Windows Weekly 926 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell are here. We celebrate this week Wow the 50th anniversary of Microsoft, and you won't believe the gift Bill Gates has for us all. We'll also talk about let's see new versions of Windows. That's usually pretty popular. Oh, and Paul's thoughts on the new Nintendo Switch 2. It's all coming up. Next on Windows Weekly, on the new Nintendo Switch 2.
00:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust this is Twit.
00:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 926, recorded Wednesday April 2nd 2025. You're ugly when you cry. Hey, winners and dozers, it's time. Gather around the podcast. What Gather around the podcast appliance. It's time for Windows Weekly. Windows Windows Weekly podcast appliance. It's time for windows. Weekly with uh windows. Weekly with paul thurot. There he is, to my uh right. He is the uh man in charge of thurotcom, publisher of many fine tomes at leanpubcom. Hello, paul, in mexico city as we say here hello.
01:25
Also to his right is the wonderful richard campbell, who is joining us today from lost wages, nevada. Yes, indeed, you are. Uh, you are in l? Lv. Nobody calls it lv. Why do they call it la? But?
01:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
not lv, I don't know. No, no, somebody. Somebody calls it that.
01:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I'm lb as a resident of the lehigh valley, I find preposterous.
01:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you would never the real lv the og oh, I'm at the fabric community conference with 6 500 of my closest friends what's fabric. What it's fabric is the data analytics stack for microsoft. They're the new uh cloud centric. You know, power bi on the front end plus the one lake in the back end and all the goodies. Dear god, what's happening?
02:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and is this a really successful product, like a?
02:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
great year. We we did a show. We did this show last year in april and we had about 4 000 attendees and the second time around and 6 500 showed up and we we about 4,000 attendees and this is the second time around and 6,500 showed up and we couldn't fit in the MGM Grand, so we rented the T-Mobile arena for the keynote.
02:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Holy moly.
02:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's been really great. I saw Lady Gaga there, wow. Well, now you can see Noorun Gulag, wow.
02:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's one of the biggest Microsoft events of the year, isn't it? I think we're going to be right up there We'll see how they do.
02:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But boy oh boy, the analytics audience is excited and the tech is great, so they've been all hanging out and having fun.
02:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's business intelligence primarily Is that.
02:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and along those lines, a lot of real-time stuff these days. So all the instrumentation, they've really brought that stack together where the analytics tools and the warehousing and they're super, you know, cross-platform I'm one data lake away from retiring.
03:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just can't watch. This is the bridge. I can't melt.
03:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, that's the first time I came to the old, the old studios. Uh, you know, in penaluna it was. It was a build event and I had to talk about data lakes because nobody else wanted to right.
03:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we were like no that was the new term of the, of the, of the hour give it to campbell, he can explain it.
03:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We were just like slowly sliding away on the seats, like, but I bought whiskey, so everything was okay.
03:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe fine, I didn't know hear a word. You said show us the view from the beautiful skies right at yeah, right At the MGM Grand.
03:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're up on the 29th floor here, so I got to look out to I think it's to the west and that's the New York, Wow.
03:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the strip you're seeing out there. That's it, holy moly. Those are all. What's funny is those are all. It all. What's funny is those are all fake, right like all of that is fake. There's nothing behind those windows after the fifth floor. It's just something like that, yeah special neighbor would be up there.
04:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't even know, but it looks like it could thunderstorm at any moment. In here it's looking really gray and uh, that's how big his suite is. Ladies and gentlemen, it has its own climate well, I wish I could turn the air off because it's freezing in here oh yeah, my uh, my apartment has its own nuisance.
04:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's my downstairs neighbor oh dear, at least they're not your upstairs doing construction work. Oh well, we had, uh, we were embargoed. We could not start this show one minute earlier than we did because of a big story, right oh?
04:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, am I wrong? Yeah, that was an hour earlier.
04:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had the time wrong well, you got me all excited. I thought we were like breaking news, but this is already.
04:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wrote I did the thing in the notes and then I looked at it again. I was like I actually asked me I'm so, this is the simplest of math. I'm'm not talking. This is not octal, it's not tax or anything. Well, it is based.
05:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What the hell is that?
05:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I said just, I'm going to read this to you and you tell me what time is the right time. And then I think there's a website called what Time Is it? There's also this thing that's in your head. It's called a brain, and I guess mine doesn't work properly because this is the simplest yeah.
05:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
World Time Buddy, that's a good one.
05:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Great. When I went to Israel in 2000, I emailed Charles Petzold, author of Programming Windows the amazing Windows programming series, right Yep To ask him if he would send me a copy of his time zone app that he wrote in one of the books and all you know in the book, because it was supposed to be available through some ftp site but it wasn't there anymore and he emailed it to me. He was very nice about that and that's how I kept track of the time zone change there. But this is two hours off. It's not hard. Yeah, you know, it's like the same day it's, yeah, I don't know.
06:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Base 24 never been my favorite well, time zones are a political construct, right like wow as our borders.
06:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's, that's fine but we still honor them they're still easy to.
06:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know. I just this is just a personal embarrassing.
06:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really wants us to go to UTC everywhere. Yeah, I don't, I don't.
06:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What time would it be UTC? Look, I would just take no more daylight savings, like, let's take baby steps, you know, let's do that first.
06:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Can we get over daylight savings time first, Then we can worry about baby steps and actually that's my problem. One of my problems is Mexico did stop observing it so for half the year it's one hour For half the other year.
06:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's two hours, it's just. Yeah, this is why I drink right here.
06:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't, I just can't.
06:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And the fact that there's a bottle of tequila in your drink. Yeah, that and the readily available. This may look like juice, Leo, but actually.
07:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Margarita All's. Uh, let's talk about microsoft's. So it's funny because apple is 49 years ago as of yesterday. 49 years old as of yesterday, right, interesting, microsoft is one year older.
07:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and it's officially as of the fourth, which is in two days from this recording. So this Friday, although I believe today is that they're having an event I think it's today or maybe tomorrow, I don't remember, but they're having an event in Redmond which I was invited to and I I'm sorry, Bill Gates just stopped by.
07:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't mean to scare you. Windows 8 is a Anyway, so. I'm Bill Gates scare you. Uh, windows 8 is a anyway, so I'm bill gates it all started with my first computer during my eighth grade here at lakeside. Do you want me to stop this teletype terminal? Yeah, what is this? What are we watching?
07:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
bill gates, uh, today published the source code for the original version of altair basic. That what In Intel 8080 assembly language with Paul Allen? I mean, he wrote most of the source code for the actual basic language, although Paul Allen wrote the bootstrapper on the plane by the way to Albuquerque to show it to the owner of Mets, very famous. In fact, they were writing code in the plane, weren't they? That's what he wrote. Yeah, he wrote the bootstrapper.
08:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yeah, yeah, you just said. Yeah, yes, he did, he wrote, but as I remember, he they didn't have. Oh god, I have to change the channel real quick here. They didn't have a um, oh boy, I can't get rid of them. They, they didn't have an Altair to run right, right.
08:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So they had access to a PDP-10 at Harvard, and by they I mean Bill Gates, and he gave access to it to all his friends. Got in a lot of trouble for that. But Paul Allen had earlier written a I forget what it was, maybe an 8, what was before the 8080?. There's Paul Allen. Your suit is a little lower right, the I forget what it was. Uh, maybe an eight, what was before the 8080? There's paul allen, the here suit 88 yeah, 8008, probably emulator on the pdp-10. So they had some history doing that. And he got the manual from intel and wrote the emulator. Uh, gates wrote it to the emulator, alan wrote the bootstrapper so it could actually come up on this device when he got there but he was writing it on a plane without the emulator.
09:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was writing it right, he just wrote it off the top of his.
09:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, because he's so good at it then. And, by the way, this thing worked the first time.
09:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It worked immediately although I think they were holding their breath, weren't they?
09:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
of course. I mean I, why? Why on earth would you think this would work? You know um, it's astonishing, it's, it's an incredible story.
09:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I have one right here. This is the replica mits altair 8800 that they wrote it for. It's running a little program right now yeah, what's it okay? I can't remember what it was.
09:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's just like yeah, they hooked it up to some kind of a teletype so they could uh type in uh you know a question like question mark, print 10 or something. It would print 10 and then they do math and then they could write short code and he wrote.
10:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's interesting, it had basic in it. He wrote the basic for it. That was their first basic right was there? Was there an operating system? Or was that also the operating system? No, that was it. There's no operations. That's, you would boot that and you'd be. No, that was it. There was no operating system. You would boot that and you'd be running BASIC and that's that.
10:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You couldn't do anything with this thing, right? So people bought it because they were so excited to own a computer. Yeah, no, I know.
10:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was amazing.
10:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you needed to buy a lot of extra things RAM, different peripherals. In the end you would spend thousands of dollars, um, but it still couldn't do anything right. So it needed a basic operating systems weren't really a thing. It wasn't until cpm came out that people could see, like actually we need something like this, we need something to interact between whatever the programs you run are and the hardware right. And that's, uh, you know, cpm was the first kind of microcomputer operating system, I guess.
11:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The book Programmers at Work had a little snippet of code that Bill wrote. Yeah, he was super proud of, you know, because he was code golfing or something.
11:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He didn't have a lot of memory so the other thing about this, by the way, I'm sorry to interrupt, is he wrote a. He had a problem to overcome with this, and this is something I think we've all kind of done, but to a much lesser degree. He couldn't solve a particular problem I don't remember what it was but he went out on a hike, which he didn't like to do. But he had a girlfriend and she wanted to go on a hike and he's like screw it.
11:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So he spent the whole time thinking and talking about this instead, right, needless to say, they didn't make it, but while out on the hike I wonder if I should do a move or a dupe here. I can't Should. I wrote it. Well, I don't. Okay, that was my replay.
11:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, he solved this incredible problem in his head, went home and wrote it on a piece of paper and then went to the lab and typed it in, and that also worked look at this bill gates wrote the runtime stuff, paul allen wrote the non-runtime stuff, monty davidoff wrote the math package, right and there here's the things to do.
12:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry, I'm turning off my microphone right now. Go ahead.
12:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's okay I just, this is the first time the original version of basic, the source code, has ever come out in full. So there are leaked versions of, you know, 1.2 one, but whatever they are, this is the first one. Um, bill gates, just you know, a month ago, published the first edition, first volume, of his autobiography and it covers this part of his history right up until he drives to, uh, redmond, to move the company there, well, to Seattle area. It wasn't Redmond originally and, yeah, they tell the story. The thing you just read is part of the story.
12:54
They were really short on time and the math I don't know if it was floating point math or whatever the math library was difficult, it was difficult and he was like we're not going, was like I don't, we're not gonna have enough time, we're gonna have to, you know, do a version without it. And then they someone at the table next to them at harvard in the whatever lunchroom, heard them he's like I could write that and he was like some math expert. And they were like, all right, and he did. And yeah, he wrote the, the math package the world famous monty davidoff and how much?
13:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
did bill pay him for that?
13:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wonder yeah, I don't know remember off the top of my head.
13:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can uh he's not, he didn't, he didn't say he did pay for it, but he didn't.
13:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, that guy did not retire on that, I can tell you that.
13:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow well, it was the middle 70s too, right like yeah well, no one.
13:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is brand new. The notion that you could write software and then make money for it. Well, it just writes software. It was almost unheard of, completely you know names in the mainstream world and then you could turn this into a business. That didn't you know. This was not obvious anyway. I, I think I might have mentioned this story, you know whenever. It was about a month ago when the gates book came out. And uh, it is. It stands as a a singular achievement. I mean, whatever you think of bill gates, or the basic language, or whatever microsoft, whatever, um, this is an astonishing feat that they accomplished for this era.
14:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's incredible well, you're also playing in what 4k of ram. So I mean it's literally not that many bytes yeah yeah, know, you have to processor.
14:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this for what? What is 80, 80, 8800, or if it mits out to 8800 but it's running in 80, 80, 80.
14:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yeah yep, so yeah, it was the first. You know, paul allen had wanted to do this for microcomputers. He wanted to go after this market early and gates Gates kept saying, no, these chips are not powerful enough and like the 80, you know, whatever, 80-08 or whatever the predecessor was, was almost there, you know, and he saw this. You know the famous story with the magazine cover. He came running back this is it. This is the thing you said to wait for and here it is. Let's do it. This is it.
15:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the thing you said to wait for, and here it is. Let's do it, and they did. I'm impressed by the comments. There's a lot, there's a lot of explanations of what's going on here. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty high quality uh code. This is almost literate coding.
15:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sad, though, that he published it as a picture of the tractor feed printout fortunately, leo, we have a tool in windows today called snipping tool, that does ocr and I you can just uh, can you? Is it good enough quality to yeah yep, yep, I did part of it earlier today, actually, not not because I wanted the code, but just I. I saw that and thought that myself. I'm like huh, you know interesting.
15:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, I would love to see, uh, maybe steve gibson, somebody who really knows 80 80 code. Yeah, kind of look at this look at this and and say, hey, you know, this was pretty clever or this was boneheaded, or yeah, I'm guessing it's all fairly clever.
15:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
4k memories, not a lot it was for the day was actually write a program in, so you don't get to. Yeah, I mean right basic.
16:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to go off the top of my head here, but I get to you. Yeah, I mean right, basic, I'm gonna go off the top of my head here. But I, the base ram on this thing was 4k the base they fit. The original I think it was 6k, but of course you wanted 8k, you know for four thousand dollars more.
16:16
Yeah, it was expensive and then, but that, but you know, whatever. And the thing is, you know, they liberally took from all of the basics that were out in the world. This was actually, at the time, one of the most advanced basics there was and it ran on a micro computer, not on a mini computer. Like this was astonishing to people, you know. They're like, obviously, given the constraints of this thing, it's going to have, you know, the integer math only or whatever, like a lot of basics did, including basics that came after this. But this is, you know, again, it's we look at it today Like we have AI. We're like, yeah, cute, but I mean, in that era, this is astonishing.
16:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's really cool to see this, I have to say, and I'm super impressed with the commenting. I know it's also like 150 pages of code, yeah, but most of that's comments. I mean, there are pages. There's some pages just comments. This is quite, uh, quite neat. Yeah, I think that's the word bill would use. It's neat, it is neat it's super neat yeah, you want to go on a hike well, he would never say that oh, let's.
17:21
Oh, you want to go on a hike? That's how he would say it. Oh, you want to go on a hike? That's how he would say it. Oh, you want to go on a hike? Okay, but I might be thinking about something. Wow, no, I shouldn't mock him. This is very cool. That's incredible and is the sense that he was a great coder. He was Conf coder or of.
17:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He was for that era Conflicting reports, yeah.
17:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, of course, those would have come from his.
17:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know competitors who were critics because they couldn't stand how successful he was Right. So you know, one of the many ways that people, even of that era, looked down on him was because he was so caught up in basic. You know everyone else was like, well, there are more sophisticated languages and you know he, he was on to something with basic, not because it's a great language, but because it's approachable by people. And that's what was needed at that time. You needed, if this was too complicated, if it was assembly language or C or C would have been probably impossible in this thing, but whatever, whatever other you know, a more structured language, a more technical language, whatever. You know this.
18:33
This stuff would have happened a lot more slowly, but he made this. You know he met this, made computing accessible, right. So the people are super excited to buy these computers and upgrade them, get all the stuff and do it. The people are super excited to buy these computers and upgrade them, get all the stuff and do it, actually do it. You know they wanted to do something with it and this is what enabled that and also, by the way, started an industry.
18:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.
18:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very impressive. Um, it's nice that he released this. You know they'll never release the windows code, cause there's too much proprietary stuff.
19:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that's okay. Other people have released the windows code, so there's some various times. You know, yeah, yeah, it's a lot of go-to tens, but you know it's okay no, actually I do, we know.
19:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it does say at the front what bill wrote and what paul wrote. I'm not sure most.
19:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Most of the actual basic was written by bill gates, except for that math package. And then Alan was responsible for the emulator and then had to write the bootstrapper.
19:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bill Gates wrote the runtime stuff, paul wrote the non-runtime stuff, which is, I guess, the logger, the emulator.
19:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and the bootstrapper? Well, he didn't know that when he wrote that code I mean right, you know he didn't know. They both forgot about the bootstrapper.
19:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They forgot there was no way to bring this thing up Like you had to. You had to be able to load this thing in the memory for this to work.
19:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right Was the bootstrappers switches. I mean, yeah, yeah, it's literally. I think in the Paul Allen book there's a picture from those notes you can see it's like up, down, down, down, down, up, down, down, and it like eight of them at a time, right. And then it's like up, down, down, down up.
20:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, whatever it is, yeah, there's some switches on the front yeah and that's exactly how you load code in yep x. Here's the altair. Here I have a note to myself how to run, uh, the kill the bit game. And this is, and this is I wrote. You can see how long ago I wrote that it's on my newton notepad nice, switch, stop up, reset up. Sw1 up, hold up your left foot, all the others down toward the moon and then to start, it's a chicken switch aux, one down and then the game kill.
20:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The bit starts right the other thing I basically was like 30 bytes, so you had to set the switches load. Set the switches load.
20:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you got them all correct I believe it took him 18 minutes to do this, something like that.
21:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was some crazy amount of time, physically, on the front of it. Yeah, and you had to get it right.
21:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you screwed up one, you had to start over. Then turn it off turn it back on.
21:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Steve Gibson tells that story on a PDP, early PDP.
21:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you can see I have a replica PDP-10 that has switches in front of it as well.
21:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
A static code storage just wasn't a thing, then right like that's right, the wrong comes later.
21:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah and bill gates is uh one of those right place, right time type stories too, because he happened to go to this very uh fluent school district. They actually had a lakeside pdp 10 with a terminal with a keyboard and paper like, so you could actually type onto this thing and then save the paper you know for later mothers had a bake sale to raise money, including bill's mother to raise money to buy this terminal, which was a timeshare terminal.
21:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's uh in the lakeside school. I went to the similar time frame in the uh it's 67, 68, 69 uh school in rhode island that had a similar room. I've never even heard of anything like this well, I'm kicking myself now if I had just spent a little more time in that room.
22:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We didn't get computers in my high school and well, we well in junior high school there was one comet or pet in a small room somewhere by itself. So I was aware of that. But when I went to high school and I graduated in 85, it wasn't until my sophomore year that we got computers and they were at that time completely out of date. They were VT 100 terminals from digital, but they were called VT 180s because they had like a double five and a quarter inch, I think. It was a floppy on the top and there was some storage. I don't remember how they did storage.
22:43
We all you know there were these giant things, right, and you know, by this point we I had, I had a commodore 64. You know my dad had gotten an ibm pc, this thing. We got these things and I was like what is? What is this? The 70s again, you know, like it was just uh, but it was probably some fire sale and you know school districts didn't have any money then either. So that's what we got. We got the bargain basement hand-me-downs from, you know, five years earlier or whatever, I don't know it's amazing, isn't it?
23:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, the history I it. It took what? 50 years to see this code, though.
23:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yep, yeah well, this is why I like it. I mean, we've seen there have been parts of it and we've seen other versions of it but yeah, I've seen a chunk of it.
23:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The chunk that Bill is the most proud of has been passed around. Yeah, no, it was in the.
23:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
As I said, it was in the appendix of the you're right, the Gates book, microsoft published book about the program, about program, came out, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago. I think we have the definitive account now between the two of this time. Like you know, these are the two guys. Like they did it you know it's. It's kind of that's really interesting to me.
23:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When did they turn mean and rapacious? At what point did that happen?
23:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So after about 10 seconds, after he got basic working, it was right there. I don't know, um, I don't know. I mean they were trying to make a business. You know it was controversial that he didn't want people giving away this program for free.
24:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at software right Bill very famously went to uh users group meeting maybe it was in Albuquerque and uh yelled at them for sharing paper tape. Yeah right.
24:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Famous letter to the computer computer hobbyist club. Yeah, so I think it's from 1976. This is the big um, out of print.
24:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But boy, it is a great book from microsoft press and it has that kind of back.
24:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's interesting yeah, so the yeah, I mean uh mitts tried to prevent them from selling basic to others. They were required by their contract to help them with that and they saw everyone as a competitor, which is accurate. So they had to go to arbitration and microsoft won, and otherwise, I don't know, microsoft probably wouldn't exist today.
24:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Interesting let me see if I can get my um overhead. Okay, just move on. I don't know. You don't want to move on. You want to move on.
25:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, it's just like Wednesday. I was like no. I mean, what do you? What are you trying? What are you trying to find?
25:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just was going to show you something. Oh, go ahead, we'll find it it's just. This is the book, so this, so this is very. This is actually related. What's kind of cool about this, though and I'm sure Bill gave the author this is there's handwritten notes as well.
25:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh jeez, yeah, I think some of those stuff is on storage layout for basic stuff like that.
25:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But we never. We only got this little chunk of uh code. So this is a good book. I recommend it if you can find it.
25:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, in the old days of the mvp summit, when bill would talk to the mvps, somebody one of the mvps had found an original manual from that altair basic and on the back of it, like the last page, it said if you have any problems with this basic, call bill gates and add the phone number. I love it. And so he got to get up on the stage and hand it. He wanted Bill to sign it for him and Bill got really emotional about it. I bet I remember the phone number.
26:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean God. Things were so simple then.
26:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was an Albuquerque phone number too.
26:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, yeah, of course, Before any of that. Yep, yeah, they were actually in Albuquerque for several years. This part of the story gets lost over a little bit, but yeah, they had a, I mean, and they were originally all languages. Obviously they didn't want to get into operating systems, you know, it's just. I think a lot of people out there are probably like I kind of wish they didn't, but I don't like.
26:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't like CPM. What would you be doing, Paul?
26:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Goodness knows I would be writing about when cpm uh or something, I don't know actually in the back of this book.
26:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gary kildall's notes for uh cpm are also here. So if you want to, or is that dr dos? He did, it was dr.
26:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it was eventually dr dos, but it was cpm originally yeah, susan lammers, if you can find it.
27:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's been out of print for a long time. Probably has it's at work Now. I'm going to reread this, now that I.
27:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is the type of book that won't be digital for some reason, but should be, and I find there's a lot of stuff like that. Actually, we're going to get into this a little later, oddly through some piracy and AI story that's coming up. But, yeah, there's a lot of books, uh, from our industry that just never made it to electronic form, which is crazy to me.
27:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, at least not officially.
27:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's got to be some rights issues out there somewhere and angley well, it's the same reason source yeah, source code I guess, but because, uh, that's got a little proprietary we're gonna get to this.
27:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's crazy like I don't. I don't understand any of this, but I bet OpenAI or Anthropic or whatever would be really good for learning or for writing Intel 8080 code right now. I bet there's so much information out there. I bet they could.
27:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just ask ChatterP to help you write BASIC for the 8080. That's right, right.
27:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like find out what feature was missing from this and then say here's the source code from BASIC. Add that feature to it right, I bet it could do it. I bet it could, I bet it got. I'd like async and away in my 4k.
28:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, 80, 80 might be a little tough because of course it's dependent on how much code there is out there, that it's red and yeah well, all you need is the, the instruction manual.
28:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And no, I mean like literally up back then whole cloth.
28:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's how paul allen wrote it, I mean, oh yeah, but wrote the emulator I, I think paul, maybe a little smarter than a deputy, just a little man, I might accept that challenge.
28:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know well he's not a smart guy? I'm not. I'm not discounting paul allen's intelligence at all. He's genius.
28:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I've met him a couple of times. Yeah, a little underwhelming to be honest.
28:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Good, though that's what he wanted. He never wanted to be famous or anything. Yeah, no, and of course that's why he went on to buy all the sports teams, and you know.
28:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But whatever, like you know, he just wasn't there. A book written about him called the accidental billionaire, I believe that was. Was that him?
29:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wasn't his? His book is called the idea man, and so for well it's. It's fair, though, because he, if you, you know we all know about the Microsoft thing and then we know about some of the other stuff, but he, honestly, he was involved with a lot of different things over time, and his, in his story, you know, microsoft, is just like an early part of it.
29:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I'm sorry, the Accidental Billionaires was about the founding of Facebook, oh great.
29:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They really were accidental, so you've read this book, right? This new book, that's a Facebook book I have it.
29:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, have you read it? I read a little bit of it. It's just tawdry.
29:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I finished it.
29:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so I finished it and you got to go to the back. I remember right.
29:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's a good book, I mean it's well-written. It's not my kind of a book.
29:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess it's not showstoppers.
29:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, because it's just about. It's about the people, politics, you know, whatever, but go read the end of it because it explains why meta is doing open source AI and it is the evilest reason imaginable and it is the worst and it's the one technical thing that's in this book. I think it's the only technical thing in the entire book and it's. I read that and I was like, oh my god, that makes so much sense it's awful.
30:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's way worse than you think it is actually, later today we're going to interview a woman from wall street journal, reporter from wall street journal, who just has written a book, the biography of sam allman, and that's also interesting. Yeah right, she's got the scoop.
30:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Morally, questionable subhumans that are have incredible power and wealth yeah, uh, the microsoft connection, of course, is.
30:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She has the story of satan adela's phone call saying what the hell are you guys doing, right she?
30:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
got the very good reporting appearance of dark satcha, dark satcha all right, let's take a little break.
30:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then we have lots of windows news as well. You are watching windows weekly with paul thorat, richard campbell and our sponsor for this segment of windows weekly sorry, you're good, are you okay? Yeah, I'm gonna cut out did you have a bad morning?
31:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, no, okay, I'm just gonna get rid of some stuff me being the top of that list probably?
31:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh well, let's just I'll tell you what. Let me just do the ad and then you can get rid of me. How about that? No that's not what I meant. Okay, I'm sorry. Maybe I'm the one who's having a bad morning. I'm a little sensitive. Maybe that's what it is. It could be.
31:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Don't be sensitive leo, I hate it when you're so ugly when you're sensitive as everybody knows completely insensitive.
31:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A riff on my favorite joke of all time don't cry, honey. You're so ugly when you cry anyway, go on. I'm sorry, I shall not say that to anyone I definitely don't say that to an actual human being like out loud, but you can think it, though it's okay to think it, I believe, our show today brought to you by us cloud love.
31:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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32:44
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34:09
I'll give you a testimonial. This is from Sam he's, the technical operations manager at Bead Gaming Gave US cloud five stars. He said, quote we found some things that had been running for three years which no one was checking. Those VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure, but once you get to 40 or 50,000 a month, it really starts to add up. Yes, sam, it does, doesn't it? Maybe that sounds familiar. Stop overpaying for Azure. Identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance, all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Visit uscloudcom Just one more reason to go there and book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. And if they say how did you hear about this? Don't forget to say oh, it was on Windows Weekly, because that helps us a lot. Uscloudcom. Book a call today. Get better faster Microsoft support for less.
35:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
UScloudcom. So last week, you may recall, I had a lengthy discussion, but a much lengthier write-up about this build of. You know, from the dev channel that signals to me the next version of Windows, even though they're not calling it that yet. And I went back and looked, only at the dev channel, at all of the features they've announced Well, most of the features they've announced. It was an enormous list and then listed out which have not yet shipped, and that was a pretty long list, right Starting with the most obvious things like recall and click to do, et cetera.
35:46
So two days later, microsoft publishes something they call the Windows 11 feature roadmap, which I have to say is a pretty good description of the thing I wrote a couple of days earlier. Interesting, they've never published such a thing. I found that to be very bizarre. So I saw this and I thought well, okay, maybe this is complimentary, I don't know. But then I forgot it was microsoft. So of course their version of this is terrible. It's really short, they lot, they missed a lot of stuff. It's nowhere close to as good as the thing I wrote.
36:16
And the thing I wrote was incomplete to begin with, you know, by design. I just didn't have enough time. So that was cute. And then I want to say two days after that or one day after that, they announced when some of the features they've been testing in the insider preview program for copilot plus PCs will actually come to stable and specifically or mostly for these Intel and AMD-pilot plus PCs. Right, because Snapdragon has gotten those features earlier, but still, by the way, in the Insider program, mostly aside from the stuff that came back in the beginning. And that too is incredibly incomplete, because they list things like the live caption with live translation, co-creator in paint, restyle image and image creator and photos and some other things, but they don't mention recall a click to do, which are still in the thing you know, like what are you doing?
37:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But only in the inside. They haven't done a release version of recall yet, nope.
37:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But even when they do, I mean certainly they will still be called previews, right? There's no way they're going to drop a preview tag, not immediately. So we still don't know exactly when that stuff's going to come. The other thing that happened that's tied to this last week and I don't remember the timing anymore, but last Tuesday was the week D preview update day they released a 23H2 and a Windows 10 preview build, preview update, I guess we'll call it, but not one for 24h2. And then that one did come out a day or two later, like I predicted, and um, it has all of the stuff you would expect. You know, the stuff we saw in 23 is, too, but also has, I'm going to call it semantic search. I'm not sure I don't know that there's an official name, but it's the ai powered search, windows search did peter norton invent it?
38:10
no, not like sam no, I'm sorry.
38:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry, that's semantic again no, no, you're good.
38:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, so that was interesting to me because I specifically enrolled my Snapdragon X based surface laptop in the dev program so I could test this stuff. So I don't remember the timing of this off the top of my head, but some weeks ago they started testing this and they phased it in over time. I think I talked about this last week. At the beginning it was local files only and it was documents only, then it was images, then it was like images only off of Cloud Storage 2, but only OneDrive, and then it became everything and like it would only work from the search box in start, but then it was also in file exploit. It kind of happened over time, so I never got this feature right. So I was actually really surprised to see that this thing was heading out to stable in a preview update and then would be going at stable period in two weeks later. And I wrote well, I wrote whatever I wrote about it at the time. And then I let's do it now, cause I yeah, when I bring up start and when I bring up file explorer, now guess what, I have it. So it just came on. I I guess it's ready. So someday this will be extensible.
39:24
So if you use a third-party storage service, whatever it might be, they can plug into this as well. But now you can do those searches. So I don't remember the search I did, but if I search for like this green or something like green, it will bring up file names. You know how Windows Search works. It has, like the item is highlighted and you can see it's in the file name. Like you can see, it's stupid, but now, interspersed throughout that are results that do not contain the word green, but it might be an image that has something green in it, or it might be a document or other file that has the word, which is cool, really, which is, yeah, exactly what I've been waiting for for about six, eight months, I don't know. So yeah, it's.
40:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that's finally happened 20 years, but okay.
40:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah, that too. Actually it wasn't really a big deal for me in the past, but now that I have so much data, you know I could actually really use it. I just I can't do time zone math. How could I find something I wrote, I wrote. I mean, think about it. I'm barely functional as it is. And then beyond that, there were other Windows Insider builds. There were new dev and beta builds this past Friday the beta build and these are both 24-inch 2 builds. The beta version only got quick machine recovery, which is a feature Microsoft announced back in November at Ignite for commercial PCs, but it's going to consumers as well. So I can't actually see that I'm in the dev channel. I mean, you think I would. You know dev channel would get this first. But we already explained.
40:51
Nothing logical exists in my world. There was, among the other controversies of last year, I guess one of the weirder ones was back in january. February microsoft announced this copilot key on pc keyboards. Since then this thing has appeared on like every new keyboard of a pc ever seen, like it's not on some of them, it's like just out there. When they did that, they got rid of the original shortcut for copilot, which was windows key plus c, and then they didn't give it to anything, they just took it away and it was like guys, not everyone has a copilot key. Like why wouldn't you just keep that? So in this new dev build and beta build that has made a comeback, you can type windows key plus c again. It's like okay, this is progress, I guess, in our world. Um, so there's other stuff there that they're starting to like it's d regeneration?
41:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know. It's like yeah, it's like regeneration.
41:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know, it's like, yeah, it's like, yeah, you know the new movie about the guy who has agreed to be cloned and he keeps getting killed and get cloned, killed, cloned. This is Windows Key Plus. It used to be Cortana, I think, before that it was something else.
41:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When you run out of good ideas, the great thing about bad ideas you get two versions, because you get to do it and undo it.
42:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Usually the great thing about bad ideas you get two versions, because you get to do it and undo. Yeah, usually in the microsoft space, though, they'll reuse something for something different, like the reuse. A brand like surface is a good example. Or um fabric, c sharp, c sharp. You have fabric there you go, um, this is the reusing it for the same thing. So this is this.
42:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not saying it's unique or no whatever, but it is weird um, and it's interesting to point out that you can't search on a search bar now in a browser and not have ai involved. Doesn't matter whether you're using bing or google or whatever you're, there's going to be an ai window. So, yeah, I guess you have to do it in windows now too, yep and I look I'm gonna give this one some time, I'll see.
42:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I will say from using it that I didn't find recall to be useful, although I I have enough empathy to kind of understand this might be useful for other people. So it's fine, um, but the way I think and the way I do things, I do think, you know, file system-based search is a good place for this for me.
43:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I'm hoping you know, we'll see my only problem with the window search thing is all the indexing that's constantly hammering away your machine. And now that you're going to be hammering away at colors too, like what does that even look like?
43:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so the initial and yeah, for the best results, you should go into the settings and turn indexing on for the entire disk, right, right, and then you should walk away from your computer for 72 hours. I recommend just going on a long weekend away.
43:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm almost looking at that option. It's like you know, I don't like my SSD anymore. Let's use it up in one sitting.
43:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Like my neighbor downstairs would be like was there an earthquake while you were gone? I'm like no, my computer was indexing. You're lucky I don't have a hard drive. It was an SSD. It wasn't as bad, At least it's quiet, but it does wear out.
43:43
Yeah, so Windows Quick Recovery looks kind of interesting. By my count, it's the 27th way you can recover a Windows computer now, but this is designed for those instances in which you can't actually boot into Windows successfully, so it's something you access from the Windows Recovery environment, and to me, what this looks like is a 2025 version of System Restore, or remember, in Windows Me. Actually, people forget this. They associate this with Windows XP, but Windows Me was the first Windows to have a driver rollback feature, where, if the system wouldn't boot, it would just automatically go back to the original version they had to I believe yes.
44:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it was no.
44:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That version had a bunch of innovative features that you know got lost and everyone hating it. So much um but do they?
44:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they stop system, restore right. They don't do that anymore.
44:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's in there, but it's not on. But this is what quick recovery has really become it's system yeah, it's quick.
44:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's system restore. Well, yeah, system restore is a good term. Actually, I'm surprised they didn't reuse it.
44:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, it's a good term system restore would fail so often yeah, oh, system.
44:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean it's to me. I I don't mind having it as a failback for certain things, um well, it just sounds so confident when you call it system restore.
44:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you call it emergency, maybe this will work.
44:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah that's a better name, yeah I also like it because, um, your doc, it wouldn't impact your documents or your files, like your non-system file, like your non-application files, and of course this. But this was created by adults in a different era and so it didn't say something like oh don't worry, your documents will be right where you left them, you know, like you know, it was just like well, we're going to pretend you're an adult.
45:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like we'll treat you like a human being. Is there anything better than booting up Windows and you get?
45:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that high and you're like oh no, we're just putting some more wonderfulness in your PC.
45:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Remember when this was your computer.
45:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hey, not anymore, you will wait, don't talk to me like I'm a dog. You're not sure I know the language. You just upbeat all the time, time, so I think everything's okay. I don't want that. Um, they're changing the color of the blue screen, right?
45:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
um they're not sure yet what color before wasn't it green?
45:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, they tested green and then I think they left it. I think you might still see green screens in the insider program. Um, but they uh what color?
46:02
well, they don't know, it's going to be green or black, it's going to look. I know, look, this stuff's important. It is so important, yeah, and then so that's most of that. So there's a pretty good blog post explaining how Windows Quick Recovery works. It's a. It's something that came up out of the secure future initiative stuff. You know, friends don't let friends use CrowdStrike, kind of thing. And then there was a beta build which basically just brings all the same features from 24H2. They're still doing that, and then a couple of unique features for some reason, because everything has to be terrible. So this morning Proton announced that Proton Drive is now native on Windows 11, on ARM, which is very cool. There's some new features. There's some new features on the Mac as well. They rewrote that client. But in the post about the Mac there's a little throwaway line. At the end they're going to bring this product to linux.
47:09
Interesting, and yeah, and I guess the rewrite that they did for the mac, which, when you think about it, is yeah it's kind of like unixy, you know it'll be, uh is going to inform that and, uh, this apparently is a much asked for thing, and I to me. The lack of a google drive, one drive, whatever you know, first class cloud storage something, something with files on demand, is one of those things that is like kind of a blocker to using Linux for me. So that's.
47:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, if you knew how to use S3, you wouldn't have to worry about that, paul, yes, Well, I do know how to use Git and I still hate it, but fair enough. Actually, git's an excellent choice, as well. Yeah, you could actually use Git for this. I'm out of focus. That's a bad sign.
47:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a good move on by Proton's part, because you know the diversity on the desktop is getting better.
47:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and it's open source. It's open source.
48:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's cool. It ticks all the right now I'm gonna have to take a look at. I've had a proton account for a long time, but yeah, I just installed it this morning.
48:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, yeah, it's interesting, so is there?
48:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a command line version is there a?
48:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
command I? I don't know, I didn't look at that. Um, I mean you could access the file system from the command line no, I just write the code to do the API.
48:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's fine, I'll be fine.
48:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, actually. So there is an API that they're creating, and that's the thing Even better.
48:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's better. Yeah, so that means there'll be third-party tools? Yeah, yep.
48:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. And then this is I just threw this in here because it's semi-related but Prot Proton VPN is now integrated into the Villevaldi browser, right? So there's a free tier of it and obviously that's what you get there and if you are a customer, you get the full blown version, whatever. That's kind of interesting. I mean, like this is like I think we would. I don't think we had started the show yet, but I said, you know, I see this need for what I think of as per app Bluetooth. I see the same need for a VPN, right. Most VPNs, I mean, there are VPNs in browsers, but I think a lot of people have a VPN app. They turn it on your whole system's on their VPN and then they turn it off and you're not. And I actually see, like the Brave browser is like a tour tab you can open. That is just for that thing, and I kind of I see a need for that. It's kind of an interesting idea. I don't really need my whole world to be on the VPN, but maybe I'm in Mexico now. I want to shop on Amazon US or whatever. That's a good way to do that. And then I don't know if you guys caught this, but Intel has had their first in-person event. It's in Vegas, by the way, you can go see it.
49:38
Richard Called Intel Vision, the first one in a while. Remember? Last fall they canceled whatever their big thing was Actually, I think they canceled Intel Vision. I think this is the thing from last fall. Their new CEO has appeared in public for the first time.
49:51
A little hard to understand, but he said all the right things In a throwaway line. If he was on stage day one for an hour, in three seconds he just mentioned that they're going to get rid of our spinoff non-core businesses and then never discussed it again or said what those things were. Haven't they been doing that for years? Yes, pat Gelsinger was doing some of that, for sure, with the NUCs. Yeah, but I think it needs to be said explicitly and he did say later to me I believe he used the word core uh that their core businesses are the chip design, which I'll describe as the x86 chip design bit, and they've got panther lake coming on their 18a process this year, and then the foundry, which is how they're doing the 18a process right. So, um, and he expressed a desire to work with uh partners, customers, on custom designs that will be new to them and blah, blah, blah blah, whatever all the right things you would expect but does this read to me like a business as usual, because it's been going so well.
50:52
Yeah, that's. I don't know if you used AI to generate that summary, richard, but that's accurate. Yeah, I mean that is what it is, but I don't know Intel's weird right. Intel was dominant forever.
51:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They were the Microsoft invented this business, for the most part right Yep.
51:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They were horrible and behaved illegally to their competitors, to partners, to customers. They were horrible, giant company, super successful. We were horrible. And now I, you know, do I want them to fail because of this? No, I'm not you know, I don't mean it. No, this is like people like I'll never use a Microsoft product because they used to hate Linux.
51:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like that was 30 years ago, I don't know how to get over it.
51:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, I always use the example like that's like saying I'm not going to Germany because of World War II. You've got to get over it, like it's gone. You know we're past this, so I'm trying not to be that way. But I see people like, oh my God, I really I want them to survive. So bad, it's, so important. I'm like is it? You know? So I don't hate them and I don't love them. I don't mean it like that. I recognize the role that they played forever. I mean they're super important we just talked about.
52:06
The first computer was based on an Intel chip. I mean they're a big deal. They always have been. But they also ignored a lot of things that were going on in industry. Microsoft begged them again and again and again. You got to make these things more efficient. One of the things he talked about on stage was panther lake. He's the way he described. It is going to combine the best of arrow lake, which is the performance and scalability stuff, with the efficiency and power savings of lunar lake. Yeah, that's what they were asking for 15 years ago.
52:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I really appreciated ben thompson's analysis and all this. He said when they missed mobile, when they missed arm, you know the writing was on the wall from then on yeah, it was, they didn't make enough chips. When you're only making hundreds of millions of chips, you really can't justify the top end stuff. You need to make billions of chips.
52:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can all. Yeah, and Microsoft had the same problem. Basically, it just high level missed mobile, right, If you want us to put it simply. But Microsoft had this fallback right. They went to the cloud. Intel also missed the cloud, by the way. I mean not that they don't have cloud stuff, but the fact that NVIDIA was able to happen on their watch is rather a sign, and they did make GPUs.
53:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They just never took it all that seriously. It wasn't a core business.
53:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. Yeah, I all that. Seriously, it wasn't a core business, that's right. Yeah, I mean, if you go back to windows vista, one of the big problems was that all of the existing computers out in the world which had these crappy intel integrated graphics could not run aero glass. It's a huge problem for people and they intel did not see this is a huge priority. You know some of their newer chips that you know, did have it, the cpus.
53:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know why you're bothering us with this.
53:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You were literally holding the industry back. That's the problem.
53:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I imagine if Microsoft had looked at the cloud and go well, that's not our core business. Yeah, exactly.
53:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Windows in the cloud. It doesn't make any sense.
54:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Arguably it doesn't, but it also turned out to be a pretty good business so it worked out pretty good, yeah, sometimes these adjacent businesses end up being the business.
54:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and that's right. I mean microsoft saw that was, you know, work groups and then servers and all this and then the servers, you know all the sql server, exchange server, etc. Etc. Um, and then was able to make this kind of semi-natural transition to the cloud. It worked out well for them and Intel just didn't.
54:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know, just didn't do it. But don't worry, they're sticking to their core business.
54:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a very nerdy joke. Yes, they are. Hey, before we go to a break, they're asking in the YouTube chat, in the YouTubes, in the YouTubes, if you care about or if you want to talk about the fact that Microsoft has killed the NRO. You know, the bypass NRO.
54:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean yeah, so that's. This is overblown, so there are different workarounds.
55:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was the thing that allowed you to bypass a Microsoft account when you installed it.
55:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I believe the script is literally named bypassnrocmd, that's CMD that's the name of it. So if you actually look at the script, you can see how they do it and you can still run those commands. Like those are not going away, oh, it's just okay.
55:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So those are not going away.
55:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, so it's just taking away the script. It's nothing. The important thing to remember here is that there are other workarounds. So when you use, like Rufus, to create a install media, then you check the right options. They're enabling those things that this script would have done.
55:41
It's this yeah, chris Titus is an idiot. So Wow, yeah, this is. A guy gets hundreds of thousands of views about nothing. He just you know he was the recall is is. They're secretly putting recall on your computer, even though they said to take it away he's wrong about the unfortunate thing about youtube.
55:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this incentive? I can't stand this stuff.
55:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes so this is nothing. I my reaction to this is this is nothing. So when I update the book each year for each version of Windows 11, I don't put every work around, I just pick the best one or two. So right now this still works. It's not going away. You're not going to download Windows tomorrow or in three months and not be able to use this. They're testing it in one build of one channel of the Insider program.
56:21
So I wrote a 6,000 word article last week about how so many of those things have never appeared. So it will or will not occur in the next version of Windows. If it does, there will be other workarounds there always are. So you don't have to worry about it. And, by the way, this is kind of a ham-handed whatever. But the ultimate workaround, or the one that anyone could do, is sign in with a Microsoft account the first time, create a local account, delete the Microsoft account and then use your local account. And there are actually really good reasons to do that right now, because one of the advantages and it's not the only one, but one of the advantages of using a Microsoft account is that it enables automatic full disk encryption on the computer, whereas if you sign in with a local account, you don't get that. You have to sign in with a microsoft account to get that once that's right.
57:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think microsoft gets a little heat for how it described this in the build well, even in the throwaway line at the end no, okay, but why, though?
57:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because what percentage of Windows users actually have used this switch ever one time? It's less than 1%, right, it's probably 1% of 1%. This is not used by anybody like statistically, it exists. My stance on this is like here's my list of why you should use a Microsoft account actually, but if you want to be smart about it, here's the list of things you should do, just like you could use Microsoft Edge, but you got to do these things. Are you being stupid? Because it's tracking you and whatever you can do it, but don't.
57:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The best thing you do with Edge is download Chrome Right.
58:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I mean based on telemetry. That is the number one use.
58:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is scary when they say this change ensures that all users exit setup with a Microsoft account.
58:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean it's clear what the intent is, but you're looking at that like it's a bad thing, because there's good and bad to everything. But for most mainstream users, well, no, for every mainstream user of Windows, yeah, that's true. This is the right thing to do.
58:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is the right thing to do.
58:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
For so many reasons. I mean, it's not just the full disk encryption, that's part of it. This is an account that's backed up with 2FA and Passkey security so you can recover it. This is an account that gives you automatic pass-through to your Microsoft services through the browser, through OneDrive, through the store, through whatever, through Xbox. I use it to go into the Xbox app, download Call of Duty and play Call of Duty and I never sign into anything because it's pass-through. It's all part of the account.
59:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um and if you're sophisticated enough or you have the need for it, you can figure out yep, you already know this is nothing to be outraged over.
59:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You already know how to do it. Don't worry about it. Nothing's changing, it's fine. That's why. That's why I haven't.
59:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why I didn't mention it's nothing yes, okay, yep, but you know it's my duty as the no I you know what?
59:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so this is something. No, this is, this is no, you're right. Uh, this is something I struggle with because I look at that and I say what I just said I I think this is nothing but it's not how they wrote it not even close well, and I don't know it's not, it just doesn't matter nothing until I hear your explanation.
59:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then I say, oh yeah, you're right, it's nothing no, but people like, they conflate things, you know.
59:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And so, like a guy who was really active in my, on my site and my forums did, wrote a forum post about it, and I'm just going to read the way he wrote this, because this is very typical, not because he's a bad guy or not, he's super smart, but, um, it's just, uh, you know, new method to install Windows 11 with a local account. It's not actually a new method, it's the command that's inside of that command line script, right With this method, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So, like, the way he describes this is like this just changed, we have to use this now and it's like nothing has changed. So, and by the way, even if, like I said, even if it does, um, you're fine, you're this is why we, but this is exactly why we turn to you guys.
01:00:28
Uh, so you give us the perspective yeah, but but the thing I got, the thing I get wrong and and this is a great example is I should still bring it up just so I can say hey, by the way, you might have seen something like don't worry about it, yeah, don't. Yeah, I don't do that like that's my own.
01:00:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's me not communicating effectively like it's, Just so I can say hey, by the way, you might have seen something like this. Don't worry about it.
01:00:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, don't, yeah, I don't do that Like that's my own. That's me not communicating effectively.
01:00:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like it's stupid that I Don't beat yourself up. No this comes up a lot. You just look ugly when you cry. Thank you.
01:00:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I do look ugly, I don't know Self it's.
01:00:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, I think you gotta. It's in my wheelhouse. You gotta play to your strengths no, in all honesty.
01:01:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I read that stuff.
01:01:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I might even think in the back of my mind yeah, that seems like a tempest yeah, here they go again, microsoft taking away our rights right well, especially when they put in a line like well, yeah, this is make sure you have microsoft account everybody has a microsoft account, and I think that there's a thing to be concerned about, which is now that they're paying attention enough that they would even attempt to remove that script. What's?
01:01:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
next Now, richard. Now let's not stir up trouble where there's no trouble.
01:01:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll try to remember where I read this. So not the Microsoft account, but it applies 100%. It was something about I'm going to forget, but Google, probably somewhere. Some blog post somewhere. This past week someone said something like we require you to have a Google account, whatever it was. For this reason, the thing about a Google account, just like a Microsoft account, is that you can come to it from you. Don't have to use a dot or an at Outlookcom account, right, so you could say, like I have Richard at Campbellcom, or whatever.
01:02:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, same with Apple. I can use a Gmail account to have my Apple account.
01:02:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the point was you can use this account, you don't have to use our email. We're not trying to get you on our email, it doesn't matter. But the beauty of using an account that's already an online account is that you now have a way to recover that account without you doing anything. Like when you set up a like if you set up paulatoutlookcom, if that was available which it isn't and you were like, okay, this is a brand new account, it's not associated with anything else. You have to go through a series of steps where you're like, all right, well, here's my phone number, here's another email address, which might be a Gmail account or whatever it is and not during the setup process, but afterwards you're expected to then go in and create 2FA, maybe through an authenticator app or through a passkey or whatever it might be, and secure that thing and you can do that.
01:02:56
But the nice thing about going into an online account like a Microsoft account with your own account is automatic recovery, right, because you can email at that address somewhere else. It's got that redundancy kind of effect. Right Now, you should still do the other stuff, you should still add your phone number to it, you should maybe or use an authenticator app, definitely. Or get pass keys going on your devices, absolutely. But the nice thing about going into it without using their address scheme is you get automatic system recovery. So look, there are actually about a dozen reasons why this makes sense, and I think those are amplified when you're a I'm going to say normal I know people don't like that word, but like a mainstream non-technical user, this is they should be using a microsoft account to sign into windows.
01:03:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They really should it's fair to say most people should have it, and if you don't want it, you are sophisticated enough to figure out how not to have it I think that's the way it should always be done. I think the way apple should do iphones, the way every operating system should operate is there are bypasses for people who are technically sophisticated. Oh, Otherwise the default is the most appropriate choice for the average user.
01:04:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't do it enough to remember exactly the steps, but when you sign into a Mac for the first time and you create an Apple account, or don't, I guess you're creating what in the Microsoft space we would call a local account. You're associating, if you have one, an Apple ID with that thing, but you're not signing in with Paul at Applecom or whatever. No right, you're signing in with Paul or whatever. You created a local account. We have not done that in Windows since Windows 7. That was the last system and people miss it. I think that's the reason. Maybe, but you know who doesn't miss it? All those people that you're not thinking, not you, leo. Normal users, the people who, which is everybody, which is 99.9999.
01:04:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The fact that you get BitLocker if you're a normal user, if you just sign on your app, your Microsoft account is a good. That's a good thing.
01:04:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And the reason you have to have that is because you need some way to recover that thing.
01:05:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have to be able to recover it right, so that's why they do.
01:05:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not like it's not an evil scheme, guys. I mean, there is evilness at microsoft. I will exist it is evil corporation, make no mistakes you know, you can put a crucifix on your computer walls, wallpaper, whatever.
01:05:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Do whatever you want, but um yeah, there's, the holy water is a problem, but yeah no, I, I look.
01:05:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I always think you know apple has a setting which by default is on the highest security setting, that you can't install applications right, which is weird places.
01:05:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But there's a way to turn that off so, by the way, microsoft in windows side interrupt but has a switch just like it. But it's the other way around. It's off by default.
01:05:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can go in and make it more secure right, it would be nice if we're on by default and then people who are sophisticated, could turn it off.
01:05:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think in their defense and I hate doing that, but in their defense I think it's because they understand that most people would be confused by this and have a bad experience I can't install and they're like what are you talking about?
01:05:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm trying to get chrome brave. What are you?
01:06:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
doing. Oh, you stopped me from doing, from doing Chrome now, oh, microsoft, yeah, no, we know what you're all about.
01:06:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a hundred.
01:06:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
YouTube videos right there, that's right.
01:06:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, chris Titus, if you're out there, please make that video.
01:06:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Go for it.
01:06:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a very good point.
01:06:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just I don't, I just look, I absolutely get outraged about things. I try to make sure those things are real, you know. And I.
01:06:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's how Google handles sideloading, and I think it's the right way to do it. On Android, you can't sideload unless you know. You go into the settings and you turn that off and it warns you. That's appropriate. Now I, as a geek, can do the things I want to do, but normal people will be protected. I think that's a great way to do it.
01:06:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's, it's optimized for the most frequent use case and, by the way, it's not 75-25. It's 99.9999, something to 0.000, something Like. It's not even close, like you know.
01:06:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if you're in that group and we're a tiny fraction of them. We are.
01:06:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're tiny. Well, we're big but we're tiny and we, you know we tend to be large anyway. The point is we tend to be larger, but we also tend to have strong opinions. Um, look, you can get. You're smart enough to get around. What are you worried about? Relax. If you were really outraged about this, you'd already be using linux, just relax it's absolutely where I was thinking.
01:07:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, one of the options is just use linux on the desktop use the mac I am, you know he's 512.
01:07:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I appreciate him in our discord. Has informed me that nro stands for network readiness operations okay, didn't know that.
01:07:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not national reconnaissance office?
01:07:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, yeah well, it may also stand for that. Uh, anyway, let's uh take a break. You are watching the fabulous windows weekly. This is why you it to get this kind of information. Paul Theriot in Roma Norte, richard Campbell in Las Vegas I'm in Petaluma. None of these town names are in English, isn't that interesting?
01:07:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, yeah.
01:07:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When I first moved to.
01:07:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Petaluma. They said Wait till we talk about whiskey and all the names are Norwegian.
01:08:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, we're doing Norwegian today. When I first moved to Petaluma, they said no one knows what it means. And then later people said actually it's from the original Pomo Indians who lived here and it means hill by the river. And what do you mean? No one knows what it means you've just so like.
01:08:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Mcungee is bear swamp which is I like it?
01:08:26
but I, richard, I meant to send you this and I just, I guess I zoned on it. I I follow this thing on instagram called the language nerds, which is spectacular. They had a, a pitch, like a picture of two things which was to me was like so, you and me, it was just perfect. One was an avocado and one was a bottle of whiskey and it was like in in, uh, in scotland, uh, whiskey. You might know, whiskey is somehow associated with like water, it's like the, it's like the perfect water of life. Yeah, in mexico, avocado is aguacate. It is a? Uh, it's not, it's actually pre-Aztec, but the Aztecs used it, so we'll call it an Aztec term. That means testicles. So which you know, you hear it and you're like yep, okay, I get it. Yeah, so it's like an avocado and a bottle of whiskey walking a bar.
01:09:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's everything you need in life you know, avocados now have to be propagated by humans because there are no large mammals to eat them and defecate the seeds.
01:09:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Well, we're the large animals that do that. But I see what you're saying.
01:09:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you ate the seed, you would be.
01:09:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you'd be passing out. One would be like, don't.
01:09:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need a moment here Do what a normal person does Put toothpicks in them.
01:09:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Put them in a glass of water by the window and grow your own tree. So next time you see someone who really knows what they're doing rotating through an avocado avocado really quickly, you'll be like it's like. They just kind of like they like jab the knife. It's impressive. It's impressive. Yeah, it's pretty good the guacamole masters, yeah uh, I'll say I love it I'm sorry, I forgot it absolutely.
01:10:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I love the linguistic games, right like. You've heard the term. You've heard about torpenhow hill, which has the word tor, which is the old english for hill, and pen, which is the old celtic word for hill, and ho, which is an english word for hill.
01:10:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's actually hill hill, hill hill so the only reason I know the word tour means hill in old english is that there were there was a map inside of a yes album in the 70s that had whatever tour, whatever tour, whatever tour, and I did the 1979 version of googling it, by which I mean I opened a dictionary or, I guess, an encyclopedia and looked it up, and I had never heard that term I feel like it's lord of the rings also uses it.
01:10:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like, see, that's I I had. It's lord of the rings also uses it. I feel like see, that's I.
01:10:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I had read the lord of the rings by this point and you would think I was. Nobody reads the map. I'm not saying I'm a tolkien scholar, leo, but I mean, okay, maybe I'm wrong, I could be kind of. I mean, no, I don't, I like, yeah, I know well, I hope you've enjoyed this ad.
01:10:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Free interlude. Now back to the show. Oh, we're back already. That's it, we're back. Oh, that was the whole thing. Wow, that was it right there, we will replace all of that chatter with an ad. Okay, oh boy, and all the good stuff.
01:11:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep on we go, microsoft 365er yeah, so we mentioned, uh, that windows feature that microsoft announced as part of SFI. Back at Ignite, they also announced what looked like a wonderful little NUC, which everyone was real excited about, until they realized it was a basically like a like what do you call it? Like a headless, not headless, yeah, headless. Like a remote access device, then client, I guess, called Windows 365 Link. So it is now available. You can pay $350 to get an empty box that connects to a Microsoft service that costs at least $20 a month, or you can just use the PC you already have.
01:11:54
I don't know who this is for. This is for businesses, obviously, but I don't feel like this is going to go great. I don't really see the point of it. But that's available. Microsoft announced I think it was last week, that they're going to enable something in Windows that will allow Office apps on Windows to start up faster, starting with Word. Now, I did what I think everyone did when they read that line in a story or whatever, and they launched Word and it came right up and they were like I don't understand, it already comes up instantly, right, but they're literally putting a startup boost app inside of Start so it starts every time your computer starts so you think it's basically just a copy of word running that you only?
01:12:47
have. It's going to start with word, but then they're going to go to excel and powerpoint and probably outlook too, because outlook actually is the one that probably could use this. Um, I don't understand what the point of this is. I have also wondered related to this, for years, why Microsoft doesn't block by default anything that tries to put itself in automatic startup at boot time. But then, of course, if you've ever run Copilot by mistake, in most cases you will have noticed you close it, it's still sitting in the tray and if you look, it's in startup tasks because Microsoft evil bad. So Microsoft does this a lot actually, and I don't like this behavior and I wish there was something that would prevent it. You should get a pop-up. It should be like that Apple thing where it says, hey, this app's trying to track you or whatever. In this case, it should say, hey, this Microsoft app is trying to put itself in startup.
01:13:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And most third-party apps, when you install them, say, hey, should I be part of your startup and you can check it or uncheck it? Yeah, Microsoft knows better than you.
01:13:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and this is somewhere else, in somewhere, somewhere in somewhere I don't know. It's somewhere in this show. I was thinking about writing about all the things I do with the Windows PC when I first install it, put it together, whatever, and then how different my life would be if I was like a normal user, like if I didn't have to do all the stuff that I do. And there's all this stuff. I would turn off for sure. But one of the things everyone should do and yet unfortunately you have to do it from time to time is go look at the startup tasks. Yeah, just did this.
01:14:12
Yeah, so if you, maybe you bulk install a bunch of stuff on your computer, you finally get it where you want it. That's the time to go look. But then every month or two weeks or something, you got to go look at this because if you ever reboot, you know, like, you see, like discord, discord puts two tasks in startup one is discord and the other one is update discord. It's like guys, jeez louise, like yeah, I, I, I don't know. So there's a lot of apps like that, and a lot of them, unfortunately, microsoft apps, you know it's the only one of being forcing onto the home screen.
01:14:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know. So there's a lot of apps like that and a lot of them, unfortunately, are Microsoft apps. You know phone link wants to do this. It's the equivalent of forcing onto the home screen of your phone. It's gross.
01:14:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's so annoying. This is, you know, apple used to do this thing. When you had a notification in the dock, the little icon would sit there and go up and down, yeah, but it wouldn't stop Bounce. And I was saying to a friend of mine at the time it's only 20 years ago, you know I said it's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. So what do you mean? This is good and I'm like all right, and I put my hand in front of his face.
01:15:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I said just tell me when this is annoying. Let me know you trying to watch.
01:15:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
TV Is this annoying? I don't know.
01:15:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tell me, you over here? Hey, can you help me just real quickly. I went over to proton drive. I thought I'd check it out and uh, it's asking me to uh identify that I'm a human. Oh boy, that's so how can I um?
01:15:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't, it's just a blank screen. What are you using? What's the browser?
01:15:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh zen is you think you're probably using some kind of an ad blocker or something oh yeah, so it's blocking the human verification. Yeah, no, I bet it is right, um, but this is like a mini version of the tech guy show. Thank you so much, paul.
01:15:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Theriot. Yeah, no, I run into this a lot, I you. Just I wonder if I can. So annoying. I downloaded an app. Let me see if I can find out what it was. I'm just cause I never did install it. I can't install it. It did one of those web things where you sign in on the web and it does you go through your password manager, like cool, like that's fine, and then it came up with the screen. It said we want to make sure you're human, just like you said. I'm like all right. I mean, okay, it seems like an unnecessary additional step. I just did all. So it's like which parts of this little grid of things are like a fire hydrant? You're like boop, boop, boop. You do it. I'm like right, and then it does it a second time. You're like all right, boop, boop, boop, boop. And you're like this time you're like I'm going to get this one right. Nope, did it again. It did it four times and I Like, guys, I passed the test. Yeah, your web page is not that important to me.
01:16:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, whatever it was, it was some app.
01:16:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was like, yeah, no, I'm done.
01:16:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just not doing it.
01:16:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So long, okay. And then this is a small thing. This is kind of cool. So I'm not an Excel guy. I don't think I've made that very clear.
01:16:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm barely a guy, but I'm barely a human being, I mean but Microsoft Excel supports what Microsoft calls rich data.
01:17:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that means things that are not just words or numbers, right? So obviously, when you have numbers, it can be different formats, like currency or whatever else you might have for numbers, but they have other forms of data. So there are things like, I think, map, locations and whatever else is rich data and you can use these things in formulas and you can use them in charts and whatever else, but they're not called out in any way. So they're adding a feature to excel called value tokens and so basically they're going to colorize and add an icon in the fields where those things exist and then also up in the formula bar. So it's the type of thing like you know. Like I said, don't use excel.
01:17:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I look at that I'm like yeah, no, it's like it's a good idea sure, I think it makes it just a little bit closer to becoming publisher, right Like now.
01:17:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can Right exactly which, by the way, every Microsoft tool that is not publisher will become by the time publisher goes away. Yeah, Yep, 100%. So I think that's. Yeah, that's fine.
01:17:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And that's it. Do you think the sense that all applications are converging on a single app? That?
01:17:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
app. Yes, that right.
01:18:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That app will be a messaging app they say that no, no, no software's done until it can get email right, right maybe I'll do that to my app.
01:18:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll just make it an email app, see if anyone notices.
01:18:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, so protons very secure. It is now made me prove I'm a human. I've've given it my second factor. Now it wants my other password.
01:18:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's very secure. Okay, yeah, so in my case, yeah, it's like you can use your email address, but you can also use just your username. That's what I'm doing.
01:18:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you can use your example.
01:18:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yes, password. And then I have two of a through like a authenticator app.
01:18:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah password and then, uh, I have two of a through like a authenticator app. Yeah, I did that. Now it wants my second. I don't know what my second.
01:18:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What are you trying to do? I'm just trying to trying to check out proton drive and now it wants another password. I think you failed a very close to me that maybe one drive is more your speed. Yeah, maybe I need to know.
01:18:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can I use my microsoft account for that please?
01:19:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is there some reason you're not doing this with Edge? I mean it would. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm sorry.
01:19:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I switched to Safari. It did give me the human test, which was a puzzle piece Then.
01:19:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I did my 2FA. Just try a. What do you call it? An incognito window or whatever? Oh my God, god, it's just. I know it's hopeless. I know hopeless it's very secure, though you can't deny that. I know I'm feeling good.
01:19:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I feel like I'm safe from you right now, so let's take it anywhere. Are you sure you're doing anything with your computer?
01:19:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm all set second password, your second password, I don't know what it is you sure it's not the authenticator?
01:19:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, it says. Second, I did the authentic second password.
01:19:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is another this is like a hobbit has a second. Oh wait a minute. There it is, I see it there is.
01:19:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I see in my notes a second password.
01:19:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh wow, holy cow, that's amazing it's the only thing better than one password.
01:19:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's got to be better, right, it's got to be better. Password 1.5. Let's it works.
01:20:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, it seems to be doing something. After second password comes 11 Zs.
01:20:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How secure can that be?
01:20:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I had to do a puzzle piece. Thank you for following that up intelligently, by the way.
01:20:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Two passwords. Anyway, I do have some project.
01:20:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hate to even say this but you understand, you're going to go through this again when you actually install this product, right? Yeah, I know, I know, I know I'm sorry. Okay, some AI dev stuff I guess mostly AI Great. A US District Court judge has ruled that the New York Times copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft can continue forward. Why is this not settled? I know Well, because of this next news item. Because today Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media of the guy that prints the books with all the funny pictures on the covers yeah, did a study on OpenAI's content and I think, using like math, determined to something like an 80 something for 88 percent possibility. You know probability. They're stealing his content. They're stealing it. They probably just asked chat GBT. Yep, determined to something like an 80 something, 88 percent possible. You know probability. They're stealing his content. They're just stealing it. They probably just asked chat gbt yep yeah, yeah, what's the?
01:21:07
yeah, what's the possibility? And they were like oh, it's pretty high man yeah, did you steal my?
01:21:12
stuff dad well, there are more yeah it's higher than the percentage of people that should be using a microsoft account. Um, yeah, so because of this story, I wrote about it. I read his thing, I looked at the report they published he linked. At the end of the report there's a paragraph where they talk about the times that AI has been caught stealing. One of them was meta was found to have stolen content from books from a free pirated book service or whatever, and I'm like what is this magical service I need to become a member of? No, so I went and looked at this thing, which I actually forget the name of it, maybe I don't want to broadcast what it is, but I pirated a book today because I wanted to see how easy it was, and it's a. It's pretty damn easy. Now, I, to be fair, I, I, I pirated a book that is a 30 years old and is that's easier.
01:22:14
It was a window CE book that Microsoft press put out just to kind of see Yep, super easy, like, super easy, and yeah. So I'm not surprised to discover that Meta was able to do that and it's I mean as an author. It's like so yeah.
01:22:33
Great but good news. Open AI is now worth over $300 billion. They just raised $40 billion, which is the most a private company has ever raised at one time. They're the third largest private company in the world by value after SpaceX, and I want to see ByteDance, the owner of TikTok. The interesting thing about this, though, is that, of the 40, which is not all guaranteed but will happen this year if they go private, they'll get the full 40. 30 of it is coming from SoftBank right, which is the I think they're still Japan-based previous owner of ARM right. Unless my math is wrong and I think I proved early, it often is that by the end of this year, if not already, they will actually be the biggest single investor in open AI, not Microsoft. Microsoft is part of a group of investors that constitute the other 10 billion, but even if Microsoft was 9 billion of that which they're not, but even if they were 30?
01:23:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is still more than 13 plus nine, right? Please verify that, richard, but I think it is. I don't know what your time zone math, but this is pretty good. Okay, good Thank you.
01:23:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, I did that one a couple of times to make sure, but I thought that was true.
01:24:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And then, just because it's open AI, it's funny that all the tech companies are the ones you're talking about that are the most privately like. I would think the Koch group is up there, cargill's up there, but nobody knows because they're privately held Right.
01:24:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is based on like, because these companies typically go through like a VC, yeah, but they do these private placements so they advertise their presumed worth.
01:24:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you know that worth is supposed to be determined by certain accounting practices verified by the sec, like how do you determine worth when you're privately held, I mean?
01:24:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's what would happen if they required open ai, but it's not what happens when they invest, I guess, yeah, it's unbelievable. Um chat gpt I'm sure everyone saw this uh, chat gpt put out this new image generation feature, or open ai did in chat gpt and everyone's making these images that look like that japanese artists, um, you know what do you call it like? Uh, woodcuts. Well, no, it's like a cartoon style, like a anime kind of something studio ghibli.
01:24:59
Yeah, yeah yeah, I'm surprised there hasn't been more pushback on this. Sam allman changed his avatar and x and everywhere else to with yeah, one of those characters. What do you? What do you just make it a middle finger, like? What are you doing?
01:25:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
like, like that's crazy. Well, you know, this has been a story for a while. We talked about on sunday and it turns out there probably isn't any trademark protection for a style of art is there anything like?
01:25:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
is there like a human decency or a no?
01:25:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ethical something, and meanwhile I'm gonna steal all your books, by the way, yeah no, you should.
01:25:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well. Actually we'll get. I'm gonna let everyone steal my books. That's at the end of the show oh good um, so, or almost, we'll get there. Um, the other thing you know, you guys definitely have heard of this thing called vibe coding, right, so this term bothered me.
01:25:48
The second I heard it everyone oh yeah, it's almost there to annoy you yeah, the, but I also realized it's not what I thought it was and it's clearly not what anyone else thinks it is either. Um, the guy who coined this was a co-founder of open ai and I also have the wrong link for the story in the notes. That's hilarious, yeah, um, so I will fix that now. But uh, he, what he was talking about was not a non-developer describing the app or game they want and then having ai create it and have it just be perfect the first time, somehow magically. That's not what he's describing. What he's saying is that if you are an experienced developer and know what you're doing, you could talk to AI and have it do most of the work for you, but you will still need to go back and fix things because it's never going to be right.
01:26:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I misunderstood. I thought you didn't have to know how to code.
01:26:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Everyone misunderstood this, so using his own terms, he says, specifically, the developer speaks to it. Like the developer knows that, for example, like he's talking, I think in this case about JavaScript or HTML but he says decrease the padding on the sidebar by half. It's not a language a non-programmer would ever use, right, they don't understand what that means, but he um he. He also says you just accept all every time. Review the changes. It's not perfect, it's going to produce bad code. Keep copying, pasting error messages to it, and it usually fixes it right he says.
01:27:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He also says it gets into a corner sometimes and it's done, yeah. Then he says it's done, yeah.
01:27:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Then he says if it's.
01:27:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Andre Carpartha you're talking about.
01:27:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, he says if it keeps doing that, ask it to keep making random changes until the problem goes away.
01:27:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so he literally there's a phone point, you switch over to the infinite number of monkeys mode. It's just ridiculous. So he says, right, it just became a meme. Yeah, he says vibe.
01:27:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Coding is not coding, but it's not too bad for a throwaway weekend project. It's amusing, it is true. But who does throwaway weekend projects? Developers. It's for developers. Um, also, I I think I mentioned this at some point, but Mark Brzezinovich and Scott Hanselman do that podcast and in one of them there was an amazing conversation where Scott said well, it's not like you know, you're going to tell it to make Python code.
01:28:09
You're never going to learn Python. He says actually, that's the Mark said. That is what I do. I don't know Python, but I just keep telling it. Improve it, improve it, improve it. And I know what the inputs are, I know what the outputs are supposed to be, I know when it's working correctly. I don't actually have to know what the code does. So that's for. But it's not like create a Mario game you know, done, you know, or whatever. It's not that simple. So I, I look. I'm not a real developer, but I think I know how developers actually think and work.
01:28:38
And AI is a wonderful tool for developers. I described it as the Reese's peanut butter cup of tech industry. Like AI plus coding, it's perfect, they go together and it's great for getting over humps and whatnot. And, by the way. Obviously it keeps improving. It's going to be great A lot of times. I'm sure now and in the future, ai can do the bulk of some work of a project, but you still have to go in as the guy who knows what's happening and fix things, like the little padding thing he talked about or whatever. It's not, it's not. It would be more tedious trying to describe to ai what you wanted in many cases than to just do it. You know yourself, depending on what it is. So anyway, yeah, vibe code. I think everyone's by coding wrong. I don't that. If you go and read what he wrote, he was not talking about a regular people very much talking about it.
01:29:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Speaker 2 and it really had. The sense is like this will be funny for other developers.
01:29:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yep, yeah, right it was. It was aimed at that audience, yeah.
01:29:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, so anyway, yeah, he, I'm actually. He coded it in a tweet, or a what do you call? Ever call an x? We're gonna call it a post because no one else knows what the hell it is exactly like we have to make thing everything.
01:29:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was stupid enough as it was. We got used to it.
01:29:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now you're gonna change it come on yeah, it's a social media message into a questionable matrix.
01:29:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, here's uh andre karpathy's uh sheet. Yeah, there's a new kind of coding I call vibe coding, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials and forget the code even exists.
01:30:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Dude he also he.
01:30:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was a founder at open AI. He worked at Tesla for a long time in AIs and he has, by the way, one of the best videos on how llms work.
01:30:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, if you've got three and a half hours yeah this one really took off. But a month or so earlier he tweeted again kind of tongue-in-cheek, but he said the hottest new programming language is english right.
01:30:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's what it's kind of sitting in this too right. Is that's what I mean, like that?
01:30:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that didn't catch on, so we kept going. You know um, I guess vibe coding is kind of a well, it's funnier, it's caught on, yeah, for sure it.
01:30:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it, yeah, touched a nerve or something. Yeah, whatever it is that it did. Touch something was a not a good touch either. No, I don't know so sorry.
01:30:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No follow-on to that. No, please show on the doll where the tweet touched you.
01:31:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was the follow-on I chose not to do, but I like it though I like it.
01:31:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, we're uh. You're watching, and aren't you glad? Uh, windows weekly. Paul thurott is here from uh thurottcom. Richard campbell from run as radiocom. Richard has very kindly agreed to stick around. He's going to do the six hour day. Oh man, you're a very kind guy. Uh, we had an opening. Paris martineau is in paris, weirdly enough, on intelligent machines, so we uh invited richard to join us. We're going to have a good show. We're going to talk about the sam altman bio. Uh, and then the latest uh ai news and uh. So I'm glad.
01:31:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Thank you for uh well, I've got my catheter here, so I should be fine you got the cory booker commemorative catheter.
01:31:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my goodness, what a, what a if he could do 25 hours. I could do six incredible. Yeah, totally, I think we're doing three. Well, we, we're doing it right there. I do three plus three most of the time. Yeah, there you go, you're right.
01:32:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You've been planning, you've been sort of practicing for this for a long time.
01:32:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should I have been building up to it slowly. This is how you do it.
01:32:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I am in Vegas right, so there's poker tournaments going downstairs and when someone does the full block block, they call them a leather butt oh yeah, walter cronkite.
01:32:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When he used to anchor the space launches and they sometimes go and hold for hours they called him old iron butt. So there's something there just stay in the chair. Did you watch? It's time for the xbox segment, paul. Did you watch the nintendo switch announcement? No switch to announcement I didn't watch it $450.
01:32:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know I thought it was going to be $350, and at $350, that would have been a no-brainer At $450,. I'm waiting for Black Friday or whatever.
01:32:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, how soon before it's discounted? I don't know. It seems too much, but the Steam.
01:32:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Deck's what $800?.
01:33:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's a good point.
01:33:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean if you're comparing it to the steam deck, yeah, but the oled, what was the oled? Uh switch when it launched? It was a 350 at launch, or was it more, I don't remember, but I don't remember.
01:33:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't buy that. I still have the original switch, but I'm thinking about buying this because you know you can't hook it up to your tv and get 4k, I guess on some games, right, so that looks great.
01:33:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually, it looks great. I, I, I to me the disappoint. Well, aside from the price, um the the system, it looks excellent. A lot of the games look great. I don't. I was. I really expected microsoft or xbox to be part of this, oh really, and that, at the very least, we would have seen call of duty, you know? Oh, I'm a little confused by that. So there were some third-party games in there. Um, I, I think, I don't know, laurent or brad or someone told me that. Um, those tony hawk games were ragging on the other day. Uh, they're gonna be on there they're big man, we love skating.
01:33:59
Yep, yep hey kids, uh, yeah, so I don't know. I look, nintendo has their own way of doing things. I they do have a kind of a weird track record, uh, when they follow up like a big hit, um, and I think the way they might get around this is that they're not really doing anything different. They've made what essentially is a new switch, right, like it's right, you know, like they went from oled to 4k or whatever, um, so I think you know we'll see. But then again, I mean, is there some limit to the number of years that we can basically have the same exact system from these?
01:34:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
guys I don't know yeah, because most of the games, I mean on their compatibility games. There's only one game that doesn't work with it from the previous switch and that's the nintendo labo toy con. Oh, four vr kit jeez louise.
01:34:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then there are the games that don't work on the original, that are new, like the new mario kart. That's part of a whole bunch of new bundle.
01:34:53
Yeah, the elden ring gang has put together this um kind of stands in sharp contrast to that microsoft backward compatibility promise of Soros. Right, I mean, it's not 100%, obviously, but there's a real focus in Xbox on your library and bringing it forward as much as possible all the time to all the different endpoints and all that kind of stuff. So you know, we'll see, this is an interesting test of this audience. They obviously have, like an apple slash, disney style, very loyal audience and that you can't I mean the switch by mid-year or a couple of months later will be the best-selling console in history. So I and I guess you could throw this into the um. This is the same, you know, it's just more of the same, right it's still, you know what nintendo's really got going for it exclusive games yeah right, mario, right mario, mario, zelda yeah it's all metroid like pokemon.
01:35:48
They have stuck to the fundamentals, I mean this this subscription services, multiple subscription services this time um, there's chat, group chat.
01:35:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's even a camera. You can you can see the people you're chatting with.
01:36:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Do they call it?
01:36:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Minect or something You're going to buy one. Kevin King, our producer and editor, is.
01:36:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think he's a big Not yet. I'm probably going to wait until Black Friday. Like Paul Kevin, you're kind of a childish geek You're probably going to get one, huh, but it looks cool, right. I mean, if it was 350 I think I would just get it. Yeah, it's tough. I don't know why that 100 bucks is tough on me, but I there's something about the number.
01:36:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It just it's like if you're a mario fan, I guess because you want the new mario cart and stuff.
01:36:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But uh, I can wait, I can wait no, I know my buddy, who immediately ordered the ps5 pro, has probably ordered two of these bloody things you can't tell until next week.
01:36:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You got to wait until the 9th.
01:36:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Plus, did you see the pre? Well, you have to have owned a Switch and have used it. They're trying to prevent scalpers from stealing them all away, right, and so the initial pre-order is going to be to people who can prove that they have used a Switch for some amount of time.
01:36:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They have a Switch with a current now on it yeah on it.
01:37:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah yeah, oh yeah, so I can I order it from the switch. Maybe that's how they'll. I don't know how it works, but like, yeah, the initial pre-orders are going to be for their most loyal customers, which, by the way, you know.
01:37:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sure, that's actually really smart. What a great way to yeah I respect that. Do you think microsoft would do an?
01:37:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
event uh, between now and then saying here's the xbox games on switch yeah, I.
01:37:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know that it would be switch specific, but they'll announce. You know they've been announcing games for both, or have they done switch?
01:37:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yet I guess.
01:37:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know they said they're going to switch, but I feel like most of the games that they've ported have been ps5, but uh I think at least some of them. I don't have a free to go to anymore, so yeah, no, you'll definitely see stuff on this, but I I don't know, maybe my, they wanted to keep it in-house, mostly for this initial thing. I don't know, I just thought there was going to be something you know, and it wasn't oh, I could watch Nintendo Direct on the switch.
01:37:52
this event was apparently kind of a disaster too. I guess it glitched up a bunch and ah, oops boy, yeah, they must have had Microsoft do it for him. Oops Boy, yeah, they must've had Microsoft do it for him.
01:38:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I don't know. You sure? You sure it wasn't Twitter? Okay, no.
01:38:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm actually not. I could have been Twitter. Yeah, sure, I don't know, I don't know. Anyway, yeah, I don't care about Mario, but like I, I don't you you have to care about. I don't care about Zelda, but what I do care about is a screen with the controller stuff on the sides that I can actually see. You know, it's not like a phone.
01:38:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Steam Deck? Yeah, I think this is. I don't know. I feel like this is better than the Steam Deck. I feel like it's more.
01:38:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, this is that mainstream versus it depends on the gamer.
01:38:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, gamer yeah yeah, this is yeah, I was surprised it's anything bad about Nintendo. I think they have played the. They played the video game industry smarter than any of them. Yep, yeah, I agree with that. They stick to their knitting. They care about the kids and they always go off.
01:38:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're Apple like. In that way they do this kind of their take on something and it's always off into the, into the arms before I can buy it, I have to register my interest you pre-ordered the pre-order. Congratulations, can you?
01:39:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
identify these fire hydrants to scan the qr code and I oh my gosh well, that's when you're in charge.
01:39:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When you're powerful, right you can I gotta say this like I have some friends uh friends whose kids actually are into nintendo hacking oh they're, uh they're hacking. Old resistance is non-trivial like it's what does it mean in?
01:39:35
nintendo. Like what is that? Well, you know that there's piratable games and that there's a account changes like there's a bunch of things you can do in there, but they'll simply block your device. You know there's piratable games and that there's account changes Like there's a bunch of things you can do in there, but they'll simply block your device. You know, if you get caught it's like boom you can't log in.
01:39:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So all the copy protection, DRM, blah, blah, blah, whatever can all be traced back to the original NES, and the reason they did that was because the video game market had collapsed and they didn't want all this low-quality crap to appear on the console, like it happened with the Atari 2600 especially. And it was a quality thing, but what they really did was turn it into a Well the App Store model Everything's going to go through us if you want to publish on the system. And they did that in 1986 or whatever year that was.
01:40:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it was in response to Atari which allowed so much crap Right.
01:40:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, this is not just related to tech, but I mean, there are a million examples of we didn't do this to hurt the world, we did it for a good reason and yep, and you also hurt the world. Mcdonald's was a response to everyone's in cars and there's a need for this kind of a new kind of a restaurant. Uh, that also killed us as a country. Um, so they, they did both. Congratulations. Uh, you know, I guess it's like the unintended consequences thing or whatever.
01:40:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know you're saying when he got his device locked out, just told his father and his father passed it over to me and I chatted with him a bit. I'm like there's really only one work around. You have to get another one, yeah. And then the father's like and I am not buying it I was.
01:41:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My kids both came home over the holidays and they both have a switch um which I was.
01:41:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was like my 30 somethings.
01:41:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Both have switches if you're a student um, you don't have room for a big game layout.
01:41:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that makes a lot of sense I have a switch in this apartment now in the corner also animal crossing switch.
01:41:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they were always on, by the way, I have the animal crossing switch. That's the one I have the Animal Crossing switch.
01:41:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the one I have. It's a cult man. It's a thing that saved me. During COVID, I played a lot of Animal Crossing, a lot of Animal Crossing.
01:41:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's just so nice and happy in there too, that's right, this was a happy country.
01:41:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody was wearing masks. It was great.
01:42:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm pretty sure I was all call of duty during the covet.
01:42:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I came out of it angrier than I was going in.
01:42:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, yeah, we, yeah. We each deal our pandemics the own way.
01:42:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe some of us are gardening, some of us are teabagging, it's the same yep, that's right richard, you're on fire today some people hug some people I'm warming up for intelligent machines I think you're gonna fit right in there yeah, it's a different way of doing things.
01:42:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's all.
01:42:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, yep, you say tomato now I have to find my two-factor authentication.
01:42:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I knew it, here we go if I were to ask you if you knew what a fire heart it looked like, would you be able to pick it out of a photo?
01:42:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't see what in my head. All right, what else is new?
01:42:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
oh yes, uh, where are we? Oh, yes, other things have happened. Um, you'll be delighted to know that amazon luna still exists and they have signed a multi-year agreement with ea to bring many of their best games to that platform, and three of them are available now. More are on the way. You need that. You know it's 10 bucks a month, subscription plus blah, blah, blah, whatever.
01:43:10
I haven't looked at Luna in a while. I should probably take a look at this again. It just reminds me that if you're not doing this every month, like once or twice a month, you should do this, which is go to the Amazon Prime Gaming website and just grab the free games you want from there, because some of them are really good, Every month. It's kind of a crazy thing that they do, which is really nice. But yeah, Luna, I looked at this. It was probably a couple of years ago now it's been a while. But if you use their controller and again, this is out of date information now, but it was a little bit like Stadia in that you had that kind of direct connection kind of effect where it was a little bit better than using an Xbox controller or whatever, because it would connect to the service.
01:43:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm really appreciating their partnering with Electronic Arts, because those guys have done so well with online games.
01:43:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hmm, okay, I don't play any of these games, but when you see the titles you're like like, yeah, like you've heard of every one of these very sarcastic, because I think okay, well, they do the like all the sport canceled online games.
01:44:07
Oh, I see well they, but they do all the sports games and I to me, like that's. I don't know if that's online or if you just play in person with people, but I think those are huge. They have the star wars games, dead space uh, death stranding, which I think is a sequel coming soon. Yeah, the Metro games, those are going to climb. I don't know. I have a very limited view of the online gaming space so I'm not really sure, but anyway, so that's happening. And then Microsoft announced Backbone is this company that makes these controllers for phones, and so there's a new version of their controller for the Xbox that looks like an Xbox controller.
01:44:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
These new controllers, they're making the mobility you know they're gorgeous and smart and 3D printable and I'm just blown away by what they're making there.
01:44:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wish to God that this thing worked with a iPad mini, you know.
01:45:02
I need like, just like one size up would be great, but it works with Androids and iPhones. So it's, you know whatever. 110 bucks, usb-c based. Obviously it looks good. I don't know. I mean, I've heard of the company. I've seen these kind of things. I've always kind of wanted one. This is the thing that will turn well, I guess, a phone, but better yet, a tablet, into a Switch or Steam Deck type thing, right with the two halves of the controller on either side. It's a good idea. And finally, today, because it is the beginning of April, we got a new list of Game Pass games across cloud, console and PC, and this time I actually recognize some of these games, it's all.
01:45:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Blitzcrank titles all the time.
01:45:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, this time actually pretty good, right? So Borderlands 3 Ultimate Edition is in there. That's a good game. Oh nice, still Wakes the Deep Diablo 3 Ultimate Edition, ultimate Evil.
01:46:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um still waits the deep, but Diablo for sure, yeah. And of course, borderlands is just a phenomenal. Excellent. Yeah, it's one of those few games where it doesn't matter which version you play, they're all a riot.
01:46:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they did something like um, cross Strike was like this for a while I'm not sure if it's still a thing or whatever. I know it's still a thing, but I'm'm not sure. It's not big like it used to be but where they just adopted this kind of neat art style that was also technically easier to draw than actual complex graphics like you would get with a. You mean Counter-Strike, right? Counter-strike, I'm sorry. What did I say? Cross-strike, counter-strike, I'm sorry. What did I say? Sorry, I'm stuck on.
01:46:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sorry, the style of Counter-Strike, and then they played it in with the whole cartoon sequence and the music. It was just really well done yeah. Or kill electrons. It's software.
01:46:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's all software. I like it. And yeah, I think that's it. That's all you got to say about that.
01:47:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, yep, yep, yep uh he's still trying to figure out what a hydrant is, isn't he?
01:47:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yes, he's like is it the plant? Oh damn it.
01:47:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh man. Which color are they painted?
01:47:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess I can't buy a Switch 2. Well, there you go, not this week.
01:47:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not you who.
01:47:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're watching Windows Weekly Paul Thurot, richard Campbell the back of the book is just around the corner. That's the place where we get the tips, the apps and the whiskey of the week. I know you want that, but before we get there, yeah, I'm going to beg. I'm going to beg for money for Club Twit, but I have to say it's a very affordable club. Seven bucks a month is all you have to pay to join the club. Now you do it. I think I would encourage you to do it, because you think this programming, the stuff we do, like windows weekly and and twit and all the other shows we do, are worth it. Because that's really the reason it's. It's to help support our programming. It's not to enrich anybody. It's not enough to enrich anybody. It doesn't go into my pocket at all. It goes into paying our hosts, paying our lighting bill and all of that. Yeah, we have advertisers. Advertisers do cover the bulk of it, but they there's still a shortfall and without the club we would have to cut a little bit more. So your, your seven bucks is very much appreciated. We do give you some benefits. You get ad free versions of all the shows you're paying us. We don't need to show ads to you, including this pitch. You wouldn't be seeing this. Uh, you also get access, uh, to the club, to a discord, which is a really fun hang. There are great people in there talking about not just our shows but all kinds of stuff. It's really my social network now. I just I just really like hanging out in club to it. Let's jump to the present and see what the club Twitters are saying about all this.
01:49:06
The they also. We do special events inside the club. We've got some events coming up. Thursday we're going to have our photo show with Chris Marquardt. We do that every month. We'll review your assignment, which was the word brilliant, and then we'll get some photography news. Paul does hands on windows uh, we have hands on mac with micah. Hands on tech with micah. Home theater geeks with scott wilkinson uh, we all record in there. Micah does his crafting corner. He's building some little lego uh, succulents, I believe. But you can do any kind of craft knitting, crochet, painting, whatever. You're building a rocket ship, a monster, it's, uh, it's a great place to hang out and be cozy while you're doing it.
01:49:51
Our coffee show is back this month, april 18th. Liz happy beans joins us. Anthony's doing the ai user group. Please show up for that if you, if you want to talk about using ai. I'm sorry I missed the last couple of them, but I will be in the next one, I promise.
01:50:09
And we've decided to do something new in the club and you'll see this, uh is brand new in our events. I don't know if you know this, but apple has been taking us down on YouTube and now Twitch. Every time we talk about or rebroadcast the Apple streams, that's their right, it's their. What am I doing? I'm pressing the wrong button? There we go. It's their copyright stream. So I, you know they can say you're not allowed to cover it, but we still would like to cover it, and so what we're going to do is we're going to not stream it publicly, but we're going to stream it in the club. So, mike and I this will be the first time we've done this June 9th, for the WWDC keynote, and because it's in the club we want you to come in, talk with us. You can share the broadcast with us, give us your thoughts and we're going to spend the whole day. It's all day.
01:50:57
Monday, june 9th we're not only going to do the keynote, we're going to do something we don't usually cover, which is the State of the Union speech that follows immediately after this, I think, maybe even more interesting, certainly more technical. So Mike and I will be back together again covering the WWDC keynote. I think we'll start doing that with all of our keynotes. We'll just do them inside the club. So if you want to watch those rebroadcasts or live broadcasts with breaking news, another reason to join the club For more information twittv, slash club, twit, and thanks in advance. We really appreciate it. It makes a big difference to us. As oh Boy says in our Discord, I love being part of the club. I wish I would have joined sooner. So there you go, don't be, uh, don't, don't delay. Join the club. All right, uh, now back we go to the show and paul thorat with his tip of the week paul yeah.
01:51:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so bill gates is giving away the source code to the pd. No, sorry to the PD, no, sorry To the Altair Basic to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Microsoft. But I'm not a billionaire so I can't give away stuff. But actually I tried, I was going to give away my books but LeanPub wouldn't let me do it. So for the day, I guess for the next 24 hours anyway. The Windows 10, 11 field guide and windows everywhere are all 99 cents.
01:52:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What you're insane, paul. You're insane. I tried to make them crazy. It's crazy. You can pay more if you want yep, and I'd encourage you to do so, but the minimum price is now 99 cents, if well I I got.
01:52:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There is a service out there that will find these books for you for free, as I mentioned earlier.
01:52:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you know it's better for your soul, Plus you get the free updates, at least on the two of those or you could pay more. If you pay $20, the authors earn $16. That's a nice thing about LeanPub. You got a little slider there.
01:52:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm just trying to get rich like 30 cents at a time.
01:53:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's the way to do it? Yep, that's the way to do it. Let me look for the entire thorat catalog. Yeah, all the books. Windows 11 field guide I don't know why I was showing the windows 10 field guide that's and now included in the windows 11 field guide and windows everywhere, which I think is really cool. The rise and fall of the most important software platform of all time. Now just 99 cents Yep.
01:53:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Love it. It's bargain basement now just like windows.
01:53:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's very generous. That's only for today, though.
01:53:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Just for I'll probably go through the end of tomorrow just to give people time.
01:53:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Cause it takes them a while. I mean some people hear the episode, I mean some people hear the episode.
01:53:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean I'll put something on my site about it.
01:53:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Good, Eternal Spring is there? Also your guide? Yeah, this is our Mexico City guide. Before I go to Mexico City, I have to have this obviously In progress. Yeah, yeah.
01:53:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, just hit. Well, these are smaller pages because it's like guidebook size, but it's just about 500 pages long now, so it's getting wow that's awesome.
01:54:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a big, big city. Oh, you're still in. It's still a work in progress. 60, yeah, yeah, nice. Well, when I move there, uh, yeah, I'm gonna get a little place off the zocalo and then, uh, just hang out with. Yeah, we'd go a little further out than that.
01:54:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's a little too busy in there, yeah I can't afford roma norte I mean, that's no, you can, but you should go down to, uh uh, one of the further out areas and just like escape all the noise.
01:54:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I want the junk man, I want the guava picker.
01:54:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, you're not going to escape that. That's part of the fabric.
01:54:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gas today. Who needs gas? All right, anyway, that's nice, it's all. At leanpubcom, just search for the therot library. Do you? You would ever you can't do a humble bundle kind of thing, I guess, with uh god knows what I can do on this thing.
01:54:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know. I tried to it. There's a switch and it tells me I can make it zero, and then I do it. It's like you can't make this thing zero.
01:54:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you crazy?
01:54:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know it was like you trying to do the capture. I tried.
01:55:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I tried, but I'm not a human.
01:55:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I just didn't work. Anyway, yeah, I tried. So if you watch Hands on Windows, we go back and forth between tweak apps that can help you Windows 11 worked the way you want it to work and then AI plus new features in Windows 11. It's kind of become the normal theme. This is one I'll be doing soon. This is a really good one.
01:55:30
I'm not sure why I haven't ever covered this before, but it's called WinToys. It's free. You get it in the store. When you run it you'll see it's kind of a modern app that's got that sidebar with a bunch of stuff on it. You just go down to the last one. The last one is called Tweaks. That's where everything is. It's all the great stuff. Using this, it reminded me of the personal hell that I'm stuck in, which is that I write about Windows as it is for the book which I'm now giving away for 99 cents and also for my site. So I can't really do to Windows what I want to do with it, which no, it's not what you think, but I but rather you know disable some of the horrible behaviors, like I have to kind of see what they're doing and what regular people would see.
01:56:18
Yeah, and then a week or two ago I think, I discussed a file Explorer alternative file. It's a big problem in windows 11. Last year or so they've been bulking it up with a when UI. It's slow and buggy and like the default home screen loads really slow. It's garbage, you know. But the files app that I talked about is it's pretty, but it also has that same problem.
01:56:41
So one of the things that's available in this WinToys app which you can also do other ways I actually have a registry script for this is you get to switch to what they call the classic File Explorer, and what they mean by that is the pre-WinUI version of File Explorer. It looks like the Windows 10 File Explorer. Let me tell you something that one's really fast. I mean I don't mean it copies files faster, I mean it loads fast, does things fast, the ui changes fast, like there's no garbage, or it does what you ask. It's a file explorer, yeah, and so I'm like you know what? I think I'm just gonna do this now, like this is what I'm going to do. I I just can't take it anymore. I can't like I load the thing and it it sits there drawing in real time and it's like guys, it's 2025, come on.
01:57:26
So, like that's been one for me, I will say there's a bunch of stuff I recommend in the uh, my little tip article, like the stuff you should look at. Um, all of the start menu settings like recommendations, suggestions. I'll turn all this stuff off. That you know. Classic interface file export server. You can disable telemetry with this thing, turn off all the ads everywhere in the system, and you can do this otherwise. But there's a feature in windows that is fairly recent where you right click an icon in the task bar and one of the choices there will be end task, which is the equivalent of bringing up task manager and actually killing that thing. Like it actually ends the task, like you know sometimes, yeah, it actually works. So you should enable that too. Like that actually is sadly necessary. I haven't looked at this last one too much. This is a single switch.
01:58:18
It just says digital markets act right, dma, yeah, yeah yeah, so if you look this up, I wrote a story about this when it happened. But microsoft has a website where they explain all of the changes they're making to windows, but only in the european economic area to meet the legal requirements of the dma. So if you flip this switch, you uh can have those anywhere in the world.
01:58:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's great. It just tells windows that you're in the eu probably.
01:58:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you can uninstall edge, for example. Uh, you can uninstall bing. Um, you can do all kinds of things you can't do here. So, um, like I said, I haven't looked at that one too much. I did enable it. I'm gonna I am gonna screw around with this soon this is pretty sweet.
01:58:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks like these are all little registry.
01:59:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's right that it's doing and I know, I know that is what it is, because that's how I enable most of these things, and I've been thinking about writing an app like this. But the one thing I would add, like, if I ever do the app that I'm thinking of, it would be a little bit like the tweak section of this app. And the one thing I would add is that it would ironically, because I just complained about this I would ask you would just do this, but you could run something at every time the computer boots that would compare what was running and what setting certain settings were like. If you changed any settings in the app, you would look for those settings and see if they were still the same as you set them and if they're not, you could tell it to either show you like a notification or just change it back. Right, because one of my strong suspicions, which is based on the fact that this really happens, is that you install like a feature update which is annual and it resets some settings, right, and then you have to go in and figure out what those are and change them back.
01:59:58
I think, then this one I'm not sure, but I believe now, because Microsoft is just updating Windows all the time that there are cumulative updates that could arrive that might do that as well. So I'm really interested in something that would monitor Windows and then report back. Right, this is something I'm probably going to do, unless somebody I keep mentioning. I'm kind of hoping someone else just does it, but someday either I or someone else will do this. I think this is a good idea, because I feel like Windows does things behind your back um shameful shameful.
02:00:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, bogdan Petrosian, who wrote this. Wind toys is not a Microsoft tool, despite the kind of name might imply that it looks.
02:00:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It looks like a modern windows app like it's not it's nicely done it's it's got a nice design, a bunch of switches but yeah, you're thinking of power toys, which is a mic? Yeah, right, so that's why it's a little yeah someone was like so this is just like power toys, like actually this is nothing like power toys like power toys are standalone utilities that improve windows in whatever way, and sometimes they actually make their way into windows, which, granted, is very cool.
02:01:04
But, um, no, this is there, are it's? Remember? Windows used to always have these like hidden apis that, like the developers at microsoft would use, or hidden features, or whatever the this goes after these things that are built into the system, but microsoft either doesn't have a ui for or does have ui, and it's all over the place like, um, a lot of the privacy settings, for example, are in privacy settings in the settings app, but they're here, here, you know they're in a million different places and this thing is like click and it just does them all at one time. It's nice, yeah, it's a good one you know what I wish I had?
02:01:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish trying to get gitkub co GitHub Copilot to write my DevOps scripts for me. I just feel like that would be so handy. I wish there were somewhere I could learn about. But Leo, AI can't write code. I want to vibe. I want to do some vibe coding.
02:01:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just want to vibe code a setting like an admin script.
02:02:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, and guess what? Richard Campbell might just have an answer to my conundrum, uh-oh.
02:02:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I should have called this show Vibe Coding in PowerShell.
02:02:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I love it, but now you can use it for later. I love it. Yes, you still can.
02:02:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it had been five years since I had Jessica Dean on. Last time was like the fall of 2020. And back then she worked for Microsoft as a cloud advocate like the fall of 2020. And back then she worked for Microsoft as a cloud advocate. Now she works for GitHub as a developer advocate. So we ended up talking about GitHub Copilot and she really went down her workflow for how she does automation as an administrator using GitHub Copilot, Rather than, you know, going to the search bar. It's like first go to the LLM and talk about what automation you want to do, what script you want to write, even debate should you do some PowerShell or are there other ways? That sort of thing and then you know, iterate through until you get to a place. It really isn't that far off the whole Vibe code thing except let's be clear, we're talking sysadmins, and sysadmins, admins and system ends are many thing and vibe is not one of them. No, you know, we're really concerned about consistency and reliability.
02:03:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is the opposite, you know. That's why we wanted automation in the first place.
02:03:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Dreary hard coding yeah, no, we want stuff to be correct, because there are consequences when it's incorrect. Yes, and so we went through some of the settings you can play with on get on github, copilot and the chat modes using visual studio code and the various extensions to really get advantages of making all that stuff work well. And uh, yeah, great conversation really. I, I talked, we talked about github, copilot, the system in context before, but it's 2025 and things have moved on, and so it was good to get to the latest bits and that's what jess was all in on run as radio, episode 978 at run as radiocom, staring 1000 in the face.
02:03:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what are you gonna do for your thousandth? I think I'm just gonna throw a party yeah, for 6 500 people at the t-Mobile Arena in beautiful Las Vegas, nevada.
02:04:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was this week, oh okay, that's been done.
02:04:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'll be the summertime it's been done. Yeah Well, I think it's time to talk about the water of life, if you don't mind.
02:04:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Absolutely Better that than testicles anyway, I may have mentioned last week, as much as I was having glitchy problems in Microsoft studios that because it was during the MVP summit, I had been brought a lot of bottles of whiskey which I did not bring with me to Vegas. I took them home, but I had been meaning to talk about Highland Park for a while, so I've prepared that conversation for this. It's another very popular whiskey, without a doubt, and it's one of the island whiskeys. You know, we talked about the different regions of scottish whiskey, but the islands is kind of a misnomer, because generally when I say island whiskeys you mean isla or jira, maybe sky, which is in a very different location. But this is the orkneys and the orkneys are the old, good old orkneys, yes, so uh, the shetland Islands, of course, are even farther and the Faroe Islands even farther than that, but the Orkneys are the ones relatively up close. They're actually a group of about 70 islands, of which only three are really big. The largest one's called Mainland, which is hilarious. Maybe 20,000 people live, total, on the islands. Three-quarters of them live on Mainland, which is about 500 square kilometers, and there's only three towns across the whole set of islands that have more than 500 people in them, so it is very distributed there. The big town is Kirkwall. There's an overnight ferry from Aberdeen you can take, although there are other fairies, mostly just passenger fairies that come from great places like Scrabster and Gills and John O'Groats, which is all on Caithness, which is the northern part of the mainland of Scotland.
02:05:57
Why are people there? Well, very fertile soils, also an incredibly mild climate. The temperatures in the wintertime are about four degrees centigrade, maybe 39 Fahrenheit, and the highs in the summertime average is about 12 degrees only, like 55. So it's never that cold and it's never that hot. Yeah, they dip below freezing sometimes, but the Gulf Stream keeps it pretty steady there, but the wind is constant. There are virtually no trees of any kind. But there's been people there for a really long time.
02:06:30
They make more than their total power consumption electricity. Even though they're connected to the mainland. They actually dumping electricity into Scotland for the most part, and they're far enough north that at the summer solstice it doesn't get dark. At night they call it the simmer dim when it gets that bright. So it's an island. The islands are about farming, mostly sheep and cattle. There's still some grain growing there, of course. There's lots of fishing and then tourism is huge. Obviously it took a blow during the pandemic, but it's already back in the swing, and that's Highland Park is located up there. It's not the only distillery up there, there's also Scapa, and a couple of years ago the Dearness distillery opened as well.
02:07:10
Their big tourism attraction is Neolithic structures. So there's evidence that humans have been living on the Orkneys from as soon as the ice retreated back from there. So there's been artifacts found that are from 9,000 BC artifacts found that are from 9,000 BC. And there are standing buildings from 5,000 BC. So this is Mesolithic, not even Neolithic like the Middle Stone Age. And then, of course, the Neolithic peoples, which were part of the Daggerlands and all of that area, when the water was much lower because the ice was still retreating, and they were the megaliths, the folks who built standing stone structures, and there's a ton of them on the Orkneys, for as small as they are, the must see is like the ring of Brogdar, which is 90 or 60 standing stones in a ring. There's also the stones of Stennis, which includes the Odin stone. Just in case you weren't sure, the Norse connects to Enmeishau. And of course, I mentioned the neolithic village that's in scarabray, um, and there are literally still standing. They were buried, you know, under sands and things. Five thousand year old neolithic homes, uh, absolutely worth the look.
02:08:20
The romans knew about the orc neolithic. They call them the arcades or the lat, which was actually derived from the earlier Celtic names before the Norwegians showed up. The name itself is kind of funny, the word orc. There's actually a Celtic word, orc, which means pig. So there's a theory that the old name was the Island of the Young Pigs. But then when the pigs take control of it for the most part after that, although occasionally the Gauls come through, and then ultimately the Norse are in control by about 900 AD and the Orkneys were really the base of operations for the Nordic attacks throughout the UK islands for several hundred years. And of course the Norse word Ork means seal. So suddenly it was the island of seals, which the Orkneys have plenty of. And then finally, you know, as the Norse movements fade off, by the 1472 it's declared part of Scotland, like most of the rest of Scotland, and it's the kingdom of Scotland thereafter.
02:09:22
So Highland Park, as I mentioned, was near Kirkwall. It's just off the A961. If you want to drive there, it's in the southern part of the town Highland Park is, as I mentioned, was near Kirkwall. It's just off the A961. If you want to drive there, it's in the southern part of the town.
02:09:30
Highland Park is not named for the Highlands of Scotland which is on the mainland. It's actually named for High Park, which is where it's located. The grounds of Orkney are pretty low everywhere, no-transcript people's like. It is a character named Magnus Unsen, which again very Norwegian name who was both a priest and possibly a butcher by day but was also an illegal distiller and smuggler by night, and the record of him existing comes from a criminal charge in 1798 of illegal distillery up in High Park. We really don't really hear about him much again, but that same location gets an official license as a distillery in 1826 by one, robert Borwick. Don't know if he was related or not. It's all getting a bit fuzzy. It was one of the very first legal distillery license issued, certainly in the Orkneys but in most of Scotland.
02:10:43
1826 was pretty early on and for about 70 years it stays in the Borwick family through a couple of generations until it's eventually sold in 1895 to James Grant and that's Glenlivet, so back in the space side and they continue to operate it. Things get shuffled around for a few years Towards the end of Prohibition in 1937, it's acquired by Highland Distillers. So Highland Distillers has been operating since the late 1880s, 1887 or so, and they operated the Bonhaban and the Glenrothes Distillery, which we talked about a few weeks ago. And the Highland Distillers also acquired Glen Glassao, tamdew, famous Grouse, parkmore, glen Turret and the McAllen and then in 1999, were quote-unquote bought by the Edrington group, which is not really what happened. What happened is, after so many generations of the family that owned Highland Distillers moving on, they decided to create a trust to protect the these distilleries. You know, in the 90s was when Diageo was emerging and trying to take everything and so they built this legal structure to keep the group together and then transferred over shipping into the Edgerton group. So still the same families, just a new entity to different structure to keep the distilleries together. Highland Park is best known for getting the first perfect 100 point score in the ultimate whiskey challenge in 2013 for their Highland Park 25. I have never tasted it. You probably never will. The 2013 edition of a Highland Park, if you can find one, last sold at auction for about $1,200.
02:12:21
Now, if you're going to make whiskey in a windy farming area north of Scotland, you are not going to use wood and you're not going to use coal. You're going to use peat, because that's what you got. But not all peat is made equal. So most of the peat that we think about is from Islay, which is down in the southwest, which has a very strong sort of seaweed component to it. It tends to be more tarry and resinous. Even the mainland peats that have more lignin in from because they're just decayed plants so they have more trees in them have stronger flavors. There are no trees on the Orkneys, and so their peat is primarily sphagnum, moss and heather. That's what grows there, that's what decays there, that's what becomes peat bog there, and so it actually has a different scent and a different flavor.
02:13:12
Now, that being said, only 20% of the barley that's used in a Highland Park is actually the peated malt from the island. In fact, highland still does their own maltings, unlike almost any other distillery, although the majority of the barley in a Highland Park comes from the commercial processors. Highland Park talks about five keystones in the way they make their whiskey that they do hand-turned floor maltings, like I just described, with their peated barley. That they use what they call Hobster Moor peat, which is from the Hobster Moor, which is this heather peat, and that they use sherry casks, cool maturation and cask harmonization. Those are the five keystones. So 20% of the barley is this still hand-turned peated barley that they do themselves because none of the rest of them do this anymore. And then they use commercial pre-prepared grist. For the rest that means their PPM level is lower than most. You know.
02:14:07
Your typical Lagavulin is running about 50, 60 PPM. This is more like 12. So it's an intro to peat. It's really quite gentle and it's a sweeter peat anyway. So they do their big batch in the mash tun. They do their warts into Oregon pine washbacks. They've got a dozen of those. It's a 60-hour fermentation, which is not particularly long. It's not warm there so they don't have the time battles. They've only got four stills two wash stills at 18,000 liters, two spirit stills at 12,000 liters, relatively short with flat-lie arms. Nothing fancy about the still, it's the mixed peat and the mild peat. That's sort of the claim to fame for Highland Park.
02:14:49
But there's one other thing that Highland Park does that's fairly unique and that is that they do not use third-party barrels. They don't use any bourbon barrels. They don't even really use sherry barrels but they do Asian sherry. But here's how they do it Highland Distillers for many years has owned forests in both Missouri and in Spain and so they cut their own oak for their own barrels and then they age them with sherry. So they buy sherry for the purpose and they soak these new make barrels in sherry for two years before they put their own fill in it. They fill it at a fairly high level, at 69.5, but that's because the wood is new and so there's more ability to extract. On that they're not dealing with the fact that there's been previous spirit in the barrel, so they have more options on how they do that. They do very traditional storage, so concrete, concrete floors, but only three high horizontal racking because the climate is so mild there they don't have all those same problems. It's just wooden rack houses and uh, and then they combine their barrels into that cask uh combination to get to their flavor points, uh, and at 12 years they don't do any barrel mixing per se. It's all the same kinds of barrels across the board, except for they're both sherry barrels, just some Spanish oak and some American oak.
02:16:15
And you can buy this. The Bevmos have got them. They're about 43% alcohol, $50. So not extreme for a 12-year-old. It's kind of a bargain. You know you'll spend more on a 12-year-old Macallan for sure and you're going to get a nice intro to peat. It's pretty light and sweet. It's very drinkable and it's one of the components that goes into making famous grouse alongside the Macallan. So it's a special kind of whiskey. It won its titles for a reason and it's not a normal pick. If you've got a friend who likes whiskey, who's never tried it before, you should get it for the great gift it apparently goes very well with sweet chili crisps, so that's another thing going forward I like the idea of a starter pete this is, yeah, this is where you start.
02:17:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, this is the uh, this is the whiskey you start with.
02:17:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a fresh-faced, zesty whiskey yeah and, but again, it doesn't hit you too hard, right? But it does have some peat in it, so lots of people don't like peat. You know the first whiskey you ever tasted with a lag of woolen? No one would be upset yeah, that's, very peaty.
02:17:22
Yeah, so you know. Then you went over to the space sides and you were happy, right, you were drinking Macallan or you were drinking Avalor or something like that. And then somebody said well, you want to move a little bit more to stronger flavors. Highland Park's a good direction to go in.
02:17:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did also want to mention somebody in our Discord mentioned that the book I was talking about, programmers at Work, is now available online on the Internet Archive. So I don't I would assume that that's on kindle.
02:17:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's so weird like, yeah, you know it's a.
02:17:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it was one of the first ones I bought, you know a long time ago, like I really want to reread it because it's I mean, it's got dan bricklin on visit calc, yes, I know, bob frankston on visit calc. It's got, uh, got.
02:18:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hackman's author, Toru Iwatani. Yeah, Andy Hertzfeld in there.
02:18:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Andy Hertzfeld in the Mac operating system. John Warnock Wayne Postscript. Yes, I know, this is an artifact of the earlier Somewhat better. I'm going to pirate it. No, I'm just kidding the other thing I like on the back of it it's got an ad for peter norton's uh programming the ibm. That is amazing. That is which I own. Actually was a pretty good book yeah, and it bagged a bunch of peter norton books.
02:18:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I, I don't think I ever owned a norton product, but I bought a lot of his books. He had one on ibm which I just came into my brain ibm, pc assembly language right, it's excellent.
02:18:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know he was he, or his co-authors were, well, I'm sure whoever really wrote it, but whatever, I mean like, but yeah, norton, god, that's so weird he's now a rich fellow yeah, we think so investing in art.
02:19:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's an art connoisseur no, look like a Rich Trello thing to do. Yeah, somebody on the channels was asking about the depletion of peat and they're not wrong.
02:19:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's been depleted.
02:19:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're not making more, right, I mean? Well, they're also making sure they don't drain the wetlands, so they're protecting the peat that they have, they should. They've also learned to extract the flavors of peat that they have they should. They've also learned to extract the flavors of peat. So a lot of the industrial production of peated whiskey doesn't involve burning as much peat, so you get this flavor without depleting the peat bogs themselves. And they are making more. It just takes millennia.
02:19:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's the problem.
02:19:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We just need a couple of dinosaurs to slow, slow process, yeah an anaerobic digestion of plant matter there's bill gates oh, look at that picture.
02:19:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That yeah, in the wall street journal dot style.
02:19:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And there's uh, you know that people had that picture up on a wall and we're throwing darts at it well, he's redeemed himself, like Andrew Carnegie did with his good works later in life. Leo if the Nazis had won World War II and cured cancer, would we be having this conversation?
02:20:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me think about that actually.
02:20:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's my horribly exaggerated response to that kind of thing. I'm sorry.
02:20:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul, go to your favorite taco bar, and I know it's a little something I need to settle down.
02:20:35
I don't know, I'm sorry paul thurot is at thurotcom where you currently can get his books for 99 cents, should you choose. But pay a little more, he's worth it. Two bucks, I mean. Come on. Come on, it was everywhere. Uh, he filled windows 11, oh code. Complete, eternal spring guide to mexico city. He's also, of course, at the rotcom his blog and posts regularly there. If you become a premium member, there's some wonderful stuff, including the first drafts of all those books, uh, behind the paywall. So maybe spend the money there instead.
02:21:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Cheap best is yeah, no, whatever, however you want to do, it is fine.
02:21:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's all good, you have filthy bastards you dirty animals richard campbell's at run his radiocom and of course, dot net rocks is also there, the show he does with carl flanklin, and he will be sticking around. We're going to give you about 20 minutes to re recoup, to hydrate and recoup, and we will be. He'll be back on the air with, uh, intelligent machines, which is great. Thank you so much, my god good luck. My butt is killing me I have a fine gaming chair.
02:21:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the key I'm going to be spending about 20 minutes standing up. That's what I'm gonna do. Yeah, there you go.
02:21:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I man, I could get the blood to go back down. Yeah, thank you everybody for joining us. We do windows weekly every wednesday, 11 am, pacific 2 pm eastern time. That would be 1800 utc. And I mentioned when we do it because you can watch us produce a show live, including all the digressions, the swearing at one another, the fistfights, all of that. Uh, available, uh, only on the live streams, the misunderstanding misunderstanding later makeups the old leather butt himself.
02:22:27
Uh, just watch us. If you're in the club, on the club to discord or youtube. If you're not, youtube, twitch, tiktok, xcom, facebook, linkedin and kick. We're all over the place. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show, audio or video are available at our website twitchtv, slash, ww, and you can also go to the YouTube channel dedicated to windows. Weekly Great way to share a little clips, like maybe this Island park recommendation. Actually, we turn all of Richard's whiskey stories into a playlist which is available on the twit YouTube channel.
02:23:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
YouTube or something weird from my closetcom or something weird from my closetcom.
02:23:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love that you kept that site. That's great. Just maps to the youtube feed goes right to the feed. That's easy. That makes it easy, it's fun. Um, we will see you all next week. Thank you so much. Thank you, paul, thank you richard. I'll see you in a few minutes. Richard, you bet see you next time. All you winners and dozers on windows weekly.
