Windows Weekly Episode 802 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thra is here. We'll talk about Windows 11. Why there's so little usage of Windows 11 and what Microsoft could do to change that. There's some new beta channel builds and some new features. We'll talk about that Earnings A few extras. We'll talk about the new Via Chip that Qualcomm's announcing and how you can use Google One's VPN on your pc. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love from people you trust.

TWiT Intro (00:00:33):
This is

Leo Laporte (00:00:40):
Thiss. Is Windows Weekly, episode 802. Recorded Wednesday, November 9th, 2022. Tiny Cricket Hammer. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by Rocket Money, formally known as True. Bill, Are you wasting money on subscriptions? Cancel your unnecessary subscriptions right now in the app at Rocket money.com/windows. Seriously, it could save you hundreds a year, and by Lenovo, orchestrated by the experts at CDW to help transform your organization with Lenovo ThinkPads equipped to the Intel Evo platform for effortless connectivity and collaboration from anywhere. Learn more at cdw.com/lenovo client. It's time for Windows Weekly. The show we cover the latest news from Microsoft with What are you doing, Mr. Paul Thra. I can't stop talking. I have a problem. I don't know. It's a good, It's actually a good, You're like, I'm gonna set the show. And I'm like, No. It's a good thing for a show host to talk a lot.

(00:01:43):
People often write me and saying, Leo <laugh>, stop talking. I said, No. Right. That's my job. Paul throt thro.com is his blog, his site, Become a premium member and enjoy the goodness. And there's even more goodness@leanpub.com. That's where the field guide to Windows 11 now lives. Yay. Congratulations. And everyone who gets a copy of Field Guide for Windows 11 gets a copy of Field Guide for Windows 10. So That's right. You get it all. Do the math. Do the math. That's 21. If I add it up, <laugh>, that's pretty good. That's right. It's pretty good. Yeah. Good to see you, Mr. Thro. You too. Thank you. Thank you for your service in Pennsylvania. Well done <laugh>. Yep. That's two in a row for us here. Since we moved is there another state you'd like us to maybe move to next time? Yeah. Can you, we fix Georgia or maybe Florida. Florida, yeah. We have a lot of Republicans who listen this show and I'm just fooling around. Don't take it personally. <laugh>, take it personally. Well, I, I'll just say Pennsylvania last several years has been kind of a purple state. It's been an eye-opening experience, I would say. And not Blue now. Yeah. I mean

Paul Thurrott (00:02:59):
Historically actually Pennsylvania has been blue.

Leo Laporte (00:03:01):
Yeah, it was. Was that interim? I think

Paul Thurrott (00:03:03):
It was Reagan basically. <laugh> I think was the last one. Yeah. But

Leo Laporte (00:03:08):
I think last night we all won. You think

Paul Thurrott (00:03:10):
<laugh>? Well, that's the thing.

Leo Laporte (00:03:12):
We all won. Everybody won because nobody won. Sure. It was like, Yeah. Yeah. It was a tie. It was a tie. Which is great. I think that's fine. A tie is better than the alternative. Mr. Thro, Somebody just joined the chair. I'm saying, where's Mary Jo? I suppose it's appropriate that we might mention the Mary Jo has a new job direction.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:37):
Who is Mary Jo of whom you speak? I

Leo Laporte (00:03:39):
Know you've forgotten her already. She's in the rear view mirror, baby. So she's join us from time to time, as will

Paul Thurrott (00:03:46):
Audrey. She sends me, she texts me photos from her in bars at night and it's like, Okay, I get it. <laugh>, I could drink

Leo Laporte (00:03:52):
Now. No, she was going to the bars. Anyway. I don't think that that's changed. I think she misses you and I wouldn't be surprised if we see her here soon.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:01):
Yes, we will. We

Leo Laporte (00:04:02):
Will. Yeah. And others too. <affirmative>, I know Rich Campbell is gonna be joining us. That's a few times next month. So we're just gonna, It's back to the good old days of Windows Weekly with Paul and Lido and we might mix it up from time to time too.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:20):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:04:21):
I told my team <affirmative>. It's a delicate ecosystem.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:25):
<laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:04:26):
We don't wanna push Paul over the edge.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:29):
<laugh>. Yeah. I am an emotional wreck.

Leo Laporte (00:04:32):
<laugh> <laugh>. Well, would you like to talk about that, Mr. Throt or

Paul Thurrott (00:04:38):
Being an emotional wreck?

Leo Laporte (00:04:39):
We only have 50 minutes, so

Paul Thurrott (00:04:43):
<laugh> Sure.

Leo Laporte (00:04:44):
Let's get right to the matter at hand, which is Windows 11. Which is weird because I think Microsoft pushed as hard as it could to get Windows 11 onto every desktop and it ain't quite,

Paul Thurrott (00:04:59):
It's not even close. So I have my own theories about this. I also, I think it's important to kind of say up front, because naturally if you criticize for Microsoft for some strategy or if you criticize the product because it's lacking in some way, the natural response to that is to say, Well, what would you do? How would you fix it? Honestly, I don't know that it needs to be fixed. I don't know that there's anything anyone could do to make Windows 11 or just Windows like a smash success these days. I think this is the real reality of the world, but I think Microsoft went too far in one direction with Windows 10 with regards to everyone's getting it. We're gonna be on one version of Windows. It was really eight different versions of Windows cuz they revved it TWiTce every year. And then they did that for too long.

(00:05:48):
And I think the PC makers kind of came to Microsoft and said, Guys are we ever gonna do something exciting here cuz we don't have anything to sell. And I think that's where Windows 11 came out of Timing was interesting. It happened right at the end of, I know it's not really over, but the end of the pandemic so to speak. There was a pandemic era buying spree that would've happened regardless of any version of Windows and did <laugh>. And that was always gonna end. And I don't know that rushing Windows 11 out the door was the right thing to do at that time. I think if they had waited a year, had a more mature product, it would've been in better shape. Would that have changed the market? But how would that have changed things really?

Leo Laporte (00:06:29):
So you feel like they were trying to jump on, and we talked about the pending decline of wind at PC sales by offering something new to get people by. You saw this morning I saw a really kind of genuine letter from Mark Zuckerberg. Meta is now laying off 11,000 people. And to his credit, he took responsibility for something that I think has been the case all through. I think the markets are showing it. Windows are showing it, which is that the pandemic artificially boosted, in Matt's case boosted traffic in Windows case boosted sales. And then people thought, Oh that's gonna continue.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:11):
That's crazy though. That's the thing that bugs me. In other words, these tech giants, these giants of industry, these geniuses, these tech geniuses apparently all thought this was just gonna happen forever. It should bother anyone who follows companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Meta, whatever, that these people are that clueless because they all suffered from the exact same problem. There was this pandemic error rush. The worst thing that's happened to the planet, the worst last hundred years was the best thing that's ever happened to big tech. And it seemingly, no one understood this was temporary. The thing that bugs me the most about this is Amy Hood at Microsoft, cuz I follow Microsoft came out about a year ago and said, we didn't realize how important Windows was. We're gonna wow a

Leo Laporte (00:08:02):
Shock.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:03):
I mean, that's crazy to me.

Leo Laporte (00:08:06):
It's pretty funny.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:07):
It sad is what it is. Mark Zuckerberg admitting we oh, went too far. We pushed too hard. You're gonna hear this from a lot of tech CEOs, some version of it. And obviously how did you not see this coming right now? I don't know if everyone thought the floor was gonna follow, but I always look at things like Windows usage or PC sales up, down, whatever. What is this thing gonna look like? I talk about this kind of new normal or a plateauing, like PC sales were falling for a while. They kind of Rose A. Little bit that where do we settle? And we're in a position now what is good news to Big Tech is things are down, but they're still better than before the Pinda. Yeah. This is the thing we're saying. Well that's

Leo Laporte (00:08:53):
Also the message to Wall Street, which isn't getting it either. Right. Last week we were talking with Philip er dewitt about all the tech stocks doing so poorly while Apple did so well. And I pulled up graphs for meta. Google's a bad example. Meta's never coming back. But Google, Apple Face Netflix, all the big tech companies, Amazon. And they are still ahead of where they were in January, 2020. They're just not where they were in July, 2020.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:26):
Well, but the question's gonna be, does this slide continue, Right? I mean other words, is there a point where we're not ahead of before the

Leo Laporte (00:09:33):
Pandemic? Good point. But I mean that's the stock market do you think in terms of sales? That's That's where we're headed.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:41):
No, no. I'm just asking the question. I don't, because I've been looking at this stuff for so long. I viewed the pandemic era buying spree for what? It was a temporary, I wrote about this, It's a temporary surge. It was shocking to me. I'll just use Microsoft as the one example because that's again a company I really follow the most. For them to come out and say what they said about Windows was the most clueless, should have set off warning signals at Wall Street that these people have no, who are in charge, have no idea what they're talking about. That's crazy to me that those kinds of words came out of people's mouths. And now I worry there's gonna be an overreaction in the opposite direction. It's like, oh well we tried with Windows 11, I guess screw it, nothing we do matters anyway, so things are going south. And I think there's a balance to be had kind of in the middle, which is where I land on all things really. And

Leo Laporte (00:10:33):
I

Paul Thurrott (00:10:34):
Think the pandemic was extreme. I think what's gonna happen now is extreme. I think both these things are temporary and then we have to just see where we land on the other side of it. I do think it's gonna be about as good as it was before or even a little better depending on what market, what product, whatever. The Windows 11 one is confusing to me because with Windows 10, they open it up to everybody. And granted the situation was so different. We were coming off Windows eight x, it was terrible. Everyone wanted off. They look, we've fixed all the problems. PC centric, desktop centric laptop centric, not touch device that nobody has centric. And people kind of ate it up. They got caught up in that. There was some <laugh> bad dealings on Terry Myerson's part where they started counting VM installs. They were trying to get to that magic 1 billion number really fast, whatever. But they overcompensated, I would say in one direction it, it's clear to me with Windows 11, they're overcompensating in the opposite direction. So when they did what they did with Windows 10, it was very customer focused. I mean it's free, Here you go, it's free. It runs on everything you have. The hardware requirements haven't changed. Everything's great with Windows 11. It's really, this was done for the PC market. This doesn't benefit customers

Leo Laporte (00:11:49):
At all to help PC makers. OEM PC

Paul Thurrott (00:11:51):
Makers. Yeah, that's right. Because they artificially cut off devices that could upgrade on a certain generation of processors, which granted to give Microsoft some credit, if we look out to the expiration date of Windows 10, and we think about how old the newest unsupported processor is, we're looking at roughly, I think it's seven or eight years off the top of my head. It's a reasonable timeframe, honestly, for a generation of PCs. But the problem is they're doing it now. And so there are PCs right now that could run this thing easily. It's a simple cumulative update. It's no bigger or smaller than any Windows 10 update. This is something everyone could be on. It also kind of raises the issue, what's gonna happen in two or three years when Windows 10 goes out the pasture? Are they gonna do something like they did with Windows XP or with Windows seven where they extended the support life cycle for businesses only that we're gonna pay extra for that.

(00:12:47):
I mean, honestly, if the story is, well, okay, but can we take these existing computers and just put 'em on Windows 11? And Microsoft says, No, you can't do that. We have very strict hardware requirements that we're not upgrading. Yeah, that's gonna be get into an interesting, Yeah, it's gonna be an interesting situation. So this was a strategy of Microsoft's making. They did what they did, It was their choice. I think the hardware requirements are largely artificial. And I also, I've come up, I just invented this out of whole cloth this morning, but I was talking about this morning, and it occurred to me that one way Microsoft could get around this three years down the road is to say, Look, we're gonna ease the hardware requirements, but we're only gonna do it for businesses that are managed, that have central security solutions, centralized security solutions because we know you guys are gonna do the right thing with that stuff and protect all of the users.

(00:13:41):
We can't do it for people because we can't trust people to update their computers and be up to date with security and stuff, cuz they just don't do that. But if you're a managed environment, maybe that's the way, cuz that's gonna be the big customer base that in a few years is still on sixth, maybe seventh gen processors would go to Windows 11 but do not want to upgrade their computers yet. They might need a few more years. So we'll see. But you can see the result of what Microsoft did in the usage chart. So Stack Counter just came up with their monthly chart. They looked at how many computers have Windows 11 versus 10 versus seven versus other operating systems. I just looked at Windows. But Windows 11 a year in is only on about 15% of all Windows PCs. And that's a gain of six-ish percentage points over six months. What <laugh> like that's not very much. Even if you just look at new PC sales, you might think this should be higher than it is. And I think what this says in many, many ways is that businesses are sticking with Windows 10 interesting. Because they're probably getting new computers and they have the right with their license to install the version they want. And I bet the version they want is Windows

Leo Laporte (00:15:02):
10. Oh, that's interesting. So a consumer, because they're just gonna get what they get many, I would say any new PC is probably sold with 11. Certainly this one that Dell was. Yeah. But businesses in that situation, if they have an enterprise license, they get to choose.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:21):
That's right. They can do whatever

Leo Laporte (00:15:22):
They want. Oh, that's very interesting. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:15:24):
That's my theory. If you look at Windows sales over the past year have been pretty good. I mean obviously this year they're slowing down dramatically. But just from the first half year alone, I mean you think you'd see a little more movement on Windows 11 usage <affirmative>, but it's pretty low. I mean, Windows seven, for example, has almost 10% usage share. That has to be not a hundred percent, but a lot of that has to be those people in the extended support program who are paying. And that's running out I think in January, if I'm not mistaken. So we'll see what happens there. But the other thing too though is if you look at usage over time, Windows usage, Windows 10 usage has been pretty consistent over six months. 73 to 71%. Not much of a change. A lot of the growth that we've seen for Windows elevens such as it is, has come from other versions of Windows, not from Windows 10. Windows 10 has been kind of declining. I think we're gonna have another Windows seven situation on our hands, basically.

Leo Laporte (00:16:27):
Very interesting.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:28):
Yeah, that's curious.

Leo Laporte (00:16:29):
Yeah. You also, that you also raised that interesting specter of what happens when in 20, it's 2025 when

Paul Thurrott (00:16:40):
Yeah, October 20, 25, 10

Leo Laporte (00:16:41):
Roll rolls at the end of the line.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:44):
Well that's the thing to think about. So if you go back and look it up, I don't remember the date off the top of my head, but the last unsupported chip set generation, just looking at Intel, it was seventh gen, right? So seventh gen chips by the time October, 2025, runs around, I believe will be eight somewhere in the eight, nine year years old. Something like that. I probably have it in the article some, I don't remember the exact number. But it's like I said, for an individual <laugh> a reasonable amount of time. In other words, you bought a seventh gen PC the last day they were available, used that thing for seven to 10 years. That's a long time. I mean, it's reasonable to think that if you're gonna get another, you're gonna keep using a pc, you'll buy a new PC at that point. That's reasonable. And a business, it's on the edge of reasonable. I mean, they're definitely on a much slower upgrade cycle. And I know just because we talk to these people all the time, nobody is, nobody's interested in following Microsoft's cute little schedule. They wanna do their thing on their own schedule. Yeah. So we'll, I will see what happens.

Leo Laporte (00:17:50):
We've got new machines, new Dell power stations for the editors. I think we put 11 on it

Paul Thurrott (00:17:58):
And they were on eight before, weren't they on one or something

Leo Laporte (00:18:01):
Like that? Yeah. Well, but that's what businesses do. We didn't want, had a nice stable thing and were, as enterprise users, we had whatever that it's not in tune whatever that subscription is that keeps you up to date and all that. But that's no reason to change

Paul Thurrott (00:18:19):
The mentality. I think for a lot of people listening to this. And for me too, the mentality is Hey, this thing's working great, let's screw with it. Whereas that's not how businesses react. It's like, this thing's working great. Leave it alone. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:18:34):
That's not really what, what a company our company wants. Yeah. Because it's an ecosystem and once everything's working fine. And I think Microsoft must know that. I don't understand why they act

Paul Thurrott (00:18:48):
Actively, They absolutely know this. Yeah. Well, again, I'm not taking their side, but just to thinking about some of the things they've done and some of the things they've said. One of the things you'll hear from Microsoft, which is accurate, they'll talk to businesses and say, Look, upgrading to Windows 10 11 rather from 10 technically is no more difficult. No more unreliable, no more scary or weird or different than upgrading from Windows 10, version 21, H one to 21 H two or whatever. Make up any versions you want. It's not that big of a deal. And that is something that has changed a lot. If you think the upgrade from Windows XP to Windows seven or the upgrade from Windows seven to Windows 10, completely different story. But this time, because the one little thing that has come outta Windows is a service in six years of Windows 10 has been, they have kind of gotten that down.

(00:19:41):
And so there are still big giant feature updates that can come down the pipe and they could be disruptive and all that stuff. But Windows 11, it's basically a cumulative update. I mean, I know it changes the ui, it makes the things different and stuff like that, but it technically, what's happening to the computer is not that complex. It's not that unreliable. It's not something you have to be worried about. And they kind of go to the businesses with that and say, Look, it's not a big deal except that businesses don't necessarily want to change the UI of a system and have to retrain people. There are still some software compatibility concerns, although I think those two I think are minor these days compared to how they were in the past. I don't know. There's a reality out there, but there's also this mentality out there. And I think with businesses they just, it's like, yeah, we've heard the story before. We're good <laugh>, we're gonna stick with what we have. And I don't know how you get around that. And it doesn't help that they made it very difficult to qualify for it. I mean, you have to have very recent hardware for that to even make sense.

Leo Laporte (00:20:51):
Yeah. Interesting. We live in interesting times. I'm happy with Windows 11. I mean,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:59):
I am too. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:21:00):
It's not, there's nothing wrong with Windows 11, but he's saying that

Paul Thurrott (00:21:05):
Well <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:21:07):
It's not the same old thing.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:09):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean maybe it's just because of a lifetime of

Leo Laporte (00:21:13):
Actually you were that, weren't you <laugh>?

Paul Thurrott (00:21:14):
Yeah, no, there are things I was gonna say. There are things, put words into

Leo Laporte (00:21:18):
Your mouth. You were saying that <laugh> but not, You said it would've been better had they baked it a little longer.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:24):
Yeah, I think if they had just waited a year, that would've done it. They rushed that thing right out the door with very little testing and none of the testing influenced the first version. It's shocking how little the product has changed year over year. But then again, we're gonna talk about this October slash November update that just came out for everybody. And to give again, to give Microsoft a little bit of credit. They did throw out a little gimme for everybody you've been complaining about the task bar task manager thing. We barely tested it, but we're you gonna put it in anyway? Cuz we know you want it. You've been complaining. And I, That's nice. That checks one of the little boxes that I think people had. I don't know. I think it's fine. To me all upgrades need to be tested against going back to the old version and seeing if you miss anything. And Windows tend to me, just feels kind of old fashioned now, which is a weird thing to say. But I think Windows seven survives the upgrade test, I guess, if that makes sense. Just from a usability

Leo Laporte (00:22:31):
Perspective. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:32):
Or a look and feel perspective. Yeah, it's nice.

Leo Laporte (00:22:36):
It's stable. And I'm on the, as we know, stuck apparently on the release the lease beta. But it's been fine.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:44):
Well actually that's a good point. So did you patch Tuesday was yesterday. Oh, should I check? Have you, Yeah, you should absolutely check. You can have some big updates in there. See if one of them is gonna be like a kb. It's like a 9 1 9 9 8 0 2, something like that. Actually, just look up the exact number. It said a KB 5 0 1 9 9 80. Sorry. Yeah that will be, We're calling this different things, but it's sort of the october slash november update. So last month there was a preview version of it that you could get if you were seeking it this month. Everyone's gonna get it eventually automatically. But you could seek and get it today. And this will bring those additional features into the product that were promised for 22 H two. But were delivered a little bit later because Microsoft, I dunno.

Leo Laporte (00:23:34):
So all I got you must have happened overnight cuz all I got is a Bluetooth windows blue Intel Bluetooth update. Your device is still set up to get insider builds.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:44):
But do this run win like Windows qr. Yeah. And then win.

Leo Laporte (00:23:51):
It does say I'm queued for un enrollment, but it said that forever. I'm on bill. 2, 2 2. Let's see. 22 6 23, 8 85, 22, 2 8, 80, 85. Yeah. <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (00:24:04):
You never even heard of it. I don't even know what that Oh cuz you're in the, You're in. Yeah, you're a little bit ahead. Yeah cuz the current stable build is 819.

Leo Laporte (00:24:14):
Yeah, well that's what I said. I'm on this

Paul Thurrott (00:24:17):
Ge. See I don't know how you're ever gonna get out of this <laugh>. It's so, it's so terrible with they're doing with this. What's the primary build number? Is it 22 6 21 or

Leo Laporte (00:24:27):
6 23.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:29):
6 23, okay. Yeah, because the beta channel has versions that people getting features and people are not getting features.

Leo Laporte (00:24:37):
I'm getting preview builds. The release preview builds. Yeah, that's the one. I'm not on the fast ring. I'm on a whatever on what they call the beta channel. Now

Paul Thurrott (00:24:47):
The beta

Leo Laporte (00:24:48):
Channel, which by the way it says recommended next to it. Sure,

Paul Thurrott (00:24:52):
Sure. It is sort of a one way dead end street. But you'll like it. It's a nice little cul-de-sac.

Leo Laporte (00:24:58):
You head down this cul-de-sac. Yeah. So we've talked, we always talk about this window, the window that closes and so forth. This is not not ever gonna now I'm just gonna always stay here, is that

Paul Thurrott (00:25:12):
I feel like they have to address this. So we keep pushing off the, When's the time? When's the time, right? So Windows 1122 H two s gonna come out or did come out. Surely this will be the time. Nope. Okay. Nope. Oh, oh, hold on. There's extra features. October, November. All right. October. Their peaches wrote. Yeah. Nope.

Leo Laporte (00:25:31):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:32):
Right. Hold on November. Everyone's gotta 'em in November. Surely this will be the time every week I look for some submissive from the insider program saying, Okay guys, it's magic window time. They never call it that. But if you wanna start jumping ship from different channels and maybe back unstable, which is what you want, this is the time to do that. But they've, I don't know what they're doing.

Leo Laporte (00:25:58):
Anthony Nielsen, in the process of getting these new edit stations all running says when asked by Adam, the fantom in our discord <affirmative>, do the editors like it? He says, There are some annoying file explorer quirks. And there were some pretty big annoyances with it. But I figured out workarounds mostly. I think you've been talking about those the file explorer differences.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:27):
So I just had to rerecord an episode of Hands on Windows where there was some kind of a glitch with the original recorder. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, no, no, it's okay. But this stuff is just frozen in my brain now. So it is a goofy fact that there were three different versions of File Explorer that have appeared in Windows 11 in one year. Oh man. There's the version that shipped with the original version of Windows 11. There's the version that shipped with 22 H two and then there's the version that just shipped with this October slash November update. And that last version is the one, everyone thinks of it as the tabs update because it adds tabs. But actually there are two other major updates that occurred, UI updates that occurred with this release. And I don't feel like anyone understands what's going on and it's a very hard thing to explain.

(00:27:14):
But in the default view of File Explorer, the home page as they call it, which is a ridiculous name is has three sections. Now there's a quick access section, which is typically those folders that are, we used to think of as system folders, desktop downloads documents, pictures, music and videos. It's dynamic. So as you add, use your system, it will see you're going into screenshots a lot. We're gonna add screenshots to quick access. And quick access appears on the homepage, but it also appears in this navigation pan on the side. Now people like me who overthink things <laugh>, I don't want this default view. So I customize it and I get rid of all the folders I don't need. And when I delete those, they delete them from quick access and that means they're gone from the home page, if you will, in File Explorer.

(00:28:08):
But they're also gone from the navigation pain. I've already lost 99% of people in the same, cuz this is very hard to explain, but in the old days, so for example, I'll just give a concrete example. I access the pictures folder from time to time, but not every day. So I don't want it there all the time. It's just taking up space. And in the old days, and by the old days, I mean before three weeks ago, I could go to my PC view and you would see those system folders above your drives. Meaning desktop pictures, music documents video, whatever else. Downloads I think was one. So in other words, if I got rid of them from Quick View, no problem. They were still available in File Explorer. Well that's not true anymore. So in 22 H two plus the November update, those things are gone. Just gone. They don't show them anymore. So if I get rid of pictures, which is the example that I use because this happens to me all of a sudden, there's no way to easily access the pictures folder in File Explorer because I've removed it from Quick Access and those folders no longer appear in this pc.

(00:29:15):
So there's a workaround. The workaround is from home or from this pc, you can click, there's an up arrow button now to go up, navigate up into the folder hierarchy. When you do that, actually it's a view of your desktop that has all of those folders, desktop documents, downloads, music pictures, videos as well as some other stuff. And then you can get to it that way. So I know how to do that. But <laugh>, it's just like it's extra step. It's just a very hard thing to describe with words. Hopefully in the hands on window video, I show it. So hopefully can that will a little more sense to people. But it's these little differences that they just don't make sense, they don't like, it's not better, it's just different.

Leo Laporte (00:30:06):
Yeah. Well everybody should watch Hands On Windows. You have to be a member of Club TWiT to do that. Or you could buy it for 2 99 a month. Seven bucks a month gets you club TWiT and all of the benefits thereof, including hands on Windows, hands on Mac at free versions of shows, the Discord, all that stuff. So I think hands on Windows alone is worth it. Worth the price of admission.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:30):
Well I'm not gonna make that claim, but I do think <laugh> I club to is a good deal. I think it's a good program. Certainly I would pay for all of it cuz there's so much more there. But this is a weird one. Be like this File explorer thing I've been talking about is not something that's in the book because the book is just like, look, this is File Explorer. Right? I'm not gonna go through the history of File Explorer. No. It doesn't matter what it was except that this is what it is. Aren't

Leo Laporte (00:30:53):
There users Users though in different states?

Paul Thurrott (00:30:56):
There are. And actually <laugh>, this is a huge problem. So you're waiting for that window where you can take your beta channel PC and get back to stable, which is completely reasonable. And the UI says will be possible. I am waiting for a day where we're all in the same build number and I mean stable, like people unstable and we all see the same features. But actually that's not the case.

Leo Laporte (00:31:21):
Which makes it hard for you.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:23):
It's very hard. So for the computer I'm using right now, for example, I'm gonna just jump ahead a bit cuz this is brought

Leo Laporte (00:31:29):
This up. I've got the image right here.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:31):
So I took a picture of this. So this, listen, I have 22 H two plus the November update on possibly a dozen computers on one of them.

Leo Laporte (00:31:42):
<laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:43):
This one, the one I'm using right now. The search button looks different. It

Leo Laporte (00:31:47):
Has a, it's not the word search.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:50):
So it's not it not in the insider program, it's just,

Leo Laporte (00:31:56):
Well it must be, it's an AB test, right? I

Paul Thurrott (00:31:59):
But why would you be doing that with Stable? Yeah, that doesn't make sense. Also we talked about this I think last week. Generally speaking, I tell people you've got all these task bar buttons. You can get rid of all of them because if you know the keyboard shortcuts, you don't need 'em taking up space in your task bar. But there are actually some exceptions to that. One of them is the task view because you can mouse over that and get your desktops ui, the virtual desktops thing, which is nice. If you don't have that button there, that goes away. Well one of the nice things about search, not that I think anyone should use this thing, but if you're using search in Windows if you actually use the thing, you can mouse over that and what you'll see is previous searches that can be handy. You did a search for something, I need to go find that thing again. It's in the popup. That's nice. Well on this computer <laugh> with the new search button, that top popup does not appear <laugh>. So it looks different and it does less <laugh>. I don't know, I have no idea why I mystery it being institutionalized. I like

(00:33:10):
Really stress over this stuff. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's

Leo Laporte (00:33:13):
Happening. And it is kind of your business, your chosen. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:33:16):
I guess so. Right <laugh>. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:33:19):
I don't blame you. And like I said, it must be difficult to write about it because you don't want four different versions of this

Paul Thurrott (00:33:27):
Task part. I can tell you what, I never want to write the following words. When you click on this button, the following may happen, may

Leo Laporte (00:33:33):
Happen

Paul Thurrott (00:33:34):
<laugh>. Yeah, no, nothing in

Leo Laporte (00:33:36):
Computer should be a may happen. It's a deterministic system.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:40):
If you're lucky, you may see this window. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. So it's possible that this search button is just a mistake. Maybe it goes away over time. Maybe it becomes this over time. I don't know. I would hate for them to change the search icon in the task bar because I would have to fix approximately a thousand screenshots so far. <laugh>, right? Well as you know, it's there all the time.

Leo Laporte (00:34:05):
I am living in the future and I don't see it <affirmative>. So

Paul Thurrott (00:34:08):
There you go. So you have search on your task bar, but it's a little,

Leo Laporte (00:34:13):
Just the magnifying glass with nothing else. You have the magnifying glass with some text in a

Paul Thurrott (00:34:16):
And so if you mouse over that, you'll see the little popup I was talking about. I would

Leo Laporte (00:34:20):
Imagine. Yes. Select here to search. And then I see the most recent things I've opened,

Paul Thurrott (00:34:26):
Which is nice. Now I don't see that on mine.

Leo Laporte (00:34:29):
<laugh>, what do you see when you hover over it?

Paul Thurrott (00:34:31):
Nothing. It doesn't do anything. It's the only button on the task bar that doesn't do anything. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:34:34):
That's frustrating. Cause that's actually useful.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:37):
Yep. It's like when you have a wisdom tooth comes in, but it grows in next to your tooth and you're like, what is this extra thing? I don't know. What is it doing? Nothing. It's just in the way <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:34:50):
I think you're gonna need some oral surgery on your windows.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:54):
Yeah, a root canal is what I need for sure. Just real quick, I did wanna step through the new features that Oh yeah. In

Leo Laporte (00:35:01):
This new KB 1 99 80. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:05):
And actually here's something, I dunno if you can do this on screen, you can try this. This is kind of

Leo Laporte (00:35:08):
Interesting. I can't for some reason right now.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:10):
Oh, you don't have,

Leo Laporte (00:35:10):
I have my Windows machine and I have an H DM I switcher and this is one of, we were talking before the show how these little paper cuts, these minor annoyances add up. So half the time I can pull up my Windows screen, half the time's blank and I don't know, I've just plucked, I've plugged everything and I can't get it worked.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:31):
Okay. Okay. Oh this is an exercise for the, No, it's fine. People can try this. Everyone knows file explorer tabs. The big thing, like I mentioned, new home screen, new navigation pain, That stuff has changed too. I think that's a bigger deal. There's a couple of minor things that change task bar overflow, which you'll only see if you have 50 icons on your task bar. I don't think that's a particularly big deal, but it has kind of a Windows 11 look and feel. Okay, fine. I call these subtle improvements to nearby share because they're so subtle I can't find them. But I believe what it means is if you use nearby share, which by the way I use every day and recommend strongly, it's a great feature. I use it because I take screenshots on one PC and need to get 'em over to the PC that I'm building the book on.

(00:36:14):
Or that's a way to share files between computers on the same network. It works over Bluetooth or over wifi. Obviously wifi is a bigger distance and better performance and just a good, it's a nice little feature. One of, I don't think anyone really knows about it. It's in Windows 10. It's in Windows 11, you have to turn it on to use it, et cetera, et cetera. Supposedly that can find more PCs, more devices that are compatible with it. These are all PCs. I don't know why they keep calling the devices, but I, I've seen no difference. But that's one. The one you can see, and this is an extremely minor feature, but there's something called suggested actions. And so if you go into a document creation app of any kinda like Notepad works fine and you type a phone number or you type a date or a time and then you select that thing and copy it to the clipboard, you'll see a new popup comes up and it's nice little Windows ui, a Windows 11 style ui.

(00:37:13):
And if it's a phone number, what it will do is offer to call that number using a calling app on your phone. Nice. So that could be Skype or whatever apps you have. That's nice. And if it's a date or time, it will, one of the options will be start a new meeting or a new event on that day or time. Content aware clipboard, I'll call that. There you go. And it is extremely limited because it's literally phone numbers, dates and times. That's the whole <laugh> extent of it. So it's the first release. I mean maybe it'll expand over time, but I, it's nice, it reminds me a little bit of not quick actions. There used to be a thing in office, God this pairs back to 2003 or seven. There was a quick, quick action quick, I forget the name of it. But there was a thing like this, you could slack text right click and it would pop up this new style of menu and it's sort of like that but it's system wide and not office specific and it's limited. But those are pretty much the new features. And I think that kind of rounds out the 22 feature set for now. We're gonna have future moment updates. But for now, for today, I would say for this year, that's probably where we're gonna be at. Except for the stupid search button. Which <laugh> still trying to figure that one out. Strange. Do you think somebody back at the home office saying, Hey it's the rats, let's, let's screw exactly. Let's flip the switch. Screw screw, screw his brain. Yeah,

(00:38:36):
I think if people knew how much I yelled at computers <laugh>, they would be worried

Leo Laporte (00:38:42):
About you. Maybe the computers know maybe that's why they're harassing you <laugh>. You ever think of that?

Paul Thurrott (00:38:46):
Yeah, I just want stuff to work. I think it's reasonable to want things to work

Leo Laporte (00:38:51):
Well. And like I said, you've got a much bigger dog in this hunt for a normal person wouldn't even know that they don't have the usual tax bar. But as an author you've gotta document it and then they come on this show and it's different and I've got a different and it's very frustrating. Freaks out. And honestly you lost functionality cuz the ability to hover over it and see your three previous searches is

Paul Thurrott (00:39:14):
Very good reason to have that thing be there. Yes. Because it otherwise just get rid of it has no reason for it to be there. You can bring up search for the keyboard shortcut. You can get to search from start you. There's no reason for that thing to be there. Actually I think the little pop ups kind of a nice feature. It is. If you use window search,

Leo Laporte (00:39:31):
I didn't know about it until you told me about it a couple weeks ago. Yeah. But yeah, it is. I always do Windows key and type the first shoe letters. That's always what I do. But it's nice to know if I'm gonna go back. I just remember I just did my settings. So if I want to go back and check Windows updates again, it's right there. Cause I just did it

Paul Thurrott (00:39:51):
So compulsive. I close things reflexively without me thinking about it. So I'll open a browser tab, I'll make a search. Okay good. And then I go and then I close it and I go do something. I'm like, but I go, it's gone. Or the window was gone in the exact location that some files at and I gotta go retrace those steps. I do this all the time and I know I do it and I can't stop it.

Leo Laporte (00:40:15):
Just looking at the updates that I got yesterday, I guess must have been the middle of the night. Is that normal? If you don't seek it, the Tuesday updates just happen.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:26):
Not the day one. But also you're on beta so you might not be getting the same. Yeah. So after you installed the Bluetooth update and did that conclude? I mean that was

Leo Laporte (00:40:36):
It. Now I have everything I did. Yeah, I have everything. So I think overnight it must have done it well. I'm looking for 99 80. I don't see 99 80, but I guess I wouldn't get that cuz I'm in.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:48):
Yeah, right. Do So when you right click on the task bar, do you have an option for task manager?

Leo Laporte (00:40:54):
Yeah, I've had that for a while I think. Yeah, right.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:57):
And I, we'll try, well just try this then bring up notepad,

Leo Laporte (00:41:00):
Notepad

Paul Thurrott (00:41:01):
Type in.

Leo Laporte (00:41:02):
I haven't done that in a while. Okay. <laugh>, you're trying to turn me into, You just miss through that pad. Okay. Got notepad open. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:09):
As you'll notice it's a feature rich application Leo. So it's dark

Leo Laporte (00:41:12):
Mode. I like that.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:14):
Yeah, I do too actually. So type in a phone number.

Leo Laporte (00:41:16):
Okay. Oh yeah. As you

Paul Thurrott (00:41:17):
Wish know. Yeah. As yeah. And select that phone number and

Leo Laporte (00:41:21):
Right click. Oh yeah, good idea. Let's try this here that you just mentioned. So copy it.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:28):
<affirmative>. Well, yes, copy it. It

Leo Laporte (00:41:30):
Doesn't say anything about being a phone number. Now how do I, Oh now it says call number.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:35):
There you go. So that's, that's suggestion. That's

Leo Laporte (00:41:38):
A popup over it. There's three dots to the right of that. And I can go to clipboard settings to turn this off. So I have to copy it on the clipboard, but then it pops up. That's a little weird. It didn't know it was a phone number until I copied it. Right. Yeah. And of course I don't have a phone app, so it's not doing anything. That's the other weird thing cuz I do have apps that could dial out on this machine. But it wants to have your phone do it, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:42:03):
No, it will work with an app on your computer, but it probably has to be compatible with whatever. It should launch.

Leo Laporte (00:42:09):
Wait a minute. What launch?

Paul Thurrott (00:42:10):
It should just come up. It should come up honestly. Yeah. Teams might come up

Leo Laporte (00:42:14):
Make and receive calls from your pc. Just connect your phone with this PC is start dialing, right? We do this. I do this last week. Okay. This is the year

Paul Thurrott (00:42:25):
Fun. We're gonna have in a very special episode of Win This Weekly. Leo is gonna pave his computer again

Leo Laporte (00:42:30):
And they again. Yeah. All right. Anyway, so yeah, I had that all set up, which it looks like I do <affirmative>. I see my messages.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:41):
Oh, then you should be able to call

Leo Laporte (00:42:43):
Right from there. Yeah, you would think. And I see my photos. Calls are still getting set up. You may be asked to turn on Bluetooth discovery permission from your phone. Ah, okay. Let's see. Yes, we need some permissions. And this is on a Pixel seven. This is not on Hung <laugh>. I like Myna hung. Okay. I gave my daughter Myna hung, so now it's just spinning. That's what happened last time.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:12):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:43:13):
The long spin.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:17):
Okay, well you get the theory <laugh>. I get the idea.

Leo Laporte (00:43:22):
It is a little weird because there are a lot of apps on that other platform that will just say, Oh, that's a phone number and give you the option to click it. It's weird that I have to copy it on my clipboard and then the clipboard. Does that work? Yeah. And now I have a highlight, a popup.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:38):
That's right. Yeah. No, it took me a while to figure out that's what it was. Because I kept, Yeah, where'd come from, I didn't have this feature. Where is it? And it's because I wasn't, You have to

Leo Laporte (00:43:50):
Copy it. Copy it, yeah. Right. Yep. Right. While I do the long spin. Should we do an ad? Would that be a, You finished this, right? Did you

Paul Thurrott (00:43:59):
Wanna talk about Yeah, actually let me just wind down the whole windows. Oh, there

Leo Laporte (00:44:02):
Are some new features. Okay. Yeah, yeah, sir.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:04):
Sorry. These are just actually, this are new features you have because you're in the beta channel. So they issued two new builds. I think this is late last week. I don't think any of these, Well, actually you could look at the widgets one. So the big one is way back January, I'd say January June, 2021. Microsoft first showed off Windows 11. One of the things they showed off was widgets full screen. So that feature is now in testing in the beta channel. And you can, they call it expanded view. It's basically full screen. So basically you have a little icon up in the corner that will make it go boo kind of out. And then you can bring it back and however you configure it, it will remember that. So the next time you open widgets will be in,

Leo Laporte (00:44:46):
Yeah, if you wanna use widgets,

Paul Thurrott (00:44:49):
My battery and power settings has a new energy recommendations option. So you can configure your PC for best energy efficiency. This is rarely what I want <laugh> when I'm using a computer. Mostly because when I do this, I have performance issues. But whatever, I appreciate Microsoft going in that direction. And then quick settings, which honestly is one of my favorite features in Windows 11, which is that thing you get when you click the network sound or power icon in the lower corner there. It's very similar to a feature in ChromeOS. Actually it's very similar in a feature to Macs as well. Gives you some little quick setting buttons. Yes. Wifi, Bluetooth, et cetera. If you have a computer with a neural processing unit, which you don't by the way, but if you do, oh you can add a Windows Studio effects button to this that will give you access to those features that you get with an Mpu background, blur, eye contact, automatic framing and voice focus.

Leo Laporte (00:45:46):
You have to have, Do you have have a surface to do this?

Paul Thurrott (00:45:50):
I think you have to have a Qualcomm based PC right now. Okay. So it has to have one of those.

Leo Laporte (00:45:55):
The new surfaces are that

Paul Thurrott (00:45:56):
The new Surface has it. And I think if you would just have a Qualcomm, whatever the new chip set is called, eight SE version three, whatever it is, whatever the new Qualcomm chip is for PCs, I think that will work

Leo Laporte (00:46:06):
Cool

Paul Thurrott (00:46:08):
As well. But it might, Yeah, maybe just the new surface that

Leo Laporte (00:46:13):
I wish I could show this. I'm so sorry. I gotta figure out.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:17):
So did you get the widgets thing to work?

Leo Laporte (00:46:21):
So I turned widgets back on cause I turned 'em off in the lower right hand, left hand corner. So I open it, but I don't see, No, it just looks like the normal widgets menu. I don't, And I don't see anywhere to change that.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:32):
So in the upper right corner there's, there's

Leo Laporte (00:46:34):
A picture of me and a plus sign is all, Oh, settings

Paul Thurrott (00:46:37):
Setting. Yeah. No. Okay. No, that's interesting.

Leo Laporte (00:46:40):
No, I think I don't have that.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:42):
It should be, Let me look. I can show you. It is, well I have a screenshot of it, but it's a plus sign and then there's a little, it's like arrow, a expanding arrow kind of thing. So you don't see that?

Leo Laporte (00:46:53):
No, I don't have, I'm looking at your now article about this. Let me

Paul Thurrott (00:46:59):
Put, It's like an expand contract. The icon change. Don't have that. Okay. Well actually I can explain that <laugh> cause this

Leo Laporte (00:47:08):
The Windows, This

Paul Thurrott (00:47:09):
Is the Windows Insider program. Leo, and these features are not going on all testers at the same time. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:47:14):
They're talking about this expand contract thing. I have the plus I have my head, but I don't have that. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:47:20):
Not, No, that's why

Leo Laporte (00:47:21):
I didn't

Paul Thurrott (00:47:22):
Get it. They're metering it out. Yeah, they're metering it out. So you'll get it eventually.

Leo Laporte (00:47:25):
Yeah. Oh shoot. Okay. Okay. Three new features, <affirmative> that I will get eventually <laugh>, right? As will the rest of us. Really when you think about it. But yeah, we'll all get it. Someday, someday, Someday, someday. All right, let's take a little break. Come back. Lots more to talk about. Have you ever, we have a new sponsor called Rocket Money. Do you ever use True Bill? Back in the day, I was a true, true Bill user forever. So when Rocket bought it and turned it into Rocket Money, I got it automatically and I've been using it ever since. So true Bill has been for a long time was the way that you would find subscriptions long forgotten that still come outta your bank account every month and cancel on this automatically. Rocket Money is formally true Bill and does that and more. It's actually, they've made it even better.

(00:48:27):
I know you're wasting money on subscriptions. You know it too. We all have in the back of our mind, I bet I have some monthly things that I've forgotten about 80% of people have subscriptions they forget about. Maybe it's for you maybe it's for a family member that's part of the problem. Maybe it's an unused Amazon Prime account or a Hulu that you never watch. Maybe you know, have it, but just, you know, forget that you just let it drag on. This is the best app for tracking expenses, for budgeting, for seeing my net worth is, but most importantly for getting rid of subscriptions. And this is an app that saves you money. I no longer waste money on subscriptions I don't even use. I found, in fact, this is a good time to do this Political campaign subscriptions that have been going on way longer than I meant them to.

(00:49:19):
They don't stop 'em automatically, but Rocket Money will. It's called Rocket Money. Do you know how much your subscriptions really cost? Most Americans, if you ask them and they did a survey, I think they spent about 80 bucks a month on subscriptions a lot. But actually the true number closer to $200 or more, you could be wasting hundreds of dollars every month on subscriptions you don't know about. We're all in this boat, but this is the solution. Rocket Money, it shows you all your subscriptions in one place, cancels the subscriptions you don't want anymore. Can even find subscriptions you didn't know you were paying for or, and this is not unusual. I wish it were subscriptions you're getting double billed for. Oh, I think Rocket Money's the greatest darn thing ever. I'm a big fan. I've got it on my phone. I have forever. I love the recurring button so I can see what's upcoming.

(00:50:16):
I can see all my recurring subscriptions, but you can also see net worth. You can see spending you really, everything is in here. Apparently I have earned $0 this month, so <laugh>, that's good. But the best thing to me, I love canceling the subscriptions. All you have to do is find the subscription you don't want anymore. Is this a subscription? Amazon Digital Services? Yes, it's a subscription Amazon Prime video. Yeah. Sometimes it says, Is that a subscription you say Yes. That is not a subscription. Okay, so I can look and let's say I really don't want to pay for this anymore, right? I'm done. I'm done. Well I can just cancel it. I can just say press the cancel button and it's, It's over. It's over. It is over. It's over. See that cancel.

(00:51:14):
Or you can remove it if you don't wanna be bugged about it. That kind of thing. I just love this Rocket Money, formerly known as True Bill. It was kind of cool because I've been a true Bill user forever. Forever in a day. And so all of a sudden one day it just turned into Rocket Money and I always said, Ooh, this is great. I continued my Rocket Money subscription. It's great. They have a pro version. You get rid of useless subscriptions with Rocket Money. Try it right now. Just go to Rocket money.com/windows. Seriously, it could save you hundreds a year. It's so great. Rocket money.com/windows. Please use that slash Windows thing there so they know you saw it here. So Paul gets credit. Cancel your unnecessary subscriptions right now. Everybody should have this on their phone. Rocket money.com/windows. You'll find lots of other great uses for it too. Thank you, Rocket. Now we continue on with Little Poly Thra <laugh> and we're gonna go to Microsoft 365 aka office.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:23):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:52:25):
This is the stuff Mary Jo Foley would do for you. But no, you've gotta do it Poll, you gotta do it yourself. There's no help. I can do it. You can do it. I know you can. I believe in you. I

Paul Thurrott (00:52:35):
Like Microsoft 365.

Leo Laporte (00:52:37):
I am a subscriber. I try. It's funny, I had a call her on the radio show was using <laugh>, what was it? Office 2006. Oh geez. And she said she was using in a Mac. She said it won't. Apple says I can't use it anymore. I said, Yeah, cuz it's 32 bit <laugh>. Right? It was at a date 10 years ago, lady. She says, Well, what would I do? I said, Subscribe. It's eight bucks a month. I don't wanna subscribe. I said, It's eight bucks a month. That's, in fact, you can get it for I think $70 for a year. So it's even less. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:11):
Oh, you could buy Can

Leo Laporte (00:53:12):
Buy it. You can buy it. Wanna. In fact, I found somewhere where you could buy it cheap. Which kind of worried me. Maybe they're selling those cards. You get in a new pc. I know. Something like that.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:21):
You should just tell it, buy it, and then I'll set my calendar for 10 years from now when you call me again. Because you won't run on the 128 bit Mac. You now have <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:53:30):
Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:32):
I

Leo Laporte (00:53:32):
Think the subscription's worth it. I really do. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:53:34):
I do too.

Leo Laporte (00:53:36):
Anyway, I couldn't convince her. I told her about 80 different things she could do. Nothing made her happy. But that happens, you know, get those calls. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:46):
It works fine.

Leo Laporte (00:53:47):
I actually told her use the web office and probably for her that would've been plenty. Right? But she, No, I want office on my computer. People, old habits die hard. That's the truth.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:00):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:54:01):
So what's new in the office worlds?

Paul Thurrott (00:54:04):
Well, first up, even some time <laugh>, as warned Zoom has launched new mail and calendar clients. Have you tried that? Integrate? No. I'm going to intrigued by this kind of, I've always, I'm a suck for this kind of thing.

Leo Laporte (00:54:22):
Me too. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:23):
I don't know why, but

Leo Laporte (00:54:25):
This is why we suffer.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:27):
Yep. Yeah, right. Exactly. If I just didn't care, everything would be fine. It looks interesting. Well, I, I've done you, I mean we experiment with things and you try different ways of doing things and Yeah, so Zoom, like anyone else in this space and this space is what I would call kind of service based communications. Google is in this space. Amazon I would say all the messaging apps, even Facebook has, or meta has aims on businesses as well with productivity software like this. So this is kind of a natural way to expand, I mean, notion and is coming up with a calendar up. They bought a calendar service and Canva is coming out with document creation apps. Everyone. Everybody's doing it. So Zoom is one of those companies that saw great usage uptick during the pandemic. We were just talking about that. And they want to keep the ride going. So they're gonna try to be a more full featured business service company. And so this is a big part of that. So this is not an enterprise product? Not yet. Anyway. It's small business individuals are very small businesses and so forth.

Leo Laporte (00:55:43):
So you've used it though?

Paul Thurrott (00:55:44):
No, no, I've not. Oh, you haven't? I've

Leo Laporte (00:55:46):
Not. Oh, it's in a beta. It's in beta right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:51):
We'll see. Surprised Amazon hasn't made a bigger push in this realm. Honestly. They actually do have stuff like this, but nobody knows about it or uses it <laugh>. But anyway, I think you're gonna see a lot of the stuff in the days and weeks ahead or whatever. So there's that

Leo Laporte (00:56:10):
For kids. Amazon's the place where software goes to die.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:15):
Okay. I was gonna make a comment just like that. I wasn't sure you were gonna

Leo Laporte (00:56:18):
Yeah, exactly. Because yeah, they have all sorts of stuff you've never heard about and including an office suite.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:27):
I know.

Leo Laporte (00:56:28):
It's a complete Microsoft Office alternative. Combining five plus one premium products, Documents, sheets, slides. Yep. PDF editor drive and mail with calendar

Paul Thurrott (00:56:37):
<affirmative>. I used this term last night, I said, that's table stakes for this business. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:56:46):
35 bucks a year. It's actually not a bad deal.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:49):
Actually. That's pretty good. My wife didn't understand the term table stakes.

Leo Laporte (00:56:52):
Oh, she's not a poker player. Obviously

Paul Thurrott (00:56:54):
<laugh>, obviously, it's the minimum you have to put up to play.

Leo Laporte (00:56:57):
Yes. Pay to play. Yeah. It's where you start. It looks pretty, You know, it's so funny. I <laugh>. It's from Moby Systems.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:09):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:57:09):
Huh. Okay. That's interesting.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:13):
I know it

Leo Laporte (00:57:15):
<laugh>. I had no idea.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:16):
I know nobody does. Yeah. Nobody knows this exists, but it does.

Leo Laporte (00:57:20):
I'm surprised you didn't have something like called cricket. Amazon Cricket. It's surprised. So many little things. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:57:28):
Productivity. The Amazon way. Yeah. First get a door and turn it

Leo Laporte (00:57:32):
Into table. That's what I was thinking too.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:34):
<laugh>. If you can think like that, you're gonna love this product.

Leo Laporte (00:57:38):
<laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:38):
But what about the doorknob? Don't worry about that.

Leo Laporte (00:57:40):
No. Yeah, <affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:46):
So <laugh> closer to home.

Leo Laporte (00:57:49):
Amazon, by the way, I just looked it up. Does have something called Cricket

Paul Thurrott (00:57:55):
<laugh>. Do they

Leo Laporte (00:57:55):
Really? Yeah. I don't know what it is, but it's There you go. Oh, it's crickets. You can buy crickets.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:04):
You gotta be kidding me. You

Leo Laporte (00:58:05):
Can use crickets. Get Yeah. Freezed dried insects for Or you can get Fluker orange cube, Complete cricket diet. So you can either I picture feed crickets or feed crickets to something else. Both.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:17):
And there's different size crickets. And they're next to a ruler. So you can see how

Leo Laporte (00:58:21):
See it, Yes. One inch large adult bandage crickets.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:25):
This is, When does it become a

Leo Laporte (00:58:26):
$24 for? Well, it's 10 cents each. So you do the math <laugh>. Two 50 of them. Why would you buy two? You feed 'em to some animal. That's what it is. You feed to your snake or something. You know what? Get the thousand pack's, only $40. I, It's a big savings

Paul Thurrott (00:58:49):
<laugh>. Oh man.

Leo Laporte (00:58:52):
I wonder if they're alive.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:55):
I think these are dried out crickets. You would eat in Mexico.

Leo Laporte (00:58:58):
They're hope.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:59):
Kind

Leo Laporte (00:59:00):
Of like a, We only sell captive bred animals. So wild animals stay wild. Josh. Josh's frogs. Have you ever been frustrated with dead crickets? We were always getting dead crickets. After years of shopping around testing other species and learning more about crickets, we found banded crickets. These crickets ship. Well, all year long. Oh, they are live. They weren't dying. When the temperature would spike a little bit off, it unexpectedly dropped.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:31):
I

Leo Laporte (00:59:32):
You feed it to your lizard. That's what it's, I

Paul Thurrott (00:59:34):
See. Yeah, you have like a turtle or something.

Leo Laporte (00:59:36):
Bearded dragons. Geckos. You got your chameleons. You large free your pack, man frog. Your yellow spa clamming tod. Your giant waxy monkey tree frog or your Malaysian horn frog. They all love them.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:51):
All right. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:59:53):
I had crickets in Mexico. We caught them ourselves in Oaxaca. Sure.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:58):
Oh, you caught them and ate them. Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:59:59):
Well you don't need him alive, so,

Paul Thurrott (01:00:01):
No, I understand. But you're at

Leo Laporte (01:00:02):
The chefs. He has,

Paul Thurrott (01:00:03):
How big are these things? How

Leo Laporte (01:00:05):
Big are these? As big as the first joint on your

Paul Thurrott (01:00:08):
Index finger? Yeah, I was gonna say smaller the, They're

Leo Laporte (01:00:10):
Hard to catch cuz they hop. They're ty, but <laugh> and he keeps them. So he kept them in his herb garden, kept them. I think they could probably leave if they want, but they liked the herbs and he said this is good because they taste like the herbs they've been eaten. So he said, You get some sage crickets and you get some time. Crickets. So we went out, we picked the crickets, put a little plastic bag. I have pictures, I'll show you someday. And then you bring it back. And then I think they did this out of our view, but I think they probably knock him in the head with a tiny cricket hammer and then roast them

Paul Thurrott (01:00:39):
<laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:00:40):
Geez. I'm

Paul Thurrott (01:00:42):
Hoping you think they actually have a tiny cricket. I'm not an expert Leo, but I think

Leo Laporte (01:00:48):
They're good. They put 'em in everything's, They put 'em in the mole. They put it on top of the, Sometimes you'll see 'em like they're obviously crickets on top of the

Paul Thurrott (01:00:56):
On salad or food. Yeah, they're good. Have you had worm salt is also a thing.

Leo Laporte (01:01:01):
I've had worm salt. Yes sir. Yes sir. That is one thing my son, Salt Hank will not sell is worm salt. He sells every other kind of salt. But not worm salt.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:10):
Not worm salt. Well, you never know Emerging markets. I'm just saying it's the

Leo Laporte (01:01:14):
He should

Paul Thurrott (01:01:16):
For

Leo Laporte (01:01:16):
The future. I'll talk to him about it. Microsoft is killing custom domains and Outlook. I saw this. I saw this. I don't have one, but that's too bad. That's nice.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:27):
Yeah. I have my primary Microsoft account dates back to 2002, I believe. I created this account to sign up with Xbox Live Gold to play Halo or Halo. Wow. In Halo too. Whatever. Yeah, it's that old. But it's a Hotmail account. Right? Because that's what those accounts were back then. And so over the years, there have been various products that Microsoft had. I at one point it was called Windows Live Domain. People might remember that. But you had the ability to add a custom domain and for a little while I actually had Paul throughout.com on that. But now for a long time it's been Paul throughout net which I just prefer to the Hotmail address. And it's what I use to sign into computers with. So that's my Microsoft account. And over the lifetime of this at some point, Microsoft got rid of the ability to have a custom domain on an outlook.com account essentially, or what used to be called Hotmail. And they brought it back a few years ago they changed it. So you could only go through GoDaddy, which a lot of people found objectionable for whatever reason, which

Leo Laporte (01:02:35):
GoDaddy used to be nasty. They have a new, longer not, Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:39):
Yep, yep. And they're getting rid of it again, <laugh>. So the good news is it, well there's two bits of good news. So it's not happening. The cutoff isn't until November of next year. So you have one year to keep using a custom domain or create a custom domain. Once you have a configured, it will just keep working. So that's what I've been doing. I configured this back when I think Windows Live domains was still a thing. That's how long ago it was. So in the interim years where they got rid of it and then brought it back with GoDaddy, I never had to use GoDaddy for this. My domain is somewhere else. It works fine. So unfortunately, if you do wanna set this up today, and this is, in other words, you have a Microsoft 365 personal account, like an msa, this is something you would get. This is a perk You get through Microsoft 365 personal or family.

(01:03:32):
You could today set up a own address, bob@bob.com, whatever it is. And you have to pay the registrar, which is GoDaddy. So you'll have to keep paying for that, but as long as you set it up in the next year, this thing will keep working. So it is going away again. I don't know. A lot of people are really burned by this. People are burned by everything <laugh>. Yeah. Any change mean, Yeah, everything is terrible. They took it away. That's terrible. They brought it back with GoDaddy. Why does it have to be GoDaddy? Is there any way I could use anything other than GoDaddy? And now they're taking it away and it's like, well I guess they're gonna have to find a new email service. Yeah, I guess <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:04:10):
So I'm a fan of paying for email, to be honest with you. I am too. If it's free email, Gmail, Outlook, whatever, Yahoo. Then you, Yeah, what you pay for.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:21):
So yeah, in this case, I guess the issue here though is you are paying for Microsoft 365 person or family. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:04:27):
Okay. This is But isn't the outlook.com free mail?

Paul Thurrott (01:04:30):
No, but it's still, So the thing is <laugh> still, but it's still for individuals. I mean families, obviously multiple users, but it's not meant to be a mini small business kind of interface kind of a

Leo Laporte (01:04:42):
Deal. That's what people were using it.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:44):
Yeah. So if you're an individual for it is more money, but you could get a Microsoft 365 business basic account, which is web only, blah blah blah, whatever. You could do a custom domain with that. Obviously you could go to Gmail Well, you'd have to go to some version of workspace individual, whatever it is. But there are other perks that you get as a Microsoft 365 subscriber with regards to outlook.com. The big one is the ad-free interface, which to me is worth everything. There's nothing worse than outlook.com with ads. But 50 gigabytes of storage for email and also email encryption support, which is kinda nice. So they're taking away the domain stuff, but the other stuff is still there. So it's not really for businesses, but people are upset. What else do we got?

Leo Laporte (01:05:38):
I like having my own email domain. I just go to a domain registrar, it's like 10 bucks a year. I use Hover, obviously our sponsor and then <affirmative> because I pay for fast mail and they, they'll let me, I have dozens of domains with one account, dozens of addresses it all, stuff like that. So it's easy. I mean it's not cheap. I guess it's not free.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:05):
But I think the issue though is people, they, they wanna stay with the Microsoft stuff and Well, they're

Leo Laporte (01:06:12):
Exchange servers out there too that you can.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:14):
Well you could, yeah. But the problem is you're gonna be paying more. So yeah, it's expensive. A business, I'd have to look it up, but I think it's, It's gotta be somewhere between six and 10 bucks a month for the basic business account That will do. I know, but <laugh>, No, I agree with you. I'm just saying people are really upset about this. I think the issue is they're paying for Microsoft 365 anyway. They need the office apps, they want the other terabyte of storage, whatever it is. So this was a perk. And so to them it was like I was kind of getting this for free cuz I was paying for this anyway, for those other reasons. And now what they're saying is, well now I gotta go pay for something else. And I get it. I mean I do understand the complaint, but what are you gonna do?

(01:06:59):
Microsoft is an enterprise company. Folks, if you want the good stuff, you're gonna have to get the business account. Which by the way is gonna be an interesting episode someday on hands on Windows. Because one, I haven't looked into this too much, but if you sign into Windows with a Microsoft 365 business account, which is an AAD account, you actually don't see a lot of the garbage that's in Windows. So I'm gonna be looking into that soon. That's gonna be an interesting future episode. So there are advantages to paying, like you said. So something to think about. That's all I'm saying. This actually happened last week and actually was announced back at Ignite, which I think was in September, feels like it was a million years ago, but I guess it was September. Microsoft is bringing what they call certificate based authentication for Azure active directory to mobile devices, meaning iPhones and Android phones.

(01:07:57):
And if that sounds like a mouthful, it is. But what it basically is, is the ability to use a UB key today and eventually other type of smart card type devices where people have their own phones, but they need to authenticate against their work website or apps or whatever it might be. And they don't want work putting management stuff on their phone. But what this is, is a way to plug in, in a pin, gain access to the stuff. If you yank the card out, the key out, that stuff goes away. Basically a way to enforce multifactor authentication on mobile without having to heavily manage a phone on behalf of users. So kind of an interesting approach to Passwordless or a new approach to Passwordless. I use well they call it two fa, but with my Microsoft account and also with my Gmail or workspace account, whatever, you're basically using two FA where I don't actually type in passwords for the most part.

(01:08:58):
Actually with my Microsoft account, I don't ever type in my password. So the first time I sign into a computer, it sends a prompt to my phone. Okay, it Microsoft Authenticator. If I am using Google, actually I do have to type in the password that one time. But then after that it's kind of automatically signs me. And this is kind of another way to do that. And it's specifically designed for businesses that would, in other words, look, you can use your own phone, but we're gonna send you this thing in the mail. You gotta go through the enrollment process, set up your certificate. It's now gonna be tied to this little key, which in tandem with your phone will allow you to type in a pen. And then you're in kind of an interesting way to do MFA for businesses. So I don't think that will ever be a consumer solution. But then again, individuals use EB keys. So they're

Leo Laporte (01:09:46):
Supporting pass keys too, along with Google and Apple,

Paul Thurrott (01:09:48):
Right? <affirmative>? Oh yeah. Yep, they are. And actually the other thing is, so I didn't know this, but apparently Android doesn't have native support for smart cards. So when you use UBI Key with an Android device like UBI Key actually has to provide software to make that work on Android. And it's possible in the future, this will be even more seamless. So for example, a better approach I think for an individual would be you have the UBI key on your key chain or something in your pocket and it uses NFC to make that connection. But today you actually have to plug it into the port, which is kind of goofy on a phone. But that's the approach that works. I

Leo Laporte (01:10:24):
Mean it works cause the original UBI keys were keyboards.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:29):
So the phone just sees that's right keyboard.

Leo Laporte (01:10:31):
And it takes the text that the UBI keys spitting out, which is a clever a little hack.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:35):
And I guess that

Leo Laporte (01:10:35):
Works on phones just like it works on PCs.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:38):
I think what's changed since the early days is that mobile platforms in particular iOS, I don't think Android is as far along with this, but they accept this as a form of authentication. This is a native capability. Now a smart card is, they think of it as a smart card, but before they had to work around the limitations on mobile. But that's getting a little more sophisticated. So I'm kind of hoping, I'm expecting, I guess even eventually we'll probably see NFC versions of this kind of thing. Cause I think there are

Leo Laporte (01:11:05):
Key has nfc.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have little versions, they have thumb print things and stuff. It's some pretty cool,

Leo Laporte (01:11:12):
They're smart. They've really made it work as many places as possible. I use a use key to log into everything. And that's just a type C key

Paul Thurrott (01:11:21):
Plus whatever you could get. Yeah, there's a lightning version obviously for iPhone. They have different versions. I mean you could use it as a Windows Hello fingerprint reader if you had the right one with the USB port. I mean there's all kinds of different ways to do it. It's kind of a cool thing mean obviously you wanna see that just built into the device if you can.

Leo Laporte (01:11:40):
Yeah, I have one UBI key that has type C on one end and lightning on the other.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:44):
Oh nice. That's

Leo Laporte (01:11:45):
Cool. I haven't seen And I think that will I pray no longer be necessary on the road.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:52):
We all do. I have some theories about that, but yes, we all do.

Leo Laporte (01:11:56):
<laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:11:58):
A bitter company by the way, it looks like. Yeah, you could

Leo Laporte (01:11:59):
Imagine

Paul Thurrott (01:12:01):
Them. Yeah. No, no, we're gonna, we'll do USBC in Europe. <laugh>, you could totally picture they're gonna do something like that. We'll see. Anyway the other interesting thing that's happened in this realm is, you may not be aware of this, but Google one is a service offering from Google. Obviously it gives you additional storage and all this kind of stuff. And they have a VPN offering that's new. I think with the Google Pixel seven Pro and maybe the seven as well. I think you are gonna get the VPN from Google one for free because you have that phone. But even if you don't have Google one I think is how that's gonna work. But they're actually now offering VPN by Google one on desktop operating systems like Windows and Mac os. Now you have to pay for the Google one subscription. In fact, you have to pay for the 9 99 a month version or $99 a year, which gives you two terabytes of storage and some other things.

(01:12:54):
But it's a VPN solution for Windows. And it's funny, be it, it's fun because the app that runs on Windows looks like a phone app because of course it does. Which is hilarious. And the screenshot that Google provided is a Windows 10 desktop from eight years ago. <laugh> like the most old fashioned, it says all the old icons and everything, The original Edge icon, the old store, all the everything's wrong. And it's just like <laugh>. They just stuck a screenshot of the app on top of it. So it is yet another VPN for Windows. But I would say if you're already paying for Google one, I mean it's just good to know that you can use this now on Windows as well if you want.

Leo Laporte (01:13:35):
That's cool. I am. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:38):
Yeah, there you go. So you should look into this. You can put it on the Mac, you can put it on Windows.

Leo Laporte (01:13:42):
Oh, I didn't know that

Paul Thurrott (01:13:43):
It comes. Yeah, it's brand new. Yeah, it comes with your plan. Yeah, I think so.

Leo Laporte (01:13:47):
So we had a massive earnings week. In fact, it's burn earnings the last two weeks.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:52):
I listen, I've made a career out of writing earnings <laugh> write ups. This

Leo Laporte (01:13:57):
Is where you really miss Mary Jo. I know. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:00):
Well no, I have to do this anyway, but I'm not gonna, I write about all kinds of earnings. So Spotify, Roku, Disney plus, blah blah, who cares? But the two I want to bring up are both related to the PC industry. So obviously given the way things are going, we're kind of looking for indications about how the market's going, what these companies are saying about the future, et cetera. Lenovo is the world's biggest maker of PCs. They did something really disingenuous, dishonest, I think I would say in their press release about this. Their press release, and I did not quote this, so I'm gonna do this off the top of my head. Basically said, I think they said for the 10th quarter in a row we grew revenues. Which is an interesting statement because this was the first time in 10 quarters they did not grow revenues.

(01:14:45):
So how did they come to that <laugh>, that quote, because are you familiar with the term constant currency? <laugh>? Oh yeah, <laugh>. So I've never seen a company do this. Companies always say we earned net income of this on revenues of this. But it was this in constant currency. The idea is the cost of the dollar goes up and down if it's a US company and that impacts earnings. And so what they like to say is, yeah, this may look bad cuz the dollar's doing awesome right now, but in constant currency we're doing awesome. So I just ignore that. To me, constant currency is like a theory. If nothing ever changed, we'd be doing great. Yeah, no, that's true of everybody. But things did change and so that impacts your finances, whatever. Lenovo actually put out a press release where they said that they grew revenues when you used the constant currency figure <laugh> like guys, that's not what happened. You, Your revenues were down actually. So anyway not too bad though. It was a 4% decline over the previous same quarter year ago PC sales were down 16% better than HP and Dell by the way. HP was down 28%. The quota Dell was down 21. I know, yeah. Oh, so lots better. Not good. Yeah. Yeah. But still double digits.

(01:16:08):
Also, this is a little bit of hard data. This is a quote, it said Lenovo maintained its industry leading profitability of 7.4% thanks to its focus on premium PCs and operational excellence. That's actually really interesting to me because we often talk about PCs being a low margin business, and I don't excuse this, but one of the reasons I think you see all kinds of crap around PCs especially now, is they don't make a lot of money on these things. And this is a way to generate a little bit of income per pc. Lenovo is making money selling premium PCs, which do not have that crap around them by the way. So when you buy a thinked, there's no crap. And unlike an HP computer, which I love, otherwise not a lot of Lenovo branded utilities, I think this is a mistake that some PC makers make, but not doing great.

(01:17:01):
They did have that quote Lenovo believes in the long term the PC sales will remain above pre pandemic levels and it's non PC businesses are gonna help it expand to new markets, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So I would say honestly in the scope of the market and the scope of the business, they're in Lu Nova's doing pretty good. So that was pretty good. And they even have a nice long-term out, we think it's gonna be fine. So that's what I want to hear. <laugh> you don't hear a lot of that these days. And then as Qualcomm and Qualcomm only factors into the PC market in a small way today they did okay. Honestly, they warned on the future, they did say their modems are gonna be in iPhones for another year, which is great. That'll be nice, short term, whatever, blah, blah, blah. But the big thing to me with Qualcomm is we keep looking forward to this Nuvia acquisition bearing fruit, and we're gonna see new generations of Windows and armed chip sets based on Nuvia.

(01:18:01):
And we keep kind of next year it's gonna be, next year's gonna be great. And so we know there's a Snapdragon event every year, usually in December often in Hawaii, which is awesome. My expectation is that they're gonna announce the first generation of those chips at that show. But they did say, this is a quote from their ceo whose name I'm now forgetting, I apologize. But he said we expect to see an inflection point. Actually I will just look at, his name is Christiana Aman. We expect to see an inflection point in Windows on Snapdragon PCs in 2024 based on a significant number of design wins to date. 2024 is not next year <laugh>. So I guess we'll see what happens. So for now, we're not pushing to next year, we're pushing to the year after next year <laugh>. So I don't know what that means for December or what's

Leo Laporte (01:19:00):
Next.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:03):
Sorta it's the months ahead is what we're

Leo Laporte (01:19:06):
Saying. There you go. That's safer.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:09):
Yeah, it's common of, I don't know

Leo Laporte (01:19:14):
I thought I saw some new via benchmarks, but

Paul Thurrott (01:19:17):
Maybe I'm wrong. Yeah, I think you did maybe leaked type thing or someone just hit a site. Yeah, yeah. It was leaked or something and I think it was the in production. Yeah, they're working on it for sure. And I think it was roughly core I five performance, which is funny because three, four or five years ago what it was, that was the promise. We're gonna hit the core I five that that's the deal. We talked about this a few weeks ago, I think when I reviewed that Lenovo Windows and Arm think pad. It's close even right now with just the Snapdragon stuff. It's close. And if you think about it, it is something of a miracle that the first generation of these devices ran on literally the same chip that was in the phones at the time. I think it was a Snapdragon 8 35 I think was the name of the chips that are 8, 8 30. They literally just took the chip and put it in a pc. And people are always like, You have no idea how powerful these computers are. And it's like, well, oh, these phones are rather like, Well, yeah, no,

Leo Laporte (01:20:16):
<laugh>. You book the pc.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:19):
Yeah, Windows can kill any CPU as it turns out. Yeah, <laugh>. So they're getting there.

Leo Laporte (01:20:25):
What's the point of the nuvia? If it's only I five speed? Is it just lower power?

Paul Thurrott (01:20:30):
Yeah, it's it what it's core I five speed, but no fans, right? The dream is super thin and light super battery life, although that's been falling and no fans. And then also instant on connectivity. Not that you have to have a windows and arm system for that, but you really don't see a lot. Remember we had this term always connected PCs you could have an Intel PC that's always connected often, by the way, with a Qualcomm mode in it now that Intel's not kind of in that game anymore. But the dream is these things will be devices, not PCs, even though they're really PCs. But true devices. There's no fan in an iPhone. There's no fan in an iPad. Something that's that thin and light, but is a full featured full power computer is the dream. But we're not there yet.

Leo Laporte (01:21:24):
It's really a race, isn't it, between what Intel's gonna end up doing with their well the 13th jet and then whatever comes next and an Nuvia Qualcomm.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:38):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:21:38):
Isn't it? I mean, Intel, it is to be showing that they can do a lot of the same thing. You

Paul Thurrott (01:21:44):
Know what though? So, alright, me, I don't wanna go down my full conspiracy theory nonsense on this, but having reviewed a lot of Intel 12 gen chip sets PCs this year I, I've come up with with a lot of theories about what's happening here. It's very clear that moving to this hybrid architecture has been difficult for Intel. It is. You would know this. Everyone, anyone watching this probably knows this. If you bought a PC a year ago and it was Intel base, whether it was a laptop, well let's just say laptop, nine times outta 10 or more, it be would've been a 15 WA U series chip. It would've had whatever performance characteristics, whatever battery life. But no matter where you went, Dell, hp, lenova, whatever it was, you could have gotten a high end ThinkPad X one carbon. You could have gotten a low end HP Pavilion, whatever.

(01:22:32):
It would've been a U series core I five or seven, whatever that would've been the chip every time, almost every time. Flash forward to this year, this hybrid architecture, they add a chip set into the middle. So this U series in the low end, which can I think is actually seven or 15 wat, there's a 28 Wat P series, which is brand new and then H series and they go up from there. And H series is the one you would typically tie to an NVIDIA graphics processor. So you could gaming PC or a workstation, whatever,

(01:23:02):
Nine times outta 10 this year. The PC you buy is gonna be a P series. So I think when they switch to this hybrid architecture, in order to achieve the same performance that you got with a U series roughly or a little bit better, you have to go to 28 watts. So you're gonna lose out on battery life happened, right? No one's really talking about this. But I find it interesting that Intel, which is making a grab for the more efficient part of the market with hybrid architectures and all that stuff, actually has to make less efficient chips to achieve performance benefits over the previous gen. Because what no one wants to see is every single review of every single hp, Dell, lenova, whatever PC saying it's weird, we did all our benchmarks and this thing is 13 or 26 or whatever percent slower than the machine it's replacing.

(01:23:51):
That was based on a more traditional four core use series architecture. This is a fact. I mean, whatever anyone thinks, I'm literally about to go off the deep end with this intel thing. But it is interesting to me that in making this transition, they had to introduce a new type of chip that basically draws TWiTce as much power on average in order to achieve the same performance as a non hybrid architecture. That's what happened. So 2022 was a really unique year for PCs because of that. I think there are other problems with the Intel chips this year, and I'm really curious what's gonna happen with 13th gen. So I know they've announced the desktop stuff, I'm not super interested in that, but January's gonna roll around, CS is gonna happen, everyone's gonna announce new versions of everything, laptops, et cetera. Really curious to see what those look like compared to 12th gen because I think this has to change. This is a one year anomaly that I don't think has been good for Intel or for their customers. But yes, they have to make this change. I guess. It's like they rip the bandaid off and they're going for it. I appreciate that. I'm glad they're doing it but something is not right. Yeah.

(01:25:07):
So anyway, that's enough of that <laugh>. Sorry, I have very dark thoughts about what's happening here, but Mike and the good news,

Leo Laporte (01:25:17):
Mike and Cam's in our

Paul Thurrott (01:25:18):
Chat room

Leo Laporte (01:25:19):
Says all it they're gonna do when they take out the fans is let it get hot. Right? Which means is just gonna wear out faster, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:25:28):
Oh, well that's a good, Actually that's a good strategy. PCs last too long today, so

Leo Laporte (01:25:31):
Yeah, right. That's smart. Them break quicker.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:33):
Yeah. It's like when you have an air cool Volkswagen and the engine just turns to sag. Exactly. Because it can't cool itself. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's time to upgrade the engine <laugh>. Yeah, maybe. I mean, look, the good news for Intel is they're competing with Qualcomm and they can't get their story straight to begin with. So Qualcomm is no nowhere close to being a major player in the PC market. AMD is a bigger problem. So the laptop I'm using today for this show is one of a handful I have that are recent AMD rising based PCs. These do not exhibit the same problems as those P series in until 12 gen chipset. So this is an opening for AMD as well. So we'll see what the world looks like, but next year's gonna be interesting, and obviously whenever Qualcomm comes through will be

Leo Laporte (01:26:21):
Interesting. It's not a bad trend, right? I mean, I think looking at how you can improve performance over power is a good thing in the long run.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:33):
Well, but if we could credit Steve Jobs one thing, he introduced a phrase into the mainstream, which is not something he invented, but he talked about performance per wat. That's it, right? And the problem with the P series is that to get more performance, you need more Watts <laugh>, right? The point of the Apple silicon chips is that they use fewer watts, but still have a level of performance and whatever, math, whatever physics, whatever, whatever. But the truth is, if you buy Mac today and you run Mac apps, everything runs great. It's not just benchmarks, it's things like using Lightroom or Photoshop or whatever it is. Those apps run great. And so I think that the P series was designed in many ways to make sure that these PCs look great on benchmarks. But what I'm saying is in day to day use, there are problems <laugh>, and they've gotten better over time, by the way. And even the U series, like the 12th 10 U series, which I thought was gonna be kind of and also ran because of how bad the P series was. Those have gotten better over time too. So I just reviewed an HP Elite dragonfly based on the U series chip. Honestly, it worked great. It was fine. So good. Maybe drivers are getting better, Maybe something's happening there, but this started off really rough, the first middle six months of this year, I'll call it were a tough time for new PCs. That's in my experience. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:27:59):
Yeah. And you try a lot of them.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:02):
I have at least 15 of 'em. Geez.

Leo Laporte (01:28:04):
Yeah, yeah. Holy cow.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:07):
Yep. Yep. Yeah. So this year, I gotta say AMD's looking pretty good. I'll just leave it at that. So I think Intel gets there, but we'll see. The 13th is the right, We'll see

Leo Laporte (01:28:18):
Me. Let's take a little break here and then we're gonna go into the developer section. We've got Xbox. I'm gonna introduce you to a little thing we like to call Mastodon, typical week app of the week. Gotta come up with some booze for us at the end of

Paul Thurrott (01:28:35):
The show. I almost did it for today. I could do it right now. If I could do this off

Leo Laporte (01:28:38):
The top of my head. It's okay. It's okay. I'm just saying

Paul Thurrott (01:28:39):
I I did actually invented a cocktail.

Leo Laporte (01:28:42):
Oh,

Paul Thurrott (01:28:43):
I might have discussed this. We could formalize it.

Leo Laporte (01:28:47):
Oh, nice. Okay. Paul's cocktail invention, <affirmative>. That should be interesting.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:54):
It's a stunningly obvious invention,

Leo Laporte (01:28:56):
But it takes some gin. And I found this thing called tonic water.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:00):
I don't don't know if anyone ever came up with Long Island iced tea before, but you just mix a bunch of crap in there.

Leo Laporte (01:29:05):
That's a complicated drink. You gotta put a lot of stuff in that one. Let's take a break. Talk about our sponsor, C D W. This episode of Windows Weekly, brought to you by Lenovo, orchestrated by the experts at C D W. The helpful people at CDW understand that as the world changes, your organization needs to adapt quickly to be successful. So how can CDW keep your business ahead of the curve? I'll tell you one way with Lenovo think pads, love my think pads. These powerful devices deliver the business class performance. You're looking for thanks to Windows 10 and the Intel Evo platform. With your remote teams working across the country around the world, collaboration doesn't have to be a problem. Isn't if you've got Lenovo ThinkPads keeping your organization productive and connected from anywhere, plus CDW knows your workforce has different work styles needs flexibility.

(01:30:02):
That's why Lenovo think pads are equipped with responsive tools and built in features that let your team work seamlessly across their favorite tools. Now think about that for a second. And let's not forget about security. These high performing machines protect at the highest level with built-in hardware to guard against modern threats without slowing your team down. When you need to get more out of your technology, Lenovo makes seamless productivity possible and CDW makes it powerful. Learn more at cdw.com/lenovo client cdw.com/lenovo. We thank CDW for supporting Paul and Windows weekly. Continue on with the show. Time to talk to developers. Developers develop. We had Christina Warren from GitHub was on TWiTtter on Sunday. Her boss Martin brought a badge from the GitHub event, which is going on San Francisco right now. <affirmative>, it's the coolest thing. It's an in badge. He programmed him. It was really cool. I am a, Oh

Paul Thurrott (01:31:07):
Wow, this is a GitHub universe. GitHub

Leo Laporte (01:31:10):
Universe. Yeah. I am a GitHub fan. I gotta say I

Paul Thurrott (01:31:13):
That's really interesting live event, by the way. You could go to San Francisco.

Leo Laporte (01:31:16):
They were doing it in person. Yeah, but there's also streaming. Yeah, that's why Christina was in town, I thought. Wow, that's pretty cool.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:25):
Yeah, she is

Leo Laporte (01:31:26):
Also in the news. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:29):
So this week, every November now, this November will always be net month, right? It's also historically been the month where Microsoft has shipped new versions of Visual Studio, although now it's on a very different schedule. But back when it was on its old schedule, November was the time for that. So this past week yesterday Microsoft announced and released.net seven with updates across the stack. I mean it's like Maui asp.net C sharp, went to version 10, F Sharp, went to version seven, I think entity, framework, core, blah blah on. And onco, even legacy technologies like Windows forums and Windows Presentation Foundation were updated to support, not just to support.net seven, but to have new features and so forth. Those technologies are more community supported than say Microsoft, but interesting. And of course, yes a new version of Visual Studio, including the first version that's native on arm, which we were just talking about.

(01:32:23):
And so I don't think you're gonna see a lot of developers working <laugh> like on Arm. And that version does support a reduced VER number of workloads obviously but it does support desktop application across the stack. Wind forms, wpf, uwp Windows app sdk, et cetera. And I don't remember the exact list of workloads, but I'm sure it does web and I don't remember what else, but it does a few other things. It's not the full version you got on X 86 or X 64 so that's that. And I was kind of hoping there'd be a really big Maui thing. Here's like something really exciting. Desktop, desktop, whatever. But I will say the presenters who I like the cover the Maui stuff all the time, casually throughout the term that Maui is Microsoft's client of, they didn't call it framework, but I say framework. That's their client framework going forward.

(01:33:21):
They've been kind of edging toward this where in supporting what I felt for a long time that no one's gonna wake up one day and say, I've got it. I've got the best idea ever for an app. But it can only run on Windows. IT apps are cross platform and Maui is that solution for Microsoft now. So this is the successor to zamron. You can create apps that run on and natively on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. And you can do some integration with Blazer if you wanna do some web stuff that's a little more complicated, but maybe someday they'll have the whole thing there. But that is live on net seven now. So you can upgrade to that. And then there's this Skid Hub event, which is what you were just referencing happening in San Francisco. Yeah. And boy do I have a hard time understanding <laugh> skid hub's, massive set of solutions. Now they've announced so many new features. So they announced something called co-pilot before, which was for individuals. And this is the way you can get code in, I can't solve this problem. Where can I get code that solves this problem? It saves

Leo Laporte (01:34:27):
You a trip to stack exchange to steel code. You just can steal it right in the editor, which is fantastic.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:33):
Repurpose

Leo Laporte (01:34:34):
That. I'm sorry, Repurpose. Actually, somebody posted a video on YouTube on to see if I find it show. One of the things copilot will do is you could type in English what you want your regular expression to do. I wanna find all,

Paul Thurrott (01:34:47):
Oh, there you go. All capital I. It will. Expressions are the worst.

Leo Laporte (01:34:50):
They're the worst. It'll give you the regular expression and then there's a way to test it. And then this was even better. I gotta find, I'll find this video and show it to you. Yeah, even better is it will take a really complicated rag jack. Sometimes these things are impossible to read and translate it and show you what it does. Oh boy. So yeah, it's pretty impressive.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:16):
Listen, as a, I'll call myself an enthusiast programmer. I've spent a lot of time Google searching. Very particular programming things always end up on stack exchange, couple of other websites. You have to kind of deal with the personalities of the people involved. There's always like, it's obvious how you answer this question. You idiot blah blah, that kind of thing. But useful, right? You often find something very useful in there. Oh yeah. Being able to get right to that is of interest. So they are bringing this to businesses now and this includes everything you would expect. Admin controls, license management, et cetera, et cetera. So for teams of programmers, I think this makes sense on the more humorous end of the scale. Well, no, I should, I'm sorry. No, no, no, no. This is not humorous. It's gonna sound humorous at first. Okay, I'm sorry. Let me stick a step back from the cliff. They're introducing a feature called Hey, GitHub. GitHub. Which is exactly what it sounds like. Actually this is important as an accessibility because voice interaction for people who can't type comfortably either at all or for long periods of time, will want to have this voice based interaction where they can fill in code Nice. And then go back and edit it afterwards. Actually that's a, I'm sorry, I just should not have made fun of that. Just, it sounds, every time I see the knee jerk reaction is to Hey, get hub blood

Leo Laporte (01:36:35):
Serious. Except, I mean, I see so many developers wearing wrist braces because of repetitive stress injuries. Yep. It's really common among developers.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:46):
Well, let me, You can't see this, but this is not that. This is some advanced ergonomic well

Leo Laporte (01:36:51):
Use. Yeah, yeah. It's a split keyboard. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:53):
I don't know that I'd be able to work if I didn't switch to more ergonomic people. Make fun of the mouse, cuz it looks like a softball <laugh> about the same size. But I'm telling you this thing with, I use a wrist dress with it with a nice gel pad. This might be the only reason I can still do my career. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:37:10):
You type all the time.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:12):
I started getting that, you know, how

Leo Laporte (01:37:14):
Many words a day do you think? You're right.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:16):
Well I can tell you from I average based on, what's it called? What's the service? Grammarly? This is just on the web so it doesn't

Leo Laporte (01:37:25):
Oh, it tells you. That's right. Yeah, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:37:26):
Yeah. It's about 48,000 words a week.

Leo Laporte (01:37:28):
Wow. That's a novel every week.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:31):
Well, I mean the <laugh>, the couple weeks when I published that the book <laugh> to the site, those two weeks, it was like 99,000 and 120 something thousand. It was like those were big ways. So

Leo Laporte (01:37:43):
You understand. Anyway, RSI and Oh

Paul Thurrott (01:37:46):
Yes. Coding, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yep. Yeah. My wife just had something with her thumb and she went to a physical therapist and in luck cuz she's not gonna have to have any surgery or anything, but she started feeling something too and I was like, you might wanna think about ergonomic stuff. This is actually an interesting problem because while you can dictate text dictating code is pretty finicky. So do this. If you're interested in this topic they have some videos showing how this works. And it is someone who has difficulty with their fingers and they have little things on their fingertips and so forth to help them. But they, it's sort of like anything else. If you say you're dictating a text message and it's something really long and blah blah blah, blah, you go on. But then you have to kind of go back and say, Okay, fix that.

(01:38:34):
Fix that. Like that. Yeah. And so it does give you the code. You still have to go look at it, obviously. Course it's not just of course, but yes. No, this is a good thing. There's no doubt about it. I'm sorry. It's called Hey GitHub. I know <laugh>. Just hear name be left. Hey, hey, hey. Well it's good cuz Apple's getting rid of the hey from Hay series so they can just lend them a hay. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Hey GitHub. Let me see if I can find a Yeah, there's a neat video showing someone who has some issues with their hands and how they use it. Is it, Hey GitHub mode. Yep. That's it. That's it. Yep. So they're hard to type. It was at a point with, and part of this is I play Apple laptop with these crappy keyboards. Yeah, exactly. Get a repetitive good keyboard. I don't understand why we don't have even slightly ergonomic keyboards. Remember that butterfly thing that IBM did with the think man? Yeah, something like that. But have a pop out and be ergonomic. Take

Speaker 4 (01:39:33):
It hub code mode. I

Paul Thurrott (01:39:36):
Activated code mode. Oh, I love

Speaker 4 (01:39:37):
This. Using, hey, get mode for the first time was totally different than anything I'd used before. You're actually starting with what you want to do and telling that to the computer and it's creating code for you. Define a function that categorizes a triangle by the length of its three sides. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (01:39:53):
So you're not dictating code. Yeah, you're actually using copilot. This is, That's exactly right. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:40:00):
Define a function that accepts three numbers from the user as input rather than having to either.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:06):
That's so cool. Yeah. You still have to customize, have to go in, of course. Yep. What a great tool that is. That's really interesting. What's impress ing? I think a lot. Yeah, I think so. I need that for my switcher. <laugh>. Hey TriCaster, take camera three. <laugh>. Oh works. Not that camera <laugh> the one that's in my brain. <laugh>. Yes, exactly. So I guess a big part of this show is GitHub is going after the enterprise now. And what that means is teams of programmers and manage teams of programmers. So you have roadmaps and task lists and workflows and you can see who's working on what at any given time, that kind of thing. So there's a lot of, GitHub suddenly has gotten very, not that it wasn't complex, don't get me wrong, but it it's the amount of stuff that they offer has gotten complex, if that makes sense. There's a lot going on with GitHub, so interesting.

Leo Laporte (01:41:09):
Yeah, I wish I could go to Universe. It's just up the road or down the road, but I'm busy doing things still. Yeah, very cool. I really I use GitHub pay for an account and I use it. Crazy use as a personal thing so much you can do.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:27):
And the growth is astonishing. Yeah, they've

Leo Laporte (01:41:29):
Done a good job. There

Paul Thurrott (01:41:29):
Are almost 95 million people who are using GitHub 20.5 million new users this year alone. 90% of the Fortune 100, which I think explains their portion into more enterprise friendly features too. So

Leo Laporte (01:41:47):
It's

Paul Thurrott (01:41:47):
Going pretty well.

Leo Laporte (01:41:48):
Their VP of developer relations Martin Woodward was in the studio on Sunday and that's where I got that cool GitHub universe badge at Martin had the program and stuff. Okay. So it's really cool. He actually was@the.net, so he was at Microsoft and when the GitHub acquisition happened, they moved him over to GitHub. So he created the Microsoft first Microsoft repository on GitHub. <laugh>. Nice. So it's a really cool thing. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:42:22):
Like, we might wanna look into this. This is a pretty

Leo Laporte (01:42:24):
Good service. Things works pretty good. Pretty good. Martin, thank you for the badge. I really appreciate it. I will wear that with the pride. Alright, moving right along. I think it's time for the moment. Really. Everybody tunes this show in for

Paul Thurrott (01:42:40):
<laugh>. I hope so. The

Leo Laporte (01:42:41):
Xbox segment,

Paul Thurrott (01:42:44):
Oddly another week of a lot of Xbox news.

Leo Laporte (01:42:47):
Weird. This is a trend. <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:42:50):
I don't know. So I think we always reference this time, it was two years ago. Was it two years ago? Two years ago, Yeah, two years ago. August. You and I watched that Microsoft

Leo Laporte (01:42:59):
Event. Oh my God.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:00):
Yeah. And we thought, I always compare it to the Wizard of Oz. I thought this thing is gonna explode into HDR 4K Wonder and it never did. Never did. What's going on with this game. It's

Leo Laporte (01:43:10):
Like the Wizard of Oz. It stayed black and white, it just never Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:12):
Yeah. Yep. So they delayed the game a year. It came out last year. It's done pretty well. I they've come up publicly and said, yeah, we kind of dropped the ball on post launch content and they've done a pretty slow job of adding features that people have expected to be there from day one. But they just Yes, today or today? Yesterday. Today, whenever it was released, what they're calling the winter update, It's November by the way, but whatever the winter update, and this is gonna bring Halo Infinite up to just about where it should have been about a year ago, which is terrible to say it that way. But Forge Beta is available. Forge is the environment that you can use to create multi player levels. There were two new multiplayer levels available in Halo Infinite. They were both created with Forage of course. And so that's there in beta.

(01:44:00):
They're doing co-op now campaign co-op. And this is only over the network. They're not gonna do the split screen thing anymore that they announced that a few months ago. The neat thing there is, I think a lot of people get into the campaign, they kind of blow through it, they just want to finish the story, but there's all these things you can unlock. There's all these secrets in the game and until now there was no way to go back and easily go play those levels over again. So now you can do that with your friends. Oh, that's find all that stuff, Mission replay, all that stuff. There's a new experience progression system, which apparently was very needed. <laugh> in the multiplayer system that's in beta. They're gonna tweak that as they go and excuse me, one new game mode called Covert One Flag and then 24 new achievements.

(01:44:52):
So finally they're getting there. I mean there was this thing they were gonna do seasons and they kept delaying in them and they were gonna do these features and then they canceled them. And it's two years later. But I feel like this is in a good space and it's not like the old days where you kind of release a game and then the developers move on to the next thing. This game's gonna be supported for many years. This is something Microsoft has done a great job with not just with the Halo Games. If you think about the Master Chief collection, but also Sea of Thieves, Gears War, Pick Your Game. I mean, they've done a tremendous job of supporting their first party title. So Halo Infant is gonna be one it's their marquee title. So they're, they're going to do right by that. And it's taken a while, but they get there.

(01:45:39):
The day came and went where the EU said, we're gonna make our decision on Activision Blizzard. And they punted <laugh>. So they're gonna take a longer look at it. They're gonna figure this up by March. I think that this was expected. It's not really a big deal. The interesting thing is if you look at what they published about it, you can kind of tell the only thing they care about is Call of Duty. Which is a little strange because Activision Blizzard owns several really important game franchises that are cross platform and matter on other platforms, other the next Xbox. But they really care about Call of Duty. So I think the formal thing that Microsoft can do is just sign some agreement with whatever regulatory bodies and say, Look, this will always be on PlayStation. We're gonna look back on this not and Laugh, but for all of this scrutiny of this, I think what's gonna happen here is what happened with Minecraft. They're gonna put it everywhere. It's gonna be in more places, it's gonna come to the Switch, the mobile stuff is gonna expand. I think there's gonna be more Call of Duty than we need <laugh>. If anything don't, the goal is not to make Call of Duty, not on PlayStation. So I think it's gonna go through, but that's where

Leo Laporte (01:46:52):
Their goal is to,

Paul Thurrott (01:46:55):
Microsoft's goal is to put Call of Duty everywhere it can be, right? They want to expand the availability of it. Sony's contention is that call, they're gonna use Call of Duty as a bargaining chip and potentially take it off the platform.

Leo Laporte (01:47:06):
Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. But Microsoft said again and again. No, no, no, no. It's always gonna be,

Paul Thurrott (01:47:11):
Yeah, I can't stop saying it. It's crazy. This isn't a huge story because they're not necessarily doing it yet. But Microsoft sent out a survey to Xbox gamers asking them about different things and one of the things they talked about was, would you be interested in having in game features that can optimize settings to save energy if you toggle them on, And we talked about something like this earlier today where it's like, I game makers, game players don't care about this <laugh>. In other words, you're telling me I could save a little bit of money on my electricity bill because this thing is a nuclear power react to take sucking down the energy grid because I'm playing Halo or Call of Duty or whatever you're telling me I could change the way the game works, like lower resolutions, lower frame rates, fewer visual effects, less GPU usage, and then I'm gonna save a little bit of money.

(01:48:07):
I don't think anyone's gonna do this <laugh>. So they, they've opened it up to the community. If this is of interest, Microsoft will build these features in to the Xbox console. So we'll see. I don't know anything about how much power consumption these things used, but according to, Okay, Microsoft's actually I do know, sorry, Microsoft says the Xbox series S, which is what I'm using, draws 74 watts. Wow. So not much more than a laptop. Xbox Series X, A typical laptop 153 watts during gameplay. Yeah, it's about double. So that makes sense. But I mean I have an H series HP that I'm pretty sure is 200 watts by the way. And of course if you have a gaming pc, like the smallest power supply you get on one of those things is probably four 50. But I bet it's more typical to be 5 50, 7 50 bigger probably. It's been a while for me. But anyway, every little bit helps. But I don't know, I <laugh> feel like when I get into a game job, one is not saving the environment, it's saving the planet from the aliens that I'm killing. Come on

Leo Laporte (01:49:17):
<laugh>. Are there aliens in call duty modern warfare too? No, there are not. No. Are there zombies though, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:49:25):
Not yet. Not. But there will, Yeah. I think there will be zombies. There

Leo Laporte (01:49:29):
Probably will be, you know, can't

Paul Thurrott (01:49:30):
This's, This game's gonna be around for at least two years. So yeah, you could expect this is gonna be a, next year's gonna be big for that kind of stuff. I think so definitely. Definitely coming. And what else have we got here? So Nintendo announced their quarterly earnings. Honestly, they're doing fine. I mean there's, they lowered their switch sales forecast by, I think by 2 million units for this year. So they expect now to sell 19 million versus 21 million. But these guys have sold, they've sold over 114 million switch units to date, which makes it, I think the third best selling console of all time. So the Nintendo DS has sold about 154 million units, PlayStation two for some reason. We have no idea how many, but it is at minimum 155 million. It's probably even close to 200 million, but 114 million makes it better. I mean, it's more than anything Sony or Microsoft has ever made. No, I'm sorry, not the PlayStation. Not counting PlayStation too. Almost anything Sony's made and everything that Microsoft has made. So

Leo Laporte (01:50:36):
They're

Paul Thurrott (01:50:36):
Doing okay. <laugh> making money. They have their own little cute market that they're in,

Leo Laporte (01:50:41):
So they're doing fine. It's a little thing they're doing well.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:45):
They do the wrong thing. Don't like that.

Leo Laporte (01:50:47):
<laugh>, the

Paul Thurrott (01:50:48):
Laws of nature do not apply to them. They do cute little

Leo Laporte (01:50:51):
Games. I love my switch. I got portal and portal two on it. I got Animal crossing. It's fun. I like it a lot better than the steam deck or whatever that thing Logitech's selling. It's it's real portable computing and yeah, sure. It's not gonna be quite as Triple A, but

Paul Thurrott (01:51:09):
Who cares. I know, but that's fine for that kind of game. I think it's not somewhere between what I'd call casual games and hardcore.

Leo Laporte (01:51:16):
Yeah, it's exactly, it's written them. And that's kind of a sweet

Paul Thurrott (01:51:18):
Spot. It is a sweet spot. They're doing great. I mean, they're killing it.

Leo Laporte (01:51:22):
It saved me during C, I played animal crossing basically without, relentlessly in 2020. <laugh>, I mean relentlessly, right? It saved me. So had my little island where nobody wore masks.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:39):
In the oxymoron department, we have this notion of gaming Chromebooks, which I'll just let you kind Weird. Yeah, steep on that one for a moment. But the reason these are starting to make some sense, there's two reasons actually. One is, of course, game streaming, right? So services like the Invidia, whatever, what's the Invidia series? GForce now? Or Xbox, Cloud Gaming, whatever. Chromebook is a big screen. It's got a keyboard you can plug in a controller. Honestly, for cloud-based games, not so horrible. But the other thing that's changed is that where Chromebooks used to be these low end pieces of junk, honestly, they're pretty good hardware for the most part these days. So Core I five, Core I seven, even AMD rise in 5,000, whatever there are actually, I think AMD is the one that makes Chromebook specific CPUs and chip sets. And they do have this notion of, well, you can install Linux on it, right?

(01:52:37):
I mean, it's it, it's kind of getting to the point where you could game on these things. And so they're kind of pushing this. If you look at the list of gaming compatible Chromebooks, it's not very big. It's probably 12, maybe 12, maybe 12 computers, something like that. They did announce new cloud gaming Chromebooks recently from a r Aus and Lenovo. But one of the big things that's coming to ChromeOS is Steam. And so back in, I dunno, February or March, they announced an alpha version of this that was only available on Chromos in the, probably the dev channel I think it's called now. There's a beta version of Steam that's available to Chromos in the beta channel. So they're kind of aligning those, and presumably sometime in the next six months or so, probably a ces by the way we're gonna see the final release of this stuff. So these things have high end processes, lots of Ram, decent amounts of storage, high resolution displays. You never know. So this is not something I'm gonna spend a lot of time thinking about, but it's out there if you want it. There it is. And this will segue into my tip. Netflix announced that they're working on a Gears of War movie finally, which is awesome. And if you've ever played this game, especially the first one or any of the games it's impossible not to think that this could be a movie and this is happening. And so I guess based on the success of the Halo TV series, I don't know are you're

Leo Laporte (01:54:08):
Sarcastic there? I think? Yes. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:54:10):
A little bit. But they're doing it, so that's fine. And we're gonna talk about gears a little bit more in a moment, but there's also gonna be a Gears War animated TV series. Now of course, I assume this is not little Weeble a guy. I think it's gonna be like an adult thing cuz this is an adult story. But good, this is good. This is something that should happen. I think this makes sense. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, the Halo TV series has been renewed for second. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:54:41):
You're kidding. Well, I was,

Paul Thurrott (01:54:42):
Well, Paramount Plus is,

Leo Laporte (01:54:44):
I was mocking, I was wrong. So <laugh> it wrong, It's wrong to mock.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:49):
You were probably in the right place,

Leo Laporte (01:54:51):
<laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:52):
So if we could, is it okay to switch into the back of the book seamlessly? Is that a

Leo Laporte (01:54:58):
Yeah, sure. Why not? Let's go. Let's do it. Did you mention the Stadia refund email?

Paul Thurrott (01:55:05):
I did not. I Oh right. Cause I didn't like to, Sorry. Yeah. So before the show started, I saw a story saying that Google had sent out their first emails to Stadia customers to explain how the refund thing was going.

Leo Laporte (01:55:16):
The reason I ask is cuz as soon as I saw that in your rundown, I checked and at 10 30 this morning, half an hour before the show began, I got mine. <laugh>, I got mine.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:25):
So what it doesn't say is good news, you're getting a hundred dollars back or whatever the figure is, right? So this, they kinda explain, Yeah, the schedule. So I'm curious to see how this goes. I bought a Stadia controller. I paid for Stadia, obviously, and I bought two games. So

Leo Laporte (01:55:40):
They say you're not gonna get your subscription feedback.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:43):
Okay, well yeah. So I'm 60 bucks for controller probably, and maybe 25 bucks a game, something like that.

Leo Laporte (01:55:49):
I can't remember what I bought. So

Paul Thurrott (01:55:52):
I hope they give it to me in the form of a Google store coupon, which actually is also a tip. We'll get to that in a moment too. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:55:57):
Really, they say we'll attempt to automatically refund each transaction the form of payment used to make purchase.

Paul Thurrott (01:56:05):
That just means it goes back to my wife, Leo, that's used

Leo Laporte (01:56:07):
<laugh>. I don't want that. No,

Paul Thurrott (01:56:10):
I want the money.

Leo Laporte (01:56:11):
Give the money, gimme the cash.

Paul Thurrott (01:56:13):
So I'm always on the outlook for good industry books. And my tip this week is about a good industry book. It's written by Cliff Cliffy, b Bazinsky. This is the guy who was not responsible for, but he worked on Unreal and Unreal tournament. But he is responsible for Gears of War, which is what we were just talking about. It's called Control Freak, My epic adventure Making video games. That's a great, right. All right. Here's the thing. Gears of War is a fantastic game. It is. And you gotta remember this thing came out probably what, 2000? It came out with the first Xbox 360. So somewhere in the middle of Halo two and three ish, it came out. It was the Microsoft needed a first, well it was a third party, but they published it. They needed a big blockbuster game that was Xbox only. And this was it. And what's fascinating about this book to me is this guy goes into great detail about how he invented this world and everything that was in it. And he had people on the team who helped him obviously. But all of the stuff that is, it's genius. This game was just right time, right place, everything. He had this idea in the back of his head, he would watch Banda Brothers came out and he's like, I wanna do something like Banda Brothers. Makes sense. I wanted it to be like

(01:57:29):
Bleak Europe gray.

Leo Laporte (01:57:30):
Well that's one of the things I remember about it is the color palette had tended towards kind of this grayish everything before then had been unreal in a real term. Had been garishly colorful and gears of were stood out cuz it wasn't. Now you've to explains it,

Paul Thurrott (01:57:46):
Unreal and unreal. At least there was Unreal Tournament in probably 2003, 2004 I think were the ones I remember. But those games were kinetic, Fast moving was a bamm pinball machine. Lots bright colors and fast moving. This game was the exact opposite. It slowed it down. It was realistic. It was it an alien world. But you're not fighting aliens. You're fighting creatures that live under the ground. It was after a war, so everything had been destroyed. You're all fighting for your life. It's a team of people that really care about each other and help each other out and all that stuff. There are a burst of color in the game. They have this luminescent I forgot the name of it, whatever the underground, the lava stuff that they use for power, which is what the creatures going after, which adds this incredible element of bright color to this otherwise drab world.

(01:58:39):
The game was fantastic. I played it multiple times. The subsequent games, and Microsoft now owns it, have been okay. They've been good to, Okay. I think I've played through every single one of them actually. The campaigns I think I have. But the first one I've played through a dozen times. It's one of those games, if you were to go back in history and say games that you play and play again and again, for me, those games are doom and quake. They're unreal and Unreal Tournament. Absolutely Halo one, two, and three for sure. Call of Duty obviously. But Gears of War is on this list, there's no doubt about it. And a lot of stuff where it's about saying low to the ground, hiding behind things so you don't get shot reloading. He explains how they did that. And it was all these things as they created the game, they kept adding all of the features that made this game what it was. And it's a, anyway, a fantastic game. But it's fascinating reading how they got to it. And it's a great book. So if you care about the industry at all in general, but I'll obviously video games or this game in particular, you gotta read this book. It's fantastic.

Leo Laporte (01:59:54):
Control Freak My Epic Adventure Making video games by Cliffy B.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:00):
Yeah, even the song, So remember the first promo video for this game was the song Mad World, which is a Tears for Fierce song, but it was a remake version that I think they used for the ad. But it's a real slow it slow.

Leo Laporte (02:00:12):
It's sad. It's a Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:14):
Yes. It's really for long.

Leo Laporte (02:00:15):
Even remember that? This was a long time

Paul Thurrott (02:00:17):
Ago. Yeah. This was epic <laugh>. Yeah, but it was monumental. This was,

Leo Laporte (02:00:24):
I totally remember that.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:25):
Yeah. Yeah. Big deal. Really

Leo Laporte (02:00:26):
Big deal. Oh, now I wanna play it.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:28):
Yep. If I can find,

Leo Laporte (02:00:29):
Yeah, it's original gear for

Paul Thurrott (02:00:31):
Excellent, excellent game.

Leo Laporte (02:00:34):
They

Paul Thurrott (02:00:35):
Did a PC version eventually that added an additional level where you fight that Relic and Godzilla thing. Here it is that eventually you

Leo Laporte (02:00:44):
Look, YouTube's got everything, I swear. Of course you do. There's nothing you can't find <laugh>. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:52):
Yes. It looks like Europe during World War ii, right? Yeah. You get that vibe from

Leo Laporte (02:00:56):
There. Yeah. Very, very Banda brothers and kind of sepia and gray. I just, I can't play, Oh, that whole song. But this, it's a mad world. Wow. Look at that. Yeah. This was a real, It's hard to establish how different this was from what we,

Paul Thurrott (02:01:16):
Everything about it was different where it was beautiful looking, but it was drab. It was slow moving and low to the ground where other games, one of the problems for Microsoft where they were like, So wait a minute, this is an alien planet and you're fighting aliens. And they were like, No, no, no. <laugh>. Yeah, it's an alien planet, but it's like World War ii. What they're fighting is creatures that already live on their planet. They're underground and they're not aliens in spaceships. There's no spaceships. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:01:42):
And it's an interesting story. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:45):
Yep. Wow, that's really well done. Yeah, it's a great game. I'd love to read

Leo Laporte (02:01:48):
That book. Okay. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:49):
Thank you. Definitely. Definitely. Look,

Leo Laporte (02:01:50):
Always looking for those books.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:52):
Yeah, no, me too. And we mentioned Google and Stadia and everything, and so Google published a preview of their Black Friday sale. This is gonna be happening a lot this month, obviously. I don't think it's everything they're gonna have. I really want to get one of their wifi router mesh things succeed. But I don't wanna pay full price for it. So I'm in kind of holding out on that. And actually I might get a Pixel seven something too based on those phones are gonna, excuse me, like 150 bucks off or a hundred bucks off depending on which one you're looking at. Combined with some other promotions and things and trade in could make that sense. So definitely just go to start google.com and you'll see that. And in keeping with Black Friday. Then the theme I've been using this, I'm gonna call it an app.

(02:02:41):
I use the web version of it, but there's a web extension you can get for Edge or Chrome. You can get a mobile app if iPad, iPhone, whatever it's called kipa. And what Kea does is, unless you search for things on Amazon, and then it tracks the price. And what you basically say is send me a notification when it gets below this price or whatever. And it's a way to keep up on stuff. In other words, you wanna buy something you don't wanna pay full price, you wanna see when it goes lower, et cetera. This is a great service. There are probably other services like this is

Leo Laporte (02:03:10):
Camel. Camel, Have you ever used that? I

Paul Thurrott (02:03:12):
Think, yeah. No, that was the, Yeah, I think it's very similar. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:03:15):
Kipa. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:17):
Yeah. So actually right now I'm using this to track the price of two different wifi mesh route sets I might choose from. So Cool. Yeah. Anyway, I found it to be really helpful. So this is kind of a neat thing. And again, Black Friday's coming up, so this is kind of a good time of year if you're gonna be buying presents or presents for yourself. I'm not, no judging.

Leo Laporte (02:03:35):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:37):
This is one way to keep the cost down potentially.

Leo Laporte (02:03:43):
Well I think you have whipped through this in record time. <affirmative>. I'm very impressed. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:49):
<laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:03:49):
Without Mary Jos slowing you down. You really get down a press tax. I tell you, Joe. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:03:55):
We could do a drink.

Leo Laporte (02:03:56):
Let's do a cocky tail. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:03:58):
I'm gonna do this off the top of my head. So my wife has not sent me the ingredients, but I came up with this idea. So basically now that we we're moved into fall, it's getting colder. This is the time of year where you start turning to drinks, I'll say that are based on brown liquors, <laugh> which are typically bourbons or SCOs, that kind of thing. And of course the classic, actually the two classics for this kind of drink is a Manhattan and an old fashioned. And they're very similar. The difference is that a, lemme see if I can get this right off the top of my head cuz I've mixed them into one drink now. But with an old fashioned, it's basically a bourbon simple syrup, bitters. And I think that's about it. And then the Manhattan gets rid of the simple syrup and adds moth, A sweet vermouth vermouth gives the drink kind of a mouth feel, which I like and kind of a unique taste. But I find old fashions are often too sweet. And were, when I make that myself, I use it with less simple syrup. My mouth makes a maple simple, that kind of thing. And the vermouth I is kind of interesting, but it's often, depending on the vermouth you get is almost not sweet enough in many cases. So what I came up with was the old hatten, which is a combination of these

Leo Laporte (02:05:16):
Two drinks. Old hat, which I love it.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:18):
<laugh>. So it's two part suburban, half apart, each of sweet vermouth and simple syrup. <affirmative>. And then of course orange and Naga, be it bitters and super easy to make it's, it is this time of year in a glass. It is the thing to sip on a cold night in November or December whatever

Leo Laporte (02:05:42):
You do. It's cozy. Sounds nice. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:05:44):
It's nice. Yeah. Big ice cube, preferably. Yeah. Gotta do that. Mix this in a drink with ice. In a glass with ice. Rather use a strainer. Very important that you mix this with ice.

Leo Laporte (02:05:54):
I'm just glad you're keeping the alcoholism alive on this program.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:58):
Listen, this, my liver's not gonna kill himself.

Leo Laporte (02:06:02):
If you follow Paul on Instagram you will see, you'll get the impression that he's eating and drinking himself to death. Honestly.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:10):
<laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:06:11):
Right? But you enjoy your food and drink and I enjoy watching along with you. That's all I can say. Sure.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:18):
So there's all kinds of reasons. You might have to have an old fashioned, I

Leo Laporte (02:06:21):
Think you're right. I've never

Paul Thurrott (02:06:23):
Baseball games.

Leo Laporte (02:06:24):
Yeah. I've always done clear beverages and now I'm thinking, man, I'm gonna try this. I'm gonna try. I see. It sounds so good. It can,

Paul Thurrott (02:06:31):
It's important, obviously with SCOs they can be very strong and they can be smokey, which I don't like.

Leo Laporte (02:06:36):
You don't want

Paul Thurrott (02:06:38):
No, you really want a bourbon for this kind of a drink. Smooth. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:06:43):
Or sometimes an Irish whiskey and you

Paul Thurrott (02:06:44):
Can address the taste. Yeah. Oh, by the way, Iris risky is perfect. That's a great choice

Leo Laporte (02:06:49):
For this. If you don't wanna do the bourbon, which is sometimes a little too cloy clean. A nice Irish

Paul Thurrott (02:06:58):
Is, Yeah. Don't use an expensive whiskey in this is, but yeah, like a Jameson or Yeah, it's delicious. Even a Jack Daniels even is fine.

Leo Laporte (02:07:07):
Yeah. Mr. Paul Thra. Mr. Paul Thra. I tell you, <affirmative>, you've done it again. We've come to the end of this now did you want me to give you a little maed on

Paul Thurrott (02:07:18):
Yeah, yeah, of course.

Leo Laporte (02:07:19):
Yes. Only if you want to.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:21):
No, I meant to ask you about this. All

Leo Laporte (02:07:23):
The cool kids are doing it. They're leaving TWiTtter. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:26):
So tell me again where you gotta go though. And

Leo Laporte (02:07:28):
So the first of all, you have to understand why Macon's not TWiTtter. And I think a lot of people who come to Macon think, well this is just a open source TWiTtter. No one owns Mastodon. It's decentralized. It's decentralized. The software Macon was created by Garron. Eugene Roko, who is a German and a good chairman, has engineered beautifully, he's been doing this for years. We've been running a Macon server for three years. But it isn't the Mastodon protocol. It runs on Activity pub, which is a very good open protocol. And there are lots of things that run on Activity Pub besides Mastodon. There is a activity pub based YouTube clone. There's plural, which is also a TWiTtter micro blogging site. There's Pixel Fed, which is an Instagram like thing. So these all use activity pub so that they can talk to each other Pixel fed so they can talk to each other.

(02:08:29):
And the way it works is somebody like yours truly sets up a server. There are hundreds of Macon servers, there are fewer of these other guys, but there are many to choose from. So the first barrier that a lot of TWiTtter people have coming to Macon is, well where do I start? They go to Macon about social, which is Garron instance. I wouldn't go there right now. It's way overwhelmed by the number cuz everybody 10 goes there. You're better off. You can go to join mastodon.org and look at various servers or search around. So that's what I did and I didn't understand. So you're gonna join one server once. I would recommend TWiT social, cuz that's our server TWiT.social. I'm not pushing it. No, no, it's too much because I want it to be a kind of cozy local instance for people who listen to TWiTt.

(02:09:22):
And that's kind of what it is. Many of our hosts are starting to move there, stuff like that. In fact, there's a lot of Windows guys. Scott Hanselman is on Mastodon. So there a lot of people, they call it the Fed averse, the federated universe. And then you go one corner of it. The nice thing about the corner is it has its own style, its own moderation. I'm in charge of the moderation of that. So I moderate it in the way that I want to. Family friendly and no hate speech and conversations, not broadcasts, things like that. But there are other servers, they all have, there's a journalist, one journal do host that just got started because a lot of journalists are migrating away from TWiTtter. So you go to TWiTtter, social, you can join there. Now there you'll see if I turned on the advanced web interface, the simple interface just looks like TWiTtter.

(02:10:14):
This ones more like tweet deck and you'll see a number of fees is the home feed, which is people you follow. That's like your TWiTtter followers. Feed local is everybody on TWiTtter.social or whatever instance you join. So that's why it's kind of good to join an instance where you like the people because that's who you're gonna see in your local feed. And then they also condition to somewhat this third feed, which is the federated timeline. It's not a fire hose, it's not everything, but it's everything. People on your instance follow. So it's like friends of friends.

(02:10:48):
And it depends on our server. It's moving pretty quick now because there's so many people on it and so forth. <laugh>, I just did send a request by the way. Oh good. And that's one thing I do to keep spammers out is I approve all the requests we've been getting more than a hundred day. In fact, I'll show you real quickly, the growth is kind of stunning. If I go to my administration interface 8000% growth in users <laugh> 3250% growth in interactions. So it's gotten, But this is a 1700 user, so that's pretty typical. There are a thousand to 2000 ma on that. Social is more than a hundred thousand now. So it's really, it's gotten too big I think.

(02:11:32):
So this is a good way to start. But then you can follow anybody anywhere. So you saw I mentioned Scott Hanselman is on there. You could actually, you can search for him and if somebody's following him on our server, there he is. So you can search for him and then you'll see his profile right here. I'm already following him, but you can follow him. And you see he's at macau.social. Yeah. So you would copy this into your interface and follow or click follow him there. Right. The other thing that happens is there's no verification checks despite the number of blue checks you might see. Those are fake <laugh>. But there is a way to verify yourself using your profile because you can do a re dot meag in any site you control. And then this will give you a green check. See Scott has done that with his website cause he controls that and his podcast.

(02:12:28):
So those are verified. He hasn't done that with TikTok or YouTube. But if you see these green checks in the profile, that means yeah, it's Scott Hanselman, at least assuming that Scott controls hanselman.com. So similarly if you look at my profile, let's go over to mine. By the way, this is how you enter him in there. You paste him into the search and then Adam, if you go to my profile, TWiTtter is verified, my blog is verified. I have an open PGP proof. This actually I did verify the TWiTtter forms, but it hasn't come through. It takes a little while to have that come through. So that's another important point. And then once you join, it's very much like TWiTtter. There are a few differences. You call 'em tuts, not tweets. <laugh>. See that There you. Okay. It grows on you trust me, <laugh>. Yeah, sure.

(02:13:19):
If you don't like that, there are some clients that call 'em posts. If that makes you feel better. You type what's on your mind, you get 500 characters, you get all the emojis plus custom emojis, including I might add the Paul <laugh> in your own, your very own Paul Throt there. Oh, it's the dark haired Paul <affirmative>. I remember him join us. Now there's one, a couple other things you can do. You can choose who it goes to. You've got privacy settings, so you can choose that. That's the globe there. This is for polls. You can do if you wanna do a poll. And then this one's pretty important CW this, they call it a content warning. I think of it as a headline. For instance there's a ethos on <inaudible>, which is different than TWiTtter, which is we wanna be protective of our members.

(02:14:11):
So there's some members for instance, who have and I would recommend this for you who have eating disorders. So it's considered polite to do a content warning and just type food in if you're gonna post pictures of food or drink if you're gonna post. So they don't have to see it. So I post a headline on everything so people don't have to see stuff about TWiTtter or whatever so that they know ahead of time and the way, So you could just let them know this is a TWiT thing and they don't read it. They're not interested in that. Yeah. Okay. So I think that some people don't like these content warnings and most people especially new from TWiTtter, don't use them. But I kind of recommend you do just outta politeness. So here's Jan. I see. Okay. So he actually didn't understand it <laugh> cause the picture.

(02:15:01):
Sure. Can you get shows <laugh> you, it's trying and that's showing the food but not the other stuff. It shouldn't show anything. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You get the idea. Politics these days is a big one. I put politics but I put all of my posts. Actually I of late have been doing that cuz I actually think it's a useful kind of headline. So you know what you're gonna see Jeff Jarvis is here now. There are quite a few people who have joined. Greta Thunberg has moved over. <laugh>. A lot of celebrities are starting to move over. I think as Elon continues to kind of Elon Musk gonna come over. Yeah. Do you think, Wouldn't that be funny <laugh>? Well, that's another thing I should point out is and why you wanna join. If you can't, it's easy to move, by the way. If you decide you're on the wrong server, there's a path for moving it.

(02:15:51):
But the server admin me in this case decides what other sites servers to federate with. We don't federate with everything. As soon as I see that a server has is a hate speech, there are a lot of free speech servers. I just don't. I federate. So that's as if they're not part of our universe. That's the choice of the admin of an instance. He can also ban individuals and say nobody can follow this individual or see their posts. As soon as I see somebody spewing racist, antisemitic hate speech of any kind, I will block them. And if a site does a lot of that, I will block the site. So we don't have a moderation problem. It just doesn't happen. And you have all of those controls individually too. So if you say, Well, Leo's not blocking this guy, but I sure would like to, you can do that. Or Leo's not blocking this site, but I want to, You can do that for yourself. So you have a lot, It's really designed, I think because it's open source, it's not a company owning, it's designed to support its users is in the way they want.

Paul Thurrott (02:16:54):
Probably not a thing that can happen. But one thing that would be useful for making a transition, this would be a way where you could post on both services at the same

Leo Laporte (02:17:02):
Time. Nobody wants you to do that, but you could. No, but

Paul Thurrott (02:17:06):
To make it, it's hard. Going hard. Leave a service where I have a huge number of followers to something where I have zero.

Leo Laporte (02:17:14):
Yeah, I left a half million followers. But okay, I understand it's, it's a little go, but there are a number of ways to do that. There are a lot of cross-posting servers. So I will leave that as an exercise for you. But you can absolutely set it up that it cross posts. You can do it with this and that as well. But you can cross post easily. And there are people who do. That's where I would use a content warning cross post, something like that. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:17:41):
Yeah, yeah, sure.

Leo Laporte (02:17:43):
Somebody is set up two fake Paul thro acid unless Oh, Oh good. Unless you have set up. Well no, Jeff's telling me that there are spoof accounts, so I will block those as soon as you tell me that they are not real.

Paul Thurrott (02:17:59):
No, that's not

Leo Laporte (02:17:59):
Me. Yeah, I figured. So

Paul Thurrott (02:18:04):
Also, that's not the picture I'd be using, but whatever.

Leo Laporte (02:18:06):
That's what I took. That's what I thought. Anyway that's one of the things you can always see. If somebody is really who they say they are with, that really is a great thing. So you can verify in a really clear way. And it's up to you to do that. So anyway, you don't have to do it. Stay on TWiTtter. When the time comes

Paul Thurrott (02:18:24):
I up and

Leo Laporte (02:18:25):
I will

Paul Thurrott (02:18:25):
<laugh> or I sign, whatever it is.

Leo Laporte (02:18:27):
Did you asked for an invitation? So I'll go in there and I'll approve. I have to do this now two or three times a day because there's so many refugees. Yeah, we have 48 people pending. But I will approve you right now so that you are accessing the site. Takes me a little while. Approve, approve, approve. Okay. Just approved you. So you should be able to go in there and do an introduction post. And everybody who listens to these shows and any of our TWiTtch shows, this is free. It's open to all. You do have to get approved only to block spammers. And it's nice to have have some of our hosts in there. It's fun.

Paul Thurrott (02:19:09):
Yeah. I'm interested in free speech. Is this gonna be

Leo Laporte (02:19:12):
Part? Yeah, come on in there. Yeah. Yeah. Just try it buddy. Just

Paul Thurrott (02:19:16):
Try it.

Leo Laporte (02:19:18):
I think you'll like it because I feel like it's kind of like TWiTtter was 10 years ago and it's aggressively nobody owns it. Elon couldn't buy it if he wanted to. Sure. Which is beautiful. It's a beautiful thing. I really like that part about it. Yeah, that's a selling point. <laugh> suddenly. Yeah. And there's things that somebody's saying, Well, let me know when my county office of emergency services get there. They may or they may not. And maybe you wanna keep TWiTtter. Yeah that's fine. I don't personally have anything to do with TWiTtter anymore, but we still parse postmarketing stuff there on our TWiT live and inside TWiTtter accounts. I'm not gonna stop them doing that if they think that's important.

(02:20:06):
But I feel like this is what social networking and what that's like the Discord. It's a more personal kind of social network. Yeah, yeah. That's right. I like it. All right. Thank you for letting me give my little plug. People ask if they can support it. We did have, I was paying 15 euros a month for it. We had a beef it up. It's now a hundred bucks a month because we got so many new members. That's great. I'm thrilled. If you do wanna support it, we don't take donations there, but you could join Club TWiT eight bucks a month, 7 99 <affirmative> gets you access to all of the shows, including Paul's new Hands on Windows ad free. Absolutely ad free. You get access to the Discord and you get access to our TWiT plus feed, which has stuff before and after the shows. Silly things, fun things, special shows like Hands on Windows.

(02:20:56):
And I should add we still have a free irc, free Mastodon free forums at TWiTT T Community. That's for everybody. But when you do join Club TWiT, it helps support those. Cause they all do cost money to run. So it helps support those a little bit. So thank you for that. Thank you so much. My friend Paul Thra is@the.com. Support him by getting a premium membership there. You'll see there's a lot of great content that you get. You should also take a look at the field guide to Windows eleven@leanpub.com and then join us every Wednesday, 11 name Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern Time. We are now in standard time, so it's 1900 utc@live.TWiT.tv. If you wanna watch live on demand versions at the website, TWiTt.tv/ww. There's a Windows Weekly YouTube channel, and of course you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player and all that's free. Thanks to our fine advertisers. Thank you, Paul. Have a great week. You do, and I will see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye bye. Bye.