Windows Weekly 900 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. We celebrate our 900th episode with Paul and Richard. We'll talk about Windows 11. 24h2 is coming soon and, of course, paul is upset. Are you surprised? Hp has some really nice new flagship AI PCs. But what does it mean when the co-pilot button is the last button you want to hit and we're going to talk about some big Xbox news Blizzard, activision and Xbox. A brand new book coming out October 8th. That tells all. Paul has the details and a whole lot more coming up. Next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust this is Twit.

00:50
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 900. Recorded Wednesday, september 25th 2024. The Eight Polls of Inaccessibility. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we get together to talk about Microsoft with these two cats right here From McKungie, pennsylvania, in the blue trunks Paul Thurott, thurottcom. Hello, paul. Welcome back, leo. Yes, thank you, by the way to. Micah for filling in for me the last couple of weeks.

01:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Also with us. Richard Campbell, hello, hello, richard Campbell, hello.

01:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Park. Good to be at home. I enjoyed Canada. We came back from a two-week trip to Canada St Lawrence, seaway, right, yeah Well river.

01:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it starts out as a seaway, but you go far enough Because we didn't get past.

01:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Montreal. If you go far enough, you get the seaway. But we went to Saguenay. Saguenay is beautiful and the river there, with all the fjords, was incredible, just gorgeous. Went to St John, halifax, saguenay, yep St.

01:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
John Newfoundland.

02:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not Newfoundland.

02:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
St John, Nova Scotia.

02:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's not newfoundland saint john? No, nova scotia, there's. There's two saint johns in canada. Come on, canada, that's like like you guys, and then uh halifax don't get me started in portland but yes, and then.

02:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that was the anglophone part of canada, the scots part of it, and then into the french part. It was right in, quebec city is amazing. Yeah, then then. And then I got COVID in Montreal. Yeah, you know, I went to the pharmacy because, it was my understanding, in Canada you can go and a pharmacist will give you Paxlovid. I went in there and she said we have no At first. I said do you speak English? She said yes, I speak English. I said do you have Paxlovid? She said no, I didn didn't, and if we did it'd be a thousand dollars, said oh, okay, the medicine stuff's so weird, um, depending on where you go yeah, because I don't have health, I don't have medic.

02:55
You know, mexico, everything's over the counter.

02:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The only thing you can't get is like controlled substances, you know, but then you go to like. We went to the uk one time my daughter it was stomach was upset, we needed to get peo-bismol, so I went over and to buy it in the airport. Yeah, she asked me who was. Well, she got. Well, they have an age restriction, so they don't want you huffing.

03:14
She said how old is the? Are you going to take this? I said no, it's my daughter. She said how old is she? And it's, you know, five or something. Yeah, we can't say that. So I walked back and I'm like your turn? And my wife went and she said is this for you?

03:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and she said yep yes, that's the trick, you know like trick. Yeah, it's for me. Well, I never did get paxlovid because, uh, here in the united states it's a it's I don't know a controlled substance. Anyway, yeah, uh, I feel fine, I feel great actually, um your immune system's working.

03:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You've had the vaccine. So, yeah, I mean I still get new ones this fall, right? So I'm still sleeping on the couch. I feel great, actually, your immune system's working. You've had the vaccine. Yeah, I mean, I still test positive. I think we get new ones this fall, right?

03:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I'm still sleeping on the couch, yeah, but actually Lisa's very kindly sleeping on the couch, oh that's nice and I'm sleeping in a full-size bed, but that's not why you're here. We're a little late today because we just watched the MetaConnect keynote with Mark Zuckerberg. Do you guys watch along with me? Anything to say about it?

04:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I flipped it on for a bit Other than my mild disdain for the company?

04:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not really. What did they announce?

04:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anything of note the MetaQuest 3X New headset, which is a lower price version of the MetaQuest 3. They did announce some updates to the Ray-Ban meta glasses, which look pretty impressive, including a translation feature simultaneous translation feature which looked pretty well. And they talked about a new AR headset that they're working on, but it is in the distant future. Um, so it was all right. You know what? It was most interesting to me? They didn't mention Facebook once. Right was most interesting to me.

04:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They didn't mention facebook once right. Yeah, it's not the facebook company anymore. Well it's. It's a developer show.

04:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's nothing for development well, you know, I thought this is a. Richard said something, but before the show that was sort of like this there's a. There's another kind of a meme in the tech industry that goes back to forever. You know, like when apple was pimping the mac in the 80s, the apple 2e was making all the money. You know the apple 2 line and, um, I can assure you the meta quest, whatever is not making any money and that all that money's coming out of ads that come off of facebook.

05:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You market what you want to sell, not what you're selling right yeah, no, facebook's still the engine, but I really think that, uh, they've pivoted well away from it. Right, that they understand that there's not much future because nobody under 50 uses it.

05:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that's not true. I have enough kids that use it so they can communicate with their parents. Oh right, yeah probably, but yeah.

05:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They use Instagram. The youngs use Instagram.

05:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, but in very limited ways in my experience. I mean, in fact, that's something I've been meaning to ask my kids about. What's the point of a post that you put up that disappears, like I don't get that I have to take screenshots of my daughter's stuff because it will never be anywhere, otherwise I'll never get to see what she's doing.

05:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dad she doesn't want you to see it.

05:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I know, it's about not having a history that comes back to haunt you.

06:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's exactly right, yeah, I am nothing but a history that comes back to haunt me, so you?

06:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
know it's funny. I was in a meeting earlier this week with a friend of mine that we've done business together for many years and I quoted him something we said when we were trying to build a company in 2009. And I said and he quoted it back to me he said if we're not prepared to hire someone under the age of 30 who has pictures of themselves vomiting on Facebook, we don't get to hire anybody under 30. That's a good point. And I said that was just that window of time and before people figured out putting pictures of yourself vomiting on the internet is unwise. But there was a time when that's what the young people were doing on Facebook, so we hired a few vomitors. Oh God, you do what you got to do, let's move on.

06:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is episode 900. Congratulations, Jeff.

06:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We did it. I'm not even 100 in yet. I was going back looking at my notes, is that true? First time I wrote up a whiskey was 8-11.

07:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
August of last year, 2023?.

07:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, two years ago it was in the winter, at least two years ago.

07:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So he said 8-11. You meant November 8th.

07:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was episode 8-11.

07:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
God you know it's not the worst thing about Canadians, but my God, it's got to be in the top 10.

07:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Putting the month in the middle. Yeah, I don't put the month in the middle. Yeah, I don't put the month in the middle.

07:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't. What did you mean by it? Oh, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. You were talking about the episode number, episode 811. The episode number it was episode 811.

07:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
All of you misconstrued it 88 episodes ago. And, by the way, when I quote a date, I quote it in ISO standards Year, month, day, year, month day.

07:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, Now let's talk about Windows 11. Why not? Why not?

07:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I lose track of where we are with what we talked about last time, et cetera, et cetera. But I would have said I'm sure that this week, that week that we're in now is week D. So if everything goes according to schedule, we will have gotten a preview update. That will be. That will be the 24H2 update that Microsoft ships next month. Right, and everything did go to schedule because yesterday happened and we did not get that because that's how everything has gone this year. It's perfect. So what Microsoft did instead was, on Monday, they shipped two separate builds to the release preview channel of the Windows Insider program that I believe are going to map to the week D update. We'll all get late, which has happened at least two other times this year, right? So, in other words, here we are, we're bearing down on this release. They're supposed to, according to their own schedule, ship the preview version of this update on Tuesday and on monday.

08:44
They're like like a kid cramming for an exam the night before. They're like, oh crap, we need one of these. We should probably compile that. Huh, yeah, like just classic. It's like when I was in the 11th or 12th grade, I had a teacher biology, biology class handed out a piece of paper with a periodic table of the elements on it and he said you need to memorize this. We're going to have a test on it on June 2nd next year, last day of school, and this is the last time we're ever going to talk about it. So there was, you know, and there was, I was honest right.

09:21
There are some people who, uh, you know, probably started memorizing that thing that night, you know, and I threw it in the trash and forgot about it and I failed that test. But the point is, that's the type of person I am and that's the type of team I think we have at microsoft right now, or the windows team anyway. So my guess is that, and my guess, educated guess, based on you know history, is uh, someday later this week we will will get the week D update. It will be the thing that will be 24H2. They'll change the build number because they do that, but October 8th will come and they'll start rolling that out. That's my I'm still on that premise, I guess. No, that doesn't. It doesn't change a thing.

10:07
A couple of new features, features, not much to discuss. It's kind of interesting that 22 and 23 h2 are both getting the same update. 22 h2, of course, will be out of support by the end of october. Yeah, so this will be the last release for that version, thank goodness. 22 and 23, it's two of the same thing, not really anything different. Yeah, yeah and then and then nothing big.

10:26
You know media controls on the lock screen underneath those four card tile things, whatever they're called if you're playing media because you know we all do so many things on our lock screen, mm-hmm, you know you search for files with the start, what we used to call start search, and if the file is local, it will have a share option there that you can just access without having to go into the file explorer first. And then this is so beautiful and perfect, microsoft. I didn't bother looking this up because, seriously, who cares? These things change every two seconds. But if you're running Windows 11 right now, it doesn't matter what version chances are very good that if you click your profile picture in the start menu, this kind of new interface pops up.

11:09
Microsoft calls it an account manager, which is ridiculous. There's no management of account occurring here. But right, it will show you the microsoft subscriptions that you have, um. So I have microsoft 365, family and game pass, ultimate um. It also shows copilot Pro, which I canceled in August, and it says that, and I don't know why it's still there, but whatever.

11:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it just wants to remind you you made a bad choice back in August, right right.

11:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But there's a little dot dot dot menu up in the corner for more options and that's where you really access those options.

11:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I click start Yep, oh yeah.

11:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then I click my head here, yep, yeah, so there's your account manager, so you can see all your Microsoft 365 Personal Xbox Game Pass.

11:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ultimate Cloud Storage Unable to load.

11:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, yeah, so see the little dot dot dot in the corner. Yeah, typically the options. You see, there are the options that most people are going there for. So if you have two or more accounts, you'll see a switch account or log out option. Well, sign out, it says You'll see the options. You can click on it and just sign into the other account, etc. They're moving the sign out option out to this main account manager window because less than four months ago they made this stupid interface and then, before they shipped, 24-inch too, they're going to fix it because so many people complained. So this is how we do things now. So they're listening. You know that's a classic.

12:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean think of it that way right yeah.

12:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they rolled it out without testing it. The great thing about making a bad feature is you get two versions for it, right?

12:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The version where you roll out the bad feature and the version when you revert it. It's slightly better than the co-pilot thing where it's been in three different places in the UI and then went from a pain to a resizable pain to a standalone app that you can uninstall Classic All in the span of like nine months, the story arc of every piece of software.

13:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't really know how people are going to react until you do it right.

13:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You could test it. That would be crazy now, if you had a formal process for testing.

13:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They did test it. They put it out in the world. That's a test right there. Every piece of software is tested. Just test it on customers.

13:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is the continuous innovation thing, right? So we've talked about this.

13:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We'll call it innovation, as, as opposed to a difference.

13:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we're closing in on the 10-year anniversary of Terry Morrison announcing this thing called Windows as a service. As I said that I was like, that doesn't make sense.

13:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Windows doesn't make sense. It didn't make sense then?

13:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
either I'm like these words. I understand every word in that sentence and none of them make sense together and know you had the correct reaction I argued at the time that, uh, you know, windows is like this legacy software code. Trying to keep this thing updated like a service is such a huge mistake. Yeah, and they made a lot of mistakes and there were a lot of problems and the irony is they actually got really good at it. It actually they can update windows like a service, and now they do.

14:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They update it every damn month and they update it twice a month sometimes you know, and for the most part people can't even tell, they're the throats of the world.

14:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Know where they are well or an it sports. I mean the it.

14:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The it folks are pretty good about just not touching it. They. They put up wsus, which, by the way, is being deprecated. Yeah, and don't allow, uh, when?

14:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
don't allow microsoft anything to their machines.

14:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You just can't you would not survive, right right it's uh.

14:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's good because I'm not already mental, so like dealing with this is fine I'm pretty sure this is a set of throt features they're building.

14:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like, yeah, it's a threat, it's a threat, yeah. How do we send throt into complete catechism like this is the path.

14:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'll tell you that regular behind the scenes updates like arc or my browser is always getting updated chrome and stuff, but this changes stuff around and does it always require a reboot?

15:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
the monthly updates do yes, um.

15:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's kind of a pain, although most of the time you, I mean. They've gotten pretty good at making reboots hard to tell. Now you just come back to your machine and it did it, it's done, it's done it, except that stuff all starts to repopulate.

15:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like when someone moves things in your office a little bit and you come in and you're like, oh, something's different.

15:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Something's wrong.

15:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can kind of tell Microsoft's been dusting again, yeah, but yeah, we sort of glanced over the central issue here, which is just that Richard said this. I think they are in fact testing these things in production, right, and that's something people did not sign up for. So, fundamentally, I just have a problem with that.

15:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, what's the point of having an insiders program if you're?

15:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
all insiders.

15:42
That's right, they don't go logically through those channels, they don't. They sometimes skip them entirely. Um, and then you get the situation. You know the, the classic one and this was right when I think richard was first coming on the show was there was a period of time and it was a long period of time, I mean like a year, where there were three different versions of one drive you could have, you know, and, um, I'd I'd have to go and look, but I think with 24h2, finally, even a base install gives you that final third version. I don't think we are, you know, I've gone back, but, um, for a long, long time you would install just clean, 23h2, and maybe even today, still, you and you got that first version. Now you might jump right to the third version eventually. But, right, you know, with a bunch of computers I'd be here. There's one, there's two, there's one again, there's three.

16:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Again, this is such a distinctly Theriot problem.

16:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because I have a huge array of computers around me all running more or less the same operating system. I get to see every variation. Because it's not. Yeah, no, I'm the canary and to this day I mean this week at least, people, I'll get an email. Someone will say, hey, did you know? I think Microsoft's turning on folder backup on me. I know that sounds crazy and I'm like, yeah, I raised that issue on October 6, 2023. And was told by many people I was a crazy person Microsoft would never do something like that. Yeah, but yeah, that's yeah. That is what is happening. Yep, I would like. Would you like to turn this feature on? No, would you like to turn this feature on? No, would you like to turn this feature on? No, this feature's on. Come on, it's on. Yeah, but we're not going to tell you that's yeah.

17:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the final well, it makes you so much more comfortable, if you don't know about it.

17:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, yeah, I and yeah, and for someone you know, like people like us, you wake up one day and you delete something from your desktop and it gives you a message about deleting from one drive and you're like god damn, like, like seriously, like what did I say? They've done it again. Yeah, so, anyway, this is the world, so it's okay. Um, so, anyway, looking forward, I would say I, my guess, again, I, I, I do think we're going to see week D. I think, if you're on 24, h two or whatever, or 23 should, I guess it doesn't matter, it's going to map to this or these um release preview, channel builds, right.

17:58
And then you know, and look, these things don't roll out all at once. You know, and look, these things don't roll out all at once. If you were to list all of the features in these updates or in 24H2 or in the October update that 23H2 will get, most of them are CFRs. You know, controlled feature release updates, so they'll come out when they come out. You know, we don't know, we're spinning a wheel, we'll see what happens, you know there's no way to know.

18:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's fun, it's an adventure, I mean what would you talk about?

18:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know. Listen, I'd love to move on to more pragmatic things, but this is what we do talk about. All right, last week we got new beta channel and dev channel builds, I think on Friday, and it was kind of interesting timing because someone had just asked me like is it me or does it seem like the insider programs kind of slowed down and it's like, yeah, they're probably waiting to get over the sump and then they can start pumping out features for um. You know these different channels. So the beta channel is currently uh testing on the 23 H. Two, you know fork or whatever right um dev is on 24h2. So these are features we're going to see in stable in november, maybe december, that kind of thing.

19:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, so that I mean 24h2 comes to everybody by november, one would argue likely in the ignite time frame.

19:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go yeah, yeah, and then they'll, then they'll keep doing what they do, they'll keep adding these new features, so and 23h2 has got another year on it or so before they're going to stop support, and they're roughly aligned, you know as they are, and that will keep going Right.

19:28
So it's kind of odd that there aren't like the same features of both of these, which is kind of goofy. But there's some interesting stuff though. So everybody's favorite new keyboard key, the copilot key, which is a problem for me because I'm a messy typist and I hit it erratically- all the time and it makes the whole computer twitch when you touch it.

19:47
Yeah, so I came up with a like. Well, what happens is Copilot launches. Because Copilot is a standalone app and is based on edge, like web technology, I now just reactively type control W to kill it as soon as I see that friggin thing comes up in my face Right.

20:04
But uh, you can remap it. I think if you don't have cop, like you can uninstall copilot. And if you uninstall copilot, have a copilot key. I believe it why it should know it launches the snipping tool. So now I launched the snipping tool that's kind of useful not if you don't mean to do it, you know. And snipping tool is a little harder to get rid of, in the sense that you can of course escape, escape out of it, but it never seems to go away.

20:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In the first one, and it's actually I I actually had to control w out of it either, right no, no, and I had to.

20:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I actually reinstalled co-pilot on one computer because it was driving me crazy.

20:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But in the beta tool drives you crazier than the co-pilot too.

20:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm surprised, yeah so in the beta channel, uh, they're going to let you configure what happens when you hit that key. Nice, that's interesting.

20:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm thinking just man, that's all you need.

20:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, here's the problem. So it has to be an MSIX packaged app the type and it has to be signed to.

21:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can put a signed MP3 file in there for you. But I was actually going to.

21:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was thinking about putting like I've. I've actually written an app that just toggles the light and dark mode in Windows because it's tedious to get to it in settings and I need to put that on it.

21:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's just like blinds. You said it was just like you know I was thinking about it. You know, this is anyway come up with a thing to make you press the copilot button again Exactly.

21:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we'll see what that looks like. And then the dev channel has a lot more in the way of new stuff. But there's those new file explorer features we've kind of talked about with the shared tab. They're going to do the tabbed interface now in the home view with, I think it's recent favorites and shared, which is new. Some other stuff about file support. The new Windows sandbox client which is in preview, is in that build. Now they're going to start putting microsoft 365 on the taskbar when you sign in to windows, uh, with an enter id account.

21:58
So, okay, whatever that media controls on the lock screen, who cares? Uh, jump lists, oh, jump list is kind of interesting. So if you have microsoft edge, actually it doesn't do anything. I'm trying to find an app that I have that actually has a jump list. I'm trying to find one. I'm sorry, I don't use this computer normally. So, anyway, jump lists appear on the icons that you pin to the taskbar. But when you right-click in start you get a context menu. But that's a start context menu. What you don't get is the jump list. So they're actually adding that to start. So, yeah, I mean, that's fine, right, that's fine. And you know some other small things, and then there's also going to be a snipping tool update. That's going to be going out to everybody eventually, but Canary and Dev right now.

22:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It makes the screen twitch more.

22:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's going to let you choose the folder to where those screenshots are saved, which actually is one of a handful of reasons I do not use this tool, so this might get me closer to this.

22:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, it occurs to me that the biggest thing the Copilot button could add to itself is that whatever it launches when you press, it goes away. When you press it again, yeah, like a ton, then it wouldn't matter, right that?

23:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
would be clever. Here's what I'd like to do Make it, do nothing. I actually I downloaded a utility that can map any key and on one computer and now it's gone. I think I'd send it back to her. But I mapped it to the left arrow key because that's the key to the right of it, so when I miss type, I'm usually trying to hit left arrow, trying to hit that key anyway. That's brilliant. Yeah, key anyway. That's brilliant. Yeah, so that's like one.

23:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What was the key I meant to hit?

23:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
do that, yeah, yeah, just do that exactly. Do what I mean, not what I say.

23:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go all right the copilot key is now a feature of all windows keyboards.

23:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I thought this was when. When they announced this, I assumed we would see it on a select set of computers, right, like as a add button, like an indicator, and it would just go away because nobody wants this thing. Instead, it has been on every computer I've ever seen, at new, you know, and I'm starting to think this is going to be a thing.

23:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it worked with the Windows key too. Right, Like they did make this stick.

24:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I think that the fact that they're allowing you to configure what it does is indicative of that, because businesses would never allow this otherwise right, I mean, they would just not get those computers right. So I think now they're saying look, we have to do this.

24:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I guarantee you there's a group of sysadmins chatting now about what to do with that button, because the one thing it's not going to do is launch Copilot.

24:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right, that's exactly right, exactly, yeah, there's no more worthless piece of software in Windows than Copilot. Okay, and we've talked about the Windows app.

24:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's not the term that the system isn't talking about. There's no riskier piece of software than Copilot.

24:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, fair enough. Yeah, that's right, that's true. Um, copilot, sorry the. Um, the windows app everyone loves the name of so much. Uh, we're in contention now with the new outlook app for the most hated app of 2024, um, is now available, uh and it's not actually awful, like it's just a bad name.

25:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, if you had made, if you had called it rdp pro, I think people would be happier.

25:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
At least you'd be saying what it was, yeah I I don't know how to say this it's there have been. There have been time frames where, like stanovsky's regime, his time, that that team was very interested in getting rid of terminology and products and technologies that came from previous teams. Yeah, they had to rename everything and do all that kind of stuff.

25:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't call it the lynchings yeah, yeah.

25:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I don't see it as that kind of a history rewriting thing. I just, I just think this is like doofuses and they're just, you know, mac using designers who have never used windows and they don't understand.

25:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like somebody sat down and said how do I make a term so unsearchable that nobody will ever find my product?

25:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly I'm searching for a Windows app. Oh, good luck with that. Yeah, because there are a lot of them.

26:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Said the guy who is on a podcast called NET Rocks with the period in the front, because that doesn't screw anything up.

26:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have an app that I write is called dot net pad, because I hate myself and instead of notepad, right, so there is not a word processor text editor on earth that can handle this. There's no version of you've ruined everything. The front facing period just leave it, just like, don't stop. It flags it every second. You are doomed. Yeah, yep, yep, and you know, I mean. It's 20 years later. Whatever it's, yeah, they're never going to fix that one.

26:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know, let's pause if you don't mind fellas and we shall continue in just a moment. You are watching Windows Weekly, and let me press the right button If I could figure. You are watching windows weekly, Uh and uh, let me press the right button If I could figure. Out. There it is there, you are.

26:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is that the right button? That's, it's a button.

26:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, let's, let's put it that way, it's a button.

27:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let's not put qualifiers, yeah.

27:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not the copilot button.

27:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the I like the idea that like in front of you is either the cockpit of a 727 or just you have like three buttons and you're like either way, you have no like, you're just hitting things, you're going to hit the wrong one.

27:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You want to see what's in front of me. It's crazy.

27:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look at all this I love it.

27:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's beautiful. You get all this nuts nutty stuff in front of you. Fantastic. Too many buttons, Too many you speak of well, too many for my limited capabilities. Our show today, uh, you watch in windows weekly, by the way paul thrott and richard campbell and we will get right back to it in a second. Paul's going to talk about some new hp pcs, but first a word from our sponsor, experts exchange.

27:45
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29:36
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30:33
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30:58
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32:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hey everybody, I'm down here Every time. It's just going to be something different every time.

32:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good, it's an answer. It's like Windows updates.

32:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You never know, it's just going to be something.

32:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this is a better, but no, maybe I should do this. Make you guys little. No, I like that one, leo. Can I come back to the other one?

32:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Really little. I think we represent the Lollipop Guild.

32:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Alright, back we go to the real people, the real experts on this show.

32:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was listening to this. I've not used the experts exchange, but a lot of people have gone to Stack Overflow. Oh, they're so snarky. They're so snarky and useless. Blocking is like someone asks a very specific question. I've searched for this term on Google or wherever, so I ended up here. I too may be looking for this thing and some guy will say you don't want to do that. Or may I ask why you are trying to do that and it's like no, you may not. You may get out of the way and allow forward progress to occur.

33:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stop showing up in my search results. I know it's awful. Occur and stop showing up in my search results. I know it's awful, it's so annoying. Yeah, well, that's experts exchange. You're gonna like it check it?

33:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
out. That's I like the sound of it, that's for sure. Yeah, yeah, I mean having suffered, you know so. Uh, this week, uh, hp had their annual imagine event out in palo alto. Yeah, I like new hardware, I hardware. Yeah, they announced a bunch of stuff. I only talked about the laptop stuff, but they also have gaming hardware. That's not PCs, but headphones and other things. They own Poly now, so they do a bunch of hybrid work cameras, headphones, all that stuff, a lot of that stuff. But they're building out this AI PC line that they have. They did that rebranding where all the consumer products are Omna something and all the commercial products are Ultra something. Did I get that right? No, sorry, elite something. And there's some new stuff and I'm struggling to understand some of the stuff. But the first one, the commercial one, the one that you could see, there is an elite book 1040 with a different name and with amd ryzen processors interesting yes, very interesting, yeah, that one thing we can't get with the thinkbook carbon.

34:19
Uh, think pad carbon, series x carbon. Um, so that's super interesting. I love that. Uh, that device style, you know this form factor is incredible gorgeous.

34:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's gorgeous. Keyboard's awesome. Other than you know, the little form factor is incredible, gorgeous, yeah, it's gorgeous.

34:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Keyboards, yeah, awesome, other than you know the little weird issues I had had at that time. And then on the Omni side, on the you know the the other side, the consumer side, they have introduced a they they well, last, let's see at they announced the successor to the uh spectre x360. So now it's out, you can actually buy this. It's called the omnibook ultra flip. This is how that works in their new naming uh convention um, gorgeous, um, this is uh, intel core ultra series 2 processors, which are also fantastic by all counts. Um, so that's great.

35:08
And then this troubling little bit, because they announced two laptops, but really they announced 2.1 laptops because they have their. That's not a lot of laptop, a little .1. It's a slice of a laptop. Over the summer, in June, they announced two CoPilot Plus PCs based on Snapdragon, right. So there was an Omni book, whatever. That was the consumer version of the consumer laptop. And then there was the elite book ultra, uh, which was the high-end, um, commercial version, right running snapdragon x elite. So they're they've added an eight core model to that line, meaning a snapdragon plus eight core. You know the eight core chip that a call common house and iPhone, right to that lineup.

35:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And that's the lower end of the ultras.

35:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, now, this will be a way to get that thing at a lower price point, of course.

36:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's, you know, it's always good but like this is in the thousand dollar range, like that low, or they?

36:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
didn't? They don't have pricing yet.

36:08
Because the normal Ultras are close to $2, right. Yeah, they're always sale, so you can usually get one $12, $15. But, yes, list prices are high. Companies buy these things in bulk, right, so when you buy it at retail, you're not really seeing the real price, I guess. But yeah, so the thing is, this is what we saw at IFA right, lenovo, especially some of the other PC makers, everyone, all of the companies announced some eight core versions of something, not all Snapdragon On Snapdragon, but when they did there, was always eight core, but they were all eight core Snapdragons.

36:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, okay.

36:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No new X-Elite anything, no Ever.

36:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So this is just speaking to this yield problem.

36:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We exelite anything? No, no. So this is, this is just speaking to this yield problem. We are, yeah, it's there.

36:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would also forget speaking of which did you get your uh developer?

36:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, no, no, just no.

36:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You would have thought a three-week trip to canada or whatever that was, yeah, maybe I was sure when I got home there'd be a little something at the doorstep, but Nothing, and so maybe we were wrong about that whole HDMI soldered shut.

37:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, no. I think the HDMI thing was real.

37:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think.

37:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But there's another. There's still a yield issue, you think.

37:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, I think this, and I think this is in the production line, right Is that Qualcomm went and did this thing to produce they're probably in boxes right.

37:37
Someone's going to to produce. They're probably in boxes, right, someone's gonna have to open them up. You know, we know, we've seen this. I mean this is, this has happened. Yeah, I my, my. My suspicion is that they, their yields, were low enough that now they that, that the engineers went back and found a new bidding setting. They cut off other processors, like probably not anticipated bidding, right, like there's anticipated bidding where you've created cut traces and stuff to take out cpus and chunks of ram and that you know, whatever your yield problems are right, I suspect that now engineers have spent more time on them because the yield was that low and said, hey, it turns out if we cut here and here, like we could take these processors out in this machine where these, we get another 15 of these processors. This is so troubling. No, it's, I mean dude, it's a new high density chip.

38:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't envy these guys.

38:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is we get another 15% of these processors. This is so troubling. No, it's. I mean dude, it's a new high-density chip. I don't envy these guys. This is an incredibly hard problem.

38:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay.

38:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I also appreciate that they're coming up with a yield factor and then Qualcomm smartly turns around as soon as they know okay, we're going to have X, many thousand of these eight-core ones goes to all the vendors say here's your price point, if you want to. You wanted a lower end, lower end price. Here it is. But if you do it, you've got to announce it. Yeah, right, and then you get that effect.

38:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, I uh, what is it? We're probably about a month away from hearing about what will be the next gen snapdragon, whatever, right, so we'll see. But we've always kind of known, going into this year, that the big, there was a really big chance that this thing was going to come out. I kept waiting for that iota of bad news about snapdragon, like something would come out, and no, it's like. Everything went great, except for recall. Uh, but every you know, as far as the hardware goes, all good stuff. But the flip side of this is Intel, amd are going to come out with the next gen stuff and if those guys nail it in any way, shape or form, I mean at some point you're you know what's, oh no you're exactly right.

39:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is like November is upon us, like winter is coming and that, whatever that exclusivity arrangement is going to end, yep, and they haven't delivered. So here's the thing. Uh, I love this. My estimated ship date now is september 25th.

39:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah and my estimated delivery date is september 20th so you know I've been resisting going to look at the air I had to look.

39:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You brought it up. I'm in time warp right now. Here I am yeah.

39:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm sorry, um, yeah, so I I don't have any new intel hardware and I do have the new uh amd zen 5 um hp laptop, which is awesome, and well, here's the question, paul why are we concerned?

40:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
like concerned? Yeah, because life would be better if there were more copilot plus pc hardware options like why are we concerned? And I, I would argue we're concerned because both you and I want windows on arm to come true right. And if these machines don't sell as soon as you have copilot plus pcs chips that you already know about, why would you take the chance? Now you have to live on the merits of arm, and the merits of arm aren't that strong well, I, yes, I mean yeah.

40:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the issue is, the issue before was multifold um arm had serious compatibility issues and really serious performance issues, so that hampered sales. Why bother supporting this thing? Right, um, I think this came up last week, but there's this kind of notion of um. There's some deprecation occurring because it's not supporting legacy technologies, um and so this is a which, depending on who you are, is a really good thing. Exactly, um. But you know, we're lazy in the PC space, and I mean it across the board. But we're lazy in the PC space, and I mean it across the board. I mean PC makers are lazy, customers are lazy, businesses are lazy. We go to the thing that we know and we stop thinking we also consistently get punished by customers when we innovate too far.

41:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, right, everybody has one badly behaved app. They must have, and it's all different, right. And so that's why 10x failed and the ones before it like yeah, security's cool right up until I can't run xyz app, right yeah, the?

41:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
um. My experience with the amd the battery life keeps going up. So in the beginning it was on the lower side, but because of snapdragon, I actually really pay attention to this. The whole time I used to wait till toward the end and I've seen it go from six to seven to eight, eight and a half now, and I'll look today or tonight and see if it's gone up again or maybe we level out at some point. But, um, the performance is astonishing. It can play video games. It's fantastic. Yeah, the intel stuff that I've read is that they actually finally did the thing they were never going to do. The basic CPU performance is actually really low. It's low for U-series it's not where it was but the GPU is very good. The MPU is fantastic and for thin and light ultrabook class laptops, actually this is a really good solution.

42:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's the thing Intel resisted for years and years. It's like a balanced solution because deeply they believe that their processor performance is what makes their sauce secret.

42:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly Now they're going to have Arrow Lake and then after that whatever lakes come next Raptor Lake, et cetera but that will address that part of it and give us higher TDPs and more performance and more cores and all that stuff. This is going to happen. So if you're that kind of customer and you like that stuff, don't worry, it's coming. But Intel has all these problems. We'll talk about that a little bit because we have to. It's been another week, but as far as the technical end of their mainstream processes for PCs, they did nail it. So the message they had at IFA, which was very aggressive and I was like, yeah, it's a good one, you don't have to worry about compatibility. And now everything works. Now we have all the efficiency.

43:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it's the place they can attack. Let's face it If somehow Intel matched battery life, you'd walk. You would walk Because why, would you go anywhere else? A whole bunch of questions go away instantly. That's right, and because you address the one thing, that mattered.

43:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You start to get used to this stuff. It's very interesting, I. I often talk about that instant on thing with the screen, which there's a little nuance to that in a second we'll talk about but, um, and how great that is. You get really used to it and then you open a laptop and nothing happens. You're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is like a meteor, like you know, um, or you, you get used to just like all day battery life, right, yep, so when you have a computer that lasts like a macbook air is 15 hours or uh more than a work day you don't even think about it, you don't even think about it, yeah

44:02
that leads to interesting new problems where, because you don't think about it, gets a charge, you're like oh crap, there's no, and I'm like, I'm not near a charger and I don't you know, like you actually I didn't even bring one.

44:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm always shocked when I look at my Mac and there's and there's no battery. You're like this actually runs out of battery life. I'd never seen that before.

44:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yeah, so that's. That just happened to me recently.

44:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I'm like wow's, it's a weird thing. So did you ever did you commented on the uh? Uh, you probably did this last week on the crazy rumor that qualcomm was going to try to buy?

44:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, this is gonna, it's gonna come up again.

44:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, we're gonna, we're gonna talk, okay, okay, okay it may not be that rumor and it's not even a bad idea, the wall street journal?

44:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, yeah, this is not right, it's not bob's rumor sitecom.

44:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, we're and we're jumping ahead.

44:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I've been thinking for a while. Intel's ready to be broken up for parts as a legacy company.

44:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Save it. I don't want to get you out of order, but it's okay, it's an interesting topic, oh no, and it's very relevant.

45:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I absolutely agree.

45:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's germane. To this right, intel could catch up, unless they don't.

45:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and one would argue they have systemic, architectural issues that they can't seem to address. Yeah, and would be better addressed by a different set of leadership we're going to find out their core IP.

45:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess, for lack of a better term, is this instruction set right? Yeah, it's the new 6502 or whatever. It's like the cockroach of.

45:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
CPUs. It's nothing that new of CPUs. It's nothing that new. X86 has been dragging around since the early 80s man, that's what I mean. That's his point. It's become legacy.

45:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just you know it's ugly and terrible. They're actually Intel. We don't have this in the notes, but Intel is working on a version of their architecture that strips out legacy code, so everything that's pre-64 bit they're actually going to get rid of. That's actually really interesting. That's not a bad idea. That's not a bad idea at all If it works.

45:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean we'll see. But did we have to get this desperate to start really innovating? That's the issue here.

46:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, that's what happened. I mean, yes, this is a huge, apparently we did.

46:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The answer happened. I mean this is yes, this is a huge, apparently we did strategy answer. Yeah, apparently. Yeah, by empirical data.

46:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yes, but listen, I mean they apparently pulled out all the stops, put this thing out way earlier than they were going to originally and look, we'll see. I mean we're going to need three, four, six months reliability. Well, you know, we'll find out, but by all accounts, they kind of hit it out of the park here in a way that I don't think anyone anticipated. So it's, it's actually good for them, yeah it's interesting.

46:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If they modernize and stay alive, so much the better. But if they don't take the parts that matter, cut off the rest and keep going like legacy, eventually is a burden right now for sure, yep, 100.

46:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So about two weeks ago I noticed there was a firmware update for my surface laptop it's that snapdragon x based machine, right and so I went to the microsoft support site to look up what it was and there was no documentation for it. It's like that's kind of curious. So I kind of sat on it and then five, six days later they actually updated the site and I assumed because the surface laptop 7 and the surface pro 11 are the same board, they are the same, it's the same computer inside right, different body, but basically the same thing that there would be one for that machine as well. But they didn't document that at the time. So it took them five or six days to get the documentation out for Surface Laptop and then five or six days later they documented yes, we did in fact deliver one for Surface Pro as well, and it is identical.

47:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Of course, it is right, it's exactly the same thing, and the seven and the pro 11 are both the latest versions. Like. This is not an old beast firmware they're doing. This is can catch.

47:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, this is a snapdragon x, right? Yeah, so it's. I think in both cases it's the third firmware update that they've shipped since. Uh, you know, before there was one that was there and that's to be expected.

47:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right in a new chip, set on you on a new implementation.

47:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's totally reasonable, I mean I, I don't track this for hp or dell, or you know lenovo. I don't think anybody has hardware no, but I mean, but they release firmware updates regularly as well. Right, and that's how you, among other things, you're fixing general reliability, performance, whatever issues, but that that is the place.

48:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's also a completely known pattern by completely known vendors building on a legacy of existing infrastructure, and qualcomm and the snapdragon machines are none of that no, no, of course.

48:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I mean, but microsoft's always been really transparent, like they actually documented. They put it up on their support site. You could you know, if you're following microsoft blogs, a lot of them will. Every single time there's any firmware update, they'll write a little story about it, right, just to kind of mention it. So I stopped doing that about seven years ago, but you could you know, they're out there. So I'm paying attention now because I have this computer and I look back and I see how they've done it and I'm like, okay, this is the thing, that incident thing I talk about all the time. That doesn't work anymore. And and uh, they have introduced the intentional, of course, but no the.

48:56
the interesting thing is, if you look over the list of fixes, they mentioned things repeatedly like wake on power Sounds a lot like my thing. Wake on land, which is, you know, semi-related, uh when system wakes from sleep mode. Yes, right, uh, something, something during sleep mode or transition between powers. This, this stuff is all over this.

49:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, and it broke the one thing, yeah so it's.

49:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not that it doesn't just turn on, it does, sometimes it's it's that they've turned it back into a pc where I actually don't know what to expect. Yeah, you just broke your confidence and that kind of that hurts a little bit, because we were gone for, uh, I showed my. I think I told the story last week, but we were gone for one week. We went to berlin and I left the macbook air sitting on the dresser and I walked out. My wife was unpacking and I said watch this, watch this. And I opened the lid and it came right on where you were and I'm like that's. I think it lost maybe two 5% of battery life at most, I don't know, maybe not even that Right.

49:54
And then I walked over to the surface laptop before I'd gotten this thing and it booted up from a sleep state which is fine, like it's perfectly acceptable. It's been a week. But now it's like I don't know, you know. So I I keep checking it, kind of of nervous about it a little bit. I want to kind of I'm kind of hoping it kind of clears itself out or something which doesn't make any sense. But it has not. So I assume if you have a Surface Pro 11, you might be experiencing something similar because they're the same computer, right. So I don't know. Breaking a feature that used to work, it's not good. The regression right, and this was something that was really special about this computer. I think it will be again. I think they'll issue a firmware update that fixes the firmware update right.

50:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We'll see. I already did that, Joe.

50:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I did, and actually, so let me go. Oh no, I'm on the wrong computer. This morning I saw something that looked like it might have been a firmware update, so I installed it, but the computer didn't reboot.

50:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there was a surface, something, and I was like, oh, maybe this is it, and it wasn't a driver update or something, something, yeah, and so I don't know.

50:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, I'm, I'm hoping they kind of get there. Okay, um, sometimes I was sometimes things happen and you're like no, there's no way. Like there's no way, this is right, you know, like this, is you, you check the date, like is it April 1st? Is someone screwing with me? And uh, I opened the iPad, I went to the, the news app. I was, as I was doing this, I was saying something to my wife. So I'm, I'm in the middle of a sentence, like I do on the show sometimes, and I'm like blah, blah, blah and I'm just staring. She's like, are you okay? I know, and I'm like, um, it says that microsoft is reopening three mile island. Like, does that combination of words make sense to you? And uh, so three mile island is, of course, the infamous site of the nuclear disaster 1979 I've done a whole piece on this, yeah um, in pennsylvania, right?

51:54
so of course I'm excited for this thing to come back, because this place needs to be a nuclear wasteland and uh, that that thing is.

52:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, apparently there were two, there are two reactors on three mile island site and one of them's still okay, yeah one of them well, one of them is a cloud of slag. That's not true reactor two was completely cleaned up. They removed the entire core assembly 100. Oh no, it's not usable.

52:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, but all of that and it won't be for 100 million years, but it's okay, corium has been removed.

52:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The radioactive materials you get tested, you have cancer, they, you have an operation and they use like a little ice cream scoop and they scoop it all out and they're like we got it all. Do you just trust that? I don't know, I'm not saying, I don't know what I'm saying, but Core.

52:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Reactor 1, they were running it. It got a license. It continued to operate. That's true. Oh no, that's right In fact. But it is an older, it's just expensive to operate. So they turned it off.

52:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right, and it wasn't that long ago. I want to say it was 2019, possibly, yeah, yeah, just a couple of years back. So the name of this company that owns it is Constellation. They're going to change the name of the facility, by the way, because of course they are. It's clean and it will have some awesome. You know, crane clean energy. You know whatever it? Crane clean energy. You know whatever it's Crane? Crane was the guy who stuck his finger in the dike so everyone didn't die or something, but okay. But if you read their announcement, it's actually really interesting. It's clear they're still upset. They had to turn this thing off, like they're kind of mad about it. Sure, they lash out at other forms of clean energy Nice and the basic claim was something to the tune of whatever wind and solar has done in pennsylvania for the entire duration that it's existed. We will surpass that energy savings or energy generation in one month, you know, or whatever. I'm paraphrasing, but they were basically just a gigawatt power plant.

53:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like it's a lot, it does make a lot of electricity.

53:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It takes a lot of wind turbines to match that yeah, so, um, they're going to spend um, about 1.6 billion dollars to get this thing restarted. There there's, you know, we talk about the chips act a lot. There's actually an inflation recovery act which I would not normally know a thing about, and still don't really, but, um, there'll be some funding from the government that will help microsoft, of course. Course has signed a 20-year contract so that, if this thing actually does come on, they're going to be there for a long, long time. And what are they going to use it for, paul? What do you think? They're going to make Windows phones? No, they're going to. It's for AI. Yeah, they're going to power over 700,000 homes. Oh, no, they're not. They're going to power one AI thing.

54:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One data center. Yeah, yeah yeah, that's what it's going to do. How to make your technology look like an overlord in one easy step.

54:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's funny because Pennsylvania is the state of coal, but there is another nuclear plant that is also running Well.

54:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Pennsylvania has a brighter new future. Leo, we're also the state of fracking, so I don't know why you're still stuck on coal, natural gas and coal.

54:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've moved way past fracking Apparently nuclear power, yeah, but you know I had the same reaction as you, paul yeah, pardon the pun. And we talked about it on Sunday on Twitter. I was convinced that this is a good thing and that nuclear power is safe and clean and we need it, know, desperately, need the generation. I feel like it's kind of sad that we're putting all of this power into crypto and ai, which I'm not.

55:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not convinced which is actually a problem for that federal funding, because that, of course, is designed to, you know, for things that will provide, you know, electricity or electricity or whatever to human beings to citizens, not to a single private company or a public company, but, you know, a non-citizen or non-state sponsored thing. So I don't know. You know we'll see if it happens. Apparently, this thing's in pretty good shape. They just they had inspected it years ago anyway. They, you know they, of course they're doing that regularly.

55:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's not anyway they did, you know they, of course they're doing that regularly um you know, it's not like there's a name like kids drink there and you know tag inside and stuff like it's.

55:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know it's been any time to rename.

55:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It would not go well.

55:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Chernobyl's back, ladies and gentlemen but that one's going to be google, because they're super evil. Um yeah, fukuyama's coming back too, uh everything's gonna be great. Fukushima, yeah, fukushima, sorry, after they made Godzilla, um, they're, uh, yeah, they're going to bring that one back. And then you know, sony can use it.

56:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Five and six are just fine.

56:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so yeah, anyway, I guess there are a couple of other nuclear power plants in the United States that were in the process of being decommissioned and they might one or two of them might come back too, so fun. Yeah, another one in Pennsylvania, susquehanna. Yeah, I mean, you'll get a book in the state and just make the whole thing unlivable.

56:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's perfect, um let's pause briefly and we'll continue in just a bit. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat, richard Campbell, and I am your genial host, leo Laporte, to tell you today about our sponsor, lookout. Lookout, love, lookout. Today, every company, every company is in the business of managing data, even I mean even a small company like ours. It's all about the data. That means, though, that every company is at increased risk of data exposure and data loss from cyber threats, from breaches, from leaks, and, of course, cyber criminals are growing more and more sophisticated every day.

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58:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We thank them so much for their their support of windows weekly, and paul thurott and mr richard campbell and google and google and microsoft, two best buds together again, oh and a sumo losing a thumb and louise style road trip off a cliff so google cloud, you know that part of Google that's sort of like Azure, I guess, and a little bit like Microsoft 365.

58:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
GCP right yeah.

58:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Google Cloud Platform. They have been complaining about Microsoft and their licensing practices in Europe for several years. In fact, this is one part of Google that, like always sends me news for some reason. It's kind of interesting and they complain a lot. Like always sends me news for some reason. It's kind of interesting, and, um, they, they just complain a lot.

59:13
So this past january, google dropped with the egress fees right, so if you wanted to leave their cloud, go to a different cloud. Um, they wouldn't charge you on the way out the door. And then they immediately started complaining because microsoft wasn't doing the same thing. Right, it's like, guys, you just stop doing it yourself. Come on, um. But the eu, and I think the uk cma as well, both at some point or another said you know, we're going to look into this. And, um, microsoft this past year had, uh, reached a settlement within an industry charity group in europe that is full of european cloud vendors, um, and that seemed to have put put an end to the antitrust worries in europe, for Azure at least. So Google has decided, for the first time ever, they're actually just going to formally complain to antitrust regulators about Microsoft, and they have done so. So they went to the European Commission and said no, you need to look into this company. This is what they're doing is not right.

01:00:09
So Microsoft's comment on this is guys, we just put this behind us, we're done. But it's the EU. So who knows? We'll see what happens there. But I guess the gloves have come off. They finally went right after Microsoft directly. They've been kind of doing a proxy battle, trying to convince these smaller companies in Europe. It's like these two giant evil monsters like hey, don't you want to complain about the other monster? You should. They're terrible, they're going to screw you over.

01:00:39
So it worked for a while, but then Microsoft settled, so that's the end of that. So we'll see what happens there. That's kind of fun. Leo mentioned this earlier. So LinkedIn updated its terms of service and said yeah, guess what? We're going to use your data unless you tell us not to. So I went to go find out how to turn that off and yeah, it's not quite as convoluted as turning off the clicking sign. You get in like Facebook the first time you have a new phone, but it's, it's in there, you know, um, so you can turn it off you know, in the in the retail world this is there, was it used to be this concept called negative option billing, that same thing.

01:01:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like hey, we're moving you this new plan unless you tell us not to. And I mean in canada that it literally was made illegal.

01:01:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there you go, you know like as it should be can that's like that's that's way to judge something, Like is it legal in Canada? It's sort of like if I'm going to eat this thing, it's like that sounds disgusting. Do doctors warn pregnant women not to eat that? Because if they do, maybe you shouldn't eat it, you know, Like that's interesting. Okay, so I think this is the opt-out model, right? This is.

01:01:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's negative option billing. We're doing this unless you tell us specifically not to, and that should be illegal.

01:01:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's cramming After the fact, and this is what Microsoft was going to do with recall. They called it opt out, but when you signed in, you were in and then you had to go find the UI to turn it off and I can assure you they were not going to advertise it. So that's terrible. Now, they were not going to advertise it. Uh, so that's. You know that that that's terrible. Now they're not going to do that anymore, thank god. But, um, they are doing it at linkedin apparently. So, not great. But again, at least you can turn it off. But, yeah, not great.

01:02:24
Um, I think last week yeah, last week we talked about microsoft's little security summit. That went great. They reached reached no agreement whatsoever. And a week has gone by. Now Microsoft is bragging about how much progress they've made on security. They're very happy with themselves. So this is another one of those. Look at the calendar thing, except this time, instead of being April 1st, I have to look and see if it's 2002 again, because Microsoft is really talking up security. You know, and I, they made this claim right up front. I it's. They describe this as the largest cyber security engineering effort in history not its history, okay, In history. And as proof of that claim, they say they've dedicated the equivalent of 34,000 full-time engineers to this process, which means they have not dedicated 34,000 full-time engineers. They are telling every single person that works at Microsoft that they need to spend some iota of time on this.

01:03:26
And then they did the math and that's what it worked out to yeah and so the way I would rule judge this is that, in 2002, microsoft shut down the development of all of their core platforms until they solved this problem. Uh, for months, for months, and they didn't.

01:03:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They didn't shut down anything this time so and arguably didn't actually solve that many problems. I do know because I've heard the screams. Uh, you know that a lot folks, especially those who develop demo apps and those kinds of things, are really struggling with hey, how do I follow these rules? And to me, the upside to this is this process will become more streamlined because there will be lynchings Eventually. The fact that you can't achieve your job means you go hunt down the people that are impairing you.

01:04:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's one of the ways they'll actually review you each year.

01:04:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's how WPF got fixed right. Like until Microsoft bet on WPF with Visual Studio, wpf was a limper. It was just hanging out there. Yeah, it was just hanging. And so the fact that they're forcing a group of very influential microsoft employees, like the folks that are largely the advocates and those sorts of folks, to follow the security rules they've been telling us we should follow means all of those mechanisms should get streamlined like. I don't disagree that conditional access is the right way to go, that managed identities are the right way to go, but have you ever tried to do it Like? It's hard, yeah, and you need to make it easy, yep.

01:04:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, at some point it's going to. You know, this is like the advice you give young people. You know, take out a certain whatever percent you can from your paycheck, go ahead and go into your retirement savings Maybe your company matches, and you just don't notice it's gone because you've the check in the first place.

01:05:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You never saw it in the first place?

01:05:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You get paid what you get paid right, and hopefully that will be the experience for Microsoft employees at some point. But yeah, right now it's. Yeah, I make fun of it in a way because it's kind of my nature, but it does seem like they are serious about it, but they were serious about it in 2002. The part I don't know is how and when. It just fell off a cliff again, right, and I suspect it was not one thing at one time.

01:05:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, that's the whole thing. It needs to make progress in a couple of months until quarterlies come up. As soon as you're going to miss your quarterlies, you'll start bypassing the process, and that's what undermined code. You're talking about 2002 and how it impacted NET. We got all this code signing uh um authentication mechanisms built into code and nobody could actually make it work like it was not deployable, and so we learned to bypass it right right, and that's the real thing here is can you make a workflow where someone gets to deliver their thing on time, because if you can't, then they will find another way.

01:06:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, if ai was just smart enough, it could just solve this problem is not this smart right.

01:06:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let's be clear ai is not smart at all. That's not a thing fair enough.

01:06:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm being sarcastic.

01:06:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, the new ai is supposed to be smart, sure reasons it reasons it reasons.

01:06:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It reasons um yeah we'll see, yeah, we'll see exactly can't solve that, though that's for sure, yeah, I, I.

01:06:36
the problem with all this stuff is, uh, every this is all made by people. People are imperfect and uh, people. And now we have ai doing it's the technological version of inbreeding, which is training on itself. You know, it's just, is it? You get this? You can, almost I. You don't have to be a scientist to sort of understand the problem here. But we'll see, we shall see Google. So a couple of, just quick, I guess, ai, this section.

01:07:02
At one point it had like seven things in the title. I was like I need to break this out a little bit more. It's a little stupid. But a couple of AI things from outside of Microsoft. Google, of course, has Gemini. There's a weird thing. You know, we joke and talk about how there are so many things called co-pilot in the Microsoft space. We feel that there will be consolidation right over time.

01:07:22
Google is doing the same thing with Gemini in some ways, and if you think about it as an individual or as a business, you could subscribe to Gemini Advanced. You can get it with. I bought a new Pixel. I got a year of Gemini Advanced for some reason, and two terabytes of storage. I mean, they almost gave me the phone for nothing. It's stupid, but you can do. I think there are similar deals for Chromebook Plus devices. There are different levels of this stuff that you get for free, depending on your well, just anybody, individual business, whatever, some things you have to either pay for, or maybe you get it with some premium device purchase, whatever it is, and then there must be a matrix somewhere, just like there is for Microsoft 365. And for Copilot, like this is where these things are, and I couldn't even you know there's no brain on earth that can comprehend all of this but they just announced this past week or this week that there will be a standard, a standalone Gemini app, not Gemini Advanced, but just Gemini Gemini, because we have to have different levels that we free for business customers at Google, regardless of the level. So if you're a workplace, business enterprise or frontline, you will get this, and so there are going to be degrees of it.

01:08:34
To date, google has charged $29.99 or $30 a month, just like Microsoft, right, for their co-pilot Gemini, I think Gemini advanced essentially, or I think in the workspace world they probably call it something add-on or whatever, but they have different tiers. So now they have another tier, the free tier. So you know I I think the AI stuff is going to filter out the way we've been talking. Where we have these special AI things, features will kind of come down market. You know, we see that in the hardware space, like Google will put out features on pixel and then say, well, we'll put this out on Android, you know. Or Microsoft had a uh, the single audio effect that was in um windows studio effects now works on any PC. You don't even need an MPU, right, they can do a software version off the CPU. That's where it's better if you have an MPU, but if you don't, still works, you know.

01:09:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so I think this is kind of them working through that same problem so I still wonder if there's a standardized interface for all of this, right like the. Yeah that we will know that any software that can that wants an mpu can use that mpu. Yeah, so that's always the question. It's like whose software works with this?

01:09:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, so right. So new phones, like new computers, have mpus and different types of mpus, different levels of performance and so forth. The very newest phones iPhone and Android right have on-device SLMs, as I would call them, but most don't range of features. Some work against the cloud, some work local and eventually, yeah, like you're suggesting, I think it will have some that will work local, but against different ships, depending on what you have, etc. And then they'll do the hybrid thing. And this is a I god. I wish I could retire right now. It's a mess. I it's like just trying to understand. This is like so no, this is when we need you more than ever.

01:10:29
Yeah, I know, I know my kind of mental is perfect for this, but, but, I will also I mean, I'll just like a really hyper focus. I could go nuts on this Like it's, it's, it's an.

01:10:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it is a matrix you know it's going to be interesting.

01:10:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We live in interesting times and I think it's going to be very interesting and it changes all the time and whatever you think of AI anybody who's listening or watching it's happening right, whether you care about it or not, and it's happening so fast and things change all the time. I made a joke about this earlier. I was just talking about the UI for Copilot. It's ludicrous, but we went from having no copilot to having four different types of ui for copilot, and now it's a year later and how many names.

01:11:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and you and I know, because we were quietly admitted to like there's a couple of hundred copilots under the hood. We just they're not let out into the world. That's right, and that's right and the world is better for it. But you know, uncle satch had, I think, did the right thing, you know, back in the day when he told the whole company, hey, go focus on this API and show us something. And they all did and they learned a ton. And now they're sort of consolidating that mess.

01:11:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's interesting, you know, we talk about Stevie Batiste, we talk about Build last year, not this past year, but 2023. We talk about the three app models for ai, the first one being co-pilot, this side-by-side ui and we actually see this model everywhere, even though it's not always that explicit. A lot of browser makers are using a sidebar pane right, brave. Does this? Google does this? Microsoft does this? Obviously, where does this? Microsoft does this? Obviously, mark does it. Yeah, mark does it, yeah. So it's sitting there next to the thing you're doing and they kind of interact.

01:12:16
Right, this isn't in the notes and I didn't pay too too much attention to this, but Mark Bernioff at Salesforcecom, they had their I think it's reinforced their show this week and was making fun of Copilot and the very notion of Copilot and that this is not the right model. This was always going to be temporary, but when you like Google positions, everything they do is like helpful, and so whether it's it doesn't matter what the UI is. In a way, it might matter that you will or will not see it, depending on the device or subscription or whatever you have, but Apple's kind of following a similar model. You're going to be in an email app. You're going to be in a messaging app, you're going to be wherever you are, anywhere you're creating content, and things will pop up.

01:12:58
And he compared this is actually, it's a little too perfect, because I think Microsoft's been kind of patting itself on the back for the whole Copilot thing. But he basically said how is this different from Clippy? Nice, right, it's a fair point. It is, it's a fair point. It's better than Clippy, though it is, but it's also 25 years later and yikes, I just did run Copilot. To summarize your show notes yes, it is, but it's also 25 years later and yikes, like we're still trying to solve, To summarize your show notes.

01:13:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then I can ask a follow-up question. And you briefly covered LinkedIn using AI, so I asked tell me more about this. And then there's a lot of detail in here and I have follow-up questions.

01:13:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so what you're doing here is actually one of the I think personally, one of the best uses of AI.

01:13:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:13:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you know, I don't work at a big company where I'm getting like 20-page memos or anything like that, but I could imagine going into like someone sends you a document or presentation, whatever the heck it is, or just a recording of a meeting, and it's like guys, I just need the gist of this. I'm not going to sit here and listen to this. One thing I actually already do, which I guess technically is AI, is I'll download a video because I, you know, like the Intel presentation, I wanted to go through it again from IFA. I didn't want to spend the time to watch it, right, but you grab the transcript of it instead, which was generated by AI, and that's another form of breaking something down into a way that's more digestible, and it is good at that, because we're talking about, you know, it's a finite thing. So that's yeah, it's pretty good. And then fun graphics. It's been, it's kind of good for that, I guess.

01:14:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you do all your graphics with Copilot now?

01:14:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I this was a tip I had maybe a month or so ago, but it would actually. It coincides with me getting rid of Copilot Pro, which is I was paying for this thing, and the one use I got out of it on a very regular basis was I would create these graphics for the website, and this isn't why I was paying exactly. But if you did the free version, they were square images, not 16 by 9. I need widescreen images and they can't always crop a square image properly. And they were also higher quality and faster speed and you had more tokens and whatever that kind of stuff was. Well, it's a lot better now, and if you go to designermicrosoftcom and say I want to create an image, they'll give you a choice of three aspect ratios and the image quality is exactly the same as it was when I was paying. So I don't pay for it anymore, because why would I, why, why should you? So it depends, um, so, yeah, I, I.

01:15:25
It's interesting, I. I the the idea of something that is there next to you to help you. I swear I never drew this clippy thing, although I, I turned that thing off immediately. I hated it. So, uh, maybe that's why my brain didn't go there, but as soon as I heard that I was like, yeah, he's got a good point. So obviously it's more sophisticated. But it looks like you're trying to write a letter. Can I help? I mean, it is the same basic problem it's trying to solve. Right, it's more sophisticated.

01:15:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You would hope it's more sophisticated, but in the end the you know the real issue with clippy was the interruption right. That's that I'm working here and you're bothering me yeah, I, I, there's this, I need the.

01:16:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I need to look into this more and write it, write more about this. We glossed over a little bit last week I think it was last week or the week before when microsoft had their co-pilot wave 2 event because it was so much of it. It's kind of hard to kind of, you know, keep track of it all. But I had said, you know, I had heard about a rebranding of some sort coming before this show, before this event, and I was like they're not going to get rid of like the co-pilot, right, any problems is like just all the new terminology, like even people who are technical and understand this world that we're in I think can struggle with some, and I certainly do anyway, with some of the language.

01:16:48
And one of the weird isms of Copilot was that for a little while on the consumer side and I think still on the business side, you could create custom, what they called custom GPTs, which is a really stupid name for something you know and I sort of wanted you know why would they just call these things custom co-pilots? And I think the answer is that they're not always co-pilots, they're not always something that runs there and like you use. It's something that goes off and does this thing for you and then comes back with that thing, and that's an agent, right? So this?

01:17:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is a agent. An agent's a very hip term right now.

01:17:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but it's another good term. You kind of get it Like OK, it's like something working on your behalf. I like it Like a bot. I guess kind of satisfies that name Like a need or whatever.

01:17:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and Microsoft makes two products. They make a Copilot Studio, which is actually grouped in the Power Platform group, so it gives you a case for what it's for. And then the AI studio, which to me is orthogonal to Visual Studio. It's for not that it's for software developers per se, but it is for data engineering and data analytics types who want to build their own machine models. And then you can surface that through copilot studio.

01:17:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they have. I don't know the names of these tools, but also part of the power platform group. Um, they've had like a bot builder. Well, yeah, that's the old one, right, that's the one, so it's okay, so framework is bot, framework, that's right.

01:18:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, my favorite version of that was this, the fact bot, where you literally aimed it at a fact site and it just gave natural language around it. But in a Siri caliber, capability terms were very important. One would argue that the biggest thing that LLMs really brought to the table was the tokenization mechanism, so that it's very language agnostic. You can say. We were working on an interview for a case study on this, the actual applied product, and they were doing insurance policies, and one of the big points they saw with the LLM is when the customer was saying, hey, I need insurance for my Sea-Doo.

01:18:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You didn't have to remember that's a watercraft, right, when you said Sea-Doo it would find the watercraft policies um, yeah, this is, this is a programming topic and maybe should be for later, but I, I there was a fascinating article in the register recently, which is a sentence I don't usually get to say, but there was, and it was the second part of a two-part series or whatever, and they were talking about the future of AI and software development and they were saying you know, right now it's a co-pilot scenario. You've got a block of code or an app or project, whatever it is, and you know, maybe it looks at the code, maybe it does that IntelliSense thing sort of where it will be. You know, you, you it's kind of a pass where you, you make sure there aren't any common errors or problems or security issues, whatever it might be, but the the as this evolves, eventually it will be AI kind of doing this thing. Right, and one of the like. This is fascinating to me.

01:19:59
You know we talk about like putting rust in the kernel, whether it's Linux or Windows or Azure or whatever, and today this is a human process. There are people, there are engineers, geniuses, who are doing this work. At some point, ai will just do this. One of the things AI can do right now is here's a block of code. It's written in C++. Spit me out a C-sharp version of this. Well, here's the Windows kernel. Spit it out in in uh rust. You know it sounds ludicrous and maybe it is, but I I mean, eventually it's going to happen well, and you know racinovich was on.

01:20:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Racinovich made that statement very publicly where he said you know, any windows engineer has to justify to me writing any more c++ in the kernel fighting me writing any more c++ in the kernel versus rust.

01:20:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there you go right like yeah, it's I, I. So, yeah, you know I. I know a lot of people poo poo ai, and I do to some degree as well, and I I think the impact may be in, I don't know, productivity sense is going to be minor in the sense that we have been getting these kind of advances just through we've been on the Gartner hype cycle for a while now and we're still hurling down the slope of disillusionment.

01:21:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
right, I don't think we've bottomed out yet, but we're down there Like the peak is law. The peak of overinflated expectations has long passed.

01:21:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Fair enough. I don't know what peanut means in the emoji thing. I don't know. You know, like I don't know. Could AI solve that one for me?

01:21:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know Again this story about Apple's requirements for the iPhone. It just speaks to you. Didn't know this in advance, like you said AI, before you knew what it meant what is the requirement.

01:21:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the base requirement on day one when this thing ships is going to be four gigs of storage on the device, but that will only go up. So as Apple releases new features, the storage requirement is going to go up and up and up, because a lot of this will be SLMs sitting on the device. This is the kind of uncharted territory. You know. We see this on phones, like you know the newer iPhones and Android phones, pixel especially, and Samsung. We see it with the Copilot Plus PCs. We're going to see it with these or are now, I guess, seeing it with the new AMD and Intel-based Copilot Plus PCs. Eventually this will just be PCs. Right, people have been writing stories for years. You Now. People have been writing stories for years. You know you get a laptop with 120 gigs of storage space and you only have Windows on it and there's 96 gigs free. Well, a couple years from now it's going to be 75. You know it's going to be a lot, because we're going to take up the space At some point.

01:22:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We just need to have space that's just for this that we don't even count because it's going to be so stupidly off. Yeah, I did get a terabyte iphone and now I'm glad.

01:22:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah that's why, when I bought the surface though it does, doesn't it?

01:22:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you said the word terabyte, phone, a terabyte phone, a phone.

01:22:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And some of that initially I thought well, maybe for video and photography.

01:22:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, I'm thinking, thinking AI models.

01:23:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's one whole language model there you go yeah, I'm sending in an iPhone on trade today and I just pulled off the photos and before I, at first it said it was like you don't have enough storage on your computer for this. I'm like, wait what? So I looked at it and of course it's an Apple device. So they've synced every photo that's ever been in iCloud to the thing for some reason. Okay, so I had to go back to I think it was September last year. Just pull those photos off. But even then there's still redundant duplicates in there.

01:23:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like On the phone story, my Pixel 9 is supposed to arrive today. The current swelling on my phone is relatively low, so somehow your Pixel 9, which you had trouble finding. No, I didn't have trouble finding the 9.

01:23:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I couldn't find the 9 Pro, I gave up on getting a Pro, but it's arriving before your Snapdragon, oh yeah.

01:23:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Easily Well. The Snapdragon device arrived five days ago, right, supposedly, except it's shipping today.

01:24:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Snapdragon device arrived five days ago right, Supposedly, except it's shipping today. I should ask the Pixel 9 why the Snapdragon is not coming. There you go. Maybe it knows. Don't ask it doesn't know what a Snapdragon is. It might have friends in the business.

01:24:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, I don't know if you were following this, leo, because you weren't here for a couple of weeks, but coming back from the last trip, the Pixel 6 started to grow outward.

01:24:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He flew to Europe with a phone that looked like a beach ball, no, no. And he was like no, this is okay, it's fine. No, no.

01:24:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've been on a plane when a phone was smoking and they pulled out the little kit he's like to scroll from the top of the screen.

01:24:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You actually have to go over the top of the roundness of the phone.

01:24:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a box that looks like an ammo box with a locking lid, by the way.

01:24:45
Inside of it is a pair of oven mitts and the lady came out and picked up the phone and put it in there, and then they filled it with water and then locked the lid. Isn't it sad that we have to have such things? Yeah, I like that. They do have such things. Yeah, I am too. They have a complete. They didn't even. It did not even interrupt the flight. If you were not sitting up front where it happened, you would never have known it happened.

01:25:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Get the oven mitts. Maude, we got another one. It's really no different.

01:25:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What about like a version of that for a nuclear power plant? There you go.

01:25:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah sure I forgot. You did a whole talk on nuclear power.

01:25:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I did. That's why I was strongly opinionated about these details. So I'm strongly opinionated about these details.

01:25:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, in your opinion, is it safe and is it something we should move forward with?

01:25:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would not move forward with those two-plus reactor designs. They're just taking advantage of the fact that thing's already built and it's not maybe a few years of runtime. The plants that are really interesting, that are being matured right now, are the small modular and the main thing is that they separate the real dangerous part, which is the handling, from the operation of the reactor so you build these, yeah, you build these reactors small enough that you can move them on big trucks right and you bring them into your production site.

01:25:49
You have a dozen of them or 20 of them. They each one generates 150 to 300 megawatts. They run for two years as a sealed product that you haul them out and set them off for reprocessing and replace them it.

01:26:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of like what you put on a nuclear sub or something like that?

01:26:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's similar to that, except those ones run with different conditions and can run for 20 years. These are only two, but to me, the biggest thing is coming from the tech industry. If you're replacing a reactor every two years instead of every 50, continuous upgrades, right You're always making a better reactor, continuous innovation upgrades, right right, like you're always making a better reactor, continuous innovation, yeah well you, you're now creating a central repository to do all of that work, where they do have the resources to continue to improve the design nice and then putting it out to more places, and.

01:26:31
But the bigger thing here is every other power generation method, even coal, has gotten cheaper over time and nuclear power has gotten more expensive, and that's really why did they turn off reactor one at Three Mile Island in 2019? Because it was too expensive to run. Yeah, and so you've got to turn that on its head.

01:26:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the good news on solar is it's getting cheaper and cheaper, incredibly cheap. Right, we just need ways to store it overnight.

01:26:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, there's that and there's a few solutions there, but the bigger thing with solar is that you don't have to build the whole power plant at once. Right is that you lay down a few megs yeah, get it working on the grid and then you add to it over time, and that's the same thing, by the way, you could do with modular.

01:27:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah right, yeah same uh, that's what bill gates is investing in, right, those sodium? Uh, cool to react.

01:27:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He wants to do a little weirder things, stuff that's more experimental. But it's fun to be a billionaire where you can just throw money at stuff like that. Like, apparently every tech billionaire has a favorite fusion project. It's a hip thing, that's what they talk about. So they talk about the billionaires club. It's like what fusion? Project you just go to the golf course. Yeah, nope, nope, nope.

01:27:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, give it a rest in the early days, bill gates put a lot of money into cialis and I think think that paid off well for them. Maybe a little too well? Yeah, maybe.

01:27:45
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01:31:14
Bigidcom slash Windows Lots of information there. You can get a free demo to see how BigID can help your organization reduce the data risk and accelerate the adoption of generative ai. Big I d. Big idcom slash windows also a lot of really valuable informational stuff there. There's a free new report they just put up that provides valuable insights and key trends in ai adoption challenges, the overall impact of Gen AI across organizations Something you need to know for sure. Bigidcom slash Windows. We thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly and we thank you for supporting us by going there, especially using that URL BigIDcom slash Windows. All right, let's talk about what I mean. Mean you talk about the register, paul, what the register called? Just a non-starter because of the cross licensing deals with amd can qualcomm. They've got the money or they got the stock value. Can they buy intel?

01:32:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, but so bloomberg, and I think was it reuters or the wall street journal, I guess the Journal had the scoop.

01:32:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, the reason why Bloomberg confirmed it with their own sources. Yeah, so as did Ming-Chi Kuo, by the way of all people. Yeah.

01:32:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Depending on what you read. I mean, part of this would involve them selling off something. Yeah, they don't have the cash to do it, they're not going to take all of Intel. It would something yeah, yeah, they don't have to do it, they're not going to take all of intel. It would be a kind of a multi-pronged thing. So the the discussion around intel to me is, um, what intel is today and what intel hopes to be in the future. Right, and in the idealized version of the future from pat gelsinger, this is a company that designs and builds chips, and builds chips not just for itself but for others.

01:33:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, but I don't expect that foundry business would survive on its own for long. That's what Qualcomm would grab.

01:33:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, yeah, right, that's where I was going. So the part that designs x86 chips, which is the part that owns those patents that Leo mentioned and whatever other IP, is in many ways, the least consequential part of this transaction, right, um?

01:33:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but also the one tangled up in all these legal constraints and so forth.

01:33:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, that's right, that's what the registry said, that those those uh licensing deals with amd go out the window as soon as there's an acquisition. That's part of the okay, that's interesting, okay, so they'd have to renegotiate all those cross licensing deals only if they took the patents, if they wanted it.

01:33:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:33:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe they don't want x86. So you think they don't want the foundry business. They want the facts.

01:33:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I think they want the foundry business.

01:33:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they want the foundry. That's the point.

01:33:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Qualcomm is a foundry business, right Right by. By the way, at least half of Qualcomm's revenue is from patents, so maybe they just want the patents.

01:34:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not sure if that's half, but it is a chunk. It's a huge portion. It maybe has changed now that they actually have it. Yeah, I don't think it's quite half, but it is a big chunk. If Intel is successful and the United States government is playing a role here to make it be successful, that would be the business. That's lucrative, right? Not the x86 chip design thing. Um it. When qualcomm started making arm chips for pcs you know many years ago now, because they actually worked on this for windows 8 originally one of the things they couldn't do was use any of that ip to emulate. You know they had to do clean room their own kind of thing. They can't. There's certain x86 uh opcodes or whatever that you just can't. You can't, you just can't use them until we'll go after you. They're very aggressive about it. That's why they had that issue with amd. But I mean, maybe they're at the point now where they don't need them. I part of you know, if you accept the fact that x86 is legacy essentially.

01:35:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:35:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that they can now emulate that really, really well.

01:35:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and the US government made AMD come into existence because they didn't want a sole provider for x86 from Intel. Right Like this was already a government construct, you can use a government construct to unravel it too. Yep, Yep, you can use a government construct to unravel it too, yep, yep.

01:35:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you know we'll see, but there were rumors a month or so ago that they had been talking about buying part of Intel. Now it's like we're going to. You know it's Intel but it's not really Intel, like it's not all of Intel. No one has said this explicitly, but my guess and I think we all agree on this is that what they're going after is that foundry business. They want the fabs. Yeah, and this is sort of like when you look at Google with antitrust and I know it's years down the road and anything could happen, but if the government actually orders that company broken up, Qualcomm's revenue comes from QTL.

01:35:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, am I talking? You are? Yeah, I thought I was muted. I was just asking, gemini.

01:35:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, because it'll know, yeah, Qualcomm Technology Licensing. Yeah, that's their licensing side. So sorry, I lost track.

01:36:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so if there was some version of Google in the future 20 to 30% is what Gemini says that sounds about right, yeah, you take out ads.

01:36:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
just do that one thing and say you can have all the other stuff you have, you're a technology company, congratulations. That company is diminished to a degree that you wouldn't even recognize this company anymore. It goes from being one of the top three or five or whatever companies in the world by value to being nothing. 70% of the revenues come directly from ads. Now, it doesn't mean they disappear, it doesn't mean whatever, but they become a vastly diminished company. Now there are other ways to separate that company out, whatever we'll see.

01:36:47
But if you think about intel as just a company that designs x86 chips for pcs that are now made by you know other company, manufactured by other companies, I guess I mean, what are we talking about here? This, this is they've already, they've lost. They have nothing to give to mobile, to the mobile world. They sold, already sold off the important bits there. They have, I guess, mobileye or whatever, but they are failing in the data center. They're pretty much just PC and I don't know if you're following this hyper growth market. That is the PC, but this is not. This is not a big future there. So that's a vastly diminished company. The real future of intel is the foundry intel, if of course you know they have shareholders right. So if people can cash out and that's part of the deal, I think a lot of their shareholders would be okay with that. But from the perspective of people at intel, I'm sure leadership anyway well, of course you want.

01:37:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stock went up and qualcomm stock went down. On this, yes, yep, everybody thought good deal for intel.

01:37:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Talk about a good deal for qualcomm. Talk about an anchor. My god, is there a bigger anchor in this industry than intel?

01:37:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
let's take that off intel strength has been vertical integration, because they largely invented a lot of this industry, the fact that they had they've always had all the pieces. They didn't have a choice. The question is, is this now legacy and actually never had a meant to?

01:38:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
progress. That was nokia's strength too, and they're gone as a mobile.

01:38:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So the thing is like you're seeing this, you know, at the same time, spacex is vertically integrated and it's considered a strength, right, right. Like one would argue in industries of true innovation, vertical integration is important and that we're not seeing that much innovation here anymore, and so optimization is more important.

01:38:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Even if we did like. What if somehow Intel innovates to some degree? That's crazy. They do something. That's amazing. It's just better than anything Apple's doing, whatever. We're talking about a market that's selling a couple hundred million, it's just not.

01:38:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And they have tried C-Itanium and been punished for it. C-itanium, that's right. The bottom line is, at the moment that they couldn't make a new chip, that their customers rejected them arguably. They should have reorganized at that point. Okay, it was commodity business.

01:39:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This was the problem I had when Vista came out and I thought, you know, I hope this doesn't prevent some future Microsoft or Windows team from shooting for the stars again, because they really went for it and they cratered. And I thought, man, this company has never, or this part of the company which you know was the company right, it was never going to take risks again. You know, and then they did windows eight and I was like, all right, maybe I should just shut up, because geez, like, like.

01:39:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sometimes they did not do that willingly Like that was they. They were bullied into it because the alternative was Microsoft going all armarm. Then which one?

01:39:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
would argue shouldn't be.

01:39:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Maybe it was yeah.

01:39:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we'll see. But a lot of people instantly kind of poo-poo this Qualcomm Intel thing.

01:39:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is one way You've got to face the regulatory issues.

01:39:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, regulatory, yep, it can be done.

01:40:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But the reality is this is an archaic business. Now the reality is.

01:40:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is roadkill and there are vultures circling and someone's going to get it, so you want it to be a.

01:40:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
US company, as long as you don't dump it in. Central Park with a broken bicycle.

01:40:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Who does that?

01:40:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody does that.

01:40:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think anybody does that, but that's a different story. Um so um. The other thing that's come up since then is that a company called apollo global management, which is a private equity firm and a fairly famous one is yeah, yeah, they're the biggies yeah, they've previously kind of bailed out um put the p in private equity yeah yeah, uh, okay

01:40:39
so um I don't know, probably. I don't know what that means, I don't know. So they've said look, keep Intel whole, we'll invest $5 billion. They're going to want someone on the board, probably, right, they're going to want some chunk whatever it is, more of the company than they paid for, that kind of thing. But it might be worth it to Intel. I don't know if they'd have to go through the board and investors and we'll have to see, but that might be an op, an option. I'll just say you know, five billion sounds like a lot of money, but I mean, their recent smallest chips thing was is worth. I think it was eight billion.

01:41:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, any given fab's a 10 billion dollar proposition, right like yeah, I mean.

01:41:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, their total investment cost of this restructuring is 100 billion yeah, that's why five didn't seem like thanks for nothing buds.

01:41:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe they need their free cash.

01:41:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe they need it. It's like someone asked for change for 20, and you're like, I got a five. Do you want that Nice, You're like how does that work?

01:41:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But Apollo is not like a tech industry fixated investment group right, they're in Kodobo and like Citigroup and all kinds of different entities.

01:41:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So well, I mean they've looked at this and said look, there's some outcome here that makes sense for us.

01:41:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and including chopping it up for parts and selling off the parts right Like that's the kind of entity you're talking about.

01:41:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I don't think that this is the thing, like I said, ideally. Yep, I don't think that this is the thing, like I said, ideally, and ideally from Intel's perspective, but ideally, I guess, in general, intel remains whole and the design part succeeds, the fabs succeed.

01:42:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The logical thing to happen to a company of this scale struggling is that you get activist investors yeah, the Carl Icahn types. Well, and what you're seeing there, with a $5 billion lifeline, is I would like to buy a seat on the board and be an activist investor. Here it comes. Yeah, exactly, whoever Apollo appoints isn't going to be a warm fuzzy. They're not. Yes.

01:42:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Their slogan is investing in tomorrow today.

01:42:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It could be investing in yesterday, tomorrow maybe their slogan should be succession, succession.

01:42:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but it's real, yeah no, no, yeah, given that, given that intel takes that money, I can't imagine they don't. Yeah, whoever that board seat looks like that, you want to pay attention to that person, because that person is going to come in with a hammer that's probably right.

01:42:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think you kind of nailed it, that's. I don't think there's the cost of a board, right?

01:42:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so this is going to happen. Uh, if it's qualcomm, it's going to happen. If it's this, it's going to have.

01:43:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's going to happen, so no no, it can easily be apollo saying we're in this to get the qualcomm deal through. There. You go right, like you're talking about weaponizing here, not.

01:43:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We shouldn't lose sight of the fact, too, that intel has actually been moving toward this outcome on its own. On its own, yes, yes, they have been reporting the Foundry financials as if it were a separate business, and then their actual plan now is subsidiary, which is a half step, 50% of the way toward just spinning it out right.

01:43:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's Well, and so Pat could be in on this too. It's like I can't seem to move people forward. Let's go get a hawk on the board that rattles the cage. That could push me to do the thing I want to do all along.

01:43:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is going to be a slight exaggeration, but let me see if I can find this, because it's kind of hard to find stuff on my site, because it's terrible, let's see. So you talk about, like chip design businesses, although I guess, arguably. And so here are the extremes. Nvidia, right, uh, briefly the biggest company in the world, I think today, probably the third biggest company in the world, oh, merely right. So they're, they're. That's one extreme. And then we have arm, on the other extreme, uh, or uh, or maybe even uh, raspberry pi, which we're going to talk about in a minute, but arm, arm is quarterly revenues of less than a billion dollars, so somewhere between a billion and.

01:44:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A trillion Just earnings. Well, it's just earnings.

01:44:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's probably two to 300 billion, whatever the numbers for NVIDIA. That's the world that this Intel business could live in, but it's going to be on the ARM side. It's not going to be on the book you know what I mean.

01:44:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like it's not a too big to fail scenario. This is a too old to live without scenario.

01:44:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's almost like too big not to be split up scenario.

01:44:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah well, it's good, and you think the regulators in the us will say, yeah, you know what?

01:44:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
oh no, I think they're going to kick up a huge fuss but, the alternative is the company fails right we're also going to get a directive, probably from the white house or whatever, that, like this thing is a national security. Yeah, we have to make this happen. American chips have to. It has to be a united states based company, that's a good point.

01:45:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, is qualcomm still in the us that we're in san diego? Are they still?

01:45:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, they are they're from, yeah all right.

01:45:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and it's a and one would argue they will move faster than Intel was able to establish the elements that the US government wants. You want fabs in country, you want skill sets matured, you want assets locked down? Fine, you do what you got to do. And again, apollo coming to the table. They're going to bring their regulator guy with them. They're going to bring the guy who's got friends on the FTC Yep. Bring the skill set that's necessary to be able to move all those pieces into play.

01:45:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this might be good news.

01:45:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, holding still is the only bad news. Yeah, right.

01:45:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Intel. They could have escaped this problem by just moving quicker 10 years ago.

01:46:02
Microsoft has been begging them not to do this, to not do what they've done, not to do what they did Not. That Microsoft necessarily was saying you need to build up your fabs and modernize there. But that should have been obvious. That should have been obvious. I mean, as these nanometer designs go down and down and down, and Intel is they were stuck on 14 nanometer for years and I don't remember the numbers anymore. But it down and down and down and you know, intel is, they were stuck on 14 animator for years. Yeah, and I don't remember the numbers anymore, but it was like seven to five to four.

01:46:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
like you know, they were just behind. If your clock was tick-tocking like this, you'd get it replaced. Huh, huh.

01:46:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right. So none of the remaining stories in this section have anything to do with each other. So just quickly I'll just say the ARC browser.

01:46:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a potpourri, just say potpourri.

01:46:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a Europe is a bouillabaisse of cultures and foods and smells. So the browser company which makes ARC just reported their first major security incident. It happened in August. Fortunately, everything went right. The security researchers that discovered it alerted the company. They worked together to fix it. No one said anything about it until it was fixed and it was never exploited in the wild. And now they're also saying all the right things about getting their processes up to speed on that kind of stuff. And so it's a small company. I think they can be really goofy sometimes. I they make an awesome product, but I feel like their response to this was really good, so we'll see what comes out.

01:47:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They got a good.

01:47:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
CISO, who did the right thing? Yeah, they did the right thing. They did. You know, crowdsource obviously screwed up, bad, but they you.

01:47:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I didn't have Troy Hunt showing up going. Anybody know anyone at ARC?

01:47:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This guy's going to be like the guy above the water where you throw the beanbag at the thing. That's going to be his job for the rest of his life, but he'll always have to deal with that. But they actually did the right thing.

01:47:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I know, and it's the whole thing. You know you've screwed up when Troy Hunt is asking for a contact at your company.

01:47:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so Raspberry Pi started in, I think, 2008, 2009,. First product, 2012-ish. They make single board computers, right? Leah was asking about what percentage Qualcomm technology licensing was, and it's whatever percent. If you asked me two days ago how do these guys make money? I'm like they sell single board computers. They do, but that's actually not where they make most of their money from. They also make these little compute modules that are basically smaller single board computers that are used by IoT and manufacturing and all kinds of vertical markets, and that's actually most of their money. So there's a good business there.

01:48:32
They're public now they're on the London Stock Exchange along with, I think, seven or eight other companies and they are doing great. Small numbers compared to ARM or whatever, but you know it is what it is Like. This was basically a charity at one point. So $34 million in profit and yes, by the way, in dollars, even though they're like UK-based, kind of odd but on revenues of $144 million for the six months this is not three months, not a quarter, it's a a half year but these are both big double digit gains over the year before 47 and 61 respectively. So they're doing great and they they're gonna keep doing great, according to their.

01:49:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're even listed on the lse and they report in us dollars. That's messed up, I know I didn't.

01:49:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was looking for an explanation of it. Yeah, why would I don't? I don't know what to say. So the Raspberry Pi single board computers they sold 2.8 million units in the quarter in the store. It's a half year.

01:49:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can't tell you how many are in this room, right yeah?

01:49:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's fun A bunch. I love it.

01:49:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're less expensive than Doritos. For God's sake, you can eat them as a dip.

01:49:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're just as technologically advanced and a little more crispy. Honestly, they have better MPUs than a Dorito if you get the orange one with the Taco Bell one.

01:49:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just got the new one and I'm very excited I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with it.

01:49:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know what it makes a perfect pie hole.

01:49:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, maybe that's what I'll use it for, I don't know, yeah, that's, but just it's great to think.

01:50:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just love, I love that it exists I love that they 35 buck.

01:50:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Computer yeah, and it runs like a hot damn, you know what it runs great linux yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, that's.

01:50:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It would actually run uh windows pretty good, if they would, just you know they used to what happened. They used to offer it it was basically somewhere between iot, normal, so it was just it was for a single. The idea was there was no front-end UI, but you could run an app. It was for an app, so there was enough of Windows. I used to run a.

01:50:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Python server on it. And then there was an AP. There was a SDK that would allow you to program Minecraft, so it was like a Minecraft edition of Windows.

01:50:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that thing, you have the 5, I believe it goes up to 8 gigs, right? Yeah, that thing would run desktop Windows pretty well. I know it kind of kills me, they don't? It's amazing.

01:50:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got two of them pinned to the wall under the stairs there. That are my pie hole 1 and 2. That's fun yeah.

01:50:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I got the HA Green on your recommendation.

01:51:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the green green sitting right beside it. Yeah, I'm sorry, the what home home assistant green. Oh yeah, and they're all. All my server names are southpaw characters, so uh, nice, you know, stan and kyle are the stan and pile of the pie holes.

01:51:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Kenny is the green, yeah, I used to go with um and the big file server is Cartman. Yeah, obviously Okay. So, and then I mentioned this last week briefly, but actually now I've done it. So that NET pad thing I mentioned modernization project using the WPF stuff that Microsoft brought back is done. I'm not going to post the code to GitHub until they actually release NET9, because it requires it. Plus, you never know, there could be like a little last minute something.

01:51:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're in RC. You're pretty safe, I know Well.

01:51:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, maybe they'll actually fix some bugs and make it better.

01:51:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now don't get crazy, Mr Farmer. I know, I mean, I know it's not going to happen, but you know, a boy can dream. Okay, okay, uh, we have to xbox. Yeah, we have some xbox stuff. So the best news we need an xbox sting. I can't imagine we do, yeah an xbox theme.

01:52:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, just a sting. Yeah, it's xbox time. I think I farted, yeah, or I could just combine them all, right, the?

01:52:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
sound of the nervous chewing of nails um for xbox? I don't know so there's a.

01:52:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it should be like a quote from master chief, right?

01:52:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, yeah, like what was he like? We're doomed um, something like that. I don't know. I was trying to find the numbers for Xbox Live Gold back when that was a thing and I couldn't. But in searching for that I found all these articles I've written and as recently as last year I was really bullish on Xbox man. I thought they were going to nail it. And God, they talk about just face raking the entire time. It's just crazy.

01:53:03
So there's a guy who writes for Bloomberg. He wrote the Social Network, for example. So he has written a tell-all book about the history of Blizzard Entertainment, which was part of Activision Blizzard right, that's the name. They merged in the early 2000s, 2006, 2007, something like that, something like that and it spoke to over 300 current and former employees.

01:53:24
Some great history in there, and one of the things they've kind of divulged before the book came out is that the reason that the co-founder and CEO of Blizzard left Activision was because of Bobby Kotick and how terrible he was, and that this guy like canceled this huge project they were making and then started putting his people inside of Blizzard to make it less independent and they were pushing things like microtransactions and all this crap that they didn't want to do and it was just a nightmare. So Microsoft kind of swooped in. After all that misconduct and discrimination stuff happened and you know, hopefully still right are cleaning it up. But then they fired hundreds of people and you know it's like they shipped Diablo 4, I think, a year ago, and I don't know what the numbers are, that we don't really know exactly. But I mean, some number of those, the guys that worked on that game, are gone Like it's, you know. So this book's about that.

01:54:14
That's interesting. Yeah, it's coming out on October Actually. Is it October 8th? I think it is.

01:54:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let me look it's what it says on your post, so I guess I'll have to believe you.

01:54:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's Patch Tuesday, so that's going to be a big day for Microsoft guys, I'm adding it to my read list.

01:54:35
The publisher sent me a copy so I'll be able to review it in time for the release. I'm excited about this. I want to know. I'm probably going to read the back of it first, because I want to see the Xbox, microsoft stuff, but very interesting. So I mean these guys. By the way, this is how long this company's been around. So in 1991, bobby Kotick joined Activision. That's how long he was there. In 1991, the people that co-founded this company created blizzard and their first games were released on the amiga and for ms dos that's how far back they go, yeah, yeah starcraft, right diablo, obviously.

01:55:10
And then they did world of warcraft, which was the big breakout.

01:55:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hit yeah it changed everything. That's the beginning of the morgues.

01:55:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's also the greatest name ever. Play nice.

01:55:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah. So that's exciting. And then Microsoft today released or announced their September update for the Xbox. And the Xbox is kind of a tough thing. It kind of hits across all the different clients, the consoles, pc, mobile, whatever. But the big news is that on mobile they're going to it. It's not there right today, but in the next month or so they're going to get rid of the standalone game pass app, which I'm not even sure where they had, and just put that stuff in the xbox app on mobile. That's where it is on windows, right. So they're going to make that more like the version of windows, which I think makes a lot of sense. Um, and that's good.

01:55:59
And I'm trying to think what else is in here. Is this some other stuff? Oh, there's, the game bar can be in compact mode now, so that when you're playing on a small handheld, this thing will make sense and it will show one widget at a time so you can kind of cycle through them. It doesn't take up a lot of space on the screen. So that's available today. So that's kind of cool. Oh, and then they they already announced microsoft flight simulator 2024, but now you can pre-order it. We know it's coming on november 19. We know all about the various editions of the game, how much they cost. Standard edition will be coming to xbox game pass. Well, that doesn't exist anymore, sorry, uh, game pass standard and also game pass ultimate on day right as part of that kind of perk. The thing that's crazy is, if you've ever played Flight Simulator, the 2020 game, it's astonishing. Like it's gorgeous, yeah.

01:56:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And world complete and real time, so you can take a lot of time to fly around.

01:56:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is making that game look like Minecraft by comparison. Lot of time to fly around. This is making that game look like minecraft by comparison. They're talking about a 4000x detail expansion where you can actually see individual pebbles and tiny stones and gravel and grass, and yeah, it's supposed to be insane. Now the first thing I think of when I hear that is like, well, hold on a second like, uh, call of duty is like 160 gigs on my xbox, like what is this going to look like? But actually they're going to lean into the cloud streaming stuff for this. So the the footprint on this thing is going to be 30 gigs and then, uh, as you get uh like the world updates and whatever other updates they do, that's all just going to stream. Part of me wonders why they're making this game, yeah.

01:57:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I think, because it feels like it's just an experiment. They're experimenting with what can we do with our data sets? You know they're having fun with it.

01:57:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It didn't occur to me when they came up with this thing they just call Flight Simulator, but we call it 2020, that they would actually make another version and kind of make them differently, Like it seemed like they would just kind of update that.

01:58:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But of course they actually over the years have made many different versions so it is in fact in keeping. But yeah, I I like the first version of microsoft flight simulator played is in like 1980 on a tier 80. Right, it was at 127 by 47 resolution.

01:58:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, the big deal. The thing that put that game over the top was when vga happened, you know don't get crazy 64040 by 40, right, like all of a sudden.

01:58:24
oh my God, look at all the text and four old colors. Yeah, so there's that. That's good news. So I guess it's good news.

01:58:33
Microsoft also announced this past week they're ending their Xbox ambassadors program, which caused a little bit of scarring on my part, cause I didn't find out what it was, I never heard of it, and it turns out that it was a kind of a almost a private program, not that they didn't, you know, you didn't know it existed, I guess, but they would pull people out of support communities and kind of reward them much like they would do with MVPs and the rest of Microsoft, right, so they were sort of the MVPs, I guess, of that that world and, um, they're getting rid of it. They're it's I don't know, I don't know what to tell you, so it's just going away, I guess it's the way to say it. So, um, they want people who wish to be involved in xbox join the insider program, join xbox research, where you can actually interact with microsoft people and provide feedback directly to the team. There's the rewards programs, fan fest, and they have all this stuff. But, um, I the fact that I had never even heard of this.

01:59:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
to my knowledge, I never wrote about, there are xbox mvps, right. Oh, they're too good, but it may be that they're now calling those embass. They're actually expo ambassadors and they're closing the whole thing down.

01:59:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah yeah, I know it's kind of like you know, yet another version of oh my god, it's doomed. Um, bloomberg did a nice piece on sarah bond, who's the president of xbox, and it had a couple little tidbits in there, and one of them is that they apparently spend about a billion dollars a year acquiring games to put in game pass right, and this is where you have to do a little bit of math and this is why I was looking up xbox. Um, live gold, right, um, they have x number of subscribers, they pay x number of dollars. They have three tiers. Now three, yeah, well, four tiers, I guess technically right for you, or three tiers, whatever they have, they have some number of tiers. Four tiers. I have many tiers, I have lots of tiers. I do nothing but spend tears, um, anyway, but do you have tears for fears? That's, I do. Yeah, I have a lot of fears too, actually.

02:00:28
Um, so game pass back in february they said uh, had crossed the 34 million subscriber line, up from 22 million in january the year before. That's a lot, but a lot of those people include our Xbox Game Pass Core, which used to be Xbox Live Gold, and that's why I was looking it up because, if I'm not mistaken, the last time they gave us a number on that it was 45 or 48 million, so that's not actually great. So I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. So we don't know how much they're paying. We know that those prices have gone up. We don't know how many games they acquired with a billion, although I guess you could look at how many games come out in a year and kind of do the math on that.

02:01:05
So obviously the basic deal is here they're convincing companies by paying them to put their product into the system, usually catalog games, but they want it to be newer games too, aaa games even, and they've experimented with that with their own games. But they're trying to turn this into a thing. Right, the future of Xbox is going to be these services, right, not the hardware, and I'm guessing it's not profitable. But I'm sure there's a point where it starts to make sense to them and that's what they're working toward. I guess we'll see. I don't buy into the fears about this harming game sales, frankly, because first of all, they started it as a way to get catalog games out into the world again, and that's they spend money and have, you know, some awesome content and a lot of crap content, but they, they spend money on stuff. So, uh, a game pass has sort of evolved in a similar fashion and, um, we'll see. The fact that they're not giving away the new call of duty to everybody on game pass is probably telling you that was coming.

02:02:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was the question number one, when all this was like how are you going to justify this billion dollar product?

02:02:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
and I. I'm sure the first thing they looked at was like we'll just raise the price, and they were like we have to double the price, okay, so we gotta do something different. Um, you know, yeah, it was so they did what they did, right? Yeah, um, they basically took it away from the biggest group, a part of that audience, right, which was the xbox Xbox Game Pass audience. So that's a solution.

02:02:44
I don't want to spend too much time on this. It's not that interesting. But Microsoft, and Xbox as part of Microsoft, has these carbon goals. They talk about being in a certain place by 2030 and yada, yada, yada. They have done a lot of this and it's been a while, but they've done the power management setting changes in the Xbox. They have done a lot of this and it's been a while, but they've done the power management setting changes in the Xbox and they say they, over the past three years, have saved the equivalent CO2e to preventing 3 billion car miles being driven on an average gasoline-powered car. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, honestly, the best thing they could do for the environment is never make another Xbox, right? So that's working out great.

02:03:21
They didn't really talk about that, but I bet that contributed.

02:03:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's a way to spin positive on a failing business.

02:03:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, I know it's awful, I feel bad, but I guess a lot of people customers have actually bought, not bought into, but have agreed to do this right. So the promise of Xbox is that this thing would sit there and run overnight. If you had upgrades or you know, new versions or whatever of games and stuff, it would do that in the background, including system updates, and if it had to, it would reboot. It's kind of a simple system when you think about it. It's not like you have a bunch of stuff running in the background. So you know you were talking about Windows Update. We reboot in the night A lot of times you might not even notice it.

02:04:06
It's even easier in a console. There's nothing really going on, right, they have games that can instant, you know, or nearly instantly start, etc. Etc. But the thing is that things like sucking power off the, off the wall, like a refrigerator. So, um, they came up with this new power management where it actually just goes to sleep, and so the downside to that is sometimes you have to. You're like, oh, here I go, I'm gonna play, nope, gotta install an update, yeah. So I guess a lot of people have done it. So there you go. People care about the environment yeah, I, I follow.

02:04:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I struggle with the greenwashing right like what is this? What is real here, what isn't like?

02:04:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, we bought carbon credits. Uh, we are carbon neutral. I don't think that's how it works. And then, just real quick as well, sony announced a kind of a retro collection of 30th anniversary PlayStation hardware. There's going to be a 30th anniversary edition of the PlayStation 5 Pro when that comes out. They're only manufacturing 12,300 units of that, by the way, and all this stuff has that kind of light gray PS one style look to it.

02:05:04
So it's the modern controller, obviously, the modern console and whatever, whatever other hardware devices they're doing, but in that kind of cool original place with the original PS logo. You know the kind of kind of three. The actually probably still is the same basic logo that they had in the whenever that was. When was that Mid nineties? Whenever that first logo, um, that they had in the whenever that was. When was that mid 90s? Whenever that first? Well, 30 years ago we would have let's do the math ball it would have probably been 94, uh, when the first one came out. So that's kind of fun if you like that kind of stuff and you know sony actually sells consoles, that's, it's good business yeah, but even they don't have an idea for a ps6, but apparently nintendo does.

02:05:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
These rumors is something that isn't a new switch coming yes, there is.

02:05:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, there definitely is. Like uh, and sony admitted as much I by by the conclusion of its current fiscal year, which is the end of march, they will have at least announced this thing, which you know I can't believe they're doing a scarcity play making 12 000 units of that ps5.

02:06:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's really something that's crazy, you know. I can't believe they're doing a scarcity play making 12 000 units of that ps5. That's really something that's crazy, I know I mean, who like?

02:06:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
are these things being hand painted? What is this? I mean you talk about the snapdragon thing and maybe someone soldering a board.

02:06:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm used to this in whiskey, but in a video game console it's just weird and the funny thing is I can name three people that are friends of mine that are going to get one, because they're those kinds of people. Yeah, they're going to do what they have to do Absolutely.

02:06:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They'll probably overpay by 3x just to make it happen.

02:06:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And won't care either, right, yep, there's also that culture.

02:06:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I actually think they look cool. They might want to consider this as a color.

02:06:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it looks good.

02:06:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's attractive. Yeah, it's neat.

02:06:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, we're going to pause for a moment, back of the book, coming up a whiskey, some tips and tricks and so forth, but first a word from our sponsor, veeam V-E-A-M. You need to know about Veeam. Let me put it this way In business, without your data, your customer's trust turns to digital dust. That's why Veeam's data protection and ransomware recovery ensures that you can secure and restore your enterprise data wherever and whenever you need it. Veeam V-E-E-A-M is trusted get this, this is kind of mind-boggling by over 77% of the Fortune 500. 77% use it. Use Veeam to keep their businesses running. When digital disruptions like ransomware strike the other, what is it? 23%? Those are the ones you hear about in the news.

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02:09:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So for the tip, it's just a bit of common sense really, and when I wrote this up, I kind of 50, 50 people like oh my God, I'm totally doing this, and the other half were like I've been doing this for 19 years. What's your? What's your problem, you know? Um, but with the New York times I I pay for a couple of newspaper subscriptions, some of my wife and I read.

02:09:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got way, po. You know, I figured that was enough.

02:09:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I pay for that that's another one, right? Yeah, so in that case, for example, like they'll have like an introductory rate, you know, and I think for WAPO I paid you know I get this wrong but maybe like 40 bucks for a year, which is great, like nothing, you know. And the next year it was like 60 and I'm like awesome, yeah. And then the next year it actually went up to 120 and they never alerted me that it was renewing and I was like okay, like okay, that's how they get you.

02:09:56
Um, the new york times, you know, is getting more expensive all the time. But they've also bought a bunch of other properties. So they bought the wire card. You get to pay extra for that. They bought the athletic. I can't read sports anymore without paying for, like you have to pay for something else. They have, uh, also things like games, like crosswords and other games. They have, uh, cooking and some other things, right, so I I was already paying them some stupid amount of money. Of course, they bill you every four weeks, so it's not 12 units of payment.

02:10:23
It's 13. So I was like they put ads in there and they animate. Weipo does a better job of that, where you can actually turn the animation off if you want, Not just in ads but not in ads.

02:10:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know my pie hole saves me on all this right. No, I use.

02:10:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
NextDNS for that as well. No-transcript week. So it went from. It went from 23 every four weeks to four dollars, right, I'm like all right, okay, I'll stay.

02:11:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's hard to say no to that. So the Washington Post is 120. I just checked my pay 120.

02:11:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I canceled that and they did not ask me back at a lower rate. But I just created a new account with a different email address and I got 40 bucks.

02:11:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so you saved. You're down a third right.

02:11:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So between the like, whatever 19 times 13 plus 60. 60? This is a lot of cocktails, plus another 60 because I was paying for the wire cutter. Whatever that adds up to it's hundreds of dollars Pretty good. This is something we need to do more of, and tied to this is this notion of like you have all these streaming services you're paying for.

02:11:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we're doing this now at this house. Here's an idea Specifically the sports streams we shut doing this now at this house. Here's an idea, specifically the sports streams we shut them all down off season. Turn them back on when curling starts.

02:12:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
For the Netflix, Hulu, whatever, maybe pay for one of those every month and just kind of cram everything in and then move to the next one. So we're moving to this system. So this was something. Maybe.

02:12:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and it looks like, looking at the discord stream, we're not alone on using uh uh email aliases. For that too, it's easy to make them. Yeah, their systems aren't sophisticated, just keep searching.

02:12:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so, if right. So I have an address now which is NY times at you know, whatever. So, um, yes, Right, you can do it. Apple does a good job of this. They'll do that automatically. I have a custom domain through Google. They allow you to have any number of aliases on any account you have, so very easy. And then for the app pick, it's actually kind of like two, three, whatever different things, because it's just kind of randomly. This past week has been an interesting time for web browsers. So and not just I don't mean the actual products, but just like stuff kind of are in that universe, right. So Google announced this past week they're going to sync Passkeys through their password manager Interesting, right, which is one of the several features that the built-in Google.

02:13:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You mean that really bad quality password manager we don't encourage nobody to use because it stores passwords in plain text.

02:13:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If we're being realistic. Most people do use it, and if one of the companies is going to be the one to do it, it's like that's probably the best choice.

02:13:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You'd think they'd fix the dang thing Like right out loud. I recommend using-. You could end this market If Google made a good pass manager like. That would be the end of the road for a lot of work.

02:13:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, I don't know the percentage, but I bet it's high. I don't know the percentage, but I bet it's high 80s, even into 90s, percent just uses. So it's just good to know.

02:13:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know why it's incredibly hard not to use it. It won't, freaking, go away. Yes, I have a real, just today.

02:13:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I look through the settings because I'm like, seriously, that's coming up from Google I have turned everything off and it's still doing auto something. I don't know what it's doing. Nope, this came up just on my site. Someone was asking about organizing data in a browser and bookmarks and bookmark browse, blah, blah, blah. I don't do any of that stuff. I'm super simple. The two big things I do is I use a third-party new tab replacement. There are a bunch of these.

02:14:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The one I use is called Bonjour, you got me smitten with this idea. I haven't done it yet but I clearly have.

02:14:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I love it, and they just upgraded to version 20. They're coming out with a version for the mobile Safari on iPad and iPhone. If you have that, it's kind of minimalistic, beautiful photos.

02:14:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know the most important thing of this, actually I realized looking at it is stop looking at the Microsoftrosoft news page when you open the browser, like that to make, because you'll click on something and everything and it's all garbage. Right now it's like there's no nutritional content there. Make it go away.

02:14:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When you say that, someone will say but richard, you can turn that off and you can, but here's the. Thing I use a lot of different computers. I suspect you at least move between a few. Yep, you actually there. There are many features, just like in windows, many features in edge that sync and many that don't. So um, uh, you know you sign in with an account it. I just don't use it, just get rid of it don't even know, and I realized that I'm not synced.

02:15:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like there's enough things broken at this point. It's like just give me a third-party product to manage all of that and so that I don't care what browser I'm in and it just works the third one is, uh, ad and tracker blocking right, there are various solutions.

02:15:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't actually use this one, um, but it's notable because adguard is this one. Yep, um, they are one of the few companies that hasn't kind of like just bitched and moaned about manifest v3. Um, they raised some concerns about it in the beginning, as in the beginning was like several years ago, by the way yeah, it's been a while talking about this for a long time and they've had to delay it again and again.

02:15:47
But now they're doing it and, uh, a couple years ago they were like you know what we're gonna. We're gonna solve this. It's fine, we're gonna make a manifest v3 version, this thing that works great, and they just released it today, uh, and it has a bunch of improvements. Even so, they've, they've you know, google had made some changes in response to feedback. There's some other things they had to kind of work around, but according to them, everything's great.

02:16:09
So I mean I wouldn't use it. No, but it's um, but I think it's a, uh, you know, sometimes, necessity. You know triggers, uh, innovation, or you know triggers, uh, innovation, or whatever. So, uh, they've done their right thing, yeah, and I guess it's good. So, anyway, between these things, I mean this is like for me, it's like the browsers, you know, get rid of as much of it as you can. Custom new tab. I use, you know, I use something called pocket for save later. I also, I will often save something to pocket and then just go read it in pocket immediately. Yeah, I also, I will often save something to Pocket and then just go read it in Pocket immediately. It's not for later just because they have that clean view.

02:16:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the stripped down last blinky blue.

02:16:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, for sure, they do a great job with it. I do like Pocket. Oh, I should say one of the things that AdGuard does that I actually don't see elsewhere. The new Safari does this. In Mac OS X Sequoia you can actually point it at individual elements on a webpage and say nope. So if your ad tracker doesn't get rid of something and you just don't want it and you don't want it to be there every time you come back it could be like an animated video thing or whatever it is you just get rid of it. So that kind of functionality actually sounds pretty good to me. Yeah.

02:17:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
All right. Well, for the rarest thing in the world, I actually did a run-ass about Windows. Can you believe it? I do.

02:17:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It has to happen sometimes.

02:17:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, the joke is I fight for them all the time. It's just there's not a lot of people who actually want to talk about server, much less desktop, but I can always count on Oren Thomas. So episode 951 is with Oren, who I think has actually written more books than you man. Hey, hey, hey, he's picked out. A 951, uh is with oran, who I think has actually written more books than you man. Like that, hey, hey, hey, that was a lot, hey, yeah, he's. He's one of those quiet, quiet, hard-working australian guys like he gets stuff done and he's great to check him with regularly. And I asked him, it's like, talk to me about the new features in active directory in the context of server 25. He's like, okay, well, here we go, and so off, we went right, like it's plumbing, but it's important plumbing.

02:18:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like so does he feel about windows server 2025 the way I feel about wpf? Or I did in the beginning, because now I've been a little let down, but in other words like, oh my god, look, they were paying attention to something that people are actually using. Nice, yeah, you know, is there kind of that element to?

02:18:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it. Well, I mean, is anybody paying attention to 25 like we? We're really struggling with people carrying right.

02:18:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I think it's because of what you just said, because it's infrastructure, it's plumbing, it's totally plumbing, but you know what? That's why it's important.

02:18:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, well, and one of the points this is why I wanted to talk about the AD side, because active directory is generally perceived as an attack vector is generally perceived as an attack vector Once you get your phishing strike through, once you're inside the network and you now are able to impersonate a domain user, you can lateral into other machines and pretty quickly unravel Active Directory and now you'll get admin accounts and so forth.

02:18:52
And the biggest issue with this is that your functional levels are too low. Right, if you actually upgrade to the higher level functional levels, there's a lot of good security features in AD. We just haven't implemented them and the requirement is hard to raise. If you want to take advantage of the security features in Active Directory for Server 2025, that means the oldest machine functioning in your Active Directory network has to be Server 2016, which, admittedly, is still an old machine yeah, I was gonna say it's still pretty old um look, you know, if you've got an older infrastructure like there's some hangers on out there and they will hold you back on those functional levels, like it is a non and, by the way, a totally unrewarding process to fix this, at best your users will perceive nothing.

02:19:39
Far more likely is that's welcome, to likely is they won't be able to log in.

02:19:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If your employees love you, they don't even know you exist Exactly. The most you can get is a. C it's super easy to get an.

02:19:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
F, but you can never get better than a C.

02:19:55
And this is exactly one of these jobs I'm going to go mess with an infrastructure that works perfectly right now because of potential security vulnerability. This is so awful, and it's just like get ready for the tickets, boys, because I'm about to upgrade this old Active Directory server, and so, again, we talked through the process of listen. You should be running those in virtual machines. You make them small footprint, build new ones and retire old ones, and we actually got into fismo roles, which is really like a way back kind of thing, but they still exist and it's part of the problem, and so it was good to push through that. Another thing we wrapped the show on which I really appreciated was microsoft certification. These days, they're getting rid of the exams. Wait, they're, they're working, they're removing. What they're doing instead is giving you exercises and they have machine learning analyzing how you, how you do the exercise and if you do it correctly, you pass so are they partnering with duolingo or something?

02:20:53
what's going on? I don't know. I don't know who's like. You can learn french music, math or active director and actor director.

02:20:59
Exactly, yeah, but that's the whole thing is like do the work and we'll pass you. So it doesn't matter how well you memorize questions and answers. You know, get rid of all those books, can you do the work? If you can do the work, then okay, here's a task, work through this, and if you get to the end point, that's a pass Right. So I'm super excited about that, because there's plenty of folks out there who are bad at taking exams but can do the work Right, and so the fact that I could get a certification because I know how to do the work is awesome. That's fascinating. Yeah, all right. Last but not least, you ready I am. You saw the name already, so you know it's a weird one.

02:21:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like we're doing the you don't like. This is like the S week.

02:21:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, there's a couple of reasons why I went with Harazaki. I mean, one of the things is I've been promising to do more Japanese full on, and since we already talked about Nikkei and Yamazaki, which are the big old guys, I felt like I was okay with going into some of the littler ones. And this is one of those, although, as is typical, the story has taken many turns and twists, some of which I am not happy about now that I've gone down the path. But you find these things out towards the end of the research, right? I mean, in some ways you're going to learn a little bit about how I build these stories in the first place. So I found a bottle of harazaki at my local um distributor and grabbed it because fun, fun and these and right. Then you start doing the research. So I learn about the yanazawa family. So the yanazawa family uh may have been making sake since 1856, so, and they're in it's named the akashi sake brewery because it's in akashi, which is in the hyogo prefect, which is the southern part of japan, just uh east or just west of kobe, and and osaka, right on the um osaka bay, and in 1918 they started doing distillation, but of course that would be shoju right, they weren't worried whiskey. So, and the shoju distillery is called Kiyoki, which is the name of the bridge that connects Kiyoki and Ashashiki, remarkably named the Ashashiki-Yoki Bridge. So that's Osaka Bay, that's where they are Family-run business. The fourth generation, which is Kimio Yonezawa, now runs it. Is the fourth generation, which is kimio uh yonozawa now runs it. And when, uh, when yamazaki goes big and we have the and and we get lost in translation and it's some time, all that stuff happens. All of these distillers are like geez, we, we should sort of get in on this. But, um, kimio is clever because what he did was say I know nothing about whiskey, I'm going to Scotland, and ends up getting tied in with an organization called Marussia, the Marussia Beverage Company, and they own Torbjörg, which is the second distillery on Isle of Skye, the first being Talisker last week's whiskey. Now this is where the story I did. I dug into Marussia. At the end of my research I'd already figured out the whiskey and all these other things. But as I dug into the company and then I got a little squeamish because it's owned by the Paulson company or the Paulson family. So this is a Swedish family that made their fortune in pharmaceuticals, an organization called Faring Pharmaceuticals, and the dad, the guy who runs the whole show, is now a big billionaire and a philanthropist. They moved to Switzerland. They're in Lausanne.

02:24:32
He's famous as an adventurer for being the first person to have visited all eight poles of inaccessibility in the world. I bet you've never heard of the eight poles of inaccessibility in the world. I bet you've never heard of the eight poles of inaccessibility. It's just the sort of thing a billionaire adventure comes up with. So these are the eight sort of most inaccessible locations on the different continents. So in North America it's like a place in South Dakota. In South America it's in central Brazil and Africa. It's not inaccessible, it's just that nobody wants to go there.

02:24:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're pretty hard to get to. They call in South America, it's in central Brazil. In Africa it's in the central. It's not inaccessible, it's just that nobody wants to go there.

02:25:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're pretty hard to get to. They call it Sturgis, yeah. And then of course, the very obvious ones are things like Antarctica. There's a location it's not actually on the geographic pole, but it's the most inaccessible part. The Russians got there first and he's been there and there, uh, and in the arctic the. He actually went to the bottom of the arctic ocean and to it is submersible to get to the location that was the most inaccessible, although at the time I remember this in the news they put down a russian flag down there which for a canadian is like pretty damn offensive. We are actually the guardians of the of the arctic for crying out loud and uh.

02:25:38
And then there's one other spot called Point Nemo, which I know from the space industry. It's the place where you drop off your spacecraft, that's where Mir crashed into and that's it's in the South Pacific and it's the point in the ocean furthest from any landmass. So that's where the International Space Station is supposed to end up and so forth. But the Russia tie is a thing, because apparently Paulson is good friends with Putin to the point where he's literally an honorary consul to Russia in Switzerland. So he's built a bit of a mini Diageo or sort of conglomerate of alcohols, and he owns a bunch of whiskeys. One of them is Watershed Bourbon, which is American. The other one is the Hadazaki. That's the one we're going to talk about Also Klontekilti, you may remember.

02:26:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Torbheg, my personal favorite, but now that I know it's a Putin affiliate, I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm a little disturbed by this right.

02:26:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not sure I want to drink it anymore. And Torbheg Osborne is a Swedish whiskey. And Castille Chamis, which is a blending. They also make a bunch of vodkas, including some Russian vodkas you cannot buy because war Gin, rum, brandy, cognac, armagnac, absinthe, liqueurs. They bought a group of different entities. So you know there's our digression. Kimio worked closely with Torab Haig to actually learn a bit about making whiskey, to the point where they got the license in 2017. They immediately bought a set of stills from Forsyth of Roth, which is one of the best still makers in the world in Scotland. So they got a 3,500 liter wash still and a 2,200 liter spirit still. Those are small stills by anybody's measure.

02:27:18
And now set about making whiskey, and we've talked about this before. Now you're, in this challenge of making whiskey, late in the game. It's 2017. When are you going to have product to sell? And, generally speaking, you need at least three years of aging, which is, for the most part, what they've done. But you're now tied in with Marussia, so you have access to other things, and that's where we get Harazaki Small Batch.

02:27:42
So this is not just Japanese whiskey. This is what's called a vatted malt, so it's only malt whiskey. No, this is not a blend per se. There's no neutral spirit in this. It's all whiskey, but it has both bourbon and Scottish whiskeys in it and which means it's probably it's a little watershed bourbon and a little Torabheg and a bunch of their own three-year-old so and the barreling makes sense.

02:28:11
It's aged in bourbon casks and sherry cask and Mizuara cask which we talked about before. That's the Japanese oak. That's very difficult to make barrels from Five to six years of aging and that would speak to bourbon because that's a typical aging time for bourbon. But the batches are really small. They only use about 20 barrels total for a given batch, so maybe 6,000 bottles, of which this is one of.

02:28:36
See how pale this is, which speaks to how young it is, and also the fact that they do no coloring or chill filtration and it's bottled at 46%. So I've gotten to have it now when I'm home and I get an opportunity to get a bottle of whiskey that I'm going to put on the show, that I get a few days to sort of live with it. So I've been drinking this in the evenings while writing. It's nice and floral up front, there's a nice nose on it, a little bit of alcohol scent and you can smell the grain, which just surprises me. That's almost certainly the Japanese component in it, because you wouldn't notice that so much in a bourbon or much less a Scottish whiskey. Still plenty of heat. It's inoffensive, right it's.

02:29:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so drinkable that's not what I'm looking for in a whiskey, really?

02:29:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, what is this? Is a comfort, comfortable drink. It's something I'm sipping on while I'm doing my thing. It's not? You know, I had the beaumont 15 sitting beside me a while back when I did the beaumont piece, and each time I went to pick up the beaumont it's like here comes the beaumar. Well, that's true, right, yeah, like that and that. So you gotta kind of figure, where am I? Am I about drinking the whiskey or am I having a drink while I'm doing something else? This is a having a drink while doing something else kind of drink. All right, it never interrupts you.

02:29:55
Um, so here's the crazy part. Uh, how does aki? Uh, they're only making about 250 000 bottles a year. Any given batch like this, the small batch which I quite like, is maybe 6 000 bottles. Uh, if you can find them, they did not initially sell in japan. Their initial releases were purely abroad. Uh, although they're selling in japan now, fine, you can find a bottle of this. But it won an award this year the gold medal in the Asian Spirits Masters Award. I don't know how credible that award is. So the price is all over the map. I picked this up for about $60, and I still see a few places online where it's there, but I've seen it as high as $140. At $60, you can buy one of these and you may not get another, but don't pay much more. It's not that impressive a whiskey.

02:30:46
It's a very young, new distillery, fallen in with an interesting organization that I would question that's doing their best to try and make an interesting product In 10, 15 years from now. Who knows what they'll be making? But at the moment they're doing what small distilleries do, which is that they're trying to make something interesting by involving other entities and building vatted whiskeys and those other approaches. This is not the only way that a small distillery could work. We've talked about some other small distilleries where they deliberately use small barrels.

02:31:17
If you're going to only make 6,000 bottles of something, you don't need 250 liter barrels, like you could be using 50 liter barrels and increasing the wood coverage and getting more flavor in less amount of time. So they've chosen a particular path and I understand it. It's one of the ways to get started and I think it's something we're going to encounter as we go into how these new whiskey makers and the number of the options that are out there, that this is what's going to happen. I'm probably not going to buy another bottle of this, but you know it's another it speaks to. There's more Japanese whiskeys coming. This is one of them. They've only had a few years and it's what you're going to get for a young distillery.

02:31:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is good, though. I mean I'm glad to know that you don't only review whiskeys that you like, that you know, sometimes it's not that you dislike it, but no, the bigger sin here is meh right, it's like, yeah, that's a big sin, yeah.

02:32:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If it elicits an emotion.

02:32:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and this was my problem, was that when it was $60, fine, but because it's now won an award, people are jacking the price up. I think on total wine I checked it earlier it was $125. Yeah, not for me, don't pay that, not for me. You know what you can get for $125?. Dalmore 12, man, like you can be drinking perfect golden caramel. Like why, if you're going to spend that kind of money like really, but for 60 for something unusual.

02:32:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're not a snob, richard. You'd say it's good or not, whether it's 120 bucks or not.

02:32:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I like that yeah, at 60,. It's worth sharing. Hey, try this. It's a new Japanese whiskey Right At 120,. Dude, you spent a lot on a weird whiskey Like we could be drinking down more.

02:33:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you aging?

02:33:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that yeah.

02:33:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I think this is whiskey, is probably a lot like wine, that there's a lot of um, snob appeal and label I am doing.

02:33:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean I like being knowledgeable. I don't like being pretentious. Yeah, because I want to dig into the knowledgeable crowd. I end up around pretentious people and I like them and that does make me enjoy embarrassing them. Paul's seen this. If you wind me up like I have made sommeliers cry, oh Well, because don't make me weaponize the encyclopedic memory. Like it can be very mean, I love it. But I've also gone down the path where I looked at a wine list.

02:33:45
This is a sort of famous story within certain circles where we're at a big part, we're at a party of like 20 people, so will you pick wine for us? And so I'm going to build a narrative and I realized it's like for some reason they bought wine from Bordeaux. But For some reason they bought wine from Bordeaux, but the three wineries are beside each other. That's really interesting. Let's get one of each. That made the chef come down to figure out who the hell I was. Yeah, why he's like, why did you know that? And you got them in order. I thought we should go south to north because of the way the river flows. And he's like show off. He then went to his private collection and we drank wine together, that's when you get the good stuff, there you go.

02:34:21
If you care enough, then the other people that care appear, and I want people who care. I don't like the snobbery. I care how this thing was made. What did I dig into? How did they figure out how to make whiskey? That's interesting to me. The fact that they fell in with a Russian sympathizer is a shame, but you know, it is what it is Right.

02:34:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mr Richard Campbell run as radiocom is the website Dot net rocks lives there as well. Sure, he named a podcast beginning with dot yeah.

02:34:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What about it? What of it? Yeah, okay, to be clear, it's a dot.

02:34:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great to have you, Richard. Thank you.

02:35:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Are you? You are you? Are you home for a little bit, or this?

02:35:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
is one more week and then the october starts in the crazy begins.

02:35:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hell yeah, I'm not complaining. It's going to be a lot of fun, but they don't call it spooky month for nothing.

02:35:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah uh. Mr paul thurot, I was surprised to find you in mcungee. I thought you'd be back.

02:35:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'll be in dallas next week and then mexico for the next whatever six weeks. Lovely, I'm so happy for you.

02:35:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul's at the rotcom. No matter where he is in the globe, you can always find them there. T-h-u-r-r-o. Double goodcom. Uh, his books are at leanpubcom, including windows everywhere and the field guide to windows 11.

02:35:35
We do this show every wednesday, 11, 2 pm. Eastern 11 Pacific, that's 1800 UTC. You can watch us live. We stream on seven platforms.

02:35:45
If you're a club member and I hope you would be I hope you are paying that seven bucks a month to get the ad-free versions. You can watch live on a very special Club Twit Discord channel. You can also chat with us in Discord. That's for the club members Outside world. You can also chat with us in discord uh, that's for the club members outside world.

02:36:02
You can watch on youtube twitch kick x yeah, we're back on x, they talked me into it um, linkedin and something else some other places that are let's evade me, uh, but anyway, yeah, watching live is probably, uh, just a small percentage of you, but it's kind of the fun, interactive way to watch. Most of you probably just download a copy. You can get it at Windows Weekly, rather twittv slash www. You can also, if you go there, see a link to the YouTube channel that's dedicated to the video from Windows Weekly. Best thing to do, though, subscribe in your favorite podcast player, whether it's audio or video. That way, you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done, as soon as Kevin King polishes it up, and today he's got his work cut out for him.

02:36:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's going to be some editing and some inlays. Been there. I once redid a NET Rocks where my track was garbled and the other tracks were intact and it was a good show, and so I literally took the mix down track and listened to it and said my words over again you did foley work, for, yeah, I folied my own show for an hour. It was awful, awful, do not recommend.

02:37:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have done similar. Yeah, things have a great week, which witchard? Have a great week, paul, and we'll see you all next week. Thank you, elmer. All of you, winners and dozers, come back next week for Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.