Windows Weekly 854, Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott's here, richard Campbell's here, microsoft bringing co-pilot to Windows 10.2. We'll talk a little bit about why you couldn't get 23H2 via the ISO download. I will install Windows on ARM on a brand new MacBook and tell you how to get an inexpensive license too. And then surface support for firmware and drivers is extended. Microsoft correct MFA fatigue, paul Therrott's got some Nintendo news and we've got a great brown liquor of the week. It's all coming up.

00:35
Next, on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therrott and Richard Campbell, episode 854, recorded Wednesday, november 8th 2023. Dated, insecure and unreliable. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by TraceRoute. Traceroute launches with an in-depth look at AI. Love it, hate it or fear it. It's time for some couples counseling for this relationship. Don't miss this two-part special and other episodes that find the humanity in the hardware.

01:23
On the new season of TraceRoute, on Apple, spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And by Miro, the online workspace for innovation, where your team can dream, design and build the future together from any location. Tap into a way to map processes, visualize content, run retrospectives and keep all your documents and data in one place. Get your first three boards for free at Mirocom slash podcast. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft with these cats right here, beautiful British Columbia, I've got Richard Thompson. I always call you Richard Thompson because I like his music, but it's Richard Campbell of runasradeonet rocks. Hello Richard, hello friend, do you play?

02:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
music. No, that's Carl's gig. Oh nice, I spent some time in audio engineering so I've mixed a lot of music.

02:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I don't. Oh, interesting. Okay, right to the left. Famous guitar player, Paul Therat. From Therat. Do you sing in the shower? Yes, sometimes in the car. You have a lovely baritone. You could maybe even a basso profundo. Wow, yes, you could say this In a world where Windows is the dominant operating system.

02:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you need a good mic for that too In a world In a world In a world In a world.

02:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Together, they cover the waterfront when it comes to Windows and Microsoft. We're so glad to have you here today to talk about Windows, lou dozers and you winners. Chat is ongoing right now in our club Twitter discord. If you want to join us there, we'd love to see you. We now do the chat in a single room called live chat. Clever. Name Clever name.

03:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it took me a while to find it, yeah.

03:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There it is, live chat. We used to have a Windows chat and we used to have a chat for every show, but now we thought, well, why don't we just have it all in one place? And then, though, if you do want to talk about individual shows, we've turned those into fora, which is the plural of forum, so you can go to the forum channels and there's a little tutorial, but you can see each show there and your comments there are welcome. So it's kind of like both chat and we realize that there's some ephemera, so that should go in the in the live chat and then there's some stuff that you might want to comment more permanently. So club Twitter members get on in there. Is there a dead chat? Paul says Twitter. Look at that little repartee in the discord. Thank you, sir.

04:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Dead chat walking.

04:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you want to join club, we would appreciate a Twitter TV slash club. Twitter $7 a month ad, free versions of all the shows and the discord and lots of other stuff. Effect Stacy's book club is tomorrow, which is pretty exciting. John Scalzi's Kaiju preservation society tomorrow, nine am Pacific and on the 16th in a week week from tomorrow, renee Richie in a fireside chat. Formerly host of MacRick Weekly, now he works for YouTube. Right.

04:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Creator liaison like big. I see him sometimes in YouTube studio. His little head pops up like a little.

04:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
sound like an easy job, though Can you imagine a lot of creators?

04:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mr Beast on the line, oh crap.

04:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh crap.

04:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like dealing with like wrestlers or professional poker players. They all are crazy.

05:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's a team handling Jimmy these days.

05:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yeah, I'm sure you know. I'm going to ask Renee. Let's ask Renee that that would be a great, great question. Paul, are you still in Mexico? Are you back? You're back home, aren't you? Yeah, I'm back, I'm back, and Congee PA and Richard. You're in Madeira Park, I am, I think this will be it for the real idea. No, you're not going home for going back to Christmas in Mexico City. I meant to ask you did you notice how crazy Mexico City was during the Formula One race a few weeks ago?

05:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, because Mexico City is the size of Connecticut and that part of Mexico City is on the other side of the airport and it was a bridge port, not in.

05:43
I would never have even know it occurred other than so many people mentioned it to me. Isn't that funny? No, and then the other thing was day of the dead. So we actually were there through day of the dead and I got to tell you, whatever Halloween something you've seen anywhere, they don't even come close. Definitely Off the charts, yeah, off the charts. Three days of trick or treating with children, three, yeah, right. And then they were just insane and insane. They did a parade, this year Wow Reforma.

06:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it was like a fun, yep.

06:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's kind of interesting because it was originally not a big deal in Mexico City. Right, right it was more.

06:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then James Bond.

06:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Spectre. It was a yeah, you've got to watch. The first time in suspect. It all takes place in the Zocalo and the Grand Hotel, which is a beautiful building with a roof made out of stained glass.

06:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they thought, well, we better celebrate. And they're like this was fun. Yeah, it is fun, Everybody had a good time. It actually is fun. I think it's a great holiday. I really quite enjoy it. Yeah, mike Elgin was in Oaxaca during the day of the dead, so a bunch of pictures from his meta. So Mike was on Twitter on Sunday singing the praises of those Ray-Ban meta, ray-bans. Of all.

07:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which I okay actually. Yeah, those look pretty cool to me because they look like sunglasses, right Like they should like real sunglasses.

07:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they don't. I mean, they're not a heads up display, but they can shoot video and stills and they have, he says, very good audio and an AI assistant inside. Sure, I don't know whose. It's not anyone. We know it's Mark Zuckerberg. I guess that's the one from BMW.

07:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sorry, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what it is Speaking of being.

07:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just got to have Mark in your head, Right yeah?

07:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You want to wrestle? Yeah, speaking of BMW, I just got a big update on my iPhone so that it wouldn't fry on a BMW's charger.

07:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually, Leo, what you got was a tiny update, but it does fix the problem.

07:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that a sterile? I've never seen an iPhone update installed like quickly. Yeah, because neither you or I have a BMW. But in case, just in case, I do have a BMW actually, but it's an old BMW, oh you do, it doesn't have wireless air purifier.

07:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it doesn't have anything. It barely has Bluetooth.

08:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, I'm sorry I distracted. We have stuff to talk about, important stuff like Windows 11.

08:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, windows Central broke the news that Microsoft is bringing co-pilot to Windows 10, but I don't know if we talked about this explicitly, but I've been thinking about that for quite a while. Like that, they would, of course, have to do this for the same reason that they'll probably have to extend support for Windows 10, which is that there's so many people on it over two thirds of the user base and literally right around a billion people as we speak. You can't leave that audience behind, as much as you want to move forward. This is something Microsoft has grappled with again and again over the years Windows presentation foundation window, wpf yeah, wpf. Why does that sound weird when I say it was originally going to be a long horn only technology, but the user base was all XP and they had to bring it everywhere.

09:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Come on, that's not why it happened. What happened is they had to actually shift this to a new one.

09:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Come on, man, it's come on.

09:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I didn't know. They're cleaning up the mess.

09:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Listen, I'm tired of your truth telling bullshit. No, you're right. My point only was that this is not unprecedented. It makes sense. You have this huge user base. I can't ignore it.

09:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Especially since they need it as much as you want to lead the parade. Sometimes, when the parade hangs right, you have to run in front of it too. This is where the parade is going. Get in front.

09:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We see this in small ways. There are little things, no new features in Windows 10. Then we start seeing little things popping up.

09:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Except this one. Maybe that one, yeah, well, you didn't get the memo.

09:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, new features are an incentive, I guess, to upgrade. I'm sure how they view them. I don't think they really are. If you want them to be used, bring them to the most people you can, and Windows 10 and 11 are essentially the same operating system.

10:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would argue that Co-Pilot was a good incentive. If you're going to talk about any one thing, that would be probably the big one, although arguably then you get back to the whole MPU thing. It's going to be the hardware in the end. Anyway, the new hardware will have the new ones, that's right.

10:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Before the show I was showing you the new M3 Mac laptop. I put parallels on it. We've talked about this before. I love this Parallels. As the installer says oh, do you need Windows? You want to install it. So it's downloading Windows 11 now, but will it be 22H2?

10:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
23H2? 23h2? I mean 23H2. Should be Actually. This is the next topic. I can't say for parallels explicitly, because I don't actually know where they're getting it. I don't know if they have their own, I don't know if they have one customized and then deploy that out to users or if they literally grab the one for Microsoft. So we'll see. I guess we'll find out.

11:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Last week, after we finished the show, I just clicked on the button that said install 23H2 on this laptop and it was not a big deal, but apparently it is for some folks.

11:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is yeah. So I spoke to this last week. I ended up writing about it after the show. I mean, if you forget all the drama from earlier in the year and God knows I cannot. But let's just for this moment, we'll try.

11:29
And I'll just say that they told me the week before this was happening they had told us in previous to this, two months ago, whatever it was that 23H2 would be an enablin package, a simple thing, an EKB, which means you still have to reboot the computer. But it comes back quick, it installs quick and basically it's just flipping some switches in policy or the registry or whatever enabling features that were kind of delivered on the side in other updates. Simple, small thing. So you think, well, everyone's going to get. That day will come. Whatever that day is, that day was last Tuesday unexpectedly, but that day, whatever, everyone's going to get it immediately. That's how it's going to work.

12:08
And no, I'm trying to write a book, update it for this exact release. This is a big problem for me. I went out to Mexico with the explicit goal of doing what I ended up doing, thankfully, but once the real thing comes out of that, I want to make sure I'm on the real thing. I want clean installs. I want to see what this looks like, and what I found last week was that there were I'm going to call them four primary ways to get this thing right.

12:33
One is what I think you're saying you experienced. You went to Windows Update and it said there's new update. There it was Hit the button Windows 11, comma Yep, that's the best way to get it as an upgrade right. But for people like me who would like, actually need it you know writing a book again there are three other ways, right, and those all involve Googling the phrase download Windows 11. And then you go to that page on Microsoftcom and there's a page that has all three of those ways. And those three ways are you download the ISO right, which is a disk image file, right? You use the installation assistant, which is away from the web, to run a version of setup that does what Richard did through Windows Update. It's a much more ponderous and long. Oh, really, it takes a long time. Yeah, it takes a really long time.

13:18
It's not, but you could do that or you could do it. I think I don't know most of it. This is what I would have done in the past. Typically is I create a version of the installation media using the media creation tool. Right, which is the Microsoft thing that you?

13:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
download from that same page. That advantage of it that is. Now you have that and you can keep it around.

13:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right and because I want to put it on multiple computers, exactly right. So that's how I usually do it. And what I found last Tuesday was that the media creation tool downloaded 22H2 and the other two would get you to 23H2. So I tried it again on Wednesday same thing, and we did the show and I talked about it.

13:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and somebody in the Discord said they were getting 23H2, but it's like Not from that thing.

14:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they weren't. We know that now because after I tried it once a day, three days in a row. Finally, not Microsoft, by the way, to my knowledge, this company has never officially confirmed this, but a gentleman from Microsoft gave it to us. It was nice enough. When asked on Twitter what's going on with this, it looks like it's 22H2. He checked into it and, sure enough, it's 22H2 and will be for about two more weeks. Actually, for now it's going to be about one more week. This is information that would save me a few days of work. Thanks, microsoft.

14:35
If you go to that page that I talked about, if you Google the phrase I said and you go to the download Windows 11 page, you'll see at the top very clearly says the latest version, the current version, the current lease, is version 23H2. Right, but all the tools you can get on that page do not give you that version. Most of them do, but one of them doesn't. So sometime around the 15th there will be an update to the MCT, as I'll call it, the media creation tool, that will bring that up to 23H2. I can't wait for it to appear. I guess I could have done this as a tip today. I'll just say this now If you need the installation media, download the ISO instead and use a tool like Rufus to create a bootable.

15:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Windows 11 set of media. Parallels is running the installation assistant and is installing Windows. What do you think I'm?

15:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
going to do yeah. So yeah, the reason they're doing that is because they customize the install for you, because one of the options in fact the default it's very hard not to do this is it will just install it for you. You know, normally you step through it and you fill things out and it's doing that for you, Right? So you have to have a local account that you don't have to sign into, because most people just want to run the apps. Right.

15:42
The idea is once you've got this thing installed, you hide it and you start just running the apps you need. That's it. That's the way they do things. It's kind of streamlined. Okay, what does this say Okay, you'll be up and running. It's just going through something, yeah. It's pretty quick.

15:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got to say it oh, there it is. It didn't take, so we do.

16:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Bing bing. Oh yeah, so this is the out of box experience. So actually, okay, I was thinking we'd not even see this. So let me see how it. Let me see what it does here, because usually this is a several step process where you sign in and do things and I don't recall ever doing this with Parallels. So let me see what happens.

16:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So so you can be more of a Mac? No, you don't. Come on. I bet it'll run pretty swiftly, however.

16:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I think it's going to run great, yeah. Yeah, I'm not going to go off line when we said this, but no, I'm recording. But I have a base model 8 gigabyte M1 MacBook Pro. Yeah, parallels runs Windows 11 fantastically. That is not a powerful machine by today's standards, yeah, not in the M series anyway, no Kind of the basic M1.

16:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, literally.

16:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, yeah, it's the two port model, the old 13-inch, they don't even make it.

17:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're going to say hi, we're going to say hi isn't it Okay if it does that sort of?

17:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
explains it. There you go.

17:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like I said, I don't recall. Getting things ready for you, oh yeah.

17:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Normally you have to step through a bunch of stuff to get to this point.

17:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, we're getting things ready for you now.

17:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here you go. So because you have a Mac, you can't type Windows Key plus anything easily or at all, because Control Escape will work for start but it won't work for no, no, no, Wait, I'm sorry. It maps the key, doesn't it? Control?

17:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I have the cursor. What would you?

17:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
suggest.

17:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, once it gets to the desktop, okay, well, once it gets to the desktop, try the option key first.

17:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
See which keys launch to start, if any. Actually, I may be in none. Do you know what? You don't need that I'm sorry. We can just do it. We'll do it differently. All right, this is going to be a little different because you can't right now actually use Alt-Tab to switch over to Copilot, which is a I think they're going to fix. You can launch it with Windows Key plus C, but if you, you'll probably get the desktop so you'll be able to just click on it, plus you can see what the version number is.

18:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, we'll see as soon as it. We'll see here. It's almost there. I hear that I say that actually means it's there. Oh, look, okay, oh good, uh-oh. Access files yeah, installation complete. Click to continue. This is just Parallel. Yeah, just doing my parallels thing. That's okay, sign in. And then it's going to say you're running this somewhere else. I'm going to say, yeah, screw it, turn it off over there. I don't want to buy another license fee.

18:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was surprised. I think we talked about this a few months ago. I was surprised to discover that most parallels users don't use coherence mode, which is where you just hide the desktop and run apps side by side, right, because then you just run a simple app To me. That's the point of it, Okay.

18:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can use it just like you would on a PC.

18:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Next. All right, so I see that you do not have a co-pilot for starters, so it looks like you might have 22H2. Windows Kies it's called Chat. Yeah, I don't know. Windows Kies, actually, just do this Open Windows, open Start Menu, rather and type in run.

19:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yeah, yeah, that. Thing.

19:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or no, don't do that, I'm sorry. Type in Winver, just type Winver.

19:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, winver, winver, there we go, so 22H2.

19:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but this is wall right 22. What's the 22. No, but you can upgrade it .702.

19:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
22.

19:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So just, it goes to Windows Update. Now, yeah, settings Windows Update and see what you get. Okay, you probably have to do a set of updates first and then reboot, and then I bet you're offered 23H2.

19:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Check for updates. Nice, it does seem to be. Oh, I got a. I have a problem. You're gonna have to activate it to do this.

19:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right, I'll do it later.

19:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, check for updates. I do have a key.

19:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You have to activate it if you want to do something like this oh cute wallpaper. But if you want to just update it, no.

20:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's Update for Windows Security Platform, cumulative update 22H2. It's all 22H2 so far.

20:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Should I do get the latest updates as soon as there's a demo. Yeah, I think you should. Yeah, let's slipstream that Sure.

20:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and that's it right, you don't want me to go into insiders? No, no.

20:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm gonna go ahead and install all and then I know like two weeks ago you're gonna be like but Paul, you told me to join the. Canary Channel. I'm like I don't, Okay, we have a recording now, so you can. I don't remember that you can say let's check the tape.

20:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can do like they do on those progressive ads. You know, get the instant replay official in here, all right, so I'll let this go. Okay, and I'll let you know. But that was interesting. So it's Windows on ARM, but it's 22H2, which I am now upgrading, and presumably with 22H2.

20:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that tells me they're probably getting the ISO internally, like they got you know. Then they customize it. Maybe they're just not done.

20:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you think I'm getting it from.

20:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Parallels. I think that's my guess, without actually knowing that would be my guess. That makes sense. Interesting Cause you know, that thing you just did, where you didn't have to step through the out of box experience, is that means it was automated in some way. So that tells me that yeah, that's almost certainly the case.

21:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The thing that's interesting is this is Windows running on a Mac book and it doesn't feel in any way like it's not native.

21:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, the way you have. And, by the way, go up to the menu there. And well, you won't want to do this for now, because actually you want to see Coreplay, but you could just turn off the whole desktop, right? Yeah, yeah, and do coherence those Windows apps will be next to each other and next to Mac apps. It looks fine.

21:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so I have Mac, so I can see the folders and everything. And if I do an alt tab, that's running on the Mac. Yeah, so yeah, and then I can go full screen.

21:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In Query it's cool. Yeah, I remember the keys of the Mac but Full screen Windows.

21:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Windows switched to coherence. I know.

22:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but a lot of people don't and you know. But the multitasking is totally integrated into the Mac system. It's nice. Yeah. So I can run a Windows app full screen and kind of three fingers swipe over to it or however it is, you guys do that, that's.

22:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Windows full screen, and now I'm in the Mac Full screen Mac.

22:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's just see real curious how the CPU usage is on here.

22:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Pretty nothing. It's just going to chuckle knowingly.

22:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you want something, are you? I'm sorry, what? Oh, I'm sorry.

22:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is there something wrong?

22:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we're just humming along here. It is using all the RAM, though, which I make sense, oh nice.

22:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, okay, but yeah, okay, that's interesting. So that's virtualization, but hopefully the Mac has a dynamic memory system.

22:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, that's got plenty of Mac.

22:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wanted to use all the RAM.

22:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean I think there are settings, as I remember, in parallels to say no, no, no, you're a 16 gig machine, you're not a 64 gig machine, but for right now that's fine, let's close this and we're just running Windows updates still, okay, look at that, look at there. And this is a Mac app and this is Windows. This is the coherence mode you're talking about. All right, Enough of me, enough about me. What about you? How about you?

23:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it looks great.

23:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You think of me yeah, what if we lose in 22H2? I mean going to 23H2. What do we? Did we lose anything? What did we lose? Yeah, did we lost anything, do we?

23:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
should we worry about that? I mean just a little tiny check of our soul, really. No, I mean, we'll get to some deprecated things, but they're not major features. We know about some things that might be deprecated in the future, or I guess technically are deprecated to just be removed in the future, but no, nothing major. Here's one thing actually If you open File Explorer, which Microsoft promotes for some reason as being modernized that modernized word comes from the fact that part of the UI has been used to be UWP technology XAML Islands really and it was replaced with WinUI, which doesn't change the user experience in the slightest, except for one thing the address bar is all new and you can't drag and drop files to it anymore.

24:26
So that's kind of a bummer. But you have to drag into the files area of the window. You can't do it right up to the address bar. The way that feature worked before is kind of cool, because you could move it to exactly the place in the path where you wanted it to go. It's actually kind of a nice thing. Of course, if you were fumble-fingered, you would probably drop the file in the wrong place and then never find it again. But that's part of the fun of using Windows. I suspect they'll bring that feature back at some point. It's sort of like the task bar. I remember when the original Windows 11 task bar came out, it was all brand new from scratch and it was loose. You know, missed some stuff, and I think that's what we're seeing again with File Explorer. So look at their kids, don't worry, it's all good. It's not all good, but it's mostly good. I like Windows and you will too, whether you want to or not.

25:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You will too.

25:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this just happened as we started the show, but there's a new Canary build out today. Nothing Windows 12 in there.

25:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sorry, it's just some although last week Windows 12 never said it even once. I know, I know that's true this, you know.

25:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're obviously testing features that are going to make their way into Windows 11 at some to some at some point right, and this is all just low level stuff. This kind of ties into some of the stuff we were talking about last week. Actually, it's all SMB, by which I mean small. Is it small message block? Small message block, yeah, small. But server message block as opposed to small business is how I read SMB. But this is the old networking protocol that has been around in Windows forever, ned Piles, nemesis SMB.

26:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, smb1. Yeah.

26:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, right, right yeah, which they're exercising from Windows as we speak.

26:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The problem is that you lock out SMB1 on your network and you find out hey, you know that printer over there.

26:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, or that NAS you're using, or that you know that's on some out of date Linux firmware thing. Yeah, yep, but it's got to go. This stuff is all. It's like NetBios and NTLA. These are the terms. I don't think about it anymore. Actually, I think about them in one place. When I go to the Mac and I want to use a file share on a Windows device, I type in SMB, colon, slash, slash and whatever the address is.

26:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Thank you for about it. Man, I don't know there's anyone else left that would do that, Okay, Well, it's fun being old. I did a show with Ned not that long ago on RunAs about SMB with OverQuick and that's supposed to be the SMB you can expose to the internet. Like it's very robust, like serious.

27:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wasn't WebDav almost that. Wasn't WebDav a web safe way to get in and out of a network? I think so.

27:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
All attempts to get past FTP. You know, just like please save me. Yeah, that SMB over quick is pretty compelling and you could lock it down as hard as you want to lock it down. You could say only machine with this cert can read it. Like they could be plenty robust. And the fact that it just maps into File Explorer and other tools to just be a share, it's pretty compelling, okay.

27:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that is part of this Canary Build that we're referring to, so it's very good. Smb everywhere, they're modernizing SMB and you said it couldn't be done. Yeah.

28:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One would argue it's a contaminated name, right, just because it has so much kind of all associated with it.

28:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there was a whole weird transition there to Atlantics, because Atlantics at one point only supported one of the older SMB versions and not the newer, and they had it. You know, that was it's all. I think we're all there. I think we're in better shape today.

28:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh no, I got my Synology NFS share to work against my home assistant media client and I'm delighted. Right, it's a SMB for me.

28:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know. My out of date, unsupported WD NAS is on some older version of SMB as well, but I'm going to be replacing that, hopefully soon.

28:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but it's remarkably archaic, Like when I got it running. I'm like why?

28:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but you know, when software is insecure, it's amazing how quickly it runs. Yeah.

28:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know when you don't have to worry about it. Yeah, it makes it so much simpler, right, right, yeah.

29:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just, but it works really fast. Yeah, no, it's working fast for the hackers who are downloading all your content as well, but Take all those layers away.

29:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who needs the layers?

29:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's fast for everybody. You'll notice. For some reason there are 300 people on your server. Okay, so I think we talked last week about Microsoft was deprecating two apps Windows Maps and Movies and TV from an olderand I think this might even be in the Canary channel, if I'm not mistaken. So that suggests that in the futureactually it doesn't suggest they said explicitly in the future, these apps will not be installed by default anymore in Windows 11. Maps app who cares? I mean, once they lost the phone, I think the viability of that thing kind of went away. Team problematic, yeah, yeah.

29:55
Movies and TVs a little more nuanced. Obviously there's a more modern media player app which isn't horrible, kind of based on Groove but it has the video playback stuff as well. The one feature it doesn't have, I don't think, is the ability to play or stream content from the store that you purchased. That's kind of the purpose of Movies and TV. So I think I said this last week. You can look for an update there on the media player app. It wouldn't be surprised if they add that Movies and TV also integrates with the Movies everywhere, movies Anywhere service, which is if you buy stuff on iTunes or Google or wherever else and you can connect the accounts on the back end and use the app you want to view those movies that were made by studios that participate in this program, which in my collection is about two thirds of them. So most of the movies I bought are actually from Apple and they show up in this app and Microsoft. It's kind of nice. So hopefully that will be coming to media player as well. We will see.

30:51
Microsoft also maintains a page on Microsoft Learn, I believe. Now that is for features that's removed and deprecated in various versions of Windows and they haven't documented yet or at least last time I checked anything that they've removed, but they did document three features that were deprecated in Windows 11, version 23H2, which to my knowledge we didn't know about before, and they are very much related to that SMB topic we're discussing. They're all low level, antiquated, kind of old protocol. Yeah, networked protocol, computer browser. It's hilarious, depending on which Microsoft source you. Is that the right one? Nope, sorry, that's the third one. Sorry, not this one, but that dates back to Windows NT. That's 30 years ago. Right, it's been around there for a long time.

31:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's two folks out there still using it. They're really annoyed now, right.

31:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yep. So we removed support for SMB1, we were just talking about that in Windows 10, and then eventually in Windows 11 as well. There's the webdav service actually I just mentioned this is why it was in the back of my brain that dates back to Windows Vista. That's hilarious. So no longer started by default. They really learned a lesson from UPnP. That's hilarious. And then remote mail slots and I have to say I've never heard of this term before. And now you want to use it.

32:12
Yeah, I'll never forget it. It's a dated, simple, unreliable and insecure IPC Interprocess Communications protocol that was first introduced in MS-DOS.

32:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so funny because that's what Lisa called me last night dated, insecure, unreliable. I feel like an.

32:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
IPC protocol. It's how C3PO would rip on R2D2.

32:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like the ultimate insult, for You're dated, unsecured and unreliable.

32:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there you go. Awesome, anyway, not a big deal, right? That file explorer thing I mentioned will probably impact way more people. So there's that. And then, in addition to those two apps I mentioned earlier Maps and Movies and TV Microsoft today just announced that the Windows Tips app is being deprecated, and I'm actually really surprised by that.

33:02
It was a moment there where this was going to be the thing that popped up when you first installed a new version of Windows, or you installed a feature update or whatever. It would say hey, this is what's new, this is what Chrome OS does, for example. Right, it's not a horrible idea and I guess nobody uses it so, and I guess they're going to get rid of it. I'm a little surprised by this. We'll see what they do there. They're going to have to replace it with something. I think that it's important to have some way to communicate with the user base, especially when there are changes that impact them, right, I think. So we'll see. We'll see what they do. Maybe it will be a co-pilot thing. It's a sidebar that pops up and says, hey, guess what's up, and you're like is that clippy? You know it's. I get like a PTSD situation going. All right and, okay, that's most of that.

33:56
I don't normally talk about the laptops review, but I did want to briefly discuss the HP Spectre Folding PC because it speaks to a number of things that are happening. It's on my list, right? Yeah, so I think you would find it uncompelling from a performance perspective. I would just say that it is a 9 watt U-Series processor. Okay, so they were trying to hit a very specific power management by brand. Yeah, right, so there's that little problem. Right, these displays are expensive, but I do think we've reached a point in the phone business where this is clearly a very compelling product for a lot of people. It's going to get more and more popular over time as prices come down the difference between a five-inch folder and a 17-inch folder.

34:47
Yeah, well, here's what's cool about it. So in laptop form it's like a 12.5-inch laptop, so it's barely acceptable. It is a full-size keyboard, usually size screen, et cetera. It works. You're in a cramped little airline thing and you can get work done. It's good. But when this thing unfolds it's hard not to exclaim out loud.

35:07
It's like a circus tent and even though it's only 17 inches compared to, say, 16 for a big laptop, it seems bigger still somehow it is something about it and it's just kind of. It's a gorgeous screen, the keyboard you separate the keyboard, you can connect it if you want with a wire, but it's Bluetooth, it keeps working. It has a built-in touchpad and stuff all works great In that situation. It's neat, it is. I know a lot of people say I can talk any laptop and I can have an external display and all that stuff and you can. But this is like having a small-ish desktop computer with you wherever you go because the thing opens up. It's like you know it's neat.

35:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But the only thing that matters is that scene, that fold point. How does it?

35:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
look when it's unfolded. So this is and they describe it this way Because this, when you're straight on, you can't see it. There's no, you've got to look for it, then You've got to wiggle around. You can see the reflection of it if you get over to the sides, but if you're looking right at it, it disappears, and I mean that in every set, like it's gone the thing. That's amazing. Well, here's the two big points, and this is why I wanted to discuss this. These are the two big points. Everyone's looking for the next form factor. You know what are we going to have?

36:24
Lenovo, earlier this year, came with a dual screen device, the Yoga Book 999. I think it was called, which is also very pretty, but it's impractical and really the two screen thing works best when the screens are on top of each other, which is not really the way. I think most people with dual screens use displays. It also did not nail the laptop form factor. In fact, that is in that form, in that mode, or whatever you want to call it. That device was hugely inefficient. It was very bad. It was too thick. You're too high up, it's. The keyboard wasn't great, didn't have a touchpad, so you could have a situation where you have a keyboard that you still touch in the screen like an idiot and I just didn't get it.

37:04
And so the first of the two points was HP got that right, like the lap they were like and they said this we know the keyboard thing had to be right and it as a laptop, it is a good laptop, it's. They nailed the basics. I think that's important. Right, that's, we can't go to the future unless we cover the today or whatever. But it's the screen thing, honestly, obviously and obviously right, that has it. And here's the thing. So we're at this reviewer's workshop a month and a half ago. Hp is going on and on and on, and I mean they're just droning on and on about the hinge. They're passing it around the room. We want everyone to see the hinge. You got to see the hinge. We did so much testing on this hinge. The hinge is incredible. The hinge is going to last as long as any hinge we've ever made for a normal laptop, so you never have to worry about that.

37:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And so none of us have ever thought about a hinge until you brought it up.

37:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly. So 10 minutes into this, someone finally raises their hands and says yeah, okay, but what about the screen? And the guy was like the screen. He says, yeah, like, what about? How long is the screen going to last? He goes, oh, oh, that's going to last longer than the computer. You don't have to worry about the screen. And it was such an afterthought Wow, right, that I, and I think it speaks to the maturity of this technology. The question is is it true? Okay, right, I know we're going to find out. That's going to be the thing. So when I say the future of the PC, I mean literally the future. It's not today, it's too expensive and obviously some of those are less sensitive to.

38:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The question is is it any good? Like, what are you getting for $5,000?

38:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So the argument here is that what you're getting is three devices and one right, it's not a two and one, it's like a three and one, and the three devices are a laptop, a tablet a really big tablet, by the way and a desktop, and I would have a hard time. Spending that much money on those three devices would be one thing to say to that. Another thing to say to that would be I don't buy those three devices at the same time, so I don't you know. Another one would be I don't actually use all three of those devices. I need two, maybe, right, a laptop and a desktop maybe, or whatever. Well, listen, then, I don't know that.

39:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's all kinds of things you could say you can't say tablet, like that's just too big. But that one's kind of a laugh.

39:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, pretty interesting and again, to me it really is just is the expense and that's a temporary condition, and then we'll see what.

39:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The reliability of the screen, of the size, but the whole question here is is it expensive because the tech is that expensive, or is it expensive because they plan on replacing them when those seams get messed up, just building into the price? Oh yeah, you're going to have to swap that a couple of times.

39:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We have to sort of speculate from what they say. It's the expense, you know, and I would remember when the Surface Studio first came out, and it was essentially a laptop with a gigantic beautiful display yes, and it was so expensive I don't remember the exact $3,000, $4,000.

39:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it also had that articulating screen Like you could lay it down and oh, so sweet yeah.

40:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But what everyone said to this was okay. But we don't want the computer, we want the screen. I want to add that screen Never sold it. And what they? Their response to that at the time was you don't understand. The screen would be $500 less than the computer it's. It's. The expense is the screen.

40:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and I understand and sell it to me anyway. Yeah, exactly yeah.

40:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't think we're ever going to see that now, unfortunately. Yeah, it might be. I think it is the screen.

40:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know when you do these big five case screens you have to have separate. Apple had all this separate processing on their five cases. It really is a computer.

40:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wish they'd let us attach a better computer to that screen, because that's the that's the point and, and you know, given the repairability, stuff with surface actually going to talk about.

40:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I still have that studio. I still have. Nobody wants it.

40:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I mean, if they were to make that computer today, it would be more upgradable, more repairable. I mean, you know, the thing at the time was mostly probably a closed box. I don't remember I'd have to look it up. Like what could you actually replace one of these things yourself? It's probably next to nothing.

41:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, but it's also just interesting to think through the workflows of that sort of draft table angle. Yeah, exactly, I've taken, I played with my taking my 43 inch 4k, which I adore like my fate, and there's different classes of work where it's like I need four 1080p screens at the same time, please. And that's what that thing delivered Full scale 4k, but then the 32 inch 1080p touchscreen down in this sort of draft board position.

41:39
Yeah, bring it up to you yeah, yeah, and so you have a touchscreen that's closer to you, up to a larger screen above, and then you have a mechanical keyboard at the tray underneath that. So when you really need it, so I'm compulsive in a way.

41:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've been a lot of people watching our listings as well, and so one of the things I don't like about touch displays is that you can touch them, and one of the things I wouldn't like about this display that you're describing is that I would want it to always go back to exactly where it was, and I would have a hard time getting it there. You know, I sat down my nephew was here for three weeks when we were gone and I sat down in front of this computer and I was like a lot of it is different.

42:21
You know, and I just you know, I don't know, I it'd be, it'd be neat if it was like a power seat in a car. Where there were, you could have. You know, press number one and it goes to that upright thing exactly the way it was, and he pressed number two and it goes, you know, then all the repositioning.

42:37
Yeah, I don't know. Well, let's see what happens with surface. I mean, I they've obviously scaled back. I don't know if we're going to see external displays. Remember, one of the unique things about surface for a while is it was going to all be three by two screens, right, which is unusual and cool and kind of a neat form factor or whatever. But for them to do an external display it seemed like it should be three by two. But now they have a bunch of devices that aren't three by two. They're kind of going in a different direction. Maybe, honestly, 16 by 10 is better for a traditional laptop, whatever. Whatever, is there a need for this thing? I always thought they were going to do, because surface studio I'm sure it was three by two. It was three by two. What we wanted was that three by two, 3000 by 2000 pixel display, right, that was the point of it.

43:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's where we're after. We said hi, give me a solution is I can lay my hands?

43:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
on. That's what I care about, and I don't know. I just don't see him doing it now. I wish I could, wish they would. I always thought they should, but anyway. So between AI, which will be kind of the plumbing part of it, and then these kind of potential new form factors, I mean there's an interesting history not history future to be had for the PC perhaps here, right, I mean it's kind of cool.

43:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a neat PC, I think.

43:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it is. It's super expensive but it's cool. It doesn't work with any like you know. That picture there is me trying to use it on my laptop stand, which would work until I started typing, and it would slide right off of it because it's not designed for that.

44:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a detached keyboard, though somewhere right there is. Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. That works great yeah.

44:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a full-size keyboard and with a trackpad it's nice Right.

44:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good review, theratcom. If you want to read it, let me take a little tiny, teeny weenie break, teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny little break, and then we will continue. If you would like, if you would want, I am, I'll show you this. I think it's a parallels issue that I'll have to work on. I don't think it has any access. Well, it says it doesn't. I did the, and then it won't say. It says I can't update anymore.

44:53
So I don't know, I don't know, I don't get, I don't get what's going on at all. Okay, yeah, let's look at that. I think it looks like, for some reason, after I did the up windows update, I lost wifi, and so I don't. I'm not sure what's what's going on, because when I was, 11, it's so powerful.

45:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can screw up your max connectivity. I love it.

45:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, no, the rest of the Mac is okay, but you see, it says not connected.

45:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yeah, right click the networking icon down there in the bottom right and should be right click. Sorry, and then troubleshoot something, something probably. Yeah, this will open.

45:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This will open this MS contact support link.

45:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, that's not good, don't do that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. In the file, uh, oh, it's like there's no network adapter there at all. That's what that's, and I think that's why it doesn't say I have probably set up in peril. Okay yeah, maybe it's it could be a VM.

45:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We know that I had it before because I wouldn't have been able to download and install, so I'm very confused.

45:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's probably when it is. You could, if you want to try this, right click the startup menu you know.

46:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know how I knew this Cause? When I went to my widgets and said I can't, yeah, widgets. That's how you know the computer screwed up.

46:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, right click it, sorry, oh sorry. Choose device manager. This will tell you if there's a networking device that doesn't have drivers or so it's clean. So look for network network adapters.

46:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I span that parallels Virtual Ethernet adapter which they should have connectivity.

46:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so that mean okay, you could try troubleshooting, then go to.

46:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll just restart. It's not a okay, you know that always works right, doesn't it shut down windows? Okay, bye, bye windows. Ah See, maybe that's it. It's it didn't have Security permission from the Mac. That one thing about that Mac. These days, oh, every app has to get permission to access even folders. You know, they've really, it's really changed.

46:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's important to keep windows in line, so I'm glad to hear it's doing that, yeah sorry, hey, our show today brought to you by another show which is interesting, called trace route.

47:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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47:33
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48:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah it's a save about that. It is, we say yeah yeah, apple's doing great. I know I you worry about this company, but honestly I think I'm gonna be okay.

48:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can anything save Apple?

49:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the iPhone. Yeah, I mean there's a story to be said, told here, right, this notion of a one product company kind of like Google is with ads, you know, yeah, the iPhone is About almost 50% of their revenues. Now, that's down quite a bit, but when you think about the stuff that makes up the slack services especially, that's all iPhone, isn't it really? I mean it's, you know it, direct and indirect revenues, I mean I bet I Don't know what did I actually calculated about 84% of I of Apple's revenues come in some way from the iPhone. It's like a. It's this incredible economic engine.

49:39
Yeah, the iPhone did not by itself make as much revenues as my, as Microsoft did, for example, but it was pretty close. And when you think about the overall iPhone ecosystem, I mean that Device by itself is it is as big as a Microsoft I mean it's incredible. It's just incredible. Mac sales fell dramatically, bad, badly in the quarter by 38, 33.8%, which is kind of interesting. But I assume last year they must have released those M2 backs.

50:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was yeah, there was this big bump and now it's down from the big bump that's and they released the M3 is like the one you bought a little bit later in the years.

50:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, those are not it. I mean this literally. Yeah, like this, is this coming?

50:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
quarter and that's typically the Apple's big quarters, the holiday quarter, so that'll be the test. It is interesting to note that services growth, especially now that we know from the yeah, google viz versus deals A trial that 18 billion dollars of it is Google Right, I know significant Portion comes from Google paying Apple this please keep, please. Yeah, who was it? Jeffrey Fowler writes for the.

50:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Washington Post and he was Jeffrey. Yeah, I really like him a lot, although he did go up the deep and a little bit about the Google AI stuff and photos in the text list. But Norm I but I do like the guy quite a bit and and it's worth reading it. He wrote today about. What does this say? This wasn't the whole part of the article, but what does it say about Apple when they talk about Privacy and how important that everything that you do on your iPhone stays on a iPhone and like, but you're being paid like 20 billion dollars to Keep keep Google as the, the false search engine? I mean, doesn't that somewhat undermine your claims? And you know it's something it's. It's a discussion behind, but anyway it is a discussion. Apples doing, apples doing great. That's my only point. So the Mac We'll see. I think the Mac this quarter will. They'll be a nice.

51:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did see an article on Windows central that said Now that we have the M3's that Qualcomm was right to, you know, kind of promote the speeds of their chips because the the early geek bench tech tests of the Qualcomm chips Do show that performance is better than the base model M3, which you know. That's Okay, I guess I just look. I this is a personal thing.

51:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah right, my pet peeve is benchmarks can be contorted to mean anything from the company you know.

52:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean these are, that's what I mean.

52:06
Like you could, you could literally optimize a chipset to do well in a benchmark, right? So it's. It's really about real world, and I'm not claiming that the Macs don't perform on the real world. That's not what I mean. What I mean is you can have a chipset like the other one the tensor and the Google pixels that does not look good on paper at all compared to any whatever snapdragon processor, but if you use one of those phones, you know for the most part day to day like this thing is fine, like it's, it works fine. Like you, never you don't think about it right. So whatever Qualcomm is doing, it needs to work that way. The problem is it never has right when you use something and you immediately notice how bad it is. Right, that's a problem and that's what the Qualcomm chipsets have been like on the PC so far. So we'll see. I hope that's true. I really do. I want this thing to succeed. I want arm to take off in the PC space. I think it's necessary, because as soon as it does, that's when we're all going to move to risk five anyway, and then it'll be another 20 years. It'll be great. Okay, welcome to my world, but anyway, I do think it's important.

53:09
Yeah, and then, speaking of Qualcomm, there were the other company and, of course, this one. Not a good one, not a great quarter, no, but it's very interesting. This mirrored Intel's earnings report so closely. It was just kind of amazing. So 24% revenue drop year-over-year, which is astonishing, right, not good. Their core business is the chipset business, as I call it. They mostly make chipsets for businesses, for smartphones. Rather, 5.45 of the 8.6 billion came from this company. That's down 27% year-over-year.

53:49
Okay, but like Intel, they say we're already seeing stabilization and we expect growth ahead. So they're already saying that this quarter is going to be better than they predicted previously. This talk went flying up. That's what Wall Street wants to hear. So the smartphone market, like the PC market exactly, has been in decline for about two years. So we're already seeing major indicate. We start from Microsoft, remember, and their earnings. We started in Intel, from theirs. There's the PC market is about to at least stabilize, if not grow. So we hope for growth, obviously. But it's nice to finally hear that, because in the past it's always been in the future, you know. And now they're saying, oh no, it's happening right now. So that's good, richard, I didn't notice you're wearing a poppy.

54:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know, you know it's Canadian thing, really an English thing.

54:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Blinders fields poppy's growing.

54:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, is it's Veterans Day? 1111, right, so you get you prepare for that. I loved that when it was in Canada, everybody wore a red paper poppy on their lapel, and they don't. We don't do in the States, and I wish we would, because I think it's a very nice. You know, okay? So this is a really good question. You know what? Okay?

55:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so this is a weird thing for this podcast. I'll just say we, walking around Mexico City in Mexico, we notice that the society there is very different from ours in the United States and I have all my theories about it right. But I think this theory I have about the United States also covers this difference between us in Canada, which is right. You're never going to get us on the same page, like in another country.

55:23
Yeah, that's what I mean, like you, you're never going to get us to agree on anything we used to, and I know, and, and yes, and it's just it's part of the individual Focus nature, the you know American dream thing, like we're just so individualistic, I mean.

55:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, james Callahan is in Vegas says yeah, we wear red poppies. Maybe in Vegas they do. I Haven't seen any around here and I don't even know where I would get one, but I'm a. I remember in Canada they're all over. You know, you can easy to get one and same.

55:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah you we do them as a as a fundraising drive for a charity, right, yeah, you drop a loony in the bin and you pick up a poppy this one actually about an ink oh, it's a nice poppy.

56:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If we had loonies, maybe we would have poppies. Maybe it's the lack of loonies, don't you have? A sack of Jawaia dollar coin used to have all these great coins, the new, only new church that uses a loony is a Canadian dollar coin, and it's because it has a loon on the back of it the bird. And then we put two polar bears.

56:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
On the two dollar coin, because that's fine.

56:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, yeah, yeah, I love. I think it's a nice commemoration when Lisa and I were in London a few years ago during this time period, and they had filled the moat of the Tower of London with a poppy for Every soldier, british soldier, who died in World War one, and it was a lot of them, it was a river of poppies. It was quite both beautiful and, you know, kind of awe inspiring.

57:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you know the, if you get to Washington DC and you see the Vietnam Memorial, that's something, isn't it? Yeah, amazing. I mean, it's not the same kind of numbers, but it's every name, it's power 55,000, something like that.

57:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, every name on there that was designed by my college classmate my own. We were all very proud. I've lost the thread. Qualcomm revenue. Oh, let's talk about, I guess, microsoft, I guess Microsoft and Surface, I guess.

57:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We I think we talked about how they are allowing more and more of the components of a surface computer to be repaired or replaced, right, yes, which is good. Yes, yeah, and this week they updated the Support lifecycle for these devices, at least for the newer ones, where they only previously promised four years of firmware and drivers For any given surface, and now they're doing six. And that's over. And above the OS updates that you get through Windows right, specifically firmware updates.

58:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's. You know, it's funny. We used to think a lot about drivers back in the day when we would add cards and peripherals to our systems. Do that as much. Drivers are not as big a deal. Well we don't, they yeah, so you know windows we talk about.

58:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This sometimes comes with these class drivers was kind of. I handled the basics for most devices, but actually your drivers are updated quite a bit, they just happen kind of by the scenes, like you know yeah, this happens all the time and it spends any PC maker in your device. Right, how you get those?

58:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but Well, I'm also argue that knows is taken Microsoft themselves to control of a lot more of the drivers these days. Yeah, you know, one of the arguments for the problems with Vista was a demand for a rewrite of Video card drivers that destabilize the machine, and the fallout of that was a lot of those WMI drivers. It's like this is the Windows standard driver made by Microsoft. It may not have a feature on it, but by golly it works. So we wanted to rely on the way we use those drivers.

59:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Dave Cutler was interviewed right on YouTube and if you, I still have not watched the complete thing, but three hours line, three hours and he actually touches on this. But there's this very famous bit of NT lore, which is history, it's true, where at some point they had to move the graphics drivers into the kernel space for performance reasons and Cutler was dead set against us for all the obvious security reasons and so forth, and he was right. And he was right and he tells the story about how, actually, from a code perspective, on Microsoft's behalf, making the switch was not a big deal at all. The problem was all the third-party drivers. And he tells a story about how they would bring them in one at a time and say so, drivers crash windows a lot of the place, what's up?

01:00:00
And they're like, oh, we talked about, we are drivers are great. And they're like, oh, really, here's the data. And like, oh, my god, like you know, they had no idea. And so you know all these. Yeah, the shift you're talking about really was the next big thing in that exact space, which was this move to, you know, hardware, accelerated graphics, and again, that To date in the PC space, to that date, the only work really being done.

01:00:23
There was in individual games Right and so those guys had great drivers for quake or whatever, but they didn't have great drivers, windows yeah.

01:00:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But there was a the. The transitory technology was direct acts. Right, it's like oh, can't fake windows, we'll give you this other driver you can use. You run through windows, you'll like direct acts the ultimate.

01:00:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a great example of hardware abstraction, which is the whole point of the the. That's what the driver players in many ways right. So hardware abstraction layer.

01:00:50 - Jason Howell (Other)
You know you write this, it was instead of yeah, which I think is why base right or a class drivers work so well, right?

01:00:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, there's no one who wants to think about them.

01:00:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, the big and the big thing is going on right now, quietly, is they're taking over all the printer drivers. It's just like, yes, yep, the whole print nightmare debacle, that was huge security vulnerability that the print companies responded terribly to Microsoft, like you know. I guess we just have to fix this. We're gonna make class for drivers for all the printers, and you're gonna, and you're gonna, lose features and you're gonna stop selling your Unless you're right a better one, you can stop selling, which, sadly, is the well that. This is exactly it.

01:01:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like what do I make her for this market.

01:01:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Getting over on the system in world. Like what are we dealing with? It's like I do not want messages to my users about buying ink. That's my job. Like stop it. And so the fact that when Microsoft says, oh, we're gonna make a class for drivers, your printer, like thanks, now I'll just get ads for co-pop, you'll get ads in copilot.

01:01:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's for sure Good news. It was just I hadn't activated my parallels, so now I Now, let's now, let's do update.

01:02:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have, I have a full, full access. This is on the Mac, on the Mac Right? Oh, I haven't activated windows, but I'll, that's okay, I'll do that next. Windows doesn't really care, windows don't care. See, now I have ethernet, which is a virtual home. I have a virtual home. There's a pair. See, now I have ethernet, which is a virtualization.

01:02:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, like I proved, that's the same thing yeah.

01:02:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Updates failed. Retry let's see, because I'm really want 23 h2 yeah and I was parody across Intel and arm versions of windows pretty much. For what for stuff?

01:02:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
For stuff.

01:02:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, yeah, for you know features and updates, and they're pretty pretty the same now. Yep.

01:02:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Although actually that's a good point, because you cannot download a windows 11 ISO for arm right now. Still, let me know from that site I mentioned. Actually, now that you mentioned it, still 22 you may have to. I don't have an update. Yeah, you might be stuck on there for a little while because it's but maybe I don't have to activate it.

01:03:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To activate it to know.

01:03:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it's going to be a value-aided, or whether or not you're going to be.

01:03:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you deserve it. Well, like I said, it's supposed to be, an available package.

01:03:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's supposed to be instant. Yeah, and that's not been the experience. I was like month maybe everyone watching the show should have had this on Tuesday night. Yeah, you know last week, and that's not what happened. At least my widgets are here, that's that works great. Yeah, that's good. That's what.

01:03:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I care about. Yeah, I got my widgets and I did Microsoft account, so I know it was a local account, which is interesting. That it signs in as local account, yeah, but now it's no. No, I just all I, all I have to do really is get rid of this horrible wallpaper.

01:03:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh no, I'm just kidding. Yeah, just hide the whole thing. It's just a coherence, it's coherence.

01:04:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I bought a while ago. I saw a deal on some site, big mistake. I said hey, $40 you get three licenses of Windows 11. That serial number does not work.

01:04:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh no, come on.

01:04:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I get ripped off. So you have it.

01:04:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I've never tried that. Don't do it as my advice. I'm gonna have to do something soon because you know they killed the product key thing right. Windows 7 and 8 when I was I used that exclusively. I've extensively you know.

01:04:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what I did, though, that I loved it when I signed in for my Windows account. I have the authenticator on my iPhone. It said your number is 90. Press the button password boom, boom.

01:04:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I assume a lot of the Microsoft guys, as I'll refer to you, are using Microsoft authenticator, right? Yes, because it's fantastic. Yeah, if you use it between consumer and Work or school Microsoft accounts, right, you may have noticed some interesting differences between those accounts in the way that they authenticate you, right? Sometimes the you know you're on your PC, on a website or an app or whatever it is, and it pops up that thing and you have to go. Sometimes it gives you a number, yep, and then you go to your app and you have to select the number from one of three numbers, right? But sometimes it kind of does this reverse thing no, it's not the number in it, the app gives you the number and then you have to type it in on the computer side or whatever, right? So I've been noticing this over the past month or so, like this, they've been changing this up. It's kind of interesting.

01:05:31
And then they just documented the fact that they're doing this on purpose, and it's because of something I had never heard of before, which I bet Richard has, which is MFA fatigue, which is hackers are getting people's credentials but they can't get into the account because they don't have, they can't do the 2FA or MFA prompt. So they just they send multiple requests, they automate the sending of requests to get the person to finally like, okay, fine In approve it, which is the stupidest thing you could ever do. Yeah, but it works. But it works because it works in the sense that it goes away. So you stop getting bothered and then you lose everything because you don't have a count anymore. So that goes away, too Exactly. So you know, it kind of solves all the problems really. But yeah, anyway, I never heard of this.

01:06:10
But as soon as I read the description of it, I was like, oh, yeah, no, I mean, I've seen this kind of thing before, like I've actually seen this, like so it's, it's interesting, and so the way, what, what they did was they changed the way that authenticated works, and they're not going to talk about how they Figure this out. But if you, if you imagine that I'm here in Pennsylvania and I've done something with my Microsoft account and then two seconds later in Mexico City, which is maybe not a great example, yes, there's some authentication temp is made across my account, they're like no, and the one from Mexico City looks suspicious. So what, what's gonna happen with that now is it doesn't pop up an alert anymore. So if it's you, because we've all done this right, have you ever done this?

01:06:50
You, you use it says okay, go to your app and get the you know, okay the thing, and you look at your phone and Nothing has happened and you're like where is it? And then you go into the app and then it pops up right, yeah, and that's what they're doing. They're basically hiding what they continue. Would they consider to be suspicious Alerts from that for authenticator?

01:07:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
right, so you don't get bothered by them. But if you what it is, you know to go up any. Exactly, right yeah smart.

01:07:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a great sign. Yeah, yeah, and, like I said, I think anyone who uses this app will have noticed this.

01:07:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, and I must, and I must have told the story of my friend of mine. He's a siss of men who is literally on the phone with an older employee whose account was under attack, right, and While they're going through that, he's you know these under attack. We're trying to lock things down. He gets an authenticator pop up at the old one that it just says, did you want to authenticate? And he hit yes, right, because he always hit Yep and so. But that was really the end. The number thing was an answer that if you can't see both sides of the deal, you can't answer correctly. So there's a way for him to say yes, good, right, but you know you're looking at an arms race, and a good one, right. And again, I'm gonna reference another run as like what I'm trying to tell you about the fact that MFA or or Fishing, is no longer the number one exploit against users. It's now number two. The number one exploit is unpatched servers, and the reason it's bomb Is MFA. Right, I'm, a thing has worked well enough that fishing is failing.

01:08:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's interesting, I did not know that Unpacked servers, like the big new exchange, zero days that Microsoft says it's not a problem. Those are the problems. Not falling for Fishing, which also is people, are using two factor.

01:08:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's still social engineering, right, it's just a different we have. They had to adapt for the system and they're still going after the weakness, that, the real weakness in the system here. Which people?

01:09:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yes, you know, and I always do. But, emma, you know a couple of why did MFA do so? Well, well, starting with, microsoft is saying hey, you've got a. If you're the administrator of an, of a M365 tenant, you can simply hit a button that says everybody uses MFA. But it's also part of cybersecurity insurance now, like your insurance void, if you have required. Yeah, exactly, it's required. Which is really disturbing when the CFO signed the agreement and didn't tell IT. Ask me how I know? Right, those things happen. So I mean driving MFA up.

01:09:36
But yeah, then the conversation went on about the unpacked servers. Was, you know, the normal strategy now is that you get updates and you run them in your lab before you deploy them, and that lag represents a security risk. So it's you know. The conversation was just deploy the patch and Deal with the consequences of it being a problem after the fact, because that's a lower risk than leaving the server on and that it's challenging because it's a business decision, because those quick, quick application of patches could lead to the Visible outages, right, and so it's like you got to go talk to the boss and say, hey, I'm, this is a preventative thing, and say, the same way you change an exterior door to auto lock on clothes. It's a nuisance, you always have to use the key, but you do it because the risk is significant, right?

01:10:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, sorry, turning this into an IT show and it's a consumer show, actually, that consumer because you mentioned that, I think I'm gonna let's, let's bump, or over to something that was coming a little later, because this kind of ties into this. Because you know, 20 almost exactly 20 years ago I think it was 21 years ago Microsoft announced the trustworthy computing initiative, right?

01:10:48
Yeah, that was a letter from bill in 2001, delayednefer here and this topic comes up in that Dave Cutler interview we keep referencing, because he you know. The story there is they were updating the server branch of this tree With security updates and the client guys who were doing XP. And then we're moving on the long and were not, and the thing they shipped was the buggest thing he had ever seen in his life, which was XP, which was UMPP, u and UPNP, which was all the attacks that would happen in the early 21st century there. And Microsoft finally had to say look, we're not creating anything new now we're gonna re, we're gonna reorganize here and do everything from a security first perspective right.

01:11:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is it funny that fond memories of XP are actually surface-packed too.

01:11:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right, right, that's a hundred percent right. I, I, yes, this is not a topic that's come up in a while, but yes, our fond memories of this thing are based on v2. And you know, you know all the windows NT, slash, 2000, dihards like I'm never searching at this place school years or interface, but you know.

01:11:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was.

01:11:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We know Yep you know, you know there was a lot of carping, right, yeah, but anyway they're doing it again. Trustworthy competing was so much fun and Cybersecurity is such a problem now that they're doing a similar initiative, microsoft today, which is called the secure future initiative, or SFI, and not trustworthy competing 2.0, the cloudening as I'd like to call it, but it's basically trustworthy competing, but for cyber Security, right for these cloud hosted services and so forth.

01:12:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So this is Charlie Bell right, I mean, that's yes, charlie, has I Jokenly said to the wrong people at one point is secure is Identity. The third rail of Microsoft, like this, isn't that where people's careers go to die? Oh, now you know the renaming to entra, like all these are all Initiatives to reorganize these security problems, because they had gotten kind of lax, you know. Yeah, it's Complaining about the quality of the CF. Is the CVS is about? You know you're not really explaining what the problem is like. Everything's getting a bit soft. It's good to have a refocus on this. They used to be the reference model, like he used to look at a my CVS. Is it like? This is the right way to describe this.

01:13:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right, I feel like different parts of Microsoft were just doing things differently. I'm sure there were some baselines and some vague ideas of where things should be, but I Think this is an attempt to bring it all in so like that we need. We need a standard here for this.

01:13:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And in everybody needs it. Like this is like nobody's gonna be unhappy. This is a good place to spend money, energy and talent.

01:13:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and for all you people who love AI and don't worry about the hallucination, she'll be delighted to know that key component of it is AI right that hackers are gonna be learning. Yeah to yeah, to kind of meet the threat at the same speed at which the threat is coming in, so to speak. There you go, uh.

01:14:11
So, that's that, okay. I don't want to drone on and on about this too much, but I love it when you do. Well, this is kind of it's kind of Parallel to the Microsoft world, right. So I had a really good experience with Google Drive Through workspace, right. And there is an interesting distinction to be made between workspace and like a Gmail account for consumers, because they're different, right, and Microsoft tracks everyone everywhere doing Whatever they're doing as much as they can. But when it comes to like a paid account, like on Google workspace, actually, you know, they don't look at your data. There's there's a lot. The rules are different. So it's kind of an interesting thing. So I've had a good experience there.

01:14:52
But as a business owner now who has to deal with partners and Whatever, a lot of the people I deal with you slack, so I had to do a serious like yeah, no, it's okay. Okay, all right, I actually thought it was okay until I started using it. So, unfortunately, slacks, slacks business model is chaotic evil is how I describe it and they don't have transparent anything or predictable anything. And you know, like, if I need to add an account on Google workspace or Microsoft 365 any version, commercial, right I do that as the business owner or the admin, like I do that and I, and then they tell me how much it costs and I say yes, and I make the account and I pay that price and I get billed every month and that's how that works. It's, it's, it's interesting, right, slack?

01:15:46
It wasn't really clear how this was gonna work. I paid for slack up front for a year for myself and then my wife had to get involved because she does some stuff on the back end and she's dealing with one of our partners on the newsletter and Didn't say anything. It seemed like she just got the editor to her a little space seemed like it was fine. I have a co-worker Loranda writes the news when we had to get off of Microsoft 365 because her old owner was paying for that, and I said, well, we're using slack. I mean, I said, if I have to pay for slack, I guess I will.

01:16:16
And then I got a bill from slack Came out of the blue, didn't. No one said it was coming, no one said what to expect. That went nothing and I I Looked up their policies. I went back and forth with them. It took me three interactions with slack to even understand why they were charging me. All right, and I don't like the way they do business. I I find it. They basically determine that someone is active, but the thing is I Didn't. I never signed off on either of these people. I don't know what I'm the one paying the bill. It's attached to my credit card. No one ever said hey, this guy is on your slack account, do you want to pay for it? They just I'm paying for someone's account who? He started his account Two years ago, for all I know, is long before we started using it. And now I'm paying for it Because he's accessing my space.

01:17:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it would told me that those gonna company like right, like he's.

01:17:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just I've never seen anything like Right, and every time I go it back and forth with them. The last time they took six days to get back to me. Right, they don't answer my question, but it's like I, I don't know. So, look, I know everyone has their feelings about how different services work and which are better or worse or whatever. And I know there's the big tech, microsoft versus little guy slack, who you know is part of sales for us talk. I don't know about it. I'm part of sales force.

01:17:33
You know whatever I'm just, but I'm just saying all I know is this, and I've always heard this Richard knows this. He deals with the IT side a lot. Businesses need transparency, yeah, and they need predictability. And as a new owner of a small business, I I know some bills are monthly and some are annual and you want to make sure you're up on those, you want to know that they're coming. And I got a 200 and whatever dollar, whatever the price, in Bill from slack and it's like what. That's a? That's an annual, that's a whole year of usage for people, for people who might be in there for like a week, yeah, and I'm like I, first of all, you should have told me I was getting charged for this ahead of time. Give me a chance to say no. But secondly, what happens when they go away is what happens I found out. You get. You don't get your money back. They don't send you a credit card. You're gonna sell sales force account. You get. No, you get the credits, select credits, what what? No, so I'm gonna.

01:18:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm still fighting this one, I'm just saying I gotta user you automatically bill you for a year. They leave it in a week.

01:18:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, here's I'm gonna give the Microsoft guys in the audience. I'm gonna give you guys a win, because here's a win, if you. So that's how slack does it? They just start charging you. Someone just joins your thing and they start charge. They don't tell you that's, that's cute. On Google workspace, I have the lowest end Google workspace. It's a Google workspace business Junior edition. I don't know what's called basic or something or whatever is six bucks per user per month, right, right? Used to be able to buy storage like you can as a consumer when you needed it for an individual. As of October 5, you can no longer do that. So what do they have? Well, they have a pool storage for your organization neat, 30 gigabytes of Gigabytes cloud storage per user. Okay, I need a terabyte. Well, how do I get to a terabyte? Oh, we have a pooled storage storage Subscription. Oh, neat. How much is that? $300 a month. You get 10 terabytes of storage and I'm like I don't need 10. I need one, no, and we don't have that.

01:19:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
For $300 you can buy a handful of terabytes.

01:19:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know. So it literally says that their Help system. It's probably gonna be make more sense for you just to upgrade your subscriptions. Well, what I want to do is upgrade one of my accounts my accounts to a business, non-junior whatever it's called standard. That gets two terabytes of storage. Perfect, it's double the price. It's 12 bucks per user per month, but that's fine. I, for one account, I have no problem doing that. I can't do that. You know why? Because I have the junior version. I can't mix and match skews Right, you have to have to upgrade all of them and I have five accounts and I'm not doing that.

01:20:16
Now, here's the win in Microsoft space your Microsoft 365 commercial account. I do well, I'm a business of one. I have the right. Now I have the lowest end account. I think it's called business basic. It is $6 per user per month. You get turbotic cloud storage, by the way, and no access to downloadable office apps. I don't need them, I get them elsewhere. That's fine. But if I wanted to, I could add a second account and it could be any kind of account. I could add a business standard, a business but whatever they're called. Right, at whatever cost. You can mix and match skews. Anyone can do this.

01:20:46
Why am I waiting? I don't know. I it seems like the right thing to do. So anyway, here we have. Slack is horrible. Google's better but not perfect, and actually in this case I gotta say Microsoft does it right, so so strange, yeah, anyway, that's my little. I don't know if that qualifies as a rant, but oh, brandy, not not happy, not happy, okay, moving on, microsoft Edge, version 119 is out. Two small changes. I'm sorry, that's a lot of versions. It is a lot of version. I know, for old school people like us it's hard. You know, like it, these browsers are on in the hundreds. We're like we're in Windows version eight, basically, or ten. You know, I know it's 11, but Anyway, I'm point one.

01:21:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There was no nine numbers are hard.

01:21:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Windows 31 was the big one, windows for work groups was, you know, or there was no five, there was no six, but there's history is a litter box of amazing events. Anyway, the art of Windows. There's only two changes in here for users. One is that the UI for Toggling the sidebar has moved this, I should say the settings UI. Not a big deal, but it did kind of hide it. I don't quite know why if you search for sidebar and edge settings, there's a sidebar Actually don't even search as a sidebar setting right there and you can't toggle it on off there. You have to go into co-pilot. Now I don't know why, but whatever I know that is a good thing about the way you're looking at things, but you can't switch to a sidebar.

01:22:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not a big deal. And then they made some split screen improvements, meaning that it will now remember the session.

01:22:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So if you have and you have icons all the way around the primitive screen, yeah, that's exactly right. I Don't fight with people, I don't mean like that, but I disagree strongly with people. There are people who love this feature. They think it's the greatest thing in the world and I'm like split is. It's called snap. It's built into the US to split up your screen. Now I don't think we need another one, but people love it, or some people do anyway. So anyway, it got a little bit better, so that's fine. There's also some low-level policy stuff. It can disable sidebar apps individually now, for example, which I absolutely could see the need for. So that's good, too Awesome. Did you guys, leo, follow this? Leo there? I don't know. I should probably look at the window I'm here I'm talking to like a text screen. Sorry, did you guys cover the open AI stuff this week?

01:23:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we did. We did the stream, I think very interesting. We're going to talk more about it this afternoon on this Week in Google, right after this show. Sam Altman, I thought little robotic, but still it's nice. That's what you want.

01:23:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what you want.

01:23:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is the.

01:23:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
John Carmack guy, the Bill Gates, you know, I agree, right, little robotic but you know genuine and boy.

01:23:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The content was impressive.

01:23:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're really moving along. These are not robots, they're just heavily scripted. I don't know. Well, here's the okay.

01:23:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't know, you know, I don't know he's copilot. It's interesting because after so many Apple you know very tightly produced prerecorded events seeing a guy on stage with a clicker Right.

01:24:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Thank you, a human being of a sort, you know he was you know, he had that.

01:24:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mark Zuckerberg complexion.

01:24:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, but that's how you know he's serious about his job, right.

01:24:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was a little his arm movements.

01:24:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You recognize him anyway, but he's not. He's not windsurfing.

01:24:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's working on it.

01:24:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think what he said well. First of all, the developers in the crowd were thrilled. The price drops, yeah, that's the power increase, and I'm starting to come around a little bit on the value of AI. For a long time I felt like it was just kind of a gimmicky, you know a little bit of a trick. What the thing that? I'm watching this and thinking, though where's Microsoft and all this Cause? Aren't they like?

01:24:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
a big primary benefit or the yeah, the uh yeah.

01:24:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean every day? No, I guess consumes Azure, so it's all good for Microsoft. Yeah.

01:25:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

01:25:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it's next week.

01:25:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Red Structure. Yeah, I could see them wanting to hold off on anything big and new until next week, right?

01:25:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just activated an old Windows seven ultimate key, that's funny. That's funny, that worked.

01:25:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I tried an XP key and said no, we, you can't do that.

01:25:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But, the. Windows seven key did seem to work. Yeah, which is interesting Okay. Well, checked it anyway and said well, we, we learned that. Shouldn't really, but it was ultimate. No, it shouldn't. I paid a column I. I yeah. I'm going to keep trying. I have an eight one key I have I have.

01:25:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, no, I mean I, I don't know, oh no.

01:25:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's that we can't cause. You don't know.

01:25:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean the black helicopters show up, yeah.

01:25:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cause. The store wants 200 bucks for this Windows pro.

01:25:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I don't. Yeah, I do not pay 200 bucks for a Windows game.

01:25:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Should I try an eight one subscription. No, it's going to give you the same. Windows 10 home 64. That should work. Right, that will work.

01:26:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That should work.

01:26:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, let me try that one, all right. I have a lot of old keys lying around. Yeah, yeah.

01:26:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do too, but not for much longer. Because they're worth. You know they're worthless. Now how do you?

01:26:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
activate a new. How do you activate a new one? I'm sorry I distracted.

01:26:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You were talking about, well most people don't even have to think about that. What do you mean?

01:26:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You come. You get a computer.

01:26:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It has a you're doing like a white box PC install.

01:26:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I have an unusual. Virtually, I should be able to buy an OEM license, right? Yep, okay, those are cheaper, I'll get one of them. One of them there. Sorry. Sorry.

01:26:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so a hundred million weekly users, active weekly users, right, so they're doing pretty well there. But the big thing I think Leo alluded to this was the developer story, right? So third party APIs are in there. You know, connected databases, email, whatever, whatever sources of data. You're essentially going to be able to create your own chat GPTs. I'm sure that's going to be not inexpensive. But every time I see an AI announcement, I wonder why more of these companies aren't using open AI's technology. And maybe this is the beginning of it, right? Maybe this is the beginning to happen. It's under the hood, right? It's hard to know, yeah, right, right, speaking of things, elon Musk they're going to try to make this drive, this one into about 30 seconds of content, if I can has announced that his AI started Croc. What a moron, what a moron, what an AI. Has a chatbot called Croc God.

01:27:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it has Elon's fine, very, robert. Yeah, it is. It's from Croc, Although it's funny, in the description they mentioned hit Jiker's a guy to the galaxy, which is puzzled me.

01:27:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But then I realized and they didn't say this yeah it should puzzle you, because I can tell you that Douglas Adams would hate this man. Oh God, yeah.

01:28:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But then I realized I think what he's saying is it has the sense of humor of Marvin the robot, the depressed robot. It has Elon sense of humor, that's for sure. It's just awful.

01:28:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, anyway, it will answer the spicy questions that are ejected by other AI systems. There you go, spicy the just, we're just asking questions, questions, in other words.

01:28:29
Here I am world the size of a brain, and I've got to live on Twitter and then this is actually kind of a half a gaming topic. But Microsoft announced this week that they're partnering with a company called InWorld to bring generative AI to game development, and that's actually very interesting, right, and of course this is happening. You know, one of the big questions with AI is whether this eliminates the need for software development in time, and, of course, everyone's chicken littling around the world, you know, bumping into each other worried about this. But game development obviously is part of that world, and what games will be possible when you don't have to have any particular skills creating games like that? So much else to say it. In other words, you might be a storyteller and you would like to turn this story into a interactive game of some kind, right? Maybe this is going to enable a whole new world of indie games.

01:29:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's not right. Inward was talking about tooling within games, like doing procedural generation of content.

01:29:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, inside the game, that's right yeah.

01:29:37
Yeah, no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm extra, I'm oversimplifying. Right, in other words, today. So a big game like GTA which, by the way, is a new GTA coming out soon or for any of these open world games, you either create those places or you know, I know, some of the bigger games now have some algorithms for creating those things. This is, in other words, we can call up, use Genitive AI in the same way that we use it to create an image with a description and say I need a, whatever it is, a character, a place, a building, an object, whatever, and it will, you know, do this kind of stuff on the fly and I've always liked that.

01:30:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
the capabilities is more of. This is what makes repeat playability possible. The next you go in to play this game, yeah.

01:30:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's mixed up a little bit, right. It's not the same exact experience. Yeah, we've had this. I mean we've had simple versions of that, right and some games I mean some games are straight up rail games and some games are a little more and I mean famously for all the problems that had no man's sky, was about procedurally generated worlds.

01:30:36
Yeah, right, yeah. So look, all this stuff is going to it's. It's we talk about Call of Duty and it's a billion dollars and it's like a Hollywood blockbuster and you need a team of huge team of people, actors and all kinds of other things. And these technologies, I think, are going to lower the price and level the playing field.

01:30:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, If it's a downside to that is, you can only make a handful of them. So this why do you keep making another call of duty? Because you know you can sell an app to pay a team that large.

01:31:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I've already developed the script I'm going to use to create my own version of Call of Duty with this technology. It's very simple. It just says make Call of Duty, but have it not, son. There you go, you know it's going to happen.

01:31:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is a game where you're trying to take care of a hundred babies who all need to divers change. It's Call of Duty.

01:31:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not good. That's not what Call of Duty I was hoping for, wow.

01:31:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're up for a lot of duty.

01:31:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, yep.

01:31:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, yep. But what excites me about this is the opportunity to make original games, to not have to keep making another sequel, and another sequel, and another sequel.

01:31:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, right, yeah. Call of Duty sequels are a lot like sitcoms, where, if they're popular enough, you start seeing the same script again and you're like, didn't we do an episode about this thing? Call of Duty, shoot them again.

01:32:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right yeah.

01:32:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And actually, yeah, call of Duty is worse because they literally redid their most successful trilogy ever Like as a new set of games. So it's and I mean we'll talk about this in the X. Well, I could just talk about it now. I mean, the new game is out there now if you're an Xbox for single player, but starting Friday, I believe you'll be able to do the multiplayer, which is what I'm looking forward to. And the reason is it's the same old maps from Call of Duty, modern Warfare 2, the original version from you know, 10 or whatever years ago, and those were some of the best games ever made.

01:32:43
I cannot wait to play those levels again. But modernize, you know, and looking better. It's like going to see a comic and only wanting to hear the jokes. You already know it's a and I, but obviously there's a market for it. I'd love to see a. I'd love to see them expand on this concept and just do Call of Duty as a recurring subscription where I can play any map from history of the franchise and have a list, a upscale.

01:33:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yep and right, have them all be modern and beautiful and but you understand, I mean this is why these technologies are coming down the pipe is like this industry is right for disintermediation, for being disrupted, because they are breaking the same storyline out over and over again, like make something new, take some chances. So I can lower the price to make a good looking game and explore some other ideas than we get to explore.

01:33:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, you're a heretic. Okay, frank Listen, I'm part of the after race for obviously the same problem in movies, right? So we just concluded what 15 year run of near endless Marvel movies, men in Tights and you know, and whatever. And when things like that are successful, of course you stop trying, right? I mean, like you know you spend money, but you know, my God, we're plumbing the depths of comic books plots, not like I, really not that the record stories are. I don't take that the wrong way, but I mean it's the same thing. Spider-man has has been rebooted three times in my adult lifetime, I mean that's the battle with Sony.

01:34:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a different problem.

01:34:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

01:34:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's well similar, you know. Anyway, it's just I don't know.

01:34:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So, yes, yeah, I agree with you, and you know we bring up indie games from time to time. I mean, there's some real gems out there. Yeah, and I'd like hopefully to say these AI capabilities will float all boats.

01:34:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just got a DLC for dredge. I'm looking forward to just getting in a couple of hours to play with what's dredge, I don't know that. Oh, it's just that, you know, you know, you know you have a boat, you're dragging stuff off of the bottom. You are a dredge, okay, yeah. So, you know, you should use a magnet, you know we

01:35:02
got cool stuff down there, you know, it doesn't, isn't in dredge at all A gun of any kind. Not one, not a single AK 47. Not one, not a, not a bit what kind of game is that?

01:35:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you do a lot of fishing.

01:35:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, a lot of fish. It's fishing itself. It's fishing Reimagined.

01:35:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every year the CBs come and they dredge the Petaluma River.

01:35:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe you could just bring your game over here and be nice Well you know, sometimes you're fishing and you bring up a tire and you're like that's not what I wanted.

01:35:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I went to a sketch site recommended by Tom's Hardware, though and bought a $18 Windows key, really, and it worked.

01:35:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it worked Like. I'm going to need that link, leo, because I'm going to be using an OEM key.

01:35:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's somebody bought. You know has an spare OEM, so it worked. So that was good. That saved me $200. So let's see now. Are we at the end of your thing yet?

01:36:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's fine. Do one thing for me, I'm just curious. Go into settings, yeah.

01:36:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, let me switch it over so you can. You can see what I'm doing as I'm doing it here, okay.

01:36:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just want to see what it says Settings. There's a couple of places you need to go, so you're looking at. Oh, you're already in the activation page, Can you? I can't see that.

01:36:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can I make it bigger? I don't think I can.

01:36:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, I did make it bigger. Yeah, windows is activated with a license. Okay, that's what I wanted to see Yep.

01:36:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's good To your Microsoft account, yep.

01:36:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Perfect. No, that's good. Go to the click home on the left there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, no, no, no, no, no, yeah, no, no, no, no. I think that's good. And then one more, one more Go to personalization, personalization.

01:36:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, what?

01:36:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
should I do?

01:36:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Background. I want to change my background.

01:36:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't like this. Well, I don't care if you change it, I just want to. Okay, yep, no, that's good, that's that's is this somehow activated properly?

01:36:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you like a doctor? And this is the diagnosis.

01:36:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are multiple points where a problematic activation could show its ugly head Really, and it looks like yours is properly active.

01:37:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, it may and it may be, let's see. I'm going to run the update just to see if I can get 23H2.

01:37:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, there are guys who run what are essentially key servers out of the internet and you can kind of activate against their you know, so-called business and yeah, no, and I wouldn't want to do that, and that's going to be a little dicey right.

01:37:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was Tom's hardware. I think I kind of trust them and it's a. I can say the site it's. It was called Penguin, penguin with an I, penguin, kingwin, I'm sorry Kingwin and uh Kingwin, and it was uh. I had a. I had a code. Oh wow, that was hysterical. So I had a discount code that saved me $2, but then they charged me a $7.38 service fee, so it was 25 bucks, that's the gut your mom and I used a privacy card, which I am now deactivating.

01:38:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So and you got $5 and shipping and handling yeah, windows 11 pro and $10 not paying attention yeah, right.

01:38:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sneaky. I got a $2 discount code and then I paid a $7 for services.

01:38:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the type of site where you want to use like a credit card that will generate a fake number for you, so I never hit again. I used privacy and, uh yep, do not put PayPal on this.

01:38:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, they will not have access to this card anymore.

01:38:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They are now. That card is now that's smart.

01:38:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's smart Interesting.

01:38:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There we go, all right, so uh hey, I'm running and when you tip of the week, folks, $25 windows.

01:38:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess I can show this. I don't think there's, you know, just it's, it's, it's trust. Pilot rated 4.1.

01:38:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know what that means, but is it 4.1 out of a hundred?

01:38:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like what's the, what's the scale? I didn't give them any information at all, I just gave them that that one privacy card. Uh, speaking of fishing.

01:39:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, I just got a text message from an eight four, four number and it says your app store order your app store order was successful about five, 63.67 USD that's how I get bills, so it's probably real and this is the world we live in. We're a constant barrage of this, yeah, and then I could opt out and send quit.

01:39:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then there's King Gwyn, and then there's King. Gwyn, and there's King Gwyn Interesting. Oh well, you know. Should I not admit to that? No, I think what they said, what Tom's hardware says, is they're people who have OEM keys they don't use. Obviously, microsoft's not going to let you activate the key more than once, right, and they sell them cheap. And there you go.

01:39:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That sounds roughly sort of like a justification to some guy. But it's okay, it's sort of fine. Look, you're not going to. I, 30 years ago I walked at my friend on an Amiga shop and he started selling PCs and I wanted to check out Windows. So I'm like you got to give me a pop your windows on three floppies or whatever, and he's like I can't do that. I, you know, I charged $300 for that and I was like Rich, Rich, come on, Rich, I'm not paying for Windows, Come on, Come on.

01:40:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like I just want to look at it. I just want to look at it.

01:40:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like you're, it's like you could, it's like you're going to be using Windows now on a Mac. You just testing it out. It's really true.

01:40:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I probably didn't need a key at all, cause what you get 30 days or something, 90 days probably, right, you get forever.

01:40:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually you could go for a long time, as long as you don't mind not customizing it or whatever it's you know that new college duty.

01:40:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sitting watching a TV show probably a football game and so a thing comes on. I think, boy, the CGI in this movie is not great. And then I realize it's a game. It's a game. It's Call of Duty modern warfare three.

01:41:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, so I? I got home from my trip last night and the first two things I did was break up my pixelate. I've been waiting for for three and a half weeks and turned on my Xbox knowing there would be an update, and it was 120 gigabytes and I've already installed the damn thing and now I'm installing it again, Apparently, or it's done now, but just in preparation for for Friday, Cause I got reasons, I got reasons and I I don't. I don't as a wife out of town on Friday.

01:41:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's the no? No, no, no, no. Where did I see this?

01:41:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I saw a thing that said I hadn't done anything in 200. I think it said 252 days or something, or whatever. It was like that sounds about right.

01:41:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this you're going off, your you're falling off the one on Friday, Huh yeah.

01:41:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sometimes you get to eat carbs. Why did you set that?

01:41:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
date? Did you set a date to say I will do this until Friday?

01:41:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I didn't set a date, but Friday is the day, because that's the day I can play Call of Duty multiplayer. So you know, yeah, we're gonna look at the maps.

01:42:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know next day, like that's the right number.

01:42:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah you mean you're gonna have to give your coin back.

01:42:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I Know it's okay.

01:42:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ships, give me your chip. Dude, you fell off the wagon.

01:42:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I Listen, I'm open to other things. I I played the beginning of resident evil on the iPhone. Well, I was away with an Xbox controller.

01:42:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How was that external display? Honestly, it was fantastic.

01:42:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I Never finished that game on Xbox. I had finished the predecessor. Oh, the new one is as village or, as I call it, the Lodge. I can't stop pronouncing things in French for some reason. Anyway, I know it's a weird thing, I do it in Mexico all the time. It's delightful, anyway, it's. It's a good game. It's a scary game. It the fidelity is incredible. I wouldn't be able to play it on the screen. I mean you can, but with a controller and, of course, the. I have the biggest iPhone you can get. It's still tiny for me because I my eyes are terrible. But Honestly, the performance is great, the graphics great sound is great. I there's something going on here. I mean they want Apple, wanted the Apple TV to be kind of a game box, and I guess it is for some simple games. But honestly, the gaming ecosystem on the iPhone is so much better and Obviously and this I don't know, this could.

01:43:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is interesting, I just screaming it's Baldur's Gate on the em Baldur's Gate 3. On that I mean M3. It's. I was running a max settings. I mean literally maxed it out completely. I.

01:43:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think this is this could be the beginning of a new kind of mobile gaming era.

01:43:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe being not mobile. I mean, they have look at this, the prop, the product right, I'm sorry.

01:43:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not you're right, no, no same processor on your iPhone.

01:43:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, your iPhones and M3. They just don't call it the.

01:43:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, the Nintendo switch is a you know low resolution, right, but talkable. It's kind of a portable slash, you know home console thing, I mean, and it's the iPhone could become this yeah, you could be on your TV with your out your controller and your iPhone sitting there burning up the couch next to you or whatever, and that's what I could see to do for sure. Yeah, it's, I don't think it's quite there yet. That's kind of like the HP folding displays, you know, but you can see it like you can Kind of see it. Anyway, I tried different. I tried some PC games. I did. I played some PC games. I didn't try them actually played some games on the PC. It's fine, we'll see. We'll see if, if I'm, if I look like a Non-recovered addict in about two weeks. You know, something went horribly wrong, his beard is growing, yeah, exactly out on the switch is is Mario Kart, like it's infinitely playable.

01:44:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I play portal on the switch. There's a lot of great games. Switch is a nice little portable thing. I think it's really better than the steam deck and its clones, because it's what it is. It's not trying to be a PC in your hands, right, and maybe that's the maybe.

01:45:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe I'll be the iPhone actually, yeah, maybe.

01:45:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me take a little break before you go on with the Xbox segment, if you don't mind. Yeah, I don't mind, is it okay? You know?

01:45:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
do whatever you want, I don't care. Do you want to run over and play just a?

01:45:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
quick round. Oh no, you can't yet not till Friday.

01:45:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't play single player, but come on, come on, I'm not breaking a fast for that.

01:45:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You think the guys are gonna welcome you back. They go, Paulie Paulie's back.

01:45:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They didn't welcome me when I was a regular, so no, I don't know what the other source you back and yeah for Paul Glad back in business.

01:45:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh it's glad you're back.

01:45:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I need someone to shoot on the guy giggling in the dark corner. You'll hear me before you see me. Oh, I like it. He's like the Joker.

01:45:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, our show today, brought to you by some really cool cats at Miro. I love the Miro it is. But what is Miro? Well, it's the online workspace for innovation. Well, what does that mean exactly, and how can it help you? This is this is where I get excited, because as soon as you start using it, you're gonna have your mind will blossom, ideas will come to you. You know you want to put it on a big screen. Go ahead and put it on a big screen. What it really is is a visual place, an incredible visual place that you could put, bring all your work together, your whole team together, even if they're in different time zones, even if they're at home there at work. It's Miro.

01:46:39
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01:49:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hello Leo again. Yes, while you were doing the ad, I was just catching up with it is just real quick. There's a. There was also a windows insider build for the dev channel that has More apps that can be uninstalled, more fixes for Explorer right which is Gonna be a problem for a while, like I said etc. So there's some stuff going on there as well. Nothing major, but I just wanted to throw that out there. And then back to the gaming stuff. Most of this is actually not Xbox, curiously, but is Xbox adjacent.

01:50:11
Nintendo actually had a great quarter, which is kind of weird given where they are in the switches life cycle and how they plan to replace it next year. But they had. There was a Mario Brothers movie this year, which I guess I'm vaguely familiar with, but apparently this thing is doing, is still doing well for them, and Whatever. And then there are new Mario at new and existing Mario and then a new Zelda game that are all you know doing well still somehow. So almost 3 million more switch consoles were sold. A quarter total for that Product is 130, 132 point four. Six million units sold over, you know, over the course of the life cycle there the software 1.13 billion units sold cumulatively. Top games two of them are Mario titles Yep, mario Kart 8 deluxe has sold 57 million units. Animal crossings, new horizons, super Smash Brothers, ultimate, the legend of Zelda, breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, which comes in in fifth place with 26.95 million units sold. Those things doing great and a plan.

01:51:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How is that high up? That's really interesting.

01:51:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was. That was my number two was number two all time on the platform.

01:51:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I played that for hours.

01:51:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think a lot of these were probably pandemic boosts. Actually, I Dispose my mind that these guys would have like of their businesses there. It's called what is called, whatever the business is that has the movie part in it. They're they sell like a 184% year of year boost of revenues out of this.

01:51:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's from no movies to one movie, so yeah, but I mean, this movie came out like April. I mean the fact that this is somehow still generating anything is astonishing. I like this shot of the movie.

01:52:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I.

01:52:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like this shot, richard, you just gave us of you, yeah, yeah of your, your backdrop there.

01:52:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the boss poked in through the door there just before the break and grabbed a picture, that is, you're still using a surface book, aren't you? That's the service book to yeah, the old work, the new workstation sitting there. I just haven't wired it up yet. The desk is new. You know, we're still shuffling things around, but I hooked up the big screen nice yeah, yeah that's an ultra-wide those in our discord can see it.

01:52:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would put it. Oh, there it is. I can put it up now for you.

01:52:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's when. That's like the original LG 34 inch, like it's old, had it for years, oh but those are great monitors.

01:52:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My other great Bad to say about my wife uses a 49 inch, so, if you know, practically curves around her. Yeah, what a view you have, though I am so jealous of that view Is that I got there, or the or the bed.

01:52:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You want to see my view? By the way, just hold up a white paper in front of your face. That's exactly what it looks like.

01:53:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the. I've got the pivot camera here so I can switch you around to.

01:53:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What a view do you see? Do you see whales go by or anything?

01:53:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I'm, we had. We had humpbacks out there eating herring the other day.

01:53:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know I.

01:53:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I described the people in my apartment building that way, but they don't like it.

01:53:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, I'm back eating herring.

01:53:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Don't like it.

01:53:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's a missy day so you can barely see Texas at the moment, but that is just really cool. The guest house is available. You know, he just got Tempted. I really get there I don't.

01:53:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what you're is a very right involved with your wife say like who is this guy?

01:53:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is why?

01:53:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is he, and I think he was on the. She was on the cruise ship with us.

01:53:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I remember. Oh yeah, never mind, I met her, of course. What?

01:53:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll wear.

01:53:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot about God. You know, I blanked that Alaska cruise out of my mind. Yeah, that was the.

01:54:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
COVID cruise yeah oh yeah, yeah, it was. That's the one time.

01:54:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've had it. Oh, she got it too. Yeah, she did too. Yeah, and Paul, you got it too right. Yep, I.

01:54:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like to be part of the crowd. Yeah, the good news is we were all vaccinated and nobody got it too badly.

01:54:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think I mean for me it's a cold.

01:54:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I wouldn't have noticed. I thought I had a cold and Stephanie said you got to test yourself because we're going home and your daughter's going on whatever, and I'm like okay, and yeah, I said I wouldn't have known. You know the killer, covid.

01:54:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, neutered. So I'm sorry, we interrupted this message, but let's go back to the gaming news. Is there any more gaming? Oh, yes, sorry.

01:54:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yeah, there, sure is. I'm starting to cover other gaming companies now because of Activision Blizzard. So EA is doing great. It's all sports games they the big thing.

01:55:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Very funny phrase. I mean EA was in the laughing stock for a long time, but they sure do own the sports franchise.

01:55:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They own the own sports, and the thing that's interesting is this is the first year they didn't use the Fife name in their football soccer title depending on where you're living and they went with FC 24 and there was a big fear that things were going to go off the rails because of that. But actually this is I don't remember the exact figure, but it's the fastest start ever for this game in this franchise.

01:55:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I've known it for 14 points forever. So FC is football club, do you? I guess maybe the people play it kind of just would know that that's. Yeah, they know what it means. That's the new one. Yeah, what I say fight.

01:55:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What did I say?

01:55:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I said fight. I said fight.

01:55:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry. I want to be really clear about this I don't, I don't care.

01:55:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I say you say it's a, it's a soccer, it's soccer or football yeah. I mean how long can they call it John Madden, Right? I mean I.

01:56:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Game is, by the way, is another one that's doing great. It's the third best-selling game this cycle.

01:56:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He buys every every year, buys the new one every year, right and that's the secret of this whole thing, right is that people just keep buying it.

01:56:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's smart because you don't really have to update the engine or the graphics or anything, it's just the new rosters.

01:56:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just, you probably do every once a while.

01:56:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, they do, and they're better every year. They're incrementally better, but that's. I don't think white people buy it, they just want the latest teams. And yeah, I Ask Michael, why does he buy it?

01:56:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I Don't know, soccer is 90 minutes of screaming in two seconds of it. I don't.

01:56:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I kind of agree with you.

01:56:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're spoiled, we're jaded because we have American football, which is I'm like I thought you were gonna say something like we're jaded because we have good sports.

01:56:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sensitive to other people's concerns.

01:56:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah.

01:56:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Canada to you know, everybody loves CFL. Only three downs, four downs and for the week. What is the name of that?

01:57:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
cup, the gray cup. That's inspiring. 30 years.

01:57:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wonder how they named that. You want to win the gray cup.

01:57:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, I think I that brought you Earl gray. Is it made a yeah?

01:57:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's the Earl gray guy.

01:57:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, it's the all gray cup, of course. Is it really no, god it has a no, but it's amazing. That would have been so perfect.

01:57:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For the man who brought you the tea now.

01:57:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, the championship.

01:57:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's good Right now 110th gray cup this year. That is kind of amazing, I mean the Lombardi trophies like 50 years old.

01:57:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's amazing. Yeah, long time.

01:57:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, 70 years old and if I was never gonna make it that long, they'll be 20 had it really was an Earl gray that named it, not the Earl gray, or was it the Earl gray? It's a governor general.

01:58:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's. You know it was a. There was a quorum of light legislatures. Leo, it's it's Canada. Things happen, you know. Remember we were on the middle.

01:58:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If we were not the ones who had the revolution when we were in your own country.

01:58:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You just filled, in a form you know, like you know, I often wonder if we had been more patient, if we could have gotten out of the Empire. Just you know. Fill out a form.

01:58:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you all be wearing poppies, like the rest, I think we should.

01:58:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, if I can get a poppy, I'm gonna get one, I'll bring you one. Well, it's only for three days, maybe next year? How about that?

01:58:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wear it. I'll wear it all next week. You'll see me.

01:58:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, I love that, and when I worked in Canada, I would wear one on the call for help. We'd all wear a poppy, a red poppy. It's a lovely tradition. Somebody came around to the office and was selling the poppies, so that's where you get them and, yeah, it's for charity. What else, paul? What else is going on in the world.

01:59:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Tell us about the epic court. I love this one Epic story. I can court night. You're wasting it on lawyers.

01:59:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This time it's Google's turn.

01:59:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so Google, because they're in a bit of antitrust troubles. It is, in fact, they're coming up in the next story as well. This might go a little differently than the apple one. It's gonna be heard by a jury. There is evidence where Google has been Paying game makers to stay in their store, which is part of the next direction, and I don't know. There's some established behavior here, so I will you know, we'll see how it goes. So I picked fighting a good fight. I wish them well. I Don't know. I don't know, so we'll see, but it's in court now. So Google is actually in two antitrust court cases at trial Concurrently in the United States. Not even in Europe. Wow, it's astonishing.

02:00:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Apple basically won the case against epic. There's was one little Thing.

02:00:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I think, actually I think one on a pretty good point, but it was so watered down by implementation, unfortunately well, and they're both down the Supreme Court.

02:00:16
Yep, yeah so we'll see who for yes, right, yeah, yeah, we'll see. And this, what came out as part of the no this came out of this, actually, I guess, is technically the same story. Sorry. Google paid Activision Blizzard $360 million in 2020 to keep games in their store as part of something internally called Project hug. I think project smother sounded a little too aggressive. You know, and this is you know I Throw these things at my wife in the morning when I read news stories, but it's a. The thing that I think a lot of people don't understand is, like, once you're dominant, like once you actually have a monopoly right Job, one becomes maintaining that monopoly, and this is where the real bad behavior comes out. Frankly, I'm scrapping your way to the top. There's nothing wrong with that.

02:01:10
I mean everybody loves you, everybody loves a scrappy under, yeah, but once you're there, once you're dominant, things change dramatically. Right, you're not innovative anymore, you're just protecting, yeah, protecting what you have. There's only one way. Yeah, and and yeah, this came up early with the Jeffrey Farrell thing. I mean, like you get, these two things are not contrary and they're not. They don't, you know, negate each other, right, the Google right now, probably, I mean absolutely has the best search engine in the world, but why did they pay $26 million in 2022 to keep it on phones? Like I mean, like, what are they afraid of? Like I mean, aren't people going to use it anyway? I don't know, you know, I think they are. But then again, open AI is happening, chat, gpt, things are changing.

02:02:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But we talked about the fact that they hadn't innovated at all. Right, but in theory they had barred years ago. We can question how good it was, but their argument for not deploying it is it cut down on the amount of sponsored ad space on the?

02:02:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
page. Exactly right. They're like, yeah, we have this great technology, but it's gonna block us from making money.

02:02:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're not doing it, yeah you know, welcome to the decision to make.

02:02:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, you don't know, here we are here we are paying money to keep things in store. I mean why we're they're gonna go leave the store in the first place?

02:02:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I, probably for the app store fees and they can side load, you know, and that they're, they're.

02:02:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That $360 million? Was that just the 30% back?

02:02:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Probably right, and also, I suppose, alternate app stores. Not that any of them are all that popular, but Samsung has one, and now we get back at that right.

02:02:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There you go.

02:02:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, I mean, activision Blizzard is humongous. I mean, epic is a big company compared to my company, but compared to Activision Blizzard and They've got one Google and Apple, it's not even one title, right, yeah, it's a lot of pop their order of magnitudes.

02:03:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you're talking about here what you talking about? Microsoft and Google and Apple, yeah, and then you just why.

02:03:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it might have been the Wall Street. I think it was the Washington Post. Again, they had their headline about this was gaming giant epic Takes on Google and cars up. Yeah, I'm gaming giant. Yeah. Yeah, one gaming giant, yeah.

02:03:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah you know for tonight.

02:03:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Owner is only right for a hugely popular. No doubt about it. You know it's a little more popular than for night Google. I just you know about world of Warcraft.

02:03:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I know like go down the list of games is Activision Blizzard. For crying like you're gonna talk about gaming giant. Here's the beast, right?

02:03:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh wait, yeah, I'm subsidiary of Microsoft, so you know, activision Blizzard didn't have the I don't know intestinal fortitude or whatever to Just do their own thing, but they got, they took the money and meanwhile epic, which could have used that money, you know a lot more than Activision Blizzard was like no, we're not doing it. I I do respect that. I mean I we can debate their strategies and whatever, but I I like that someone is calling these companies to task. It needs to happen.

02:04:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's yeah, I mean it's. There's a part of this being the sort of self-righteous approach. On the other hand, it is kind of crooked like it's not so much what. What you get out of this is that you surface all this into the public record.

02:04:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, it's like finding out about paola in the music industry or anything you know it's talking about it big players, don't I?

02:04:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll bet you anything at. 3360 million is exactly that. It's the 30%. Yeah, there, you go late paid. So the Google could point and say, hey, the big players paying, so you should pay too. And then on the back door so like here's your money back.

02:04:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, which is the? And this didn't come out of my brain. I read this somewhere else, but someone, someone else, I think someone else made the excellent point of explain to me. So You're Apple and you're the biggest company in the world. Yeah, and you report your finances normally like every other company in the fourth quarter, but you've never once mentioned the fact that your biggest deal of all time 18 to 20 billion dollars in one year for search, bolstering your services business dramatically you never mentioned that publicly. That's interesting, like how embarrassed are you that you hide that from the public while promoting your privacy initiatives? And what happens on the iPhone stays on the iPhone?

02:05:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and awesome, paul, you're running into this terrible thing. I remember when public companies were about protecting the public.

02:05:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we're actually disclosing information legally and whatnot. Yeah, no, I do remember that I miss those days Legal structures.

02:05:56
we hide where real sources of money it's incredible, though, Like that you made that much money Like, for example here's one way you could hide something big when you're kind of embarrassed by it. This is an Xbox related topic. A couple of winters ago, Fortnite was running great on Xbox to an excellent, and Microsoft said that Xbox software and services were up 234% due to the popularity of a third party title. So that's all they said, but you everyone knew what it meant. You know, you knew what it was Like. These guys are just like you're like wow, Apple Arcade is doing way better than I thought. No, it's not that. It's not that. It's apparently it's Google, and the fact that this is institutionally embarrassing to Apple in both companies agreed or demanded that the public never learn of this is something important.

02:06:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think to this story. The group to be embarrassed is the SEC. You're supposed to be protecting the public Right, Exactly.

02:06:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the one. I don't know this part of the world well enough. I do report on financial earnings every quarter for multiple companies and so forth, but I don't know if something has changed behind the scenes with the law or regulation or whatever. But I do know explicitly that the reporting has gotten vaguer and vaguer and vaguer as we go forward and because no regulator has ever called them on this, it just keeps getting worse. I can't believe a deal of that. Activision Blizzard went through 18 months of regulatory nightmares. This payment, what did they just send? To? What did they do? Wire transfer, nobody, nothing.

02:07:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've always kind of known that this was going on. We didn't know it was this big yeah.

02:07:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, here is like clearly you have a mandate to go after the tech giants. Why didn't you do some good while you're doing it, incidentally?

02:07:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is actually today. Hey, google's in court and what the Verge calls the Fortnite trial, all right, and they say, hey, you're on a spotify. Please don't tell anybody about our Spotify deal. This is the quote disclosure. The Spotify deal would be very, very detrimental because apparently they gave Spotify a sweetheart deal instead of 30%. Yeah, so this is why these trials are very damaging for both sides. This stuff and discovery can really be this stuff needs to be they shouldn't have to go to discovery, they should be public.

02:08:34
I know Well, but it's not. I mean, that's the SEC right? That's what the SEC tells them, what they have to tell investors. The SEC, yeah, yes, yes, securities and Exchange Commission. It's pretty funny. Apparently, spotify got a sweetheart deal. They all did. Yeah, all right.

02:09:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right, all right Enough. And then this doesn't warrant much attention, but Sony announced that it was going to kill a Twitter integration on its console PlayStation 4 and 5, I guess it didn't have Twitter integration. How about that? Yeah, yeah, we used to have it on.

02:09:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Xbox too. Yeah, Everybody's killing it.

02:09:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nobody wants to have Well you don't want to pay for it. I mean the volume of traffic that they probably looked at. Why would we do this Like this is crazy.

02:09:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, so that's it. It's simply. It's just a money thing. It's API access money, yeah.

02:09:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Twitter's changed or access change. I don't know if you guys have noticed this. Twitter has gone down the toilet bowl a little bit. It's been kind of a weird cesspool, I don't know.

02:09:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you going to pay the 16 bucks special SuperDuper Premium plus Twitter feed Feed Feed? Obviously, Leo.

02:09:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love Twitter. Yeah, who wouldn't no? So my problem with Twitter is that I have 125,000 followers and it drives a lot of traffic to my site. Yeah, and if they want it to hold a fire to my toes which it sounds like they do I have a real decision to make there, because it's a it's actually significant for me. I'm not just out there spewing conspiracy theories. I also have a business that I don't want to say relies on Twitter, but it's a lot of value to be down than it was.

02:10:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's always driven our marketing department crazy that, despite the fact that I have half a million followers on Twitter, I refuse to use it to promote our network. We do have, we do use it, but you know those accounts are much smaller. The Twitter account and so forth, right, but I just sorry, I'm not going to post on Twitter, I'm just not. I know it might hurt us, I don't know. So do you really think you get traffic by promoting on Twitter? You do, they do, yeah, so I should probably be doing it.

02:10:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I actually I can't, I'm not sure I can say that Twitter the problem. How do I say this? People have been complaining about Twitter since there's been a Twitter Right and they talk about toxicity and all this stuff and I know that it's.

02:11:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They stole our freaking name.

02:11:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, that's a really good reason no, but, but, but Twitter until Elon Musk always for me, was like this little. My part of Twitter was like this little oasis and it was good, yeah. But what I've seen over the past several months is especially is that stuff that people talked about has made its way into my world now too.

02:11:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I people I'm following. It's still pretty much okay. Yeah, Okay, I can't say that for the replies. I, you know, I don't post, so I don't know what my replies would be like. They do, you know. As you know, they promote blue checks in the replies, so sure I don't know if I would resisted the blue check to date. I don't like but that's the thing is the people who do pay for it get pride of position and replying to you.

02:11:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They shouldn't have any pride, because those people are paying for this and it's this makes them look like stupid people. I think I I don't think it makes them look better, it makes them look unsophisticated.

02:12:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I have to say I mean I still the same people I was following before. You know, for those the problem is it's not as many great people. A lot of the journalists are gone. A lot of the reliable sources are gone.

02:12:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Certainly, the main thing is you don't know if they're there or not, because there's no.

02:12:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'm saying I have the same I have. I still have people I followed from day one, sure Like I don't know what it is like 10,000 people. Those people, when they post, I'll see them in the following tab. It's a.

02:12:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The big loss for Twitter, to me, is just that it was the place you would get information in, the. If there was a disaster, something bad happened, a municipality, a government or whatever would always go there and say, okay, and now those places they're trying to get less and less. Yeah, and they just, of course, they say no. This is, and this is the public service aspect of Twitter that I think will be missed the most.

02:12:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree, and there's no replacement out there. Nobody has critical mass, so you know, there's blue sky.

02:13:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, and it's. The thing is like nobody wants to build a social graph again. We're done, right, that?

02:13:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
whole idea. That's really the truth. Yeah, it's over and that's sad. You know, yeah, I'm looking through. I haven't been on Twitter or X in a while. I'm just looking at the in the following tab and you know these are good. I don't get bad stuff in there because these are the people I've explicitly followed, but there's not a lot of stuff, I mean, and there's a lot of ads and a lot of junkie ads and Timo is advertising like crazy on Twitter. Timo is a Chinese, like it's the new Alibaba. Yeah.

02:13:51
I don't know. All right, all right, so what's next?

02:13:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's it. That's it. You're done.

02:14:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know where your seven bucks a month would go. You know, I think to a long way to really supporting a quality information source into my pocket. That doesn't. I wish it went into my pocket. It doesn't go into my pocket. What it goes to is paying the lights, paying the staff, paying Paul and Richard. That's our club Twitter membership.

02:14:27
And, as Lisa was prescient two years ago, she said you know, we should have a club where people can support us directly. I said I tried that in the beginning, wasn't a whole lot of money. She said times are changing, we should have a club. And she was right, because podcast ad sales have disappeared, as have numerous podcast networks, you know Gimlet and Stitcher and WNYC, and on and on and on, because the revenues aren't there anymore and so we don't want to go away. I'll be honest, we want to keep doing what we're doing. I think we're going to see some shrinkage, but because times are getting colder, it's getting a little chillier, but if you can help, the damage will be very much mediated.

02:15:15
Seven bucks a month, what do you get? Ad free versions of this show and every other show, which is great. You also get shows we don't put out in public like Paul's Hands on Windows show. Our untitled Linux show is very popular. This week in space started in the club, so it and there's events like tomorrow's Stacey's book club, so we try to make it worthwhile. There's also the things that we talk about before and after shows become part of the twit plus feed. We're trying to give you some benefit for it, but the real benefit is you're helping us continue on, because I think we provide important service. If you feel the same way, join the 8,000 other people who are now members of club twit. Twittv slash club twit and thank you in advance. Back of the book time. Paul, I'm going back to you for your tip of the week.

02:16:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, actually I have two app picks this week. Okay, Brave, which I've talked about a lot. I've got a long article coming about Brave soon. I was writing part of it on the plan. I get weird pushback about Brave. I feel like people don't understand what's happening with this browser.

02:16:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a browser based on Chrome, or Chromium to be technically accurate.

02:16:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's privacy and security focused. It's secure and private out of the box. It's thin and light. I know there's some little UI things that people can't stand, but seriously left, click, remove.

02:16:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a simple. Is it pretty light? Because it feels like because it has so many features, it might be heavy, like the vault no actually it doesn't have a lot of feet.

02:16:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the thing. So if you're looking for the latest, you know UIs and little you know UI feet. No, this is not the browser view, but I just want to browse the web. To me, the browser is about getting to me the thing, not about all it's snappy as Chrome yeah. Yes, yes, look, we'll try talking about it, yeah.

02:17:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chrome is kind of a pig in terms of memory.

02:17:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, no, no, no no, chrome's gotten better actually, and you know it does. All the stuff that Chrome and Edge do around sleeping tabs and all that kind of stuff. According to Brave, these statistics are probably actually a year or more out of date, but they do have statistics about how. I'll just read it to you, this article that I promise you I will eventually publish their statistics on performance and efficiency. Listen if I can find this exact thing.

02:17:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, speaking of stealing our names, Brave did steal my name for their AI assistant.

02:17:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, no, you ruined it, I was going to get to it. Okay, continue Significantly faster, use a significantly less memory and offer it provides significantly more battery life Then Chrome.

02:18:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so the reason it's an improved Chrome that's good, yeah, but it's as compatible as Chrome and that's why people still use Chrome, because all the websites want it.

02:18:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It works with all the extensions. All the websites work on it Chromium.

02:18:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right.

02:18:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, the reason I'm mentioning it today is because they did add an AI based browser assistant, and its name is what is it? Leo, leo Gosh, darn it Keeping with the lion theme, I guess. A brave friend, oh, I get it.

02:18:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yeah, leo the lion. Okay, yeah, that's their kind of like the way it works.

02:18:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't use a sidebar on my browsers, but you can just type in anything in the address bar and one of the options you'll see at the bottom will be convert. That uses as a start of a conversation with Leo, so you can say things to it. Like you know, tell me a joke and it will tell you a terrible joke. Why did the computer go to the doctor? Go to the doctor because they had a virus, anyway, but the idea here is that it works.

02:19:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that the joke?

02:19:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that's the joke. That was the first joke I ever asked it and that's what it told me. But this is, they're also one of the little prongs into a paid service if you want to pay for Leo premium. Sorry, you could do that. I'm not going to do that, but anyway, they're working with Anthropic and I think they have a center and lighter version. I call it Claude, maybe, or Claude yeah.

02:19:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anthropics is Claude. That's like their chat yeah. Right, so it's worth trying. Yeah, it's worth trying Quite a bit. Anthony's a big Claude fan.

02:19:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

02:19:41
But, you can use it for free and that's nice. I don't think I'm going to use it too too much, but it's in there If you like that kind of thing. And if that's keeping you from using Brave because they don't have it now, they have something at least. And then the second pick is something I've already used. I apologize for that, but it's been updated significantly. So start 11v2.

02:19:57
We talked about a week or two ago I think probably two weeks ago and they've improved it yet again. And the reason I'm mentioning this again is because this is kind of a cool feature. So one of the rumors for Windows 12 is that they're going to continue down the Mac path. Take this centered taskbar, which is skewed off because of the stuff on the sides, and pull it up off of the bottom of the screen and have it float there like a I don't know dock if you will, and they can even look more like the Mac. And so the new version of start 11v2 actually provides this functionality. Now, if you want to see what that might look like kind of a floating taskbar in this case, kind of fun.

02:20:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
As long as it doesn't float away, everything's going to be fine, or if it does, who cares?

02:20:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know keyboard shortcuts folks, that's why we use Windows Please don't ever forget that.

02:20:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Could be Linux I don't have to worry about that Right as opposed to a Mac.

02:20:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mr Richard Campbell run is radio. What's coming up?

02:21:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, the website's fixed yeah.

02:21:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What was it? Do you knew?

02:21:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I underlined, engine for running, managing the podcast. Simplecast had changed the API. We were auto, we were just doing a direct Fetcha shows and it used to pull the first thousand shows and since we're only at 900, it worked great. They changed to 500 and that would give a problem. Fixed the code to actually grab all the shows, fewer problems. Nice, that's fixed.

02:21:30
This week's show just published today was with Ulrika Headlin, who's a Microsoft WP and RD, runs a great business out of Sweden called StoryAuls and has an unbelievable roster of clients, and they are all asking her about large language models, about co-pilot. This was a series, one of a series of shows I've been doing helping system men's get ready to deal with large language models, acknowledging the first thing, which is they're already using them inside the organization. Are you paying attention? This was much more the conversation of okay, if you have a larger organization, what's the strategy, the kinds of training, what products make sense in that environment? What kind of governance do you have? How do you manage data leakage, those kinds of issues? Ulrika is in the midst of all of this and it was great to talk to someone who is fighting the good fight and give everyone else a leg up.

02:22:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice Ulrika. Yeah, I like that name, ulrika, and you did pick a nice brown liquor for tonight.

02:22:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what we all know, yeah.

02:22:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you introduced me to it.

02:22:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, although I introduced you back in the day to Abanda Right, this is a different version of it, but let's talk a little bit about Abelur for starters. So this is a space side distillery, the original version built in 1825. Wow, although it was grand for a few years before James and John Grant moved on to make the Glen Glant Distillery in Rothes, literally down the road. And then the distillery wished to set vacant for a few years until James Fleming reopened it in 1879, where it promptly burned down, as he did back then, because lack of fire controls and using explosive gases like alcohol. So there was a major reconstruction in 1898, which will become interesting a little later on. And then it goes through the usual iterations that most distilleries go through. It's sold to a group called WH Holton Sons in 21.

02:23:37
In 1945, it went to S Campbell and Sons and in 1973, they did a major expansion of the distillery, largely because they were selling a big portion of their production to doers for the blends and at that time, in 1973, they were putting a new set of stills in. So they excavated the backside of the still room and found a time capsule from 1898. Oh my gosh. It included some of the recipes for how they were making whiskey in 1898, which actually became the inspiration for a Bouta, which in Gaelic, which I'm terribly mispronouncing, means the original. So there's this idea of hey, we basically have their recipe from 1898 on how they make whiskey. We should start making that whiskey. It took them a few years to get it up and running and during that time Pernode Ricard bought Avalar and all the other Campbell distilleries, so that's. And then eventually we buy Chivas and so forth, like they're one of the major giants in that space.

02:24:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do they change things? I mean, is that a bad thing, or they?

02:24:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
just, there's a bunch of things that happens when you end up in a conglomerate, like you, become parts of blending groups. You do barrel sharing, so the product is affected, but you know they're still the same stills Right, the still is shaped with a lie arm. The way the Udb works, like all of that stuff more or less stays as things. You don't mess with the stills, which you probably mess with. How you buy grain. You probably change how you handle barrels and often you're dealing with scale issues because you're part of a larger group now and you're probably going to produce more because you get access to more markets, right, pernode Ricard sells all over the world and so you know things have to expand. Now the whiskey that you two fell in love with, avalar, is a fantastic whiskey and I often have it around because it's one of the very few cast strength whiskeys that you can buy off the shelf. Cast strength are rare. What makes that whiskey distinctive, and Avalar especially, is that it's aged only in sherry casts. So they buy Spanish sherry casts, which are expensive and very large and do long ageings. Although if you look at a bottle of Ibunda, you will notice that it has no age statement on it. It's an NSA bottle and there's a good reason for that. The whiskey's not that old. You can't age a long time in sherry casts. Most of the time it becomes quite strong Like. You won't like the flavors. So the rumor is that it's between five and 25-year-old barrelings that they use, but it's mostly five to eight-year-olds and that's young enough that putting the year on it, putting five on it, wouldn't make anybody happy. So they don't. And let's face it, it tastes good. You liked it, I like it. It's a great whiskey. They do no coloring. All that color comes from the sherry cast. They do no chill filtration. So that's Avalar Ibunda. That's where it comes from, and today the Avalar Distillery has two sets of stills. That second set was put in in the 1970s. They like stainless steel mash guns. They use no heat whatsoever.

02:26:48
I was delighted to see that they use the Maori cream yeast, because you guys love the idea of cream yeast, and they use rackhouse. I always get a giggle when I mention yeast creams, so I always would. I noticed it. I'm like I'll write it down for you guys. And they do rackhouse aging, which is dirt floors, barrels on their sides and wooden racks Wow, classic.

02:27:14
So a couple of years ago they made a new edition of Avalar Ibunda how did I not know about this? And it's called the Alba. Now, alba is a funny word because it's actually a reference. It could be a reference to Aquarius Alba, aka the American white oak. That is, the bourbon cask, because this is a version of Ibunda made in bourbon cask instead of sherry casks. Alba and Gaelic also means Scotland, so there's a fun little crossover there. But it is a different edition of a Buddha.

02:27:49
Other than that, again, no age declaration on the bottle. Multiple barrelings, still cask strength, still cask strength. So you'll see some places referred to it as being 57.1% alcohol and that's because the first picture that Avalar provided of it, that was the strength on it. But I found 62, 64. So anywhere between 55 and 65, they borrow it at about 68. So the fact that it's only down to 62 or 63 means it's probably only five or six years old. The first editions were released in 2019, specifically for the American market. It is relatively expensive $85 for a bottle of Alba. If you can find it. It is that Total Wine and Bedmoh. They're around, but its flavor is described as younger Well actually okay.

02:28:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean Avalar Bunda is a little harsh. Does this mean this is harsh?

02:29:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah Well, let's think about the difference in a sherry cask and a bourbon cask. So, for starters, most sherry casks although modern sherry casks today that the Scottish distilleries could buy are literally made for the purpose of providing the Scottish distillery. So in the old days they would make these barrels for export of sherry, because you bought your sherry in barrels and then they had to left over barrels so they would use them Today to limit. They sell in bottles and so to provide sherry flavorings in the sense of the sherry cask. They do young editions of sherry, typically a three-year aging in that barrel, and they sell that barrel off and they take that three-year-old sherry and they use it for other things. It goes into other barrels, it'll age on further, so you get a certain richness from sherry. That's distinct right, and the barrels are typically used only a few times before they're used up.

02:30:00
Bourbon casks are always the same they're small, they're used once and they're heavily charred and so you go in. The American bourbon makers always go into the barrel at 63.5%, so the Scots always go in above that, they'll go in at 64.5 or even with, in the case of Abelay, they come in at 67 and 68. It's trying to go cast rank that they're gonna lose a little right and so it's gonna pull different notes out of the wood Because it's had a different. It's had a different experience. American Barrels are charred. They've only had a five or six year aging with bourbon in them, so they've only got so much exposure. You're gonna get a different flavor profile. I mean, I would argue they're abusing the name this is a yeah, that's my one.

02:30:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

02:30:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If it was a yeah, like a sweeter, I mean I mean I ironically it's more expensive than the regular, but yeah, I found them within a $10 of each other. Oh, okay, yeah, it's not that much different. But I mean the, the it's the you. I guess the name's appropriate in the sense that they're using the same process, right, that is cast strength, multiple barrels of multiple ages, and where the old, the original, is all sherry, the, the Alba is all American bourbon, so okay, it's, it's. If you look at it as it's a style, it matches the style, but you definitely can tell the difference between a sherry cast version and that sounds like I prefer the Regular, but not then the Alba, to be honest.

02:31:36
It's a problem, it's that this is a first love problem.

02:31:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, leo, yeah, that's true, I'm like a little duckling. I am printed.

02:31:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We have this at our house regularly, like it's a that's, you know it's there.

02:31:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe we'll get one of each and and have a tea. Have a little taste off, that'd be curious that would be an interesting thing, that, especially for developing your palate, to say, okay, sherry cask, bourbon cask, can you tell?

02:32:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
especially when you talk to yourselves. The only thing I would say Against the Alba like what? Where the Alba is in trouble is that we know they use older Barrelings of sherry, like 20 year old, to round out the flavor and they're not gonna have that for Alba. They haven't had it long enough.

02:32:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So interesting. However, yeah, if you have not discovered Abelour in general, you should.

02:32:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They are famous for sherry casking whiskey.

02:32:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In the space I saw no Pete Other than and I learned there I don't like the PD, so yeah, the 12, that's a trick with Scotch.

02:32:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the abound is kind of special, yeah, yeah.

02:32:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now you say abound. It's spelled BUNADH. Yeah, but god knows it's Celtic.

02:32:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It could be anything, yeah, so yeah, I get like okay and I mean I've heard it pronounced by Scottish people. I'm doing my best. A little hawk, a little g is somewhere in there, and I say it better after I've had like a boon, ah, boon ah, I'm, but I'm free.

02:33:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You drink more of it, laddie Good, don't worry about the name, laddie it's just, I'll never forget the day that we must have.

02:33:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It must have been like a build event. You and Carl were there and Mary Joe were all sitting at the table at the previous Twitter location and Leo was secretly trying to steal the. I loved it I loved it. I kind of bring it like a criminal. He was like like just pulling his hand back slowly, like bringing it in, you know.

02:33:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hey, you know, I think I brought you guys a 20 year old barter house too, but you never gave any love to that thing you got.

02:33:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I there were you to you introduced me to angels and V.

02:33:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
At that sitting, which I really still like, I learned a lot about, about stuff. That's my first experience of cask strength, for sure.

02:34:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I. My initial reaction was I said something to the effect of I feel like I was just shot in the tongue.

02:34:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You sunk back at the chair saying, oh, this is my chance, yeah.

02:34:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everything else receded. Oh, sweet mystery of life. I have found you. Yeah, I want to try to find that, that round table experience in the old brick house.

02:34:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, looking at all of your appearances, richard, of course it's been a little messed up, and so it look for April of May, probably it'll probably be in One of your first appearances.

02:34:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a long time ago, oh very much pre-pandemic oh.

02:34:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean a decade before that Like it was.

02:34:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a long time ago.

02:34:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they had me data lakes, it was something.

02:35:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Data lakes.

02:35:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Through the short straw. What do we have to cover that nobody else. That nobody else cover Richard your first appearance.

02:35:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at this 2013, 10 years ago. Oh, let's not mention that one. Who else is there? It doesn't look like that. Looks like yeah, we don't want to talk about actually, and so Mary Joe would bring you in when Paul wasn't here in the in the 10 years ago.

02:35:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but this was like a live.

02:35:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we were in the in the studio. That's why you you think on the thumbnail I would see us. I know sitting in the studio, but I wish I get. Yeah, there's a, it's missing. I don't know why it's missing. Here's live from build. That was the one where you made the pillow fort, right Pillow fort, didn't you do that?

02:35:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
was a million years, wasn't that? There you are. I was interviewing Tom and I jumped into the yeah, I remember that one, I Don't know why.

02:36:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's like it's missing. It's like it's the missing episode In another somewhere. Yeah, if somebody finds it, send us a note. It'd be fun to pull that up, and and and you could watch Paul's first taste of Abel, or pretty sure I gave cautionary tale.

02:36:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've almost regretted bringing it. It's like listen, this is a double every time you need to. Yeah, that's right, because it's cast strength.

02:36:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not. That was the first time I ever even heard that the Whiskey manufacturers dilute their whiskey before selling it to you.

02:36:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How they dilute or they even barrel it can't find pictures from this either.

02:36:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's weird yeah.

02:36:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'll be, I'll have it somewhere, I'll be able to find it, I just so.

02:36:55
I don't know All right, I think it was around 2016. That's what I think. Anyway, kids, that's it. There's no more home we have. We have completed our journey here with Paul Thorot and Richard Campbell as Windows Weekly Episode 854, winds to a close. You'll find rich at run as radio calm. That's where he does dotnet rocks and run his radio. He is also, of course, here every Wednesday, as is Paul Thorot from Thorot calm. That premium membership really is great. Lot of the stuff we talked about today from the premium. He also does books, windows everywhere and, of course, if you look at the winds 11, all at Lean pub comm. You said you were writing in Mexico City. Were you writing another book?

02:37:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I'm updating the windows 11 field guide for 23 h2.

02:37:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the nice thing about buying that you will continue to get it Updated, right, so it's always up today. That's a really good deal. We do this show in the studios here in beautiful downtown Petaluma every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, now 1900 UTC, because we've gone back to standard time, 1900 UTC. The live stream, live TV. If you're watching live, you can also watch live in discord, by the way, and we're gonna, I think, the next few weeks, move to that Permanently. So if you're not a club member, you really want to join and and join us in the discord. For the live stream. We open a stage for every show After the fact, on demand versions of the show available at our website twit TV Ww.

02:38:35
There is a dedicated YouTube channel to Windows weekly the videos there. You can also subscribe audio or video on your favorite podcast player. We like pocket casts. That's the one we recommend, and that's that's iOS or Android and it's free. But if you subscribe that way, you'll get it automatically Every Wednesday afternoon right after we're done. Thanks Paul, thanks Richard, have a great week. You're gonna stay home for a while, I'll have to ignite next week.

02:39:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, me too.

02:39:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, next week show is from ignite right, are you got use? We were thinking that maybe you could use the podcast booth, but now we're thinking you should probably just go back to your rooms. Yeah, okay, so we will, but we will have all the details from the ignite conference next week. That's a thank you for reminding me. Have fun, I maybe have a share, a tip, oh.

02:39:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or two. I can guarantee you they'll be drinking will be tippling not gonna do this stuff sober.

02:39:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, that's the explanation. Thank you, paul. Thank you, richard. Have a great week. We'll see you next week in where is ignite these days? Seattle, seattle, see in Seattle next week on Windows weekly. Oh bye. I'm Jason Howell. How do you thank?

02:39:56 - Jason Howell (Other)
your hard-working team. Well, with a club twit corporate subscription, of course, you can show your appreciation and reward your tech team with a subscription to club twit and that way they'll be informed and entertained with Podcasts covering the latest in technology. With a club twit subscription, they're gonna get access to all of our podcasts at free. The members only discord, exclusive outtakes behind the scenes and special content and Exclusive shows like hands-on Mac, hands-on Windows and the untitled Linux show. Go to twit TV, slash club twit and look for corporate plans for complete details.