Windows Weekly 890 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat is here. Richard Campbell is here. We're going to talk about the new AMD-based AI PCs. They're not co-pilot PUS PCs but in some ways they're actually better. Windows 11 Photos now integrates with Microsoft Designer. We'll talk about AI. Some developer news. If you like NET, you'll like NET 9, preview 6. And once again, paul's mad at Microsoft over the Xbox Game Pass. All that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 890, recorded Wednesday, july 17th 2024. Nub Muscles, it's time for Windows Weekly. Yeah, the show. We talk about Windows Weekly With these. I almost said clowns, these cats. I almost said clowns, these cats. They're not clowns.

01:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I thought you were going to say cats. It sounded like cats. It started cats.

01:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, that cat on the left there, that's Paul Thurott Thurottcom, one of the premier. You know, I just realized Delphi 3 Super Bible's gone.

01:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're missing it already. It's the hardest loss of all.

01:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it was the only thing holding down the sheets there, so yeah, they're not going to flap.

01:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It makes a.

01:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it makes for a good laptop stand or like a monitor stand you will be happy to know that I have taken that and your fabulous window secrets that you did with brian livingston to the new studio, to my attic, and they will have a place of honor you could smuggle something in there to like a prison.

01:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like you know, they would have like a cutout for a knife put a file in there yeah file an entire array of weapons you could hey your honor.

02:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was just bringing him a book about windows. On his left, your right, Richard Campbell of Run as Radio fame. He is up at the house, the Mad Park house. I'm in Mad Park. Mad Park is a happy place. It's a beautiful day in Canada.

02:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah it's lovely up here Just waiting for the forest fires to get out of control.

02:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's morning again in Canada.

02:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You need a Delphi 12 book, man, because delphi 3 is a little old paul, are you working on?

02:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it is 12, the current version other stuff.

02:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
12 is the current version.

02:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, it'll be a delphinet book I love it.

02:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm very happy to have the delphi 3 super bible. There you go, and it's, uh, it's. So. I've yes, I have a bookshelf and I'm gonna put all our hosts books on it, about that much. So, uh, windows, we're gonna do something we've not done lately. We're gonna start by talking about windows. This is weird this is weird.

03:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the other stuff's getting boring so I'm going back to the back to windows.

03:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, the original the ones the most the most comfortable complaining about right yeah yeah, it's like.

03:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's like riding a bike. Um, so I I've spent the better part of the last I don't know three years complaining about microsoft and how it updates Windows all over the place, and they just announced they found a new way to update Windows. And I'm just like you've got to be kidding me. But actually this one's fine, it's fine. It's not something that will ever impact anybody, it's just something that's happening behind the scenes, behind the scenes. So for individuals, you're not going to really see any changes, but they're basically doing this, uh, differential update now on some but not all monthly cumulative updates for windows 11 going forward, starting with windows 24 version 24, sorry, windows 11 version 24 h2.

03:59
So I yeah, I don't know, I'm not even sure I microsoft has made a lot of these kind of announcements later where they're like hey, we're doing this thing on the back end, it doesn't really change anything, but let's talk about it. Yeah, okay. So they're called. This new type of update is called a checkpoint cumulative update, as opposed to a normal cumulative updates. Cumulative updates, as the name suggests, are cumulative, so if you miss a month and you go to update, you'll get the next month instead and it will include everything from the previous month, but the checkpoint cumulative updates will be smaller because they'll look at what's on your PC and only download what you need. You know the differential.

04:39
This is something that the Exchange team has been doing for a long time. Yeah, this is something microsoft started talking about in, I don't know 2002, probably with uh, branch office and window. What became windows server 2003? But, and it was because we wanted.

04:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
if you're running an exchange server like we had these security problems and these little quick patches were good, and then you get into a tangle because maybe you've installed it, maybe you hadn't, and then the next CU would just sort of sync you back up. It's a dependency problem. Yeah, they were also lower tested. Like you only install this because you have this problem or you have this concern, and then the main CU would clean you up.

05:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know if we, as individuals will ever get to see this happening. I don't know that we'll ever see anything it's not a way they describe it it doesn't seem like it.

05:32
Um, some admins who are on, uh, certain deployment technologies might see two files instead of one, so you'll have some sort of a indication that something new is going on. But it's funny, there's like one of the files is like this really tiny checkpoint file, and the other one is what they call a cumulative payload, which I think is what we dropped on Hiroshima, if I'm not mistaken. It's just, I think it's a dynamic file that's created based on your specific configuration. So it could differ from pc to pc.

06:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, I'm pretty sure, hiroshima was a service pack, service, feature pack yeah, yeah, it was a pc reset, um.

06:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So anyway, I I read this whole thing like I do a couple times I'm like all right, there's gonna be something in here that makes sense, that why would they? Nope, there isn't. And it's also one of those things where I think if you weren't really paying attention, or even if you were, you might read this and think you weren't doing this all along but yeah, but at the same time you also have that sense of you're not going to do this actually yeah, and and you know what?

06:42
so, okay, um, here, here's the one little hint I did get from this description. We've talked about how, with right before windows 11, 23 h2 came out, microsoft decided we're going to ship everything that was going to be in that update out to 22 h2, because we want to make sure that everybody has co-pilot and 23 h2 is going to be a huge update. So everyone in 23H2 got this massive monthly cumulative update probably September, october depending and then they got 23H2 a month later and it was just nothing. It was like a little enablement package, no big deal, and in fact, some of them didn't. And so one of the things we've talked about since then is that 22 and 23H2 are both the same feature set. They've got these two versions of windows that are just moving forward with the same features.

07:27
Yes, why this has this is might be what inspired this, because the problem with cumulative updates is the same thing. That's good about them. They're cumulative, so they get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And so when Microsoft does something like did did with 22 and 23 H two, or they just have a release, as they do sometimes, where it's just an enablement package, it's still the same code base as the previous version. Instead of having 12 months of updates, of cumulative updates, now you're looking at 24 of them, and so over the course of that process, those things get bigger and bigger, and I think this is maybe their solution to that problem that they created so you know, I don't think much of it from the bandwidth point of view of the consumer.

08:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But think about the bandwidth consumption for microsoft. Yep, you know that to to double or triple the total number of bytes downloaded, like that's pushing exabytes, like it's crazy numbers right they must.

08:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know there's a setting in windows update that is probably, I'm sure for businesses is something you can enable via policy where you only have in a home you'd have one computer that would download the update and then the others would get from that computer update catalog technique.

08:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you go to the catalog and you download.

08:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so they must I'm. I assume they're doing something like that, but whatever it's still at scale. I mean, anything you can do to make these things smaller leads to faster download times. Faster install times?

08:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think you guys are very hopeful to think that we do that at the consumer level. I mean we do it at the enterprise level with Windows Update Server and the like, Because you're trying to keep everything in sync. But if you're the Windows team and you want to do A-B testing, the idea that you'd have everybody in the house get the same version there's one guy in Paul's house who has multiple versions. That's funny, there's pretty clear evidence that they don't.

09:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, yeah, I'm doing A-B testing with my wife.

09:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Honey, how do you like your version of windows that is? That is a little bit of an issue, isn't it? I do that. I, all my computers now have, uh, a sticky note on them so I can tell, oh, wow, at a glance what it is running, because I have to keep so many different things and I want to make sure, in this little matrix of testing, I have to do that. I, it's like I'm you know this? Nope, uh, this here, it is good, you know, like, you know, here's the one that's like 22 home, x64, good, and then you know you go from there. But whatever, yep, that's my life. Uh, what else? Okay?

10:01
So last week I went, went to New York for an HP event that was largely about AI. Well, it was literally all about AI, but AI across their stack, as they see it, and of course, hp is a company that serves both consumers and commercial customers, and in addition to you know, the computers and printers and things that we know them for, they're also starting to sell a lot of services and do different things, and so they've jumped into this AI PC era with two feet. They've rebranded all their computers, starting with those CoPilot Plus PCs, and as new computers come out. We'll see those like. That HP you've got in front of you is an HP EliteBook 1040. Like off the top of my head, I believe that thing would be called an hp elite book x, I think is the term, or alternate. No, I guess x and then um 10, like 10 every time we mock microsoft for naming stuff.

10:55
I look at pc games like yeah, well, you know their, their name. Their new naming strategy makes sense, but there's all these little caveats to it. It's like if it's an X360 style computer they used to use that term those will be called flip now. So it's like HP EliteBook X flip. Okay, so we'll be the next version of that thing. But whatever, that will be a problem for a new day. So the thing I was most interested in was they announced a new AI PC based on a next-gen AMD chip that they would not disclose the day I was there. And then Monday came and we now know that it is one of the upcoming AMD chips and AMD has now released some more information about this. But they they announced new generation mobile and desktop chips back at Computex in June. This is based on their new Zen 5 processor technology. You know, like we see the Intel side hybrid, big MPUs, etc. Etc. More efficient, so we know more details about that stuff.

12:04
The hp is just is a laptop, again to me a little confusingly named because they're they're just released. Copilot plus pc is called let's see if I get this right and hp omnibook, I think is it x. I'm sorry, I get it. These names are terrible, um, and, but this is going to be an hp omnibook ultra um, so it's running this amd. Uh, what's it called? What is the actual name of this chip? It is called a ryzen ai 300 series. There are two of them, uh, two different of the Ryzen's, that is for mobile computers. They're claiming 20 hours of battery life asterisk, really, 13 hours of battery life. 50 or 55 TOPS, mpu, depending on the US. Wow, that's a lot of TOPS. Yeah, I don't know if TOPS are like exponential as you go up, like it's the Richter scale or something. No one has that. Yeah, exactly, I know enough about numbers to know 50 or 55 is bigger than 45.

13:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, uh, definitely better um, but not considered a co-pilot plus pc so well.

13:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
See, this is part of the.

13:15
The interesting thing about this is it verified what I had reported back in june, which was because at the time I went back and looked at very carefully what everyone said about this, because we all knew, knew, next gen Intel, amd chips were coming and the assumption was that these things would be called co-pilot plus PCs. And we actually don't know that. But we do know they will not be called that at launch because, as we've been saying, there is this exclusivity window. We just don't know when it ends. So when this thing launches in august, it will not be called a co-pilot plus pc, but it will get those co-pilot plus pc features at a later date when microsoft ships a free update, which we know is windows 11 24 h2. So that probably means it will happen in october, but I would say maybe the, to be safe, october at the earliest, because you know it could come be a cumulative update later. Um, the question is, at that time, does that thing become a copilot plus bc? Does that even matter? I don't know. Um, I don't know.

14:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nobody's saying so, I would think so, but you know whatever you know, in October, six months since build, when they announced all that stuff so that seems like a reasonable window six months yeah, yeah, we also.

14:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, um this, in my, my little world, my sad little world, um, there are, you know, people that just kind of hate everything you know and they're, and they especially hate anything new. And, uh, they've just been, they hate ai, uh, they can't stand co-op plus PC. They don't believe in Snapdragon X at all. So this kind of thing gets announced and they're like so let me get this straight, this thing's going to get 20 hours of battery life. It's an x64 chip, so it's going to run everything natively. It's got a faster MPU than a co-op plus PC.

14:58
So what is the point of Snapdragon X? Again, and to answer that question, I would point you to the? Uh, the photograph of the side of this laptop, because if you look at it from the side, you will see that the AMD based is about twice as thick as the Snapdragon X. Um, it's going to have a lot of? Um active cooling, it's going to be louder, there's going to be a lot more fan noise. Um, you know, the point as such as it is is, you know, thin light. It's that always well, we don't have always connectivity anymore, but it's that the original promise of windows and arm, which is just the, uh, the longevity plus thin and light, and hopefully one day no but no um fans, although in my experience with these computers, fans are not actually an issue at all right so anyway, it's great to have a fan in case you need the performance that it needs to cool itself but yeah, as long as that fan, unusually used, never spins, never makes a sound.

15:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I I know this isn't technically true.

15:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know that if you, I don't know, re-rendered a 4k video for two and a half hours or something that it would throttle. But I will tell you, there is something magical going on with the macbook air, which is just passively cooled. It's just a base m3. It is unbelievably good performance 15 hours of battery life wow, we're really getting to you, aren't we?

16:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, well, it runs mac os oh no, it's no no there is.

16:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's not, it's just the truth. Like it's amazing, and I don't know exactly what combination of hardware software makes that a reality, I think owning the whole stack makes a big difference.

16:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's amazing, although I guess you could say, in some ways Microsoft owns the whole Surface stack, although it doesn't make the processors. They don't make the processors.

16:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They don't make the processors right.

16:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't make the processors they don't make the I mean apple literally can tune its processors to. That's right be optimized for the hardware and the operating system well, they integrated I mean one chip in the first place right, there's a.

16:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know you pay a little bit with your soul. Um, you know you have to use mac os, which is terrible but, no but no, but that trade is.

17:03
You live in the walled garden right and look, some people embrace that, you know, just like some people embrace uh, jones down and kool-aid, but it's, it's. You know there's good and there's good and bad to my, to my opinion, but, um, I you can't argue with the uptime and the performance. It's just incredible, it just is. And I don't think we're ever going to see that in a Windows PC. I just don't, there's no way, not that combination. But Snapdragon X, I guess, is pretty close. And then you know, I guess it was Thursday when this event occurred they were being very coy about the chip and would not discuss this. So Monday came, you know, maybe a day or a couple of days before they sent some information out. But Monday AMD started putting out more information about these chips. And I'm not a hardware guy but I'm fascinated by the different approaches that AMD and Intel are taking to try to kind of hybridize their x64 chips now to make them more like ARM. It's very, very, very interesting. And, um, again, I it's not my area, I'm probably going to misspeak here, but I do know from reviewing laptops for many years. If you think about something like intel, just to keep it simple, they would typically have, like these, 15 watt u-series chips that would go into thin and light computers, right. Sometimes they would have a seven or nine watt variant that would be for like tablets and really really really thin things. They would have like an H series and K series, different series, you know, but H series would be like the high performance version and then for the 12th and 13th gen they had a P series that sat in the middle. So the H series were 56 watt parts, the P series 28 watts, and AMD has done the same thing until this generation of chips. So I mentioned that there are only two versions of the mobile versions of the processors. There's also desktop versions. They both can scale from a TDP perspective. It is up to the PC maker to configure it to run at 15 watts, 28 watts or whatever. The figure is 56 watts they can run up to whatever number. They're not going to sell a lot of different chips, they're just going to sell two and they're scalable from a kind of power consumption, power output perspective and it just depends on how you use them. So, different way of doing things, very interesting.

19:30
The other thing I just kind of point to, because I don't think anyone ever really thinks about this stuff, but a year ago, this summer, HP released something called the Dragonfly Pro in Windows, pc and Chromebook variants. The chromebook is now a chromebook plus because it meets that specification, sort of like the copilot plus pc thing. But the the windows version had an, a special amd chipset at the time, and amd and my and hp work together to subvert the power management capabilities in windows and do their own thing, and so this chip. Their approach was we don't have performance cores and efficiency cores. We have cores. They can scale up and down. You can turn some of them off.

20:15
So there are times when the PC is not doing too much, where this thing runs at a very low power consumption because only a couple of the cores are on. It was good for leaving it on overnight and are sleeping overnight and it wouldn't drain the battery but it could fire up cores as it needed. But for this to work properly they couldn't use the power management in Windows. So they completely redid that and HP has done a lot of that type of stuff since then. They're doing it in Intel-based machines too. In fact, leo, that computer you have has an updated version of the system that I'm talking about.

20:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This kind of smart sense, whatever it's yeah, yeah, it's cool and um yeah, it's very interesting life as a result, by the way yeah, and, and meteor, like uh, in my experience has been garbage.

20:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In fact, meteor lake on this exact computer, but without that software was garbage. I experienced that with the uh z book, firefly g11, I think, was the thing, but it's almost exactly the same computer, but they it didn't have any of that stuff I just described, plus it had a dgpu too. But, um, so, yeah, this is. You know, pc makers are starting to work around this stuff. But the reason I mentioned this is because a year ago, hp, hp, because I asked, I was like, excuse me, I have a question, you must talk to Microsoft, right, I mean? And they said, yeah, we can't really talk about this too much, but Microsoft is aware this is a problem. They know this stuff has to be extensible. They know they have to let us get in there and be able to make these changes. Chipset makers like Intel and AMD and Qualcomm now want to make these changes too. They want their systems to work as well as they can work right. So my assumption was, by this point we would have seen this occur in Windows and there has been nothing on that front, like zero, and I don't think we're going to see it in 24-H2, right, even though there's updates coming, et cetera, et cetera, but this is still something that kind of needs to happen.

22:05
And you mentioned Apple and owning the whole stack. And you know, one of the advantages they have is, when they have this kind of a problem and they want to solve it, they own the whole thing. They can change. They change the Mac, they don't change. You know, they don't have to subvert anything, it's theirs right. So this is an issue you know. Know, this is the other side of the sword. We have all this choice, we have all these different designs, we have different, uh, companies making different kinds of products and they're running into these walls and because they don't own the whole stack, like apple does, they have to do that kind of stuff. So I suspect in fact I'm positive on this this new aipc, I'm sure it's doing some kind of power management, power you knowenanigans I'll call it to achieve whatever level of battery life it will get. So we'll see.

22:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, actually, spec-wise it sounds like it's superior to the Copilot Plus PCs Spec-wise. Yeah, I mean it's much more expensive Copilot Plus no.

23:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That yoga slum you have is like $1,300.

23:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a bargain.

23:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, this is going to start at about $1,450. Which, by the way, well, it's a consumer, it's like a prosumer device. I mean, their Elitebooks are started about this price. So it's not quite $500 more than the cheapest co-pilot plus pc. But it's also a slightly different kind of computer, even though it's you know it's an ai pc. Obviously it's a laptop, but it's not a thin and light. You know this thing has a workstation. Well, I don't know what to call it. So amd radeon 800m graphics are, depending on who you ask, um, you know they're embedded, they're what they used to call like an ap. You remember they're. Are they discrete graphics? Are they? You know it's, they're kind of. You know everything's changing a little bit. Um, I will say I don't, I don't not used it to this capacity and it's not aimed at this market. But I suspect you could throw a modern game on there. It would run really well, right, these are, these are powerful creator class computers. Maybe it would be the way to say it.

24:13
So we'll see. I I'm. I wish there was more amd out in the world and um less intel.

24:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So do you think that you know, there's always that big red versus big blue thing? Do you think AMD's processors are superior or just a good lower-cost alternative?

24:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they might be both. Yeah, well, that's interesting, because when you say superior, you know that means a lot of different things.

24:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sure, I mean bang for the buck is one way of talking about superior.

24:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But also, just how about just basic reliability, right? Or you know, I don't know what you call this, but every day I still do this, every one of these computers. Every morning, I get up and I open the lid and they all come on and I'm like this is the best. This never happens Well, I should say never, but very rare in the X64 world for that to be the case Without, you know, hibernation and, and you know, slow bootups and all that kind of stuff.

25:05
So, um, intel, uh, I've had, I've I've expressed the issues I've had with Intel chips over the previous two generations, including the current gen. Um, I think meteor Lake is a major step back when it comes to reliability. We're starting to see uh in battery life and we're starting to see reports from others who have been complaining about 12th and 13th gen, the previous two gens as well. I think intel belatedly got the message on the way the world was going. It was telegraphed 20 years ago, but whatever, and they're racing to catch up. And in the race to catch up, I think they're making mistakes and, um, they're breaking things. And I am very leery of their latest gen chipset, um, I and it's, it's an orphan, it's their, the next one's going to be nothing like it. So this thing's just kind of kind of sit out there alone. You know, I don't, I don't, I, I don't see a good future for for these computers. So, uh, you know, we'll see. Is amd any? The truth is, I just don't see AMD enough out with the reviews that I do.

26:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean from an IT perspective. When we were looking at it from servers, they tended to have more cores per dollar, but they were simpler cores, yeah which is the ARM approach, right In a way, yeah. It was sort of, but it straddled the two lines. The sneaky part was when Microsoft started licensing by core. Suddenly AMD based servers became much more expensive than Intel based Right.

26:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go. Yeah, that's funny. Microsoft licensing, yes, very so aimed. I mentioned the AMD chip that's in the dragon fly pro. You guys can go look this up and see what this thing is and how it works differently than mainstream x64 chips did at the time, and maybe that's becoming more common now. But AMD's approach to the ARM challenge is different from Intel's. So I think we're going to have an interesting battle and some good conversations. Lots and lots of people are going to review these computers and we'll see. We'll see what conversations.

27:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you know, lots and lots of people are going to review these computers and we'll see. You know, we'll see what happens. Yeah, I thought they were Intel in those.

27:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Dragonfly Pros. The Dragon, every one of those computers, but the Pro was Intel. Yeah, every previous Dragonfly, whatever the one that came out mid-year last year, was.

27:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
AMD Mid-AMD one. Yeah, I see all Intel, intel core I'm looking at yep yeah, I don't uh.

27:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, look up track the one that comes. Yeah, I think there's only one dragon might have been only for one year. Yeah, or was it the chromebook version? The chromebook is intel yeah, this naming strategy sucks yeah, well, I'd say they fixed it, but they changed it. I'll say that. So, yeah, the Pro is an AMD Ryzen 7 something, but it's a chip that at the time was only available in this one computer. I'm not sure.

27:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They also made Pros with Intel, too, because why not use the situation?

28:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, anyway, I welcome my AMD and or Qualcomm future. Either way, either one's good with me.

28:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, by the way, that Dragonfly Pro got killer battery.

28:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're an anything but Intel guy. Now, when I turn it on manually, the thing fires up. You can hear a jet engine and this is like a brand new computer. I just got one of these. It's a new one. Like again, it just keeps happening and I just don't understand. I have a little AMD-based I think it's a Yoga something, something. It's kind of a thick little device. It's only a 13-inch screen and based on all my Snapdragon X stuff. I was like you know, I'm curious, I'm going to throw Doom 2016 on here. Yeah, 90, 100 frames per second, no problem. Like, looks beautiful, it runs great and it's just a little stupid laptop. You know, it's nothing special. The Intel equivalent, which I haven't reviewed yet and I'm not actually sure I'm going to, it's so bad but can barely get out of its own way. Even file copy operations are slow on this thing. Like it's crazy. That's terrible. No, it's not an atom, but it kind of feels like that. It's weird. It's like a.

29:14
U-series meteor Like it's terrible.

29:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The Studio 2 that I picked up at the end of last year, which is the pedestal design to make it seem like it's thinner than it actually is. That lower pedestal has vents all the way around. Yeah, so I've been running a couple of gpu intensive workloads that kicked out enough heat that it warped the side of my cell phone case oh no oh god I thought you were gonna say itped the uh pc itself because it's a metal case and there's a reason it's a metal what is that's?

29:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, this is the surface laptop studio studio laptop two, and it is a what's the chip? It's like, um, it's a weird. Yeah, but it's like a, isn't it basically a desktop chip?

29:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's like a, I think it is yeah, and it's like 13th gen, an RTX 3070 in it.

30:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and they tacked an NPU onto it.

30:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but it is the GPU firing up.

30:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, is it NVIDIA? So it's Intel, so it's NVIDIA graphics, it's NVIDIA.

30:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
RTX. Yeah, so it's plenty powerful, like it does the job, but that thing's no fooling hot. You would not put that on your lap, you would sterilize yourself sometimes that's a good thing.

30:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what your goals are um, look, we have choices.

30:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, you know, that's the beauty of the pc industry. We have this range of choices. They're, you know, the um. I have these guys and I said all the time they would never even consider something new. They want these old things. They work great for what they do and it's like okay, and I don't care about battery life. Or some of them claim that the battery life is fine. I think there's a syndrome going on there. But whatever that's okay, whatever works for you is fine.

30:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have the Slim 7X. You have the one that I'm lusting after.

31:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It looks really nice yeah, it's really solid, so I just reviewed it. Um, they're going to send me the. They have a thinkpad based on snapdragon x as well, so I'm going to get that.

31:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, see, I'm a thinkpad guy, so this is not a thing, it's not the thinnest thing.

31:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just like um, what is it like a t14s, so it's not an x1 or anything like that, but it's uh, you know like a it's.

31:24
it's not an X1 or anything like that, but it's fine. I think the big deal with this, two big things with this particular computer compared to the other Snapdragon X PCs OLED display, 14.5 inches, beautiful, reflective but gorgeous, and the RAM and storage upgrades are super cheap For less than $100, I think you can go from 16 to 32 gigs of ram and from 512 to 1 terabyte. Yeah, that blew me away. If you want, yep, and then even like the windows. If you want to go from home to pro, 28 bucks like that microsoft will charge you 99 dollars for that upgrade.

32:00
um, that's a good price point, being being buy it fully loaded. Yep, you'd be stupid not to buy it fully loaded.

32:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're also making a T-Series right.

32:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The T-Series ThinkPad. Yeah, Is that what you meant? Sorry.

32:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Isn't it funny so somebody in Discord it's Keith KeithSwipe12 says it's made in China. It's so funny because it's keith, uh, keith's 512 says it's made in china. It's so funny because I, you know, you it's been well, I think it's owned by lenovo, it's owned by lenovo right and I've you know. You kind of forget that ibm was the thinkpad and then they sold it but lenovo's done a good job. I think lenovo makes fine.

32:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They've done a great job yeah, and they haven't run into any of these.

32:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, thinkpad is still a ThinkPad.

32:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, 100%. It still has the weird red nub and you either like that nub or you don't. Right.

32:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or you just buy it because the weird red nub tells you that it's a ThinkPad that's starting to go away, by the way.

33:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think the new one doesn't have it right the track point is starting to go away. Is there a track point on?

33:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that one On the one you have. Yep it is.

33:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is there one on the Yonah? I don't have the On the ThinkPad. Oh, you don't have a.

33:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ThinkPad.

33:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You have a Yonah. I don't have that one yet. No.

33:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I can't remember. It's has the red nub and that kind of turns me out.

33:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't like to read it doesn't, it being there, it doesn't get in the way. But when Windows trackpads were terrible, which actually most of them still are, really Wow, oh yeah, that's disappointing. I love the trackpoint because it was so precise, right track point. Because it was so precise, because otherwise I'd have to bring a mouse to do the precise, whatever precise work I had to do in graphics. Whatever mouse to do a man's work you gotta no but um, but that thing was that precise, it was fantastic. But now touchpads, trackpads, whatever, have gotten a lot better and so I'm, I'm, I'm fine now with a trackpad almost all the time for everything. So, um, I, it's, uh, it's kind of weird, like when you, I use this, now I find it hard to move, like the little muscles in my finger aren't there anymore because I don't use the track.

34:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You lost your nub muscles.

34:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I lost my. It's like the opposite of Nintendo thumb or whatever, like I've lost that muscle on my index finger Nub muscles. My track point muscle has gone away. But anyway, yeah, I think we've moved past the point where we actually did that.

34:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What's your favorite one of these? Now, you've tried what? Four of them? Yeah, you've had a bunch of them.

34:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, three, and I've got a fourth coming. Well, so there's two different things here. Right, which is the one I would recommend to people and which is the one I would want for myself? Right, the one I can recommend safely to everyone is the one I just reviewed the yoga it's. It's the perfect combination, it's it. It has three usb-c ports. They're all usb 4, 40 gigabytes. They're identical. You never see that. Some on each side of the device.

34:59
The only display. It's 14.5, not 14, 16 by 10. Perfect, the cheap memory and storage upgrades. Like I said, the keyboard's great, touchpad's okay, it's not fantastic, but it's fine. It's thin and light and it's 11-ish hours of battery life 11.5, whatever it was, it's great. It looks gorgeous. I have to say I lately, last couple of years, have been trending toward bigger computers, bigger laptops. Last couple years have been trending toward bigger computers, bigger laptops. So the thing that I bought for myself, which is a surface laptop 15, is closer to kind of the mac book air style. Just look and feel, um it, but really it's the bigger display. Um, oh, the other thing this thing has. By the way, none of these computers have fingerprint readers, which I don't like those are going away, paul.

35:44
They're very rare now well okay, but they're um, really you'll, you'll, you will see, you will see them on this hp elite book that I that I'm going to lose in about an hour. It has a fingerprint reader right, but the hp elite book, snapdragon x computer does not yeah, interest doesn't have it, huh yeah yeah, so I don't like that.

36:02
But the um, the, the Lenovo and the HP both have presence sensing. So if you're going to use this thing with a camera, it's really nice because it turns on when you walk up, so you instantly sign in, there's no wait whatsoever. And when you walk away it signs out and turns everything off. It's nice. The Surface does not have that, does not have that, so I don't know why microsoft, which uh put this into windows, did not include it their own computer. But it doesn't have presence sensing so it also doesn't have a fingerprint reader. So you have to walk up, tap the thing. It comes right. It comes right on, it does come right on it. The instant on is there um, but the um, yeah, it's the one thing, but I just I, I yeah.

36:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean the the camera. Hello approach is everything gives you the biological security feature. Like why put a fingerprint reader in if you've got that?

36:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So my feeling is that this choice is important because some people like to explicitly sign in. You can disable, you don't have to use Windows Hello, you don't have to use windows hello, you don't have to use presence sensing. You can turn all that stuff off.

37:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but sometimes I kind of like the self, and you have to remember how to log in what's that?

37:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, you start to your pin or your password, yeah, but the thing about hello is it just does it right. And I agree with you, paul, I think I I would prefer that I am proactively put in my finger on the thing.

37:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's my preference, so I just like to see both. But I also often have multiple accounts on a computer and so I like to have different ways to sign in. And if I walk up and I just sign in and I'm trying to use the second account for the book or whatever I'm working on, that's a random use case, it's not a big deal. So do you use different fingers for different accounts? Is that where?

37:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we are yeah, yeah, jeez, okay, careful, careful. Guess which one I use for my book account um the I have to be honest, the fingerprint reader doesn't always work and hello always does. You know the camera, so the camera, yeah.

38:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm kind of face id now, yeah if you wear glasses, you want to train it with both and thing is, the macs do not have face id.

38:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't have hello which is crazy.

38:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Have touch, they died.

38:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They do have a giant notch uh, they don't have face id, yeah, which is crazy, yep yeah, I agree well and for me, I don't care because I just want a security problem.

38:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The finger thing is explicit and works fast. You think this is the fingerprint? I agree, but for me I don't care, because I just want to have security problems. The fingerprint thing is explicit and works fast.

38:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You think is the fingerprint less secure than face ID?

38:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what the pros are saying. They have more problems with fingerprint readers, with the way that they encode data. The face is more effective.

38:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, the Windows Hello ESS. They require a specific kind of fingerprint reader, which, by the way, is the kind that Lenovo has always been using. It's that finger-on-match or match-on-print, whatever the technology is. It's physically separated from the rest of the system, so it stores everything locally in its own secure enclave. It doesn't interact with the rest of the system, so it's its own little thing and you have to have that style for windows hello ess. Anyway, they're coming, we just don't have.

39:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's our tokens, yeah let us uh pause, place to do it. Uh take a breather, enjoy life, smell the roses while I talk about one password. How about that?

39:23
our sponsor yes, interesting, interesting. You may remember that we talked a lot about a company called collide k-o-l-i-d-e, and I was a big fan. I have collide socks and I actually wear them. But collide got acquired by one password a few months ago and now they have joined together. Well, let me tell you a little story.

39:49
Imagine you got to use your imagination. Imagine your company's security is like the quad on a college campus. You know, there are nice brick paths between the buildings. Those are the buildings, and the paths, the company-owned-owned devices, with it, approved apps and managed employee identities. Then there are the paths people actually use. Right, there's always right through the grass. There's always a path just dirt. Those are the unmanaged devices, the byods, thes, the shadow IT apps, non-employee identities like contractors those are the shortcuts through the grass. Most security tools only work on the happy brick paths. Unfortunately, your security problems almost always happen on the dirt paths. The shortcuts right. Have I gone too far with this analogy? On the dirt paths, the shortcuts right. Have I gone too far with this analogy?

40:46
One password, extended access management is the first security solution that brings all those unmanaged devices, those apps, those identities, all the shadow IT and the BYOD all under your control, which is great because it ensures that every user's credentials are strong and protected. Right, they have to prove they're themselves, but every device also is known and known healthy. Every app is visible. This is not a fairy tale. This doesn't require any imagination. This is 1Password Extended Access Management. It solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM just can't touch. Can't touch this. It's security for the way we work today. It's available now to companies that use Okta Coming later this year. This is really good news to Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra. So if you've been saying, oh, but we don't use Okta, stay tuned, check it out. 1passwordcom slash Windows Weekly. 1password that's the number one P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D dot com slash Windows Weekly. Back to Paul and Richard and let's talk about being an insider.

42:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He was the insider. He walks alone by night. Uh, we, this came up with the. Uh, the very first story. You know, microsoft is like talks about the stuff they're doing on the back end that related to this. They've been talking a lot lately about things that, like no one should care about. Like, hey, we redesigned part of file explorer. It's using the windows app sdk now. And it's like, okay, what does that mean? Oh, it means the address bar is not going to work. Remember that. Um, you know it's. I don't know why they talk about this stuff, but they also talk about things like, um, hey, we're, uh, we redesigned the photos app and we're using actually the same technology that they use for the File Explorer app. You're like, okay, is it any different? No, it's the same, it's just that we just redid it. You know, we refactored it with, like a new code base. You're like, okay, is it faster?

42:57
No, it's just different and you're like why are you telling us this? We have these weird conversations, you know. So today Microsoft made an announcement about Microsoft Designer, which is that AI-powered, you know, co-pilot-based graphic design app that is tied into the image creation stuff. Right, but the real announcement to me was actually about the Photos app, because that new Photos app now has a designer button at the top and it will launch into this designer. It's a web app, like a website, but you can. You can, from photos now edit something with edit an image, not something, I guess an image with a designer, in addition to the other options that were there before, like you could open in paint or whatever. Right, and okay. That's kind of interesting.

43:47
They deploy this to the world today. So if you're in the insider program, it doesn't matter which um channel you're going to get this. If you're unstable, yeah, you got it like it's in. I got it this morning like they. They never tested it. It's only a button, it's not a big deal. It's not like there's an additional in-app ai-based photo editing features. You actually leave the app, but kind of interesting. Um, so designer remains a, a p. I guess it's a pwa. It's a web app, right, so you can access it from the web, you can get it from the microsoft store because pwas can be installed and used like apps and the mobile app is now available in stable like not pre-release version on Android and iOS and it has other integrations now with Word and PowerPoint et cetera, et cetera. But Designer to me has always been kind of a poor man's Canva, I don't. Every time I look at it I'm like I don't really, I don't know.

44:42
I don't get this. You know the image creation stuff that's really co-pilot, is also called designer for some reason. It's you know, part of it, I guess it's you know.

44:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're trying to put everything everywhere, but um hey, good luck being sure you got the right one.

44:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is yeah, it's a bad name for finding it yeah, so the one thing that's kind of cool about microsoft designer is there's a feature in the photos app if you have a co-pilot plus pc called imagery style, and that's the one where you take. I took a photo of my wife and I turned it into like a renaissance painting or a you know whatever different styles and uh, that's actually a feature now of designer people with co-pilot plus pcs that can try that yeah, it's, it was very it still is very limited.

45:29
So, um, now you can uh do that in the cloud through designer, so it's, it's, that's kind of fun. That's actually one of the the few co-pilot plus pc features I really liked. It has all those, you know, magic eraser type features now that you would expect from an ai photo editing solution, etc. Etc.

45:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, okay, so yeah, whatever that's cool yeah, and it's exactly that, like just take a picture, fire it up to it and see what happens yeah, yeah, I was that.

46:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was the one. Like I said, the one thing I I actually kept throwing pictures through it. I was like this looks really cool. Like this is. I can't think of a use for it. You know, I don't really need it for anything, but I was like, okay, no, this is, this is pretty good.

46:16
And then, unless something changes while we're recording this show uh, that's haven't been as it can happen. Um, we had did have, for the first time in a while, a bunch of insider builds last week and, um, I think the previous show we talked about a canary build and now we have the other channels are all accounted for. So last week, after we did the show, they put out a new dev build. Um, they had remember paused the rollout of new features in dev. For some reason, they had done the same thing with the release preview before during the 24h2 recall mess. Those features are now re-rolling out, if you will, to dev. So if you're in there and you've got that switch turned on where you get the new features, that's happening nothing. Well, actually, that's not fair. There's some interesting stuff happening. So they're going to allow drag and drop apps from the pinned section of the start menu down to the taskbar. To pin them on the taskbar, you just drag them down. It's like oh, okay, also in the release preview channel we're going to get to that in a moment They've improved the widgets on the lock screen without doing that. One improvement I think they need to do, which is let us choose which are there, right, you can turn them all on or turn them all off, but you can't select which ones are there. Yet we'll get there, um, and they are. They're doing that improvement to the widgets button on the taskbar we already talked about with other channels, where they've improved the graphics that are there for the alerts and the little weather icons and all that stuff. It's just kind of nicer looking. Uh, nothing major, but the other two channels are actually very interesting.

47:50
So in the beta build that was released last week, they're redesigning the homepage of File Explorer yet again, right? So if you're familiar with this, you know there's a quick access section at the top which is replicated in the navigation bar, and then they have recent and favorite sections. You can arbitrarily turn those all on or off, and if you sign in with an enter ID account, you also get a I don't know what it's called. I think it's called recommended, and the recommended section will have files from across your organization, based on projects you're working on with other people. So what they're looking at adding is yet another new section. This one's called shared, and these are the files that are shared with you. We're running out of space, so what they're doing is, under quick access, they're putting those other three or four depending on how you sign in sections in as sort of like tabs, right, and so, instead of having them all top to bottom, you've got quick access and you've got tabs for recent favorites and shared. And if you're on entra, um, recommend, right.

48:56
And I'm like yeah, I was talking to lauren about this. The guy doesn't know. He's like, he's like you, he goes, you're really up on this. He's like what, what's, what's? And I'm like okay, so we kind of stepped through it. I was like you know what? I normally don't like them futzing with things, and I still don't in a way. But this is logical enough. There's nothing wrong with this, and it kind of mimics the way that, um, you know, office local, all kind of look. So it's yeah, it's, it's fine, um.

49:27
And then there's other changes. They're like a little ai button on the taskbar when you're using windows studio effects or other ai powered features. You know, kind of like you see, like a microphone icon when you're using that microphone, like okay, yeah, that's pretty good. Um, smaller, uh, date time display, right, um, which I actually I wish I could find this now. Uh, I should have put this in the notes, but they're, they're, they're enabling a a very small date and time. Uh, you can turn it off, by the way, if you don't want that there, but you can, you're, and soon we'll be able to make it smaller. And I made a version of this where the date and time were next to each other and I'm like, if you're going to do that, you just make, make it, you know, half the height and then the taskbar becomes the menu bar from Mac OS X or Mac OS X right. I mean it looks just like.

50:11
I did like a little mock-up and I'm like what does this look like? And he's like that looks like the Mac and I'm like exactly, and like you know, you know, um, yeah, so that's kind of interesting, um, and then the most interesting one, in a way, because this is stuff that will be coming out soon to us and stable, is the release preview build they put out. So we'll see on the timing of this, but it is what is the date? We always, we always do this now because every two weeks we get something new. Um, next tuesday is week d, tuesday is when we get the preview update.

50:43
And don't be surprised if in 22 h2, 23h2, and 24H2, you see these features appear in a preview update. So you can right-click on a File Explorer tab and duplicate the tab. Nothing major that drag and drop pinning from the pin section of start down to the taskbar. That's part of it. And then, because it's you know, a month, another month we're going to have more changes to nearby sharing, um based on whether or not you have wi-fi and or bluetooth turned on. So not a big deal, but remember we uh, last month 22 and 23 h2 got a ton of new features, all based on stuff in 24 h2. 24 h2 got nothing. So I'm guessing that in preview this month and then in august on patch tuesday, we're going to see the first post release new features for 24 h2.

51:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I think these are them, you know, maybe all of them we'll see and that, yes, by the fall, 22 h2 should go away and we'll just have 23 and 24 h2, even though they're going to be feature identical. Yep, that's right, unless you're running a co-pilot plus pc right.

51:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So for this little magical slice in time, which really is just a couple months when you think about it, it's going to be basically well, now, I guess. But also, you know, august, september, maybe into october, these three versions of windows 11 will all have the same features, basically, except the copilot plus stuff. Yeah, yep. And then you know the other little I got to get. I I'm behind on this, but there's all these limitations in 24 h2 with regards to new installs and and getting around the online microsoft account requirements, etc. So I gotta go, I gotta look at that. But, um, there's some other changes. Yeah, but as far as the actual feature set of the os, once you're in, yeah, they're, they are and will be for a little while, identical. Also, there was a windows 10 build um to the release preview channel, which, which should excite everybody, there are no new features.

52:51
Nor should there be right? Yeah, I know. It's like we heard you want a new feature. It's like where did you hear that? No one said that. No one ever said that.

53:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We've got two Win 10 machines here. The one that's running here still got the remains of the domain instance on it, so it really should be paid. But I think I'll go new hardware. The other one that I rebuilt last fall I think I'm going to pave it in Win 11 because it's cranky for some reason.

53:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Windows. I can't remember now, I think I would just know this off the top of my head. But windows 10 is frozen on version. Is it 21 or 22 h2? I thought it was 22 h2, 22, um. So when it comes up, you know, I, I just I did that computer, I keep keeping that up to date. I have it on a surface book too, and um, first couple days I was like man, this thing will not go to 23 h2. I'm like what's it doing? I'm gonna have to go download it, you know. And then I looked it up, I was like oh yeah, yeah, yeah, they froze that there's a reason yeah, don't worry about that.

53:54
Um, we have kind of a light uh ai section this week, but a lot of it has to do with kind of antitrust stuff, so that at least turns up the interest level a little bit. The UK CMA is looking at Microsoft's hiring of staff from inflection. You know Mustafa Suleiman, right, the guy who runs their new AI division. They hired him and basically most of inflection, which you know, like the open AI partnership, you could view as a a way to sidestep uh antitrust, uh oversight, because you didn't acquire anybody, you're just, I'm just hiring people. That's what we do. We're a company, we hire people.

54:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, but um, and they wanted a job. Right Like, yeah, no, I know it's, but it's not a hostile takeover, no but's but it's not a hostile takeover.

54:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No but it. But it could be, you know, 10 years ago or 15 years ago, whatever it might be Microsoft probably would have just bought this company, you know. And now it's a different regulatory climate. Microsoft's a much bigger company. They already went through that Activision Blizzard thing and it's pretty clear they're being creative about how they can get where they want to be without doing it the old way, you know. Um, I'm not saying they broke any laws or that this is wrong. I, I, I think it's weird, I and I don't mean that from the perspective of the uk cma. I mean they have open ai, they have these other partnerships, they have all these people in house. Let's hire someone else and he'll run a new uh ai division, and it won't be kevin scott're like what's going on here?

55:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, and I think we talked about this at the time, which is that they don't know what to do about consumer AI, right, all they know is that their enterprise guys aren't it. So let's at least make something new and and see what happens Like it's not a it's not a bad thought, I, and see what happens.

55:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like it's not a, it's not a bad thought. I always I associate this thought with you. Um and I'm not actually sure that I don't remember, but for some reason, every time this comes in my head. I think Richard said this but, um, it's very clear to me that AI is not a thing, it's not a. You don't sell AI.

56:00
Although people are selling AI, companies are selling AI. Um, it's really just a feature of other things you know and that, if you look at something like Microsoft or Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a great example. These are the types of features that two, five, 10 years ago would have just rolled out to Microsoft 365. I mean, they're just they make that product better. You know they use AI, I get it, but it's I don't know. We've drawn kind of a weird line here and I feel like we're going to reach the point where A no one's going to get all that excited about any of this stuff. We just talked about Microsoft Designer and you can do magic eraser type stuff. That's kind of the point. You can't have a photo editing solution today that doesn't do that stuff.

56:45
It's in everything it's a feature, yeah, and, and look, I know some will be a little better than others, yada, yada, yada and, and there were very real advantages, uh, to have an mpu based stuff. But in the end it's going to be that orchestration thing I was talking it's going to be everywhere.

57:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It should also just be plumbing right, like you shouldn. You shouldn't notice.

57:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, I hadn't used this example in a while, but I brought it up with a friend from HP. I described it as MSG. It's a flavor enhancer. This thing's already pretty damn good, but throw a little MSG in there in the form of AI now and it gets better.

57:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You won't know why but it's better.

57:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, and there are different opinions about whether it's healthy or not, but look, it tastes better. So I know it's addictive, um, but yeah, like trying to sell ai I especially to consumers, yeah, I don't know. You know, I think we talked last week about the affinity deal where you can get their products for free for six months. Whatever. Those products are fantastic. They're not particularly like infused with AI or anything. You know they will be, of course, right. So I mean, even Adobe has got kind of a commercial or a creative professional market kind of sewn up for themselves, but there's a much bigger world out there and I think this, that stuff, it's going to be tough for them to differentiate, you know.

58:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So anyway, we'll see with uh, with what mr suleiman could do here, but he's the one who got a little hot water by saying you know, it's okay if we just take everything on the open web, it's oh my god I just I yeah, in case he he was basically he left um because he had to, but he got into trouble at some previous company for you know, basically just being big jerk.

58:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and the fact that here we are 10 years later and he's still. He's like, still, like this came out of your mouth. Are you serious like I? That doesn't make any sense to me I don't understand I mean it might.

58:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure he believes it and it's probably even true at least, but it's not politic to say it out loud. He said the quiet part out loud, yeah.

58:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, don't tell people you're stealing from them.

58:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't like it.

58:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
People don't like it yeah.

58:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
People get prickly about it and you don't care that you're stealing from them, right, it's like I'm stealing from them and so what, and so what.

59:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because, it's okay, but that makes you know.

59:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But this is why, when it works out that Microsoft isn't going to be able to sell AI, right, microsoft's going to be fine, right, they're a humongous company. They're going to sell this back end that all these other companies are going to use in their services too. They're going to do great, but you knowumers don't care. They don't care about you and everything that you're doing, everyone is doing, you know. So the fact that you stole from people and now they're stealing, like your things too, it's like, yeah good, nobody cares. You know I, we hope the whole, I want all of everything you do to be available in open source and cheaper solutions.

59:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So so what do you think of that spreadsheet LM that they're, they're, LLM they're LLM they're talking about.

59:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is this the Microsoft or Google?

59:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft Isn't that Google. It's their new AI model designed to understand and work with spreadsheets. Right, oh, I'm sorry, yeah. It was just a research paper, it's not a product, but it feels like this is them trying to find a justification, something you can do with it, sure.

01:00:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That you'll be glad that you have it. I just you're going to charge me for microsoft 365. That's going to be a feature of it.

01:00:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, that's, it's going to be that's what I'm paying for. I'm not paying for it and if it's not in excel, what?

01:00:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I right, I know, yeah, exactly yeah, um, yeah, I want the thing that isn't excel but is a spreadsheet. Um, what's what? Huh, yeah, that doesn't make, but is a spreadsheet what? Huh, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. But well, whatever they're trying things, I mean it's fine. You know, google has that.

01:00:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, and the idea that somebody sends you a complex spreadsheet and you can ask.

01:00:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Copilot. What's this spreadsheet say? That's interesting, that's a great feature of Excel. It's an Excel feature. You know what I mean. Like they can describe. This is what I mean. I think this is what's behind the thing I was talking about earlier, where Microsoft for some reason feels the need to explain the back end. Nobody cares. Here's what I care about. Does Windows Update work? Is it reliable and quick? And do I have to reboot? Less Excellent? Couldn't care less how you do? Yeah, except ultimately it's going to be. This is why you pay for microsoft 365, because that's the thing, that's going to sell.

01:01:13
That's what people care about they're trying to sell copilot as a relatively expensive add-on, as you know, although I think they've lowered the price, but by all accounts it's not selling that well no, and because what people find and I don't know how you look, at some point they'll insure to find this but um, what people are finding when they pay or don't pay for, whether it's open, ai or gemini or co-pilot or whatever is you know, the free one's pretty damn good. Yeah, like I, I don't really need it that much, but again you get back to that where spreadsheet ll might be interesting.

01:01:43
It's like this is only in the paid version because it knows spreadsheets well, but the differentiator there, though, though remember, I mean Microsoft is the big controversy five to ten years ago was Microsoft wants to get rid of standalone perpetual office right, they want to sell you an Office 365, what we now call Microsoft 365 subscription. Okay, and the way we do that is Microsoft is they add a ton of new features to the product over a year, sometimes for month to month, right, depending on the year, and that there's the value. So there's some people like, yeah, I don't care, you know, but there's some who say I'm still hanging around with office 20 2007 because, right, it works fine yeah, you might be running office 4.2.

01:02:26
It still works great. I don't know, it probably does. Um, I hope not, but you know, whatever I know windows will run it. So that's, you know the value prop there. But, um, yeah, so there's the divide. But the problem with the copilot stuff is it creates this third tier and there are actually multiple tiers because you know multiple microsoft 365s. But look, the thing you're really selling isn't it more expensive tier of microsoft 365? Like I the the marking of this of ai? To me, the thing you're really selling is a more expensive tier of Microsoft 365. Like, the marketing of this of AI to me is the thing that people are just like yeah, I don't, nobody, I don't care, I don't. You said AI and I don't care because everyone says AI. Just show me a better spreadsheet and maybe I'll pay for that, because no one cares about it.

01:03:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's well.

01:03:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Show, show well and again, show me something I can't do right now and the summarizers are a great one they are, yeah, but again, I, I, these are going to be everywhere. This is the problem, you know you, yeah, you could put up some random browser like opera it has its own thing and say summarize this document in word, and it's going to do it. You know, is it going to be as good as the one that you pay for at Microsoft? Maybe not, maybe not.

01:03:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But the power of Copilot is, I don't have to go find the document. I say, find me the latest spreadsheet with sales figures in it and summarize it for me, and it goes and navigates the graph and finds it Right. The graph, and finds it right, it was from there. I just don't know they are positioned to do more with it. I don't know they know how to. I don't know they know how to tell us how they're doing it. But that power inside of m365 is substantial. Just got to surface it in a way that's going to delight people right?

01:04:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I would start by not calling it ai in a prayer right now. You're not wrong. Yeah, I don't know. I know that's a weird stance.

01:04:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just name.

01:04:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mentioned earlier on the show, um, this uh uh feet restyle image feature that's in photos and apparently now in designer, right, it's, it's pretty magical, like it's neat. Um, and I said I did because I did really do this. I spent some time. I actually started looking for fun photos so I could throw them against different styles to see what those look like. But here's the thing I don't need any of those pictures like I don't. This is not a need, it's, it's fun, it's cool. I am not going to save any of those things. I I I can't tell you I was impressed by them, but I it's not a need, you know so well, I not a need, you know.

01:04:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I have a need to interrupt this.

01:04:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is it a need for speed?

01:04:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a need for Big ID. I want to just interrupt briefly. We will continue with the fascinating AI discussion in just a little bit, but I thought it might be a good time to talk a little bit about since we're talking about AI about our sponsor, big ID. So let me explain. You know data securities. You know kind of like job one it's all we talk about breaches and so forth. But you also know you've got to fortify against bigger problems. All custodians of data, especially modern CISOs, need proactive solutions. But luckily there is something you can use, you can trust, that will help you secure your most valuable asset. That's Big ID B-I-G-I-D. If you're a CISO, your job is to ensure that the promise of AI doesn't become a security pitfall. Remember, in the early days of OpenAI, ibm and other big companies banned it. That's not the best solution. I mean, I understand you know it's like well, don't use it. But there are better ways. Big ID's, generative AI solutions, gen AI solutions help you navigate the labyrinthine world of AI from the point of view of security, from your CISO's perspective. With BigID, you can leverage solutions that take a defense-in-depth approach to automating manual processes, to improving accuracy and actionability and applying AI and ML to cut through the noise, to improve risk management and to enable a robust data security strategy. You can have both AI and security. Bigid allows you to find and classify your data accurately and at scale, wherever it is on-prem in the cloud, structured, unstructured, semi-structured I didn't know there was such a thing semi-structured, covering hundreds of data sources. You know who uses Big ID. The US Army uses it. Imagine where their data lives In legacy systems in the cloud, on-prem, all over the place. And, of course, they want to use AI. They want to train AI, but they only want to train AI in data that's safe to use. That's what BigID lets you do. You can minimize your attack surface through policy-driven retention management by removing redundant and outdated data. You can audit and inspect what data is being shared with AI, be alerted when usage policies are breached. Another company, another big group, that uses big id telenor. They use big id to reassure their customers that they're handling data in a secure way. And you know, with the latest breach in a big company, telephone company in the us, you might think telenor actually takes this pretty seriously. Here's the quote from Telenor we want to solve customer problems and regulatory demands. We want to focus on the business and have a partner like BigID to focus on the tech. We wanted a partner that understood what we're doing, who can help us. Companies who use BigID are showing their customers that they are taking data seriously. Bigid has won a lot of awards in this space market leader in data security, posture management and the global infosec awards that's from cyber defense magazine best data security company. That was the cybersecurity excellence awards. A coveted spot in the citizens jump cyber 66 report, which recognizes big ID for elevating data management and security with first-of-its-kind AI technology.

01:08:36
This is a name you need to know. You may have heard it before. It's a name. If you know it, check it out. Start protecting your sensitive data wherever it lives.

01:08:46
Bigidcom slash Windows. That lets them know. You heard it on Windows Weekly. Bigidcom slash Windows that lets them know. You heard it on Windows Weekly BigIDcom slash Windows. In fact, you get a free demo there to see how BigID can help your organization reduce data risk and accelerate the adoption of generative AI. Again, bigid. It's B-I-G-I-D, b-i-g-i-dcom slash Windows. There's also they have a lot of white papers and reports that you can get there free, including one that will give you lots of insight and key trends in AI adoption. It outlines the challenges and the overall impact of generative AI across organizations. It's really good, big ID dot com slash Windows. You may not even know you need it, but you do. Thank you, big ID, for supporting Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat, richard Campbell we are talking, continue talking, ai. Are you the kind of person you use Windows betas? Obviously You're an insider. Do you use the Apple betas? Yeah, I do you do.

01:09:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yeah, and I kind of go in and out of this. But because of all the stuff going on this year, I signed back up for the Apple developer program so I could get going on that early and it was buggered. So I could get going on that early and it was buggered. Ios and iPadOS were horrible until right after the third beta and they finally caught up. But they're finally letting you move the icons around wherever you want and all this stuff. But to me, the bigger deal is just the automatic. They have dynamic themes now which are gorgeous and they change color and um, like darkness over the course of the day Really really neat, um, and then Mac OS. I don't know, it's not a big deal. You can, you know, do that remote iPhone thing from the Mac, but I don't, I don't care too much about that.

01:10:54
Obviously, what we're looking forward all the non-apple intelligence stuff I wonder if they've over promised on this well, you know we are taking them at the word that they're going to roll it out slowly, and they are I don't think it's that.

01:11:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they always said, in fact, it wouldn't be part of uh the new, yeah, uh version I'm not.

01:11:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't know how clear they were, but I think they'll be a little bit right at launch yeah, yeah yeah, some later. Some of it won't be issues, you know I mean yep, oh, yeah, yeah yeah, yep, yep I know I thought is not a this wasn't to the Mac observers on Mac very quickly.

01:11:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not a surprise at all. We knew this wouldn't wouldn't happen.

01:11:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think to a lot of people because there was so much hype and they're like, oh, here it comes, you know. It's like, yeah, it's okay. It's just that you know, the Apple intelligence stuff is really big. So I the thing I equate it to, was the iphone 7 plus I think it was called the first one that had two cameras. They they were promising portrait mode with bokeh and that didn't ship in beta until that november or december, whatever it was, and it was terrible. You know, it was like the first version was off, um, so that that took a long time.

01:12:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was just one feature in the camera app you know, yeah, well, that well, just what I'm worried about with this is like I'm interested to see if we've all made this presumption that apple's going to do this better, right? Because? Historically they do. They come in a little later, but they come in with a better solution, right we'll see.

01:12:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean I, I, I like, I like their approach. I mean um so far, far it's just been talk.

01:12:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They definitely got the branding and the concept down. Now the question is can you make a product that does what you said?

01:12:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it is sort of what we just talked about. It's a bunch of features for other stuff. You know it's weird. We're going to look back on this whole AI chatbot thing as like what were we doing here, exactly?

01:12:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think I've been having conversations with a few development teams and trying to utilize LLMs for various specific verticals and the big battle for them is building a good enough tester to know when the thing is spat out garbage Right. Good enough tester to know when the thing is spat out garbage right. That that you know they.

01:13:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They basically need a parser to parse the output of the llm, sufficient to at least have a gate in front of nope, that wasn't right this is, um, well, this is related to what you just said, but you just reminded me of a thought I had the other day where, um, because we're going to talk about some programming stuff in a little while but when you you target something like NET, you know you have to deal with like runtime versions and there are different ways to package that.

01:13:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And NET is this thing Code signing, like there's a bunch of.

01:13:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's an additional level you know, it's not a big deal.

01:13:51
I mean, but it's something you you know. It's not just you have to, there's something you have to think about um, if you are a developer and you're I don't know um, you maybe make a video encoding app and you're like or you know video editor and you're like look, we have, there are these three slms, like lms you would install locally, and each one of them makes one of our features way better if you have an mpu, right. But we have to get those things on people's computers right and it's not just updating the software that we make. They have to have this thing there to configured properly, etc. Etc. This is a daunting, yeah, a set of requirements right now.

01:14:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, getting software onto somebody's machine full stop because it's not a dot net.

01:14:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Runtime. It's not a dot net. You know. Runtime, install. It's like these. These things are pretty big. You know some of them and, uh, you know different versions. They're improving all the time. They're changing it's. The whole thing is a mess and honestly, I think from a software developer's perspective whether you're adobe, some little guy, that's what's so attractive about targeting the cloud. You don't have to it. It removes a bunch of the complexity also expands the market right. Uh, very dramatically.

01:15:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now we're back to debating whether an MPU is really going to do anything. I know.

01:15:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's important to see both sides of it, but, um, it's. You know, we're in this transition period, so everything's a little weird now. Um, we don't know where it's going to land, but early times, um, we skipped over this, but just real quick. Um microsoft had gotten in trouble a couple years ago in the eu for its cloud licensing. I don't think this is. This is actually just europe. I think it's the european economic area. There are european companies that have complained to the european commission and other uh regulatory bodies that microsoft's licensing in the cloud cloud licensing specifically is um problematic, and it is, or at least was. I mean in the sense that um microsoft and not just microsoft, but microsoft in this case was making it very difficult for customers that got onto their cloud to get off of their cloud because there were all these exit fees.

01:15:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Specifically exit fees. Yeah, it was exfiltration charges, right, yep, we charge you to be paid about that and this was yeah, amazon and Google were doing the same thing.

01:16:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Once Amazon and Google stopped doing it, they started complaining about Microsoft really vocally, which I find to be humorous. When this first came up, brad Smith actually published a blog post where he's like you know what? They have a point. We really do make this kind of hard. We're going to work on this, but it's been two, three years now. Google has been working behind the scenes to make sure that Microsoft is not able to settle this, because Google is just number three in this market. The complaint, the worry here is not about Google. It's about these little companies. Right that maybe there are businesses in Europe that would run on a smaller local cloud infrastructure if they could, but just getting off of Microsoft is so prohibitively expensive they can't even consider it. So Microsoft settled with a trade group that's representing most of these companies. We think.

01:16:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We think that because got rid of their x fill charges yeah, yeah, they did that right.

01:16:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So all three of those companies have done that. Um, this has not been made completely public yet because I think there's still some groups that have to agree to this, but google released the information because they were involved in the process and, um, I think it is going to happen, but I don't know. No one's ever going to be happy with big company like microsoft dominating, you know, a market like this. So I'm not sure they're out of the woods yet, but, um, apparently and they got out of it pretty cheap too you would think this was going to cost them billions of dollars 20, I think it was 20 million, if I'm not mistaken. Rounding error is what that is. Yeah for them, that's. Yeah, we'll give up a couple of mouse sales, whatever.

01:17:38
Um, and then, so we talked about opera last week, I think on the desktop. Uh, they're beta testing a new ui on iphone and, I think, ipad. Um, you have to use test flight and get on a wait list. So I actually did this. It's actually a beautiful little app. Um, they have the their uh area ai, which you know is available on mobile as well. So it's, you know, if you're an opera fan, nice, uh, take it on the road, leo, are you right? What is you?

01:18:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
look like a mousketeer, no, no, this is a ZDTV hat. Oh nice Vintage. I'm actually rescuing a few hats that I realized I might have been premature in ejecting.

01:18:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's a pill for that.

01:18:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, premature injection. It's an on-prem solution you know, I really feel like we should open our doors to club members. They should just come in and grab a piece of you know twit memorabilia.

01:18:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's so much stuff, literally hundreds of hats be careful, though, because it's going to be like, uh, when the berlin wall fell down it's gonna be like a scream in come the sledgehammers I'm taking this piece of wall yep, like this. What are you doing with the hammer you?

01:19:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
know, I kind of did that already. I tore the logo off the wall. I wasn't sure how it was attached, so I started working on it and it just came right off. It was just double-sided tape. So I'm glad because I wanted, I did want the you know the twit bug, right, but there's a lot more Boy, is there a lot more Including? By the way, I just found three unopened boxes of OS2 warp. Nice, wow.

01:19:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If anybody wants them. That's a while ago.

01:19:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that was the operating system that had XP built in, or not? Xp NT?

01:19:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh no, I think it was just 3X. It could run 16-bit Windows apps.

01:19:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was that what it was?

01:19:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah.

01:19:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, Is the media working and do you have a device to?

01:19:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
use that. No, I'm sure there's nothing I can do. I think it's three and a half inch floppy.

01:19:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll go get it while you talk about the modern world the dot net nine, preview six. Yeah, I don't know how much time we should spend on this. This is almost a personal thing for me, but I I did want to talk to richard about this because he's involved.

01:20:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're diving in now when it's not going to ship till november. You were still talking about pretty early bits, although C-Shop is now in.

01:20:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, and I did not intend to go down this path now to this degree. Here's what happened, though. So back in May, microsoft announced, as part of Build, that they were bringing back WPF, the Windows Presentation.

01:20:31
Foundation they really got rid of it. Well, but as a first class. In other words, developers come to them and say we want to build a new native Windows app Like what do you have? They would say WinUI, which is really Windows app SDK. But now they say we have that and we have WPF. Right, and the reason is WPF, like Richard said, has never gone away and the reason is WPF, like Richard said, has never gone away.

01:20:49
This has been used extensively. They open sourced it, though. They open sourced it, so there's a community thing going on where they're keeping it up to date and everything but three, four years ago I had created multiple versions of a Notepad app called NET Pad, windows Forms, vb, and then C Sharp, wpf and UWP, and I put, I think, just those three, the last three. They're up on GitHub if you want to go see that stuff. But if you bring down the WPF version of NET Pad, which is my favorite, because that is my favorite Microsoft framework, application framework, you know it's dated, right. We have Windows 11, which has this modern theming and styling with light and dark modes and stuff, and this is like it looks, not quite a Windows 2000 app, but it's. You know it's old school, like Windows 7, I guess we call it, and you know because Microsoft wasn't actively keeping it up to date. In fact, there was a period of time where they're actively trying to pretend it didn't exist. Trying to pretend it didn't exist. This, all this ui that's common in some cases gone that it never supported officially, right. So part of the community open sourcing effort is has involved different groups or even individual developers, kind of bringing it up to speed so you can create apps that look normal or modern or whatever on windows 11.

01:22:07
So I would I this will not mean much to most people listening or watching. I apologize, but when they announced this, this was one of the most exciting things that's happened to me in a long time. I was really really happy about this and I'm like I'm going to bring this thing back from the dead. I'm going to modernize my app for windows 11. So the way this is rolling out, like richard said, is it's part of dot net 9, which will ship publicly in stable, I guess in november. So we have whatever. That is, six months, five months now, whatever, it's going to be a while, and every x number of weeks they put out a new preview milestone. So this week they put up preview six, but the week of build, uh, they put up preview four. And preview four is the version that added the code.

01:22:49
Well, added the the functionality you need to begin modernizing wpf apps to look right under windows 11. Now just a flag, as I were. Yeah, it's basically um, three or four lines of xaml code that go into appxaml and uh, it will eventually just be a checkbox in the ui link, but for right now, during the beta, it's just like a. You just have to add this code. Now they've done a horrible job of documenting. This is almost nothing out there even today, but at the time I had to watch a video and still frame it to get the code, to figure out how to do what I just described, and you know pretty quickly I got the base UI up and running and looking like a windows 11 app. Pretty exciting, you know, and but lots of little detail work to do. And then you start thinking about like, well, how can I modernize this?

01:23:36
Whatever I was thinking as the other previews came out, there would be more and more functionality with each release, but there hasn't been. There was that one release and that's been it. Um, and then over the past week or so, I, I, I just I was like I've been working on it, not just over the past week or so, but in the past week or so. I just, I was like I've been working on it not just over the past week or so, but in the past week or so. I just kind of hit on something and I realized I could do this, like right now, like I could make this.

01:24:00
I could do this now and I, like, as of today, have almost completely done it. The only thing yeah, if you look at Notepad in the modern version that you get in windows 11 in my app, the only thing I don't have and granted, it's a, it's a huge one is tabs, and the reason is that the tabs implementation they're using is from the windows app sdk, which is modern and whatever that's not been updated for wpf. It's super old-fashioned, it's kind of garbagey. But basically everything else, like the settings pane and the collapsible expanders and all that, I've pretty much done it like it's there.

01:24:36
So I have to go back and add things, you know, or fine tune things, whatever. It's going to take a little while, so it will be at the end of the year, before this is kind of officially, but I'm going to be able to document it and I've been doing like high level overviews of what I've been doing. But that's awesome, it's really cool and yeah.

01:24:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so but when do you do a like an os2 port?

01:25:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, yeah, um well, you mean like the, the command line or the gy, because I I was never really a big presentation manager guy it.

01:25:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is Warp, so that was all about presentation. Oh, and I have Warp here.

01:25:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is actually version 1.3, refresh level 1.30.1.

01:25:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, I think I gave you that. I think that was for me.

01:25:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and then somebody, I guess, decided to live it up, and this is a CD-ROM upgrade.

01:25:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are two things in your collection, I believe the first one is that old version of OS 2 and the other one is the Lotus.

01:25:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I have the Lotus books out there too.

01:25:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, it's the Lotus. It was for the Mac.

01:25:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It wasn't 1, 2, 3. But it was called something else. It was Lotus.

01:25:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Symphony. It came in like a little leather book and everything. It was really neat. Would you like some? I little leather book and everything. It was really neat. Would you like some frame, would you?

01:25:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
like to make money off of figuring out what printers you could buy that would work with symphony. Yeah, and with you know your act pack accounting software. It's like you had to build this venn diagram up. It's like okay, you're down to six printers that work with for you youngsters who may not right remember what I like the, uh, the use of a ps2 computer.

01:26:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Installing OS2. I'll just skip to the important part.

01:26:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like that. It's multiple pages, oh many.

01:26:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is just the install book To install the OS2 operating system. Remove the installation diskette from the plastic diskette sleeve at the back of using advanced features and insert the diskette into drive A. To insert 3.5-inch diskettes. Insert the diskette into drive a. To insert 3.5 inch diskettes. Insert the diskette into the diskette drive. The arrow side must be up in the arrow must be pointing to the diskette drive. Push gently, lord on the outer edge of the disk.

01:26:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It will make a very healthy chunk sound until it clicks and drops into place.

01:26:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and then uh they also have quality yeah, look at that, there's. Now you know you're in the right place. Ibm launched it.

01:26:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I used to love the IBM books. Remember they were in like those binders and they would issue updates for DOS or whatever and they would replace the pages. You know.

01:27:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this might have that actually.

01:27:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So the CD one you have a chance of installing, because you can get a USB DVD drive that should be able to read that CD.

01:27:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But when you say chance, look at this.

01:27:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, what you do? You just download the disk images online. Actually, it's smaller than I thought it would be. That's only five floppies, yeah well, it's only dos that's the old one, right this is it's?

01:27:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
basically just dos, it's dos, it's like a probably a 32-bit version of dos or whatever.

01:27:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, oh my gosh. Guidelines were ready, those 720K are 1.4 floppies.

01:27:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're old enough, they might be 720.

01:27:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh good. So here's the good news here's our floppy disk drive. So we're ready to go.

01:27:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In fact, I'm going to follow these instructions If you were going to install this. I strongly recommend a virtual machine. Wait a minute I. I strongly recommend a virtual machine. Wait a minute I underestimated.

01:27:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's two per slot.

01:27:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that's two, four, six, eight, ten disks, but the last eight are just printer drivers.

01:28:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's no way that disk still works. It's only 20 megabytes. It can't possibly function.

01:28:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Listen to this it works. This is a Ryu floppy drive. Do you think if I plug this into the HP it'll? I think it's going to come back like a blank disk.

01:28:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't have a PS2 there. Come on man, what are you doing?

01:28:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, thank, I didn't realize you were the one who gave me these. Thank you.

01:28:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just the old OS2, and then the. Would you like them back?

01:28:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like I said, no the, the old os2 and then the um. Would you like them back?

01:28:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
like I said no, no, I would not. You could say I used to have a crazy amount of stuff like that, oh yeah people thought that was just. That was just fodder for some future fire.

01:28:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, it's just not yeah, people thought that because I had a lot of space in the old place that I wanted all their old crap.

01:28:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So everybody said I actually didn't even consider that. I was like I just don't want this. Leo will want it, for sure, leo will take it. Leo takes anything. Leo doesn't take anything. He puts it in the background.

01:29:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Well, I have bad news for you. I don't know how much of this is going to survive the.

01:29:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't think any of it's functional. That's rust. Wait a minute I'm trying to store a song.

01:29:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This one came with a bonus pack, I wonder what's in the bonus P-A-K. Oh, you know it's going to be good. Online access and more. Oh, ibm works too.

01:29:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they've had a deal with. Oh God Prodigy. They used to sell PS1 computers through Sears.

01:29:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, it says this. Well, that's. It's a little confusing. It says os disc at one four cd-rom.

01:29:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know, I don't understand how that works for cds you put the floppy in first, and then you can mount the rom.

01:29:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, because you couldn't?

01:29:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
boot from a cd-rom back in the day.

01:29:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, you needed drivers. Yeah, yeah. Oh crazy.

01:29:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're holding the future in your hands right there.

01:29:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right there Now those.

01:29:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
CDs might work, but there's no way those floppies work. Not a chance. You think, well, we might have to try the problem's going to be just.

01:30:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, you won't be able to boot or anything. It doesn't matter if you can read the disk.

01:30:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just not you can't do anything with it. I don't think the disk is readable. I think you're going to plug it in and it's going to go. You want me to format this.

01:30:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's how you learn OS 2. Oh boy, yeah, it's right here. Look, windows, it's exciting. Look at. Oh, this is how you use a mouse.

01:30:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It sure is. Are you sure this is the right book? Leo Looks like ghost hands. I wouldn't go to the next page, wow.

01:30:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What an aesthetic, Isn't that amazing? Preparing and installing dual boot, printing files, updating directory windows displaying files and directories.

01:30:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's amazing you got anything done.

01:30:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a lot of work.

01:30:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean people don't appreciate that we didn't get here just coasting expectations were small, too right, you weren't. You weren't doing that much work.

01:30:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, anyway, thank you. I I forgot that you sent this to me. Wow, now I know who to send it back to.

01:31:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was wondering well, I I'm most of it did not come from me to be clear, you sent me Symphony.

01:31:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember that, yes. Yeah, thank you? Yeah, All right Back to the future. Google Android, Stu. We're talking still developer section. Are you done with the netpad?

01:31:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know, probably. Oh, just one thing real quick on the dot net thing um, the, the work that microsoft is doing to bring wpf back is based on that community stuff and there's there's a couple of projects, but the one, the one they, I think they just basically hired. These guys are paid or whatever, but they they took something called wpf ui which is actually available as a gallery app in the windows. The microsoft store, if you wanted to go see the stuff, is something I might actually use because they they have some controls that are correct for windows 11 that are not in wpf, although I'm hoping that changes over time. So I guess my only point is like, aside from a couple of small things like and one big thing, um, like, that work is pretty much there like it's, it's. It's not like you could modernize a like a 20 year old app if you wanted to and make it look good in windows 11.

01:32:21
It's kind of it's pretty exciting, maybe we should port os2 to dot net it would have to be a 32-bit or better windows app, but, um, oh well, also written with wpl. Um, yeah, so google, uh, had google io back in may, as everyone knows. But now they're going on the road and I think they're doing a couple of remote follow-up shows. This one was in india and they announced a bunch of different things, but the one that was most interesting to me is they are bringing Android Studio to the web, is the simplest way to say it. They have something called Project IDX, which is a web or cloud-hosted IDE based on Visual Studio Code, extensible. It launched with a couple of workloads in preview sometime last year. Now it has dozens of workloads. It's all the major languages and frameworks, et cetera, and frameworks, etc. Etc. Web and, in some cases, mobile. Um, so, and it's, it's publicly available now. But now they're showing the first pre-release version of android studio running in the code, and android studio is their full-up. You know local ide that installs on windows, mac, linux and Chrome OS, but running like hosted as a website or a web app. Right, and so it's using. It's somehow integrated with Project IDX in the sense that you launch it as one of its workloads, but it's its own IDE. It's not based on Project IDX, I guess, maybe the backend is, but they're bringing their IDE to the cloud, which is it's pretty amazing, right, so it's interesting. Um, that opens things up nicely.

01:33:58
Um, one of the stories I know that uh, from microsoft, it really bothers me still to this day is that if micros, if apple, improved safari which they could, they just literally ignore the stuff on purpose on the ipad. They could bring full featured visual studio code to ipad. But apple just won't do that work because they're trying to hold down web apps. Right, they want to, they want to do native everything. Go through the store, yep, and they're like, yeah, but you could develop apps for everything on this, if you just, you know, like, I'm not doing that. So, uh, I don't know, maybe someday that changes, who knows? We're just, uh, getting the ability to move icons in an ipad screen right now. Maybe we should lower our site, but, um, anyway, that's where they're at, so that's happening.

01:34:40
I I just that's very interesting to me. Um, anytime, uh, microsoft with visual studio or code, or google now with android studio, I guess, or whatever. Apple doesn't do this with xcode, but they could, um, you spread this thing to different platforms and make it more accessible. I think that's that's really exciting. So I don't really I don't really like android studio per se, but not having to install it locally doesn't sound like such a horrible idea frankly I have some wonderful, wonderful people I can tell you you about.

01:35:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm actually a big fan. You maybe heard me talk about the ThinkScanary before. What is the ThinkScanary? We have one right here, one of our sponsors. Actually, they're honey pots. They look just like external USB drives but they have an ethernet connection and a power connection. That's all drives, but they have an Ethernet connection and a power connection. That's all Inside is the smartest thing I've ever seen. You know, I remember talking to the creator of the first honeypot, bill Cheswick. We actually had him at an event in Boston and he was talking about how hard it was to do to make a credible honeypot that will fool the bad guys. If only, if only things had been around.

01:35:55
That Think Scenery is so easy to deploy. You can literally do it in minutes and it can impersonate anything. Now mine over here is a Synology NAS, and I mean impersonate, I mean it's DSM-7. You see the login screen. If you're a sharp hacker, you go. Well, let me check the MAC address on this hardware. It's actually Synology, a Synology MAC address. Everything checks out, except it's not. It's a honeypot, and as soon as they log into it you get a notification in any way you like it Email text syslog, there are sports web hooks, there's an API I mean literally any way you want it but these are only the notifications that matter. It means that somebody is in your system, either a malicious insider snooping around or, worse, a bad guy who's gotten through your primitive fences and is now doing what bad guys do, kind of surveying the scenery, seeing what's in there, what they can steal, what they can exfiltrate, before they encrypt everything and ask you for $35 million. You need a thinks canary. On average, companies don't know they've been breached for more than three months. That's a long time to let a bad guy be wandering around your system, but what do you have that will let you know? This is why you need to think Canary If someone is.

01:37:16
They make lure files too. By the way, I should mention that you can create a Canary doc that could look like a PDF or a doc or an XLS file. You can name it something juicy. Employee information I wouldn't be so blatant as to say social security numbers, but you could do employee information. That wouldn't be so blatant as to say social security numbers, but you could do employee information that's going to get them, but as soon as they double-click that file. As soon as they try to open it, you get a notification. You will know you have a problem. No false alerts. It could be a SCADA device, an IIS server, it could be a Linux box. You can light it up like a Christmas tree with every service under the book, or you just judiciously pick a few juicy services. Then you wait and when those attackers breach your network or malicious insiders, whenever they made themselves known by accessing that lure file or your things canary, you will know immediately and you can take action.

01:38:10
Ignorance is not bliss. Not knowing that they're in there is problem, problem, big problem. Visit canarytool slash twit. Now some big operations might have hundreds of things to canaries. Smaller SMB might have a handful.

01:38:25
Let's give you the basic kind of five things canary model. You get $7,500 a year. You get five things canaries. You get your own hosted console, you get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance. But I got an even better deal for you because if you use the offer code TWIT in the how did you hear about us box, you're going to get 10% off the price, and not just for the first month or year but for life.

01:38:52
Here's another nice thing.

01:38:53
If you're at all skeptical, I wouldn't Trust me. This thing really works. But if you're at all skeptical, you'll be glad to know they have a two-month money-back guarantee for a full refund 60 days plenty of time to decide, you know. Is this worth it? But I got to tell you one thing In all the years and it's more than seven years now we've been talking about the Thinks Canaries, not one person has ever asked for a refund. They're that good. You might even say, oh, you know, I got them. I'm going to buy five and return them. But as soon as you hook them up and you see how it works, you're going to go oh, actually I need these. Oh, actually I need these. I'm not returning them.

01:39:31
We love the things Canary. In fact, if you want to see others who do go to canarytoolslove A bunch of stuff from some fairly well-known CISOs and others. But if you go to canarytoolstwit canarytoolstwit and enter the code TWIT in the how to Hear your Hair Best box, you'll save 10% and, believe me, you can thank me later. This thing is a must-have for every network Canarytools, slash, twit. We thank them for their support of Windows Weekly. Let me hear your dulcet tones, paul. Hello, oh, you're all better. You're all better.

01:40:12
So in that case, let's do the Xbox segment.

01:40:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is a big one. We actually touched on some of this last week and I think this was happening as we recorded the show, so I wasn't 100% sure what was going on there, but now that I know the details, it's worse, unfortunately. Um, the short version is that microsoft did not announce this. By the way, I they a support document went up that had this information in it, and it's it seems like what they meant to do was announce something along with the news that they were raising prices on all the Xbox Game Pass subscriptions, neutering what used to be called Xbox Game Pass for console and reneging on their pledge to bring all Microsoft Studio games to Game Pass on day one. So it's different for each tier. So it's it's different for each tier. You know the more expensive ones like a ultimate especially obviously. Well, not obviously, but to retain all the perks from before. But the thing that didn't happen alongside this information was oh, but don't worry, because we're going to give you all this other stuff and it's going to be fine, right? Because if they had come out with and I think this was the plan I don't know this, but I feel like originally the plan was look, we're going to have to raise prices. Obviously, we've talked about this. You don't spend $68 billion on Activision and release a new Call of Duty game every year that makes several billion dollars and just put roll that all into a like a game pass plan without lower you know, raising prices. You know something has to give right. Raising prices, something has to give.

01:41:53
The thing that I would just remind people of I don't think I said this last week, but Game Pass, when it first launched, was a way to reacquaint gamers with catalog games. The idea was, by this point, xbox had this whole library of content. They were talking, they were doing backward, compatible stuff. They were like, all right, you know, maybe we can start bringing this stuff forward. And for developers that were never going to make another dollar on these titles anyway, this would be a way to make some more money too. So it's kind of a win-win.

01:42:23
And when the Xbox one tanked in whatever year that was 2013 or whatever they realized like, look, we're not going to, the console thing's not working, like we're going to have to do something else. So they embarked on the strategy that they're still on today. They've expanded it, but they've expanded the notion of what it means to be Xbox as a platform. It's not just about consoles, right. So they have different tiers of these Game Pass subscriptions. They have one for PC, hundreds of games on console, 100-ish, whatever, maybe 150.

01:42:57
I'm not even sure anymore, but fewer games but still a pretty good library on Game Pass on PC. The PC world is a little different because multiplayer is just out there. Everyone has that. People get games from everywhere, it doesn't matter where they come from. They can't really do some of the things they do on console. It's a different, it's a different world. And of course, they are also expanding into um cloud streaming, like game streaming over the cloud, uh, with xbox game streaming, which is a perk of the ultimate subscription. So, yeah, I don't know, I'm not good at math, but 68 billion dollars divided by x number or whatever subscriber is, I don't, you know it's uh, it's a long-term bet. So, yeah, prices are going up. The the most successful of those subscriptions is gone uh, that's the one for console, and the thing that replaces it no longer has that day.

01:43:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One promise for the microsoft studio games and they haven't released the new games yet. Like, at least do this alongside and ta-da, like I said.

01:43:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that was the plan. I think this thing went live on their support website by mistake, I don't. There was no. No one has ever said anything publicly about it. It's weird. So you know this is not for the first time this year. I keep talking about this, guys. I, you know this is not for the first time this year. I keep talking about this guy. You guys please, you know, say something. Um, this has been a terrible year for Xbox. They just don't seem to do a good job of countering all the bad news and things keep happening and it's like guys, you're just losing us here, like this is bad.

01:44:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, uh, how do you feel about the Microsoft Activision acquisition now?

01:44:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I still think it was fine. It's just that I don't understand why they haven't said what they're doing to give the like. In other words, as a gamer, it doesn't affect anything, right. But if you're an Xbox guy, gal or whatever person you know, the expectation is like oh good, I'm going to start getting access to this stuff. That's for me. That's why I might support that as an xbox fan.

01:44:57
That has not happened, with the exception of diablo 4. There's nothing there, I mean, and they just raise the price like what you know, I'm paying. I'm not, I'm paid ahead now, but I mean, like it's 20, it's going to be 20 bucks a month soon. That's how much I give netflix. Like I come on like it's got to be a better value than that. I think it's going to be. I think that's how much I give netflix. Like I come on like it's got to be a better value than that. I think it's going to be. I think that's the point. But we're in a weird period of time here where they're just not talking I don't know why and they, they just raise prices. They don't think they meant to, and clearly this announcement's coming because they dribble stuff out. But, dear god, what's going on? Um related to this.

01:45:30
Every year there's a new Call of Duty game. Obviously, sony had an exclusivity window with Call of Duty for a while, which meant that they got everything first. That expired actually, and I don't remember exactly last year, I want to say the last couple of years. We moved into a system where the DLC and everything comes out across the platform same time. It's not we don't. You know xbox, people don't wait any longer, but I believe this is going to be the first year where, if you're on xbox, you can actually get into the early access and then the open beta at the same time as playstation. I could be wrong about that, but it's actually coming to game pass subscribers so you'll be able to participate in the pre-release versions of the game, although when the game comes out you'll have to buy it because it's not coming out.

01:46:16
Well, actually, that's not necessarily true. It depends on if you're paying for ultimate. I guess you will get it. Um, so there you go anyway. It's complicated and I, if you had asked me, in october, the day that this acquisition went through and they wrote a check for 68 billion dollars or however that went down how long do you think it's going to be before you will be playing, uh, call of duty games on game pass.

01:46:45
I would have said, I don't know. Two weeks, four weeks, I don't. What are we talking about here? It's been it's, could it be a year. It could be like we're closing in on this, aren't we like? This is getting weird. So I don't know. I don't know what to tell you anymore because I've I kind of support the whole thing. I like phil spencer, I like the strategy, I like what they're doing, I like the expansion of the notion of xbox as a platform. Cross-platform play is fantastic, in whatever form. Um, it's good for everybody. And where are the games? Because right now I'm paying for a subscription. I want to. You know, I want to get those games.

01:47:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't are we grandfathered in at the old price? Have they? Are they?

01:47:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yes, well uh whatever time you got left on it right?

01:47:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, if you've. If you had paid for a year, yeah, you're good, they're not gonna like cut it down by some percentage. You get it for that year at the end of the year. Next time, oh wow, yeah, next time you have to pay.

01:47:38
So I'm not, I'm really not grandfathered you know, next time I well I mean a new price if you get a, uh like a, a new computer, and you get like three months of xbox game pass ultimate, you can add it to an existing subscription and you can kind of push it out that way. There are ways to do it, but Just keep buying computers every quarter.

01:47:57
Yep, that's why I review computers. It's for the free Xbox Game Pass. I don't know if I mentioned this. It is very typical for new computers to have that offer like three months of Game Pass Ultimate. The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 new computers to have that offer like three months of game pass ultimate. Um, the microsoft surface laptop 7 uh came with one month of pc game pass. I was like what, one month and plus? Well, no, sorry, it was ultimate, because uh pc game pass doesn't work on right. Um, it is ultimate.

01:48:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it was one month, so you could do uh cloud streaming only, I guess which is like we had all these thoughts that game pass was just going to make this monthly collection for gaming forever. Yeah, and we'd get everything. And now they basically undermine that yeah right, I this is the thing.

01:48:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It makes me feel like you just switch back to steam and buy the game when it comes out yeah, yeah, I mean, look, there's more to it than this and, by the way, the collection, especially on console, but even on pc is is actually good. It's not. It's this is. It's not horrible. It's just that, you know, because the consoles did so poorly, they added this like later, you know, to kind of jump start it a little bit. They were like all right, look, we don't have, it's not like we own activision blizzard, we're going to give away these games day one to game pass subscribers, like nice. That's a really nice perk, like you know, at 9.99 ish a month for um console or pc. You're like you know what? That's great, that's a good price. Yeah, um, the problem is now they've I don't know the exact number, but like they went from several studios to like a million studios.

01:49:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, when you're only going to get one tier, one title a year, out of that a hundred bucks is fine.

01:49:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they could swallow like you know. By the way. No one will ever know for sure, but you know Halo Infinite did not do particularly well, yeah, and it was available day one.

01:49:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And you know, one of the theories is you know, if you sold this to theories is it might have done better. Yeah, there's no way to know. Yeah, that's interesting. So I mean the other side of game pass would be a discount or you get it a day earlier, a day earlier for gamers.

01:50:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't care what the price is, they'd be all over. So you do get. You do get discounts when you buy games if you're in a one of those subscriptions out% according to Out of Sync yeah you do get that. There's also things like not every game is there Off the top of my head right now, like Doom Infinite or whatever.

01:50:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As long as they have Pixel Puzzle 6, I'm all in.

01:50:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what's important. Doom Eternal is available through the Game Pass subscriptions, but the original Doom 2016 is not Okay, so it's like okay, whatever, and I'm not going to get this one exactly right. But if you like Flight Simulator, for example, I don't know that every single tier of Flight Simulator is in there, but the basic, like the standard version, is in there, I think is how that works, probably, um, you know, so they've been kind of, you know, they're playing around with it a little bit as it is, but now that this has happened, it's like, well, I don't know, I this needed to be counted with a. Here's the list of all the activision games and here's the day they're coming, or days, you know and it would be like, okay, that's still gonna happen, right like just we haven't heard anything.

01:51:12
The problem is they just raised the price anyway. It's like you just raised the price and gave us nothing like what are you doing?

01:51:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but you said they never announced it, so it sounds seems like a mistake.

01:51:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The premise but they did raise the price like that, that price that went into effect.

01:51:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah yeah, one of the reasons I bought an xbox and a game pass ultimate was the premise that, well, I'm a kind of a casual gamer. I don't really have a right. I'm not like paul. He has call of duty and that keeps him occupied day in, day out. I I thought, well, I want to dip my toe in a different games, of course, but it's it's. It makes sense. But it turns out maybe I really belong to the pc master race because I just you.

01:51:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think the solution is you buy the game when you want it on steam and yep, and if you care about day one, then you're already signed up and you get it automatically and if you don't, a year from now it's 50 off.

01:52:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so when pc game pass was only 10 bucks a month and it had 100 and 100 to 150 games whatever some which you know very, very good, you could kind of do a mix and match thing where you kind of go in and out and maybe sometimes you're doing these games through Game Pass, sometimes you're not. You could sample a game through Game Pass, right, and say, okay, like actually I think I want to buy this thing and maybe it makes sense, because you're in Game Pass, to buy it at that discount and or maybe it's on sale somewhere else.

01:52:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
whatever you can buy, you know buy it however you want, especially in the scenario of a console. You could say you get three hours of play time of this game for free and then it goes yeah, I mean, well, they do, they do things like that.

01:52:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, we don't really talk about that in fact, I almost never talk about this but they do, like a free game, a free play day thing, where they have, you know, like today you can play call of duty all day, you know whatever, right? Um, they do stuff like that so they're, you know they. This was just in a year in which they really couldn't afford yet another. Like kind of bad bit of pr. It was like are you serious?

01:53:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I, I gamers then it's like okay angry with microsoft than they already are.

01:53:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just so yeah exactly, you know, yeah, exactly. And then, um, we're gonna prove you wrong because actually it turns out you can't be more angry and we're gonna go through with the price raise, and but we're not gonna make that announcement yeah, we're not gonna tell you.

01:53:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's like, guys, what are you doing cost you more surprise I yep, just really bad.

01:53:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, yeah, I know, um, I have never gotten xbox uh, game cloud gaming sorry, I keep this name is just wrong to me. But to work well, of course I want to play 3d action titles. You know 3d shooters and they're just not good for this kind of thing, but I hear from people are like, you know, more casual games. Whatever works fine.

01:53:46
Um, I think we talked last week that Microsoft had a partnership or has a partnership with Amazon to get the Xbox app with game streaming up on their Fire TV sticks the new ones. Now they have a bundle for this Prime Day event and it is an Xbox wireless controller which, by the way, is on sale for 40 bucks during Prime Day, with a Fire TV stick 4K and 4K and sorry, oh, and one month, you know of xbox game pass ultimate so you can play. You can try this cloud streaming service and see if it works well for you. Um, for 69 bucks, um, so it's basically you're paying 20 bucks if you want to, assuming you want to fire tv stick 4k, which you know like. My question um, why would you want that?

01:54:35
it's worth every penny, you like ads? I don't know, like. Whatever it might be you like, like. I want interfaces that respond after I click the button. Penny, you like ads? I don't know, like whatever it might be you like, like. I want interfaces that respond after I click the button, if you like that kind of thing fire tv stick fantastic, worth every penny.

01:54:46
Yeah, it's, it is. You're getting exactly what you paid for, um, and then the xbox controller is just 20 bucks, so that's a good deal. Normal, that's a good deal. Yeah, so that's a good deal. Um, don't get it, but that's a good deal. Uh, this is awesome. I, as a huge fan of the deadpool movies, there is a. This can't be real, but it is deadpool xbox controller, where the back of the controller is his butt and oh my god it is.

01:55:17
If you have seen these movies, you understand why this is. I know why that is unbelievable. Yes, here's my, here's my commentary to this, though I don't know why no one has asked this question. That has extra battery in it, right? Yeah, like just space. Clearly there's a bigger battery. That must. That's a bigger. So that would be right. Oh, like there should be a bigger. There should be a bigger battery in there. That's, that's hysterical. It is literally the deadpool butt on the back.

01:55:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'd be very comfortable to use, though I think I think, so is it? You probably find yourself I did.

01:55:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I did not rub it or anything. I don't know they call it a cheeky controller it's nice. Yeah, it's pretty funny. Wow, that is brilliant. Wow, I'm actually kind of surprised that microsoft went along with this well, a little too risky for microsoft yeah I, yeah, I it's, I right now it's, it's part of like a special promotion because it's the new Deadpool movie coming out, actually next week I think, and um that thing's not out already, christ, they've been promoting it for months.

01:56:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought it was. I thought it was long gone, to be honest.

01:56:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My, this is the. This is the allure of Deadpool. Um, I'm not into comic book movies at all. In fact, if Marvel would disappear, I'd be the happiest guy on earth.

01:56:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But the deadpool movies are hilarious and even like my wife and my daughter love these movies, he's just brilliant.

01:56:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But we my wife literally quotes from this movie regularly, like when something goes wrong, she'll look at me and she'll go. Well, at least we still have bowie ah, which is a line from, I, I think, the second movie I don't remember the first or second but like, literally, that's a Deadpool reference and we, we use this not every day but like almost every week, like it comes up all the time. Anyhow, that's hilarious. And then nothing on the Activision Blizzard front, obviously, but it's the second half of July. Microsoft announced three games coming to game pass and all three are going to be day one titles, actually, right. So I again I feel like this was all part of something bigger, you know, and they decided to hold back the really good news for some reason, so I don't know. Anyway, these were all coming sometime between the 15th and the 20th, I think they're all. And what's the date? They'll all be up by the end of the week, I think.

01:57:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Awesome. That's it. That's what we got. That's your Xbox segment. Ladies and gentlemen, that's the stuff you tune in for Tough week for Xbox.

01:57:56
So let me just pause. Before we get to the back of the book, we got tips, apps, run as and, of course, some brown liquor. But before we go much farther, uh, you probably noticed that bits and pieces of the studio have started to disappear and it might be giving you a little ptsd. It is me, because the last time this happened, we closed the brick house and moved and we did a kind of like a week or two of shows with, like things slowly being dismantled behind us. This one won't be quite as quick a turnaround. Well, that was a tough one when we, when we moved out of the brick house into the East side studios where we are now so now it's eight years ago we did that. It was a big deal because I told the team you know, we don't want any downtime, we want to flip a switch. We've done that twice now. It's going to be a lot easier this time. We're moving into my attic and it's already pretty much ready to go.

01:58:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm moving into my parents' basement.

01:58:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, that's what that sounded like, yeah, it kind of is. Yeah, it kind of is. It's kind of like that. It's a lot cheaper in the attic I don't have to pay any rent, actually turns out. The city of petaluma says we have to inspect it to make sure it's safe before you can. I love it where you can have a business up there.

01:59:16
Uh, all right, fine, fine, uh, the reason we're doing it is to save. Uh, save a little, to pinch pennies, frankly. Uh, ad sales has just plummeted. It's not just for us, this is across the board. Uh, in fact, it's not even just podcasting, but it's. But it's really hit podcasting hard. It's hit all media hard. When's the last time you bought a magazine at the newsstand? But it's really hitting podcasting hard because podcasting, as a newer medium, is the first one to go. It's like last in, first out, and so, while we were able to afford a studio for a long time, we just really can't anymore.

01:59:58
But we want to keep doing the shows. We have this weird I have this weird compulsion to keep doing what we're doing. I wanted to keep doing it, so that's why we need your help. I think it's perfectly viable. In fact, I kind of wanted to do this from day one Didn't work, but I wanted to. I think it should be perfectly viable to be listener supported If you listen to the shows, if you like the shows, if you want to keep the shows going. Uh, seven bucks a month, you know, a couple of bucks a week, that's it and uh, and with that money, honestly, we can really continue to grow and build and do all sorts of stuff. I don't think we'll ever move back in the studio. I don't think we need a studio anymore. Those days are gone. That was kind of an old-fashioned idea. So we're going to save that money. So every penny that you and oh, I should mention, neither Lisa nor I are going to get paid for the next few months for sure. So every penny that you put into Club Twit goes right into Paul and Richard's pockets and the staff pockets and keeping the lights on and their houses and keeping the shows going. And well, we sure would like to get you into the club.

02:01:02
There are benefits Ad-free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Twit Discord, where there are it's a wonderful community really smart, interesting people that you'll. It will become your new social media. It has mine. It's really a fantastic place to hang, day or night. You also get special events. We've got an inside twit coming up, mike is doing creative corner and one of the things I'm hoping you know, having a studio in my attic will make it easy for me to toddle upstairs. And when I say toddle, I will toddle upstairs and do a show, maybe every day for an hour or two, just shooting the breeze with you, answering questions, maybe bringing on guests, that kind of thing. Wouldn't you like to get a one-on-one, candid, no-holds-barred interview with Paul Theriot? Wouldn't you love that? Find out what's really going on inside that He-Man physique.

02:01:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's normally the model of restraint.

02:01:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Where did this go?

02:02:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will ply him with liquor, ladies and gentlemen, and if you join the club, you will hear the result, I would definitely do an evening whiskey tasting with you guys.

02:02:11
Oh, you know, there you go. Paris wants to teach me how to play Baldur's Gate 3. We're going to have some I think it's going to be more clubby, frankly and so if you want to join the club and help us do that, make this transition into something new and exciting and different, please go to twittv, slash club twit, and you know what. If you don't, that's fine, we will still do as much as we can. I don't like paywalls. I'm not a big paywall fan, so we'll make sure that you get good content, but if you enjoy the content, it makes sense Fork over a few bucks, a couple of lattes, to keep it going.

02:02:48
That's all I ask Because I might have to send this laptop back. Twittv slash club twit. There won't be a laptop here next week unless you join the club.

02:03:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're not being fair to yourself. When you started Twit, it was not old fat.

02:03:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is so much more streamlined. Here's why I say that, though Nobody does a studio. That's crazy.

02:03:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, not, I know, but it's 2024. You're talking about 2004, 2005, whatever year that was.

02:03:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the reason that's why we built those studios is to tell broadcasters this is not some guy in his basement, right?

02:03:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But now it really will be.

02:03:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:03:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And, as expected, you know, we bought Telos OnePlus 1s for NET Rocks. What's that? That was the telephone hybrid that gave us mix minus through the telephone lines. Oh, yeah, right, because you could do call-ins. Yeah, so that we could have collins.

02:03:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's how we brought the guests in like, yeah, that's what you did. You, I mean, we've come a long way and it is now possible to do yeah we were the first couple years um we're gonna keep doing video.

02:03:53
I've already bought, uh, two cameras. Might have to buy a third one. I've started building the set in the attic. Um, we moved a bunch of stuff over today so I was a little bit late today, so we're getting there. I'm excited to me. I'm a little sad because I love the studios. I, you know I get catered to when I come in here. They do all the work. I just sit in front of the microphone. But at the same time I'm kind of excited. This is the next kind of the next generation, the next era, something a little bit more modern. Only in a sense, when I say that, paul, it's because I came from old media.

02:04:29
You know, I thought oh well, you build a radio station or you build you were definitely a modernization of from we did it much cheaper.

02:04:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, but the world has, I mean the world's changed so much. That's not on you, I mean it's.

02:04:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah it is. The world has changed and it's fun, and you know what Consumer technology means. I can do stuff cheap, even cheaper than when we started. I bought 40. We are on right now cameras that are really kind of technologically way behind. These are Canon, vixia, camcorders, and when we built the Brick House, 15, what is that? 8 plus 5, 13 years ago, I bought 40 of these and they were $800 each, something like that. I bought 40 of them, put them everywhere and we thought, oh, this is great, you know, this is cheap. Now you can use your phone. This is great, you know, this is cheap. Now you can use your phone, I know. You know, by the way, how much does your phone cost?

02:05:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's 800 bucks.

02:05:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's true.

02:05:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, you know, that's a good point, but we all have one for other purposes. I have one anyway.

02:05:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm actually not going to use the phones. I'm going to use a. Sony makes a really good cinema camera with an APS-C sensor called the FX30. So I've got two of those possibly a third coming and it's really kind of fun to see what.

02:05:47
it's amazing you know our audio chain is worth tens of thousands of dollars. The Telos Axia it's a Telos also, but it's an Axia and thanks to Telos, kirk Harnack and the Axia folks who kind of donated it all and Kirk, I remember, came and set it all. It was hard to set it all up. He set it all up, got it all working. I can buy now for $300 a Rode Podcaster Duo mixer that does all the same stuff.

02:06:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep.

02:06:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've got a.

02:06:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Zoom P8.

02:06:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
here it's the same thing I love my Zooms, yeah, yeah.

02:06:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
With the pad insert Yep, yeah 32-bit float.

02:06:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We didn't know from 32-bit float back in the day, so times have really changed. Anyway, I like the idea. I think it's a lot cleaner and simpler of having the audience support what we do.

02:06:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we're trying that I kind of picture burke back there with like a 1950 style disney camera or something.

02:06:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's like, you know, like one of those like on a track going around the room um, we're burke's gonna have fun because he's he's gonna get to do a lot of uh, jerry rigging I guess we'll call it burke rigging uh to figure out how to get all this. You're gonna chain them to a wall up, I might have to castle freak.

02:07:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I brought, I brought over the giant gear.

02:07:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know how, what I'm gonna, he's gonna. Oh, and the sight sign that he revitalized, the sign from the old tv show I did on msnbc. Yeah, the producer of the show who recently passed now I understand why he called me. He said, would you like this? And I said, yeah, david, david boorman. And I guess I he must have known he was on his way out, so I took it. But it needed a lot of work and burke took out the. There was custom curved fluorescent lighting around a plexiglass with the name the site. He took it apart, put in leds, modernized it and it's beautiful and it's about 80 pounds and I'm not going to leave it here. So somewhere, somehow, I have to hang this giant sign in the attic. It's awesome.

02:07:50
I might just put it leaning against the wall behind this scary clown. And just you know, it could be one more item in the attic, one more toy in the attic, all right Back of the book. Thank you for letting me vent. Yeah, please join Club Twit, twittv, slash. Club Twit, your tip of the week. By the way, I know this because I've been buying a lot of stuff on Amazon the last couple of days.

02:08:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I haven't actually bought too much, I just bought a cheap little laptop stand thing, but uh, we waited to equip the studio until prime days, just hoping, yeah, yes just, yeah, this is the time. So, uh, as I described in the notes, it's the most magical time of the year. It's when so much, it's so much on, amazon is uh, you know, amazon is the reason for the season. That's all I'm saying. What season is this?

02:08:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the end of July. What is this? The Ides of July, oh yeah.

02:08:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Everything's on sale. So look, whatever you were thinking about buying, this would be the time to take a look, like the Eero 6E wireless mesh thing that I bought from Mexico Excellent, significant and a great device. Yeah, yep, so just take a look at that.

02:09:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean we did a post, but everyone's doing this post.

02:09:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean Wirecutter wherever every site's doing this, yeah. And then the app pick is ProtonPass, although right now I'm actually evaluating two other password managers. So ProtonPass. Proton's a company I've had in my eye now for a while. They've been really busy the past year releasing new products and lots of new features for their existing products. That's the privacy security focused company that has mail, calendar, password manager, cloud storage and I'm forgetting one VPN, and really so far, the ProtonPass stuff has been awesome. The other one I'm evaluating and they were an advertiser but for, I think, their business class service is 1Password, which is kind of widely acknowledged as being one of the better ones.

02:09:49
I've been using Dashlane, which is great. The reason I went with Dashlane beginning of this year is because they have a passwordless password manager account, which I love. But I'm just going through these. I have to say both of these are actually pretty great and they all work everywhere mobile, desktop, et cetera. It's something to take a look at. They've added a bunch of stuff to it recently, but they also I don't know if it's still valid now, but as of last week, we're having a sale. Protonpass is very inexpensive. These things are overly inexpensive If you pay for them. I want to say the. I don't know what it is normally, but it's like 50 bucks a year or less, or 30 bucks or something. I think it's about right yeah, I'm really curious.

02:10:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They must have a bundle of the mail, the drive, the VPNn and the password all in one the only.

02:10:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so these are paid services. You know, uh, but they're, but you're paying. You know they're not selling your information on a track. You know they're doing all this stuff but, um, their storage tiers get expensive quick. So once you go past like 512 gigabytes, which is the most you can do without doing add-ons, you know it, it gets expensive. But if you know if you're tired without doing add-ons, you know it's, it gets expensive. But if you know, if you're tired of, uh, google stalking you around the internet like a psycho, um, and you don't mind paying for quality, it's definitely something to look at. So this is my I. I don't I didn't publish this article, I was. I'm describing this as the gateway drug to the proton ecosystem, so it's so inexpensive.

02:11:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good, I'm very curious myself, yep.

02:11:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can say this works fantastically well. It's really really good.

02:11:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, paul, for your fabulous tips and picks of the week, but now I must say it's time for Richard Campbell and Run as Radio, a little bit of Kermit the Frog effect there.

02:11:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It ain't easy being twit.

02:11:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It ain't easy being twit no, and you know, one of the tricks we do on the Run as Radio site is the shows come in 11 colors. Oh, they're actually all of the Vista Metro colors from the original palette.

02:12:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That I really didn't know, that's awesome.

02:12:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and one of the reasons for it was that I often have listeners who contact me saying I can't remember what show it was that I talked about this thing. Well, that's exactly it, because I put that color everywhere. So whatever the show they're listening to, that color will help them get to the last. That's hysterical and I make, and I make mugs in each of those colors as well.

02:12:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I had no idea that there was a method to your madness, that's great.

02:12:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There is much madness in my methods. I feel like I'm owed a mug. Well, all the cool kids have one.

02:12:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's what I thought I have this, you have the blue one, that's. So that's. Uh, that's one of the metro colors, that's the metro colors, that's right yeah, it's one of the metro blues. Well, that I'm taking to the attic with me.

02:12:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's I hope so, yeah uh, this week's show, uh, was from build back in may, so it's got a couple time on it, but it was a timeless show because I got a chance to interview Arun Gulag, who is the head of Azure data all up. This is the man responsible for all data related stuff at Microsoft from Azure, sql, cosmos, postgres, mysql, all of the data analytics stuff, the warehousing and so forth, and he actually, before that, was very much on the analytics side. He's one of the architects of Power BI and his focus today is on the thing they call Microsoft Fabric, and so this show ended up really being a conversation about his experiences in data analytics and how it's evolved over the years in the industry. That's led him to creating Fabric Really this idea of how are analytics different when you have effectively infinite storage and infinite compute via the cloud? So you don't have to do all the planning you used to do for data analytics projects where, once upon a time, if you have to buy that hardware, you spend a year in analysis trying to figure out what's that data warehouse is going to look like, how big is it, how complicated is it? Uh, what are you going to do with it? And that's just not necessary today.

02:14:10
You know, microsoft's had plenty of data analytics offerings before fabric, but they were very much ports of services that used to run on-prem, now running in the cloud. What's really happened here is they've realigned them all to be very analytics-driven, where the analysts can push through the various layers down to the back end of data and back again and still be able to be properly governed and controlled. So if you listen to it, it it's a very fun conversation. We're really enjoying each other because a couple of old data analytics geeks just you know, rattling on on all the different stacks and how things have changed, and in the process you sort of get a picture of his vision for where he wants data analytics to go inside of microsoft all right, I look forward to it.

02:14:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Run as radio yeah, find it easily enough at run as radiocom or wherever, as they say, podcasts are stored and forwarded to your machine. Now let's get brown. It's not easy being brown it's a little easier, easier actually I'm going back to Canada.

02:15:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One of the reasons is that this weekend is a celebration weekend up here on the coast for me and many of my friends my birthday, my wife's birthday, a ton of friends' birthdays all fall in this week-long period, oh nice.

02:15:36
And so they all come up. We used to do this at my house down in the city, but now we're going to do it up on the coast, which people are really excited about. So there's a lot of whiskey coming and one of the bottles coming is this particular edition, the Crown Royal Blender's Mash, and it made me think about going back to the Canadian whiskey stories. So I went back and listened to the when I first mentioned Crown Royal back in like 814 when we were when I was not even I was just guesting, and so sort of threw that in there. And then we did that 20 minute or so bit on Canadian whiskey where I talked about the prohibition games and all that sort of stuff.

02:16:14
But I never really drilled into the origins of this, uh, particular whiskey and this whiskey maker which is seagram's. Uh, because it's and as I drilled into it it's like I should talk a little bit about seagram's because this has been around a long time and then when I actually got into the story it's like I am reading the script from succession here it got kind of nuts. The, the seagram's company, is a crazy story, uh, and not because of the guy named, because of bronfman or bronfman yeah, absolutely the nutty story.

02:16:47
So if you go all the way back to the beginning 1857, so that's pre-confederation canada is not yet canada. Yet uh, a group of uh folks, none of them named seagrams this is Hess, beller and Randall create the Granite Mills and Waterloo Distillery. So they're combining, bringing grain into Waterloo, which is on the lake, and making flour from it, and then any leftover grain that they haven't got sales for for flour flour they're going to make into whiskey as sort of the side venture. And this was the town of waterloo in what was then known as upper canada, because it's not ontario yet, canada is not a country yet. And they start making a rye whiskey. They were german immigrants and so their rye whiskey was called altkun schnapps for old rye, because they were mostly processing wheat. But wheat whiskey by itself doesn't taste particularly good, but if you add a little rye to it it's getting a little spicy, it's tasty, it's all good. So that's 1857. By 1864, they hire a fellow by the name of Joseph Seagram who is taking care of one of the partner's interests. At this point they've scaled up to making about 50,000 gallons of spirits a year, of course all still sold in barrels at that time and within a decade or so, by 1883, Seagram has brought out all of the partners and owns it entirely himself and renames the company Joseph Seagram Flour Mill and Distillery Company. A few years later he'll make his first named version of whiskey for Seagram flour mill and distillery company. A few years later he'll make his first named version of whiskey for Seagram's, called the Seagram's 83, based on the fact that he bought it in 1883. And by 1911, during World War I, he's brought his sons into the company. He renames the company Joseph Seagram's and Sons. And that's about as far as it goes on the Seagram's side, because now comes the Bronfman's right. That's about as far as it goes on the Seagram side, because now comes the Bronfman's right and Samuel Bronfman.

02:18:43
This guy's got a biography. For a reason he's like a force of nature, born in 1889 on a ship traveling from what was then known as Bessarabia now we know it as Moldova to Canada. And he ends up in his family lands in Manititoba, and they get in the hoteling business. But in the 1920s, as uh prohibition has taken hold in the US, they realize the opportunities for distilling are huge. So they set up a distillery in LaSalle, quebec, and then they call the company the Distillers Corporation Limited, which I think was a play, because this is a time when Distillers Company Limited out of the UK was the largest entity in Scottish whiskey and in fact by 1927, at the height of sort of the stock craze, they make a deal with the Distillers company to sell half of their business to get away from the name conflict. But they also get access to all the distribution rights for the popular scottish blends of the times, that's hay, black and white, doers, fat, 69, all big. The next year seagram's goes public and dcl distillersillers Corp basically buys them out, essentially does a forced merge by buying enough stock quickly enough on leverage to end up essentially forcing a merger. And this becomes a theme with the Seagram's leadership with the Bronfman family that they do a lot of forced takeovers and hostile takeovers of various companies. So the new entity in 1928 is called distillers corporation seagrams and basically the seagrams family is a minority shareholder and off they go.

02:20:27
This is when, uh, this course during us prohibition and the canadians are allowed to make whiskey. They just can't sell it directly to the us and I think I told you the story back in the canadian story where they used the islands of St Pierre and Milton off the coast of Newfoundland, because they're actually French protectorates and the French couldn't care less about prohibition, and so they would ship all of their whiskey to St Pierre, this tiny little island that used to just be a cod fishery. Now was covered in warehouses storing various kinds of booze, and then would sell it as as a french entity, into the us. And when the us gets upset about that, then they start putting them on ships and going just offshore, so they're outside of the country borders, and then the american citizens go out to the ship, have a party and come home with cases of booze like all workarounds, one after the next. Um, the bronfman's went up maybe a step too far because they started using milton to sell whiskey back into canada to avoid the taxes, and so as prohibition ends, they actually end up in a investigated by the rcmp, but managed to make a settlement, so the case gets dropped.

02:21:39
Now, tying this back to our whiskey in question in 1939, the now named Seagrams they get rid of the DCL name entirely decides to make a special whiskey in honor of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, which we generally know as the Queen Mother and mother to Queen Elizabeth II RIP on the very first UK royal family tour of Canada in 1939. So George and Elizabeth came by ship up the St Lawrence and landed near Ottawa and then took the train, which was part of Confederation. There's a reason that Canada is Canada is because they put a train line all the way across, all way to vancouver. In fact there's a, there's a road in vancouver called the king's way because it was built for george vi to be able to go from port moody, where the train line ended over, to vancouver proper. And it's the run road that does not connect with the grid system that is the rest of the city, it sort of bisects it and I've seen photo, ancient old photographs of literally was a dirt track through the forest to connect the two parts of these different pieces of vancouver together. So, uh, and they make this version of whiskey. Uh, they put it in the purple pouch because it's royal colors with gold stitching on it and you can still buy. You know, crown it in the purple pouch because it's royal colors with gold stitching on it and you can still buy. You know, crown Royal in the purple pouch, good for your D&D dice, yes, and and apparently the the royal family goes home with cases of it and for for 20 years it's only sold in Canada before it's finally opened up to a foreign market, specifically the US.

02:23:20
So Seagram's is a hit. They're doing very well and they start buying up other distilleries and wineries. They buy some, they start importing rum from Puerto Rico and Jamaica. They end up owning distilleries that make Captain Morgan and Meyers and Trelloys. They even buy Chivas in the UK because this is all Sam Brofman and his aggressively growing the business. And when that slows down and they kind of are one of the largest booze makers in the world, they branch into petrochemicals. So initially it was Canadian. They brought Royal Light in Alberta, but then they bought Texas-specific coal and oil and the Frankfurt Oil Companies. At this time they build a skyscraper At the time the most expensive skyscraper in the world in 1958 in New York for their New York petrochemical operations, called the Seagram's Building, which is generally still known as, even though they don't own anymore. And so by 65, seagram's is operating in 119 countries with in excess of a billion dollars of annual revenue. They are a monster at that time.

02:24:26
And in 71 Sam Bronfman dies and the sons and uncles start fighting. It's the company is controlled by the Bronfman family. The shares have been distributed. Even though it's a publicly traded company, they have the majority voting shares. They call it the Seagram's company and they sell off the Texas Pacific operation to Sun Oil Co for $2.3 million in an effort to buy Conoco, one of the largest oil companies in the world, from booze to oil. Okay, yes, they're still making booze, but they're doing this.

02:24:59
And again, they do this as a very hostile takeover approach. And so the board brings DuPont in to buy them instead of allowing Seagram's to do it. And DuPont pulls it off, buys for $7.8 billion, but in the process, because Seagram's had bought up a big chunk of the shares of Canoco, they end up owning 25% of DuPont. In the end, they're actually the single largest shareholder of DuPont at that time, and DuPont, because it's also a family-owned company, primarily pays massive dividends every year to shareholders, to the point where, within a few years, 70% of the income of Seagram's is DuPont dividends. So they have a lot of cash. Their businesses are almost secondary to the point and the family gets even crazier, and so, the 1990s, they decided to get into entertainment. Now they've been pushed to sell DuPont for a while, so they sell their stake for $8.5 billion, attempt to buy what at the time was known as MCA, now we know as the Universal Music Group. So they end up opening the movies. Uh, the movie business, the music business, the theme parks, all of that.

02:26:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And uh, I don't know how to make money on it.

02:26:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is such a succession so and in 2000, because they're, they're mismanaging all these different businesses. The families all fighting. They get bought by Vivendi, the luxury brands holders, for $42 billion, but in the process the Bronfman family collectively only owns about 25% of the company, actually 25% of Seagram's. They end up owning only 8% of Vivendi. So they have no say. They're on the board but they have no control. And as the fights go on, vivendi spins off all the liquor businesses, so Chivas goes to Pernod Ricard and Crown Royal and all of those other products end up in Diageo. Aww, so that's the end of the Bronfman's in booze. But that's sort of the pattern of this entire thing and it's just a nutty story about.

02:27:03
Seagram's basically is just a brand. Now it's not a, it's not a company per se, but Crown Royal.

02:27:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Blender's Mash still so an excellent.

02:27:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We need to go back to what? How does Canadian whiskey different from other kinds of whiskey? The rules of Canadian whiskey are a little looser. The big one, of course, is that they must be mashed, distilled and aged in Canada. It can only be made with cereal grains and it has to be aged in wood no less than three years and must be at least 40% alcohol to be called Canadian whiskey. Oh, they also have the phrase and I just went back and double check, check this on the us, the canadian government site must, quote possess the aroma, taste and character generally attributed to canadian whiskey. Whatever that is, I don't know what that is. But okay, now let's get into the favorite rule of them all, the 111th rule, or what's now known as the 909, or 9.09% rule, which is to say that Canadian whiskey can still be called Canadian whiskey with up to 9.09% of other things in it. Now, that could be coloring, it could be flavoring or it could be another spirit, although if it's a spirit, that spirit has to have been aged for at least two years, which basically means it has to be some kind of barrel-aged spirit. But it can be any kind of barrel-aged spirit. It can be wine, it can be brandy, it can be whiskey, sherry port, like some kinds of tequila, and rum are aged in wood, like all of those would qualify under the 909 rule.

02:28:34
Now why does this rule exist? This rule is insane. Like who would invent this rule? And it turns out it's because of America. So, as American whiskey was getting was struggling in the 70s, like most whiskey manufacturers were, they went protectionist and added large tariffs onto imported whiskeys. But there were a lot of influential Americans, including some in the senate, that loved their canadian whiskey and didn't want to pay more for it, and so they said hey, if at least 1 11th of of that drink is american whiskey, then it doesn't get taxed at the same rate. Oh, wow. And so the canadians clued in and went okay, we'll make a rule. The 1 11th rule it's still canadian whiskey as long as it's 1 11th. So it wasn't only restricted to export. But Wow, and so the Canadians clued in and went okay, we'll make a rule. The 111th rule it's still Canadian whiskey as long as it's 111. So it wasn't only restricted to export, but it was done so they could export to America at a lower tariffing rate. In the end, it's all about taxes. Yeah, wow, but there's a sign.

02:29:32
As insane as it sounds, because there's still restrictions around it, it does open the door to things like they didn't have to struggle to buy sherry barrels to do sherry finishing when they could just add a little bit of sherry to the whiskey. And in fact, things like alberta premium dark horse has eight. It's mostly canadian whiskey. You know 92 of it and then eight percent of it is old granddad bourbon with a little less than one percent sherry in it. There is there's a whiskey you cannot find anymore called JP Weiser's Union 52, because it's 96% 15-year-old Canadian whiskey and 4% 52-year-old Scottish whiskey. It's weird, right.

02:30:15
Like Canadians approach whiskey from a different perspective, one of the most important things to know and it directly affects Crown Royal and all the variations is that the normal approach because they're not restricted the same way in their barrelings is that you make separate grain whiskeys and combine them after the fact. After the fact. So you'll mash, you'll mash malt and mash and and distill wheat separately from rye, separately from barley, and put them all in barrels separately as well, and then combine them at the end to make particular versions of whiskey, to the point where Crown Royal, the original Crown Royal was 50 different whiskeys combined in different ratios. Now I can't think of 50 different ways to make whiskey, and I don't know if they can either. But there's two core concepts here.

02:31:10
There's this idea of base whiskeys and flavoring whiskeys. So a base whiskey is something you distill to a high level, like up into the 60s and 70% range, probably higher than that, because you use a column still. Then you cut it with water and put it in used barrels, right. So typically distill with a column still, because it's fast and efficient. Then you level it off to say 63.5, the magic number, put it in ex-bourbon casks or put it in sherry casks, things like that. The flavoring whiskeys, they come in much lower in the 50s, and then put them into raw barrels or other more temperamental barrels where you don't want to pull too much flavor from the wood, just a little. And so you age them for less time and at a lower strength. So you're able to tune all these different additions, different math, at different grains, at different concentrations in different kinds of barrels and then assemble them into the whiskey you want to make.

02:32:09
And so, like I said, crown the crown, original, crown royal, five different, five different kinds of grain, 50 different whiskeys all told with different barrelings, to get to that particular edition which speaks to this fact that all canadian whiskey is blended. It's just that, our thought. When you hear the word blended, you think mostly neutral spirit. But that's against canadian whiskey rules. You can't call it canadian whiskey. You put neutral spirit in. You have to have aged it. So blended whiskeys from canada don't have any neutral spirit in them, but virtually everything is blended because you're always combining multiple barrels from multiple sources and multiple grains.

02:32:45
So now we get back to Diageo. Where does Blender's Mash? Well, blender's Mash is actually a subset of the whiskeys that make the regular Crown Royal, focused particularly on bourbon. In fact, the original version of it made was called Bourbon Mash and they even got permission to sell it in the US called Crown Royal Bourbon Mash, except that it made a lot of people angry because it's not bourbon and so they renamed it to Blender's Mash. Now it's got a three-grain mash bill. But understand that these were each different barrels. So 64% corn, 32% rye I consider that very high rye, 4% barley that's typical. But understand they didn't actually combine those grains together and then make an addition. They literally used more corn barrels than rye barrels than barley barrels to make the combination drink wise the way it's described.

02:33:47
And I'll have to taste it. I haven't had a chance to taste the bottle because they're fairly rare now. They say it tastes a little like bourbon, a little like canadian whiskey, so it's a little burny, it's got lots of heat. It's spicy because it's a little burny, it's got lots of heat. It's spicy because it's got a stronger eye flavor. But it's also very sweet because it's very corn heavy. And it is inexpensive if you can find some. I found that Total Wine had a few bottles at $27. So a bargain actually for an interesting Canadian whiskey. And Diageo is now going down to an array of different combinations based on the barrels that they already lay up for making Crown Royal.

02:34:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does it still come in a velvet pouch? That's all I care about.

02:34:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's all that really matters. There are different editions that come in different kinds of pouches. They've got a new one called Golden Apple, which is supposed to be 26-year-old Canadian whiskey that's got an apple flavor to it, but it's got a green bag. It comes. It's also 250, so don't come on. No, it doesn't taste like apples, no. Well, and the and the and the maple one is a little horrific, but some people like it. The peach one is apparently a hit.

02:34:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think those would be good for cocktails.

02:34:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they're all for cocktails really, but that's where the golden apple makes no sense. $250 bottle of whiskey I'm going to put into cocktails.

02:35:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's crazy.

02:35:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, you're right. But, you know this just digs further into what's distinctive about Canadian whiskey and that the Augeo is doing right by the brand. They are kind of sticking to. They're not using the 909 rule as much, not certainly for just the export stuff, but they make their own edition of whiskeys and they're exploring making more editions around their whiskey technique, which is cool. It's distinct to Canada.

02:35:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there you have it, another fine whiskey for you to sample. This show is turning a lot of people into drunks. Uh, richard, I think you'll be very proud. It's the right way to work. I think you can see over my shoulder, that I have my.

02:35:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, oh yeah, that's the l burn that's sitting here up this side is that in the decanter?

02:35:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do you have that in the canter I?

02:35:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
put it in. I put it in my decanter, yes, and why is that? Just because decanter.

02:35:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I put it in my decanter. Yes, and why is that? Just because you want to have it quickly and easily available. Yeah, and I think it looks better. Yeah, it's pretty, although.

02:36:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I like to see the labels.

02:36:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean the whiskey bottles, like wine they put a lot of effort into that. They're beautifully developed right yeah.

02:36:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I have a nice decanter set and I'm doing my Mad Men thing. I think that's nice. My set sits in my office readily available.

02:36:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was so tempted to buy a martini set like as seen on Mad Men. I love that idea. Yep, it's legit. Yeah, is that beautiful crystal? I?

02:36:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
bet it is. It's bohemian crystal. A genuine article. I bet it is.

02:36:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's got class Paul. I don't know what he's doing on this show with us.

02:36:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But Well, I got it in Bohemia when it was just. You know, they call it a decanter.

02:36:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a decanter, yeah, a decanter Paul Theriot is at theriotcom. That's his website. Become a premium member and get all the goodness there. You can also get his books Windows Everywhere and the Field Guide to Windows 11 at leanpubcom Nice site. You get to pay what you want on that site. I actually wanted to do that with a club, but Lisa said we could. She said you know, the problem is there's the overhead for the credit card and then there's the. You know, patreon takes its chunk and by the time we're done somebody's going to say I'll pay you a buck and it's going to cost us $2 to make them members. She probably has a good point there $7 about as low as that.

02:37:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
She should do money stuff for you guys.

02:37:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She should because she's got a head for it, doesn't she? It's all in the brain. She's very smart that way.

02:37:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paul, thank you for being here.

02:37:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're gonna be in uh mcungee for a while, or yeah, or yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe. Okay, richard campbell, he is in a beautiful madeira park, british columbia. You're gonna be there for a while, yeah, until uh, into august. Oh, this is the summer break where you don't travel this is yeah, it's going to get weird in.

02:37:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
June or September but we'll get there.

02:38:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, all right, richard's at runasradiocom. That's where you'll find his excellent podcasts, both Run as Radio and NET Rocks, but you will find both of them right here every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm, eastern 1800 UTC. Now where is right here? Well, there are many places you could watch live. You can watch on the website twittv. You can watch on YouTube. You can watch on Twitch, twitchtv slash twit, youtubecom slash twit. You can watch on Facebook yeah, we're on Meta. You can watch on LinkedIn or Kik or even Xcom. So please watch us live.

02:38:44
We love it when you watch us live, but if you want ad-free versions of the show, join the club and download it, because obviously when you're watching live, you're going to get the ads. Club Twit is at twittv slash club. Twit is at twittv slash club twit. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show available at the website twittv slash www for Windows Weekly. There's also a dedicated YouTube channel to Windows Weekly and, of course, the best way to get the show subscribe in your favorite podcast player and that way you'll get it automatically as soon as we edit it all up. Kevin King, our wonderful producer and editor, is going to go to work on it in moments. Thanks Paul and thanks Richard. Have a wonderful week and we'll see you next week on Windows Weekly.