essay on the benefits of Ottawa. I just need the answer. And then stop talking <laugh>. No, no, no. I see you give the answer about Ottawa and then I tell you all the things I can tell you about capitals.

(00:45:37):
Yeah. There, right, exactly. Ottawa is the <laugh>. Yeah, it's, I don't know. I don't know why they talk so much, but anyway, hopefully AI could be used for good, not, they are upselling upselling. They upselling up upselling knowledge. Yeah. Yes, that's right. Do upsell. I <laugh>, I just brought this up 'cause we were in DC when my kids were little and we'd go on vacation, didn't matter where France Prato and in Madrid or wherever, I would say, listen you guys' on vacation. Don't you dare learn anything in this building. If I see you reading something, we're leaving <laugh> <laugh>. We're walking through here. So, you know, I got the parenting skills. <Laugh>, I got the review summary here. I need that one. This one's particularly exciting to me 'cause I'm all, I'm definitely upgrading to this phone. So to the eight eight, yeah.

(00:46:23):
The Pixel eight Pro in my case, or eight and eight Pro probably coming out in October. Right? Yeah. And there's been a variety of leaks, which everything so far has been good news for me. And it looks like they're gonna be adding a feature, at least to these phones. The way Google does things is they'll probably go back to the, at least the seven as well at some point. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but a feature called Audio Magic Eraser. So if you're familiar with Magic Eraser, which appears as a feature inside of Google Photos on a pixel, it allow you, it allows you to remove objects from photos like you would expect, right? Yeah. This is a, a, a feature that used to require like a high-end product like Photoshop and Yeah. Now you can do it on your finger, like it's finger painting and it works pretty well.

(00:47:01):
You know, it's pretty good. And in all of the mocking of machine learning models and things that we're doing, like, this is what you actually want. Yeah. Right, right. Something truly useful. You know what it doesn't say on Magic Eraser? Magic Eraser ai. Exactly. It just is Magic Eraser. Right, right. Like, listen, this is AI's not a product. <Laugh> big products with it. We gotta get past this era. It's gonna be a tough couple of years. Yeah. But this, it's, yeah, it's so, I'm sorry I audio arra magic eraser though is I, I, when I heard that term, I, I guess, I don't know what I thought. I, I thought it was something slightly different than what it is. And what it is, is what I think most people would think it is, which is you remove background sounds. Right. you can only, there's It's a quick, it's a leaked video, so you can just see three of the items.

(00:47:46):
But the first three are people. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> music and what's the other one? Oh boy. Car accidents. Car accidents. I don't remember. I don't know. Where I can't, I'm, I'm surprised I can't see it in my own article. Audio items says the other one's people. Oh, it's just background noise. I'm sorry. Noise <laugh>. Background, background, background noise. I mean, the big one for me would be copyrighted music. Yeah. You know? Right. Because you're gonna post something online or anything like that. Yeah, that's right. Like, just be able to Yep. And have it integrated into the phone. Once again, it's like these smaller machine learning models mm-hmm. <Affirmative> these as size to run Right on the device that can run right on the device. You know, meantime, you're, you're shoveling buckets of money into the Azure kiln Right. To run these large language models.

(00:48:37):
That's, yeah. Pixel is weird since the Pixel six. Right. Pixel six was the first one with the tensor processor. They're you know, they have some issues. Right. They they charge very slowly 'cause of heat issues. They heat up very quickly if you're doing things out in the world with them. Yeah. they're never gonna win any benchmark tests or anything like that. They're not particularly good for games if that's your thing. It's not, I don't really care. But it's not, but I think their little bet on those machine learning capabilities and ai, if you wanna call it that, is, is gonna pay off. And I think a hundred percent. Because it's the thing that makes a difference, right? Yeah. Like, you don't race the size of the sensor anymore. Don't race putting 17 sensors on it. But yeah. Race the natural things that most people would want to do to correct a photograph Yeah.

(00:49:25):
Or to correct a video clip. Like those are the features that are gonna make a difference to people. Like, when I use my phone, I get better results. Full stop. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, it's right. These things work really well. So I'm curious to see the audio version. Yeah. Here's the video. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. I don't, I don't know if I can get the audio out of this, but Yeah. It's hard to, well, the audio isn't super important in some ways. It's the odd <laugh>, ironically. It's the, there's a quick, well, first of all, you see a light blue collar there, so we know that's coming. But there's a quick shot. There you go. Right. Can't believe how this stuff lease out. This is ridiculous. So the jet plane is in, is going over and you want to hear her skateboarding or something? I guess.

(00:50:04):
Yeah. Okay. Fine. We'll see. You know what, you know, who's gonna be the number one use for this podcasters. Yeah, exactly. So we'll see. 'cause We, you know, that's, that's the thing I wanna see. Automatic though. In other words, how about removing it at record time? Yeah. And then having it be one of those dynamic things where you could actually bring it back if it made a mistake, <laugh>, you know? Yeah. We'll see, I bet this evolves over time and is, it becomes quite sophisticated. So this seems like a good idea to me. You know, when ing when you think about for sure, the view of a piece of audio when you're producing it. So I have separate vocal tracks, right? I have a background track. I might have a music inlay and so forth. You can imagine technology like this using a standard microphone on a, on a smartphone, and then giving you the tracks anyway.

(00:50:51):
Yeah. Right. You know, one of the biggest reasons I like re recording remotely is that we, all our voice tracks are isolated by nature. Right. Right. Where that's a problem with Zoom when you, or for, not probably the way Leo's doing it, but like, when you, a normal person records Zoom, they're both on same track. It is it's one track. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it doesn't separate the audio tracks. I thought it did. Mm-Hmm. No, I know. You think it would, it'd it's two separate sources. It would be easy enough, but it, yeah, it doesn't, and and I do it myself with a loop back through the, through the pa probably the same way you guys do. But you know, the, you back to the point, it's like, if the software's good enough now to literally off a single audio recording, just go, wow, this is his voice and this is his voice.

(00:51:26):
Separate them, create tracks from it, and oh, and here's the background noise and here's foreground noise. You know that skateboarding? Yep. And here's music that was heard in the background, and here's are some loud noises. They're actually, and you can what to suppress. Actually, even on the pixel seven, they're pretty close. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Google ships the recorder with it that does auto transcription. That is as good as, you know, the $99 a year auto ai. It's unlimited. That thing is actually is fantastic. Yeah. The, the only issue I have with the Google for recording audio, the pixel is I want it to be directional, and it isn't always. Yeah, I know what you mean. So sometimes you get this thing where, like, I'm pointing at something and something's happening here, but there's this noisy city behind me, and it still gets a lot of that ambient stuff, and I don't understand why.

(00:52:09):
You know, I feel like it, you know, you want, I think that's the microphones more than anything. Yeah. But it should be sophisticated about it though. It should let you prevent that from happening. I think we've run the camera race on smartphones now. Maybe we even run a microphone race. We've done. Yeah, I think you're right. Video, video is still a big deal. I think getting that right. But that's gotten a lot better. One thing that's funny, so obviously we've, Leo gave me this a microphone, which is incredible. And we have a lot of trains that go by the house here, and it hasn't happened on this show. But you know, a train will go by. You won't hear it at all. It's, it's completely isolated. Does a beautiful job. Oh, I didn't even know they did. Wow. Right. That's great.

(00:52:51):
Right. But my wife in there where there's stupid little Google earbud things. We were on a call, a group call, and she was in the other room with the door closed, and we were talking to someone, train went by, and I didn't think anything of it. I, I know that he doesn't hear it. And all of a sudden he said, he goes, is that a train? And I'm like, you heard that? Ah, but it was because of my wife's thing. She had a window open and, you know, whatever. She didn't have a fabulous high PR 40 like we do. Or even I had like a fan on me. I was in DC talking to Brad on a call, and I I was like, can you hear the fan? He's like, what do you mean? I'm like, can you hear a fan? He's like, no.

(00:53:21):
And, and it was just Bose noise canceling, whatever, but, oh, that's interesting. But they did enough, good enough job just to filter out the silence. Nice. Yeah. AI could be an interesting application there. I think a lot of what noise canceling has been up to now is, is mechanical. Yeah. Directly algorithmic. Well, it's, it's inverting the sound. Yeah. The multi-track stuff is really interesting because it lends itself to that non-destructive editing thing where you could you record whatever you record mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and it does a good job or not of getting rid of those background sounds like the train or whatever. But sometimes you might actually wanna hear that. Yeah. You know, and it'd be kind of neat if you could selectively decide what appears, I think, I think it's all, I think it's all coming together. I I will look forward to hearing it.

(00:54:09):
Yes, me too. One thing I miss by the way, from DC I'm gonna keep talking about it, is there was a place called Museum, which was a private museum. Oh, that's very famous, incredible collection. Oh, incredible. I'm jealous. I would love to go to the museum. It well, it's gone. No, it's closed. I know, unfortunately. I know, I know. So they, they had Aspire from the World Trade Center. They had like Daniel Pearl's laptop. They had the Un Unibomber cabin. You know, I'd have no idea why the Smithsonian didn't buy this thing to keep it going. It was so, such a great museum. But one of the, the excellent exhibits was like, it's 1985 and you wanna do a live broadcast, the gigantic truck with the crane arm on it, with the satellite thing, and all the people that needed to man all the electronics.

(00:54:49):
And it's like, what does it take today? It's like this thing, it's called an iPhone <laugh>. You know, like everything you could do with this, basically, and all the communications capability is, you know, on a phone. Kind of incredible. But <inaudible> what a world. Yes. Speaking as, as we can get past this sort of deception wear, crap wear phase of, of artificial intelligence technologies. Right. Yeah. We're in it. Right. Really, it's like scam wear. Yeah. Well, I do, I appreciate they got right to the insured notification of AI <laugh>. We're just gonna launch it in ification, but meantime, there's a bunch of us who are actually trying to use it in a, in a reasonable way, and often in a way that's just not visible to the user. Right. Like, I'd appreciate that Magic Eraser doesn't have the word AI in it anywhere.

(00:55:32):
Right. It's just Magic eraser. Yeah. Speaking of purification, I wanted his plug for this week's twit. Corey Dro, the creator of the term. Oh, good. The original term and not the ized version Paul is using. And Rebecca Glin, well, his co-author know from Choke Point Capitalism, are gonna do a takeover in ttt. It's gonna be the three of us. I can't wait. Oh, that's neat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that'll be fun. That's, I've known his name for a long time, and I, I don't know that he ever kind of entered into my perception in any way, but this thing has really hit home. It's like, yep. This is 1%. Oh, he nailed. He's brilliant. He's an amazing guy. And one of the reasons you know, he's been on twit since, you know, 2008, I think, but okay. Whenever he is on, he's so smart and he's so articulate.

(00:56:19):
There's no room for anybody. I mean, it's just like, okay, let's just sit back. Listen what he said. Yeah, what he said, <laugh>, you know, so that's good. This, I figured, you know, what, if Corey's gonna be on, we're gonna have his co-author and him and that's it, <laugh>, and let him Nice. It's a take. I call it a takeover. 'cause I, I know they will, but there's a lot to talk about. Whatever he Yeah. Whatever he has done or will do in life. I mean, this to me is marvelous. You've done it. You've done it. It's Marvel. Like this is Marvel. He was at the e f for a long time. He was their European director. He's a, he's a, a novelist. Really? If you've not read any of his novels. Yeah, that's right. No, I have this new one is hysterical.

(00:56:52):
He's got a, he's creating a kind of a Sci-fi James Bond. The guy's a forensic accountant, <laugh>. Oh, geez. But it's good. No, it's, I know, but it's really good. He's a, he's a really great writer. Anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Continue. No, no. I, that's not at all. We don't need to stretch this show because the listeners will be stretching for us. <Laugh>. That's right. Momentarily. the last mobile story is not AI related, but a, you know, it's, it kind of the conclusion of a long running case, which is that Apple, which had agreed in 2020, I think, to settle Battery Gate for u up to $500 million will now pay owners of the iPhone six through seven Plus. And concluding, s se a pro anyone who already got into the settlement, by the way. So that's <laugh> that's, that ended years ago.

(00:57:40):
That settlement check will be coming to you soon. It's gonna be more than expected. About $65 a person is the current estimate. There's a whole story behind this. I mean, apple for years, and I, I, I found stories I wrote in 20 15, 20 16, where I was like, everyone who has an iPhone knows this. They, they get slow over time. It felt like this conspiracy theory, like they're doing it. So you upgrade to a new phone. Right. And apple's, and it turned out to not be a conspiracy. Yeah. Well, but their reason, I'm not, you know, I think it's a little bit of both, but they, it was like, look, batteries decrease the power over time and we have to throttle it to preserve the life of the battery, et cetera, et cetera. The outrage over that forced them to put a switch in iOS where you can choose between better battery, better performance.

(00:58:26):
It's Apple. It sounds like a bunch of lawyers said, can we squeeze this giant company for money? Yeah. Yeah. I'm on. Yeah, that helps too. The interesting thing is that this would've been paid out three years ago. It's just that two of the people in the class action were like, no, we're not accepting this. And they appealed it as far as they could appeal it. Their final appeal was tossed aside. And so now Apple is free to rid itself of this problem by giving money to people and pretending it never happened. So, you know why it took so long? Apple agreed to this years ago. Two people said, yeah, two people. Yeah. It's not enough money. We want more <laugh>. Yeah. The judge said, no, that it, it's enough. Go away. It's been going through the courts for three years. Finally, the judge said, please just, can we just give away the money?

(00:59:09):
I'm gonna stop. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Crazy. So it's happening crazy. It's good. Yeah. We are gonna give you a chance as I mentioned to join us. If you're in the club, go on to the stage in a few minutes, we'll ask you to raise your hand and we'll give you a chance to ask anything you want of Paul and Richard. And of course, if you're an I R C, we'll, you'll have to text test. I'm sorry, type your questions, but I will read them dramatically. You could choose the voice you'd like me to use so that Paul and Richard can, we don't have AI voices that they could choose from. Oh, we should. I would like Sarah to Morgan. Morgan Freeman will read your questions <laugh> in just a little bit. But first, Neil Degra Tyson, we're gonna take a break and then the Xbox segment. Okay. Everybody breathe.

(00:59:58):
Now it's time for the Xbox segment. Paul ot. Well, you know, Richard, I don't wanna leave you out. Oh, anything you wanna say about Xbox <laugh>? Okay. Paul Ott. <Laugh> <laugh>. He's like, what now? I actually fired up my Xbox this morning. 'cause I want to get that new blizzard. I'm sorry. Bethesda. Game Star. What is it? Star Flight. Starfield. Starfield Starfield. Excited. That's gonna be on Pat. Play Pass. Yeah. The Xbox is for hosting Plex and Netflix. <Laugh>, nothing else. When you're remember of the PC Master Racers. Really? That's right. Do anything else? Well, but see, I can play Star Field for free on my Xbox. I'd have to buy it if I wanted to play it on my pc. But I agree with you. I'd, I kind of prefer to play it on my PC if I can. Maybe I'll buy it if it's good on the play pass.

(01:00:51):
I'll buy it. Yeah, you can. Yeah. I mean, you could stream it if you wanted to test it. Oh, I could. Really quick. How does that work? Does that work well? Yeah. it works. Okay. I think your starfield will probably be pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Anyway. Sorry. Didn't mean to hijack. No, that's okay. Fire. Anyone who has used an Xbox or done anything online probably is familiar with the notion of toxicity. <Laugh>. And I would say there's a special brand of toxicity you see in video games. 'cause It's a lot of guys just acting like guys. And a lot of terribleness occurs. I mute everybody online on Xbox for this reason. I can't stand it every once in a while. I don't, for whatever reason, I'll I let everyone's mics on. It takes about 30 seconds. You're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

(01:01:33):
That's why. No way he remembers suddenly the guy singing to himself. For some reason, the guy talking to someone else in the room, the guy with the TV on that, you can hear the music, the guy shouting racist or sexist comments at his, you know, scream, whatever it is. And it's like, I can't, geez, enough mute. You know? I, I think it's fair to say Microsoft has not done enough about this. There have been various initiatives over the years. There was a guy named Steven Tuus, you guys may or may not remember who unfortunately back in the early days of Xbox Live, was responsible for this part of the company and was like those people who have to deal with horrible things online. And he had all kinds of issues. And unfortunately his past oh dear, he was, yeah, he was a great guy too.

(01:02:15):
It's too bad. Anyway they're might, they're doing something about it again, <laugh>, right? And so the new system is based on a system of strikes like you might have with the D M V, although you get way more strikes with Xbox than you do with your local D M V. And the idea is that whatever the upfront is, it could be some of the things I just described. It could be cheating, it could be whatever it is. You'll receive a strike for each incident. You the strikes remain on your record for six months. If you get eight strikes, you are out they will suspend you. Actually there were suspensions that occur along the way before then, I should say. So I think there's like a day long exp a day long expulsion after after one strike and then after three, it's like two days or something, you know, it goes, it kind of escalates over time.

(01:02:59):
But if you actually get up to eight, you're out for a year. And, you know, we'll see how this goes. I as a, how do you get strikes removed? Is it just time, time six months? Was it six months? If you don't teabag anybody for a whole six months? Well, so that's, this is the thing. So here, here's the problem. I, I as a, as a veteran of the Xbox Boys, I will tell you that there are rules and ways that you can play within the rules and still be horrible. And then there are things that are against the rules where you can be even more horrible. So, for example, I use this example all the time 'cause I do this all the time. 'cause I am an ass in Call of Duty. If you play the hardcore versions of the games and death match, that means that among the many changes in the game, you can kill people on your own team.

(01:03:44):
That's actually bad, right? 'cause The other team gets a point or whatever. It's a friendly fire. Yeah. Friendly fire. Now, the point of the point of it is, it's a mistake. You have to be careful, you know, right? You're firing at a guy. You can do a biopsy. A guy on your team is running between the bullets, right? You get stop shooting runs in front of you. Now, the problem is toxicity. So that guy could, because he doesn't like you, for some reason, might be running in front of your bullets on purpose, right? Because if you do the three times you get kicked outta the game, or I'm a dick and I don't like some guy, and I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna use these two and shoot this guy in the face because I can't stand him and I want him to know it, but I'm not gonna go for the third one and get kicked outta the game.

(01:04:20):
So you can play within the rules and still be kind of toxic, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I think <laugh>, it's not good behavior. It's not healthy. That's my motto. But you can play, play within the rules, but still kind of toxic given that background. Now I look at this system and I think to myself, not that I would ever go for these kinds of strikes. I don't, I don't want to get kicked off of, you have to balance the strikes versus the number of days you get booted, right? So one, two days, one, two strikes is one day each three strikes is three days off. But you know what, maybe I'm going on vacation and I'm like, you know, I could, I could do seven strikes right here, <laugh>, I'm out, real God, and I'm gonna be gone for couple, couple days. Course of course, anything that a company will do can be gamed.

(01:04:59):
And that's what I mean. Like, people who are bad, people who are just toxic or whatever, whatever the word is you want to use, will look at this and say, Hmm, I could live with some of this. I could do that. You know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So I'm wondering, I, I feel like maybe this needs to be tightened up because I know that's gonna happen. I know how terrible people are online. I know how terrible I am online <laugh>, you know, and I, I, I, we'll see and we'll see how this works. I, I like that they're finally doing something. It's, this is basically like a community guidelines thing. Like, they're spelling it out. They're like, look, this, these are the rules. You can break the rules, but you know, you're gonna get suspended and we'll see, you know we'll see how this really goes down.

(01:05:39):
It's possible you're doing something illegal online, whatever that might mean. And you could just lose your account after one strike. You don't even need, you don't need strikes, you know? I, I found it am amusing sad, I guess. There was a person on my site who having understood this new system, said, well, I, I don't like that you could lose your, all the Xbox content you purchased through the store. That's not cool. And it's like, wait a minute, but how far do you have to go to lose that? Like, what are you talking about? Yeah. That is a, the point of punishment is that it's punishment has consequences. Yeah, exactly. <Laugh>, right? I mean, to me that's like the point. It, it has to be strong enough that it stops you from doing the thing. It's tough though. 'cause There's always gonna be somebody's gonna game it.

(01:06:24):
Yes. And there's, I, I can't think of anything that's not gameable. And in a way, by doing it, you kind of encourage people to kind of game it, which is great. Oh yeah. Well, what you do is you set the guidelines, right? You, but you have to set the guidelines. This is a you know, like on my site I, we have a community guidelines and it's like, look, you know, stay on topic. You do this, you, I'm not gonna kick someone off the site. 'cause They can't stay on topic and the comments, right? But I, but there are people who go after the other commenters very aggressively. There are people who go after the writer of the article very aggressively. I, one of the things I have in there is about misinformation. And it's like, well, who get, who gets to decide what's misinformation?

(01:07:03):
I do <laugh>. It's my sight. And I define it as something that's not a fact. Yeah. That's presented as if it were a fact. <Laugh>, you know, like climate change isn't happening or Covid wasn't really a pandemic or that restaurant. It's not good Chinese, I understand, right? Yeah. Right. That's a fact. <Laugh> that, so Right. No, everyone, 3.5 opinion is not good. You know, everyone has opinions. I mean, that's fine and you can disagree and all that stuff, but it's, you know, we're okay with you being wrong. It's fine. The point is, you have whatever the rules are, you can agree with 'em and disagree. We can debate 'em, it's fine. But you have to, I think this is, I agree with Leo, a hundred percent. People are gonna game this. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> taking this step of just saying, this is the deal. There are rules.

(01:07:47):
It's so important. Yeah. Well, they must have always had explicit rules, but they never told us what it was. Oh, they haven't? Well, that's a, yeah. So if you go, I could go on. So imagine I turn all the microphones on and I'm running around and some guy's doing some racist something, whatever. It's so, I, I can hold down on the record button. It records the last 30 seconds. I report that guy to Xbox. Sometimes I would hear, I you hear back, thank you for your report. Just wanted to let you know we actually bumped this guy off. He's gone, I think. Wow. But you don't, I would say not nine times seven, eight times outta 10 you don't even hear, you know? Yeah. And sometimes you see the guy again, you're like, oh, well, there you go. There was one guy who made it very clear to me that he was the re he, I was the reason he lost his account on Xbox.

(01:08:32):
And he started a new account. And I was like, welcome back, <laugh>. I, I have a feeling this will be a temporary thing. Yeah. Looking forward to voting, reporting you again. Yep. To be clear, the reason you lost your account is you, is is 'cause of the way you are. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. The way you're behaving. Yep. So anyway, I find those people to be amusing, but you know, they're out there. So anyway, I'm glad, I'm glad. Before it was just kind of nebulous. Now it's at least specific. I do think they're gonna have to adjust it. Yeah. I would think just take a strike off a month or, you know, like Yeah. It's gotta be a regular people are going to curse. Right. Like, that happens. I don't think it's gonna be, I mean, I hope it's not gonna be for something like that, you know?

(01:09:12):
No, they said profanity was a strike and then they talk about a one day suspension for a strike. Yeah. But if you're, so you're paying, you're playing a mature game. Right? Right. A game that's rated m Yeah. And it will be there will be swearing curse in game. Right now the game includes swearing. Yeah. Right. So look, anyone who gets shot in a game and yells out the F word or something, I can't imagine they're gonna get a score for that. It's gonna be the people who are just like sitting there on their mic, open mic, ba, ba going on and on and on. You know, Balder's Gate three has nudity. Can I game naked?

(01:09:43):
I mean, <laugh>, I mean, yes. <Laugh>. Oh, I guess no one can tell, right? Yeah. I don't know. If you don't have a leather chair, I would say maybe <laugh>. Well that's part of the fun. Yeah. Now try to get up <laugh>. Like, you gotta leave in five minutes. You're like, I need more than that to get off of this chair. So it's gonna take a little while. It's gonna take, yeah. It's like removing a bandaid. That's one of the old Xbox Beta stories. Or not the Xbox. What was the, what was the three D Gizmo Now the name just jumped out. My three D fx? No, the, the, the bar that you put on top of the Xbox for Oh, the Connect motion capture. Yeah. The connect in the beta of the connect, because there's is a camera on it when they're still trying to figure out the model work.

(01:10:24):
Well, an email went out to all the beta testers says, please do not play naked <laugh>, we can see you, please. Yeah. Yep. Wait, and we need to see you. Like, it's part of our jobs and we're not enjoying it. And we really like, our job is tough enough already. Please don't do this to us. Come on. Yeah. Because no offense, but the typical Xbox player, we're not, you know, we're not talking particularly athletic here. Yep. okay. What else We got? Game, pass. Pass. Yeah. So second half of August is actually looking pretty good. There's only for Game Pass four games that they've announced. Two are of interest to me. So one is a game I've already played through Firewatch. It's gonna be on all the platforms. This is a fantastic game. If you have game pass, please go check it out.

(01:11:14):
The other one is called the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Which, which is kind of interesting. You can play. What's it about again? Well, you're either killing or being killed is the you can play both sides of the chainsaw, I guess. Is that true? Say it. You can, that's fun. You'd be leather face or you can be one of the would be victims and maybe beat by their face. I guess that's, this is following up like a, remember the Friday, the 13th game came up two, three years ago. It's supposed to be really good. I couldn't get into it. I'm kind of a big fan of stupid horror movies, but I di I just didn't really enjoy it. But they got some licensing thing happened, I think possibly related to the movies, actually. 'cause There's some debate over who owns what. Like, that game just kind of disappeared, unfortunately.

(01:11:55):
Like it just drops off. Actually, I Georgia Dow challenged me mm-hmm. <Affirmative> to play The Exorcist game on the Quest. Apparently it's terrifying. Okay. And she said, I said, I'm not gonna be, it's a game. I, it's not scary. She said, sure, I dare you to do this on camera. So at some point we're gonna set it up and I'm gonna Oh, nice. Okay. Play this game on camera. And, and I'm gonna scream <laugh>. I I have embarrass myself. I had never been more scared than it was 1993, probably whenever Doom first came out. And I had my big headphones on playing it on my computer. And Stephanie walked over to tap me on the shoulder to say she was gonna bed. And I screamed like a little girl. <Laugh>. I, she scared the living daylights out of me. So, I mean, I, I guess it can happen. I, or it does, it certainly has happened.

(01:12:46):
I'm trying to think of the game that scared us. Not there was a game that I had already stopped playing unless I, and well, I played it during the day. Like, 'cause you tended to I would game late at night. Yeah. Headphones on. Right. And that just, the sound effects and stuff just got to me. And I'm like, Nope. I'm only playing this game during the day. <Laugh>. It's, it's messing with my sleep. I'm going to put my back to the wall and use the speakers on the computer and not headphones. And halflife when those suckers jump out the, oh yeah. Yep. Nowhere to jump face jump scares. All good. Jump jump scares to the best. Yeah. Can't really go wrong with that, can you? Alright. What else? Yes. Was that all the Game Pass titles? Are there more?

(01:13:27):
No. The, there's one last thing. This is just sort of semi-related. I actually Xbox, but Netflix, which you may know, has launched mobile games through their mobile app, which I don't like. I wish that was a separate app. But I get what they're doing has announced that they're going to, well they've started a beta, so they are going to do a cloud gaming service, meaning they're gonna stream games to mobile devices over the internet, which has not worked well for most <laugh>. Yeah. That's never, yeah. The internet. That's never catching on. Well, it's, it's a le it's, so Leos is, you know, Starfield. So Starfield ISS type again, I think will be okay. The two, I don't only, I know one of the two games are, beta testing is called Oxenfree. It's a famous game. This is not a fast action game.

(01:14:09):
And this is the type of thing I think that would stream pretty well actually. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So we'll see what the, I don't quite understand. I would just download the damn thing. I don't get it. I think Netflix is just trying to find revenue streams. 'cause The studio thing's just not worked out that well for 'em. Yeah. And, and you've gotta footprint in people's homes. Sell 'em as many things as you can. I just don't get it because, you know, I know that's not how we know Netflix. So Yeah. It is just a question of do they survive if they don't diversify? Right. Like that's the real threat here. They pivot once before. In fact, they're, now, they're just now killing the red net. You know? That's right. Two weeks. But if you're going to, you know, Disney, like, if you're, that's what they, you'd have to be afraid of.

(01:14:46):
Right, right, right. Well, Disney, that is always Disney gonna be, well Disney. So Disney raising prices, Disney going after account sharers. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> or Disney, you know, Disney is, you know, figuring out what every, what everyone else figured out, which is like, we have this big audience. We need to monetize 'em better. Yes. And we have the largest studio set. We have the sort largest set of products. We're no longer selling it to these other companies. We're gonna keep it for ourselves. Is that enough? One Delorian, you know, Marvel and Star Wars great. But I mean, don't you wanna watch something else? Maybe not. Maybe, maybe I do, but maybe. Well, and so we're gonna talk about streaming services when we get to the back of the book. And, and Disney is my example of I don't really need this. Yes. You know, so it depends.

(01:15:26):
So you have little kids recognizing that Demolition Man was the ref. It was a fundamental reference for the 21st century. You know, and there's a great quote in Demolition Man when they're about to go to, to the restaurant and slice loans all confused about, we're we're going to Taco Bell. And he goes, oh, you don't know about the restaurant war, the 2034. Yes. All the restaurants are Taco Bell. This is, so I always confuse demolition Man with judge Dread for some reason. But yes, those well, it's Scott Stallone in him. Those competing visions of the future are beautiful. Yes. But you just reminded me of my favorite Fufu Ram joke, which is that that guy goes a thousand years in the future, whatever goes to his ba or he has to pay for something. And he is like, you know, pays with a credit card.

(01:16:02):
He's like, oh, sorry, sir. We MasterCard went outta business in 27 18. He's like, oh, do you take Visa? He's like, no, visa went outta business in 3015 or whatever. It's like, okay. How about Discover? It's like, sorry, we don't take Discover <laugh> <laugh>. It's like, like Discover somehow has survived Still alive, but no one still takes it. It's just beautiful. Perfect. Yeah. But it, to me, it seems like all streaming services one should eventually be Disney like that. Oh, don't, so I, I don't think so. Bob Iger iss about to sell it off for parts. Oh boy. Wow. We'll talk about, we'll talk about it. Yeah, it's in your back book and we're gonna get to the back of the book in a bit. But first it's time. How exciting to get our chatters involved. Now, if you are in the club Twit Discord, I've opened the stage.

(01:16:50):
So head over to that live stage over there. Kevin has raised his hand. You see raise your hand and I will I will invite you onto the stage, but that doesn't, that's not the only people who can participate. We also have, of course, just the best people. Well, those are the ones who give us money. We also have the I r C. And if you want to join us in the I R C I will do a dramatic reading of your question. Oh, that's what that was for. Okay. <laugh>. Because they're using Telnet or something. Yes. <laugh>. For those of you, you think Telnet. Yeah. I will do a dramatic reading. If you're on dial up, I will translate your question in real time. I'm glad as it comes in. I, well, you know what, I see you Kev. He raised his hand fast. So let's invite him up on the stage. And Kev Brewer will from the uk, I just like his accent. We will ask the first question anything you want. It could be about Brown liquor. It can be about Call of Duty Paul Thora and Rich Campbell. It's an ask me anything. Well, yeah. Go ahead, Kev. Hello, Kev.

Speaker 3 (01:17:58):
Hi. How are you? We're great. You well?

Leo Laporte (01:18:00):
Yes. How are you? Good.

Speaker 3 (01:18:02):
I have a question about the intimate future of Windows 12 and the new devices that they must be bringing out to make that work. I e NPUs for one, for the AI side, but also given that Microsoft are also moving into the sustainability area and putting replaceable parts in their kit. Now, do you think they're also going to start thinking about replaceable batteries for their new laptop?

Leo Laporte (01:18:28):
<Crosstalk>? They may not have choice.

Speaker 3 (01:18:31):
Well, there's the point means they're completely designed. What do you think?

Leo Laporte (01:18:36):
I think Go ahead. Go ahead brother. I think it's a hundred percent achievable. We've seen replaceable batteries work in a lot of scenarios before. There is a risk to lose a certain amount of power capacity. But I also think folks will just take a slightly thicker machine to do this. There's gonna be a great aftermarket for replacing batteries too, but mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it is a forcing function. Like we have to have someone like the EU come in saying, Nope, you've gotta do this, or you can't sell 'em this marketplace. And then the reality is everybody else gets the benefit because they're only gonna make one. There's no two ways, you know, two ways about that. I, let me ask you a question though, KEF. 'cause I think in our twit community, Paul, I think, I'm sorry, big D is his handle in the, our twit community said that there were in fact exceptions on the battery law that would allow if you have, if you have more than 500 cycle chart, if you keep 80% after 500 cycles, there are a few exceptions that might actually eliminate laptops Well and mean that it's only only phones that have to worry about this place, but related.

(01:19:39):
Well,

Speaker 3 (01:19:40):
It's gonna have to happen.

Leo Laporte (01:19:41):
Yeah. If it should happen, right? It's laptop manufacturers just agree to do this because it's a good idea, right? Yeah. It's more likely there'll be repairable rather than the old style where you pop it off the bottom at first. I mean, I think that's gonna be the step and we'll see if we get all the way to where it needs to be. But I, I don't really think repairable is enough. I think user serviceable is the goal, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I mean, re repairable means it's not glued that you, right, that's right. That a lay person with normal tools like a screwdriver could replace it. Yep. Go back and look at some of the early I dunno, s fix it or whatever, those videos where they they jerry rig or whatever, they tear things apart and look at some of the early surface devices, like early surface laptop or whatever, and all of the glue and tape and nonsense. And it's, it, it's, you destroy the device just to get at some of the innards, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, especially if it was like an Alcantara device or whatever. I think this is, I think this is one of the best things that's ever happened. I think it's going to, I think this is going to keep progressing over time. I think it's, I think it is gonna

Speaker 3 (01:20:44):
Get to, well, they've got history, haven't they on this because their nine 50 windows phone had a replaceable battery mm-hmm. <Affirmative> if they take the back off and stick it in.

Leo Laporte (01:20:54):
Well, all the old phones did. It was one of

Speaker 3 (01:20:55):
The thing that did

Leo Laporte (01:20:56):
It. Yeah. I love that. I think I told the story a couple shows ago. Yeah. The old, the first windows phones Samsung focus. Mm-Hmm. I would drop this thing all the time. Four pieces would fly apart, put, pop it all back together. <Laugh>. Yes. True. It was wonderful. Like, I, I loved it. I mean, I loved that. And, and I would buy Samsung phones and two extra batteries just be, of course, then the battery life wasn't great, so you'd have an extra battery and launch down swap, but you carry around this tiny little thin battery in your pocket. It was great. And this is like, there's a whole massive conversation you could have that that starts off, the iPhone was so great that we gave up all day battery life. We gave up removable batteries. We gave, we gave up all this stuff because the, the sum total of that thing that they offer was so great. But, you know, I think over time you realize we could still have that, there's no mm-hmm. <Affirmative> valid reason that, that Well, the only ment is you'll have slightly less battery life or a slightly larger, slightly device, slightly figured device. Which honestly, at this, this point, it's like,

Speaker 3 (01:21:53):
I don't think anybody mind a slightly if they could ask

Leo Laporte (01:21:56):
Frank. I don't think so. The, well,

Speaker 3 (01:21:57):
I think it's just silly.

Leo Laporte (01:21:59):
Yeah. And I think there was a window there where the, the polymer battery, the flexible battery really did make such a big difference. But that window passed, we now have enough battery life or, or cable having enough battery life. This is removal batteries. Just don't, this is Kevin we're talking to, right? That's right, Kevin. Is that right? Yeah. Kevin, I have a question for you. Why is your background better than all of our backgrounds? It looks, this camera's better <laugh>. Look how good it looks. Oh my God. What's what's, what's happening? This, you look like you're a professional, like broadcast Andrew

Speaker 3 (01:22:30):
Also my work desk. Well, I, I have been like in the game for quite a lot of years. Like <laugh>, you, I've done radio, I've done television. I write nowadays because it's just easier as you know, I'm gonna go spend 16 hours on a film crew on a set somewhere in the middle of nowhere and wondering how the hell I'm gonna get back to the hotel and find that the restaurant's closed at nine o'clock. Right. That kind of stuff. So yeah, I've just put three lights up. This is just a reflected light with a tiny little 20 quid light on the back wall, which is white's had to change that color. I've got a white one, about 45 degrees ahead of me and above me, I've got a ring light. And that's all I needed. My,

Leo Laporte (01:23:10):
Oh my God. Have more lights in this studio. <Laugh>. So you're making me look bad. And I think all of us and you stop. Just stop. <Laugh> <laugh>. I, I will carry you. Look great. That was who's, what's your internet bandwidth, Kevin? And that's another thing, right?

Speaker 3 (01:23:24):
I'm on a 500 up.

Leo Laporte (01:23:27):
Yeah, there you go. 500 up. That'll do it. It's all about the hundred up. That'll do it. Geez. That's how I can tell you. Don't look. Five,

Speaker 3 (01:23:32):
Five down. Sorry. Not five. Oh, it's 35. 30.

Leo Laporte (01:23:36):
40. Up 40. Oh, okay. There you go. That's, that's the r c normal. Actually it's, it's down 25 up. Like are you serious <laugh>? Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:23:44):
I did want to go to big gig. They're asking too much money for that.

Leo Laporte (01:23:48):
Where, where in the UK are you from? Oxford. I thought you maybe, I don't

Speaker 3 (01:23:51):
Know. No, I mean, Nottingham.

Leo Laporte (01:23:52):
Nottingham, that's right.

Speaker 3 (01:23:53):
Nottingham robbing Hood land. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:23:56):
Yeah. I have

Speaker 3 (01:23:57):
Might the center of the country. I'm three hours from anywhere that matters.

Leo Laporte (01:24:01):
I've been to the Oak. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:24:04):
Oh, the old Sherwood. Yeah. It's a major oak.

Leo Laporte (01:24:06):
Yeah. In the Sherwood Forest. Is it still standing?

Speaker 3 (01:24:09):
Oh yes. It's still standing. Nice. In fact, they've just completed 9 million rebuild of the visitor center up there. So it's all glass and sustainable wood and everything

Leo Laporte (01:24:18):
Almost makes you believe Robinhood was real, doesn't it? <Laugh>

Speaker 3 (01:24:21):
Almost almost

Leo Laporte (01:24:22):
Went Philadelphia. A

Speaker 3 (01:24:24):
Statue three is not a castle.

Leo Laporte (01:24:28):
<Laugh>. Hey, it's great, Kevin. You're a great member of our community. We're very glad always to have you in the participation.

Speaker 3 (01:24:34):
Love the network.

Leo Laporte (01:24:35):
Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thanks for joining us. No problem. He's also You're welcome.

Speaker 3 (01:24:40):
See you guys. Thanks

Leo Laporte (01:24:41):
Kevin. Yeah. Yeah. It's Kev Brewers on Mastodon. I'm gonna invite specialist first class Casey of the 91st. Something, something, something. Casey, what is the what is the 91st Ss f g Stand for Wow.

Speaker 4 (01:24:59):
Special Forces Group.

Leo Laporte (01:25:01):
Are you Special Forces?

Speaker 4 (01:25:04):
This is a gaming sim <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:25:07):
<Laugh>. You're the guy with the strikes. Okay, now we got it.

Speaker 4 (01:25:12):
I'll know. I I never go Rambo <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:25:16):
Welcome and thanks,

Speaker 4 (01:25:17):
Liz. And, and the sim is a, sim is playing with others, not Paul style.

Leo Laporte (01:25:24):
There you go. Okay. That's right. Well that's right. I take the team out of Team Deathmatch. I

Speaker 4 (01:25:30):
Was watching Office Hours yesterday, and a question came up that I think is pertinent, particularly for Paul at about 55 minute mark in which they were talking about world market shares of various video conferencing software. Yeah. Now I have, I have no way to verify the numbers, but they had Zoom at 55%. Teams at 21 go to at 13. Webex nine, RingCentral, six meet five, FaceTime three, Skype, three Facebook Messenger, less than 1%. And I found it amazing that there was a certain company that was completely missing from the list that seems to have had some antitrust discussion in the last few weeks, all, and I was sort of wondering what your thoughts were.

Leo Laporte (01:26:22):
Which company is that? <Laugh>? well, I think it's interesting that Google isn't in there and way Yeah. No. Google meets there and Teams was there. Oh, gig Meet was there. So I Teams was Teams that Google represented. Yeah. Teams is teams Skype or Microsoft. I'm, I, my understanding was that Zoom was about 50%. So that kind of, it sounds, it sounds right. You know what, the interesting thing in that stat is that WebEx is Slack. Well, so low. Yeah. That WebEx, which used to be the dominant form of, or that GoToMeeting was even in there. <Laugh> still somehow <laugh>. Well, no, I mean, I find I, we've kind of talked around this a little bit, but it's, it, it is interesting when the pandemic happened, Microsoft should have ran with Skype at that time. Yeah. They were pushing teams so heavily, they just couldn't scale back, you know, step back from that Cliff.

(01:27:12):
And Teams is a horrible brand for consumers, for obvious reasons and whatever. But it's it's interesting to me, which companies did benefit Zoom, right. Was the big one. And which didn't. And I use the example of Slack with regards to that antitrust case in in Europe. And I've only, I mean in my Richard's probably done this a lot more than I have. I've only used Slack one time to do this kind of a call. It's not, it's for some reason just not Slack experiences. They call it a huddle in Slack. Yeah. I hate that term, that term. And we use it sometimes for intercompany calls because we're in Slack. We're living in Slack, and you press a button, it says huddle, and then you have a call. So I think that's the main purpose of that is not so much to do.

(01:28:00):
Yeah. let's have a meeting. 'cause I mean, it's more like in intercompany calls, teams, teams benefited greatly. I had written an article where, I don't remember the numbers now, but like right at the start of the pandemic teams had, I'm gonna just guess and say like 30 million users or something. And then you, you spit out yourself on the other side. It's like four oh million people or whatever, whatever you say, 300 million. It's like, I, and look, let's be fair to them, they added a ton of features literally every month during that timeframe. It's not like they sat still on it. But I do feel like Slack kind of dropped the ball. And, you know, part of the problem there is the same problem Netscape had, which was Yeah, yeah. Belligerent and, you know monopolist over here beating you to death with all their power and money, but you also screwed up yourself too.

(01:28:44):
And in this, in the same way that, you know, Netscape was purchased by a a o l for billions of dollars. Slack was purchased by Salesforce for billions of dollars. And I mean, normally that's when investment happens and you see the product explode. And I'm not saying Slack didn't, I mean, I'm not a Slack expert, but it's weird. It's weird to me. They didn't come out better. You know, it's too bad Microsoft. It's weird to them. That's why they would go after Microsoft <laugh>. Yeah. Microsoft did, you know, Microsoft did this thing that nobody noticed or cared about in both Windows 10 and 11, where there was basically a Meet Now feature that was a way to, without an account, start a call, talk to anyone in anywhere in the world, you could send 'em a link. They didn't have to have, you know, Microsoft accounts or anything.

(01:29:28):
They could be on any device. It was a very nice thing and it just didn't go anywhere. You know, just, you know, zoom just, I, I can't explain Zoom's ascendants during the pandemic because it was one of many things that did the same thing, but Zoom. Yeah. They just, it was super easy. You didn't need an account. They gave you 40 minutes free, you know, like they did a lot. Right? Yeah. And, and then when it, when horrible things were happening with it, I thought they addressed it pretty quickly too. Yep. Like, they really did work hard to make it hard for people to hijack your, your call and stuff. But, but be honest, I don't think any of us knew at the beginning of the pandemic thought, oh, here comes Zoom. Everybody's gonna be using it. Right. That, that's, that's kinda my point was outta nowhere. It really was. I don't know there will ever understand it. It had a, a nice short brand, I guess. I mean, but Skype, same number of letters. Am I wrong? Yeah. But like, I, I don't know. I think it's gotta be ease of use. I really do. And I, I don't know why, but what do you use Casey?

Speaker 4 (01:30:28):
I use Skype and primarily Zoom.

Leo Laporte (01:30:31):
Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. It's just a default. And that, you know, there's a natural network effect because you've gotta use the same thing that the other person's using. It's like messaging. Yeah. And so if everybody you're talking to is using Zoom, you're just gonna use Zoom. And I think that that's how it snowballed. I will say it does. I mean, I, I use a lot of, I use Slack and Teams and Skype and, you know what's WhatsApp and whatever. But zoom is the only one that remembers my settings every time. Yeah. like one of the enduring frustrations of teams is that at least twice a week I'll sign in and he, someone can't hear me. I can't hear them. And it's like, guys, nothing has changed here. Nothing. Yeah. But it just, it can't. And, and Zoom does a great job with that.

(01:31:16):
And maybe that's part of the ease of use. I think, you know, when the world is falling apart and things are going bad and something doesn't work, software is like, I'm moving on to the next thing. You know, I don't have time for this. You know, maybe that's, I I still can't, I still can't logically explain it. It does work. Well, we're using it right now. Yep. Yeah. I mean, the whole company runs on Zoom now. It used to run on Skype. Casey, what game are you playing? That's right. That you're in the Special Forces group.

Speaker 4 (01:31:46):
It, it's arm of three, but the game right now is a certain d and d related game that seems to be

Leo Laporte (01:31:55):
Popular. Right. I have I was late to work work yesterday. 'cause I was trying to get out of the spaceship in Balder's Gate three. Is that the, is that the one you're, you're talking about Casey <laugh>. You gotta get I like that. It is, I like everyone. It's tough. It's a good game. It's like a primer on d and d all of a sudden. It's like, yeah, it's D and d isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's turn

Speaker 4 (01:32:18):
Based. It's weird. Well, I, I've played, I played d and d for more than 50 years, so

Leo Laporte (01:32:23):
Yeah. So you feel comfortable with it. I mean, you, you like outta the box, you go, oh, I get what's going on and all that. See, I'm not a d and d guy, so I'm learning.

Speaker 4 (01:32:33):
Hmm. Well, sort of. Yeah. It, it's, it's not easy, but it's

Leo Laporte (01:32:38):
Fun. I'm enjoying it.

Speaker 4 (01:32:40):
Well done. Well, well done gang.

Leo Laporte (01:32:42):
Have you gotten outta the alien ship? I bet you have.

Speaker 4 (01:32:45):
Oh yeah. I'm, I'm exploring and <laugh>. I'm, I'm right now in a in a Crip trying to not get killed. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:32:55):
Have you played it yet, guys? Paul Rich, have you? Well, I know. No, you're gonna learn what I'm playing soon. That's gonna be in the back. It's

Speaker 4 (01:33:01):
Not a first person shooter, Paul.

Leo Laporte (01:33:03):
No. Yeah, it's turn based. It's so weird for me to, you know, you do your thing and then you have to say, okay, turn. And then, you know, the, well, that's, that's the whole D d d. It's d d yeah. Experience. It's term based. Hey Casey, thank you. You're a regular too in our discord. I thank you for your support as a club tot member and for all your contributions in the Discord. We really appreciate it.

Speaker 4 (01:33:28):
Thanks for answering my question.

Leo Laporte (01:33:29):
Yeah, thanks. Casey Jr. Has one for you in the I r c. So I will read this, which is not JR my JR. <Laugh> Jr. Rafael, I don't think could be Leo. I need a Windows 10 or 11 lap tablet. Sorry, 10 to 12 inches, hopefully less bucks than Surface. I need my Excel V B A macros to work. Do you have any suggestions? Yeah, I, I mean surface devices have gotten a little bigger over the years. Like the surface pro is 13 ish inches now, you know, from whatever. But honestly, this is gonna, you said no surface, but I would look at the refurbished store at Microsoft. Oh, yeah, that's, that's a good idea. Microsoft Store idea, actually. Yeah. And get a, you know, a couple of generations old version of Surface. I wouldn't recommend one of the smaller Surface pro the surface tablets, like the go or whatever.

(01:34:24):
I think those are two underpowered, Intel, penem, blah, blah, blah chips. I wouldn't do that, but I would, I would look at a two gen old pro to see what those prices look like. Does Asus make Windows tablets or convertibles? I just don't know enough about the other stuff. Yeah. There was a time period where all the major PC makers were making their version of a Surface pro, right? With some kind, their version of a kickstand, their version of a clip on keyboard case, you know cover whatever their version of the pen, et cetera. I don't, I'm not sure if that, I just don't, those don't come across my desk a lot. I, most of the time I'll e either see like a traditional laptop, obviously, or like a two in one of some kind of convertible or something that can flip around and be a tablet.

(01:35:10):
But I, I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say no to Surface. I mean, I would look if you can't, if you don't wanna spend it on a, although by the way, I think the sales, I, I believe they're back to sale back to school sales still happening at Microsoft Store, so that you might be able to get a good deal. But I would look at refurbished. It's, that's how I buy half of my Apple equipment, for example. That stuff's expensive. So I've always had good results. Chicken had mentions, and I do like these, the Dell X P s two in one, which is a convertible, and I don't have the convertible version, but I do love the X P S. That's a nice platform. Yeah. But I suspect from the question, maybe he wants like a literally a tablet, tablet, you know, pen based, just a tablet. Yeah. God, they used to be those getting, they're a little harder to find. Yeah. Remember when Bill Gates said, that's the future of computing? Remember that? Yeah. We should have known that. That was not the answer, but right when he said it, yeah. That's not gonna happen. Bill. yeah, handwriting. I <laugh>, you know, raise your hand if you wanna talk. Joe Esposito. We love Joe. He designs our stickers for us in twig. Yes. And he is on the line in the Discord. Hi, Joe.

Speaker 5 (01:36:24):
So actually it's sort of related to what Paul was just saying because he was talking about how the devices were getting bigger and I was always interested in the studio, which they stopped with the studio too, right. They haven't done anything so far

Leo Laporte (01:36:35):
Since that with a giant Yeah, we'll see. Yep. Is

Speaker 5 (01:36:38):
Do you think there's any chance that comes? 'cause As an artist, I mean, I don't know if I would ever be able to afford it, but man, I want one of those things. I always thought it was such a neat form factor. Such a neat device.

Leo Laporte (01:36:47):
Yeah. Well Padre did this right? That one of the problems with that is they had some low lackluster parts and you could upgrade your SSD from, you know, I will mail you <laugh> surface one because I loved it. We had it and it was great. So here, here's the, it's, it's a little underpowered for na for today. I think we always wanted Microsoft to come up with a surface studio screen. Right. Whatever they call that. Just computer. Just I don't have the details on this. I just saw the headline, looked at it briefly and moved along. But Dell, I think just today announced a 27 inch display U S B C that comes down just like the Surface Studio and does touch. So like that, that's, it's gonna be probably it Sure it's 16 by 10, not three by two and all that kinda stuff. But I, I never understood why we didn't have standalone displays that worked like a surface studio. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so it's possible that the still display might, I don't know, sort of meet you halfway to what you're looking for, but

Speaker 5 (01:37:45):
Well be great. It's probably, I mean, I use the iPad primarily now, but I mean, it's, it's a small device, so I end up having to zoom in a lot. It's just not made for working. It's, it's fine if you work small scale, not Right. Made for working large scale. And I tend to work large scale, so it'd be great to have something like that. I always thought the studio. Yep. Because I remember I went to one of the Adobe Maxes and they, I think they had one with the dial on it, all this different Dodge Tech stuff

Leo Laporte (01:38:06):
On it. I was like, like, whoa, this is so cool. This is amazing. It was so cool. It was,

Speaker 5 (01:38:09):
It was great. And then just kind of died off almost like Windows foam, where I wish they, I think try that again.

Leo Laporte (01:38:14):
<Laugh>. Well, it's, it's a bit like, I know they

Speaker 5 (01:38:16):
Won't, I know they

Leo Laporte (01:38:17):
Won't. What's the surface hub? It's, I think it might've been a victim of the pandemic a bit. And you know, we were looking for more, more basic computing <laugh> I think during that timeframe. So, we'll see. I, Brad just brought this up. I, it's possible we will see a new Surface studio at some point. Possibly. That'd great.

Speaker 5 (01:38:34):
Because I love that thing. I mean, I think it was

Leo Laporte (01:38:35):
<Crosstalk>. We should have announcements in October, right? I've been holding out for announcements in October. Yeah. Yeah. 'cause I need new laptop. It will be something this fall. Yep, yep. Okay. Ooh, we need an event. Will they be doing an event do you think? <Laugh>? We need, we need a couple more events. Microsoft's spotty on the, you mean like an in person event? Or It doesn't have to be in person just like, like an Apple event. You know, recorded is fine. I, we, we thought we would be doing about 12 events one a month. Right. And we've only, they they've been kind of scammed. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. People just aren't doing events like they used to. They're not doing trade shows. Well, because they save money for three years. They're like, you know what? Yeah, we don't need to do this. Like, what? Yeah. A lot of production. They're expensive. Joe, what's the name of your where do you have a website for your art and all that stuff? I want to give you a plug. 'cause You do those great, these great stickers for us in Twig.

Speaker 5 (01:39:22):
Yeah. The, the easiest address is just ozone art foundry.com. If you go there, that's my art site. And that will show you different stuff. Nice. that I do and have links to things. So that's the easiest one that has kind of the work that I've been working on currently is not,

Leo Laporte (01:39:37):
You know, I would show people, but I brought the stickers home. I'm putting 'em on my laptop. Oh,

Speaker 5 (01:39:40):
There's more stickers coming. Oh God, this week in Google. I have a tease this week in Google. I have what might be one of my best ones yet based on Jeff Jarvis. I have to admit, I'm pretty proud of it. So stay tuned for that. If you wanna see something that only a pool would come

Leo Laporte (01:39:52):
Up with coming up. Yeah. And actually a big announcement coming up on this week in Google from Stacy. So we will, we will share that with you. This is the these are the stickers that we've got so far. Mr. Pruitt seal of approval. Now that's legit. Lemme get my my Korean barbecue outta the way and I'll show you the closeups of these here. That's legit. There's <laugh>, Mr. Pruitt seal of disapproval. No thank you, sir. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, Stacey Higginbotham's, bougie seal of approval. <Laugh>. Oh man. I keep deleting the wrong thing. I'm, I'm putting the U R L for that Dell monitor and that thing. Ilet. Oh, good, good. It's 24 inches, not 27. I'm sorry. And that's okay. O f me Go bore a hole. That's, I think you could, maybe we could get one with the poll in there. Sure. Or something about the Chinese restaurant. I don't know. I'm just thinking, I'm just thinking just thinking spit balling here,

Speaker 5 (01:40:49):
Joe. I'm sure I can come up with something. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:40:51):
We love having you in our discord. Thank you for all you do for the club. Sure. thank you for asking the question, member. We appreciate it. Thanks, Joe. Thanks for listening to me. Yeah. Take care guys. Take care. Thank you. You guys wanna do one more or how do, how do you feel? Sure. Absolutely. You're feeling good. Let me check just one more time on the I R C Intel event is stand September 19th. Keith, five 12 says, so maybe Microsoft's waiting for Intel to announce a new chip that they can then use then like, use incorrectly and have to have recalls and stuff. Yeah. Maybe I dunno. Hey, Sean is on the line. Hi, Sean. Our club TWIT members welcome in the Discord. Oh, look, we've even got a blue screen shot of Sean. You know, Sean, when you do that, anybody can put anything they want behind you.

Speaker 6 (01:41:49):
I, yeah, I'm aware of that. I'm a sign language interpreter by trade, so that's why I have the blue

Leo Laporte (01:41:54):
Backdrop. Oh, so cool. Nice. So they actually do embed you in videos. That background is a, is a, is a, is a key. Yeah. It's a chroma key. Oh yeah. It's

Speaker 6 (01:42:04):
Cool. It's chroma key. Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (01:42:05):
<Affirmative>. Oh, that's so cool. Guys. What can we,

Speaker 6 (01:42:08):
Yeah, so yeah, I would love to try to solve some of team's identity issues. So I do some work with <laugh>, Microsoft and some of their vendors. Oh, I already after <laugh>.

(01:42:21):
So they constantly adjust things. And I have to reset all of my video settings because obviously teams has a different viewing format than Zoom or other video conferencing solutions. Zoom keeps everything the same. It's easier to just, people just send me a link. I'm able to join their meetings and interpret. Whereas if it's Windows related, I have to log in using their secure stuff and I constantly have to restart my, my computer several times to finally get in. Is there any solution from you guys on how to solve the identity issues when it comes to using Microsoft Teams?

Leo Laporte (01:43:02):
When you say identity issues, you mean user account identity, like settings. Settings. Like his settings every time he has. Yeah. Or, or you mean your little I

Speaker 6 (01:43:09):
Have to constantly switch both <laugh>, because what happens is it'll, I have to, I have to log in with a personal Microsoft account, and then I have to log in using Microsoft's account that for certain things. Yep. And it'll never save my settings. I have to constantly,

Leo Laporte (01:43:29):
Well, it's never gonna save. I can tell you that's never going to mm-hmm. <Affirmative> <laugh>. That's never, that's no, this is I with device just talking about the device part of it. I, I, I feel very strongly there should be a setting. It's in teams that says if this device is present for audio or video or speaker or whatever, always use this device. Preach. Yes. I don't care what the OS is saying, I don't care what, you know, whatever. And I, it, that doesn't, that's not a thing. <Laugh>, that's not how it does things. I, it just doesn't work. But I, I, I have u I have mixed and matched teams between M S A and worker school accounts successfully. But I don't, but I'm trying to think. But I, I guess I never really needed those settings. I'm trying to think The usual crisis, just view an event, you know?

(01:44:17):
Yeah. I mean, the usual crisis is you have an M s a account with a, with an email address, and then you've used that same email address for an A a D. Yeah. That, which is a, just, then it's, it's a que the machines gets to guess like, what account are we playing with today? Yep, yep. I assume you're not doing that, I hope. In other words, you, you have a, like a, an a a D account, and then you're like, oh, I'll make this an M S A and the therefore bork everything you're ever gonna do for the rest of your life. I hope it's usually the other way around. Because a, a D is newer. Like you've got an old, you use that old usual <crosstalk>. Well, both directions are a problem. <Laugh>. Yes. So for the same reason or for similar reasons.

(01:44:58):
Cool. I mean, I was in, I literally was in red yesterday and was talking to a VP who I'll remain nameless, and I said, am I wrong? He said, identity at Microsoft, the third rail of Microsoft <laugh>. And you, it's where s been to die. It's, yeah. This is the multiple A, I want to transfer two MSAs into one, or I wanna be able to flip between two MSAs. And this is, could there be, but this is crazy idea, like a registry. You know how you could double click a registry file and it changes things could, there is, is maybe teams doesn't, or even like a custom launch script or something that launch teams with a certain you should be able to say, this is my settings file, and I want you to use this, and this is how I launch teams.

(01:45:43):
Or every time I launch teams or whatever. It seems like there should be a way to automate that or a PowerShell script. Yeah. How, that's the question is how is there, is how automatable is teams, how, yeah. I would say that I've, with regards to success with a machine that I built from scratch as an M 365 machine, so that as I was setting it up, I, we have that option to log into your a e d account from the beginning. Like the main workstation now was set up that way and a lot less pain. And not say no pain, but less pain. So, but if you literally have to use two account, I mean can I assume a web-based version of teams is not cutting it?

Speaker 6 (01:46:26):
No. Microsoft will not let us use the web-based version because it, it degrades the video too much.

Leo Laporte (01:46:31):
Yeah, of course. Right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm sure you're working with Microsoft on that. It is worth a tech support call <laugh>. Yes. Yes. Guys are pretty good with that. It's funny because you're doing this with Microsoft. Yeah. And the woman on the other end of the phone's gonna say, I have never reached the end of the flow chart before, sir, but it just happened. <Laugh>. you know, like it's, I I don't, I'm sorry. This is just one of the weird Yeah. I, but I do know of folks Achilles or whatever folks in the system in space that did a p ss s forward identity crisis like this. And they did something. I couldn't even tell you what they did, and it was better. So you might be worth your time to go, go down that path. And just, they can sometimes untangle accounts, they can't even figure out a way to have a personal account and a commercial account in teams on the desktop in the same app. Right. I mean, I, I I just feel like they've,

Speaker 6 (01:47:21):
And that that's the issue.

Leo Laporte (01:47:23):
Yeah. They've been working around it, I think. 'cause You could do it on mobile and I s I mean, I can't imagine, well, <laugh>, I mean iPhones and Android phones have great cameras. I mean, it's, I I is mobile an option? I don't even, I don't know.

Speaker 6 (01:47:41):
Not, not for how we use it. Yeah. You know, 'cause basically what they're doing is the producers on the other end they're basically taking screenshots of our team's feed and then feeding it into some more stuff on their end so that it produces a final video. So we'll be interpreting some of their internal and external events.

Leo Laporte (01:48:03):
Okay. Yeah. I, I, I think this is just a weird limitation of teams right now. It's, I, and I do think it's related to my devices issue that I keep bringing up, where it's just it, there, it's really good in certain areas and they just have these weird blind spots. But like Richard said, identity's been a problem for Microsoft broadly for however long there's been identity. Mm. Well, really, at Microsoft, it really only really became a problem when Azure came along. Like, yeah, once Azure came in and they needed a a d and it had to work a certain way. So we had a real schism of lots of people using both. Okay. Then we got, then it got really broken. I, that's when the, I mean, candiditis came up back around the time before a e d, like, it was still, it was a problem with MSAs back, whatever we called it at the time. Windows live IDs or whatever mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. yeah, I don't know. I'm sorry. I, I don't know of any good answer for this. Yeah. Other than having to sit there and manually redo it every single time, which is what happens to me about twice a week. Hey Sean, how do you, how do you know as l I appreciate you. How do you know as s l Yeah, sorry.

Speaker 6 (01:49:07):
Both my parents are deaf. So it was my first language.

Leo Laporte (01:49:10):
You're Coda?

Speaker 6 (01:49:12):
Yes. Ida

Leo Laporte (01:49:13):
Coda. Let me tell another Washington C story that makes my son is deaf and no sign language. And in the eighth Street quarter, apparently there's, oh, there's a school there for the deaf, and there's a big deaf community there. And there are businesses that are run by deaf people that have sign language signs. So it's the individual characters, right. There's a Starbucks, a pizza shop, and a couple of others. And it is as quiet as the library in those places. Lemme tell you, you <laugh> go there and it's all, if you don't, if you don't know sign language, you can write on a pad of paper to order. And there's a lot of waving that's to Yeah. It's really, it was really neat. It's a, it's kind of a neat area. I wish I knew a s l 'cause yeah, I do too. There's actually evidence that it's like learning any other language. It expands your brain. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but it expands it in a unique way. And kind of a smore of a spatial way. So, boy, that's neat.

Speaker 6 (01:50:04):
Yeah. Ass. A bi a bimodal language. So

Leo Laporte (01:50:08):
Yeah. 'cause You got the spelling finger spelling, but you also have Yeah. Gestures. Right. So not a lot of secrets with a s l though, right? You can't whisper as s l you just, you just do it under your We do,

Speaker 6 (01:50:18):
We do have whisper. We do have whisper signs in as s l

Leo Laporte (01:50:21):
Do you? No. We

Speaker 6 (01:50:22):
Refer to 'em

Leo Laporte (01:50:23):
Of people who know a s l. It's Got you. You can't really lean into someone and <laugh>, you know? Yeah. Well find, you. Find ways, I'm sure. Sean, thank you so much for being part of the club. We really appreciate it. Thanks for what you do too. I think that's really cool. You too. Yeah. we'll see you on another Windows Weekly soon. I hope I'd like to keep doing this. I think it's a lot of fun. We have great club members. Great. I r c folks. And it's always nice to get your questions in. So Please let's do this again and thank you to all the people who raise their hands. Yeah. And this should be like a regular thing at some point, like a schedule. We could do it. I think maybe the more we did it, the more likely we'd get people participating People are, it's funny, people are shy, but may, you know, people are shy.

(01:51:12):
I think I'm, I'm shy. Like, what is this episode? 800 and something and say someone else is talking to me like, oh, crap, <laugh>. You could have a submit a question mechanism too. So they don't necessarily have to be on the show, but could do that. Yeah, we could do that. I mean, I R C is is fairly anonymous, but Yeah, we could, yeah. Alright, coming up. Thank you for all the questions. Thank you for all the answers coming up in just a bit. It's time for the back of the book, back of the book time. Richard Campbell, Paul Ott. Let's kick it off with Paul with your tip of the week. Yeah. So I don't know if you guys have noticed, but everything's more expensive all of a sudden. <Laugh>. And a big part of that is the online services that we all use.

(01:51:58):
And I've been like so many people, I pay for a lot of services and I'm just gonna look at video streaming services for this one because it's there's a lot of good strategies for saving money and I need to save money. So I, I just did this this morning. I, we we're with our kids last week and to some degree our kids are still using, we're still subsidizing their lives, right? So they're using some combination of these services as well. So I actually went through every video streaming service we pay for, found out we're paying about $75 a month. And I'm not happy with that. So we're gonna get rid of some stuff, but, you know, there's some obvious kind of ways you could figure that stuff out. Like how, and so, you know, for example Disney Plus came up.

(01:52:42):
I at some point talked myself into a Disney bundle, which is like Disney plus with no ads, Hulu, no ads, and ESPN plus with ads. And with the idea being that it was cheaper. It was cheaper than just doing the two separate Disney Plus and Hulus together. But now it's 20 bucks a month and I only watch Hulu and I don't know why I'm paying 20 bucks a month for Hulu. 'cause It's pretty much Frazier, reruns and Futurama. And I like those things I guess to some degree, but I don't really watch Disney plus. So, you know, one thing obviously go through and get rid of this stuff you're not using, but I also pay for like, the most expensive tier on almost everything. So, for example, I pay for lemme see if I can find the exact name of this Netflix Premium Alter HD <laugh>, which is like four K.

(01:53:27):
Yeah. This thing's like, it's 20 bucks a month, you know? Yeah. And and, but, and that's before other people. You actually have to pay 7 99 per other person per month. Right. So for both my kids it's like 35 bucks a month. So that's gonna be changing <laugh>. The, the, the one I'm gonna get rid of first for me is Max. I don't watch it enough. It's 16 bucks a month. The tier, you can actually pay 20 bucks a month for this thing if you wanted to. Of course they're all like this. But, you know, the, the strategy I kind of came up with in my, in my brain for this, and I've never actually done partly because of the kids. 'cause They all watch different things. It's kind of hard to do. But I still think it's a good idea is you could just rotate between these things like Netflix for one or two months, Hulu for one month or something.

(01:54:15):
Go on to Max for one, you know, and just use that time to kind of binge watch everything that's on that service. Right. Because by the time you get back to it again, there'll be new content and, you know, you can kind of take it that way. I think the toughest thing for people of our age, especially 'cause we grew up with like real TV or whatever, live TV, is that it's hard not to watch things when they're brand new. But it's better, I think, to wait until they're complete and then binge the whole thing at once. And if you can get into that kind of a rhythm, it kind of takes away this notion of like you know, Thursday night must see TV or whatever we, or whatever we had back in the day. It's just like there's a new season of Narcos or whatever the show is you like.

(01:54:56):
And neat. So in three months when it's done, I'll watch the whole thing then, you know, do do that kind of thing. But man, something's gonna give. Like, it is interesting to me in this year how much stuff has escalated. And this is kind of a trend story. Financial Times did an analysis of costs as little as a year ago, a popular set of streaming services added up to a total cost of $73 a month, which was $10 less than an equivalent cable package. But because of the price increases you just noticed, including by the way, a 75% increase in Disney plus in less than a year, it's now $87. It actually costs more than basic cable. And I think, well, okay, but what some people are saying is that these companies are trying to push us toward the ad supported modeling.

(01:55:44):
Right. Netflix, that's, and I, I'm not personally interested in the ad supported tiers of anything, but I'm not either. But that's what, that's, that's, I guess that must make more money. It's a big way to save money Yeah. For you as the consumer. Well, and they, I think they want you to do this, frankly. So I didn't include like services that do live tv, but YouTube tv, which I signed up for on day one, back in the day was 35 bucks a month at launch. It's now 73.99 a month, which is over double the price, not Google's fault. Right. This is the same, the same package problem that costs cable so much money. And you know, you don't, you can't just get the show you want. You have to get a bundle of crap that is most of stuff you don't want and it drives the prices up.

(01:56:21):
But yeah, bundling. Yeah. Yeah. It, that stuff's kind of tough. But the, the central advantage there is still because every, as, as those prices went up, everyone started griping, obviously, which makes sense, but it's like, it's no better than cable or it's even more expensive than cable. But the nice thing about these things is you can drop, you can drop any of them at, at, at a moment's notice and then pick 'em back up months later if you want to. Like, cable is still a very manual process that involves point. Yeah. It's like, Ooh, you, we, we still have you on landlines and I, if you do this, it's gonna be, I ran into problems with multiple cable companies over the years, I will say with every cable company I've ever had over the years for this kind of a reason. Like I got off of Fios briefly because of this.

(01:57:03):
R C N was screwing us over at our, our previous house where I was being charged double basically per month. What they were charging new customers for the same service. It's really hard to go in and it's basically impossible. You move and you change cable and that's it. Like that's, there's no easy way around it. But with these services, you can at least go in and out. And I think that is the nice thing. And something like, I don't know the exact rules per service, but like Netflix has a rule where you close your account or you just stop paying, you know, for the subscription and you come back six months later and all your stuff is still there. So if you have a list of whatever, and you don't lose any of that stuff. So it's still very easy. It, it's portable, I guess would be the term to kind of move between those things.

(01:57:43):
I, I still think there's an advantage to that. Yeah, that's a good point. But man, it is. But there's so expensive. It is widely thought that there's a crash coming in the streaming services that the reason these prices have gone up so much is that they're, they've invested billions in, you know, Amazon Prime spent. Well, it's a a billion dollars just to get the rights to make the Lord of the Rings preco. That's right. It's expensive to make these shows. And then there's also too many esoteric little services like Paramount Plus and Peacock and Yeah. What the, what is this that fatigue is, is coming, I don't wanna subscribe to N B C. I don't even know what that is anymore. Like I, that's there's gonna be a shakeout. Yeah, we went to the, went to from the we Great bundling to the great unbundling to the great bundling again.

(01:58:30):
And yeah. Yeah. And now we're paying more. And you know, the cable companies were smart, they knew this was coming, so they raised the cost of their internet. Right. So that they would be essentially making the same amount of money. That's right. Giving you over the top axis. Yep. This is how Microsoft's gonna win in gaming with Azure. Yeah. You know, even if other companies win in video gaming, if it's all running on Azure, they're gonna win big. Yeah. Yeah. They can't, they kind of can't go wrong. And it, and you're right, everything's data in the end, right? Like the, the Yeah. These ISPs have been risk resisting this idea that it's all just data. Sell me the low lowest price. Right. I don't, it just be a pipe, you know, it's like you're a pipe. Just be a pipe. You're a pipe.

(01:59:08):
Sorry. Just Yeah. Get over it. A pipe. Yeah. And unless you pay a couple a hundred bucks a month for cable plus internet, oh, you probably cord cutting is gonna save you, isn't gonna save you money. You can be smart about it. I mean, it depends on where you are in life and what your situation is. Right. But, you know, if we were completely cut off from the kids with regards to having to worry about, my daughter likes Hulu and my son likes Netflix or whatever I think we would, I mean, we might, I feel like Nets Netflix would probably be the one I would kinda keep. You get Amazon Prime and no one watchess it anyway 'cause you pay for Prime. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, apple TV's cheap. But the other ones are like, eh, you know, I could, I could do without Hulu, I could do without, with Disney.

(01:59:48):
I could do without Max. You know, it depends on, you know, everyone's different, but I think, but the fact that you make it easy to get in and out means a new series comes out, you're already wanna watch you pay for the month, you watch it. Exactly. You'll let it go. Yeah. If you're gonna be diligent, it'll make sense. They're counting on your lack of diligence. Yeah. Just take that like, all right, we're watching the series, but we're gonna also watch whatever else this thing has. So let's catch up on how Hunters or whatever nonsense is on that thing, and just Yeah. Make month I if you Yeah. Rotate through the monthly Yep. Binge your shows. I know, I, to be clear, I've never actually done this, but I, no, I still think it's a great idea and I, I I, I think it's something we could do and will do when we finally cut the cord on our the two little leeches <laugh>, but I love so much <laugh>.

(02:00:33):
I don't sometime recently we were talking about retro gaming and I was mention, I mentioned I I was playing Doom three. Mm-Hmm. Hmm. Very vintage classic. You don't get more retro than that. Yeah. Oh, you get, you do actually, actually could. Yeah. But you go <laugh>. And one of the ways you can do it is Quake two is just, just came out as LA last year, last week rather, was the Live quake, what's it called? Quake World. Whatever. The live event they have in Texas is, they brought it back first time since the pandemic. And they as expected announced a remastered version of Quake two. And because it is owned by the Bethesda, which is owned by Microsoft, it's everywhere. Baby <laugh>. So pc, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, game Pass, Xbox, cloud gaming everywhere colored lighting much better than before.

(02:01:19):
Better resolutions. Every <inaudible>, sorry, not Quick World. Thank you. It's great. And this game you know, everyone knows Quick Doom and Doom Two, everyone knows Quake, you know, quake two doesn't get enough. I, I, a lot of people would put Quake Three Arena kind of ahead of this. Honestly, quake two is a fascinating game because came out of its software, which is a company that to this date, had only made games that were just fast, fast action, no plot, no nothing, just blow things up. Right? And this thing opens with like a theatrical intro. There's a plot. You find out why you're on the planet. There's, you're in constant communication with this other team that's telling you where to go and what to do. This puzzles. And it's, so there's all the first person action and all that great stuff. But the, this thing came on, and it's also, I should say gorgeous.

(02:02:07):
Like the, all the accessibility features are on by default. So all the text is like beautiful. And, and at first I was like, I don't need the accessibility. I turned it off. I went back to this like three 20 by two 40 gross looking pixel text. I was like, Nope, actually I do need that on. And it's instant just retro wonderfulness. Like it still plays great, looks great, looks better than ever, but it's still like, just a fun game to play, single player. And there's a new episode of multiple levels that adds onto the single player experience and a new multiplayer map as well, which I haven't looked at, but I've just been, I've just been playing through it. And it's like, yep, this game is, and you hear the, like, the sound effects and everything and the three D ness of it are amazing.

(02:02:53):
And the way the, the the stro or whatever say like, they're like trespass. And it's like, yep, I'm back, baby. It's like literally 25 years ago. Like, it's, it's, it's awesome. And it's very inexpensive. And if you're subscribing to Xbox Game Pass, it's just part of your subscription. So go get it and enjoy it on Go g wherever you play. I'm glad, I'm glad that I saw that the four K remaster and I almost almost bought it. It's, it's, it's really great to see these games survive and live on. Yeah. I really feel this is important. It's so great. Yeah. Work hard. And it's a testament to how good the gameplay was, right? Yeah. It's still fun to Doom. Doom is still fun to play. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Do Doom and Doom Two, you can get on an iPad, you can get on Android.

(02:03:38):
They, they're fun. It, it blows my mind that Quake Quake two, doom three even aren't, aren't, I don't know why these games are automobile. They should be. I think they could be. They could very effectively. Yeah. Yeah. It's a question of anyone done it. The, one of the things interesting about Quake Two, like you're talking about the cinematics part of it was that was one of the, well, it was one of the games that Romero was no longer involved in. That's right. It was a Yeah. The first one. Yeah. Yeah. And it was the other Carmac that took lead on it. The artist Carmac that did a lot of that storytelling part of it. Yeah. And, and with American be, yeah. To be fair to Right. And to be fair to John Romero, the original vision of Quake was going to be something like that. Not like this story, but it was gonna have a story in characters.

(02:04:16):
And it was going to, you know, wasn't gonna be a fast moving first person shooter. Yeah. I mean, and I recall they wanted it, they didn't want to call it Quake to like, they fought so much over the naming of the game that that was the only thing they could agree to. Sure. Well, so Unfor, so <laugh>, where we stand today this quake, the original quake, there is a, which has multiplayer and single player, but single players, there's, I mean, there's no rhyme or reason to it. You just go through these three different worlds or whatever. Quick two is this thing, space drug, you know, storyline. Fantastic. Quick three Arena, fast Moving, arcade Gamer first person shooter has nothing to do with any of the other games. Mostly multi, no. 100% multiplayer. You can only play multiplayer against bots or against people.

(02:04:54):
But that was, 'cause that was the beginning of that. They were literally experimenting with, can we make this really work? But then Quake Four comes out and it's a sequel to Quake two <laugh>. And you know, quake four is underrated. I Quake four, I had a Quake four was the first Quake game I played on Xbox. It was a Xbox 360 game at the time. And it, you know, it, I thought it was great. And and someday we'll get a new version of that too. I can't wait. So, yeah. And it is got a Conway's Law effect to it. There. It's definitely a struggle between the original founders of I Yeah. And what kinds of games he wanted to have made. And so the kind of tip turns, well, so there was a, John Carmack, if you follow him on Twitter, posted some photos of him at QuakeCon, and he shows up just as a show goer, checking out his former digs.

(02:05:33):
You know, it's like, he is like, it looks like the dude love it. Okay. And he is just a guy now, you know, but he's not, he's never just a guy. He's John, he's Carm, he always John Carmack, but you know what I'm saying, he's not right. He is, he's not the, he's not involved. He doesn't have decision making or anything. He's, you know, it's, Hey, he already made his own space program. Like he's done that, you know, he's not okay. He's, he's, he is, he's hurt himself. He'll be okay. Somehow he'll get by. Yep. Yeah. Good stuff. What is Richard coming up on Run's radio? That's what the inquiring Mind wants to know. Released earlier today in the wake of poor Recinos show last week, which has which went gangbusters brought Sidney Smith back. There's another show that I grabbed right after Build.

(02:06:12):
We met at Build and got a chance to chat with her. But Sydney's been working on PowerShell get since the beginning. So this is a package manager that you run through PowerShell. Hmm. designed for installing and managing applications. And is this related to wind get or is it not, it's an alternative to like, 'cause we don't, can't possibly have enough package managers in our life, although we do talk about that, like went from zero to two. So that's good. <Laugh>. Well, and more like 11, right? There's a bunch the but it is, it is ing see what's the strengths and weaknesses of each. But the big part here is that a PowerShell get is really just an extension module for PowerShell. So folks that like working in PowerShell, it's very easy to work with it there. The V three mission is interesting, for no other reason, it's taken almost two years to ship.

(02:07:02):
I mean, the first two came out like less than a year apart. And the what's happened, of course, is they're on GitHub and so they've been interacting with the folks that are using it. There's been issues, people contributing and so forth. And so it's really taken shape, although you will find out if you listen to the show that I get her to commit to a date, which is that it's now bundled, it's going to be part of PowerShell 7.4, which almost certainly will be released at a major Microsoft event. Which means it pretty much has to be ignite. So probably second week in November. Awesome. Sydnee Smith PowerShell gets run as radio.com. Now, the moment you've all been waiting for our brown liquor pic of the week, whiskey Time. Whiskey time, ah, you know, I just kind of went back to the well of the Buffalo Trace Distillery today.

(02:07:56):
Christine, in some ways easy and, and almost should go back and do a whole story. 'cause There's all these different lineages. You know, we talked a bit about Woodford and, and the the, the folks, the, the folks involved with Blanton's, which was an acquisition through a guy named Albert Blanton. Well, the, eh, Taylor is part of that stack as well. So the, I'm specifically referring to that, the most common version of eh, Taylor, if you can find it, is a small, is there a small batch American bourbon? It's about 50% A B V, very reasonably priced named for Colonel Edmund Haynes Taylor, who was born in Kentucky in 1832. Of course, he's the Kentucky kind of colonel. It's a, it is an honorary title. He was never involved in the military. What whatsoever. He's really just a politician, although he is a descendant of both James Madison and Zachary Taylor.

(02:08:51):
Oh. So double double presidents in his, his family, but born, raised, lived in Frankfurt, Kentucky. And so is he a, is he, when he says colonel, is it a Kentucky colonel or, he's a Kentucky colonel. He's a Kentucky colonel. Okay. Yeah. Not a military. He's a Kentucky Fried colonel. Yeah. Very much the same thing. No, no military involvement whatsoever. But as a banker, he was financing distilleries in Kentucky. Ah. And so at one point one of the, of the distilleries that he was involved with Leestown Distillery and got into financial trouble, and he bought it along with the the Carlisle Distillery, and he renamed them the old-fashioned copper distiller, O F C, which is one of the historical distilleries of the Frankfurt region. And he ended up having his own financial problems and sold it off to a well-known name in the bourbon space, a guy named George t Stag.

(02:09:45):
And so George hired eh, to run the distillery. Anyway, it was just a financial issue, not that he was doing a poor job and eventually Reed the Stag Distillery. But it's all the same location that is now known as the Buffalo Trace Distillery. So, I mean, the thing about that space, if you talk about blends and so forth, is it's a common set of stills. They have three different mash bills that they generally make bourbon with. And eh, taylor happens to come from Mash bill one, which is the low rye mash bill. So it's a little higher in barley, a little higher in corn compared to most, so tends to be not quite so spicy, a little lighter and smoother. And then they have a ton of different rec rooms, different buildings that they actually mature in. There's a famous Taylor building called Warehouse C that's when this particular issue's not necessarily aged there, they actually have a special edition they do in warehouse C, but they tend to be the wooden rick building.

(02:10:42):
So they down, they manage heat fairly heavily there. It's very warm in Frankfurt. They are prone the barrels of prone to losing water and actually rising in alcohol levels depending on the time of year. But what you're getting here is a, a lighter, smoother, small batch bourbon, easy to drink, not that expense to come by priced around 50 bucks. But part of this amazing lineage of a array of different distilleries that come outta the Buffalo Trace facility by Ach boy there, I, you know, when you look at the list of brands at Buffalo Trace, including as you mentioned before, Pappy Van Winkle, Blanton's, we've talked about I that, but I like the idea of list rye. I have to say I am kind of a wimp when it comes to this. I was gonna say, Leo, that puts hair in your chest, go for the right.

(02:11:30):
Yeah, no, I want smooth and light. I <laugh>, so I'm gonna try currently like No, you should look up no bad. They even have kosher whiskey, which is hysterical. I'm not sure why whiskey wouldn't be kosher, but maybe. Yeah. Well, it just means the rabbi's gone. Okay. It's been blessed. Yeah. And specif, especially designated kosher barrels to satisfy Passover requirements. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So if you <laugh>, if you need to drink during Passover and who doesn't, and the man of Schitz isn't gonna do it Buffalo Trace has something for you too. Wow. Wow. I'm gonna try, I don't know what to try. I've had the blands, I guess I should do the e h Taylor Junior Colonel. Yeah. No, e h Taylor find fine bottle to come by. And not that particularly difficult to find there. He's got some special edition that are very tough to find.

(02:12:21):
But that one you'll accept, you'll find in a total wine or a BevMo for 50 bucks. Oh, okay. Yeah. They have single barrel, barrel proof, straight rye, sour mesh, warehouse seed, tornado surviving <laugh>. You know, if you survive a tornado, you should have a special whiskey to celebrate it. You know, that mean I could do that story, but that is the, the building seriously damaged, takes 'em a while to pull 'em out. They get put aside and they get lost while they restore the building and so forth. And so when they turn up those barrels, sometimes later, I don't even recall, one of the very first ones I ever did was Orphan Barrel. Yeah. I could probably go back and visit Orphan Barrel again, just because it's, that happens. Barrels get stored in places and sometimes people lose track places. We don't dunno where this came from.

(02:13:03):
Don't they write on the barrel what's in the barrel? Oh, yeah, normally, but it's just you, you don't go deck down into that basement. Oh, right. You don't, you don't, you don't necessarily go there. And you know the story of Orphan Bell, and I don't know that I did all of this, so maybe I'll save it for another thing. Save, save it, save it. 'cause Yeah, yeah. You, you don't wanna run through all your whiskeys in one swell food, you know, every so often. I feel like that's a concern. And then I sort of look at what I haven't talked about and I'm like, oh, I think I'm gonna be okay. We're gonna be all right. I think there's enough whiskey to survive. We'll be okay. A couple of decades of Windows Weekly, Richard Campbell run as radio.com and t Net Rocks great to have you on the show.

(02:13:42):
When are you going out to the ocean? Soon? one more week here. Okay. Then a week in Copenhagen, and a week in the Netherlands. And then we'll be on the coast from the high country to the low country to the coast country. Richard Campbell, he's the peripatetic. Richard Campbell. Thank you sir. Paul Thot. He is@theat.com. As we mentioned last week, that premium membership really makes a difference to Paul. Now that he's a sole proprietor, know how that feels. Paul? Oh boy. You can also subscribe to the newsletter there, and there's a whole lot more. And his book Windows Everywhere along with the field guide to Windows 10. Both books are available@leanpub.com. Thank you Paul. Thank you, Richard. Thank sir. Have a wonderful week and we will see you next time on windows Weekly. Maybe we'll do some more questions from the gallery, the peanut gallery. I thought that went very well. Take care. Listeners of this program, get an ad free version if they're members of Club twit. $7 a month gives you ad free versions of all of our shows Plus membership in the club. Twit Discord, a great clubhouse for twit listeners. And finally, the Twit plus feed with shows like Stacey's Book Club, the Untitled Linux Show, the GIZ Fizz and more. Go to twit tv slash club twit and thanks for your support.