Windows Weekly Episode 814 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 Theros here. Richard Campbell's back from his visit to England. We're gonna talk about Windows 11. Microsoft's got a new way to kind of trick you into upgrading something. You might wanna watch out for Intel's earnings fall off a cliff, but they've got a better way than firing people to make money back. And we'll take a look at.net Maui and desktop applications for Windows that and a whole lot more. Coming up next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love

TWiT Intro (00:00:30):
From people you trust it.

Leo Laporte (00:00:41):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Throt and Richard Campbell. Episode 814 recorded Wednesday, February 1st, 2023. Dump Truck Fade. Windows Weekly is brought to you by Miro. Miro is your team's visual platform to connect, collaborate, and create together. Tap into a way to map processes, systems, and plans with the whole team. And get your first three boards for free. Start creating your best work yet at miro.com/podcast. And buy Melissa over 10,000 clients worldwide and industries like retail education, healthcare, insurance, finance, and government. Rely on Melissa for full spectrum data quality and ID verification software. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/twit. And byta too often security professionals are undergoing the tedious, arduous task of manually collecting evidence with dta. Say goodbye to the days of manual evidence collection. Hello to Automation. All done at DDA speed.

(00:01:55):
Visit dra.com/twit to get a demo and 10% off implementation. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we get together and talk about Windows and Microsoft in general with these two cats right here on your left, paul throt throt.com and of course, lean pub.com for his books on your right from run as radio and.net rocks. Mr. Richard Campbell. Hello Richard. Hello, Paul. Good day to you, SIRS. Hello. Hi, Richard. You were in London. I was in London last week. Yes. And speaking at the conference and make recording a few run ass, you know, trying to stay outta trouble. Did you have fun? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Did you see the king? No king, no king Chuck to be seen <laugh>? No. Yeah. That, that much hasn't changed. Yeah, I'd like to see Chuck. I would, I'd like to see him in all his regalia, but yeah, they'll there's gonna be a coronation at some point. I'm sure it'll be a thing. I think it's a couple of months. I think it's, it will be in the news or April it will be in the news. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:59):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:03:00):
Paul is in his basement again. But you've kind of, you've added some decor. Well, not really. Sorry, I'm <laugh>. Yeah, it looks the same. No cat.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:10):
Well, the cat's on the bed. She's enjoying herself over there. Anna. There

Leo Laporte (00:03:15):
You go. <Laugh>. That's all it matters. Microsoft News, let's get right into it. Did

Paul Thurrott (00:03:23):
It, did it, did it

Leo Laporte (00:03:26):
<Laugh>? Should we start with Windows 11?

Paul Thurrott (00:03:28):
Yeah, why not?

Leo Laporte (00:03:29):
What's news?

Paul Thurrott (00:03:32):
Well, Leo, I'm glad you asked. The Windows 11 update is not going so well. Or upgrade, I should say, for Microsoft. So now they're gonna ram it down in their throats. Nice. Yeah. And there's a couple of different ways of doing this. The first is they've announced that they're going to just automatically update to Windows 11 on non-managed PCs. Meaning PCs run by individuals. Right. so that's gonna happen. The other thing, and this is, this is the most beautiful Microsoft thing of all Microsoft things. People are starting to take screenshots of their you know, their computer screen. Cause you can't take, I guess you can't screenshot this part of it. It's during setup and they're being told they need to upgrade to Windows 11 and there are two buttons. It says, okay. Or do it later. <Laugh>,

Rich Campbell (00:04:22):
<Laugh>. Those are your

Paul Thurrott (00:04:23):
Choices. And those are the choices.

Leo Laporte (00:04:24):
There's no never. Huh. Cancel

Paul Thurrott (00:04:27):
This. Well actually, you know, my, again, Microsoft, there's a little link at the bottom. You have to really look for it and it kind of says something like, click here to stay on Windows 10 or whatever. Uhhuh <affirmative>. So it's

Rich Campbell (00:04:35):
Not just pushing 2 22 H two. It is getting you off of 10.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:39):
They're doing both. Yeah. Okay. Yep.

Rich Campbell (00:04:42):
I am, I am days away from re rebuild building a couple of new PCs. Yep. And you know, I'm, I'm prone to 10 cuz I like my task bar on the left,

Paul Thurrott (00:04:52):
But Yeah,

Rich Campbell (00:04:52):
I don't know if it's gonna let me.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:54):
Well, what, you can configure Windows 11 to put it on the left.

Leo Laporte (00:04:56):
You know, they always say that, but is that really the right answer? You know? Oh, that's all you're worried about. Isn't there something where there's 11 that is also like the centered task bar. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:09):
Gonna be bad.

Leo Laporte (00:05:10):
You can't, Mr. Campbell here,

Paul Thurrott (00:05:12):
You can't turn off the round the rounded corners, you know, that might be an issue. And you get

Leo Laporte (00:05:15):
The search pill.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:18):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:05:19):
You get the widgets where the start button used to be.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:24):
Yep. yeah, I look in my experience because I've done this a lot and I've been kind of freaked out at how inconsistent it is. If you download the ISO from Microsoft they're, they actually do a pretty good job of keeping it up to date. Like you don't go back to October or whatever. I don't know. <Laugh> you want, I mean, if you wanna stay in Windows 10, you can, of course you can download that ISO as well.

Leo Laporte (00:05:54):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:05:55):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:56):
But they're pest to you. You know, you only have like two, two and a half years. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:06:00):
It's kinda annoying. Yeah. This is kind of annoying. So, so you're gonna see Okay. Or do it later. And then at the bottom of that dialogue box in a somewhat low contrast font

Paul Thurrott (00:06:12):
That's

Leo Laporte (00:06:12):
Right. It's gonna

Paul Thurrott (00:06:13):
Say a one point font. There'll be a little link blue

Rich Campbell (00:06:16):
On blue. I wanna stay with Windows 10.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:19):
Yeah. So, you know, I

Rich Campbell (00:06:20):
I wanna make bad choices <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:22):
Right? So I, I, my understanding is that this is probably like that screen you might see sometimes when you reboot and it says, Hey, let's finish setting up even though you have finished setting up. Right. And you can say, yeah, it just reminds me in three days. And then it just reminds you the next time you reboot, which is typically because you've installed some update that requires it. And I always just click through. I never want to go through that. I just don't care. Like, I don't, I don't care what you want me to do. I'm not doing it <laugh>. I'm just gonna skip it. And I think it's that pattern you're here

Rich Campbell (00:06:48):
To serve me for crying out loud. Like,

Leo Laporte (00:06:50):
This feels like a dark pattern though. I mean

Paul Thurrott (00:06:53):
Yeah, that's right. That's

Leo Laporte (00:06:54):
Right. It feels like they're really trying to trick people into going to wins. 11. And some percentage of people will just say, okay. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:07:01):
Right. I wrote the first Del I app I ever wrote was like this. It was like you tried to click the button on the dialogue and it would, the dialogue would move <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:07:09):
You're

Paul Thurrott (00:07:09):
The one that did that. I hate that. I guess today, yeah. Today we call that a dark pattern, but you know, kind of like spell checking is ai, I guess. Did you

Leo Laporte (00:07:18):
Do it for the lulls, Paul? Is that why you did that?

Paul Thurrott (00:07:21):
Well, I was just doing, it's a test. I see.

Leo Laporte (00:07:23):
Yeah. Can I keep the button away from the mouse?

Rich Campbell (00:07:26):
That's, that's right. It's a cancel button that runs away. <Laugh>. That's right.

Leo Laporte (00:07:29):
<Laugh>. It's the classic <laugh>. Always funny

Rich Campbell (00:07:33):
As, or as you go to click on them, they actually flip positions. So you click on the Yes,

Paul Thurrott (00:07:37):
Exactly. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:07:37):
Exactly that.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:38):
Well, actually, so I, I, yeah I did, I did that application as well. I had one called I always forget the name of it. It was visual Back. It was like it was like a way to format the disk. What the heck was it called? Not disk part. It doesn't matter. It was a command line interface. So it was like a graphical front end to this thing back in, you know, the days when dos was still part of Windows. And you would click cancel and it would say, okay, formatting C and it would go

Rich Campbell (00:08:05):
<Laugh>. Oh God inducing terror.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:09):
I always forgot the name of that. I can't remember that. Command line utility. Yeah. Anyway, it was like a format type thing, but not format.

Rich Campbell (00:08:14):
It was, I also found that if I made, if I made progress Gors, go back down. You get people to be really angry. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:08:19):
That's right. You need to put 80%. Oh, there's nothing like waiting for a computer to reboot. And then it goes to the second you know, it actually goes to the bios, comes back, and then it says rewinding whatever you just did. And you're like, oh, come

Rich Campbell (00:08:31):
On,

Paul Thurrott (00:08:32):
<Laugh>. Like, come on.

Leo Laporte (00:08:34):
So Steve makes a little program called in Control that yep. You know, that's his way of saying never upgrade to Windows 11. It's, I think it changes some registry entries is what it does. Okay. So there is a way to say, I don't make sense want to ever be pestered about this.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:56):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:08:57):
The problem is when I'm looking at this mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, he's got a, a little pa an in control page. It looks like you're also preventing updates of all kinds. Oh geez. Which would not be, wait a minute. Operating system upgrades are your control system security updates will be received and installed as usual. Oh. But all feature updates and os upgrading under your control. I like that.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:20):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:09:21):
I like that. So you can say, I wanna stay on that.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:23):
What is he some kind of a hippie <laugh>

Rich Campbell (00:09:26):
<Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:09:27):
My god. Socialism in action.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:30):
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Leo Laporte (00:09:31):
<Affirmative>. I like that. So he offers that for free. It's just a little assembly language tool. I'm sure it just changes a registry entry. So if you knew what the Red Dead was, you could probably do that.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:41):
Yeah. Well, and,

Rich Campbell (00:09:42):
And probably a bunch of them actually. Cuz why would you put it in one place?

Leo Laporte (00:09:45):
Oh yeah. I'm sure it is. And,

Rich Campbell (00:09:46):
And I bet his most important service is that it auto starts every time you bid up the machine. Because every time you actually apply a patch, it's gonna reset all those entries

Leo Laporte (00:09:54):
Again,

Paul Thurrott (00:09:55):
<Laugh>. Yeah. That's the thing. That's the problem with a lot of these windows 11 utilities, you know, the things that try to bring it back to the weight wiser changed some behavior. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, Microsoft, you know, they're active. They'll revert it. Thwart that's Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:10:08):
They'll revert it. Yeah. Yeah. He does. Yeah. There is a command line way to do what in control does. He has a script command line script you could use. So Yeah. It's just a, a reg. It is. It's just,

Paul Thurrott (00:10:20):
Just have it run it every time you boot <laugh>. Yeah. You know, just have it

Leo Laporte (00:10:23):
Run. It started. Yeah. it's just a variety of registry entries Exactly as you said. Right. and you could do it. I guess you could do it. Man, look at these keys. <Laugh>, six different registry keys. It's changing so that you won't ever be pestered.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:43):
Man, I thought we were gonna get rid of the registry, you know, 20 years ago. Possible. I really thought we were here. Is

Leo Laporte (00:10:48):
There any that, so I've always said the registry is a horrible hairball of a way to store settings in a binary fashion. Modern operating systems usually use XML files that are human readable p lists, things like

Paul Thurrott (00:11:03):
That. Well, you gotta, so this goes back, I think, to the creation of NT as the anti Unix. Right, right. And you know, windows used to have these win and sis and Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:11:13):
Which were text Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:15):
Which were plain text. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:11:16):
Reason. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:18):
But, you know, people, normal people go in there and they start screwing around.

Leo Laporte (00:11:20):
Ah

Paul Thurrott (00:11:21):
And

Leo Laporte (00:11:21):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:23):
So

Leo Laporte (00:11:24):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:24):
Except that registry was now

Leo Laporte (00:11:25):
Normal people go into their registry and when they screw around <laugh>, they cause instant damage. Yeah, exactly. Instant irrevocable permanent damage.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:35):
You're doing,

Rich Campbell (00:11:35):
You're doing brain surgery on yourself with your hair. Like it's not

Paul Thurrott (00:11:39):
Going, can you move the mirror a little to the left? I got

Leo Laporte (00:11:42):
<Laugh>. So, and, and I think also because it's a, it's a binary file and it can get very large. It's kind of a hairball. Right. and then people, and because a lot of computer are, let's face it, a lot of us are a little bit O C d. They want to clean it up. They don't wanna have old keys lying around, even though it's harmless. Mm-Hmm.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:03):
<Affirmative>, this is this, I love that this has turned into a self-help chat, but <laugh> Yeah. It's, it's no. Right. I no, absolutely like this. You know, like I, I used to sp I've spent, how many countless hours have I spent k just removing things from a start menu I am never gonna look at. Yep. Great. You know we all do this.

Leo Laporte (00:12:23):
It's,

Rich Campbell (00:12:24):
Yeah. It's titting up a room. I'll never go

Paul Thurrott (00:12:26):
In mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. After a while, you know, with some things you just kind of give up on it after a while. I don't think there's any, these are the people who like run CC cleaner every

Leo Laporte (00:12:35):
Morning, you know? Right. Yes. Exactly. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:37):
They used to run Disty fra before you did anything in the morning just to, you know, make sure everything was lined

Leo Laporte (00:12:42):
Up. I used to tell people, I said, well, I understand. I honor your desire to have a clean, tidy registry. Yeah. But these programs either are gonna risk screwing things up because they're too aggressive, or they're gonna be so careful that it's useless. They do nothing. They do

Paul Thurrott (00:12:59):
Nothing. I also say fr you know <laugh>, not to turn it into a weird comparison, but like Windows is such a hairball and it's such a mess that it's like, you know, in Phoenix when I lived in Phoenix, Arizona, there was this thing where you could steam clean your engine because there

Leo Laporte (00:13:13):
Always a mistake. Always a

Paul Thurrott (00:13:14):
Mistake. Don't ever do that. Don't ever do that. Because now your engine leaks oil all over the place. The grit, the grease holding it,

Leo Laporte (00:13:20):
It's holding stuff in.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:21):
Yeah, exactly. Don't clean the registry. It's what's holding the thing together. It's

Leo Laporte (00:13:25):
Really good. An analogy. It's like clean, it's like that. Yeah. You wanna have a nice shiny clean engine.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:30):
It sounds like it's a good ideas,

Leo Laporte (00:13:31):
Not a good idea.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:33):
Yeah. It looks great. Take a picture of it cuz it's not going anywhere. That's

Leo Laporte (00:13:37):
A really good analogy. Oh,

Rich Campbell (00:13:39):
The solution ultimately is just build a new machine so that

Paul Thurrott (00:13:41):
You Yeah. Start over. That's thing. Scratch actually. Yes. So I, I will say that, you know, most of the people this show obviously are technical, so this is not a big deal for them. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but normal people, understandably, are freaked out by resetting windows, by, you know, factory resetting it, you know, that kind of thing. And I get it. But you know, the truth is like, that process is actually super reliable now. It works really well. You don't, I, you don't really hear about people barking the machines that way. Yeah. But when people come to me and they say, Hey you know, when I, I feel like Windows is slow down or, you know, blah, blah, whatever it is, I, you know, to me, because I'm always using either a different computer or I'm just blowing computers away all the time. Right. It's like, yeah. Yeah. I don't really experience that. No. and so the solution is probably somewhere in the middle between never doing it and doing it as often as I do it. But you know, once a year for, for for sure six months, I don't, if you're setting your computer up correctly, if you have all your data syncing to the cloud if you know your applications, you don't have to worry about like product keys or whatever. Right. this process is actually not that, not that painful. Yeah. And it doesn't take that long.

Rich Campbell (00:14:46):
I like I said, I'm rebuilding a couple of machines, so I'm gonna kick some parts loose and we've got teenage boy neighbor living next door and I'm like mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you want these parts and we, we'll build you to the machine. You gotta bring me a new case, a fresh power supply and a set of fans. Like all the spinning hardware needs to be replaced, but the rest is gonna be fine. That's

Leo Laporte (00:15:04):
A very cool thing to do. And are you gonna help him learn how to, what it all means?

Rich Campbell (00:15:09):
Yeah. We'll walk, I'll walk him through building the machine. Cool's. That's a great, it's an afternoon ritual. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:15:14):
<Laugh> Sure. I like that. And you can do that in Canada, <laugh>.

Rich Campbell (00:15:18):
You can do that. You can risk of litigation low. Yeah. Not a lot of stand you're ground up here. A

Leo Laporte (00:15:25):
Ground here might not be the <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (00:15:27):
But in

Leo Laporte (00:15:27):
Canada Sure. You can do that. Sure. Yeah. That's really nice. I think that's a great thing to do. And it's a, you know, it's a great way to get a kid into computing mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Right. It's often a father fathers son activity, but not all parents are technical. And so you know, he got a technical neighbor That's great.

Rich Campbell (00:15:45):
Yeah. And, and have, and then he has his own machine. So I know I talked to the father Exactly. First it's like, oh, of course we'd like to, you know, this is a good thing. We're gonna go through the rules around this. So like, excellent. There you go.

Leo Laporte (00:15:56):
You're you're doing God's work there, Richard. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:15:59):
Was the last back years in the world. It is God's work. It's,

Rich Campbell (00:16:02):
It <laugh> my best. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:04):
No linns. That's the deal. You didn't mention it. I kind of buried the lead. I thought yeah, maybe this was the biggest, to me, the biggest story of the week. It's only a rumor from Bloomberg and the information that we're gonna see chat G p t four in Bing in the next couple of weeks. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:25):
Right. I I bet to tweet about that. <Laugh>, my, my tweet was gonna be imagine a world

Leo Laporte (00:16:34):
<Laugh>, which

Paul Thurrott (00:16:35):
People actually use Bing every day. You know, it sounds like science fiction. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:16:39):
But that's the, that's why Google's scared. Yeah. Because that's the kind of thing that might move people over to, it's gonna make me look at Bing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:48):
Sure. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:48):
Of course. I use I mentioned this before, I use Neva, which is a, a little startup search engine.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:55):
Wasn't it Index Google

Leo Laporte (00:16:56):
Guy? Yeah. It's former Googlers. Yeah. He's been around for a few years. They do their own spidering. They don't use anybody else's index. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And they have, when you do a search, they have a chat G p t like agent that will, you know how Google gives you the knowledge graph, but that's always just like a quote from somewhere. Usually Wikipedia with Neva. Let me, let me just, I'll give you an example. I'll just do a search for.net with Neva. It gives you, and I think it's a good little synthesis mm-hmm. <Affirmative> it's gonna, it's gonna generate, there it is. It's in the little dots thing. And you tell me if this is no.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:32):
Oh, oh, okay. It's doing it. Oh, interesting.

Leo Laporte (00:17:34):
Yeah. It's getting it from,

Paul Thurrott (00:17:36):
It's

Leo Laporte (00:17:36):
On the fly. Microsoft and Wikipedia. Yeah. It does it on the fly. Do you see? And it does footnotes

Paul Thurrott (00:17:40):
You see pulling in.

Leo Laporte (00:17:41):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:44):
I, I guess so I guess my only thing here is like, what is, like, what's the complaint about Google? Like what, like, do people go to Google and say it's not doing what I want? I'll tell you the

Leo Laporte (00:17:54):
Complaint, it's crapped up because crapped up Google is an ad company and they're loaded, they're larding up the search results now. Right. The first half of the page above the fold is almost all as this

Paul Thurrott (00:18:07):
Is true. I mean, everywhere. Right. I was just searching for something on Amazon today, and I was kind of, I was looking at the top, you know, the, the stuff that came up at the top. I was like, this is not what I asked for. Right. And it was because there were ads. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:18:19):
It's crapped up, sponsored everywhere. And it's what Cory doctor wrote calls the certification.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:24):
Yeah. The, well, the certification.

Leo Laporte (00:18:26):
I have to say it that

Paul Thurrott (00:18:27):
Way. I, I saw, I just saw that.

Leo Laporte (00:18:28):
Yeah. I'm doing the Good place. That's a good the certification.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:31):
And he did that with, to the stratification, as you call it, of TikTok, for example,

Leo Laporte (00:18:35):
Was, but he used as an example. This happens to everybody. He uses Amazon as an example. They always, when you're starting something new, you, you, you do it for the consumer service.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:43):
A good example. You make

Leo Laporte (00:18:44):
It easy and you wanna build on, and then you do it for businesses. But the third stage of the stratification stage is when you start saying, okay, now we got everybody locked in businesses and consumers. Now we start taking some money outta this.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:57):
And you turn the screws. Yep. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:18:58):
And it happens every time. Yeah. And goo it's happened to Google. It's inured, <laugh>. It's just all crapping up. And I think that Google is right, is ripe for takeover at this point, for disintermediation that somebody's gonna come along and Bing is a good candidate. If they, but here's the problem, Bing. Microsoft's also in certifying because they have the, of course, the Overture, whatever it is, you know, there's a lot of Bing rewards points. Come on guys. Coupon codes. I, I guess that's

Paul Thurrott (00:19:28):
It. Does anyone that could out Certificate <laugh>,

Rich Campbell (00:19:32):
Search Google. Let's talk about how Certified Windows has gotten

Leo Laporte (00:19:36):
Grace.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:36):
Well, that you

Rich Campbell (00:19:37):
Do a consumer install of Windows. Boy, that's a lot of jumpy poppy things.

Leo Laporte (00:19:41):
Yeah. I

Paul Thurrott (00:19:41):
Just went, okay, so right before Microsoft, Richie did, you missed so much last week. I'm sorry he missed so much. Oh, m something down. He was in

Leo Laporte (00:19:48):
England. He had d with it. I know.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:50):
I'm No, I'm just saying. Right. But so we're gonna have to reference a couple of things from last week. So right before Microsoft released the earnings on Tuesday, I wrote an article about this very topic. I I, you know, I keep talking about the slippery slope thing, but it, it's not just advertising in Windows, it's just the whole direction that it's kind of going for individuals. Right. Because you are not paying Microsoft every year, every, even every three years. You're, you're paying for Windows once and they use it for the duration for the pc. And Microsoft wants to monetize all those people. It's understandable. And what I would like to see is just the ability to pay to not have that in certification. Sure. it

Rich Campbell (00:20:31):
Should be, it should be a part of N 365.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:33):
Yep. You pay your pay. Thank you. Exactly. An extra

Rich Campbell (00:20:35):
$3 a month and your window size it

Paul Thurrott (00:20:38):
Suck. That's right. And Microsoft's response to that as well. That's like an implicit admission that what we're doing is terrible. We talked about this to which I respond, but you're doing it with Adri.

Leo Laporte (00:20:47):
It is terrible. People know it. You're not telling them something they don't know. Right. <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:53):
Right. However, there is another thing they could do. Yes. And the other thing they could do is let individuals buy Windows 11 or Windows 10 enterprise, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which actually solves the problem.

Leo Laporte (00:21:03):
What happened to this signature pc? I thought that was one way to address that, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:21:08):
Yeah. That went away because of internal conflicts at Microsoft, basically

Leo Laporte (00:21:14):
Guess who Right? The ad division.

Rich Campbell (00:21:16):
Right. And, you know I've been running a domain infrastructure in the house, you know, with kids and things like that so that they knew when they were in trouble, the machine would tell them, please speak to your administrator <laugh>. But, and I'm ready to, it is just the two of us now. I'm trying to retire all of that. And I'm kind of afraid, cuz I think I've been insulated.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:35):
You have totally been from

Rich Campbell (00:21:37):
A lot of this stuff. Just because I've always run the enterprise editions of things. Be

Leo Laporte (00:21:41):
Afraid.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:41):
Richard, you have been you have been walked by the line of people. The line of people standing outside the door and haven't been allowed to go in. He's

Leo Laporte (00:21:47):
He's inside the rope.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:48):
Yep. Yep. Yeah. And you just, yeah. You don't know what it's like out here in the cold <laugh>. No, it's not, it's not good. So good. I'm,

Rich Campbell (00:21:56):
I'm gonna go there and I'm gonna be horrified. And then we're gonna flip back to

Leo Laporte (00:21:59):
That. This is, by the way, why I stopped using Google and started using Neva Nevas five bucks a month. I'm paying not

Paul Thurrott (00:22:04):
Five bucks a month. I don't mind that. That's, that's,

Rich Campbell (00:22:07):
That's here's my $60. Thanks.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:09):
That's right. Yeah. That we talked about Adobe last week as an example of something. That's a lot too much money every month. But yeah. There's a lot of services where if it was reasonable. Yeah. I, I'm happy to pay first service. I, but I mean, fundamentally though, what I would like is just that option. You know, there are many, many examples Richard just flew and upgraded is, you know, on the flight. And there are the people back in the back of the bus and there are people in the front of the bus mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and they have slightly different experiences and it's not a surprise that you pay more to get to the front of the bus. This is a system that exists, you know, basically everywhere.

Leo Laporte (00:22:42):
It's what we do at twit. If you don't want ads in Twit, you pay seven bucks a month and you're in Club twit. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:48):
It's that Netflix is like this Spotify,

Leo Laporte (00:22:50):
It's not Andy, it's not anti-democratic. Because we still offer free,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:54):
It's very much de democratic.

Leo Laporte (00:22:56):
Yeah. We give you the choice. Yeah. And you don't have to get, I don't like, I mean, every time I go to the Financial Times, I just go, oh, I hate that.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:04):
I know, I

Leo Laporte (00:23:04):
Know. Because I can't get in at all. But if

Paul Thurrott (00:23:07):
I hit a Bloomberg is very expensive. It's 30 bucks a month or the, the information is 30 bucks, a 400 a year

Leo Laporte (00:23:13):
Bucks.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:13):
Yeah. It's really expensive. I buy 'em

Leo Laporte (00:23:15):
Both. 

Paul Thurrott (00:23:15):
To me those are just unreasonable prices for that kind

Leo Laporte (00:23:18):
Of thing. I agree. It, it chs me to, I get

Paul Thurrott (00:23:20):
The Wall Street Journal for 40 bucks a year on sale. You know. Yeah. how, how are those publications worth more than the Wall Street Journal?

Leo Laporte (00:23:27):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:23:27):
Yeah. If everybody's trying pricing, but you know, at least we're starting to pay for stuff. It was a long time where we were told the internet's gonna be free. That's right. It's just about that part where you're the product

Leo Laporte (00:23:37):
Still a lot of people

Paul Thurrott (00:23:39):
Conditions miss you so much

Leo Laporte (00:23:40):
That the internet should be free. Data information wants to be free, says the hacker ethic. And so they don't like the idea that they have to pay for stuff, but all this stuff does

Paul Thurrott (00:23:51):
Cost money. Creator, you're paying get paid for the work that you do is understandable and reasonable. Yeah. Right. 

Rich Campbell (00:23:58):
Well, and it's certainly a theme on.net rocks we're talking about. Even if you, you're using opensource software. We know you are. Yep. You should be contributing. Yes. And not even, and if you can't write the code, just send them a tip once a month. Like it doesn't take that much. And if everybody did it, all this stuff is far. Oh

Paul Thurrott (00:24:14):
My God. It's incredible. You know, even like my little book on Lean Pub, you know, people, I get these emails when people buy the book and it's like, you know, the normal amounts of money that every once in a while someone just sends in like a <laugh> like a crazy amount of money. And it's like, I wish I knew who that person was. Yeah. Like, it's incredible.

Rich Campbell (00:24:31):
It's anonymous and I've been that guy, Paul. And I'll tell you why <laugh> you, you saved my bacon one day, right? Oh boy. At some point something's I'm struggling with something and I read it and you just, you mean you saved me $200? Like literally it's like I was gonna spend the whole day beating down this life. I'm gonna say you fixed it. And I, I just love being able to go, here's 50 bucks. Like, cuz it was worth more than that to me.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:51):
Right. Well that's great. I mean, that's nice. It, it's yeah. That, so yes. You're, you're everyone, everyone is Right. <Laugh>, <laugh>, you know that

Rich Campbell (00:24:59):
We're all

Paul Thurrott (00:24:59):
In violent agreement. We should Well, we should all, yeah. We should all be contributing however we can contribute. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:25:05):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:25:06):
Well, cer certainly it's an area I I'm paying a lot of attention to, but I you, you guys have now got me filled with a sense of dread. I'm about to build a couple of 11 machines that are gonna be consumer mode. I'm like, I

Paul Thurrott (00:25:15):
Can't, I gonna hate, is there, is there a way I could zoom into this and watch <laugh>?

Rich Campbell (00:25:20):
I'm, I people have this play out over the show for a few weeks.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:23):
Yeah. Yeah. I'll be a

Leo Laporte (00:25:24):
Little contrarian. I don't think it's that bad. I I don't, I'm be I'm really curious what you'll say after you do this, and like if you'll say, you know what it is, well, I can live with it. Or boy,

Paul Thurrott (00:25:32):
This is, it's a creeping horror kind of a thing. It's not, it's not gonna con it's not like walking into Times Square and be like, oh my God, what is going on there? It's not like

Rich Campbell (00:25:38):
That. It's

Leo Laporte (00:25:39):
Not like Dancing Elmos.

Rich Campbell (00:25:42):
I'm trying to shut down active directory in the house. Like, it, it doesn't need to be here anymore. Sure. It literally was a PD c BBC implementation from 2000 impressed, upgraded stead. I'm impressed that you, you were running

Paul Thurrott (00:25:54):
Active directions. I did, by the way, I did the same thing, but I got rid of it many years ago. Yes. I mean, you know, that's

Rich Campbell (00:25:59):
Hysterical. Many and my own exchange, she, so I could look those guys in the eye and say, I feel your pain. I feel

Leo Laporte (00:26:05):
Your pain.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:06):
I hope that you tailored the error messages so that they said something like, you must contact your administrator. Yes. You will see him at dinner. Mm-Hmm.

Rich Campbell (00:26:13):
<Laugh>. No, no, they definitely, there is several great, you know, moments like that where it's like or remotely controlling the machine and just writing on a notepad on the machine. Hi, I'm your laundry. I'm scattered all over the laundry room and that it makes me feel bad. <Laugh> what is, and then just don't give the controls back until they, you know, when's the laundry cleaned up? What is that

Leo Laporte (00:26:36):
Inscrutable message? Copy machines used to give like the

Paul Thurrott (00:26:41):
Load letter.

Leo Laporte (00:26:42):
Yeah. Load letter,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:43):
Load letter,

Rich Campbell (00:26:44):
Load letter or

Leo Laporte (00:26:45):
Check key manager.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:47):
I believe load letter is the reason the movie office space exists. <Laugh>, you know, PC load, it was PC load letter. PC

Leo Laporte (00:26:54):
Load letter. There you

Paul Thurrott (00:26:55):
Go. Yeah. Of course you think has something to do with a computer and it doesn't. No, it's

Rich Campbell (00:26:58):
But I realized I training my daughter so well on the whole Yui doesn't work when you haven't done something that when we finally had the dump truck back into the colorful pole outside the house, that cut both internet connections at the same time. Their answer to come downstairs is say, what did I do wrong? Oh, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:27:14):
Well, you've trained well.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:15):
Right?

Rich Campbell (00:27:16):
Did you see those streets? You know, there's many things I could fix and dump truck fade is not one of

Leo Laporte (00:27:22):
Them. <Laugh> dump truck fade. That's a very, that's a good excuse. I'm sorry, son. We're suffering from dump truck fade right now.

Rich Campbell (00:27:31):
Well, the number of years I spent, you know, with company data centers trying to give them a redundant connections that didn't run down the same pole. Right. You know, right. Where it's like one hit and we're out. Like just trying to split all that stuff up. There's only so much you could do in your house.

Leo Laporte (00:27:45):
All right. Back to Windows. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to distract you. I just thought that was an interesting story and I know you, you don't have it here in notes. Of course it is just a rumor, but we'll talk about it when it happens. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I think it's gonna be a very interesting challenge to Google. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:00):
Yeah. I mean, I, I I don't know. I, you know, I wonder, I mean, I, I I think there's a, obviously there's a lot of hype around ai. I I feel like Google is pretty entrenched. I mean, it's, it,

Leo Laporte (00:28:11):
It, well, they say we, oh, we have it. We just didn't, we didn't, you know, we don't trust you with it, so we didn't release it. But now that Open AI has done it. Okay. Don't worry. We've got stuff even better. 

Paul Thurrott (00:28:23):
I I love that Google had ethics all of a sudden and now they're like, unleash the hos. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:28:28):
Forget that. Jan Lacoon, who's in charge of AI at meta said there's nothing special about chat G p D. We've had that for years. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:28:36):
<Laugh>. Okay. Well

Leo Laporte (00:28:36):
That's had that forever <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:38):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:28:39):
Okay. I'm sure he, I'm sure he said that to, to to Sundar too. And he's thrilled, right? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:28:44):
We've

Rich Campbell (00:28:44):
Always had that. Apparently they've called Larry and, and Sergey back in, like it's all hands on deck. Have they really? Is that true? Oh, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:51):
Yeah. Well, they came in. Yeah, they're, they're kind of, yeah. They, they're not coming in like full-time, but

Rich Campbell (00:28:56):
They're, no, I don't

Leo Laporte (00:28:57):
Think they're gonna much use Sergey doesn't wear shoes. Shoes agree anymore. And exactly.

Rich Campbell (00:29:02):
Yeah. But I think this is a politic political I

Paul Thurrott (00:29:04):
Google into the office, don't

Rich Campbell (00:29:05):
Make me call Mommy and dad. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:07):
Really?

Rich Campbell (00:29:07):
Yep. You won't like it. Wow. That's right. It'll

Paul Thurrott (00:29:10):
Make you Well, my, by the way, there some Microsoft kind of did this with Bill Gates a little bit, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I mean, there's some

Rich Campbell (00:29:16):
Pressive bill's halftime at Microsoft to this day. I've talked to Microsoft people all the time. He reviews product. Every single product quotes goes before Bill. Well that's cool, but he's not the face of it at all. Right. That's the main thing is they've taken away the face part. But I talked to product team guys when they're going before Bill, like it's a three month practice cuz he will shred you.

Leo Laporte (00:29:37):
I think that's actually awesome.

Rich Campbell (00:29:39):
I generally think it makes the product better and I don't let else can do it. Right. And somehow he still has this gravity that when he sees that three teams are actually building the same thing, he can essentially order a project and say, you know, thou shalt contribute to devs, each of you to this project and all of you will use it. He is, and doesn't, doesn't evidence anybody else could do

Leo Laporte (00:29:58):
That. He doesn't have a title or official Roy. He's no longer on the board.

Rich Campbell (00:30:01):
No, he's an advisor. Just

Leo Laporte (00:30:03):
An advisor. Interesting.

Rich Campbell (00:30:05):
Didn't other interesting advisors floating around out there? Huh?

Leo Laporte (00:30:08):
Where's Ray Ozzy these days?

Paul Thurrott (00:30:09):
I thank you for saying that. I literally, I was just thinking about Ray Ozzy because again, last week, I think we were talking about, I think it was last week, but this notion that, you know, Satcha n delegates all this credit for the cloud and everything, but really this started under Steve Ballmer, but really it did, but it started because of Ray Ozzy, who was then Chief science. What was he? Chief science officer, I guess Chief, is that the right word? No, chief software architect. Sorry. And he was the one who pushed Microsoft down this cloud path in the same way that Bill Gates used to write these big internet title wave memos and so forth. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, he wrote the big memo about the cloud. And honestly, in many ways, that might be the most prescient memo ever written at Microsoft. Yeah. And that guy was not really around that long.

Rich Campbell (00:30:54):
No. And I don't know that it resonated well with him. He, he's got a new cup called Blues Wireless. It's an IOT company. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:31:00):
Really? Yeah. What's he doing?

Rich Campbell (00:31:02):
He's, he's, you know, doing, he's one of the, the founders. So they're they've been, they were in self mode for a couple years. They're up and doing a thing now, but they working closely with at and t on, you know, hardware that will work automatically with at and t's network. So,

Paul Thurrott (00:31:18):
Yeah. Idea. And this is in area? Or where is he? I

Rich Campbell (00:31:21):
Don't know where he moved

Paul Thurrott (00:31:21):
Too. Interesting. Yeah, he's 

Rich Campbell (00:31:26):
Because he was never a satellite, right? Like I, no,

Paul Thurrott (00:31:28):
I was not. Probably for him in Boston or something. I don't even know where he was from, but yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:31:34):
Heed Lotus Notes and, yep,

Paul Thurrott (00:31:36):
That's right. Well, and then he recreated, he was,

Rich Campbell (00:31:39):
He was at Lotus Notes before IBM Boston

Leo Laporte (00:31:41):
Before it. Yeah. Yeah. But his whole thing was kind of cloud collaboration, the

Paul Thurrott (00:31:46):
Groupware stuff. Groupware like Groove. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:31:49):
Groove was his thing at Microsoft. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever happened to that.

Rich Campbell (00:31:53):
It was very cool.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:54):
They turned it into a music service called Groove

Leo Laporte (00:31:57):
<Laugh>. No, they just, they ran outta names. Come on,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:00):
<Laugh>. Yeah, they sure did. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:32:03):
Hey, I wanna take a little break the cruise, come back. There's more to talk about insider build. There's something very exciting happening to snipping tools. I know. You're, you're gonna <laugh> you're gonna love this.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:13):
Yeah. We're gonna spend half an hour on that.

Leo Laporte (00:32:14):
Yeah, that's gonna be great. Earnings. There's still some more stuff to talk about. Richard Campbell's back. Paul Thots here. Windows Weekly continues in a bit. I wanna say hello to a brand new sponsor. Had a really great call with him couple of weeks ago. Miro, m i r. Do you know Miro? Miro is super cool. We've started playing with it. I created an account immediately. You could do this too. You can create a free account and see what it is you're tempted when you first look at it and say, oh, this is a whiteboard. I get it. It's so much more than a whiteboard. Miro is designed for teams, teams who have multiple tools. They use. You know, you're going from tab to tab, workspace to workspace, tool to tool. And you know what happens when it's the same thing when you walk through a door, you get context shift ideas fly out.

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What was I I <laugh>. Why did I launch this? I know there's, with Miro, that doesn't have to happen. You're in one tool, you're doing it all inside. It's a collaborative visual whiteboard. But again, that doesn't say it, it doesn't say it enough. It's so cool. It brings all your great work together, no matter where you are, whether you're working from home or in a hybrid workspace, everything comes together in one place. Online. We wanna start using Miro for our shows, which I think is gonna be really interesting. You can, you could do, it could be as simple with Miro as kind of a dream board. Here's some ideas. We're gonna put them together in an inspiration. It could be a mind map. It could be a can ban. So you keep track. You're in charge of this. You're responsible for that. Move it over.

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(00:35:29):
It's, it's, but you ca it's hard to describe. That's the problem. So here's what I want you to do. Just go to miro, m i r o.com/podcast, miro.com/podcast. Your first three boards for free. Start working better with Miro. You, I, I you gotta do this. There's, and then, oh, please, once you're on the website, start playing with the different templates. They've got a really wonderful section in the mirror website where people have uploaded their prev, you know, their work. And there's all sorts of cr like crazy cool stuff. But it'll give you a much better idea of why companies like Cisco and Walmart and Volvo and Deloitte and Okta used Miro to get their work done. It's just incredible. I mean, it really is a freeform place. You can do whatever you want and take a look at all the integrations. Take a look at their their, their cases.

(00:36:30):
There's stuff, there was a Harry Potter I think used by the British government, I think template from Harry <laugh>. From Harry Potter that they were using. I, it, it's incredible. It's just incredible. Take a look at it. And there's one that has the the Beatles in it. It's very, some very creative people are using Miro to do amazing things. Just look at the Miro verse. That's what they call it to explore what people using Miro have done. You, you, you can get some great ideas. Here's some ice breakers for meetings. Incredible stuff. Incredible stuff. This is, these are all real templates that people have uploaded in the mirror verse from, you know, from their projects. And this is the only way you can really understand. Look at midnight sailboat retrospective <laugh>. I don't know what it is, but it's the be event retro and happy hour character mix and ice match icebreaker Valentine's Day. Love people. There's a memory game people doing. Here's the Harry Potter from the UK government <laugh> Harry Potter retrospective. This you could have taken with you on your trip. Richard <laugh>, m i r o miro.com/podcast. Check it out and get your first three boards for free. It's the only way really to understand what you could do with Miros

Rich Campbell (00:37:53):
To play. I did get to a Broadway play. And when London, while I

Leo Laporte (00:37:55):
Was Did you go to the West End? What did you see?

Rich Campbell (00:37:57):
Yeah, we, I saw Juliet. Oh. Which is a very meta show where

Leo Laporte (00:38:03):
It's about Romeo and

Rich Campbell (00:38:04):
Julie William Shakespeare. Yeah. You have William Shakespeare and his wife rewriting the Romeo and Juliet with, from the point of view of Juliet not being dumb and drinking the poison, going, why, why not dead? Why should that?

Leo Laporte (00:38:19):
And even if he

Rich Campbell (00:38:19):
Were be is what about me? Oh, what

Leo Laporte (00:38:21):
About, yeah. Well that's, anyway,

Rich Campbell (00:38:23):
It's, it's good fun. And that's, it's

Leo Laporte (00:38:26):
What's, that's what I do. If I go to New York, I go to a show. If you gotta go to a show and if you go to London, you gotta go to the West End. There's amazing theater there.

Rich Campbell (00:38:35):
Yeah. You know, it was a, a little, little theater was a lot of fun. Nice. It's a good, it's a great way to spend some time. Good evening.

Leo Laporte (00:38:41):
Jealous. Very jealous <laugh>. Yeah. I used to do that when I would go on business trips to New York by myself I would just go to the box office. You'd always get a single ticket. Right. Because you know people Well,

Rich Campbell (00:38:54):
Yeah. I I I think we ate 40 pounds for four tickets each. You know, like it was

Leo Laporte (00:38:59):
That's nice. That's

Rich Campbell (00:39:00):
A good Cause it was day of right? It's a sort of StubHub effect. It was,

Leo Laporte (00:39:03):
Yeah. You go to the box office, there's always like, you know, there were three people bought seats and there's this one, and usually you can get really good seats that way. These single seats. Cause they want to get, they want people in them. Anyway. Yeah. I don't know how this turned into the theater show <laugh>, but I'm a theater head. So Windows 11 insider preview build 25,002 90 Heads to Dev channel.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:28):
Yeah. I wish I had some interesting news here. <Laugh>. last week, Richard, what you missed was that the only new feature in a build was a Facebook Messenger widget. Oh boy. This week there were two widgets two new widgets I should say. One is for Spotify and one is for Phone link. So obviously one of those is a third party app. The other one is the, the application built in the windows. But this is all the I think it's Microsoft opened up the capability for third party developers to create widgets, I think late last year. And we're starting to see that. And yeah, that's not that exciting, is it? This kind of reminds me of the, the Longhorn sidebar, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it was like we have this other thing. It's Windows,

Rich Campbell (00:40:17):
This other thing that whenever I get anywhere near the right side of my screen, stuff pops out and interferes with what I'm trying to

Paul Thurrott (00:40:21):
Do. Yeah, exactly. That thing. Yeah. So now it's on the left. So the, it's completely different. <Laugh>, you're gonna love that when you get to Windows 11. <Laugh>. So, well actually it's in Windows 10 too. It's called, what's it called? News and News and something. I don't,

Leo Laporte (00:40:38):
You don't get it in the lower left corner, right? You don't,

Paul Thurrott (00:40:42):
Yeah. But if you move the start button over to the left, it, it makes it a button next to the start button so it's not all the way over.

Leo Laporte (00:40:49):
Hmm.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:51):
Anyhow, that's more time than that. And that's

Rich Campbell (00:40:54):
Exciting. As Windows is getting these things. <Laugh>. Woo.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:57):
I'll wait to hear the next story. So last month we learned that Microsoft was gonna be adding screen recording functionality to the sniping tool, which by my count is the 17th way. You can take a screenshot in Windows 11 <laugh>. And they tested it first in the dev channel. So this week they released as password, I should say they released a a build to the beta. No, no, actually it's not a new build. I think they've just released it to the beta channel. Right. So yeah, exciting. I, I don't know

Leo Laporte (00:41:28):
How

Paul Thurrott (00:41:29):
Many people need this kind of thing, but I do agree it should be part of Windows. I don't have a, have any problem with it.

Rich Campbell (00:41:33):
This is, I I kind of like the idea that we should have a, a continuous recording of what we're doing on our machines. Yeah. Know. Anyway. I mean, the number of you, cause you never had that stuff turned on when something goes wrong. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:44):
Like a D

Rich Campbell (00:41:45):
Cam then, you know, and I've been the IT guy where it's like, it just broke. It just broke. It's not breaking now. You know, maybe

Paul Thurrott (00:41:51):
Cuz you're, you look at the film and you're like, actually you did it

Rich Campbell (00:41:53):
<Laugh>. Yeah. <laugh> idiot flick here.

Leo Laporte (00:41:56):
What would you record? Would you record all mouse movements, keystrokes, events? It'd be like a big event log kind

Rich Campbell (00:42:03):
Of, I think this is a whole, a copy of the whole screen. Real time, right? Yeah. Just what you were doing. Just keep

Paul Thurrott (00:42:07):
It going. Right. The, the the most recent

Leo Laporte (00:42:10):
Down like crazy.

Rich Campbell (00:42:12):
Yeah. No, it's gotta be invisible, but it's po you know. Sure. Listen, the CPUs in these machines.

Leo Laporte (00:42:16):
Yeah. We have a lot of headline. They're

Rich Campbell (00:42:18):
Yeah. They're smoking cigarettes and playing poker. Right. Like they don't have a lot to do. Just hanging out.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:22):
No, it's what was that one of those Intel? Processor vulnerabilities. 

Rich Campbell (00:42:29):
Meltdown inspector.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:30):
Oh, thank you. We'll, just, it's because of the the work we did to fix those two things. That's why it's 5% slower. <Laugh>. It has nothing to do with the recording.

Rich Campbell (00:42:38):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:42:39):
Actually, I just saw there was a bug in Discord, which is the chat program we use for club twit that slowed some Nvidia GPUs, particularly the 30 80 and 30 90 I think down 200 megahertz. It was just a bug. Ooh.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:55):
200 megahertz. Yeah. Wow. You're gonna party like it's 1999. I'm working here.

Rich Campbell (00:43:01):
Look, look for the turbo button. There's gotta be a turbo button. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:43:06):
Access 95 is not loading fast enough. 

Rich Campbell (00:43:09):
Weird things and what you have to do reboot it to reset it?

Leo Laporte (00:43:12):
No. It, they have to re they have to fix it. And NVIDIA's put out a patch. That's awesome. And Discord, I mean, how could you write a user space program that would slow your GPU down? It must

Rich Campbell (00:43:26):
Be doing, you're not supposed to be a video. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:43:28):
I could do it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:43:28):
<Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (00:43:29):
I guess.

Leo Laporte (00:43:29):
Although, yeah, you're doing some sort of weird rendering or something in the background.

Rich Campbell (00:43:32):
Although it's video driver, they're mostly rings zero. Just

Paul Thurrott (00:43:35):
Push it all onto the cpu. That will <laugh> that will do it immediately.

Leo Laporte (00:43:39):
The problem is that a lot of gamers run Discord at the same time as a gayman. Yeah. So this was a particular problem.

Rich Campbell (00:43:47):
Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure there were angry loud noises.

Leo Laporte (00:43:50):
Discord recently started rolling out. Scooter X has this in our chat room and an update that enables AV one streaming with GForce RTX 40 series cards. This updates appears to have introduced the memory, some memory clock issues on some RTX 30 cards. <Laugh>, if you have an RTX 40 card, you're fine. Maybe it's just a RTX a subtle way of getting people with 30 eighties to upgrade to 40 nineties. I don't know. Wow.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:14):
There is a lot of them,

Leo Laporte (00:44:16):
So, yeah. That's ridiculous. Oh man, that's, anyway, there is a fix's an odd one. There is a fix for that, but Yeah, that's a weird one. Just shows you, but I agree. I agree with you. You have enough head room, you probably have enough drive space. You probably could. I'm sure there's I'm, I know there are tools in used in business to do periodic recordings of your screen. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> mm-hmm. <Affirmative> so they could see when you're surfing porn on company time. Oh, geez.

Rich Campbell (00:44:42):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:43):
I mean, windows had a screen recorder tool. Right. If you were having a problem, you could go back and duplicate it and record it and then send it to the it help desk. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:44:51):
And then there was, I remember tools where they would record like a journal, like all the things you did. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:59):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:45:01):
Not so much for troubleshooting or to spy on you, but just kind of, you know, here's what I did. Just remember the the camera Google put out Yeah. You would wear that, you would wear around. It was, was Gordon Bell's idea back way back in the day. His wife Gwen Bell, he was a at deck for a years famous engineer. His he started the computer history museum. His wife, Gwen Bell had Alzheimer's. So he made this, he said, the idea is well wear this camera around and you'll have a recording of your whole day and you'll always know what you did. The only problem is the camera's shooting from basically from your, from your name. Yeah. From your belly button. And it's a such a weird angle. We're just not you. Everything. We,

Paul Thurrott (00:45:37):
We have a, a roll of film. Well, it was a digital camera, but we, but we gave a camera to my son when he was a little kid and he ran around the house and took pictures and all the picture was like the, the kitchen counter from below the counter. Ah. You know, like it was all Yeah. The picture a picture of my knees. Yeah. But that's what he says. Yeah. That's what the world looked like to him. Yes. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:45:53):
That's what your dog sees

Paul Thurrott (00:45:55):
<Laugh>. Yeah. All right. It was a little weird.

Leo Laporte (00:45:57):
You say there are, we talked about earnings last week. Microsoft's quarterly report came out two weeks ago. Yeah. But there is more because other companies now have checked in, including Intel. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:08):
Intel in AM md Yeah. So not surprisingly, Intel, which is perhaps overly reliant on the PC industry, experienced some problems in the fourth quarter, as did the PC industry. So their revenues dropped by 32%. Their net editing, so basically profits was down 60%. I, I don't care. I people seem to focus on that number a lot. I don't know why mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, the revenues to me is the big one. And then full year, their revenues are down 20% year over

Rich Campbell (00:46:40):
Year, isn't it? And you think this is just a reaction to the over buy during the pandemic let's, the markets just tapered off again, and you're seeing this is a trailing indicator, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:46:48):
Yeah. This is a the correction.

Rich Campbell (00:46:52):
Yeah. Yeah. So it's not that big a deal. I just, I immediately started looking for the layoffs and couldn't find any.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:58):
Right. sorry, but yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Rich Campbell (00:47:02):
Yeah. Then we, and then found one of the insider groups saying, oh, they've caught wages across the board. Right. The, you're running the mill and workers are all taking a 5% hit rather than have a 5% layoff. But I, they scaled it up as you got more senior VPs, 10% senior leadership, 15%, and the CEO 25%. Now, you know, 25% off of 80 million, somehow the boys buy, like, life is

Paul Thurrott (00:47:25):
Hard. Yeah. One less yacht.

Rich Campbell (00:47:27):
Yes. Not enough yachts. But you

Paul Thurrott (00:47:30):
Know what, I I, that is a, that's a very interesting response to a problem that a lot of big tech companies are, are facing mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And it's not what everyone else is doing. No. we kind of half joked it wasn't really a joke, but this notion that Satcha Nadela having flown in his private jet to Davos last week, right. Announced some initiative and then laid off a bunch of 10,000 people. You know that kind of thing. There's a disconnect there. And I, I feel like this is an, I don't, I don't know what would happen if you pulled employees, right? Yeah. Is

Rich Campbell (00:48:02):
This a better, is this better for morale? And, and I, yeah. I was in the situation with a company that I had a leadership position in in 2008, 2009. Yeah. Where we did one group that I was working with, we did do layoffs and the other group, the management team took a huge pay cut and everybody took a small pay cut. And by the end of the year, we'd recovered and were able to catch up everybody's wages. Like it, it worked out. But I thought the the morale of the pay cut folks was higher. Right. That, that, you know, the language there was, listen, we are not overweight. We don't have, you know, fat to cut. You're all valuable. Right. And we want to keep the team together so we can do it if we do this. I, and it's hard to think of Intel that way with that many employees in that gigantic of a company, but Right. That's what this move seems to make, and it's smart that the leadership takes a bigger cut, even though admittedly they have absurd wages.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:01):
Right. No, I, I I think it's a, it's, it's a good way to do it. I, I, it's simple. It's

Rich Campbell (00:49:05):
Symbolic though, right? I mean, come on.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:07):
It's, well, but, well, but ra, so I don't, no, I mean, I, there's we talked, we've talked about this over different shows, this kind of weird immaturity in big tech where they overhired during the pandemic Yeah. And now they're correcting it. And I don't understand why either of those things happened. <Laugh>, you know, and to me, this is, I think, a better solution. Unless, of course, the real problem is, look, we really do have too many employees. I mean

Rich Campbell (00:49:35):
Yeah. That's the que and therein lies the real question. Yeah. I mean, a 5% cut is nothing. And if you think about your, your regular, your working engineer in Intel, right. Whose interest weights just doubled. Yep. And then also his wages get

Paul Thurrott (00:49:49):
Hit real world. Yep.

Rich Campbell (00:49:50):
That's pretty tough, you know? That's right. That's not a small thing. Like, we're gonna get pressed on both sides.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:55):
I just had an old guy conversation at the gym today about this, about how the price of everything is up, you know, milk, gas, eggs, you know, whatever. Yep. And we were mostly, we're just laughing at the, the crazy, like, this is what we're talking about. You know, but but, but these are real world costs for real, you know, people and mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and Yeah, you're right. So 5% cut and then everything is more expensive. So it's almost like a, you know Yeah. You're not having good job, better than not

Rich Campbell (00:50:19):
Having a job. Yes. The alternative is being laid off in the midst of tens of thousands of layoffs in the industry.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:24):
Yep. The, you know, Intel has unique problems though, because they are also investing enormous sums of money right now in chip provocation facilities in the United States and in Europe and elsewhere probably. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:50:38):
We've a lot of government help

Paul Thurrott (00:50:40):
Too. Yeah. In the United States at least. Oh. Probably everywhere, actually. <Laugh>, but yes. Okay. Fair enough. But still, but still real world dollars for them as well. Yeah. And they're, it's very risky. And I, I don't know that there's a lot of faith out in the world that they're gonna be able to pull this off.

Rich Campbell (00:50:57):
Yeah. I mean, I would argue they've gotta keep those initiatives going because they did make g government, government guarantees. It's like, you give us as money, we will build this thing. That's right. Cutting staff would be a mistake. Keeping those people in place by cutting their wages. You can make that fly, at least from the government side.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:13):
Yeah. and the, you know, the ongoing problem for Intel, which is something we're gonna see again with AMD and something, Michelle, Microsoft actually, that was the, the big news in some ways with Microsoft was them coming up and saying, Hey, this current quarter it's gonna be even worse. Yeah. You know? And Intel said that as well. In fact, they expect to lose money in the current quarter. So in other words, not turn a profit. Yeah. they're, they're, they're <laugh>. Yeah. They're actually, they did the quarter ending last, the last quarter. They post a loss as well. I should have said a $700,000,

Rich Campbell (00:51:48):
Which kind of astonishing on the billions you're talking about.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:51):
I know. 14 billions in revenue, 700,000, 700, the loss. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:51:56):
That's sort of a point where you say, Hey, you know, maybe I won't make a payment here and just at least be in the positive.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:01):
Isn't there some accounting thing we could do? Mm-Hmm. I, I, I suspect that that was the result of the best accounting. Yes. So it's probably,

Rich Campbell (00:52:08):
It was probably, I know how to make it only a 700,000 loss, not a $2 billion

Paul Thurrott (00:52:11):
Loss. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So AMD interestingly had a much more positive quarter, but there were a couple of asterisks to it mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. so they had a net income of 21 million in revenues of 5.6 billion. And I always like to compare those numbers because you know, this is like Burger King and McDonald's, right? So

Rich Campbell (00:52:34):
They're, they're what, a third of

Paul Thurrott (00:52:35):
The size? About a third? They're about a third. Yeah. They're a little bit more at this time. Yeah. 5.6 versus 14 from a revenue perspective. But the net income was down 98%. <Laugh>, like, yikes. Revenues were up though which is interesting. But that was because of a data center business. And I think I, I didn't, I don't have a handle on what the other thing is, but it's some kind of an investment they made. It was some kind of a, just a money kind of a thing that had nothing to do with operations.

Rich Campbell (00:52:59):
Yeah. So this might be CFO games moving money around to

Paul Thurrott (00:53:02):
Yeah. But they were upfront about that and they said, look revenue's gonna be down in this quarter compared to the prior quarter a year ago the acquire, sorry, the same quarter a year ago. So revenues were up 16% that quarter revenues, they're expecting this quarter will be done 10%. And then the PC part of their business experienced bigger percentage loss in Intels actually 51%. It fell in revenues down to 900, $3 million. Not even a billion dollar business.

Rich Campbell (00:53:35):
Nope. But it's a, and it's, these are all trailing indicators. We saw this with the PC sale slumping. It's like, this is going to hit all the hardware folks. That's as they report in as people didn't buy stuff.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:45):
Yeah. But yeah. And then AMD did great in the data center, which, you know, I don't, you know, care about personally too, too much other than that, it saved the quarter for them in many ways. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that was up 42% by revenue to 1.7 billion. So,

Rich Campbell (00:54:00):
So what are they doing that they're making good data center sales? It's just to Right. Pricing.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:06):
I, no, I think I wouldn't call what AMD is doing, like a hybrid architecture. Exactly. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but AM MD has been doing that kind of multi-core thing. Maybe it is sort of a hybrid architecture. I feel like they're just more,

Rich Campbell (00:54:18):
My experience with multi-core AMD is that they're, their pipelines were shorter. Yeah. Cause it was easy to put more cores on a die. Okay. And that was only bad when you were paying by the core for licensing.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:30):
Yes.

Rich Campbell (00:54:30):
Right. Like, if I was buying SQL Server, I kind of wanted to buy it with an Intel chip set because I used fewer cores to get the same workloads done. Where otherwise I generally have an advantage, more cores that are short and quick and, you know, move through a lot of workloads.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:43):
And I think this is, hybrid architecture is even more important in the data center than it is on computers, frankly. Yeah. and the, I think the race right now is to get there in that market as well. So

Rich Campbell (00:54:55):
Yeah. More unknown workloads, generally speaking, the shorter pipeline is better.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:00):
Yep. Yep. Yeah. So, yeah. You know, we're just treading water here. And then I usually like to, when I do, I do a, an annual thing on PC sales. I mean, I do a quarterly thing as well, but the big one is annual. So I did that a coup, I dunno if that was last week or two weeks ago, but a couple weeks ago. Yeah. A couple weeks ago. So I'd like to do the same thing for smartphones. But what happened last year was IDC released their numbers in January, and then Gartner did waited until March <laugh> for some reason. So it's like, okay. So again, this year IDC has come up with their numbers. Gartner has not. I'm, I've just decided to look, I'm gonna write this up cuz I, you know, it may be two months. But the smartphone industry is experiencing exactly the same problem that we saw on PCs. They declined by 18% in Q4 and 11% overall for the entire year.

Rich Campbell (00:55:49):
So it's not somebody picking one device over another, it's people. They're not picking fewer people buying stuff.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:53):
That's right. It was the lowest annual shipment total since 2013. Wow.

Rich Campbell (00:55:59):
That's when it was still an emerging market five years into the iPhone.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:03):
Right. That, that time. Right. That date is closer to the release of the iPhone than it is to know. Yeah. Which is like hard to even concentrate.

Rich Campbell (00:56:11):
It's amazing. But it, it is mean. We, I watched part of the Samsung announcements this morning and Yeah. I'm like, we are outta ideas for phones. Right. <laugh>, it's just like, this one's got five cameras. <Laugh>. Right. I could Right. It it they're all slabs of black glass with bumps on them. That's right. And, you know, you pick your, pick your poison, you could spend $1,200 all day long, but will it change anything substantial? I mean the, the 200 megapixel camera on the ultra 23, that's astonishing. But I don't need to see my pores that close up. Yeah, exactly. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:56:45):
A lot <laugh>. Right? It's like the CIA license plate photo from space. Yeah. yeah, I don't know. I mean, I, to me, the big thing that could happen in smartphone photos or in just camera lenses would be having the three primary lenses be closer to each other in terms of capabilities. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, there's a huge gulf there. And then this kind of notion of like periscope telephoto lenses, which could make

Rich Campbell (00:57:08):
Yeah. Three and five times

Paul Thurrott (00:57:10):
Zoom, optical zoom be that much better.

Rich Campbell (00:57:12):
Now you kind of see this in the 23 line where it's mostly 12 megapixel cameras and then Yeah. One other one. Like there's a, there's power angle, there's a wide angle, there's a selfie, and then there's a big camera and it's either a 50 or 200. Yep. It's more than you need really.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:27):
It's probably, yeah. Right. I mean, I, I don't know for everybody, but I bet 90 something percent of most photos are just taken off the main lens anyway. Yeah, yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:57:35):
You know, if we thought about it, we wouldn't be taking item in the first place.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:38):
Yeah, exactly. That's the whole point of shoot and click. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. So there's

Rich Campbell (00:57:44):
That. And in some ways I'm, I'm content to see that in general, like, you know what, this is all inflation fighting. This is folks pulling back from spending maybe to take the inflation off a couple of notches. Right. and, and calm governments down. Cuz nobody likes an excited government

Leo Laporte (00:58:01):
<Laugh>. That's true.

Rich Campbell (00:58:06):
Hey, chill him out. Hey, speaking

Leo Laporte (00:58:07):
Of licensing, did you guys, or do you maybe Richard, you have more of an opinion on this note, the change in licensing from Oracle on Java?

Paul Thurrott (00:58:16):
Oh, yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:58:17):
I know I haven't really paid a whole lot of attention to it. All I know is that Java people are unhappy a lot.

Leo Laporte (00:58:22):
Well, the, it potentially could cost a lot more, I think. Yeah. yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:58:26):
I'm really reading the room, you know,

Rich Campbell (00:58:29):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:58:30):
No,

Paul Thurrott (00:58:30):
I mean, seriously, what, what

Rich Campbell (00:58:32):
<Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:58:32):
What's God in the world that you think this makes sense right now?

Rich Campbell (00:58:35):
Yeah. It's a great, great time to, to be stabbed in the open source folks in the Lake <laugh>. Yeah. I've only had to buy a few or Oracle products over the years, and generally I found their licensing model along the lines of, so how much money do you have? Right. <laugh>, like, we,

Leo Laporte (00:58:52):
We'll take it.

Rich Campbell (00:58:54):
They literally asked us for financial statements. Yeah. And we're like, wow, how about No. Wow. You know, they, you know, we, you know what? There are alternatives that don't involve you.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:03):
Right.

Rich Campbell (00:59:06):
So yeah. 1200 bucks for full bore Java development suite from from Oracle today,

Leo Laporte (00:59:13):
Starting with Java 11, they'll no longer be free downloads.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:17):
Yeah. You have to have a commercial license, I think to,

Rich Campbell (00:59:19):
And that's an updates that's about, about the same number as an MSDN premium. Right? That's a lot. Yeah. 1200 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. And, and you're paying for, when you get an SDN premium, you're obviously paying for studio with a bunch of the, the premium features, not the enterprise features. Yeah. I think there's very many of those. And then also, so I think it was like four tech support calls in your, in your package or two,

Paul Thurrott (00:59:43):
I think this must be a reflection of what the market for Java is today. Right. It's, it's primarily like a server-based backend kind of a thing.

Rich Campbell (00:59:52):
Now it's, it's infrastructure software, right. This is runs banks, this runs, you know, enterprises. And it's all long term. It's lock-in. There's not a lot of, not a lot of greenfield in some places. Like if you've got a good de Java crew making new apps makes perfect sense. But I don't know that any startups are thinking, Hey, we're going to, the three of us are gonna kick off a Java

Paul Thurrott (01:00:11):
Someone, some company, I don't know, some giant software company should make something that's like Java that has like a programming language like Java and a runtime that's like Java and then they should open source it. I wonder, I'm surprised no one's done that.

Rich Campbell (01:00:25):
Yeah. It's strange. There's an

Leo Laporte (01:00:26):
Open, there is an open jdk. In fact, that's what I

Paul Thurrott (01:00:30):
Generally use. Net <laugh>. Yeah. Just basically, yeah. Yeah. open jdk.

Leo Laporte (01:00:36):
Open jdk. But I think that there's, I don't know, I think there's still some proprietary stuff in there.

Rich Campbell (01:00:43):
Well, Microsoft's mill making a version of open jdk.

Leo Laporte (01:00:46):
Right. Oh. And many linuxes come with open jdk.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:49):
It's like riding a bike, Richard, you know, once you've

Rich Campbell (01:00:52):
<Laugh>. Well, and you know, I'm just throwing on that old history hat since I seem to do that a fair bit. Like Microsoft was making a version of Java in the late nineties that was almost too popular. It made sun. That's right. Microsystems very nervous as they started optimizing it for Windows. Yep. That was Andrews Berg's original job at Microsoft was built. That's Java tooling. That's right.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:11):
Yeah. The window, what do they call it? Win what's it called? Wcf, the framework he created for Windows for G visual, J plus plus.

Rich Campbell (01:01:18):
G plus plus. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:19):
The windows. What was that called? The windows, <laugh> windows. So something, I don't know. Anyway, it was the predecessor to,

Rich Campbell (01:01:26):
And then they got the cease and desist. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, that's the story of Brad Silverberg signing that deal with son in the first place is that as before the ink was dry, both companies were in violation of the agreement. Right. Like it <laugh> it was a very much a forced marriage that nobody could comply with. So it was just a question of are we're gonna look the other way lit.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:43):
Literally a den of snakes.

Rich Campbell (01:01:45):
Yeah. And, and ultimately when the consent, when the, not the consent decree. Cause that was another thing having about the same time when the when the cease and desist happened, they had to purge the JVM from Microsoft. They had to, they had to show that they had eliminated everywhere that there was none of the code showing anywhere. But that's why C Sharp exists, because in the end, they needed a enterprise class object-oriented language. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that was Java. Now that they couldn't have Java, they needed something else. And so, right.

Leo Laporte (01:02:13):
And that's the risk of doing this. Of course. I think maybe what they're saying is, look, everybody's gonna use open JDK for if you want support from Oracle, you know, you not, you're gonna have to pay for that, I

Rich Campbell (01:02:24):
Guess. And I, and you said it looks like the Msdm premium bundle. Yeah. Yeah. It's very, it's very similar. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:02:29):
That sounds loud. Yeah. Yeah. And somebody in the chatroom saying, and I think this is probably true, that everybody, every Java a developer he knows, uses open GK jdk. Nobody, nobody wants to use Oracle's stuff.

Rich Campbell (01:02:43):
No. And they're on, and they're using Spring or Tom cad. Like, yeah. You know, there's a lot of ways to Java.

Leo Laporte (01:02:48):
Let's stay, let's stay open. Yeah. Yep. All right. Lemme take another break. We are gonna continue on with Richard and Paul. I forgot his name, but he's, I think he's still the other guy. Yeah. Yeah. The other guy that's and <laugh>

Rich Campbell (01:03:02):
Says all the writing. You know that guy?

Leo Laporte (01:03:04):
Yeah. That guy. The guy keeps writing the books and stuff. Yeah. Paul's doing a great job, by the way, with hands on windows. You're now talking about the different accounts you can create, which I think is really important. You know, the we're you're way ahead of us. You record stuff like a all at once, but I think we're doing the local accounts and all this,

Paul Thurrott (01:03:26):
This is the this is the Richard Campbell model. This is the thing I always was resentful of with Richard. Like, he

Leo Laporte (01:03:31):
20 podcast recording this. Yeah,

Rich Campbell (01:03:34):
Yeah. No, all my shows for March are in the can, you know. Wow.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:37):
Look at him. No, that's awesome. I love that. So this is my chance to do something like that.

Leo Laporte (01:03:41):
Yeah. Well, we appreciate

Rich Campbell (01:03:42):
It. I highly recommend it. You get into a groove. Although I found I can record like three.net rocks in a day. Wow. Is fine. But aren't

Leo Laporte (01:03:50):
You fourth the exhausted by the end

Rich Campbell (01:03:52):
Of that? Oh yeah. No, you're, you're done. But the four, if you do four, if we're, we have to do four for whatever reason, the fourth

Paul Thurrott (01:03:58):
One better be damn good.

Rich Campbell (01:03:59):
But you gotta, you gotta have the right guest. You got someone who could just fly on their own. Right. Talk win api. Go that. Or it's just going, it's just gonna be a bunch of fart jokes. Like one or the other.

Leo Laporte (01:04:10):
<Laugh>. I have, I have shows like that where I relax

Rich Campbell (01:04:14):
Somebody taste, let, let that great guest rip mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And and you can, your, your brains are cooked. But we, years ago we did like 24 hours of.net rocks where we just recorded shows back to back over a weekend. Yeah. And it was a du I think we made 30 shows, shows by the end of that. Right. Many of them, we, you know, all the ones towards the end of each day. Not that good. Little

Leo Laporte (01:04:35):
Silly, a little punch drunk. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:04:38):
And and a few of them actually expired. Oh boy. Te that's my

Leo Laporte (01:04:42):
Technology. Can technology changed. Yeah. That's why we don't too far wanna get too far ahead, because I mean, hands on windows you can, because it, you know, that's, that's gonna stay for a while. They're

Rich Campbell (01:04:50):
Telling you

Paul Thurrott (01:04:51):
Something different. We can, we've done this once so far, but something happens where there's an update and it's like, well let's just record this. We'll slip it into the next, it'll be the next show now. Right. So you can do that kind of stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:05:02):
Yeah. you're wondering how to get it. You have to be a member of Club twit TWIT tv slash club twit. Seven bucks a month. You get that. You get hands on Macintosh with Micah. You get the Untitled Linux show. You get all sorts of great benefits and ad free versions of all of our shows. It's really think a very good way to support what we do. We really appreciate all of our club members. Our show today, brought to you by Melissa. Melissa's a leading provider of global data quality, identity verification, and address management solutions. Today they announced a successful partnership with Tom. Tom. You know the name Tom Tom. They're a global pioneer in satin nav satellite navigation for consumer use. Why would Melissa partner with Tom Tom? Well, this is really cool. By layering Tom, Tom's comprehensive global address data, location data and country data on top of Melissa's industry leading data quality, enrichment, and at any verification tools, Melissa has now got a really rich way of taking any address, any contact and, and, and making it this super rich database of information about any client, any customer.

(01:06:20):
They really are the address experts when you're talking about postal addressing. Global postal addressing multi-language, multi-format support is absolutely vital. Every country's different. Our zip codes are not like your zip codes, Richard. And, and if, if you go to Venice, they don't have street numbers. I mean, they have street names, they don't have house numbers. <Laugh>, you just have to know, I guess. But Tom, Tom can handle this. They ingest the country data into one global. And this is important standardized data set while supporting multiple languages. So Tom, Tom handles the various addressing nuances, country by country, making Melissa's solution stack efficient, seamless and truly international, truly global. So now Melissa can increase its global support across get ready for this 240 countries and territories. That's pretty impressive. That's basically fully global. Greg Brown, who's the VP of global marketing, and Melissa says, by adding Tom Tom's rooftop precision capabilities to our solutions, Melissa's customers can rest assured their data is not only clean and verified, but also pinpoint accurate and of high value to business operations.

(01:07:33):
It's ensuring that restaurants are found that packages are delivered to the right place at on-demand. Drivers, drivers find their passengers and so much more. You know, port data quality costs you and it, and it goes, it continues to go bad. It doesn't just, you know, degrade. Once it continues to degrade. On average, organizations lose 15 million a year on bad data, you know, mailings to the wrong dresser contact completely lost off, you know, disappears. And of course, the longer this bad data stays in your system, the more losses you accumulate by leveraging Tom Tom Maps points of interest, seven digit postal codes, address points, and a routing api. Melissa is providing you with best of breed address engine. It's critical to business needs worldwide. Since 1985, Melissa's been doing this. They've specialized in global intelligence solutions to help organizations unlock accurate data for a more compelling customer view.

(01:08:37):
Melissa, of course, treats your data like it's theirs with kid gloves. They undergo continuous independent security audits because they're committed of course to data security and privacy. And of course, compliance is important for you as it is for Melissa. They're a SOC two compliant, HIPAA compliant GDPR C compliance. So, you know, your data is in the best hands you can really trust Melissa. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today. 1000 records clean for free. You could do it on-prem, you could do it with a secure FTP upload and download. You could do it as a SaaS. They have a very good a p i you could actually add it to your customer service software or to your mailing software or you know, what have you. Your shopping carts. Check it out melissa.com/twi and get started with 1000 records clean for free so you can see how well it works. Melissa, m e l i s s a.com/twit. We thank 'em so much for supporting windows Weekly. And we thank you for supporting us by going to that address. So they know you saw it here, melissa.com/no. We

Rich Campbell (01:09:44):
Send out run ads radio mugs to listeners who write a comment on our show or Facebook or things like that. And I think I tried three times to send a mug to a

Leo Laporte (01:09:53):
Guy named your Oh yeah, she's me. Not gonna make it. I'm sorry. We every year with our Christmas cards. It's funny cuz I used to get bill Atkinson who was one of the, you know, the key guys in the design of the Macintosh and the Lisa. He was the guy. Did quick draw. He Yeah, he's like a photo nut. And he had a, an app for a while called Photo Card. And we would use those as our Christmas card and Bill every year Bill would say, could you please get your address together? Cuz he would by hand go through it and fix it all. And he'd say, I don't wanna do this anymore. He finally stopped doing the app. So maybe we take some, we take some of the credit for getting him out of that business. It was a lot of work. But boy, they were great. Christmas cards. Now we use Melissa of course. And it's an easy thing. The other thing that happens is you, and you don't wanna do this either, rich, is you mail out multiple mugs to the same person. Yeah,

Rich Campbell (01:10:44):
No, that's definitely

Leo Laporte (01:10:44):
Happened. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:10:45):
Somewhere there's a postal worker in Africa that has three of your mugs and the next one to come.

Leo Laporte (01:10:50):
Exactly. In Venice, they're all piling up at the Grand Canal. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:54):
Yeah, exactly. That's why the cruise ships can't fit in there

Leo Laporte (01:10:56):
Anymore.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:57):
All the mugs at the bottom

Leo Laporte (01:10:58):
Of the call, the mugs at the bottom of the canal. All right. Where did we drop off here? Did we talk about smartphone sales? Did we get to that? Yes, we did.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:07):
All right. Yeah, we're onto we got some dev stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:11:09):
Let's do some.net stuff. Yay. Woo.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:12):
Yeah, so I, I've been writing this series of short articles that I call Small Bites with a y cuz I'm an idiot. And <laugh>. Yeah. A lot of it's sort of just trying to explain developer topics to people and a developer kind of thing. And this kind of a pet topic of mine, but I wanted to look at what it meant. Like what does it mean to create a, a desktop app with net Maui, right. Which is the success of Xin. So my determination here is that nobody's gonna create a desktop app with Maui, but what you would do is create a, a cross platform mobile app, and then add some desktop features to it. So it it was a little more natural or normal on, on the desktop. Right.

Rich Campbell (01:11:50):
The idea is to have as much common code as you can. Yeah. And Maui's pretty good at that, but you end up with some, you know, if phone form factor, if tablet form

Paul Thurrott (01:11:58):
Factor, if form factor. Yeah. And there's also some, some automatic behavior, which I think is kind of nice. So the, like a couple of the features that will work automatically like that are secondary windows mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and the menu bar. Right. So if you add added a menu bar, it won't appear on mobile automatically. It will appear on windows, obviously the Mac. And if you have an iPad with a keyboard attached, interestingly it will appear there as well. It notices. Yeah. That's kind of cool. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:12:25):
So these control makers are smart. Like they are seeing here's the automatic renderings for these things.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:30):
Yeah. I thought that was pretty cool. And then you know, the way dot net Maui sort of works is that each of those screens that you see is, is a page, like a content page. And you can optionally have that appear as a floating window if you're running on the desktop. So you don't have to do any conditional code there too. It's kind of nice. You have like an about box or something, the floating window pops up, you click okay. To get rid of it on mobile, it just goes to that screen. Yeah. And you can navigate using swipes or the built in navigation or have a button, you know. So anyway, I thought that was kind of cool, but I, I guess the, the point was simply that dot net Maui is not really, it's not a like a desktop framework, but it, it will let you take one of the mobile apps that you create with it and tailor it for the desktop. Yeah. Which I think is,

Rich Campbell (01:13:15):
Which generally, I mean, again, it depends on what you're working on, right? Like Yeah. It's not like use of of WPF F and wind forms is disappearing either.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:23):
Yeah. Although, you know what, so actually that's a good point. So one of the interesting things about.net Maui, I think is that it's the easiest way on Windows to create a WIN UI three app.

Rich Campbell (01:13:34):
Yeah. Right. Because it don't win UI three Yeah. Is now part of

Paul Thurrott (01:13:37):
Mount Yes. It's native, it's part of it. It's nice. Yeah. I wish there was an easy way to take a legacy WPF F app in particular, but wind forms, whatever mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but especially Wpf F and replace the UI with Win ui. Right. and you, I I think there are sort of ways actually, Richard, I went meant to ask you, you probably, in fact, I'm what

Rich Campbell (01:13:59):
Kind of dragon did you want? Right? Like Yeah, you were asking for this. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:14:02):
You have probably talked to someone from Alon ui, right? Yes, I have. I assume So this is a is it open source or is a, it's open source third party project mm-hmm. <Affirmative> to bring a W P F style environment into the 21st century, so to speak, or into the modern world, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and I, I don't know if they are WIN UI or whatever, I'm not really sure, but I that might be another way that, that might be an easier way, but I know it's some sort of AML Islands nonsense <laugh>. Yeah. You know but it seems

Rich Campbell (01:14:35):
To me it seems to put your underlying tricks to make that work.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:38):
Yeah. It, it, it shouldn't be so hard. Like to me, you should be able to create a ZL file, that's when UI three create your UI and then wire it to all those backend things you already have and then say, okay, this window's gonna replace that old window. And I wish there was a way to do that.

Rich Campbell (01:14:53):
Yeah. I I think there's an interesting business going on because this is a huge problem for Microsoft Yeah. In know, modernizing all these applications mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and you have a schism too, because if it's an internal app, Microsoft wants you to make it a power app.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:06):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:15:07):
So one of the points I do on one of my talks is I say, have you looked at the cognitive services form recognizer? Because it works for paper forms. Like, it'll literally make you key value pairs out of a paper form to drop into as ammo document and make, you know, basically generate a form for you. But there's no reason that paper couldn't have been screenshots of an app.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:29):
Right?

Rich Campbell (01:15:29):
Right. So I think we're, we are seeing the shape of tooling to modernize a lot of these applications.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:35):
When I'd, so I don't know about paint, but Notepad Windows 11 looks like the thing I'm asking for mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it's clearly the old app, but the

Rich Campbell (01:15:45):
Front end, it's been skinned.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:46):
It's been skinned and it's beautiful and modern. It hasn't lost any functionality. If anything it's, it's gained some, they've, they find Replace UI is now like this nice floating, you know, win UI style floating window kind of a deal. Yeah. And it's the rare example of a modern app that doesn't feel like a Fisher Price toy. Yeah. Where you, where even someone like me who uses Notepad every single day can use this and not feel like I'm being forced to use a toy. You know, like it feels, it, it, it is modern, but it is also clearly notepad and I would love for there to

Rich Campbell (01:16:18):
Be more stuff. And the Windows team did that. So what they're tapping is an interesting question as to how they go about doing that. Yeah. Right. This has been the art, the challenge all along is they surface these new visualization, the material design, you know, those kinds of mindsets. And then it's up to the various dev stacks to decide how they're gonna implement them, much less how the customers are really going to use them. You know, Microsoft made a version of WinForms for core Three One in, in 2019 mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and it wasn't Bite for Bite compatible with the old farms because the main thing they were addressing, the thing that everybody wanted was being able to have wind forms work on high DPI screens. I

Paul Thurrott (01:17:00):
Was gonna say. Yeah, exactly. It has that problem.

Rich Campbell (01:17:02):
Yeah. UI. And there was no way to just make that go straight across. So you had to rebuild your app, you had to go through some steps, like they just a certain barrier of entry to all of that to make that capability work. And people were unhappy. Like it's, even though they'd done the thing, they really wanted it, it was it's not, you know, they, they just want it to work and it's like, ah, it's harder than that. Welcome to real life.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:23):
Yep. Yeah, because yeah. Wind Forms came out and what, 2001

Rich Campbell (01:17:29):
Oh, wind Forms goes all the way back to Thunder Forms in Okay. In Visual Basics circa 1991. Right. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:37):
Alright, well it's okay. So pre-high dpi

Rich Campbell (01:17:39):
Either way. Yeah. But no, the high DPI version was 2019, like, that was the wind forms for Core three one SDK where they said, okay, well Core still cross-platform, but we have this set of Windows SDKs for UI components and there's a high D P I tolerant version of wind forms.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:55):
Well, this is, yeah. So like, anyway, the, yeah, the, there's a gap between W P F, especially wind forms, but wpf F and Wind ui, and I wish this bridge could be gap or this gap could be bridge, I should say.

Rich Campbell (01:18:08):
And Maui's not mature. Right? I mean, it's been a battle to get it this far. It's a lot of team wrangling they've done. I mean, this is right. The ZAMARIN folks, this is the Windows folks, this is the W P F folks and it's also the the WIN ui. The WIN UI folks. Like, there's a lot of different political maneuvering to get them to all play together. So they're, there's iterating slowly in comparison to a lot of other things they've built. And you know, when I put my enterprise IT hat on, it's like, tell me why it's not a pwa. Right. I don't want to deploy an app to the workstations or even to the piece to the phones really just, you know, use the manifest in a pwa, push it that way. I'm in a security context, I trust we get the latest version automatically. Like it is very hard to argue against that.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:55):
Yep. Yeah. I know. And I feel like we kind of talked about this, like the, for all the people are asking me like, well, what's the next, you know, desktop framework? There is no next desktop framework. And if you're looking at desktop class apps, you might, you should be looking at pwa.

Rich Campbell (01:19:08):
Yeah. You know, well, there's an awful lot you can do. There are some edges without a doubt. And there is the power to quote unquote native apps on phone devices without, you know, also true. Yeah. But the price is so high. Yep. So, I mean, if Mau Maui could get good enough, I think flutters good enough. Like you did.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:26):
That's about I, so yeah. So one of the next articles in a series, I think I'm gonna call it declarative programming, although that's a little off, but this notion that you would declare a ui, like it's

Rich Campbell (01:19:36):
A declarative ui, you're exactly right. Right. Yeah. That's, that's odd. But it also is remarkably good at working across devices.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:44):
And I think the fascinating thing about it is Flutter is Yeah. And the thing that's fascinating to me about that is you do that in the programming language, which is dart, which is sort of the equivalent of C Sharp, not in some markup language, like zl XML

Rich Campbell (01:19:58):
Or whatever. Yeah. And ZL has baggage. They, it was under opinionated when it was created. And so there's just too many ways to do things. And that's, you know, it goes back,

Paul Thurrott (01:20:08):
I really, I I

Rich Campbell (01:20:09):
2005. Right. It's old.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:10):
It's not that I really like, I really like Sam. It's kind of a tough thing for me.

Rich Campbell (01:20:13):
Like I you get to do what you want for most part. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of, and they're trying to narrow the scope and, you know, one would argue that Flutter was created cuz Dart had to do something, nobody

Paul Thurrott (01:20:25):
Else. Okay.

Rich Campbell (01:20:28):
But they did a great job. Like it's enough now. And they started with phones when we first started talking to them back in the day on Donna Rocks. That's right. We was all about phones. And then later they came to, to Mac.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:37):
They do everything now, and they do, and, and they're way further along for desktop apps than

Rich Campbell (01:20:42):
Diamond. And, and so it's an interesting point to, to think in terms of could Maui be this good in another two years? Maybe. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:50):
They're, they're revving flood really fast though. They

Rich Campbell (01:20:52):
Just had a big, they're, they're in a groove no choice about it. And it's compelling. Tim, it's still a question of

Paul Thurrott (01:20:58):
You must know Tim sneeze,

Rich Campbell (01:20:59):
Right? Oh, I do. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And, and a lovely and a lovely person and, and smart as a whip. Great. Great things at Microsoft doing great things at Google.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:08):
Yeah. Okay. <Laugh>. All right. Sorry, <laugh>. And then this doesn't warrant too much discussion, but I was kind of, it was one of those, they don't have this yet, but they just announced a a cross-platform media player control for a Dyna Maui. So you can have media playing, whether it's audio or video Yeah. Inside of your app. And it works across all the platforms that I supports. And it's like, duh,

Rich Campbell (01:21:31):
<Laugh>, there was third party stuff for that already.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:33):
Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:21:34):
So

Paul Thurrott (01:21:34):
I think it's actually, it might even be based on a third party.

Rich Campbell (01:21:37):
And it's all part to Maui's Young. They're still getting their feet on 'em. It's gonna take 'em three versions and they're kind of at one and a half.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:44):
Yep. That's right. So I'm curious what you think about this one, because I saw this number and then I went to Google and I said, Google, how many developers are there? <Laugh>? Yeah. And Google told me there were about 27 million developers in the world. But GitHub says that they have over a hundred million developers on the service now, which is, we actually talked about briefly last week, but it had just happened right as we were recording the show. So since then I had a chance to kind of look into this. And I, I know that because I use it this way, GitHub isn't always used by developers. It's also

Rich Campbell (01:22:13):
Used Sure. That's the real issue, is why would you call people using GitHub developers?

Paul Thurrott (01:22:17):
Yeah. Well cuz everyone's a developer. Rich, you didn't know that. Okay.

Rich Campbell (01:22:20):
<Laugh>. But I, I know folks who write books on GitHub.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:22):
Well, I do the

Rich Campbell (01:22:23):
Rest of

Paul Thurrott (01:22:24):
On Git. That's right. Yep. Yep.

Rich Campbell (01:22:26):
All, all of the most of the best podcast lists are actually there you go. You know, get, so

Paul Thurrott (01:22:31):
Do you have any, do you have a handle on what, like how many developers there are or whatever? Like

Rich Campbell (01:22:37):
Yeah, again, it's like, how do you define that number, right? Like is it studio users versus Eclipse users versus rider users versus, I mean, I use

Paul Thurrott (01:22:47):
For my

Leo Laporte (01:22:47):
Code as well as my net files and my and various things. But I don't think I would count in the 27 million developers. I'm sure Google doesn't know about me.

Rich Campbell (01:23:00):
So, and I'm even loaded to say professional developer. Yeah. Right, right. What mean? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:23:06):
I mean, I write code and I put my code on GitHub. Does that make me a developer? I don't know. But it's,

Rich Campbell (01:23:10):
It makes you a source of information from I'm

Leo Laporte (01:23:12):
One of the

Rich Campbell (01:23:12):
Hundred million very much. Yeah, right.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:14):
That's right.

Leo Laporte (01:23:14):
No one wants my list code. Trust me. It's safe. Yeah. <laugh>. Well,

Rich Campbell (01:23:21):
Although it's, there's not a lot of the, the whole, you know, co-pilot thing. We had a great conversation with Mish Mans a while back about there's not a whole lot of quality checks on that. Like they, it's, it'll spit out code, but it doesn't mean it works much less is secure.

Leo Laporte (01:23:34):
Right, right. Well that's just like chat G P T. It's That's right. It's a massive BS machine speaking

Rich Campbell (01:23:40):
As long as you know nothing about the subject. Right. It

Leo Laporte (01:23:42):
Sounds chat g pt, it sounds very reasonable. It's

Rich Campbell (01:23:44):
Confidently

Paul Thurrott (01:23:45):
Wrong. Yes. Something, I just got an email about this. So I believe this, this is a third party company. So if you go to creative data studios.com mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you'll see an add-in for Microsoft Office called Ghost Writer that uses chat. G P T. Hmm.

Rich Campbell (01:24:02):
Man,

Paul Thurrott (01:24:03):
Advanced natural language processing and machine learning to help you bla brainstorm plan and create content. And I think it's the create content part <laugh> like Right. That we're actually concerned about. Right. It's almost like they're underplaying that part of it. This

Rich Campbell (01:24:17):
May be saying,

Paul Thurrott (01:24:19):
Yeah, this may be the first add in for

Rich Campbell (01:24:23):
Chat J B T

Leo Laporte (01:24:25):
Huh.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:25):
For word. Yeah. For word that incorporates chat gb.

Leo Laporte (01:24:28):
Yeah. I doubt this is what Microsoft will end up doing with it, but maybe they will. I feel like this is a little too on the nose. Right. Like have it write your stuff.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:37):
Seems little less. I think this is what people expect AI to do for them. Right? Yeah. And I, and you know, technical people are freaked out by this and normal people like, oh my God, thank you <laugh>. You

Rich Campbell (01:24:47):
Know, believe me, I often whip up JA Chat G B T to try and write abstracts for shows. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's horrifying. Like

Paul Thurrott (01:24:54):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:24:55):
Yeah. But I think chat g d could summarizing other stuff, like if you had 400 pages of stuff and you, you fed it through chat G B T it could maybe, yeah, I don't know. I wouldn't, I think this is not something you should get yet because let's wait and see what Microsoft does.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:11):
Sure. I used to perform that service for Steven Kovski post. I would take a an 8,000 word post. Yeah. That's your Jeff 80 words. <Laugh>. Yeah. You know, of actual,

Leo Laporte (01:25:19):
It's a humans used to do, now we can mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Yeah. Yeah. A machine do it.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:24):
Yeah. What's he really saying here? It would just be like a, like a puff of air, you know, it would say nothing. There's

Leo Laporte (01:25:28):
Nothing

Rich Campbell (01:25:28):
<Laugh> nothing. But he said it for 20 minutes. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:31):
He said the hell out of it. Lemme tell you

Rich Campbell (01:25:33):
<Laugh>. Yep. And nothing hit me right in the head.

Leo Laporte (01:25:38):
I'm very interested to see what Microsoft does with it. Did they, is there a timeline for them introducing chat G P T or whatever it is, G B T Ford into office?

Paul Thurrott (01:25:46):
No, but we always do, this is cheap, but you know build is coming up probably in May and Ignite is coming up probably in November. Yeah. And these would be the two big times for them to start talking about that stuff.

Rich Campbell (01:25:59):
And there's clearly a push to put these technologies Oh, it's a race as possible. It's a, it's a AI race.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:06):
That's

Rich Campbell (01:26:06):
Right. And I don't know if there is a Gates letter. I suspect there isn't, but that's essentially what's going on. Right, right, right. When Gates wrote the internet tidal wave letter, everybody had to do something internet related. Even some dumb things actually. A lot of dumb things. Yeah, that's right. And when he wrote the internet, the security letter, everybody had to focus on security and there was some important stuff down there and some dumb stuff down there. So this, you know, put it, I suspect there is basically a motion saying make sure these open AI things are surfacing in your products wherever possible. And we're gonna see some

Paul Thurrott (01:26:37):
Clever stuff and some tell me a bunch of that. Anyway, here's a peek at what's probably coming to Word <laugh> in the form of an add-in.

Rich Campbell (01:26:46):
Well, you know, I I felt like Word had hit a point where they were now only working on bad features. Cause you get two versions from it. One, when you put it in and one when you take it out. Right. Right. Like there's no more good ideas. Yeah. It's a word processor. Please stop.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:00):
Yeah. I'd like to strip it down. In fact, if it wasn't so much work, I would spend time just getting rid of ui. I don't,

Rich Campbell (01:27:05):
I find myself writing way more stuff at vs. Code of all kinds. Now.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:09):
I, yeah. I, we, I believe me, I've looked into this a lot. <Laugh>. Yep. Mark down might be my, where I'm at gonna

Rich Campbell (01:27:17):
Your new friend where

Paul Thurrott (01:27:18):
I'm gonna land my new friend, but it's gonna be my <laugh> my only writing friend soon, I think. Yeah. I like markdown.

Rich Campbell (01:27:27):
All right. You want an Xbox? Let's Xbox it baby. I love it. All right. Give us the Xbox. There's

Paul Thurrott (01:27:32):
A lot of a lot of Xbox News news this week. So I have not written this article yet, but I have an article that's kind of in the process where I'm that ha that I started writing before it was revealed that a lot of those layoffs that happened at Microsoft came out of 3 43 industries, a part of Xbox that the, I should say the Microsoft Game studio that is responsible for Halo now. And my, where my head was at was sort of, I I in fact, it starts with that moment. You and I Leo were watching that game preview and it was Garbage <laugh>. And I k and I always describe it the same way cuz it's perfect. I just said, you know, I, at the time I thought this game looks horrible. Yeah. But they're gonna pull a Wizard of Oz moments where all of a sudden it transforms into this futuristic, awesome graphics, you know, and they did. And it never happened. And I thought, what is going on here? And then they delayed it for a year <laugh> right after they previewed it. And I knew from that moment that something was horribly wrong with this game. And my feeling is that, so it

Rich Campbell (01:28:31):
Started

Paul Thurrott (01:28:32):
When

Rich Campbell (01:28:32):
Microsoft bought Bungee, which made the original Halo. That's right. Halo. But then fired everybody <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:38):
Well, I Bun no Bungee wanted to leave like Bungee Bunge spun off, wanted to go, wanted they wanted to go p private again. So they all left basically. Well, but Microsoft said you can leave, but you, you obviously but leave the IP with

Rich Campbell (01:28:50):
Us. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:51):
Obviously. So now you had game budget proceeded to make, but no developers. Well yeah. So they, they created a studio and I'm sure there were some people from Bungee who stayed cuz they wanted to keep working on Halo,

Rich Campbell (01:29:02):
Maybe. Yeah. Created

Paul Thurrott (01:29:02):
This studio

Rich Campbell (01:29:03):
Called 3 45, but they they've shopped it to different dev teams. Yeah. For years it's been kind weird. Halo Products was made by the same dev team and they had an huge engine that was a little apparently according to the stories hard to work with.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:16):
Right. That's right. So this, this is, this is not the first time this notion has come up that, you know, should Microsoft take Halo off of their own in let's call it the Halo engine, you know, take it off of this internal thing and put it on something more popular that other people know how to work with. Right. Because it's much easier to acquire talent if they know the engine you're working in. I look you could go back and forth, but there's a look to

Rich Campbell (01:29:40):
Halo that's

Paul Thurrott (01:29:41):
Different from from That's exactly what I was just gonna say. That the one thing I will say about Halo Infinite is you bring that thing up, you're like, oh nice. This is Halo. It's Halo. It's very clearly it's got it own Halo. But then again, you know, maybe that's not so good. Right? I mean Halo is also this very old fashioned game franchise. It, it comes out every five years-ish with a new title. The modern Microsoft has done a very good job with other games of keeping them fresh with new content. You know, CIA Thieves gears of War, many other titles. They've done great with that. Minecraft, I mean, is incredible. Halo got off to Halo, infinite got off to such a bad start, spent the first year spinning wheels trying to just get caught up with, with what they promised for the initial release, stumbled all over that. There's all kinds of stuff they're not doing that they promised they would do. Split, you know, like split screen for example in co-op you know, kind of upsetting the community. And now basically what they're saying is actually we're starting over. We're gonna go use the Unreal Engine. We have far fewer employees, <laugh> who are working in this group. I'm sure there'll be some hiring of outside talent as well,

Rich Campbell (01:30:50):
But, and they'll be able to cuz Unreal is number one. Really?

Paul Thurrott (01:30:53):
Yeah. But you know what this, you don't make a game like this in a year. No. This is gonna be three years at least. I mean

Rich Campbell (01:30:59):
It's Yeah. It depends on how much you're constituting a team and what vision you have.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:02):
Yeah. This is, this is halo Infinite was already such a long process and it also leaves an open question about what happens to that game. Yeah. You know, I just sort of mentioned that they've done a really good job keeping existing games up to date. Does Halo just Halo Infinite sit there in the water and not get updated that much or at all now because they're working on this new thing?

Rich Campbell (01:31:24):
Well, and and it does happen that they go back over old titles cuz they could just drop the data sets into the new engine once they reach the

Paul Thurrott (01:31:31):
Military. Yeah, right. They could do like a master chief collection. Yeah. They'll do a collection

Rich Campbell (01:31:34):
Or something pull pull the games up into the

Paul Thurrott (01:31:36):
New engine. Yeah. But that's fine. But that doesn't help the people who actually like that game today, you know that want to keep playing it and want new maps and want new content and want new whatever, you know, this season, season thing they have. But if

Rich Campbell (01:31:49):
It is not in Microsoft's best interest to make their own engine, because that means you, I agree. They can't have to work by themselves.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:54):
This is, this is the chromium of game engines. Yeah. This is exactly where do you want to spend the money and your resources and time. And it's not creating that, that creating an engine is stupid.

Rich Campbell (01:32:05):
No. And you could argue they contribute to, they contribute to Unreal. They could contribute to Cry. Like there's a few ends of their engines and whichever one you pick, you're going to help a lot. Yep. Because that's a lot of, of firepower.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:16):
I just feel like this whole thing has to change. Like, I, I don't, I'm not saying like the Call of Duty model is right. Because even Call of Duty's not doing the Call of Duty model this year. No. But but

Rich Campbell (01:32:27):
It's gonna be very inter you know, it's, it's a hundred million dollars to build a tier one game now and three to 400 people, you know, and if you're lucky, you get it done in a year and you make the deadline. Right. Like, it's like making

Paul Thurrott (01:32:38):
A movie. I

Rich Campbell (01:32:39):
Mean, it's hard and it's expensive.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:41):
It's a Hollywood blockbuster is what it

Rich Campbell (01:32:43):
Is. Yeah. But the amount of compute you've got in a, in a one s or in a PS five, you need that money people to make enough assets to exercise that machine to

Paul Thurrott (01:32:52):
Actually make it look any good. Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:32:53):
Otherwise, why did I buy this $600 machine? Like make me a game that presses against the edges of the machine.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:00):
Yep. I don't know. I'm just

Rich Campbell (01:33:02):
<Laugh>. And that's the thing is like, and there's what a dozen billion dollar titles a year, nine or 10 of them are call avert duty version 17. Right? Sure. Like, because that's safe. Right. And then if you're lucky, there's a couple in you titles that are something innovative typically out of a smaller studio who will immediately be bought by an activist or an EA or

Paul Thurrott (01:33:25):
One of those. Yeah. I I I mean a game of this magnitude though, there aren't that many and they tend to be, you know, like Sony will have a few of them that are exclusive to Sony. Yeah. I don't

Rich Campbell (01:33:39):
That is debate again with

Paul Thurrott (01:33:41):
Yeah, yeah,

Rich Campbell (01:33:42):
Yeah. Acquisition. Acquisition and like, should they make Halo exclusive to the Xbox?

Paul Thurrott (01:33:47):
This is it's troubling. It, it, I I feel like they should have made this decision before and you know, blatantly they're doing the right thing,

Rich Campbell (01:33:55):
But really the industry's in a corner. Right. Yeah. You know, the funny thing is the movie industry got in the corner too, and then they innovated. Right. Like if you looked at the technology they used behind the Mandalorian, which by the way Unreal Engine That's right. It allowed them to do sophisticated sci-fi movies for dramatically less. Yep. Yep. The, I would argue the gaming industry is overdue for that. Like, that that something they should be working harder on is more scaffolding Yeah. To allow storytellers to make great looking games quickly.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:24):
Well, I'm, this, the nature of my website is I'm gonna hear from every single person who believes that standardizing on anything is bad and <laugh> that what we need is more variety. Much you're

Rich Campbell (01:34:34):
Willing to wait and pay $80 or a hundred dollars for the game. Right. Okay. But people don't, how much though, does the engine inform how the game plays, looks, and feels?

Paul Thurrott (01:34:45):
We're gonna find out. Right? I mean, that's the thing. Halo is very distinct. Yeah. yeah. Whether you like it or not, I mean, I honestly, my, I found it a little tedious over time. I mean, at, at first it was like at this thing nice, you know, like, this is how I remember Halo. I Halo 1, 2, 3, I I replayed those games and replayed those. I love those games. And in four and five I was like, eh, <laugh>. You know, and, and part of it might literally, part of it was storytelling maybe or whatever, but I think a big part of it was the games didn't really evolve graphically or thematically mm-hmm. <Affirmative> at all. I mean, they were just doing

Leo Laporte (01:35:23):
According to your story on the ro.com, halo Infinite was developed with an engine that had been written from the ground up for that game slip space.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:33):
Yeah. Okay. Right, right. To be because they wanted to be faithful to the franchise, but take advantage of the

Leo Laporte (01:35:40):
New cons. I guess If you're writing a custom engine, you could make it look like the old engine. You could, you know, do whatever the old engine did that's unique.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:47):
This is, this is a tough one because we just talk about, we're just talking about Java. So one, one of the issues with Java was, you know, Microsoft eventually realized, aside from all the legal stuff and all the awfulness they were doing that, you know, for, and Andrews would've said this a million times to different people. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> like we needed to control this for this to make sense for us. Right. And that's why.net happened in Csharp and all that kind of stuff. And that's kind of the attitude I think with people who support Microsoft making their own game engines like, this thing's special, we need to do this ourselves. And it's like I feel like game engines are so sophisticated now that they could do anything. And I wouldn't be surprised to discover that an unreal engine based version of Halo will look and feel like Halo,

Rich Campbell (01:36:26):
<Laugh>. The other, the other direction to go in is to build an engine that you then license to others because that's what ultimately makes it better. It has to be a revenue source and it can't just be an internal one.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:35):
And I have never heard anything about Microsoft wanting or trying to do that, but I can assure you even if they did

Rich Campbell (01:36:41):
That, but that comes down to an injury. Carmack like an extraordinary mind, right. Who can actually lead an initiative to build an engine, not an array of game development companies be willing to use.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:53):
Yeah. yeah. Microsoft's not, I mean whatever. It's over so doesn't

Rich Campbell (01:36:57):
Seem like the right thing to do. No.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:59):
Yeah. It's crazy. Now, all that said I don't know where the blame lies from the outside. To me, it looks like it's three 40 three's fault <laugh>. You know, I'm like, if you're gonna go, if you're gonna just do unreal engine here's an idea. Maybe take this away from this team. I don't feel like they've done a great job with this thing. It's been a freaking disaster from day one. But that said, maybe part of that was the length of the time it took to develop a same,

Rich Campbell (01:37:21):
The the other thing is we're in a year where everybody's cutting back on things that aren't sure to pay off this year. Right. So if you're really gonna rebuild a team on a new engine, the chances of you shipping a title by October are

Paul Thurrott (01:37:33):
Zero. Oh. Says zero. That's a hundred percent zero.

Rich Campbell (01:37:36):
Yeah. It's do a minimal buildout just to keep some engagement planned for a two year run. And, you know, some in the next

Paul Thurrott (01:37:42):
Will hire up. But that's two years. I would be impressed. But I, I, that's the problem cuz we have, we still have this game sitting here. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, and Microsoft's modus opera operandi. And what they've promised for this particular game is we will keep this thing updated with new content. Who would wanna be on that B team? It's like, it's like you're a, hey, you're a, you're gonna make the service pack for the current version of Windows while we move on to the next exciting thing. Yeah. Yay. You know, it's like, am I being punished for something? What is this <laugh> like? No. Who'd want to do that? Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:38:13):
There's a group of folks that does, but you only get certain classes of work from 'em too. Right,

Paul Thurrott (01:38:17):
Right, right. That's right. Anyhow, we'll see what happens, but, ugh. Yeah. A, a big, a big part of the coset Xbox came out of 3 43 and there's a bitter part of me that, I don't mean to say like good, but when I look at the part of that that wasn't working absolutely was 3 43. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I just don't know what the reason is. I, maybe it is the engine. I don't want to say it's, you know, the people I really don't know, but it's really tele, they've also lost a lot of people over the past year. Sure. I mean, every couple months you know, the person running the studio, someone really high up they, you know, they're just sort of falling up by the wayside and leaving. And that's telling cuz if this thing was going gangbusters, they would probably wouldn't be leaving. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:39:00):
And, and that's the thing is have you got enough vision to really build out a good game? Org Is this zone set of skills,

Leo Laporte (01:39:06):
I suppose everybody wants to be a cross-platform, but wouldn't it be interesting if Microsoft said, we're gonna write the best possible game engine for Xbox.

Rich Campbell (01:39:13):
Yeah. Only after they finished the ac the Activision acquisition.

Leo Laporte (01:39:17):
Right. But if you had enough games, <laugh> Well, but I mean, then you then you

Paul Thurrott (01:39:20):
Develop the Don't say that now,

Leo Laporte (01:39:22):
Please. You develop a group of developers who are proficient in developing games just for your platform.

Rich Campbell (01:39:27):
Yeah. But then I would also think you would license it to others. Like that's how you make a sustainable engine is what I mean.

Leo Laporte (01:39:33):
Oh, yeah. Anybody who wants to write a game from Xbox, it's like visual basics. No, no, no. Anybody wants to write a game for Xbox would do this engine because it's the best, it's the optimized for Xbox engine

Paul Thurrott (01:39:42):
Visual

Rich Campbell (01:39:43):
Impact, your cross plating.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:45):
Right. I think visual basics made sense in a world in which windows in the PC were dominant.

Rich Campbell (01:39:49):
Yeah. When it's 90% of the market

Paul Thurrott (01:39:51):
Today, it's heterogeneous. And by the way Xbox is not in first place. They're in third place. Yeah. And consoles. So, you know, it makes more sense to latch yourself onto a really high quality standard in this case on Unreal Engine and make sure that that thing runs like gangbusters on your console.

Rich Campbell (01:40:05):
Yeah. And, and to bring in the s political smart know that engine.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:09):
Yeah. Yeah. I I just think it's the way the world is today. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:40:11):
If you're leading, you get more choice. You get choices.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:13):
That's right. But you can do, yeah. Like Sony maybe could pull that, but even Sony, like, why would you bother? I mean you want, you know, you, you're competing with PCs from like a graphical quality standpoint. So make your thing run as run unreal engine as well as it can mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and and compare favor and

Rich Campbell (01:40:32):
Make your visuals distinct so they don't all look like unreal engine. I mean, that's the biggest thing is you use the base cla the base set of libraries, then all your games look like unreal games. If you take the time to build your own stuff and it's expensive, that's a bunch of work by a bunch of artists to give a distinct look and feel, then it's your game.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:51):
Yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:40:55):
Well,

Rich Campbell (01:40:56):
Not that I have strong opinions,

Leo Laporte (01:40:58):
<Laugh>, it feels like a lot of this all that was unplanned, that it happened just kind of by chance

Rich Campbell (01:41:05):
And Well, I I think it's also this

Paul Thurrott (01:41:07):
Push.

Rich Campbell (01:41:08):
Yeah. It's the, you know, capitalist is supposed to be built on the idea of grow, grow, grow, grow, then lean out, right? Yeah. Have a little recessionary period and lean out. So you're seeing this, this lean out moment for the first time in 20 years.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:20):
Yeah. It's like,

Rich Campbell (01:41:21):
What's

Paul Thurrott (01:41:21):
Working? It, it's, it's too bad the way it had to go down, but this is what should have happened for Halo Infinite. I have no idea what they were thinking. Creating their own engine. I'm sure there were re obviously there were reasons, but

Rich Campbell (01:41:32):
There's always somebody inside there who really wants to do it and you don't have a reason to stop him cuz you're making money. You don't care. It's good enough.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:39):
Right. Well, that's the thing. I, cutting

Rich Campbell (01:41:40):
Of the belt helps,

Paul Thurrott (01:41:41):
But I bet this game is probably underperformed dramatically. Sure. And when you're only putting one out every five years-ish or whatever it is that hurts a hit, that hurts a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. You expect that to always be a hit. Yeah. But they've had a pretty, I don't know, I would say four or five and infinite that that's been, they had a classic trilogy and then they had a <laugh>, a prequel trilogy or whatever, like it, it didn't, you know, it's like not

Rich Campbell (01:42:05):
Quite. Yeah. You need a storyteller who's got a bigger narrative around that world. Yes. Yep. To give your room to go,

Paul Thurrott (01:42:10):
You gotta a hold universe so you can take advantage of just like Star Wars Yeah. Expand out into the world.

Rich Campbell (01:42:14):
Oh no. Do a Mandalorian like go off the standard characters. Exactly. Go, go play a side story.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:19):
Right. Yeah. And someone's gonna bring up, they, there were little Halo side games. I know that like little, but

Rich Campbell (01:42:24):
You could do more than that. No.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:25):
You

Rich Campbell (01:42:25):
Can shift for for half Like back in the day. That's exactly right. Like there was so much fun. People love that world. Go have some fun with it.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:34):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:42:34):
It's challenging though cuz when you're, if you were gonna start a new game, today is three to five years. Right. So you have to look ahead. It's so tempting, as you said Richard, to, to do something that's already succeeded. Just do, you know, call of Duty 11. But wouldn't it be interesting to try something new and different and kind of

Paul Thurrott (01:42:51):
Yeah. But you do, that's, I think it makes sense for this schedule to do what you're saying. In other words, like, call of Duty 11 is because Call of Duty 10 was last year. Yeah. Yeah. These games are every three to five years. So

Leo Laporte (01:43:00):
There's

Paul Thurrott (01:43:01):
An opportunity, you should be looking at spatial audio and, and

Rich Campbell (01:43:04):
That's, that's how finances work. You're expected to make money every year. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And it's even exceptional. The gaming industry is allowed to make money every year instead of every quarter. Right, right. Which is now you get back to the Dotas and the world of Warcrafts and stuff that make billions a year.

Leo Laporte (01:43:20):
So this is why you don't really have innovation very often, you know? Mm-Hmm.

Rich Campbell (01:43:24):
<Affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:25):
Although I think they need to rethink Halo from top to bottom. I, I, it's, you know, now they're doing the rendering engine. Do it all. Just do rethink the whole

Leo Laporte (01:43:32):
Thing. But, you know, they're gonna just do a Fortnite, they're gonna do a a, a battle Maria Battle player. Yeah. And because that's what's hot right now. But who knows, three years from now,

Rich Campbell (01:43:41):
What if you did a World of Warcraft in Halo?

Leo Laporte (01:43:44):
I wouldn't

Rich Campbell (01:43:45):
Mind that. Now we've got, now we've got different planets to go to and different, you know, comment scenes and different storylines to explore. That's a lot of content to make, but that's also $30 a month immunologically indefinitely.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:57):
Right. It's, it's a big risk, big reward because you don't, if it's, yeah. You know, Microsoft just brought Halo to TV and it didn't really move much of a mountain there. <Laugh>. Yeah. I would say. But Sony has brought, it was it called The Last Of Us that's HBO

Rich Campbell (01:44:13):
Max's

Paul Thurrott (01:44:13):
Huge's the biggest thing about this in, in, in, in an entertainment world where we have turned to sequels and Marvel movies, and that's all there is. The H B O has looked to a video game franchise for a story that's actually a really good story. And they didn't change it. It's the story from the Game <laugh>. You know, I mean, one of the goofy things about the Halo TV series is they change things and if this thing was strong enough to begin with, and I kind of feel like it was No,

Rich Campbell (01:44:41):
They did cha They're they're changing the ending, apparently.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:44):
Okay. But you, but by and large it's, you know, there's a lot of dialogue that's stray from the game. Like that's pretty, and they got

Rich Campbell (01:44:50):
Great characters

Paul Thurrott (01:44:51):
Too. Yeah. It's a good high quality story. Really hard, you know

Rich Campbell (01:44:54):
You know, there's plenty of bad video game movies out there. I would argue the

Paul Thurrott (01:45:01):
Majority of them. Oh yes. I would al the 99 point something percent of them for sure. Although I did enjoy the first person perspective of The Doom movie with the Rock. I thought that was good.

Rich Campbell (01:45:10):
Yeah. And you also have cold hits, like Resident Evil.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:13):
Those were not great movies, but there's a great, which I love them. Watch them over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing like The Game. They should do a Resident Evil movie that's like the game. That would be smart. Yeah. oh, well anyway. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Rich Campbell (01:45:28):
Games with Gold

Paul Thurrott (01:45:30):
Most of the, yeah. So this kind of stuff is not particularly exciting anymore. Back in the day, games with Gold was pretty cool. It was Xbox 360 Games at the beginning. Then they went forward to Xbox One and went backward to original Xbox. And now we've kind of milked that cow as much as we can. We don't have four games each month now. We only have two. This is, they're newer games. <Laugh>. I know. It's just, well, it's a, it's just a perk of your subscription. So, yeah. I, as I have to say, so often I have never heard of either of these games. <Laugh> for The King, which is, is described as a strategic r PPG and Guts and Goals, which I, I, I saw the name and I, I was hoping it was Guts and Goats, but it's an arcade soccer game.

(01:46:13):
 Hmm. And we'll just leave it at that. Okay. <laugh> Better News if you have a Game Pass subscription, this month is gonna be an incredible month for Game Pass. In fact, it's already started. So we had Golden Eye oh oh seven, which was that classic N 64 title come has already arrived. That arrived early. Age of Empire, two Definitive Edition came to the console I think today or yesterday or the other day, fairly recently. So that's part of this hall That's really good. There's a game called High-Fi Rush that came outta nowhere, which is like one of the biggest things that's happened on Xbox in a long time. Hot Wheels Unleashed and a bunch of other stuff. So this is a good, this is looking like a good month for Xbox Game Pass subscribers, if you are one of those guys. Nice. I haven't, I <laugh> I had an opportunity. I'm not an, I don't play games like Age of Empires, but I, I had the opportunity to do it before it was released and I declined. And now I'm told it's like this incredible conversion. It's supposed to work really well with a controller. You know, this is a PC title that I don't know when I came up 15 years ago.

Rich Campbell (01:47:20):
Oh God. I was a huge age of empire's fanatic. Yeah, sure. Back in the day.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:25):
Yeah. so anyway, there's that. We saw some price hikes with consoles in the fall, not in the United States although that could be coming I guess. But Microsoft just announced they're era, the price of the Xbox Series X N s in Japan. I don't know what to say about that <laugh>. It's just the way it is. Okay. So unfortunately, there you go. And then there's some controversy around whether or not Sony is actually having its PlayStation to be our two shipment forecast. Sony has now said that they are not. But of course Sony would say that. Right. So this thing is $550, which costs more than a PlayStation five <laugh>, which made us kind of crazy. It's supposed to be pretty high quality. The initial forecast was for 2 million units. According to Bloomberg, that has been halfed to 1 million units.

(01:48:25):
 I don't remember, I don't, was there ever a figure for, I don't remember. Yeah. Okay. Actually here it is. Yeah. Sony apparently sold 5 million units of the original VR headset, the PlayStation VR for the original for the ps4. That was a console that had sold over a hundred million units. The current console is somewhere north of 30, if I remember correctly. So I'm sure it will end up north of 50 when we're done, or even, you know, we'll see how that goes. But 550 bucks for an add-on for a consult that already costs, you know, 400, 500 bucks, whatever's.

Rich Campbell (01:48:59):
And what's the, what is the marquee title? Like what's the game? Yeah. You can only play like there. And that is always the problem. Like, you buy your PS five cuz you want the latest final fantasy, cuz you want Right. Grand charisma. Like you want those definitive

Paul Thurrott (01:49:13):
Games. Yeah. I don't know that there is a definitive game, but there is actually a pretty decent list of games. Yeah. Now I don't know that, and I can't imagine too many of these are VR like exclusive.

Rich Campbell (01:49:24):
No, I mean, it's Bloody Beat Saber, right? Like that's

Paul Thurrott (01:49:27):
<Laugh>, like Grand Tomo seven is gonna be updated so that it works with vr.

Rich Campbell (01:49:33):
Yeah. So these are adaptations which have pluses and minuses, but you know, we're still looking for the mist for vr. Right. That's right. The game. It's like you have not seen, you've not played vr you've not experienced until you played this game. Right? Yeah. It's, that's true. And you've got this network effect problem where there's not enough headsets, so nobody's gonna spend the money to make a game good enough. So there's not enough headsets. Right. I was talking to some friends of mine that are involved in Valve and they said average sales for a VR title a hundred thousand.

Leo Laporte (01:50:02):
Hmm.

Rich Campbell (01:50:02):
Well, and that doesn't pay the bills like Right. Does not pay the bills.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:07):
Yeah. Like those guys had put out that game whatever it was called, the Alexa, what do you call it? The Alex, Alex

Rich Campbell (01:50:12):
Alex title. Alex, yeah. That was an experimental

Paul Thurrott (01:50:15):
Title. I would love to play that. I'm not gonna buy a VR headset to play it. I'd love Halflife. You know, I'd give anything to play that. Well, not anything cuz I'm not buying a VR headset. Yeah. Not

Rich Campbell (01:50:23):
Everything. Clearly

Paul Thurrott (01:50:23):
There's a line. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:50:25):
Our games, you would think doing VR versions as they develop mm-hmm. <Affirmative> or is it such a small market, they don't even bother doing that.

Rich Campbell (01:50:34):
That's seems to be the, the case, but also that the game behavior is different in VR than is Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:50:40):
It's hard to move around in, in vr you can't, there's no real good need.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:44):
That's Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:50:44):
You made people nauseous and, and you know, the game, my game building friend said, you know, when you're running in Call of Duty, you're running at 30 miles an hour. Right? Yeah. Because otherwise people get bored. And if I do that to you at the, he talks about the three foot experience versus the three inch experience. If I do that, you three inches, your hurling.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:01):
That was always my issue with when Gears of War first came out, the the multiplayer was, it was all low to the ground stuff. And I was like, what? It's like I'm running around with a loaded diaper. Like, what, what is this <laugh>? Like, this is not, I'm, I want to be super soldier. I wanna leap over, you know, fences and stuff.

Rich Campbell (01:51:18):
<Laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:51:19):
You know? Yeah. That's not good. <Laugh>

Rich Campbell (01:51:21):
That's not good. But I, I I feel like we're seeing pullback on VR at all levels. Yeah. Between the debacle with meta and the, the gutting of the HoloLens team. I know, you know, Sony's pulling back, like, I think everybody's taking a look at saying, this isn't gonna pay this year and we're not gonna spend this year, so we're just gonna dial it back and see if anybody's going to do anything. Interesting. That's not the

Leo Laporte (01:51:46):
Way to create a market.

Rich Campbell (01:51:48):
No,

Paul Thurrott (01:51:49):
No. I, no, I, I man, I still feel like there's a, there's room for this. It's not the next big thing. It's not where gaming goes, but it's still this. And I, and maybe with the PS4 and the psvr, the original one, that was a good indication of what the market is, you know, sold a hundred whatever million consoles, and then 5 million of the VR headset. So there you go. Right. It's like <laugh>, it's like a 20th or it's

Rich Campbell (01:52:15):
Less than a twentie. And how am I gonna spend that kind of money to make that game great? Or I'm just gonna do a great adaptation and it's not great. Right. Yeah. VR only title besides Beat Saber, you know? Right. They're, they're pretty scarce

Leo Laporte (01:52:28):
<Affirmative>. And E three is getting to be more of a desert. Yeah. By the week. I know.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:36):
It's, it's, it's gonna be like the indie game show by the time we're done with it. You know, it's like this is kind of what happened to Comdex, obviously. This used to be it, this was the big show, but as we see so many times for so many companies in other parts of the tech industry you know, people want to announce things on their own schedules. Well, and 

Rich Campbell (01:52:56):
Isn't the other argument that they don't have anything to announce? Like, it's not cheap to

Paul Thurrott (01:52:59):
Go. That's, that's another way to say it. You

Rich Campbell (01:53:00):
Don't have a game. What are you doing? So isn't this really admission that none of the big players have a game

Paul Thurrott (01:53:06):
By chance? Yeah. Well, you know, Microsoft just did a little game event where they talked about a bunch of upcoming titles. And to me, like, you know, I play games, I like games, but I find these events to be a little tedious. It's just like, you know, trailer after to trailer after trailer. Yeah. You bring out a couple guys to talk and then, you know, if, if you're lucky every couple of years, every five years or something, you'll have some, here's a piece of hardware, you know? Yeah. yeah, I don't, so E three is supposedly coming back this year at Nintendo. Sony and Microsoft are all not gonna be there

Rich Campbell (01:53:34):
According to it. It's a conservative year, right? Yeah. Everyone's pulling back. They're

Leo Laporte (01:53:38):
Gonna spend less. So you think if they had a game next year, they might be back. I feel logical

Paul Thurrott (01:53:43):
Thing. I don't think they ever come back. Honestly, even before the pandemic, they were walking away. Microsoft started by, it's

Rich Campbell (01:53:48):
All the question of who's got the audience right

Paul Thurrott (01:53:49):
Across the street? Remember <laugh>, you know? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:53:52):
But every one of these companies can have their own event and draw people.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:56):
And they do.

Rich Campbell (01:53:57):
And they do.

Leo Laporte (01:53:58):
That's what happened to Comdex. They didn't need it anymore.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:00):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah, exactly.

Rich Campbell (01:54:02):
Welcome to the internet.

Leo Laporte (01:54:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:04):
It's all good news, guys. <Laugh>, we haven't lost anything.

Leo Laporte (01:54:09):
Let's take a break. And we got the back of the book coming up. We got some brown liquor coming up. We got some good stuff just for you. Stay tuned. Richard Campbell is here from Run Radio and.net rocks paul thro.com. Our show today brought to you by Draw, to draw to is your organization having a little trouble achieving compliance, continuous compliance, especially as you grow and scale. I can't believe so many businesses still, so many enterprises still do manual evidence collection for compliance. That's slow. It's inefficient. It's just not the way to do it. As a leader in cloud compliance software, G2 says this, by the way, leader in cloud compliance software, trada streamlines your SOC two, your ISO 27 0 0 1, your P C I D S S G D P R hipaa, another compliance frameworks by providing get ready 24 hour continuous automated control monitoring.

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Paul Thurrott (01:58:42):
Yeah. So we talked about bit warden and password manages and all that kind of stuff. And I switched, but then I had to make that final step. This is, this is like a, like a multi-step process, right? So you switching, like moving your passwords to a new place is easy. In fact, it might be too easy. But then you have to go through the process, right? So you have to set it up in your browser to you know, to autofill. Obviously you

Leo Laporte (01:59:09):
Have to such a pain.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:10):
Ugh. Turn off that in your browser. So it doesn't do it itself. You have to on mobile, have to go through an interface. I think I mentioned this before, but one of the interesting things about the iPhone is you can actually have multiple autofill services.

Leo Laporte (01:59:22):
Yeah. I use both apples and Bit Warden. Yeah. And it works fine. Just gives you a choice on Yeah, it works fine. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:28):
On Android you have to pick one. So anyway, I switched everything over to bit bit Warden. Okay, good. And it's been working great, but of course our sponsor, I wanted to make sure over time. Yeah. I wanted to make sure it was good. Right before I took,

Leo Laporte (01:59:39):
I did the same thing. I left my password's on last pass just in case. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:44):
Yeah. And then, I don't know, two weeks, three weeks, whatever amount of time went by. And finally I was like, all right, it's time to say goodbye. I can tell you that's a gut punch. <Laugh>. You go into, you go into your old pa, whatever it is. If it's in a browser. I have, I had pa I had passwords in multiple locations actually. Oh man. Cuz I, you know, I test so much, so I switch around. So I had to go into like Edge and Chrome and Clobber 'em all <laugh>, you know? Yeah. And, and nuke it from space. And that's the thing. You gotta, you gotta do that. That's the point when

Rich Campbell (02:00:15):
You've got a lot of machines too. So it's like mm-hmm. <Affirmative> on and on each machine. Oh

Paul Thurrott (02:00:18):
Yeah. You gotta get through.

Rich Campbell (02:00:19):
Yep. If you did local storage,

Leo Laporte (02:00:21):
Here's the one pitfall I found. I don't know if you've ran into this. I had a lot of shared passwords and last pass with Lisa and others. Right. And I thought, well, I was, I don't know what I was thinking. I thought, well maybe they just copied it over and it's in their vault now and I don't have to worry about it. Sure. Soon as I deleted the last pass vault, Lisa said, where'd all the passwords go? <Laugh>. They were being shared, actively shared from last pass. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:43):
Right. So, so you probably know about this. I, someone asked me about this today. I looked it up. I know they do this, but I don't, bit Word does have passwords shared. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:00:52):
Yes.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:53):
Oh yeah. I just don't, I just don't do that. So I didn't,

Rich Campbell (02:00:56):
Yeah, I, well, and I had to set it up a you set it up in two steps, right? So you do the export from last pass, which is very disturbing. Cause now you have a CSV file of all that's

Paul Thurrott (02:01:05):
Clear text, I plain size file of everything else.

Rich Campbell (02:01:08):
And then I, I cut it up into shared stuff and personal stuff and loaded them separately.

Leo Laporte (02:01:14):
Oh, interesting. So

Rich Campbell (02:01:16):
To make sure that I had them in the shared, shared vault so that she who must be obeyed had

Paul Thurrott (02:01:21):
That's right. Okay. They have multiple vols.

Leo Laporte (02:01:23):
Yeah. But see this is the difference. Lisa's still on last pass, right? Yeah. So if I could, if I could have gotten her to move to bid warden then it wouldn't be as big a problem. I would've done anyway.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:34):
I think it's the man of the house. You have to put your foot down and just say

Leo Laporte (02:01:37):
Charge. Right. Who wears the

Rich Campbell (02:01:39):
Gonna be fine. I'm the one with the tin foil hat on here.

Leo Laporte (02:01:42):
All three of us are married. We know. Yeah. Isn't that how we, how it

Paul Thurrott (02:01:45):
Works. We may talk tough when we're alone together, but the reality is

Rich Campbell (02:01:49):
<Laugh> Now this was a couple of cocktail conversation to persuade to say, yeah, this is in our best interest. It's

Leo Laporte (02:01:55):
Gonna be, well that's the thing Lisa knows, but it's such a pain. Yeah. She also knows and she has been doing this to her credit, she has to go through all her passwords and change them. Yeah. Yeah. And she's been doing that. She says, yeah, I do. About that's 10 or 20 a week. I just do it. A

Paul Thurrott (02:02:09):
Bunch of this's a good thing to do during baseball season when you can kind of only half pay attention. You get your beer, you get your head dog, you get your password, man, you got your baseball game, you get your

Leo Laporte (02:02:17):
Passwords, here you go. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:18):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:02:19):
Anyway,

Paul Thurrott (02:02:20):
Also, there's other stuff. I don't use any of this other stuff, but you can use these things to store, you know, credit cards. And I do that too. Identification. And

Leo Laporte (02:02:28):
That's another pitfall just to be aware of binary files that are stored in LastPass don't get exported with the export. So you have to,

Paul Thurrott (02:02:35):
Right. This is a separate

Leo Laporte (02:02:36):
Thing. Save them out and then reimport them or create new images. Because I have passports

Paul Thurrott (02:02:40):
Drivers about this

Leo Laporte (02:02:41):
Security, social security guard. Everything did astonishing. All I use secure notes. I mean, what better way to keep secure notes, of course in your password manager

Rich Campbell (02:02:51):
Me was the authenticator keys. You know, you get that queue of numbers for authenticator keys or you have to rebuild authenticated from scratch that I put in. And that did import properly.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:00):
Oh, that's good. Oh, that's nice. I've rebuilt authenticator from scratch so many times. I,

Leo Laporte (02:03:04):
It's, I a, I don't wanna keep my my TTPs in the password manager. Cuz then if somebody gets my passwords, they also get

Paul Thurrott (02:03:12):
My secrets have, yeah, they have the,

Leo Laporte (02:03:13):
I don't want to do that. So you know what Steve Gibson does, which is hysterical but actually kind of smart. Whenever he gets the QR code, he hits print and he has all his QR codes printed and in his, in a notebook somewhere. Really?

Paul Thurrott (02:03:28):
Yeah. I mean, aren't a lot of those temporary?

Leo Laporte (02:03:30):
No, no, no. That's the, that QR code is the secure, that's the key. Oh, okay. That's the 28 digit key that then gets meshed with the time of day to create a T otp. So that never changes. That's your secret. That's what last pass or bid warden keeps track of. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:46):
This is probably semi obvious too, but after typing in my master password a couple times, I was like, obviously I could protect this with biometrics. Like what, what am I doing? You know, so

Leo Laporte (02:03:57):
Yeah. You have to do that again over and over again. Do that

Paul Thurrott (02:03:59):
As well.

Rich Campbell (02:03:59):
Yeah. Yeah. I quick, I quickly moved over to using my Fido keys for that. I don't want to Yeah, the master password is very long. Yeah. The Fido key is much less painful.

Leo Laporte (02:04:08):
But as long as my password is 31 characters and I've been typing it in a lot <laugh> because I

Paul Thurrott (02:04:14):
Made Bitcoin. When you, when you add a password, it's like typing your master password. What, what were you, what?

Leo Laporte (02:04:20):
Yeah. Well it's

Paul Thurrott (02:04:20):
Good. Appreciate security. But,

Leo Laporte (02:04:22):
But yeah, I use a Fido I mean a UBI key for my Fido. Yep. it, there's still, you know, in order to turn that on you have to type in your master password. So yes. I up typing that move is a big process and I'm still angry a little bit at last pass for forcing us to do this. I feel like. Yeah. Had they been well,

Paul Thurrott (02:04:42):
But then you know what though? Sometimes you need that push and Yeah. I mean you've at least looked at your stuff. I mean, even if you ended up keeping it there this was a, a healthy reminder Sure. To pay attention. True. I think we get, we, we, you know, it's wake up when you go to the lead, it does ask you like, why are you leaving? And one of the option is because you've completely sue screwed up your Yeah. Cause you screwed up fruit too. <Laugh>. Right. You tell me why I'm leav it's because we completely effed up. Yes sir. Yes. That's why Oh, we understand. Got it. It's been

Leo Laporte (02:05:14):
Literally the most popular topic on the last six weeks of our shows.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:18):
Sure. Why One of the answers was just spite <laugh> <laugh>. Why? You know, why are you closing your account spite.

Leo Laporte (02:05:24):
Yeah. So LA yesterday we were talking on security now about Bit Warden again, bit warden's a sponsor. But it seems to be kind of, a lot of people have kind of centered on that one. One password's very good. There's plenty of other

Paul Thurrott (02:05:36):
Guys. Best Bit warden of the two. Yeah. They're very

Leo Laporte (02:05:38):
Comparable

Paul Thurrott (02:05:39):
Routinely, you hear. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:05:40):
But because Bit warden's open source, somebody did a pull request to cuz you know, they're all using pbk DF two, which is a hardening system to, to hash your password to salt and hash it. And in some cases not enough iterations because modern GPU machines are very fast and can actually, you know, do these calculations pretty quickly. All it is is a speed bump. But there is a better way to do it, which is memory hard. Technologies like S Crypt or Argon two dash lane uses Argon two in a kind of interesting, maybe not the best implementation, but because you can issue a poll request a bit. Warden people have written now Sry and Argon two plug-ins. And we were talking yesterday one of the guys who did this said he'd been working with Bit Warden and they both agreed that rather than confuse people with two different password hardening technologies, they were gonna sit back on Sret and implement Argon two.

(02:06:39):
And so Right. He said, then the next iteration, the next version of Bit Warden, next time you get an update, you will have the choice of key hardening technologies you could use, continue to use ppk DF two. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, there's a standards organization that that requires that I can remember the name of them and that's that's why it's still around. But you'll be able to choose Argon too. And I'm certainly when that happens, we'll we'll make a big noise about it. But that's really great. That's really great. There is a setting in Bit Warden already that lets you choose the derivative function and mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and now you can choose, you'll soon be able to choose Argon too. And that will be the thing to do. And then, and then mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I feel like with a long good master password, two-factor authentication, a good key derivative function, you're probably, even if the vaults get lost, you're okay. I

Paul Thurrott (02:07:32):
Think. Yeah. <laugh>. Well we're gonna find out Leo. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:07:35):
You know, <laugh> well you gotta figure bad guys are hammering on last pass one password bit Warden robo form, all of them saying, let you know, let's see if we can get this. Cuz this worked out so well on last pass. Right. And it, you know, there's a lot of social engineering going on and so forth.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:53):
I don't if I feel pretty good about it,

Leo Laporte (02:07:55):
I'm, I turned my ppk DF two iterations to the max, which is 2 million. Yeah. And it's not that, it's not appreciably slower, it's fine. So I guess that's what I'd recommend for now. And then Argon two down the road. But, but yeah, I think you're doing the right thing. I didn't, you did it after two weeks. It took me a few months to get rid of it. Well

Paul Thurrott (02:08:16):
It might have been three weeks or that's more, I don't remember. Maybe I'm, I

Leo Laporte (02:08:20):
Really misremember really. I was, I just figured, you know, I know I'm gonna log in somewhere.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:24):
Yep. Oh yeah, no, I, I, I'm, yeah, same thing. Positive and across mobile too. I, I'm really concerned about mobile autofill and apps and stuff like that. Like I need this to work, you know? Cuz there's nothing, I can't type a normal sentence on my phone. How am I gonna type a password into this thing? Oh God. So anyway. Yeah. I wanted to make sure it worked. So when I, it seems

Rich Campbell (02:08:43):
Like, yeah, when I, I had the two side-by-side until I did all the things. I went to the Coast place. Yep. Yeah. I went abroad. Like I made sure that every machine context I was functional and then I'm like, okay, you can go now. And

Leo Laporte (02:08:54):
Yep. And yet with all that I discovered, oh, <laugh>, I just killed all my sheer passwords. Yeah. Sorry, Lisa.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:01):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:09:02):
<Laugh>. So now I have to, it's not good, you know, I can't share 'em with her cause she's on Bet Warden, so I have to text them to her. So yet

Paul Thurrott (02:09:09):
<Laugh> There you go. Yet

Leo Laporte (02:09:09):
We're getting there. No, we're in fact, company's moving to Bit Warden, so I think it's just a matter of time before

Rich Campbell (02:09:14):
We'll be an enterprise bet.

Leo Laporte (02:09:15):
We're gonna do enterprise Bit Warden. Yeah. We were enterprise last Fast and that's a, cuz now we gotta do all the same things for the enterprise for sure. Right. Yikes.

Rich Campbell (02:09:25):
For the same reasons. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:09:27):
Paul's book the Field Guide to Windows 11 selling like hot cakes.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:33):
Well, it's selling like cold cakes. But I have, so I mentioned another book that I'm working on. So in 2019 and then I took a break and then again, in 2021 I guess, yeah, probably I wrote a, what is sort of a technical history of Windows. Right. which I stupidly called programming Windows on the site, which I can't call as a book <laugh>, but I wanted to turn this into a book. So I I I, I sort of, you know, as I would as you know, we were talking about OCD and whatnot, I became kind of obsessed to see like, how long is this thing? Right? So just the text. And I originally, I was gonna do like chunks of the book and kind of put it on Lean Pub and see what it looked like. And then finally I was like, no, I'm just gonna blow through this and just see what, what's the text look like, you know?

(02:10:19):
And just the text, like just text is like 675 pages Woo. In PDF form. However, there are several chapters that are just basically short coding chapters, those sort of coding examples. Like hello world type applications, so across multiple languages and frameworks and whatever. And I was like, you know, I wonder if there's like, I bet some people wouldn't care about that at all. Right? Like, what does that look like? And so I think I'm gonna put that, I originally, I was like, do I do two versions or, and I think I'm gonna put that stuff in the back of the book, but just without that stuff, it's still over 600 pages long and I have to go back and add this photos and screenshots and all kinds of other stuff. So it's, it's a pretty substantial book, you know, and so I'm gonna Good for you. Try. I'm still, it's great.

Leo Laporte (02:11:03):
Still

Paul Thurrott (02:11:03):
Still trying to figure out a name. I think I'm probably just gonna call it Windows Everywhere, which is not an ironic name. And

Leo Laporte (02:11:11):
But it's, but it's history. It's the history of Windows programming. Is that it really?

Paul Thurrott (02:11:16):
Yeah. Yeah. It's, well, it's the history of Windows, but with sort of from the perspective of an app developer, because, you know, like Windows is this thing, I wanna write an app, you know, like, what's going on today and what are your choices? And like, why do those things happen? Like how Windows change because of things that were happening out in the, you know, the industry or whatever tr like, you know, like OP was a huge thing in the, you know, the 1990s and then it wasn't, and then Components and then dot net obviously was a huge thing. And then it wasn't, and <laugh>, you know for Windows anyway. So it's just, it's kind of, yeah. It's just kind of an all it parts of it is just straight up history. I mean, I just, you know, whatever. And then parts of it are very specifically, you know, Java is a big deal at one point. And like we just talked about, and I, it's kind of an interesting's a great

Leo Laporte (02:12:01):
Idea for a book. I love this. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I read all of the articles on the premium throughout.com, but I still want the book.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:09):
Yeah. But I gotta do all kinds of, I, there's all this, I want my, my wife's gonna help edit it and she doesn't know anything about any of this stuff. So she's already said like, you need to have some kind of

Leo Laporte (02:12:17):
Yeah. Technical

Paul Thurrott (02:12:18):
Reviewer, technical list of, you know, terms and, and Yeah. I might do like a code name list cuz there's a lot of code names in it. And wow. I did glossary. Glossary. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:12:29):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:30):
A lot of stuff. So anyway, I just wanted to, we talked about this last week, I think, and I, this is since then I'm like, screw it. I'm just gonna blow through this. I'm gonna convert it all to Mark down and just see what it looks like. And do some light editing. There's

Leo Laporte (02:12:44):
A great site you might need this. This is a great site I go to called Rosetta Code. Are you familiar with that? No. Rosetta code.org. It it talks about commonly programmed stuff and then it shows it side by side in different languages.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:03):
Oh, that's funny. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:13:04):
So they call,

Paul Thurrott (02:13:05):
So I did, yeah. I mean, I did some of this. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:13:09):
So it's, it's, it's, let's see, here's, you know, just, I don't know, here's a hundred doors, which is like a, you know, coding problem. Here's the problem, and then it just shows you how you would do that. There's 360 Assembly.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:22):
There were this in quick basic Python

Leo Laporte (02:13:24):
Four dos 65 0 2 assembly. I love

Paul Thurrott (02:13:28):
It. Geez. Geez. 65 0 2. It's

Leo Laporte (02:13:30):
Actually really as I move around from language to language and I'm going, well, how do I do, what's the map command in? So, all right.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:36):
I just, only you guys would appreciate this. So the, the, the, the thing I did that I think was the coolest thing I did in writing code sort of was I was writing those Notepad applications and I wrote the first one of Visual Basic because I had some background in that. And before I learned C Sharp and I needed to print, and I couldn't figure it out. And I'm like, I wonder if Charles Petzel wrote anything about this <laugh>. And sure enough, actually in a C Sharp book, he wrote a, a basic Notepad app and he implemented printing. So I took that code and I converted it to Visual Basic, and there were a couple little niggling things, whatever. And it worked. And I got printing working. That's great. And then later on I did a C sharp version of it, and I took my code from Visual Basic and I converted it back to C Sharp <laugh>. And then I later compared it to what he wrote originally <laugh>. And it was pretty damn close. Wow. And so it was like this game of telephone tag, except like, at the end it was like, it's fun. Yeah. I got the message right. <Laugh>, that's great. It was

Leo Laporte (02:14:35):
Pretty good. That's

Paul Thurrott (02:14:35):
Really fun. I thought that was kind of cool. Yeah, I, I was pretty happy about that.

Leo Laporte (02:14:40):
Coding's fun. Yeah. I like it.

Paul Thurrott (02:14:43):
Okay. Anyway, sorry I didn't mean to waste too much time on that. But

Leo Laporte (02:14:46):
Let's move on to the next segment, which is the app

Rich Campbell (02:14:50):
Pick

Leo Laporte (02:14:51):
Of the week. Who's doing that for us today? Rich is,

Paul Thurrott (02:14:54):
I'm doing

Leo Laporte (02:14:54):
This one. All

Rich Campbell (02:14:55):
Right. Rich. I, I stumbled onto a website recently, just trying to read better news, you know, oh God. As I wish I, I've subscribed to Reuters, I ascribe to Associate Press because they seem to have the raws,

Leo Laporte (02:15:08):
Right.

Rich Campbell (02:15:10):
But ground.news is this site where they're pulling from everywhere. So you can see all the variations on a given story, how all the different media, major media groups have written about that story. And it's very, to me, it's been fascinating just to realize where my own biases lie, what I'm reading when I'm not reading. And so it presses against all of that. And so I'm, I'm still getting deeper into it. It's, it's also interesting to see where stories are covered by more only covered by more liberal Yeah. There's

Leo Laporte (02:15:42):
A little graph on every story. Yeah. Show who covers it more. That's interesting.

Rich Campbell (02:15:47):
Yeah. And so it's just been a mechanism where I'm trying to read more broadly and see sort of where the biases live. I like this.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:55):
I like that. The, the top level menu for me, I dunno if it's, it's like home My feed local Tom Brady. Wait, wait, what? <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:16:03):
That's the big story of the week. Yeah. And then Ty, Ty Nichols and then Valenti Terry, I'm sorry. I guess this must change all the time. But this is a good example. You know, a fed raises interest rates by 25 basis points, you know, and some, some news sources would say in, in the smallest hike since March. And some would say as inflation continues to roar through the economy, and it's really, I think

Paul Thurrott (02:16:28):
That's fascinating. Winter storm threatens 100 million Americans.

Leo Laporte (02:16:31):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. 10% of America under flood watch. I think this

Rich Campbell (02:16:36):
Is, so normally I would run around and grab them from different places. Yeah. But here they've got them all in one spot. How much

Leo Laporte (02:16:41):
Does it cost?

Rich Campbell (02:16:44):
10 bucks for a year.

Leo Laporte (02:16:45):
Oh, that's nothing.

Rich Campbell (02:16:46):
Yeah. Okay. For the, for the 10 bucks for the, that's basic. They've they have, yeah. They've, they've got a, there's like a hundred dollars a year for the full meal deal with all the goodies.

Leo Laporte (02:16:55):
Well,

Rich Campbell (02:16:56):
But even then you're talking less than $10 a month. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:17:00):
This sounds really interest. And it, and it really is unbiased cuz sometimes I go to these sites and Yeah, they're, they're biased <laugh>,

Rich Campbell (02:17:06):
They show you where they're pulling sources from, I love. And how they, and the different ranking services they use for that. So they're trying to sit fairly neutral in that. Yeah. Good story

Paul Thurrott (02:17:15):
Space. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are reportedly all skipping. E three is 100% left.

Leo Laporte (02:17:22):
<Laugh> <laugh>. Really? Nobody on the right talking stupid tech

Rich Campbell (02:17:27):
Rumors video games.

Paul Thurrott (02:17:28):
You make me sick.

Leo Laporte (02:17:30):
All right. Hey, good tip. Ground news.

Paul Thurrott (02:17:34):
Oh, that's funny.

Leo Laporte (02:17:36):
Really good tip. It's been, yeah,

Rich Campbell (02:17:38):
It's video. Yeah. Crew been great.

Leo Laporte (02:17:40):
Yeah. All right. Mr. Paul Throt. No, no. I guess we're still doing brown liquor. Yeah, let's do some I

Rich Campbell (02:17:48):
Got, I figured it was Canadian turns, so Right. I wanted to go to one of my favorites, one of the ones that's always in my cupboard, which is Crown Royal. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:17:56):
Yeah. Now see this is, see this is interesting to me mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, because Canadian whiskey is, how would you characterize it compared to say, scotch Irish or bbo? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:18:07):
And, and can you generalize it in

Rich Campbell (02:18:09):
Any way? You can't, I mean, different distilleries do different things in the case of Crown for, they make a bunch of different variations, but their core mash bill is more or less the same. It's primarily corn than typically rye. They have a few exceptions and a little bit of Marley, which is, you know, not that different from a bourbon mash bill. It's, it's pretty close. Although you can't call it bourbon because it's not in America. It was the it came from a company called Seagrams, which was started in Canada and ultimately acquired by larger conglomerates over time. That eventually landed all in Diagio, cuz the Diagio owns everything these days. But it's called Crown roll because their original edition from 1939 was made specifically for the Royal tour into Canada, which was not Queen Elizabeth. The second, anyway, it was King George the sixth. His wife Queen

Leo Laporte (02:19:03):
Or Dad. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:19:05):
Her dad back in the day. 

Leo Laporte (02:19:09):
This is the one that comes in the purple velvet bag. The

Rich Campbell (02:19:11):
Little purple bag, which some people really don't like <laugh> like that bother some folks.

Paul Thurrott (02:19:16):
Really? That's a great place to put your d and d dice.

Leo Laporte (02:19:19):
<Laugh>. Oh yeah,

Rich Campbell (02:19:19):
No, those, those bags are super useful. Right. <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:19:22):
That's historical.

Rich Campbell (02:19:24):
It's made in a place called Gimley Manitoba. And that, and Gimley, Manitoba is really only famous for two things. One is crown one, one is Crown, and the other is the Gimley glider,

Leo Laporte (02:19:37):
Which is okay.

Rich Campbell (02:19:38):
Back in 1983 7 67 did not load enough fuel and nobody noticed. And in mid-flight they ran outta gas,

Leo Laporte (02:19:50):
We're going to Manitoba, everybody <laugh>.

Rich Campbell (02:19:53):
And the pilot was able to dead stick it down on a drag track that was in use.

Leo Laporte (02:20:00):
Whoa.

Rich Campbell (02:20:01):
Yeah. No loss of life. But pretty impressive was one of these crazy things. And the real reason it's Sing Gimley is for the same reason that bourbon is made in Frankfurt and Bargetown in Lawrenceburg, which is that their water table sits in limestone ah, and limestone makes very soft water. And that's what you need when you're going to make booze. You need, you need water with as little minerals. And it is possible. And so that they build it in, they make it in Gimley cuz they got the right water. And that the sort of claim to fame for crown Royal was that back in 2016, it won Bess whiskey in the world for their northern rye.

Leo Laporte (02:20:39):
Huh.

Rich Campbell (02:20:40):
Whoa. And wiped it outta the market. You couldn't find it anywhere. Yeah, I, I, I managed to get a bottle and it was, it was very good. I don't know why it won, you know Yeah. Records, but it was, it's very tasty. Whiskey, it's they don't use pot stills. They use only column stills. It's very efficient way to go. But there's a, there's a whole argument in whiskey making about pot stills having a higher reflux level. And at some point I'll do a whole dissertation on still designs. But column stills are good for making very high distillations. If you wanna go up to 90% or something, they're, they're great for that. You have to manage 'em to do lower distillations. But now all they use is column stills and they get all these great flavors out of it. They have gone a little nuts in the

Leo Laporte (02:21:20):
Past. Yeah. I'm not sure I'd get peach or salty caramel flavor. This is a little goofy, but we actually have some of the apple which we use for cocktails.

Rich Campbell (02:21:28):
Yeah, no. And the same way that you would do a flavored vodka, you can do a flavored whiskey. Yeah. But you know, so I always, cuz you see

Leo Laporte (02:21:34):
The answer this, so I just assume, oh it's, you know, mass market, mass produced whiskey. But it's not, it's

Rich Campbell (02:21:42):
Pretty good. Well it is, it is. But it's reasonably priced, right? That's right. And it's mostly corn, so you know all the flavors coming from the rye. But my, you know, go-to I, you know, highball drink would be crown with ginger ale.

Leo Laporte (02:21:54):
Yeah, there

Rich Campbell (02:21:55):
You go. You know, you don't feel bad mixing it if you, if you got a fancy your whiskey, you gotta drink it by itself. And sometimes that's, it's not good on a summer day, you want a big glass with some ice and a little whiskey in it. You could have gone a gen and tonic, but you could do a crown ginger.

Leo Laporte (02:22:07):
There you go. I was watching last night a very well known documentary called The War Room, which is about the 1992 presidential campaign. Clinton and Bush the first. And it really features, oh this is really about James Carver. It's really about James Carville. It really features James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. But at one point, as they get close to election day, they want to celebrate. And somebody, and I didn't notice this the first time cuz I didn't know you're Richard, but somebody pulls out a bottle of a Avalara bna. Are

Paul Thurrott (02:22:37):
You really? In 1992.

Leo Laporte (02:22:38):
In 1992. And Carville knows <laugh> Carville note, note because he, they say sniff it and he said, I ain't sniffing this. I'm drinking <laugh>. He goes out and he gets a glass. Yeah. I think he knows. That's great. It's a good, it's a really good whiskey. And I looked at that and I thought, oh, that's beautiful. Wow. I know there's a little insight on that. Thanks to you Richard. So that's cool. Yeah, that's cool.

Rich Campbell (02:23:01):
So I mean, it is a simpler whiskey. One of the things they do because they're not stuck with the bourbon rules is they do age and cherry and used bourbon casts and things like that, which is fun. More fun.

Leo Laporte (02:23:11):
How about their cognac? Aged? Would that be a good choice? The xo

Rich Campbell (02:23:15):
Different kind, different kind of barreling? I I've not really tried it. Okay. generally if I wanted cognac, I drink cognac, drink cognac,

Leo Laporte (02:23:21):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:23:22):
If fact, if you, if we get an opportunity to do whiskey tasting often with folks who really like whiskey, I'll slip a cognac in the middle of it because you probably can

Leo Laporte (02:23:29):
Tell. Interesting. Really

Rich Campbell (02:23:31):
Interesting. The difference between grain alcohol aged in wood versus fruit alcohol aged in wood is small. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:23:38):
Interesting.

Rich Campbell (02:23:39):
Huh? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:23:41):
I have a Louis the 15th bottle <laugh>, we drank all the, the cognac out of it, but I'm trying to think of what I As well. You should. Yeah, we should. But the bottle's beautiful. I wanna put something else in it. Yeah. So maybe I'll, maybe I'll get some XO and put

Rich Campbell (02:23:55):
That in there and, and one of these days I'll tell the story of the whiskeys or the cognacs of Moldova. Ooh. The Transnistrian region Clint. It's mostly all bought by the Russians cuz it's very good. And they have beau they have beautiful wines and they have beautiful cognacs. And I, the only way to get 'em is to go there and I have on occasion. Nice. Yeah. Nice.

Leo Laporte (02:24:19):
Moldova.

Rich Campbell (02:24:20):
Wow. Moldova. I don't know that I go there right now. They're right beside. Yeah, I was gonna say green. It's a, when you're driving on the highway in mold over there are signs that say this way to Odessa and you're like, I am very far east. <Laugh> <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:24:34):
Wow. My friends, we have concluded this gripping edition of Windows Weekly. So glad to have you back, Richard. Appreciate it. Great to be back. You'll find Richard at Run as radio and.net rocks two great podcasts on the internet. Paul Throt is at throt.com. You should be a premium member there. It really is a great way to support Paul and, and get great extra content. And of course his book the Field Guide to Windows 11, including the Field Guide to Windows 10 is available@leanpub.com. When do you think you're gonna get the new one out?

Paul Thurrott (02:25:10):
So I'm gonna do it in stages. I think I'm gonna, I'll just do like the text first. It will be, you know, because it's like a publishes you go kind of a thing and I'll go through and edit it. I actually want, I'm gonna add content to it too. There's a lot of stuff I didn't cover, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:25:22):
Oh, oh

Paul Thurrott (02:25:23):
Good. So I want to, I, yeah, I, I'm gonna, as soon as this coming week I'll, the first version. You

Leo Laporte (02:25:29):
Like that it's a labor of love. I know. Yeah. this is a subject you like to write about and I can't wait to read about. So we look forward to it. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern. That would be 1900 utc. If you wanna watch us live, there's a live stream at twit tv slash live. Audio or video you can choose. If you're watching live, listen live@irc.twit.tv or chat live, I should say. You can also chat in our club Twit Discord, where we are now talking about Brown Liquors <laugh>. You

Paul Thurrott (02:26:03):
Got, which I have to say I'm a lot more engaged in. Yeah, you got, you

Leo Laporte (02:26:06):
Got us started and now that's all we can talk about. The Discord is available to members of Club Twit. Seven bucks a month gets you in you get a lot more, of course, than just the discord, but that's a good part of the fun. After the fact on demand versions of the show are available at the website, twit.tv or on YouTube, there's a YouTube version. Of course you can subscribe and that's probably the best way to get it automatically the minute it's available. As they say, wherever finer podcasts are aggregated, syndicated, and stored for your delight and download Paul Richard, have a great week. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-Bye. Thanks.