Windows Weekly 891 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.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott's here, Richard Campbell's here, of course, their take on the CrowdStrike outage. In fact, I think we know why it happened and it's not good. We'll also talk about Windows 11, version 23, h2. Fully available. Imagine that it only took them six months. Finally, Microsoft's bringing ads to the Microsoft Store search box. You've been waiting for this forever, I know. And what did happen with Halo, the TV show? All of that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly.

0:00:30
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit

0:0:40 - Leo Laporte
This is Windows Weekly. Episode  It's time for windows weekly, the show where we talk about Microsoft and not crowd strike. So don't get your hopes up. Buddy, Paul Thurrott there on the left he is. He is the man in charge, the mater d, the uh master of ceremonies at thurrott.com t T-H-U-R-R-O-T-Tcom and writes his books at leanpub.com. And this guy on the right there, this cat here he is Richard Campbell of NET Rocks and Run as Radio. Is that what we're doing now? And I got your mugs. Yeah, I got your mugs.

0:01:40 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, just rub it in my face.

0:01:42 - Leo Laporte
Anything that's still in the studio at this point, it's staying in the studio. So it's no honor that your mugs are there.

0:01:50 - Paul Thurrott
You notice that the inside was there. It's going to be used in the set of like a post-apocalyptic movie. Someday I will bring your mugs home.

0:01:56 - Leo Laporte
I will bring your mugs home. You're right, this is it. And Paul Theriot's going to crawl up on the sand and say you did it.

0:02:03 - Paul Thurrott
You damn dirty idiot.

0:02:06 - Leo Laporte
So, all right, I guess we should probably mention that there was a little problem with Windows machines. Eight and a half million of them, yeah.

0:02:14 - Paul Thurrott
Starting on the 19th and if you're a Delta customer still problems.

0:02:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I keep seeing pictures, oh, my gosh, it's Louise, like I feel so bad. Christina Warren tweeted that she had a family emergency. She couldn't get home to Atlanta because Delta, you know, and she couldn't get anything. They wouldn't even answer the phone, yep.

0:02:34 - Paul Thurrott
No, they probably couldn't.

0:02:36 - Leo Laporte
It's not that they wouldn't. They'd like to. They wish they could.

0:02:40 - Paul Thurrott
So, yeah, I mean I had a fairly terrible weekend because of this, and not for the reasons, that would be obvious, but just because I had to deal with it from sort of you know my angle. Yeah, you know, the first thing you see is that something happened and everyone blames Microsoft. And then CrowdStrike very quickly came out and said yeah, it was us, you know it. Just you know it happens. And, by the way, kudos to them. They were at least transparent about it pretty quickly, right, right up front. That doesn't always happen. And then the weekend progressed and you know we've there's a lot of stuff happened, but to me the most interesting thing, from sort of a Microsoft slash PR perspective, was that on I don't remember, actually Saturday or Sunday, there was a Wall Street Journal article because everyone was writing about it. Everyone was publishing photos of blue recover screens, calling them blue screens of death, which drives me insane. And the Wall Street Journal buried the lead, like in the last paragraph of this article. They're like oh, and, by the way, Microsoft said, this never would have happened if the EU hadn't forced us in 2009 to allow other security companies to have the same access to the Windows kernel that we have, and I was like I was like, wait, what? What happened? So this kicked off me going down a series of rabbit holes. Actually, the thing that really did it was I got onto Twitter and Frank Shaw, the head of communications at Microsoft, ripped into journalists for not doing, not knowing, like doing the legwork, essentially to know that Microsoft was constrained by its EU mandated requirements. So I was like, okay, I got to look this one up because I don't remember this. Right, I don't remember this, and here's why I don't remember this, even though I've been living and breathing this stuff like 30 years, literally this year, 30 years. Remember this, even though I've been living and breathing this stuff like 30 years, literally this year, 30 years. It's because it wasn't 2009,.

It was 2006 and Microsoft was just about to release Windows Vista, but the thing that was holding held over their head at the time well, one of the many things, aside from all the delays, was that the EU had concerns, based on complaints from other companies, that Microsoft was going to continue abusing its market market dominance, and they were already under the the weight of an EU order related to Internet Explorer and the bundled middleware apps. You know, media, media player and all that stuff. You know the the thing that resulted in the end additions right of Windows at the time, so late breaking in the game. Microsoft I think it was September, october, right before they finalized Windows Vista said we're just going to fix these problems, and it was just. It was one of four or five things where, you know, google was concerned about Bing being the default search in Internet Explorer, right? So like, all, right, we're going to make a little interface. People can choose.

These security companies which, by the way, not European companies, it was McAfee and Symantec. At the time, united States companies were worried that Microsoft had created this thing called kernel patch protection, which was just going to be in the X64 version of Windows Vista and preventing, basically, live kernel updates while the OS was running. So Symantec and McAfee said well, hold on a second, we need to do that because that's one of the ways that we update our virus definitions and whatever to protect PCs. Like, Microsoft has this new security thing at the time, security center and they're not allowing us in. So Microsoft's like, we'll let you in and we'll do it by this to service pack one, which is, by the way, exactly what they did, although the actual, the actual. We don't really know the exact technical details of what they changed. At the time, Microsoft said we will give them at least some technical details of what they changed. At the time, Microsoft said we will give them at least some of the access that they're looking for. Like they weren't really willing to open it up fully and it's really not clear what they did exactly. But they ship what they said they were going to ship X 64 versions of windows. Since then it become mainstream, starting with windows 11. That's now the only version of windows, right.

So the ability to patch a 32-bit kernel in Windows went away. Well, it's still out there technically, I guess with Windows 10, right, but if you have a 32-bit version but those are pretty rare, I would imagine. And so my take on this was the EU had demands or had concerns, actually not demands. Microsoft was the one who addressed those concerns. They brought these solutions to the EU and the EU decided not to block the release of Windows Vista. So as far as I'm concerned, this came from Microsoft. This wasn't like. The EU was like here's the design of the kernel we'd like you to implement. You know why would they do that?

But so the reason this was terrible for me personally is that we live in this age where big tech is finally receiving the attention it deserves from antitrust regulators, right after skating free for like 10 plus years, and there's a certain contingency of the audience here who just feels that, like apple, Microsoft, google, whatever should be able to do what they want. Free economy, you know like, if you don't want to have an app on iOS, just don't put it on iOS. Like that's some kind of a solution, right? And unfortunately, the message here delivered by Microsoft and by Microsoft's head of PR essentially communications is yeah, if it wasn't for antitrust regulators, windows would now be very secure. So there's a bunch of other stuff that goes into this.

Part of the conversation was about Apple and the changes they've made to the Mac. Apple has, much more recently in time, instituted various kernel level and other security improvements to macOS. That post-date what Microsoft was trying to do in 2006 by many years. But whatever, you know, like, whatever, there's infrastructure, which is largely Linux based in the world, and Microsoft as well, right, there are PCs, and that's largely Microsoft and Windows based, and then there are some Macs and there are even fewer Linux based PCs, whatever. So a lot too much of this conversation was like this didn't impact Linux and Mac. Linux and Mac are great Windows sucks and it's like guys, come on.

0:08:50 - Richard Campbell
And they did the same thing to Debian three months ago. Yeah, CrowdStrike did.

0:08:55 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's just. No one seemed to notice that. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, that's interesting. Well, that's a little bit of an indictment of CrowdStrike.

0:09:06 - Leo Laporte
Crowdstrike, I didn't know they've done this recently, like in April, yeah, like April.

0:09:12 - Paul Thurrott
So CrowdStrike is the type of company that we have today. Microsoft is doing this too, for what it's worth, right? We live in a world where, all of a sudden, for some reason, we are again deciding to ship early and fix later, and you see that in and when do we talk about this? This is one of the things I've been complaining about for two, three years now. Like this half-hearted, half-implemented thing appears in Windows. They move it around, they change it and then, I don't know, like a year later, sometimes two years later, they kind of get it right. And you know they're like we're innovating quickly and it's like ah, man, you can't do this ring zero stuff.

0:09:45 - Richard Campbell
You cannot do this with security Exactly, and CrowdStrike also has a reason to move quickly. They are dealing with a known zero-day vulnerability. That doesn't mean they shouldn't run their software before they ship it, but you know.

0:10:00 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, they've explained it themselves. Look, I don't want to. We don't really know what happens.

0:10:07 - Leo Laporte
Still, is that exactly I mean they, in other words steve, was saying, you know, it could have been that that 921 sensor was corrupted in the cdn, for instance, that maybe they did test, maybe they they rolled back so quickly and said they, they shot it they wrote

0:10:23 - Richard Campbell
back so quickly, yeah, they had rolled back within the hour.

0:10:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but that well, but it could. Okay, let's say the CDN was corrupted. That would be how quickly you could fix that, because it had the wrong code.

0:10:37 - Paul Thurrott
Well, look, there's a whole cascading series of problems.

0:10:41 - Leo Laporte
They did put out a paper, since Steve did his thing. So I'm curious what their Literally today yeah, what their explanation was.

0:10:48 - Paul Thurrott
And Microsoft had rolled out a patch that you could install, which I played around with. I don't have a computer that was impacted, so it didn't do anything, but I got it to work. And I here's the problem from like our perspective. When you, when you think about backend cloud-based systems, whatever those things go down it, when you think about back-end cloud-based systems, whatever those things go down, it's really obvious.

If you go to the internet and you start typing in googlecom, it doesn't come up. You're like something's wrong and you troubleshoot it and eventually you realize everything else is working fine, but there's something wrong with the service, right. But when you go to an airport or a train station or a doctor or a hospital, whatever it is, and there's like a blue recovery screen on the screen, which is, in that case, impacting what Microsoft described as a very small percentage of computers worldwide, it's just that they are public-facing. You know customer service systems that you know impacted people in the middle of trying to travel, or God help them if they're getting medical care, and of course you look at that thing and you think fricking Microsoft. You know and.

I appreciate Microsoft. Microsoft, you know, and I appreciate Microsoft. Yeah, like I appreciate them, sort of wanting to set the record straight and maybe even lash out a little bit because they feel like this is unfair. I mean, Microsoft has a rich history of kind of understanding as the maker of the platform. That, like when an app doesn't run or whatever it was back in the day, everyone blamed Microsoft.

Right, and anyone from Microsoft who was around at the time will tell you they go through all the. They didn't call it this, but they would go through their telemetry data, whatever, and they would uncover it like there was a bug. I think it was Windows 3 or 3.1. That was like stop Aldus page maker from working. They couldn't ship the product and it was a bug in Aldus. But they were like look're, people are going to blame us, we're going to fix it and it's just going to be in the product and no, you know, no one's going to celebrate us for you know, for something working. But when it doesn't work, yeah, they're always going to look at us. And that's still true today to some. Obviously still true. We just saw it, it happened. It was like instantaneous.

0:12:37 - Richard Campbell
right, there's also an argument that crowd strike did not need to be a ring zero that there there are now api level calls. They could have been calling to do the things they wanted to do, but they just but why no?

0:12:46 - Paul Thurrott
but when you're that I know, but how do you resist ring zero when you're the?

0:12:50 - Richard Campbell
security. Same way, same reason. You want to sysadmin password right well, and that's.

0:12:54 - Paul Thurrott
Perhaps the reason it doesn't ring zero I mean, like we have to have that capability right.

0:12:58 - Leo Laporte
I mean that's the rationale so Microsoft's excuse was what we had to provide ring zero access according according to the EU.

0:13:04 - Richard Campbell
So we do I know? That's not what the EU does. Apple blocks as of recently.

0:13:08 - Paul Thurrott
You never said listen, it's going to be ring zero access. They don't have that level of understanding. They weren't designing the API. They were like look, these companies complain.

By the way, the big complaint with security with Windows Vista, from the EU's perspective, was not this thing we're talking about now. It was that there was a UI in Windows Vista called Security Center that would notify you of things that happened with Windows Defender or whatever that was called at the time, but not of third-party tools. So they were like we want to be integrated in that. And Microsoft was like okay, and that has come and gone, no one talks about the same, I don't care. But like stuff was like okay, and that has come and gone, no one talks about the same, I don't cares. But like at the time, this was like big, this was big stuff. And, um, they, this back end stuff. They were like look it, we looked at these changes made in vista.

Uh, I think they, we think they have a point like what, what's your response? And their response wasn't no one needs to be at ring zero. We're also not doing that, by the way it was. We will give them at least some of the access we have, and here's what we're proposing and the eu didn't actually say yes. They just didn't say no to blocking windows vista. That's how that went down. So I I don't know I just so.

0:14:21 - Leo Laporte
Microsoft blaming the EU is perhaps a little far-fetched.

0:14:25 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, look, everything is a little more nuanced than the black and white.

0:14:31 - Richard Campbell
The clever angle on this would be they're trying to stave off an investigation from the EU by getting in front of it and saying you don't want us to say what we're going to say if you go after us for this.

0:14:41 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, all right, but I feel like that maybe shouldn't have been communicated in the last paragraph of a single article in the wall street journal on sunday well, admittedly, frank put it out in a tweet, right, yeah? But but to blast it for it, for the, so that the reporter or whoever wrote that article didn't do their legwork because a A, like I said, the date was wrong and the inference here is the EU forced us to do something and you can see the thing. You got to remember the day.

You got to remember too this is literally right when we were starting this podcast. This thing's barreling down the pike. It's years late. They've never taken this long to ship a major new version of Windows. They're under antitrust scrutiny and a consent decree in the United States and scrutiny and a. They don't really have a consent decree, but they're under order in the EU and they're like look, we can't afford what would happen if they blocked it. We can't, we can't let this keep being delayed. So we're going to acquiesce, we're going to meet their needs, we're going to do what they ask.

0:15:41 - Richard Campbell
What do we need to say to get to keep moving on, but no one from the EU said this is what you need to do.

0:15:46 - Paul Thurrott
They said make a proposal, and they did, and the EU, like I said, didn't say yes, they just said nothing and it went out the way it went out and just about exactly a year later, windows Vista SP1, you can look it up did include this set of APIs for third-party security vendors. They released it exactly when they said they would. So was it the EU's fault? I do think there's a better case to be made, and Richard, kind of, I think, just said this, or someone said this Microsoft has created APIs for this that exist in user land that should be used.

0:16:27 - Richard Campbell
And that would be the other nuanced piece on this is, now that this has happened, we are going to lock up ring zero and you're going to have these APIs.

0:16:34 - Paul Thurrott
Explain to me how Microsoft, a company that hasn't been under antitrust scrutiny on the client for over a decade, in that entire amount of time shipped Windows 8, 1, 10, 3 versions of 11 and never once thought hey, remember that x64 kernel thing. I don't know. Do you think we should uh, lock that down?

0:16:52 - Leo Laporte
maybe because apple did now, apple only recently did this. It took them a long time because so many programs use it that when you, if you just said now, no, you can't have access to the kernel, uh, it would break a lot of stuff.

0:17:05 - Richard Campbell
You're going to break a lot of software Apple very gradually.

0:17:08 - Leo Laporte
it took them five years. They said we're going to do this, we're doing it Careful, we're about to do it, and they still give you an exception. If you really need to, you can override it.

0:17:18 - Paul Thurrott
To compare that to how Microsoft did it, aside from the fact that it was years earlier. The way that Microsoft did it was a year before this. Microsoft had shipped a product that was used by exactly three people called Windows XP Professional x64 edition. It was the first yep, I did too. It was the first x86 slash, x64, 64 bit version of Windows on the client. With Windows Vista they were going to ship both in the box. So every edition Home Pro there were multiple, remember Ultimate. Whatever they had would ship in both 32 and 64 bit versions.

Most people installed the 32 bit version. Windows 7 came out three years later. Same thing, 32 and 64 bit. Most people installed 32 bit. You can gradually make this change. Windows 8, same exact thing. Windows 64-bit most people install 32-bit and are upgraded from whatever computer they had. You can gradually make this change. Windows 8, same exact thing. Windows 10, same thing.

The thing that changed between Windows Vista and Windows 10 with this regard is that by Windows 10, most new computers all new computers by this point were 64-bit. There were no downsides to doing 64-bit. The driver situation was never really an issue. Performance was never really an issue. Compatibility it's all there. Probably Windows 10, most of those are 64-bit. So with Windows 11, it's all 64-bit. So they announced this change in 2006, only on x64, only on x64, and it wasn't until 2020 or 2021, I guess, that windows was actually all 64-bit on the client. So that's the slow roll rollout right there. This was going to impact a very small number of computers for a very long time, giving everyone time to make the necessary changes and whatever and adapt and on. Honestly, it was probably even longer than the Apple schedule. Right, it just would have happened sooner or earlier.

0:19:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and it makes sense, because Windows is famous for not breaking legacy code. So if they are going to do something that's going to be this hazardous to legacy code, they're going to take their time.

0:19:19 - Richard Campbell
Yep, I mean, there's a bunch of things they could do in there. As soon as something called into the kernel level, it could pop an entry into the event log for an administrator going hey, this is a security vulnerability.

0:19:33 - Leo Laporte
Kind of what Apple does. If you try to install a kernel extension now, it'll say no, but if you really want to go into the system settings and explicitly allow this kernel extension, Right right Dave Plummer, that former Microsoft engineer from the 90s did a pretty good job about this. Now, by the way, chocolate Milk and Any Sip in our Discord is telling us the exact verbiage from CrowdStrike. The team member who created the problem probably should say ex-team member, but anyway the team member who created the problem member who's?

now being drawn and courted in our he's being hung from his ankles outside our corporate headquarters. Uh, who created the problem? See, here's what happened, and this is this should never be have happened followed a template and the template validator was not complete. In other words, they didn't have tests for the template that he used or the tests weren't complete. So when he pushed it, you know the normal process would be you would have the tests run and until the test passed you couldn't push it. They all passed because they. They all passed because there were nothing. It's like pass, pass, pass. That should never have happened on code that's running in ring, zero or not.

0:20:47 - Paul Thurrott
But especially what really was happening. His wife wanted to watch Netflix. He's like hold on. I just got a second. He was distracted.

0:20:56 - Leo Laporte
He pushed the button and everything. It's always like.

0:20:58 - Paul Thurrott
I from the very beginning, without knowing anything about this Right you have to. Where your mind should have gone immediately and I think a lot of it did for a lot of people was this is human error right, and once you know it's not. Uh, an attack right, once you know it's not.

0:21:12 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, when the rollback came back that fast, you're like yeah, you know this was, you broke it. You knew you broke it. You did your best to fix it, you know, yep so I look, I don't know, I to me.

0:21:24 - Paul Thurrott
It's just that the finger pointing here is very frustrating. Our inability to see nuance and anything is continually frustrating to me.

0:21:33 - Leo Laporte
Um here's the way that Microsoft this tweet blame the eu. Yeah, that was so funny brilliant first day of crowd strike pushed a little update now taking the the afternoon off, yeah, exactly. But you know there is legitimate upset from a hell of a lot of IT people, many of whom listen to this show, who have very sore feet from a weekend spent going from machine to machine to machine.

0:21:59 - Richard Campbell
You've got to see my phone man. This whole weekend was unbelievable.

0:22:03 - Leo Laporte
The good news is from a technical perspective, and then all the.

0:22:08 - Paul Thurrott
Delta customers who are sitting at the airport today, unable to do anything. Well, okay. My point about Delta, though, is this is on Delta now, isn't it? That's on Delta at this point, Like you're telling me that everything went down for a lot of airlines on Friday. There were still some outages happening Saturday, maybe into Sunday, whatever. But you're telling me it's Wednesday and Delta's still having problems.

0:22:27 - Richard Campbell
Their crew management system was also using Falcon, and so they've lost actually all of their crew placements. So they have to restart that and they basically have to. Every crew member's got to call in and they've got to rebuild the catalog for where people are at. That's awful. That's why it's taking so long. Well, and the reality is that's going to drive displacement, right, yeah? Yeah, you have one day of displacement. It's a week to recover. This is an airline and this, these guys are going to be longer than that.

0:22:54 - Paul Thurrott
Well, they're going to be lots of investigations. The server lining this is. I described this before. The show is kind. We're always solving the last problem. You know like. We've all right. Now we know what to do. We're not going to let this happen again. And OK, good, that's good. The problem is the root cause of this, this kernel, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Yeah, thou shalt have not right.

0:23:13 - Richard Campbell
This should not come on, this is 101.

0:23:17 - Paul Thurrott
This is they knew this in the 1990s. Yeah, like I. This is not okay. No.

0:23:24 - Leo Laporte
What you're saying is there's plenty of blame to go around. Oh yeah, Well and the chances of us making real.

0:23:31 - Richard Campbell
You know, to Paul's point, we won't do root cause analysis because we don't want to do root cause fixes.

0:23:37 - Paul Thurrott
Right, yeah, we'll fix our testing, it's as far as they're willing to go, but from Microsoft's perspective, aside from what I said earlier, like they should have taken this responsibility on 10 years ago. Whatever, let's forget about that. This happened. You just announced security is your number one priority this year. You do have that awful vulnerability. We still haven't heard the full story on. By the way. Here's an idea announce that you're fixing this right now and guess you would say no to it.

0:24:01 - Richard Campbell
Nobody yeah, well, and maybe again, what that parlay about the EU thing might be the beginning of saying, hey, you know, they may even want the EU to come back at them and say you shouldn't allow software in Ring Zero.

0:24:16 - Paul Thurrott
This was so long ago that the person I think who at the time might have just taken over this job was Neely Crows as the EU commissioner. There's a name that resonates, yeah the resonates, the good old days yeah steely neely, as we used to call her um, wow, um. We didn't know she was the b team until her successor came around but anyway she was pretty good back in the day.

0:24:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, neely crows seems like a good person, the easy one.

0:24:45 - Paul Thurrott
She's a pushover, that one, but um, I yeah, this is the time let's fix it. Let's do it right now, that's it is, and honestly that's kind of my central point. Who cares about the finger pointing right? It's like the old Microsoft we're all pointing, we got it.

0:24:57 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's the problem yeah, the future security, the security futures initiative is a great wrapper for all of this. Yep, although really SFI was a Microsoft internal initiative to manage badly managed cloud accounts.

0:25:13 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, which is really cleaning up Because of the vulnerability problem which was exactly what you said it was, by the way which was there are a million VMs out there created by little guys working on projects that they did. The little thing walked away from it, forgot about it completely. It's sitting out there with by little prize guys working on projects that they did. The little thing walked away from it, forgot about it completely. It's sitting out there with whatever access and no one did any management work to auto unenroll those things or whatever, like ever. So, yes, I mean that's obviously a huge part of it.

0:25:40 - Leo Laporte
Um, but that. But but a good point from our discord. Um, does crowd strike this falcon work as as well, if it can't live in ring zero it?

0:25:50 - Richard Campbell
should. It should, because it doesn't need it. It shouldn't need it.

0:25:53 - Leo Laporte
Those APIs are sufficient to give it. What CrowdStrike does? You know they were a sponsor and I know I talked to their CTO about this the whole idea of CrowdStrike one of the fundamental ideas is, with all these sensors it gets early warning on zero days and other malware. So it's running at that low, not just as like an antivirus, but it's actually monitoring.

0:26:17 - Paul Thurrott
No, but it's not the run level of the thing. The point of what they were doing was basically injecting what looks to the system to be a driver Right, you know, know, this is this is. This is what they're doing. Does not require it, does not need to do uh rings, there are safer ways to do that yep, and the windows apis for that are moving us to do that. There's two unfortunately they're uwp api, so no one knows how to use them.

0:26:39 - Leo Laporte
But not yeah, um hey good news go ahead, go ahead. I'm sorry, the mean. The other aspect of that is it was.

0:26:48 - Richard Campbell
All these places did have it configured to auto update, right? Yes, which you know. There's plenty of IT people like I don't like auto update. I want to test myself because I don't trust these guys.

0:26:56 - Paul Thurrott
That's the other problem here. Right here we go. This has been the central debate since Windows update was first announced. Like I don't want in IT, Microsoft dictating when and how I update my computers right, you get this central divide between these kind of two theories that you're, and there are lots of examples of Microsoft pushing a patch that screwed things up Absolutely To this day everyone still points to. I think it was Windows 2000, service Pack 4 or something we're still really burned about, that one that went out horribly or whatever. But whatever, I mean it was a million years ago. But I think there were more examples of maybe the reverse being a problem Like the vulnerability was solved, we rolled out the update, but you in your infinite wisdom decided you have your own schedule and you didn't do it.

0:27:45 - Richard Campbell
So there's a debate to be had, and this is also a security feature that's supposed to capture zero days, which is why you're supposed to immediately install any updates. Right, that's right. I did a show a while ago on run as with sammy lejo, where we're talking about the fact that phishing had fallen to number two as the primary exploit path because mfa has worked as well as it has and unpatched servers is now the number one vulnerability and the risk of delaying a patch is higher risk than uh, than just not installing the patch immediately and dealing with the potential manifestations of that. And then the falcon issue comes along.

0:28:20 - Paul Thurrott
I hate to even say this out loud, but this is a fact. Unfortunately, like Microsoft, has spent about 20 years ago, years now explaining and begging, and whatever people that look. Look, you got to let us roll these updates out. They've changed the way Windows works to make this harder for them or to shrink the schedules, et cetera.

0:28:38 - Richard Campbell
They used to say they would only do security patches.

0:28:40 - Paul Thurrott
But they lied, that's, that's what I was going to say. So every month we have what they call a cumulative update. They lied, that's what I was going to say. So every month we have what they call a cumulative update. Ideally, the only required part of any cumulative update is the quality part, and actually not just the quality part, but because quality could include features and feature improvements, but rather the security bit. The problem is, these things are all assigned a KB number, which is related to the security update part of it.

And what we don't talk about enough because I don't have enough to complain about is all the other stuff that goes out with almost every single one of those updates, and in Windows 11 in particular, it's been tons of features. One of them, by the way, was the entirety of what was going to be the entire new version of Windows 11, 23h2 that they put out in September and October last year to 22H2 as a cumulative update. Oh, don't worry guys, it's just an enablement package. They have all these cute little terms for it. You know what? It isn't Just a security update. That's what those customers actually wanted.

When we talk about how Windows 11, 22, 23, and now 24H2 all have the same feature set and I joked stupidly, maybe that everyone got what they wanted. Microsoft's customers who didn't want the feature updates are still on the version of Windows they wanted to be on see Technically pedantically solved. But Microsoft also got what they want because they got those features out there. Nobody wants the features. Well, some people do want the features, but what everyone needs and should have probably is the security updates and there's no way to digest those as a customer without taking the other crap with it. This is the thing that started with when they put IE into Windows NT.

Remember they were like, were like oh, you want the, was it service pack or feature pack at the time, option pack, whatever it was? You have to take IE and it becomes part of the shell, makes the system less stable because it was written by high school students, from what I can tell, and you just did the worst thing you could possibly do to undermine the integrity of Windows NT. And you know where we're going here.

0:30:47 - Richard Campbell
We do to undermine the integrity of Windows NT. You know where we're going here. That's here.

0:30:52 - Paul Thurrott
We've got to keep Microsoft out of Ring.

0:30:56 - Richard Campbell
Zero. Yeah, it's not right. Microsoft is not reliable enough to have that responsibility. You're right.

0:31:04 - Paul Thurrott
There should be a team that maintains Ring Zero, and that team should be maintained by Linus Torvalds.

0:31:13 - Leo Laporte
That's not a bad idea. That's like the vault. I mean ring zero, which is where you know.

0:31:14 - Richard Campbell
That's the uh that's the um system space would be the first time I've had the argument that that windows should be the gooey over top of linux.

0:31:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, uh, yeah well, I thought that would happen. Actually, I think I've said that on this show. We've had this conference a couple of years ago. I thought that would happen. Actually, I think I've said that on this show.

0:31:27 - Paul Thurrott
This has come up so many times that's inevitable. We'll leave it to the world Sorry, real quick that Snapdragon X ARM processors can emulate x64, x86 code to such a degree that you couldn't tell. Are you telling me it's technically impossible or infeasible to do what Richard was just describing and have those apis?

0:31:47 - Richard Campbell
yeah, yep yeah, by the way, you can't hack the windows kernel because we're not running it, because it's not there anymore.

0:31:53 - Leo Laporte
Happy to say that my snapdragon dev kit comes friday. Oh, there you go, you got it, I got it it rejected four different.

0:32:02 - Paul Thurrott
My address though it's uh sorry, I got the wrong address.

0:32:06 - Leo Laporte
No, it turned down like four credit cards. This has been happening a lot to me lately. The credit cards just don't go through anymore. It's like well, I don't know. It seems like a lot of bad guys are buying.

0:32:16 - Paul Thurrott
Snapdragon developer kits. So that's how I got Slack to send me a thing about that and there was nothing wrong with the card, yep, and I was like, I don't, maybe this is how I get out of slack. I just let this slide. Either you figure it out or we just part ways like that would be okay.

0:32:31 - Leo Laporte
Something else yeah uh, more to come in just a moment with our esteemed team and I'm very excited about getting that windows machine. It's actually for the new studio. I mentioned this before. In a couple of weeks, uh, this, uh, in two weeks from today, if all goes well, we will be closing down this studio and you can see I've already taken all. Well, you can't see but I've taken all the hats out and I've taken all the books out. The delphi three super bible lives in my new studio and that was a load-bearing book, leo.

0:33:00 - Paul Thurrott
What are you doing? It is a load-bearing book.

0:33:02 - Leo Laporte
I made sure that that was strapped to the wall in case of earthquake, uh, but uh, that's where the snapdragon will live. I'm gonna have a table, a desk with cage underneath, one from a mac mini and one for a snapdragon, and I'll have access to both, which will be very nice. I'm excited, uh. So stay tuned uh for that, and, of course, thanks to our club twit members who are making this all possible. We're doing it for you. We're cutting the costs.

0:33:29 - Paul Thurrott
I want to see like a PR from Qualcomm today that says like Snapdragon dev kit sales have exploded today. They double.ed

0:33:35 - Leo Laporte
Our show today, brought to you by a name you will remember. I really love to get these guys on. I had a nice conversation with them Experts Exchange. You remember that? You know, like, sure, like in the 90s or the 2000s, you'd go to Experts Exchange and you'd ask a question and they'd get a good answer from a real human. And now, of course, that was such a good idea. There are almost an infinite number of companies doing this, but not well, and it was an infinite number of companies doing this, but not well. There's a lot of snark involved and the worst thing is AI there, you know, these companies are turning over all the content to AI and they're letting AI generate new content not at experts exchange. So if you have tried them in the past or you, the name rings a bell time to try them again. I have a great offer that will make it something you really will want to do. Join a network of trustworthy, talented tech professionals to get industry insights and advice for people who are actually using the products in your stack Real experts instead of paying for expensive enterprise-level tech support that often is less than expert. It's a tech community for people tired of the AI sellout.

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Experts Exchange is committed proudly committed to focusing and fostering on a community where human collaboration is fundamental, is encouraged. It's what it's all about. Their directory is full of experts, many of whom listen to this show and other shows. Rodney Barnhart is a VMware Expertm Security Now listener. Edward Von Bill John is a Microsoft MVP and an ethical hacker. There are Cisco design professionals. There are executive IT directors and there are experts. There are graybeards, like maybe me, who you know. You say, well, I got NetWear 2.0. I don't know what the heck is and they will say, oh yeah, I can help you with that. That is awesome. That is awesome. Everyone deserves a place where they can confidently share their knowledge without worrying about some corporation coming along and stealing it to increase shareholder value. Humanity deserves a safe haven from AI experts exchange.

Now here's the deal, because they want you to come back and try it again. If you've left as me, you know I stopped using it after I don't know some years ago they're going to give you a 90-day free, no credit card needed trial so you can join them right now and get three months for free. That's how confident they are that you're going to get the information you want, that you're going to love being a part of the Experts Exchange 90 days free, no credit card required. Go to e-e.com/twit. That tells you something. That tells you they've been around. They got a three-letter com. e-e.com/twit. It was funny. I still have the bookmark. I love it. e-e.com/twit you get three months with them, no credit card needed. Take my word for it. You need this. You will want to have this the next time your computer and, by the way, Paul was very clear it's not BSOD, it's recovery mode.

0:38:53 - Richard Campbell
Okay, Next time dummy.

0:38:57 - Leo Laporte
Your computer goes into recovery mode. I mean after blue screens. But you know what? Don't worry about it. No, I love that. That was. That's classic Paul Theriot. Excuse me, but, and, by the way, excuse me, sir, that's not.

0:39:12 - Paul Thurrott
I think you misunderstood. It is a blue screen. I get that.

0:39:17 - Leo Laporte
It's not a death, it's a recovery, it's a blue screen of recovery anywhere.

0:39:21 - Paul Thurrott
I don't know where that comes from.

0:39:24 - Leo Laporte
I loved you for that, Paul. Are we done with CrowdStrike, or is there anything more you want to talk about? I think we've beaten this one to death. I'm just excited about my Snapdragon developer kit. I'm so excited.

0:39:39 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I am too.

0:39:41 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I was going to get that Lenovo that you like so much, Paul, but I have keyboards, I have monitors the Yoga or the T15 or the T14?

0:39:49 - Paul Thurrott
The Slim that, Paul has right, Although since then I've gotten the ThinkPad. It's like oh, it's nice, you like the ThinkPad better? No, I didn't say that, I just got it, but it's, you know, ThinkPads.

Yeah I'm a think bad guy going way back. Um, they're not what they used to be. Your number, yeah, no, but you know what it's. Um, uh, this, you see this way hp2, like a lot of these really premium laptops, uh, to get super thin, yeah, they gotta do they. They're still. They still pass all these you know, uh, mill tests or whatever, but um, they feel they're almost like, they almost feel too light. They feel like cheaply light, like it's. How did they get this thing so light? You used to be able to take a.

0:40:27 - Leo Laporte
ThinkPad. Take any component off and replace it.

0:40:30 - Paul Thurrott
You could nail a nail into a wall with it.

0:40:33 - Leo Laporte
No, I mean you could and then replace the keyboard. Yeah, you totally could, yep.

0:40:39 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, now the magnesium. You remember it was like a carbon. Or at first it was magnesium, then it was like a carbon, or at first it was magnesium, then it was like a carbon, carbon fiber. Yeah, what do they call it? A carbon composite, something, right, I think now they just pass it by the scent of carbon. It's plastic.

0:40:52 - Leo Laporte
It's carbon fiber, but I love the old magnesium. Oh man, those are beautiful. Yeah, such beautiful machines.

0:40:58 - Paul Thurrott
Well, they used to have to have that structural integrity for the dry bays and extra matters and stuff and you could any component you could upgrade or take and replace. Yeah, it's not like that anymore.

0:41:07 - Leo Laporte
No, Although the world has changed. Let's face it. The world has changed. You know what, though?

0:41:12 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, I'm actually writing about this, so this is my brain. But you know, when Apple came out with the MacBook Air, one of the things it instituted was a decade and a half of sealed, milled aluminum CNC cases on premium laptops. We couldn't get into them to do anything, but one thing you see now is now you have we're back to this two-layer design where you can unscrew the bottom and you can repair everything inside of it, and so, whether it's a Snapdragon based computer or a modern yeah, but everyone's not they're not doing the modular thing, but they're doing the back is four or five screws, it pops right off.

0:41:45 - Richard Campbell
It doesn't require tools.

0:41:47 - Paul Thurrott
There's no glue to get through or anything Nicely labeled. You know what's what. You can replace everything. Who's doing that? Everyone Really.

0:41:56 - Richard Campbell
Everyone. Oh, the latest Surface machines that have little notes inside them. I know they're like notes, wow.

0:42:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh wow, notes inside them I know they're like nice wow, oh wow, that's great, that's really good they have little um.

0:42:06 - Paul Thurrott
They have symbols for the exact tools you need for this thing and the part number. It's a qr code, you know? Oh, that's so. The only thing on a snapdragon uh pc you can't replace is the ram but the rest of it, because that's on the whole system board. But you could do the whole thing, so.

0:42:20 - Leo Laporte
So this has a 512 gig hard drive. If I wanted to put a two terabyte in that, I could actually do that. I don't know that exact box, but it's just a box. That'll be the first thing, absolutely, you can.

0:42:30 - Paul Thurrott
It's probably just on an. M2 SSD, so you can do whatever you want with it.

0:42:34 - Leo Laporte
Cool, and I won't be running Fortnite on it. I understand.

0:42:39 - Paul Thurrott
That's okay. That's the Achilles heel of this system, that Achilles heel of this system.

0:42:43 - Leo Laporte
That's cool man, Fort Nightless. I'm not buying it for a game.

0:42:47 - Paul Thurrott
By the way, I did very early compatibility tests with all the hardware and software I had and the only software I ever found that didn't work at all was Google Drive. I found this very early on. That's weird, and every single time I read an article about this system, because everyone seems to be going out of their ways to explain why you don't want it, they always cite Google Drive and I'm like I felt like I was the only Google Drive user in the world. But I guess everyone's using it now because this has become like a big problem in the PC space.

0:43:14 - Leo Laporte
So can you use Google Docs? Can you use. You just can't sync with Google Drive. Yeah, that's all browser-based stuff.

0:43:19 - Paul Thurrott
What you can't do is do the file system sync. The file system sync, but it works with OneDrive. I believe it works. I haven't tested this, but I believe it works with Dropbox.

0:43:26 - Leo Laporte
I still have unused two terabytes of OneDrive just lying around.

0:43:30 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we all do. Yeah, that's somewhere right I?

0:43:33 - Leo Laporte
don't mind. I don't mind using that. It's funny, Every time I log into OneDrive on a PC it shows me the same four pictures I uploaded like 10 years ago.

0:43:42 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, same thing. Right, I'll see like an article from like 1997.

0:43:46 - Richard Campbell
I'm like what is this is2, what is that, or whatever, oh well every so often I stumble across some old file store in the cloud of one kind another. It was just ancient stuff and you're like oh, this is yeah.

0:44:01 - Paul Thurrott
Part of my digital decluttering was the 1,000,001 versions of all the temporary backups I dragged to my NAS. It's like my two-file folder that has all the stuff I wanted to file away but never did, or like the desktop from some random install on a laptop or something Like I had not a million, but I had hundreds and hundreds of those things. Just, you know, sitting there taking up space. Yep, super important stuff. You know how to save it. I'm a packer, okay, okay.

0:44:34 - Leo Laporte
Okay, okay, okay so. Windows 11 23 H2.

0:44:39 - Paul Thurrott
Wait a minute. So every year Microsoft comes out. What's that? This is 2024, right.

No, I know, that's why this is confusing, that's why I was leading this way. So, every year, Microsoft, no. This is why, literally this is what I was going to say Microsoft will release this new version of Windows 11. Now For a while it was Windows 10, obviously Right, and then every quarter, x number of months later, it could be anywhere from three to nine months later. This, I think, might be the latest date they did it. Microsoft will announce, and announces a strong word.

They they quietly reveal on the micro. I think it's the Microsoft learn or Microsoft support website, where they have, like the release information status for every version of windows. They put a little update in there that says this version of windows, the last one we released, is now broadly available. And every year they do it. I write a story just to confuse the hell out of everybody, because it's crazy. They're like what does that mean? This thing has been out since October, plus, you might recall, I just mentioned this.

Right, windows 11 version 23 H two is just an enablement package. It's windows 11 version 22 H two, with just a couple of digit shifts on the version number. There's no difference and they did that. For whatever reasons they did that. But the nice thing about that from a customer perspective is it's the same code base, so it doesn't didn't bring with it any compatibility issues that were unique to this version. It's just the version that's from a year ago, that's been updated every you know since, and here it is again, and yet it took them nine months to get to nine months.

And here's. So here's the. This is goofy to me, because what what this means is, with every version of windows, there are certain things that will block your machine from getting the upgrade automatically Right. Some of those things are compatibility related, which, for this version, shouldn't have been a big deal for the aforementioned reason, but sometimes it could be like a hardware device you have that just isn't going to work ever, or whatever. Some people have actually like you unplug a printer or something, or a USB device, and then you're like, oh, here's the upgrade. You know, like it's this thing that was holding you back, right, but what broad availability means? Is that all?

of the blockers that were known have been resolved. Yeah, so, unless your computer is just not compatible, you will be offered this now. Yeah, um, now I've obviously I've heard from people who say that's not the case. But you know, we don't know what the there could be some system component something, something we don't really know for sure. Also, if you're on Windows 10, you'll you get, like these, eligible PC update notices because they want you to use 11. Yep, if you actually say yes to that now, you will get version 23 H2.

0:47:19 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, If you're. That's. What I really think is that this means this is the base version now, because they are about to drop 22H2 support. Yep, that's right.

0:47:28 - Paul Thurrott
That's right, which you know again, because 23H2 is 23H2, it's like are they? I mean, are they dropping?

0:47:33 - Richard Campbell
it, you know it's okay, I'm still hanging on to Win 10 on my really wide screen machines because I want that taskbar on the left side and you can't do that with Windows 11.

0:47:46 - Paul Thurrott
Side, and you can't do that with windows 11. Yeah, that's true. Yep, yep, don't worry, they'll release that as a random cumulative update on like a thursday some year. You know, that's a month, rather without uh trusting it, you know? Yeah, just to move the few people like me who aren't I mean, how long did it take them to fix, like the right click thing for task manager, or months or they? I just it's the way they do things now yeah, it's fun I'm trying to leave so all right.

0:48:09 - Richard Campbell
So how many snapdragon machines have you gotten now?

0:48:14 - Paul Thurrott
I have four, four.

Okay, and the new one is the t14 yep yeah, the commonalities between these machines is very interesting to me and, um, and I think, speaks to the kind of limitations that PC makers did not want back when Windows RT was the thing and it was one of several reasons where they kind of backed off from RT. Not the only reason, but I think the world has changed a bit, so I guess there are two ways to look at that. On the one hand, all the major PC makers are on board Lenovo, hp, I think, dell I might be missing one. I've all released like at least two models, you know, two different products, right, that's great, this is better than it's ever been. But I will say, since that date, june 18th, when these things first came out, I gotten nine laptop review requests from lenovo alone, and eight of them were for x64 pcs and all but one were for intel based pcs. And that's the, that's the reality of our market. That you not you rich I mean that one needs to remember.

I know, you know this, but, um, and, and the reason I say that is because, uh, one of the other reasons that pc makers did not jump on rt, well, it, it was because Microsoft was doing Surface, but also because of Intel. Like Intel, has these incentives that they provide to PC makers. It's one of the little factors that goes into whether or not they can be profitable selling any particular computers, and so part of the success of Snapdragon was Qualcomm waking up to the fact they had to do the same thing. You know, and I don't have any insight into this, but my guess is that amd maybe doesn't do that as much, and that explains why one and out of every 10 maybe, or whatever it is, goes out with an amd sticker on it. Um, I have very limited experience with this, but in that limited experience, which I think we can call anecdotal, um, the amd stuff has been much better than the Intel stuff in the last couple of years.

0:50:08 - Richard Campbell
Yeah.

0:50:09 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I wouldn't argue with you there.

0:50:11 - Richard Campbell
And part of it is their design strategy is, I think, better thought through.

0:50:16 - Paul Thurrott
I have this little 13-inch laptop I got from Lenovo that has integral. They call it an APU, they call it an APU or like the. It's an integrated AMD graphics processor with a just a standard level. Uh, whatever Ryzen processor. And this thing plays video games. Great, like great. Now it runs like a jet engine, but it would right, but it's, it can play video games. It's the. It's the computer. I'm now downloading call of duty to, like I know it's going to be fun games. It's the. It's the computer. I'm now downloading call of duty 2, like I know it's going to be fun, and that's fascinating to me. Um, intel's getting there. The uh, the media like stuff a little bit and then I think, with the improvements that they're talking 2x on graphics, on the next one for, uh, what do you call it? Lunar lake, they're gonna get there too. Right, that's gonna transform pcs. I think that's very exciting. But they're big, the intel is big and they have lots of marketing dollars and they have lots of incentives that they hand out?

0:51:11 - Richard Campbell
yeah, the question is, can they actually make a good chipset like that's the no they can't.

0:51:15 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, that's the problem fundamentally. You know like well, we'll see. I I don't want you, don't count them out.

0:51:22 - Richard Campbell
But no, I, I never count them out. They've got enough money to keep making mistakes, right? Yes, yes.

0:51:28 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, they do. So, yeah, I mean these things all tie in together? I mean yeah, so anyway, you asked about the, the snapdragon stuff. I mean they they all do have their little differentiators. The surface laptop that I just reviewed, which is the one I paid for with my own money, is fantastic, but it's also the only one that I have that has that big screen, which is what I really want. I want that 15, whatever inch screen.

0:51:52 - Richard Campbell
What about the processor? Have you got any of the high end processes, cause I thought a lot of the sample units were the base processor.

0:51:58 - Paul Thurrott
I don't recall, on the ThinkPad probably, but the, except for the Surface, they're all that base X Elite processor. The Surface has the next one up and the difference between that and the base processor is this dual core boost. So for intense workloads, two of the 12 cores can go from whatever. The base clock speed is 3.8 or whatever, up to I think it's 4.3 gigahertz, whatever that. Yeah, for a little while, yeah, sustained, and I have noticed zero impact from that. Now I I actually ran, uh, some video encoding test before I wrote that review, just in case there was something in there. There is not.

0:52:39 - Richard Campbell
well, I mean the other part would be just instrumenting. Well enough to know, did it kick into boost mode like how do you even yeah?

0:52:44 - Paul Thurrott
how do you even, yeah, how would I know?

0:52:46 - Richard Campbell
I don't know, so I I've not much less make sure that the workload ends up in the right processor in the first flip in place?

0:52:52 - Paul Thurrott
uh, this is not isolated in fact, let me think about that yeah, this is not isolated to uh qualcomm processors. But I've actually seen a bunch of stuff because I've done a bunch of this recently where for some reason and this is opposite of logic and science it runs these encoding tests faster on battery than it does on power.

0:53:10 - Richard Campbell
What?

0:53:10 - Paul Thurrott
That's not even possible, but I know, but that's what it does, so I don't know what to tell you.

0:53:15 - Richard Campbell
That might just be a bug.

0:53:17 - Paul Thurrott
Nothing more complicated than that right, it's hard to say yeah, I don't know. So anyway, surface Laptop's fantastic. It does not have presence sensing, which, honestly, in a premium laptop, this is not a Snapdragon machine.

0:53:28 - Richard Campbell
This is an Intel. No, this is Snapdragon. Oh, it's Snapdragon, okay.

0:53:32 - Paul Thurrott
No fingerprint reader. What I know, I know Present sensing is big. So the one consistent thing I've seen across every single one of these computers and this is why I wanted to talk about the HP laptop Every one of them, every single time, and it doesn't matter if it's like an hour, five hours, the next morning or three days later because I've been doing other things and I haven't touched it. When you open the lid to one of those computers Snapdragon X based, it comes on that second Right.

0:53:59 - Richard Campbell
Every time. You never very much not over this.

0:54:04 - Leo / Paul / Richard
No because there's still pictures in instagram. I giggle like a little girl. Every morning my wife goes in she makes coffee.

0:54:13 - Paul Thurrott
I sit down in front of one of the laptops, I open it and I go like it's like every single time. So I love that. Um, that's what the mac does, by the way, yeah you get used to it.

So today I opened the macbook air for the first time in several days because I saw that there was a new beta version out. Same thing comes right on that that's. That's that. I don't know what to call that. Consistency, reliability, performance, whatever. It is instant on, that's what wanted. That is what all of these things deliver. Right? The ThinkPad is the first to include an integrated fingerprint reader, by the way, so we finally have one of those.

But, yeah, but they're all very consistent and most of them are that lower end processor, without the dual core boost which, again, to date, in my experience, I've not noticed it, I think is the way to say it. I don't know if it's doing something on the backend or whatever. Also, this laptop has identical battery life to the yoga, which is very interesting because different size screens, different types of screens, different size batteries. 10 and a half hours on this thing, real world, like, not benchmarks. I mean 10 and a half hours, um, on this thing, real world, like, not benchmarks. I mean like actually using it. 10 and a half hours observed um. So that's good stuff, um, the one thing I'm trying to figure out how to write about this. I was. I just just came up about intel and review laptops and whatever. Most of them are intel based, right? So, um, I have a bunch of lenovo laptops and some hp stuff in-house right now and, um, last week, two weeks ago, it feels like a million years ago I was in new york for an hp thing, right, and the time I did it for mary joe's apartment, I guess it was two weeks ago. And, uh, what I? They talked about this new ai computer which is based on an upcoming AMD chip, and then I had a reviewer's workshop for a Intel Meteor Lake Orphan Generation. Hp EliteBook 1040, which I believe is the laptop that Leo had, and it is in its own way, it's beautiful. This has always been my favorite keyboard on any portable computer well, not always, but for a long time. And this gen different, the body's a little different, the keyboard is very different looking, although it actually feels the same, thank God. I was worried about that, but they didn't see, they're not going to say this. Right, hp, lenovo, those companies, they get incentives from Intel. They're not going to crap on Intel, right, but they are, they are doing work and they always have behind the scenes to make these computers more reliable right.

When SurfaceGate happened, when the Surface computers were hotbagging Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book 1, Microsoft lashed out publicly at Intel and my buddies at PC Makers were telling me, like these guys have no idea what they're doing. This is how it works. You know, we ship the updates, this is on us, you know, and we'll get to the Intel thing. That just happened, because this is an interesting story, but they are. I remember that whole thing, yeah, we. Only that was the big one I can think of where it kind of came out public like Whoops, yeah, that was the big one I can think of where it kind of came out public, whoops, yeah. And Microsoft lashed out at Intel in ways that I don't think people understand. They actually obsoleted a couple of generations of Intel processors. I think just like punitively dropping support for Windows 10 just says a little F you to Intel, like a little pushback.

0:57:36 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if it's widely known you guys know this that Microsoft and Intel it is a love hate thing. Right, there's always been that.

0:57:43 - Paul Thurrott
No, this is. This is I'm writing. I've written so much but I've not published a lot of it yet about this very thing, because every every like dating back to when dave cutler and then Microsoft, Microsoft picked AMD's x64 extensions for x86. And Intel had to see the AMD name in the source code all the time. It drove them insane, yeah.

Cutler did Windows and Windows They've been laser focused on any architectural decisions that Microsoft makes with regards to processes, right, and so every single time ARM has come up Windows RT, the first reveal in January 2011,. Windows 10 on ARM, now Windows 11 on ARM with Snapdragon X what you see is the same thing every time Intel trying to ruin the party right by coming out and saying, hey, don't forget a bus, don't forget a bus, don't forget a bus. You know, don't forget about us. You know, intel made sure that their garbage, adam SOC, was part of the initial Windows on ARM, the RT announcement, because that's how powerful they are. They're like we're not going to not be part of the story, you know, and they were not part of that story, but this is, you know talk about.

They throw their weight around you know, yeah, anyway, sorry I'm getting off track here, but so this hp computer is very interesting, because I started I was like, oh man, I'm like meteor lake, I've had all these problems with it, but then they start talking about these things they did now again. They're not crapping on intel, they don't say it that way at all, but they're like look, you know, typically with these computers what happens is you open the lid and nothing happens. You press the power button, it comes out of hiation, takes a little while and it turns on the part. They're not saying is that's not what always happens, because it's super unreliable. But leaving the other side, they said we put these sensors in the machine where it can detect things beyond just present sensing.

It does present sensing, but it also does things like it detects when you take it out of a bag. It detects you coming up. It detects movement when you're not. When it detects you coming up. It detects movement when you're not, when it's not open. Right, and the idea is that what this thing does is it works around the problems with this architecture by putting it into this deep sleep but then having this thing running so that it's looking for an event and then it comes up to the normal sleep state, which is the thing that happens right after you close the lid, so that if you do open the lid, you get this like sort of instant on experience right. That's the theory. So I had this thing for about two weeks. Well, I guess it's two weeks now, so we'll call it 10 days. This never worked. Like it never worked, and I was like, oh man, I'm like what am I going to write about this? They were talking about what a great work around this was you know.

And then over the weekend one day I opened the lid and it came right on and I was like, wait, a minute, wait, did that just happen? I was like, is this a snapdragon computer? And ever since then it has actually been working. So it's like this kind of old school architecture. And hp did what pc makers do? They kind of work around the problems and, um, yeah, it's too bad because meter lake's on the way out, but they, I think they kind of figured it out. It's kind of like a little. So anyway, that uh, the hp elite book 1040 I think it's the one leo had it's meteor lake based. Yeah, it was instant on um.

1:00:50 - Leo Laporte
I didn't realize that that was so hard it's gray, but it's almost white in certain light. Yeah, it's pretty looking machine yeah it's neat yeah, so I didn't even. Anyway this is where I'm at a disadvantage, because I don't use that many Windows machines. I just thought, oh that's. I didn't think it was anything special.

1:01:07 - Paul Thurrott
Right, but it is. I had gotten the HP Firefly I'm sorry, zbook Firefly, which is like the portable workstation version of that exact laptop, but it does not include those things I just described right. So it doesn't have the sensors, it doesn't have the software and that's the computer where they actually fixed it with BIOS updates or firmware updates, but they for the first couple of weeks I was having horrible reliability problems. That was the one where I opened it up one day and the battery had gone down to zeros off. It was just dead Somehow. It had drained overnight and when I looked at the battery report later there was an hour between, I think, one and two pm where it lost 67 percent of power. Just sitting there on the desk with the lid closed. It's like yikes, what kicked in. I don't know. I never saw anything. I never saw. I never saw. I looked, I didn't see any like something.

1:01:56 - Leo Laporte
That's the hot bag problem too. Right it right. It's just not sleeping well. It's also the Leo old man problem.

1:02:05 - Paul Thurrott
Well, the problem is when you experience that once, hopefully, but maybe twice, whatever you never trust it again. Right, and so for years ever since Surface Book 4, if I go to the airport, I turn that computer off every time without even thinking about it, and, um, it becomes reflex. Yeah, when I took the mac to uh, I guess mexico, probably back in february, march, whenever that was I made a point of like you're gonna suck this up because just put it in the bag and don't worry about it. And I did, and I opened it on the plane, it came right up it was 99 battery. I was like nice, you know. So the snapdragon x processors will basically do the same thing. You actually do lose one to three percent overnight. It's not perfect, but um, so far that instant on thing, though.

1:02:50 - Leo Laporte
Perfect like that's I never switch off my max. It's so funny. Yeah, you don't think about it. You don't think you're trained. Yeah, before, but there is an advantage to making the whole stack.

1:03:01 - Paul Thurrott
Well, I guess Microsoft sort of has that advantage. It's a double-edged sword, right. I mean, you're beholden to the limitations that that company decides are proper for the platform and all that stuff.

1:03:11 - Richard Campbell
Well, and you know Microsoft fixes now, but they only learn to make laptops with those early versions of the Surface and so forth. The problem you were describing with the chipset, that was early days, you're right, because they just didn't know, they were not pro-hardware, they were not savvy with what the obligations are.

1:03:31 - Paul Thurrott
Honestly, they actually really appreciated this happening because they were like we've been kind of telling you this for years and you weren't paying attention.

1:03:39 - Leo Laporte
We've been doing this all along, yeah.

1:03:42 - Paul Thurrott
I mean well, now Microsoft knows right. So now the big guy yelled yeah, all right. So I, ever since starting with the 12th generation Intel core processors, I've noted various problems with these chips. Right, this is when Intel shifted from. So eighth generation was when they went to a base of dual core for their core processes. Right, quad core, sorry, quad core, I guess, but it was the same basic architecture they had had for several years. And then, starting with the 12th gen, they started using what they call a hybrid architecture. Right, was the beginning of their response to arm. So, from 12 and 13 are very, very similar. Uh, 14 probably is as well. But 14, before 14 came out, is when they did meteor lake. Meteor lake is the first gen core ultra, and that was a radical change and one that, to my experience, has proven to be very unreliable. And now, with arrow lake and lunar lake uh, the second gen core ultra we're seeing yet another radical change. So there are three or four radical changes in there.

But, um, the big thing I saw with the 12 and 13th gen was this problem with the usb docks which I talked about. I was out in Mexico and I was trying to connect. It was actually using it for this podcast and I'd be like what's going on with these computers? I had an 11th gen, actually Z book, I think it was, that I had to use for the podcast on that trip, because the 12, 13, whatever it was, the Tigus 12 just would not work. It was, they were, were broken.

You know, um, with meteor, like, I've seen all the power management problems, like the thing I just described, battery life is down horrifically, uh, model over model, um, and to me, like this thing is just broken, but more recently, um other sites, I guess, or I don't know who was complaining, uh, people have been complaining, I guess, for a couple years now, that the 13th and 14th gen which I've not tried, so 14th is the non ultra chips. They announced, probably at CS or whatever, essentially the same as 13. There's the desktop version of the chips. There's some problem Everyone is experiencing where these things are physically like melt, like basically melting internally and won't work anymore. Right, there's some kind of they're overheating, right, and sometimes it's because it's like, uh, physically like melt, like basically melting internally and won't work anymore.

1:05:59 - Richard Campbell
Right, there's some kind of they're overheating, right, and sometimes it's because it's something like is it a fuse that's that's breaking like they're saving themselves or they're actually destroyed?

1:06:08 - Paul Thurrott
so in what intel says is that, so they are physically destroyed. That is, that's true. So intel is actually replacing all those for free, no questions asked, reportedly, according to them. But intel examined this. They actually came up with a public statement. This is somewhat Unusual, unprecedented. I mean it may not be literally, but it is. According to them. It is a Let me see if I can find the exact quote.

There's an elevated operating voltage stemming from a microcode algorithm that resulted in the incorrect voltage request to the processors, causing them to run hot, causing instability problems if you overclock it enough, causing a physical defect where it cannot be fixed physically, like you have to actually return it. And so they're replacing those, they're issuing a microcode update. Now, this is the thing that actually does happen that we don't really hear a lot about. So when there were problems with Intel processors and probably AMD, they released these microcode updates. You don't go to Intel, you know supportincocom or something, and like download them, you get them from UPC Maker or you get them from Windows Update, and so they have described this, they've talked about it. This is something I don't usually do, but they're like this is mobile versions of those processors are fine. They don't have the same exact problem, but they're actually going to issue from the mothership like an update for these chips. And again, I'm not saying it doesn't happen, of course it happens. They must release microcode updates, of whatever kind, fairly regularly.

Yeah, it was Meltdown Inspector, was that right? Yeah, there you go. Okay, great, actually, there you go. That that's why it's not unprecedented. That was a thing. That is your precedent, that there you go. Yep, so it's interesting they chose to go public with this, like somehow the pushback on this issue was so vocal.

1:07:52 - Richard Campbell
Well, meanwhile, I'm over here like nobody cares. From the intel perspective, it's like if you get, if you can get people to install this patch, you won't have to replace their broken machines, like that'll save you.

1:08:01 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's a good right remember in the early days I'm not, I'm, I'm not dumping on them, I but um, you know it's, it's. Is it a crowd strike level problem? Uh, it's probably a similar lack of quality control, honestly I mean.

1:08:16 - Richard Campbell
But but you don't automatically know why a machine fails either. So it's a different thing, and it's not like all of them failed at the same time.

1:08:23 - Paul Thurrott
On Friday this is part of the problem. So when we talk about like hotbagging or anything else with Windows, if you open a laptop the screen doesn't come on. You hit the power button, nothing happens, whatever it is, or you have like a random experience single day. I don't know how everyone operates, but for me I blame myself a lot. You know, maybe I did something I don't know. Maybe you know or you just get into a that kind of mindless. You know computers well.

1:08:47 - Leo Laporte
That's why I was discovered by a system integrator, not an individual right okay because they had a lot of okay greg and our youtube set says it was april and a system integrator discovered it and intel was forced to.

1:08:59 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, like if you had a, if you had a customer who was overclocking a gaming PC and they were having unreliable or reliability issues, your, your response at any point along the chain of support, would be like, yeah, obviously you are. Well, look at what you're doing. You're doing something crazy. Like, maybe tune it down a little bit. Like, maybe tune it down a little bit, you know, but I, I guess, in this particular case, it didn't actually matter if you overclocked or not. It did matter to the degree the damage would be done, I guess. But, um, it was a pretty, you know, but yeah, it was like. So someone is also like, because gaming Nexus tried to shame them and it's like, who's gaming Nexus? Who cares? You know, like, I, like, like it's. I think the reason they responded was because it was real.

1:09:41 - Leo Laporte
It was actually widespread. Yeah, but gamers nexus is a pretty big youtube channel. You, you and I are old school. We don't understand the power of these youtube influencers. And uh, okay, they're they. Look, I carry a lot of weight.

1:09:54 - Paul Thurrott
I is my, my whole, look I'm. I'm glad they responded. They did the right thing. It's good, it's, it's all good and and by there's no real word here but the what you hear from kind of back channels is this is not going to impact the performance of the computer, which is an important thing in the wake of specter and meltdown, right that, um, the horrific fix required to make these things work correctly is 15 hit across the board.

1:10:18 - Richard Campbell
And. But you know what made what it made specter meltdown important was it was a vulnerability that would affect the cloud, that there was the possibility of an adjacent process inside of a machine having a view into another process's data set. It never happened, but it was a possibility. And so you know, if you upset satcha, wow, you really upset someone, haven't you?

1:10:41 - Paul Thurrott
so, uh, this is interesting to me because I anytime I think about intel and chip reliability issues, which I'd say I think about just about every day um, I I always think back to surface gate and Microsoft sort of immature pounding on the edge of the crib response, and it was like guys from HP and Lenovo wherever else are like yeah, that's actually, that happens, like you did that.

1:11:05 - Leo Laporte
It was just a blogger. We don't have to pay attention to that. Just some bloggers. This is what happens now. Youtube, especially in the PC marketplace, these big YouTube channels they drive a lot of sales.

1:11:18 - Paul Thurrott
So that's interesting. I'm always rereading parts of that Steven Sanofsky book, and the part I'm in now is the time between the developer preview and the consumer preview of Windows 8 and how everything shifted dramatically negatively in that time frame. He quotes an article I wrote at such length.

1:11:39 - Richard Campbell
I don't know how I didn't get royalties from his book, but there's a that's an homage, Paul, that's a way to get a page and a half, don't you qualify?

1:11:48 - Paul Thurrott
oh, it's three pages plus really. Yeah, yep, um, there's a, there's a term in there. I it's weird. I don't remember seeing this before, but I went back and reread this very carefully. Obviously, enthusiasts are whatever they are, you know. Then they claim to represent some group of people. They're influential and influential in their own way. They help other people to computers, so it's important that you adhere to their demands. But there's a term I guess this came out of that One of the diehard movies where there was the Justin Long computer nerd guy who had Kevin Smith in the back room who was the real computer super nerd and he was in the basement, and Microsoft adopted the term the basement to refer to these enthusiasts who maybe didn't have as much sway as they thought they did.

You know kind of a thing. Maybe they weren't so representative of the wider world. You know, um, he's wrong, by the way. Uh, he's completely wrong, not because um of influence or anything like that, but this, this the. The reason he brought this up was that Microsoft built um muscle memory stuff into windows 8 so that it worked like windows 7, right? So, in other words, if you were used to hit start button type, it would work on Windows 8, right, and to Microsoft's engineering mind, that was enough. But the problem wasn't that. The problem was that normal people like my wife or my friend Chris, who I always held up at the time, would get a new computer with Windows 8 on it and then say how do I use this thing? Because they didn't have muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts, right, they clicked on things and those things were not there anymore. The affordances?

1:13:25 - Richard Campbell
yes, and my wife who's?

1:13:27 - Paul Thurrott
smarter than I am. I watch her on a plane or next to me, sometimes on the couch, and when she has to save a document she moves the mouse up to the thing and clicks a button. And I'm like I've said to her a million times, like, do you not have autosave on for one thing? But but do you not use like, do you like? I'll say what do you use the keyboard shortcut for? She's like I have no idea what you're talking about and I. This is the central disconnect, you know, between like an engineering mind and like a normal person. And anyway, that's why Windows 8 sucked.

1:14:01 - Richard Campbell
So I can't believe you brought up live free or die hard.

1:14:03 - Paul Thurrott
That's hilarious. I well, I I brought it up because it was in the book. I didn't. I don't, I remember this vaguely, but I it didn't make much of an impact on me.

1:14:12 - Leo Laporte
You know what you know, whatever. Whenever I listen to you, Paul, I think you this guy, needs therapy.

1:14:18 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you should think that You're right. Or just drugs, you know.

1:14:24 - Leo Laporte
No well, I got a solution that you don't even have to get off your couch. I am being silly. Truth is, therapy is the best thing anybody could do, but you, Paul, especially you. Paul, more than anyone that's a lot of said it. No know, I go to therapists every week. I, I love him and I love it, and it's such a valuable tool for me to kind of, uh, set goals, to set expectations.

This episode, brought to you by a company we've talked about before, called BetterHelp. H-E-L-P. BetterHelp what do you do when you get caught up wishing your life looked like someone else's? This happens all the time. Right, you go on Instagram and you go. They're having so much fun, and I'm not.

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1:18:06 - Paul Thurrott / Leo Laporte
Paul, not to drag that one out, but I, you might have experienced this with your own children. No, I just, I mean I that it being shameful to get self-help yeah, isn't that ridiculous health care? Yeah that's a generational thing. Like my kids do not have this problem. No, neither do mine.

1:18:24 - Richard Campbell
Yeah you're right, you know, and I think the pandemic definitely brought that to light too.

1:18:28 - Paul Thurrott
Yep I had a yes I. I remember having a conversation with my daughter about something that's private, it doesn't really matter, but it was just like look, I mean I said something like you would say from the 60s, like no one has to know about this, honey, I can. She's like what do I care? I didn't do anything wrong.

1:18:43 - Leo Laporte
Everybody I know is in therapy. It's no big deal there you go yeah.

1:18:55 - Richard Campbell
I mean it's a much healthier approach to life Well, who are in therapy and those that should be in therapy? That's the choice. Yeah, yeah yeah.

1:19:04 - Leo Laporte
All right, thank you for letting me interrupt. Let's go on to the insiders, shall we?

1:19:09 - Paul Thurrott
Thank you for letting me interrupt. There's a couple of minor updates from last week. In the insider program they're updating the Microsoft store. Um, that will now show suggested content you might be interested in in the search box that appears as you start typing in the search box. So ads, uh. So yeah, I mean, in case you thought there was some corner of windows that Microsoft forgot about, don't worry, they're going to get there.

1:19:38 - Richard Campbell
Um it'll be a pill-shaped box, right? Of course it will.

1:19:44 - Paul Thurrott
Is there just a kill me now button? I can. They're also testing different layouts for the start menu. I got to be honest I don't understand what they're doing anymore.

1:19:58 - Richard Campbell
And you think, they do Fair enough. I mean, I get that.

1:20:03 - Paul Thurrott
Well, I guess my point is why. You know, like the, they have the data that shows that most people don't launch apps this way. So anyone who's like spending the time to finally curate the layout and contents of this start menu it's summertime that person, those person needs to be.

1:20:19 - Richard Campbell
Those are interns.

1:20:20 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I mean get outside, do something, that's stupid. So they're making all these little organizational changes to a UI that I don't think anybody actually uses that much.

1:20:30 - Richard Campbell
Wait till. September. Yeah, all those kids go back to school.

1:20:35 - Paul Thurrott
It's frustrating. And then I don't remember, last week they one of the builds from one of the channels had added this ability to right click a tab and then duplicate it, right, so you can have a second tab with the same location. They've added that to canary channel. That was the only build released today. Okay, there'll be more tomorrow. Yep, yeah, tomorrow, yeah, or friday if not, but yes, uh, it's the 24th. So exciting, I don't know. Just not that interesting, but yeah, we're in kind of a slow time. It is the summer.

1:21:06 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, no, and the interns are running wild. I see pictures. They're having a good time.

1:21:13 - Paul Thurrott
That was the other thing. I can't remember the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. It had a bunch of apps pre-built in and they were literally built by interns and they promoted it and I don't think they got the feedback they expected.

1:21:27 - Richard Campbell
Yeah you know Interns do good work. They do absolutely. Yeah, look at Notepad. More importantly, they often get the things nobody else is going to get to. So when it gets traction then it gets pulled into the team, like it is a way for a group of pms, while not so many people are watching them because they're on vacation to do some adventures with some young developers who want to try stuff. Right and and you?

can't tell me who has energy and yeah, and it's going to be delighted to the fact that they did anything in Windows at all.

1:21:58 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, Wants to be challenged you know I worked on my dad's operating system. It was fun, yeah. Then I went back to the Mac I usually use, yeah.

1:22:06 - Richard Campbell
I tried to edit it on a Mac, but I couldn't do it.

1:22:08 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah Right, I used WPF. So as we started the show, uh, laurent, the guy who writes news for me, uh texted me to say hey, um, bing just announced that they are adding generative search to their web. You know the web search. So this is the thing that google's got into a lot of trouble for. Um, I haven't had time to look at the story. I'm not sure how it has rolled out, or let me, let's see.

1:22:36 - Leo Laporte
Let's go to this is what I was something I haven't done in a few years and go to bingcom and uh, this is one of the things I hate is ai everywhere. I was saying before the show started, I think I said you know, I did a normal ctrl f to search the page on a website and ai popped up. It's like no, go, go away, go away. It's like clippy, I'm trying to do something here, you're not helping. Yeah, you're, you're in the way yeah, that's it.

1:23:00 - Paul Thurrott
That's an interesting point. I mean, depending on your search, uh, you know, when you say something like what day of the week was june 1 1966 or something you know, there's an answer right. So putting that right up there. You don't really need search results. That's the right approach. Um, but a lot of these generative AI search results are just what are they like? Summaries of content that may or may not be high quality, and because it's summarizing from multiple places, it makes mistakes.

1:23:29 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, so do humans, though, to be fair, right but that's.

1:23:34 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, that's our job. Yes, the New York times, I think, had an article which is about two years too late, but it said something like you know, AI has a math problem. Like, yeah, we know that, We've known that forever. Don't ask us to do arithmetic, that's for sure, and that's why we sort of thought that Google would be kind of a leader here, because they already have that search result thing. Where we want an answer, a discrete answer, it's that you know they got the whole the world's information.

1:23:59 - Leo Laporte
You can actually do a calculator in Google search. You can ask it to do math and it does a great job.

1:24:05 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so, but saying that, like AI can't do math is a is a simplistic way of saying it doesn't know the truth.

1:24:13 - Richard Campbell
you know and yeah you said you know like humans make mistakes. Truth is not a feature in an LLM. Come on.

1:24:18 - Paul Thurrott
Well, there's a quality ranking and search that hopefully bubbles up high quality sites or services, whatever, in response to a query, Open AI, whatever these big LLMs. It's just a garbage, you know like it's just like it's solving everything and that's like. Well, let's see, let's see what the randomized version of all this crap looks like. It looks like randomized crap sometimes is what it looks like. All right, it's kind of an interesting problem.

1:24:44 - Leo Laporte
It's a really interesting point because Google does accurate arithmetic right in the search bar. Yeah, right in the search bar.

1:24:51 - Paul Thurrott
Because it's a computer program.

1:24:53 - Leo Laporte
You're asking it for deterministic, but if you ask Gemini, like what's three plus three.

It'd probably probably like broccoli, but that's the difference I don't know, like you don't, like I don't know, so you're missing. So I guess my point is that you're misusing it, that if you want math, use a calculator. I mean, it's not well, yes. And if you want kind of a more, if you want a more generative answer, a fuzzy answer. If you will more than using a line, butative answer, a fuzzy answer. If you will a more, then use an LIMB, but understand, it's a fuzzy answer. Fuzzy and arithmetic don't go together.

1:25:25 - Paul Thurrott
I'll try to find. I doubt I can find a sternus show, but I found this great video several months ago about this exact topic. You're using it wrong. In other words, we have been trained, your expectations are wrong. That's the problem. Well, also like we tend to be very terse when we search right, but we found that actually you want to be verbose when you interact with AI, like the more detailed you are, the better the results usually. Right kind of details, of course.

Yeah, it's kind of a you know Google works against the world's information and comes up with the answer, but AI works against the world's information and comes up with a gobbledygook somehow. So I guess this is an advance, but I think the impetus to put it in everything comes from it's like a marketing problem. Like you can't be Google trying to present yourself as the AI leader and not have AI in your search. You know that's your premier product. You've got to figure it out. It's garbage, you know. So far, I think, and anyway, so Microsoft's added it. So if you like Bing for some reason and I do not want to hear from you, but I know you do some of you there it is. Yeah, I don't know they're doing it too. Let's see. There it is, yeah, I don't know they're doing it too. Let's see.

I have some stuff in the. I think it says a pic or an app pic or something about this. That's yeah. Actually, both the thing my tip and app pic this week are both semi-related to this in kind of an interesting way, because there are good use cases for generative AI and this is not one of them. So you know I and this is not one of them. So you know, I want the definitive answer. You know, when I Google something, or whatever you want to say it like, I search the Internet. I'm looking for an answer. Right, I'm not looking to have a conversation about it and I certainly don't want to know everyone's opinion about it. I just want the answer. You know, some of these things are just literal facts. Can we just have a discussion about that?

1:27:16 - Richard Campbell
I mean, yeah, facts are discussion about that. I mean, yeah, I don't know. Again, facts are not essential to a large language model. It really doesn't even have the concept of that fact.

1:27:21 - Paul Thurrott
A fact is just another word, the beast of castically manipulated saturday morning cartoon uh lyrics, like a little cartoon guy dancing around. The fact is just a fact. Um. So I've been talking about Proton a lot lately. Proton bought a oh boy, I forgot the name of it like an online note-taking tool. Earlier this year They've turned it into a docs feature for their Proton Drive online service. This past week they've announced something called Proton Scribe, because everyone has to do this, right? So this is an AI writing assistant integrated Actually, right now it's I'm sorry, excuse me, it's integrated first into ProtonMail, but it will be coming to everything, I'm sure.

So right now it's in mail. I'm sorry, but that's a good place for it, right? So you want help proofreading or shortening or lengthening or whatever it might be in email? This is a good way to do it. You know that whole open source privacy. I have a ProtonMail account. I don't use it for everything yet I'm still kind of testing it. I think I mentioned last week I've been using ProtonPass, the password manager, which I love, and I hope I described it because I'm going to eventually write this up this way as kind of the gateway drug to the Proton ecosystem. But they also have storage.

1:28:40 - Leo Laporte
I mean, they're really building this whole array of tools. Yeah, an ecosystem, exactly Ecosystem. Yeah, I just, you know, I'm curious. The only thing that stops me from using ProtonMail is I in fact, you saw me do that when I just bought the Snapdragon PC. I have all my domains hosted at FastMail and I can make the before the ads. I have all my domains hosted at Fastmail and I can make before the ads.

1:29:02 - Paul Thurrott
I'd be anything. So every time I make an account, you're already doing something that's not Google or Microsoft Right, or maybe Apple or whatever. So you're in a better position than most people, I think this is oh yeah, if you're moving from Gmail or Outlook absolutely You're looking at, maybe I want some privacy, right?

You're looking at, you're like maybe I want some privacy, right? You know, maybe you've seen that thing one too many times where you search for something and you start getting ads. You know, you're like I think it's time for me to. Maybe, if I pay a little bit, I've had a ProtonMail account forever.

1:29:31 - Leo Laporte
I still have a paid account. I have too. It's a mistake to imply that email can ever be really secure. This whole notion that you can encrypt email. I mean you can and when it works, it works, it's secure. But email is not. It's not really intended to be secure. You should use Signal or something that is secured by design More intrinsically secure yeah.

Yeah, you can. I mean, I use PGP all the time and if everybody knows what they're doing, yeah, it's secure. But I think email should be thought of more as a more public medium.

1:30:06 - Paul Thurrott
Well, email is turning into what phone calls, and now text have thanks to all these spammers, which is something you just rely on less and less because it's mostly worthless. It's hard to find 90% of my email is like I love your content. Here's a link to an article you wrote 11 years ago. I want to work with you. We can promote this site. You obviously don't know anything about me, lisa was complaining about that this morning.

1:30:25 - Leo Laporte
She said there's been a huge influx of people wanting to write articles for our site, which I'm sure both of you guys get.

1:30:35 - Richard Campbell
I have a sponsored article I'd like to put up because all rss feeds are blog feeds, right, like they don't know enough to know it's even a podcast well, they're right, we do have a website, but it's you know, it's obviously mass emails.

1:30:46 - Leo Laporte
They don't know anything about us or the website and lisa responds to them.

1:30:50 - Paul Thurrott
Cindy that sent this.

1:30:51 - Leo Laporte
I say don't respond to them, you're just giving, encouraging them oh no, this is block marcus spin.

1:30:58 - Paul Thurrott
This is I.

1:30:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't ever respond and of course they're getting really annoying.

1:31:02 - Paul Thurrott
There's a person out there who wants to contribute to my site because they did not see it.

1:31:06 - Leo Laporte
We don't accept contributors, so it's not an issue ever. But you know they'll send another one and another one. Didn't you get my mail? I still want to do this. Are you still there? Hello?

1:31:17 - Paul Thurrott
I know I still want to put this to the top of your inbox.

1:31:20 - Richard Campbell
I know you're busy Go away Circling back on this, yeah, yep.

1:31:25 - Leo Laporte
Let's put a pin in you.

1:31:27 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, exactly, I'm just putting all my ducks in a row here. I got a pin for you.

1:31:33 - Leo Laporte
You know Okay. So yes, your point well taken. Email is useless these days, pretty much, yeah, and yet we still need it. You have to have it, you have to have it, but it's, yeah, you can't rely on it.

1:31:44 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, yeah, I mean look, as an older guy, I mean when things like Slack and Teams occurred, I kind of had a semi-visceral reaction to like chat-based communications with people. Like I hate that, you know I hate, but email might be worse.

1:32:02 - Leo Laporte
So you know, like honestly, Well, I think what happens it's in-shitification. It's so Slack and email. Email got bad, then Slack and then Slack's getting bad, then Signal and then Signal will get bad. I mean, you just have to stay one step ahead of the spam.

1:32:16 - Paul Thurrott
Just keep moving. We're just moving, trying to keep ahead of the certification, Yep, which is like trying to run a tsunami. You're not going to win. It's a failing strategy. You're not going to win. Unfortunately, there was a report in, I think, the Wall Street Journal that Amazon I want to say I think it was over four years lost something like $25 billion on its devices business, Oof billion on its devices business. Because the point of selling these things for under the cost, I guess, or selling them very cheaply which is sort of what Toys R Us used to do back in the day with diapers to get mothers or small kids into the store was you would spend money on other things, right, and I guess that hasn't really worked out at all and that's part of that big scale back that we know is happening. A money-losing hardware business is a perfect fit for a former Microsoft executive, I know.

1:33:03 - Richard Campbell
And interestingly, he's running this business now, but Amazon was doing layoffs to the Alexa group like two years ago, even before the LM broke out. They've been kind of walking around.

1:33:16 - Paul Thurrott
Well, and Google Assistant too.

1:33:17 - Richard Campbell
Like both was like within a couple of months of each other, both the Alexa team and the Assist team said yeah, you know, these have never delivered on what we thought We've got to cut back. We spent too much.

1:33:28 - Paul Thurrott
The thing is there is definitely a connection between the voice control stuff, which I think is the important bit, and then what happens on the back end is almost immaterial, because now, with these AI chatbot things, this use could be. You know, I do know older people especially who will talk to an Alexa device in their home or whatever, and they ask it about the weather, they ask it to tell stories or read at the news or whatever. It is Not AI, by the way, you know none of that, but there, but there's a lot of good learning. I think that went into that whole interface and I think it could apply nicely to these chat bots and, um, these things are complimentary, maybe is the way to say it. So there will be next gen Alexa something, something that you know we'll have an AI component, maybe paid. Uh, google's doing the same thing. Google rolled rolled their that business into another business. It's all part of android now.

1:34:17 - Richard Campbell
Yeah but then the timing of those layoffs was hilarious because they were months away from chat, gpt happening and and the world going crazy.

1:34:24 - Paul Thurrott
When I know it's like all of that yeah yeah, well, you know, this is just chasing bad money all over again. Right, they would have.

1:34:29 - Richard Campbell
This would have continued and I'll learn the home assistant world. When they made those announcements in 22 home assistant said okay, we're going to do the year of voice and this is the open source home automation tools, uh, where they they're big on do smart homes without being dependent on the cloud at all, which none of the vendors want to do, right, right, and so they help you, to help you identify what's going, making trips out what is, and like doing everything locally. So they really worked hard on doing a local voice system, which, by the way, does not work well. It's very hard.

1:35:05 - Paul Thurrott
All the local AI stuff is kind of lousy right. This is what we've seen. It's a battle.

1:35:10 - Richard Campbell
So I mean the house I sold in the city was heavily dependent on HA and the new owners have got much of it working but not all of it. Oh, good on them. One of the pieces that isn't working. I've been helping.

1:35:21 - Leo Laporte
That's one of the debates by the way, is do you rip that stuff out before you give your hosts a house, or do you leave it in and pray they don't call you?

1:35:28 - Paul Thurrott
It's like having gold trim all over your house. Like 1% of people are going to love it, but most people are going to.

1:35:34 - Richard Campbell
Well, I did a bunch of things. Actually, I've been doing some videos about this. I transferred all the accounts related to the various services to an Outlookcom mail, so you create a dummy email. I've done this. From now on, the house should have its own email.

1:35:49 - Leo Laporte
The house should have its own email Because it owns those.

1:35:52 - Richard Campbell
It should have its own Slack account. Richard, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm with you right now. Yeah, I'm thinking more.

1:35:57 - Leo Laporte
This is good. I want Richard's best practices on this because I really I have, you know, all over the house everything is smart, I.

1:36:05 - Paul Thurrott
But I have a folder on my phone with nine now 10 apps yeah, to control each thing individually I have never once triggered siri on purpose, but that damn thing comes up every once in a while because I hear something I said and it might. Most of my interactions with this thing are shut up, if you say seriously it will trigger you go and I say you got, you know me well enough. No, I say that all the time.

1:36:26 - Leo Laporte
I think you do so ha is the universal way of solving this problem those guys.

1:36:33 - Richard Campbell
I mean, it's a really great story because they while while being a volunteer open source sort of project, they lit up a thing called nabu casa a number of years ago. That was just a web proxy, but they charged five bucks a month for it and like 20 000 people signed up for it in the first month. Suddenly they had a hundred grand in cash flow.

It doesn't cost that much on a web proxy wow, and they didn't lose their minds, like what they did was they put it to employing all these people that were key to making this product great and then started as the numbers went. That was only the first month. The numbers are up from there.

1:37:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm about to. I just put it on HA, on my Synology, and yeah, I think I'll sign up for Nabucasa.

1:37:12 - Richard Campbell
You sign up for Nabucasa because it's all about the phone client, right, right, and it's a great way to support the thing. But now that they've done is they've gone around and picked up various smart home entities like esp home and the like, right as basically aqua hires, where they smart give them a job. Would you like to work on esp home full time? Yeah, right, and and so, uh, they're now building stuff faster than amazon, google, habitat, habitat, any of those competitors in the you can't keep up with HA now.

1:37:41 - Paul Thurrott
And at the same time, this mantra of all in the house that might actually make sense retrospectively, I guess, meaning maybe it doesn't make sense for a company at scale to try to do this stuff, but for a smaller business where they can actually make a go of this and make sense of it.

1:37:57 - Richard Campbell
Well, and sort of be that center point right.

1:38:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, and everything's siloed right. Google doesn't really want you to use HomeKit, but so HA, though works with ZigBee, z-wave, homekit, everything Matter, you name it. What I want to do is roll out of bed and say, good morning house, yep, and off it goes. And it turns on various lights, starts my coffee, opens the curtains, whatever.

1:38:20 - Paul Thurrott
That's what happens in my house. You can do that.

1:38:24 - Leo Laporte
Good morning Leo. It's going to be 55 degrees today. Let me tell you what I found on the web about that? Yeah, exactly.

1:38:30 - Richard Campbell
Useless. The bigger one is the low friction stuff. Right that the lights turn themselves on and off.

1:38:35 - Leo Laporte
I have Lutron. Caseta everywhere themselves, on and off I have lutron cassetta everywhere, yeah, and which works great with ha, by the way. Okay, yeah, and then I have. I just bought automated blinds and that's the ones that work with lutron uh well, supposedly they work with home kit and everything else, so we'll see. I think there's zigbee, um, but it's a really it's a tower of babble.

1:38:58 - Richard Campbell
I mean it's crazy we can derail the show by miles. I avoid talking about ha most of the time because I am one of the obsessed and I can go for days I'm glad to know because I finally settled.

1:39:10 - Leo Laporte
I, yeah, I realized I gotta do h I can't have. Yeah, I mean, I'll show you, this folder is everything you're still gonna have those you're just not gonna use home connect atomi ring, sonos, lutron myq virtual keypad, which is the alarm company.

1:39:30 - Richard Campbell
I mean it's just crazy, yep ha will bring it together for you. So you know, she who must be obeyed doesn't need has a dashboard, it's in ha. It doesn't know what the Must Be Obeyed doesn't need has a dashboard, it's in HA.

1:39:39 - Leo Laporte
It doesn't know what the different hardware stacks are, it doesn't need to know that's what I think I'll do is dedicate a iPad or maybe this Google tablet, which I've never used.

1:39:49 - Paul Thurrott
I just walk up and open the shade so I don't know what you're talking. I still flip the switch, open the which is my version of saying like I listen to music on albums.

1:40:00 - Leo Laporte
What do you know about that Screw the cloud? Well, I put HA in my synology, so that's the first step. There's a long journey, no doubt. Yeah, okay, sorry, Paul, we'll go back to the.

1:40:13 - Paul Thurrott
And now back to your show, which is already in progress.

1:40:16 - Leo Laporte
I can't remember what it is anymore, but Panos Panay is running Amazon's, is that? Who's in charge of it? Yep, oh, my God, I know.

1:40:26 - Paul Thurrott
I know It'd be funny if it wasn't true From the frying pan to the fire. You probably thought I made that up, but it's true.

1:40:33 - Richard Campbell
I thought you made it up. We'll see.

1:40:35 - Paul Thurrott
Their big annual event is in. September and.

1:40:38 - Richard Campbell
I can't wait.

1:40:39 - Leo Laporte
Oh I love those.

1:40:39 - Richard Campbell
It should be amazing.

1:40:40 - Leo Laporte
Those Amazon events are hysterical because they announce 44 products.

1:40:44 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, this year they're only going to announce three or seven. I think it's going to be small, but we'll see.

1:40:49 - Leo Laporte
We'll see, that's when they announced that Astro Robot Yep, which they just went away Ages ago. They have this day one project stuff where you have to sign up and if you're lucky you get an invitation to buy the thing. And I got invited to buy the sticky note printer for your amazon echo. And my whole idea was oh look, lisa, we can, we can tell a word. We can tell echo what's on the shopping list, add stuff. You know, hey, echo, add butter to my shopping list. It'll remember all that stuff. And then we say, print it out on the sticky note thing and it puts little check boxes, the whole thing, and she never used it. So I got rid of it. The other day she said, hey, where's that sticky note printer we could use that? I said, yeah, I know, but but it's gone. That's amazing. This is the problem with home automation. It's just like your relatives who use a mouse their whole life. They don't have home automation, they have hidden affordances. They don't know where to go. Before we had Wi-Fi as a standard.

1:41:55 - Paul Thurrott
You could buy cards for your computer that would create a wireless network in your house that were completely incompatible with each other and everyone had a different one, and that was like you couldn't go there as another person and use it.

It was just you know, that's my Wi-Fi Yep, okay, google has been working to jam something called Privacy Sandbox down our throats the past four or five years. Whatever it's been, they've had delay it, delay it, delay it. This is an attempt to balance the needs of customers, who want privacy from ads, and advertisers, who constitute 74% of Google's revenues and want tracking. So they've gotten a lot of pushback on this. They remember Flock was the first version of it. They dropped that pretty quick. They've been working on this other thing based on topics and some other things, I think site-suggested ads and ad measurement.

They actually rolled this thing out. It's in every time you set up Chrome you'll see it. It does not say privacy sandbox, but you'll see something called enhanced ad privacy, which is an oxymoron, and or the opposite of that. But they finally, after many, many delays, they did not say we're killing it. What they did say is the thing it was supposed to replace, that they were going to kill third-party cookies, is now not going to be killed, which means they're killing it right. And the reason they're doing it, guys, regulatory, yeah, concerns, yeah, right. Antitrust regulators went to them and said, uh no, this is not what you say. It is the cma from the uk which I think we can agree not necessarily the most competent of these regulators raised no fewer than 39 concerns about privacy sandbox yeah but was there concern privacy or the that eu or, in this case, english companies would not be getting their advertising information as they expected?

1:43:51 - Leo Laporte
that's I think the complaints came from.

1:43:52 - Paul Thurrott
No, you know.

1:43:53 - Leo Laporte
No, I think the complaints came from at least this is what steve said yesterday from ad companies.

1:43:59 - Paul Thurrott
It's like you can't take away our third-party cookies, so we need those.

Oh well, here's the thing. So, third-party cookies are easy to block, right, privacy Sandbox. If they got rid of, third-party cookies may have although we've heard contrary information about this detuned the capabilities of ad blockers and tracker blockers that are in a browser extensions, right? Um, some browser makers not all, not Microsoft, interestingly kind of said like we're not doing this, we don't care what Google does, we're going to rip it out. Uh, they did the same thing with, uh, the flock based thing that Google had done earlier. And then, the day that Google announced this privacy badger that you know anti-tracking extension that I do recommend strongly announced a new feature for their product they're blocking privacy sandbox. So, so you don't even have to worry about configuring it correctly, you can use Chrome and they'll just turn it off for you. So, um, so the the net result was what we wanted, which is this is terrible, so get rid of it. And now it's gone.

And speaking of antitrust regulators, I think a week or two ago we were talking about how Microsoft had reached a settlement with this trade group in Europe who represent cloud infrastructure companies in the EU, not with all of it. I think this is the last major holdout. Was this company called OVH Cloud. Yes, ovh Cloud, a French-based cloud company.

1:45:26 - Richard Campbell
Famously had a big data center fire in Germany a few years ago.

1:45:30 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, they reached a separate agreement with Microsoft. They dropped their complaint with the European Union, and this is all tied to that exit fee stuff. They're going to make it easy, slash, basically free for customers to exit Azure and go somewhere else if they want to. So that's really all they were asking for, although I do like that. This company, ovh Cloud, had a cute little dig at Microsoft at the end of their little announcement where they said you know, this agreement does lead to concrete progress for the entire European cloud ecosystem, but there's a crucial need for further action to effectively put an end to all anti-competitive practices implemented by hyperscalers in the EU cloud market All of which, by the way, are American companies like Microsoft. So hyperscalers? Microsoft was like yeah the way, are American companies like Microsoft.

So hyperscalers, Microsoft was like yeah, wait, hey, that's us, they reached an agreement. But it's not like these companies are best buddies or anything. Okay, where are we? We?

1:46:33 - Leo Laporte
are ready for the melissa break well, thank you, I'm glad you mentioned that. That's an advertiser of ours that we've been doing ads for for many years and a very fine, a fine company, a longtime supporter of this show and all of our shows. Let me tell you a little. You know, this might be a good time for me to tell you a little bit about them. What do you say? Okay?

1:46:55 - Paul Thurrott
Sounds good.

1:46:58 - Leo Laporte
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Melissa's services use secure encryption, of course, for all file transfers, and an information security ecosystem built on the ISO 27001 framework, so you know it's secure. They also adhere to GDPR policies and maintain SOC 2 compliance. That's important because it's you know this is your data. It's valuable to you. It's secure. They also adhere to GDPR policies and maintain SOC 2 compliance. That's important because this is your data. It's valuable to you. It's valuable to your customers. You want to make sure Melissa protects it. They do they also now and I think this is a great move they offer transparent pricing for all services, so there's no guesswork. You can absolutely estimate your business budget. You'll know what it's going to cost up front.

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1:50:12 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, don't, don't be too excited, leo, because what comes after antitrust? Oh wait a minute, we did that one, we did that. Thank God, stop it, thank God. Yeah, don't be too excited, leo, because what comes after antitrust is quarterly reporting. Quarterly, yeah.

1:50:20 - Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah, in my latest round of support for the European Commission, I'd like to mention 17 factors, I think.

1:50:28 - Leo Laporte
Oh Lord, so what?

1:50:30 - Paul Thurrott
Google alphabet. Yeah, I'm only going to really highlight that one. For the most part, Microsoft, apple, amazon it's all coming. The next few weeks are going to be horrific for me, but Google's doing great guys. I don't see a lot of it being AI, although it's ads. Google's an ad company, so 74% of their revenues come from ads. But Google Cloud had $10 billion in revenues for the first time ever. They've broken out this new group called Subscriptions, platforms and Devices, which used to be called Google Other, which is almost $10 billion in revenues. Yeah, you can't have $10 billion under Other. Yeah, I know it just looks billion under other. Yeah, I know this looks kind of weird. So, yeah, they're doing fine. You know they did lose $2.3 billion, or I would say maybe invested $2.3 billion putting their AI infrastructure together, but you know Google's going to Google. Yeah, we don't really have to talk about this next one too too much. But Netflix and Spotify both announced their earnings as well and I don't want to talk about that in too much detail, other than I want to understand how these horrible, horrible companies are doing so well Both profitable, double digit everything. Both these products completely insured.

I think Netflix is the standard bearer for how awful you can be to your own customers. It's unbelievable. This is a company that has about a billion videos you can watch and no way to organize them whatsoever. You can make AQ. You cannot organize it in any meaningful way. They make it really difficult to do anything. They change the the the things that you see, like the topics, every day. They're in different positions. Sometimes your cue is at the top, sometimes it's in the middle, sometimes I'm not even sure it's there. You know, it's just a. It depends on the. You know the Netflix gods. They keep changing all of their subscription tiers. They're trying to figure out things that make the most sense for them to spending a lot of money on content from companies like India, countries like India. I don't want to see, uh, sports games or sports, wwe wrestling, live events, guys. I just want to watch a fricking movie tonight. Can I just see a view of that? But no.

1:52:58 - Leo Laporte
Um, the reason Netflix does this anyway is to avoid churn right. So their problem is you watch something and then, if they don't have the next thing for you ready and have to go out the door. You, okay, you lose them.

1:53:08 - Paul Thurrott
Here's the all right. So do I have. I probably don't have netflix on this computer, but let me just check real quick now.

So a lot of it's crap, but it doesn't have to be If I were to look at, whatever the screen is, my TV, my tablet, whatever it is, and there are let's pretend there are 20 icons for movies or TV shows, whatever recommended. I have seen at least eight of them. Right, there's no sense of do not show me the thing I already saw. There's even no sense of you can rate things like a thumbs up, thumbs down. I know it's not paying attention to this because it's constantly recommending the thing I said I did not like.

1:53:44 - Leo Laporte
So that's crappy software, that's, you know it's so bad, it's just terrible.

1:53:48 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and you know that we put up with this because for they had a run there where they were like the new h right, they did Narcos, they had all these kind of really high-quality shows and you're like, oh my God, this is where everything's happening, and now it's like 25 Bollywood shows that I have to watch, apparently.

1:54:07 - Richard Campbell
Running studios is expensive. Man, I got to cheat away.

1:54:10 - Paul Thurrott
No, I know, and they're going to have to pay for it some way, and that way is uh, I don't understand why you're confused that they're so profitable going so far down the certification process.

1:54:20 - Richard Campbell
Why do you think you insure it's? Wildly profitable cycle.

1:54:24 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's not a virtuous cycle, but it is a profitable. It's a non-virtuous cycle. Yeah, it's a yeah, yeah, it could be like spotify is the same problem. I, I don't. I, it confuses me that anyone would use Spotify. But yeah, anyway, I don't want to get off, I don't want to go too long on this one. It's just, I just don't understand this.

Game Pass would fall into this conversation as well If Game Pass actually made money and or was you know whatever. But Game Pass was kind of a no brainer for Xbox guys for a long time, a couple of years anyway. And then, chris, you know, we talked about this. In fact, we're going to talk about it again because last week Microsoft announced Sorry, no, they didn't. Microsoft didn't announce. Microsoft posted a support document on the Xbox website that explained that they were raising the prices of all the Xbox Game Pass tiers and getting rid of the one that was the most popular and replacing it with one that does not have day one guarantees for new games because Call of Duty is expensive. We talked about this. Right, I assume we talked about this.

The FTC has used this as a chance to do what the FTC has been doing since they lost their case to block the acquisition again to go back and say, see, see, and they are so wrong. And it bothers me so much because the truth is they did just kind of ruin it. You know, they kind of did not because of the reason that the FTC says the FTC who, by the way, did not give a crap about Activision Blizzard employees even for one second until Microsoft decided to have layoffs and then pretended there was no way they weren't going to lay off 10,000 plus redundant new employees, like that was one of their things. And then this thing the problem with Game Pass to the FTC was not that they were going to make this subscription worse, it was that Microsoft was going to make Activision Blizzard games be exclusive to the service. They've done nothing.

1:56:26 - Richard Campbell
They've gone in the opposite direction.

1:56:28 - Paul Thurrott
I talk about this every week. We have one little minor update to that, by the way, coming up in a second, but in one year no, not one year. Nine months they've added one game to the service until today, by the way, but one game. They doubled that amount. Today they've added a second game. It's not like they added 50 games. You know. There's a whole stable of Activision Blizzard content sitting there that is not on the service, but silence anyway. So the FTC is terrible, but the the thing that Microsoft has done is also terrible, and it is this insurification thing. It absolutely is. This is like somebody woke up and realized that this deal was too good to be true and they were like, how can we ruin it? And like, well, we can raise the price and we can make it worse. And like, yeah, that's great, that worked great for Netflix. We should do that and maybe it will be profitable.

1:57:16 - Richard Campbell
now I don't know, but yes, I am still very upset about this and it stinks because I'm wondering if Amy Hood decided, once the deal had gone through, to put that on the balance sheet. For the Xbox team it's like okay, boys, pay off your 70 billion, get to work.

1:57:33 - Paul Thurrott
What did they think it was going to go like? I mean I, I I mean xbox, that is like I don't know I you like to think that there are competent people in this case who can do math, who can look at the finances of the various businesses, like call of duty and whatever, and say, okay, here's what needs to happen. Um, I think I raised this before, but if not, I it's, it's maybe, and maybe a a point that, as far as day and date games go, it's not 100% true. Right, like there are different versions of I keep using this one example but, like Flight Simulator, like you, as a Game Pass subscriber, get the standard edition. You don't get the better editions, right? I mean you could have done the same thing with Activision, right, I mean you could get. You could have done the same thing with Activision, right, I mean you could get Call of Duty single player. See, we did it. But if you want to play online, you got to buy it. You know, there's all kinds of ways you're going to solve this problem.

There would have been a lot of complaining, no matter what they did. But the one thing I think we all need to acknowledge I assume most people have is that? Look, look, something was always going to happen. This was never going to make sense. You don't have to be too good at math to look at how much money Call of Duty just by itself generates every year, and then try to figure out what has to happen with Game Pass for that to make any sense. And it never does. No, it never does. Math just doesn't add up.

1:58:47 - Richard Campbell
No, all these Class A games. You can't give that away. My best idea was you buy game pass so you get it a week earlier than everybody else. Yeah right, you know you still pay full price for it, but you get it first, yep which you know.

1:59:01 - Paul Thurrott
There's a class of player like you. You do get like a 10 I think it's 10 discount, I mean that's no, I think they're missing.

1:59:07 - Richard Campbell
I mean, they're missing the ball on that one. Yeah they. You know, people want to be first.

1:59:12 - Paul Thurrott
That's what excites them yeah, and these, these games like this are just like movies, that the headwind is not very great, everything it's a like explosion right up and then whatever, although, yeah, I mean.

1:59:23 - Richard Campbell
The risk of that is, if it's a dead game, a bunch of people who paid extra are going to find out it's dead game first, and your second wave's not going to be strong yeah, then you lose. So maybe it's only a 24-hour head start, but I'm telling you there's no classic gamer that would pay for a 24-hour head start.

1:59:38 - Paul Thurrott
This may be. Leo mentioned Netflix and the kind of business model where you, what you don't want is someone coming like there's a new season of Narcos, pretend or whatever, and join so they can watch it, and they it all lands at once, they all watch it in two or three days and then they cancel the service, right? You don't want that, right, and Microsoft doesn't want that with, uh, you know, call of duty. You don't want to have, like this november announcement like oh my god, we just like tripled our uh xbox game pass ranks. This is amazing. And then december comes, it's like they're all like I mean, you don't, you know you don't want that. So I I'm.

2:00:10 - Richard Campbell
I'm not saying I have all the answers, I'm just saying no, and you do want, but you can educate your investor that there is a chunk of churn, right? Yeah, Either way, those are 30% people that paid you for a month that wouldn't have otherwise, just to get that head start.

2:00:26 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I don't know how fast Call of Duty drops off and I don't know what the deal is with in know in-game purchases or dlc purchase, whatever that stuff is, I don't know, but I this is, this was such a lousy way to have done. I just it's just, it just feels malicious, yeah, um. And speaking of malicious um, as of today we now have two activision blizzard games, um, on Pass. The second is Call of Duty, modern Warfare 3. This was the game they released last October, so it's the current game and it will be the current game until late October when Black Ops 6 arrives.

2:01:07 - Richard Campbell
So, okay, all right Last year's Series A game. And that would be the other argument is that all the games that are a year old are on Game Pass.

2:01:16 - Paul Thurrott
I would say right, I mean, I feel like this to me is acceptable.

2:01:20 - Richard Campbell
The nostalgia mechanism is real. Old games don't die, they just live in Game Pass.

2:01:26 - Paul Thurrott
I mean people are playing it right Probably millions of people right now. I mean one of the neat things about Call of Duty now which was not the case three, five, whatever years ago is that it's cross-platform broadly. It was a big deal to get PlayStation and Xbox gamers in the same games, and now we have PC gamers too, so you've got this much bigger audience that can play the game. So it's viable for longer at least. Multiplayer it's fine. But I'd like to know where the other 1,798 games are and seriously, we know the new Call of Duty is going to be on most of Game Pass.

2:02:02 - Richard Campbell
The money they wasted was Game Pass signups for Fallout After the TV show dropped. How many people wanted to play Fallout?

2:02:10 - Paul Thurrott
I know that was the perfect storm of getting it right yeah, and then having content so people could continue. That was hundreds of storm. Of getting it right yeah, and then having content so people could.

2:02:16 - Richard Campbell
That was hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, and you could have such a win. You could have even made a dlc around that show and I know they should they still should easy money.

2:02:26 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's still not too late, but this is an awesome segue to the halo tv thing, but I just I have to mention, because when today came, knowing we, they only made this announcement. I think yesterday, the day before I got up, open a laptop, I'm like I'm going to download this thing, try it on the computer, and uh, it was not there. So later in the day laurent texted me. He says, hey, uh, it looks like this thing's out now. It just had some question about it. So I saw something I've never seen before, which is I opened the xbox app and the game was there. It wasn't advertised but it was down in the list and I clicked on it and said, uh, click here to buy it in the Microsoft store for 20 off, because you're a game pass subscriber like I, you're giving me this thing for free. I pay for game pass, ultimate, that's one of the subscriptions.

I'm like what's going on? So I clicked on the link because it opened the Microsoft store. And when I went to the Microsoft store, same thing. It was just a link to buy it, not a link to just download it. Usually it says install right. So I'm like what's going on here? And so I started looking around and this game was part of a bundle and that bundle. So the bundle there's the game Call of Duty, modern Warfare 3. And then the bundle included a second game called call of duty, and call of duty was free. I could install that and call of duty is required for this game and then for also for war zone, for the last game, for the next game that's coming in October. It's like the core engine or whatever. It's like the kernel, and I was like, oh, Microsoft, you are just perfect.

And what I realized later on? I think it's hard to tell, because now I kind of, by downloading it, it's in my library and now it might have changed the UI. But I think it was just a staging problem. I think if you go today and you have a subscription, you'll just see an install link and it will just install right from the Xbox app like a normal you know game or whatever. So I hope you have like 300 gigabytes free in your hard drive. It's a big, big title and have fun. I'm expecting to be able to, based on the download speeds, the size, I'll probably be playing it Saturday, maybe Sunday morning. It's going to be a while. It's not going, not morning. Um, it's gonna be a while it's not going. Not going quick, not that fast, yeah, which is something the Microsoft store is known for, unfortunately, if these big this is the weight of these Activision blizzard triple a games is going to break this system like they're going to, have to fix this they gotta improve the cdn.

um, and then this past week uh, I think it's paramount plus canceled the halo tv series, right, which is an example of how not to pull a Fallout Because it was not good. It was not good, yeah, I only watched a little bit of it. It was disappointing. I think the big freak out a lot of Halo fans had was that it. You know, the guy took off his mask or whatever. But I have to say the problem with it is what the Fallout guys got right, which is that I've never played a follow game and my wife hasn't. Obviously she's never played any game except for like wordle or something, and like this was just entertaining, like it was just good story, good, well told, a funny, uh, kind of a bizarre take on the apocalypse where everyone just kind of gleefully accepts the world as it is in this insane state.

2:05:35 - Richard Campbell
You're talking about Fallout, right, not Halo yeah.

2:05:38 - Paul Thurrott
This was like it made you want to play the game. I'm like this looks great.

2:05:42 - Richard Campbell
This is an amazing world.

2:05:44 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, halo did not do that, and that's the thing. Him taking off his mask is like a problem for the Halo pedantic types, but this thing just had to work as a Battlestar Galactica style.

2:05:56 - Richard Campbell
You know, science fiction series right, and that could be done well, look at Battlestar Galactica.

2:06:01 - Paul Thurrott
Sure, there is a rich universe here. I think that could be mined.

2:06:06 - Leo Laporte
First you got to get good writers, good actors, you know that kind of thing you may get picked up by the way it's possible.

2:06:13 - Paul Thurrott
any day now or someday in the future, you'll hear Netflix or Amazon.

2:06:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's the thing these days, isn't it?

2:06:18 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, no series is automatically gone. Yeah, yeah.

2:06:22 - Paul Thurrott
So it could happen.

2:06:22 - Leo Laporte
All you have to do everybody sign the petition, Bring back Master Chief. Yeah.

2:06:28 - Richard Campbell
Bring back Master Chief At the same time.

2:06:29 - Paul Thurrott
It's like you don't hear a lot of people say no but they're not doing.

2:06:32 - Richard Campbell
The all-up thing of you should be making a dlc for the game that's related to that, like there's. You mark it on all the channels well, okay, so this is.

2:06:41 - Paul Thurrott
I also did not play the game. What's that, sony? Uh, left, not left to die um last of us, last of us, yeah so last of us was turned into a very successful series. I think max quite loyal to the game too. Yeah, it's right supposed to to be like a lot of the same dialogue. It's the same basic story.

2:06:57 - Richard Campbell
When you know it's a video game and you watch the show, you see that there's definitely scenes.

2:07:00 - Leo Laporte
There's quests.

2:07:03 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's not like the Doom movie where you can see for a little while. You can see him walking down the hallway like this but you know what, To me? So, having never the game, and my wife again, having played nothing but Wordle, both really love this TV series. So the fact that it was faithful to a game did not make it better or worse To me, it was just good. It was just a good TV series.

2:07:24 - Richard Campbell
It has to be good first and it was a very good story-based game, yeah.

2:07:30 - Paul Thurrott
I thought they did great and it's coming back soon, I guess, and good and whatever they're filming it up here they're filming it over on Vancouver Island. Halo kind of evolved like a lot of the newer Star Wars shows where it's like I want to like this, you know yeah, and I start watching it. I'm like oof, I really don't like this, you know it's like I just don't, I don't know.

2:07:49 - Leo Laporte
I think games a long time ago, yeah sure was Out of Sync in our Discord says that they're taking too long to get to Halo. They're really slow walking the arrival. I mean it's two seasons in and they're almost there. Now there's not going to be a third season. That might have been a strategic error.

2:08:10 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I know, you know when the show's called Halo, you should arrive on the Halo.

2:08:14 - Paul Thurrott
You should on the Halo, you think it?

2:08:15 - Leo Laporte
should be about that Episode one. Yeah, it should be a Halo. It should be a Halo. Why is this thing called Halo? There was no Halo, it's coming in season three.

2:08:21 - Paul Thurrott
Don't worry about it. Yeah, we got this, we're building it right now?

2:08:31 - Leo Laporte
No, that's bad storytelling. It's just because you get people who love the IP to tune in for the first episode. Yeah, but it's no guarantee they're going to stick around.

2:08:42 - Paul Thurrott
There's a bunch of really good Halo games you could have made fans. That's true.

2:08:47 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, you could have had, and you can facilitate fan service while still bringing the newbies through.

2:08:53 - Paul Thurrott
You could also do what the best movies that are made out of books do, which is you tell the story well, it's so well done that it makes someone leaving the theater or whatever want to go buy the book so they can get the more complete story. And if the video game was done right, it would have been halo combat evolved, would have been season one, but it would have been, you know, condensed because it has to be. And then if you really want to go play the game, it's there. You know it's on game pass. By the way, it's one of the few reasons to own it um, so yeah, let's take a break.

2:09:25 - Leo Laporte
We've got the back of the book just around the corner. That means your tips, your apps, your brown liquor of the week, all ahead with Paul thurot and Richard campbell. You're watching windows weekly, we're, by the way, on. I love it that we have all these live listeners and viewers now, because we're not only in the club twit discord, but we're also on youtube.com/twit/live, twitch.tv, uh, x.com, Facebook, Linkedin, Kick. We're everywhere. So I hope you watch live.

The show is every Wednesday around 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern Time, 1800 UTC. Go to one of those sites. Usually it's slash twit, you know, but you can also search for twit On X. We're almost always right at the top there because there's not a lot of other live stuff going on. Should be pretty easy to find us and watch the show live. But don't forget to subscribe and if you like what you see, if you like these two, join the club, add free versions of the shows. You get lots of club extras. We've got a inside twit coming up on Friday. Lisa and I'll explain the changes that are about to occur. All of that at twit.tv/clubtwit. We thank our wonderful members for all their support Our show today, brought to you by 1Password.

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2:14:08 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, they both kind of a tip and an app pick in their own right sort of if that makes sense, and they're both sort of Copilot related. So in Windows 11, whatever version Copilot was jammed down everyone's throats. It was a pain, it was a resizable pain and then it became an app. So it's an app now. It's an app and you know who cares, right, I don't use the thing, I don't really care. It's an app and you know who cares, right, I don't use the thing, I don't really care. But the thing that has impacted me is they replaced that right context menu key to the right of the space bar on these new computers with a copilot key. Normally the context menu key, yes, and oftentimes that means that that new key is right next to the left arrow key, which I use the arrow keys a lot, kind of a keyboard shortcut guy. I'm also, you know, messy, I don't you know, look in.

2:15:02 - Richard Campbell
You don't have the precision figures of a 20-year-old anymore. Big fat fingers, that's what it is.

2:15:06 - Paul Thurrott
There you go. So what that means to me is I launch Copilot possibly 10 to 20 times a day by mistake, and someone at Microsoft Telemetry was like, oh my God, this thing's going gangbusters, turning this into an app. It was the smartest thing we ever did. But so because I hit it by mistake, right, this happens to me all the time. But here's the tip it's an app, it's a web app and that means you can hit control plus W to close it. So as quickly as I can launch that thing by mistake by hitting that key, I can also type control plus W and get rid of it.

2:15:42 - Richard Campbell
It's the other hand too right. So your fat finger on the right hand and you clean it up on the left hand.

2:15:47 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, clean it up with the more muscular finger of my left hand, I guess Slightly tied to this I am paying for. I'm still paying for Copilot Pro, which is the consumer version of Copilot from Microsoft 365, basically I use it. I've tested it for writing type stuff. I just don't like that. But the thing I still use it for every day is I create images for my website with it, right, and one of the benefits of using the paid version which sounds like a little thing is it creates images in 16 by 9 wide format, right. The free version is square, which is garbage, because a lot of times you can't. You know, the important bits of the image can't be cropped out easily, whatever, so I pay for it. Important bits of the image can't be cropped out easily, whatever, so I pay for it.

So Microsoft last week released Microsoft Designer, which we talked about. It's a web app that links into the Photos app now in Windows 11. And Microsoft Designer is kind of the brand they're using for the co-pilot-based image generation capabilities of Microsoft's AI platform. But if you go to designerMicrosoftcom, which is his website, among the things you can create with it aren't just the you know, canva style designs, like you're going to make a newsletter or a whatever you do with these things, I don't know a business card or something. Uh, you can generate images and when you go to that link, it works just like copilot and it will create a choice of image aspect ratios, including square, wide and and portrait, and you do not have to pay for it to get it. So I'm going to experiment with this and we'll see. Maybe I can stop paying for this thing, yeah.

You do have to sign into Microsoft Designer with a Microsoft account. So there's that.

2:17:29 - Richard Campbell
And notice, not an M365 account, because it is personal only. It is not supported in the M365 ecosystem.

2:17:36 - Paul Thurrott
That will change obviously in time. But yeah, but for now.

2:17:38 - Richard Campbell
I hope so, because it's sure messing with a lot of heads, yeah it will.

2:17:41 - Paul Thurrott
I mean it will, I'll just leave it there. There is a. There's probably some kind of a limit, right? I mean a daily limit probably and no, a daily limit probably and no, a daily limit definitely. Right, you couldn't just sit there and generate 1100 images. It would probably, you know, you'd lose your tokens or whatever. But I don't, you know, we'll see if there's one over the course of a month, but you know, for my needs it might be fine. So anyway, I guess my point is I I initially was dismissive of Microsoft designer, but now it might become a core part of my workflow because this thing is free, and why not? So it's something to look at if you like to generate images. I like the Copilot ones still the best of all of them, the big ones. So it's the same back in.

2:18:28 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I had a great demo of this designer by an MVP a couple days ago and I was blown away. Yeah, you know, it's impressive, yep.

2:18:39 - Leo Laporte
Mr Campbell, is there a Run as Radio in our future?

2:18:43 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, it came out this morning actually. So you know, I've had an ongoing series talking about the co-pilots, of course, and the. You know, the air quote phrase is always make sure your data estate is in order, which is just, yeah, like make sure your systems are secure. It's one of those impossible to know, never complete, kind of problems, and we've always talked around what that would look like, and I decided to stop fooling around and just go to the expert, and joanne klein is that expert. The tool you want to use if you're really going to take an organization's data security, governance and data sets, governance and controls and so forth seriously is a product called Purview, and so Joanne is like one of the best in the planet on Purview, and so we got a chance to just go down and say, all right, I got this problem, I've now gotten budget to clean up the data security problems, right, because the boss wants all the co-pilots and I've warned them of this problem and they're afraid, so now I have budget to go for it. What do I do? And so we started going through exactly what Purview can do for you and it's tagging approaches and so forth.

What's interesting is to see that the LLMs are showing up in Purview itself. It's getting very good at identifying sensitive information on its own. So you know it's really good at recognizing personally identifiable information. So in some ways you could count on it for turning up things you don't even know about. But I mean, the main thing here is just identifying data uh, that's sensitive and how it's sensitive. And then it also switches over into rights management as well. So internal documentation can't be taken out of the office effectively If you've tagged it. As soon as it's like that it's got a security profile on it and can't be opened only under certain circumstances, only for a certain duration of time, like there's lots of protections there and absolutely sort of the. This is the full-on. So you want to do co-pilot right way? Here's an earlier step and we had a awesome conversation. She's brilliant well done.

2:20:43 - Leo Laporte
Run as radiocom now. Thank you, you have a unique brown liquor pick this week yes well, well moved out loud when I saw this.

2:20:52 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah, I and okay, so they. We got us at the stage here, and the stage, of course, is that, uh, the last half of july is sort of the big birthday weeks for a bunch of my friends, including myself and my wife, and so we hosted a party over this weekend. Happy birthday for a number of friends that thank, and so this was a gift, right? This is one of the whiskeys that I got given, which is the tequila task. Finished version of Writer's Tears. So the least I could do was write about it and figure it out, because we've already talked about Writer's Tears. In fact, we talked about Writer's Tears in January on show 864, a show we called Word Doesn't Respect Me. Why Writer's Tears, tears, where does the phrase come from? Well, this is this idea that all of these irish writers the james joyces and the yates and the oscar wilds and so forth were heavy duty drinkers to the point where, while they were blocked, their tears were alcoholic. Right, their tears were literally yeah, that's, that's the phrase.

writer's tears.

Uh, I'm, this is a t. The original writer's tears is what they call a vatted whiskey. So the company behind it is a company called uh walsh distilling and they don't actually make their own whiskey, right, they are what they call a non-distilling producer. They're a brand operator, but they chose to make it interesting whiskey in writer's tears in that it's, while it may be a combined whiskey, it's only barley, so there's no neutral spirit in it whatsoever. They use a couple of different distillation processes, which is basically built on what stills could they get access to. So the whiskey is actually a combination of 40% triple distilled single malt, which is likely from the Cooley distillery, and 60% triple distilled pot stills, likely from the new Middleton distillery. They finish it in American bourbon because that's an inexpensive casking. They don't put an age appellation on it, so it's almost certainly three years because that's the minimum amount of time to still call it Irish whiskey, and if you're going to go longer than that, you might tell somebody. So you don't. And in the end I think the conclusion I came into in January was listen, riders Tears is very tasty, but for its money you can get a cheaper whiskey, you can get a better whiskey, it's mostly you're paying for the marketing of it. Now, uh, and that's fine.

You know the the, the walshes started out only in 99. They're they're a newcomer relatively speaking. Well, they've been in 20 something years now. Writers, tears. They didn't produce until 2009 and they were originally in a partnership with a company called uh, with an italian called Ilva Serrano. These are the guys who make Death Serrano and Tia Maria and a bunch of other things, and they were trying to build a distillery in Ireland, which they got something up and running in 2016, although they've renamed it a couple of times, and it doesn't make any of the Walsh, just whiskeys. They make something else called the Busker and it seems like when that relationship broke down in 2019, that distillery, I think, went with with Ilva Serrano. So that's sort of lost.

But in 2021, when I, when I wrapped up the show, the conversation in January, I hadn't really gone on to other acquirers because it didn't seem to make any difference, just as they had plans to do some other contracting and variations and so forth. But in November 21, they were actually acquired by a group called the Amber Beverage Group, undisclosed some, which is a normal practice. Amber Beverage Group is one of the largest alcoholic producers in the Balkans, of all things. So they actually started out of Latvia. There's a core company that's from like 1900. And at this point they own over 100 brands. They're very much this massive multinational like in 180 countries kind of thing, and they routinely buy up liquor distillers and liquor producers. They often keep their principals behind as managing directors, and so that's what they required in 2021. And Bernard Walsh of walsh whiskey is on as a managing director for that, and so they.

But but they also own like I just looked at the last five it was like a couple of of collective of uh distribution houses. But then also like fabrica did tequila's finos, which is a huge producer of tequila, a bunch of dozen different brands out of tequila mexico. They've got mountain spirits out ofos, which is a huge producer of tequila, a bunch of dozen different brands out of tequila Mexico. They've got Mountain Spirits out of Austria, which did a bunch of different kinds of snaps and so forth. Like it's a big operation and so they have a lot of different products that they work in and they are spending money on Walsh.

So they did commit this year to building a new distillery in Ireland for Walsh to the tune of like 35 million euros. So that's a that'll be a serious distillery and that's how we come to this, because Walsh has nothing to do with tequila, but Amber Beverage Group ABG does. So the way they describe it is it is writer's tier. So they're doing the same thing with bourbon casking. They probably spends a year or two in the bourbon cask and then they finish it in Anejo tequila casks for less than a year. It's almost certainly the.

Ka tequila. Wow, Well, it's a great question, isn't it? We're going to get to the drinking part soon, but one of the reasons you know it's Ka A. It's definitely owned by ABG.

2:26:15 - Leo Laporte
And this is the graphics they use all the time.

2:26:16 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, although the day of the dead skull, sugar, yeah, sugar skull yeah, they're doing the day of the dead thing, but they call it a cinco de mayo whiskey, so it's like, do you understand?

the colonies that's not right well, they got the history right. Yeah, and I understand that, since the act was right, writer's tears was always already going down a bunch of specialty versions and when abg got involved it's even more like. At the current count, there's like eight or nine. There's redhead copper pot, double oak cast strength, uh, mizadura cask, single pot, still marcella cask. There's even an inniskillen ice wine cask, inniskillen's in ontario, but okay, uh, and then there's this one.

And if you look at the, the link I provided is actually the press release, which I loathe, but that's the way it is, because it's abg that's promoting it, not walsh whiskey, and it's actually what I would call and most whiskey people call a duty-free whiskey. That's right. They sold it to the loop, which is the Dublin duty free service, and uh, well, okay, listen, in general, I do not buy whiskey duty freeze. If it's, if it's a normal whiskey, it's not that inexpensive, or it's one of the special additions which are designed because you need a gift, or that you don't know enough whiskey to you, know you, so you don't know enough whiskey to you know, so you buy the pretty bottle, right, that's the game. And this is 150 us dollars at 47 percent. Oh, that's right. Yeah, it's crazy.

2:27:46 - Paul Thurrott
So I mean it looks like whiskey, it's brown it looks like it's got no burn oh man, that is damning with faint praise, as we say it is weirdly sweet and it's got kind of a late finish on it. So the sweetness is the.

2:28:03 - Richard Campbell
I think it well remember it's only had the. It's had nine months in a tequila barrel. Right and, by the way, tequila barrel is an american oak barrel. It's just had tequila in it and if it's an Ajo then it's at least you know, two years that it's had tequila in it. This is not great for $150. And just you know. I went and looked because you know I do that for $150. Do you know what kind of whiskey you can, kind of Irish whiskey. You can buy a bottle of yellow spot for that. You can buy red breast 15 for $150, like really very nice Irish whiskeys, yeah, uh, and then go down from there. You know, the red breast 12 is only $60. The so is green spot and heck, regular writer's tears is 42, which, by the way, there's nothing wrong with that, except that it's actually a 25 whiskey. So why should you buy this if you're a whiskey?

2:29:08 - Paul Thurrott
fan. Well, the bottle's cool. I mean the bottle's cool.

2:29:10 - Richard Campbell
No, you should my point here if you're a whiskey fan, you don't buy this. This is a whiskey that your friends buy you because they want to get you something you haven't had. Oh yeah, and you only do that once. It's brutal, just once. Right, they should, because they're only going to buy a whiskey you haven't had, so now they've done it. They won't do it to you again.

2:29:28 - Paul Thurrott
You're not going to buy this so you're saying this is a rite of passage that we just need to accept?

2:29:34 - Richard Campbell
if you, yeah, listen, my friend gave me this whiskey for my birthday. He meant well, but sometimes you know, and he did mean well and he did, he did his task right, which is to get something unusual. It's unusual right, um, it's harmless. You know, got a little heat, you know a little burn going on, now that I've drank a little of it at lunchtime.

But yeah, it's nothing profound, it's just a curiosity and a pricey one, oh boy. So again, if you want to, if you've got a friend who's had everything, look, I would hate to buy whiskey for me, Like that's impossible.

2:30:14 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, I'm just saying I'm a writer who spends a lot of time in mexico, so the yeah, the whole notion of this thing is intrinsically appealing, yeah, well, anything, yeah, except that I imagine anybody from mexico would look at this and go.

2:30:22 - Richard Campbell
Why?

2:30:22 - Paul Thurrott
did you say? Cinco de mayo, like what they're like I need you to sell your home and move right now. Yeah, like just what are?

2:30:28 - Richard Campbell
you, what are you doing? Yeah, um, and it's not like there wasn't somebody down in Mexico that knew that they bought a huge facility in tequila, right, like those guys know and, by the way, those you know done better. And cod tequila makes a day of the dead tequila that are in skulls. Right, that looks exactly like this. Right, like this graphic is exactly like the container. Is that 3d?

but it's a day of the dead whiskey. Yes, right, that's what it is. I suspect that there was an american involved who said, oh, we don't have anything to do with day of the dead, but cinco de mayo, that's a party so okay, the mexican saint patrick's day, yeah, yeah listen in the united states.

I think it's a very good idea and I did talk about this in the black carnitas right, it's also made in tequila to age tequila in bourbon casks. I think that's a good idea. I don't think that it's a good idea to age whiskey in tequila casks it seems like a bad thing.

2:31:31 - Leo Laporte
This is vodka in a crystal head, autographed by Dan Aykroyd. Now, how much would you pay?

2:31:40 - Richard Campbell
Yikes. I mean it's basically grain alcohol that's been cut with water. I know it's vodka. I mean I'm sure you just need some money. Yeah, the bottle's great and that's. You know, the nature of vodka is that you have to sell it on marketing, because you're not going to sell it on the taste of the product. That really doesn't do anything. Yeah.

2:31:57 - Leo Laporte
Right. Anyway, it feels like somebody's opened this, it seems like there's some missing.

2:32:02 - Richard Campbell
It might be water all the way down.

2:32:06 - Paul Thurrott
That's what I used to do.

2:32:06 - Leo Laporte
Well, yeah, Dan Aykroyd drank some of it before I went out bit smudged. He signed it for me but his autograph got just a little bit smudged.

2:32:15 - Richard Campbell
Anyway, I'm glad I've had this, because it reinforces things I already thought Like. In general, I think that duty-free whiskeys are a mistake, and I think that these combined caskings are very challenging to do. And when I look at what ABG has been doing with all of the variations, this is not a company who's carefully grasping a bunch of different whiskeys and getting the most from it. This is a company that's just trying to find something that'll sell, and so they make as many things as they can lay their hands on based on what they already have access to.

2:32:44 - Paul Thurrott
It's the Netflix of whiskeys.

2:32:46 - Richard Campbell
It's like listen, we couldn't use this barrel for tequila anymore, so why don't you soak some of your whiskey in it, right, like that's the sense I get from this. Yeah, oh yeah I mean it's a cool looking thing.

2:32:58 - Paul Thurrott
It is a very cool looking thing like it's.

2:33:01 - Richard Campbell
It's very pretty. You know pay. I hope they paid that designer well. They did a good job. It should be a day of the dead whiskey. Uh, that would at least be legit. Yeah, but uh, and I'm not unhappy to have tasted it. I'm also glad to occasionally talk here about whiskeys that are a mistake too. Right, it's not the only time we've done this so far. Most of the time, I can't just say every time this is great, you should try it, because I do say that a lot. Yeah, and this is one of the ones where I'm like no, no, no, no.

And the good news is you're probably not going to find it. The good news is you're probably not going to find it. They've only done one run of this and I think it didn't sell well, so I think this will be gone soon.

2:33:42 - Leo Laporte
This is also, I have to say, a very instructive lesson about not buying whiskey at airport duty-free shops, so I will make sure not to.

2:33:45 - Richard Campbell
I mean in general. No, I think that makes sense. The big thing here is go. Duty-free's eventually figured out that people had the internet and so they'd look at the price of a regular available like a Macallan 12, and they'd go.

2:33:58 - Paul Thurrott
this is no cheaper than at home. Arguably it's more expensive, except they get to carry it back.

2:34:04 - Richard Campbell
It's the same price and inconvenient, and so then they started making editions that were only there.

2:34:10 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, which is smart in its own ways.

2:34:13 - Leo Laporte
Smart in an evil way, yeah, so they can't look it up on the internet anyway, yeah yeah, well, the only chance you look it up is it's only the duty-free.

2:34:20 - Richard Campbell
So it's exclusive right. So, and that at least stabilizes the price, but it doesn't mean it's good.

2:34:27 - Paul Thurrott
Because it was good, you'd sell it in more places this is like when you go to a restaurant and they're like our special special tonight is some fish thing and you're like you're trying to get rid of this, aren't you?

2:34:38 - Richard Campbell
In general. The special is sell this before I feed it. Buy this before I feed it to an animal.

2:34:42 - Paul Thurrott
This is about to go bad. We need to get rid of this.

2:34:44 - Richard Campbell
That's why it has lots of sauce. It's special.

2:34:50 - Leo Laporte
So much you learn on this show. So much from Richard Campbell and Paul Theriot. We're glad you were here for Windows Weekly. We'll be back again next Wednesday. Richard Campbell is at runisradiocom where you can find his podcast, runis Radio and NET Rocks. He also has a very elaborate speaking schedule and probably is coming to a town near you sometime soon.

2:35:17 - Richard Campbell
Do you post your schedule anywhere so people can? I probably should, because uh, yeah, like the fall is crazy. I'm gonna be in orto, I'm gonna be in warsaw, I'm gonna be in tunisia, lithuania, like normal places how do you do this?

2:35:30 - Paul Thurrott
do you have a?

2:35:30 - Leo Laporte
speaker's bureau. You, you represent, your represents you, or how do you get these bookings?

2:35:35 - Richard Campbell
oh, they reach out to me on linkedin mostly. They know you, they just know you. You got a good read around you. Make people happy when you come to speak to them there's a lot of me on youtube these days for certain topics, so often they're asking for talk.

2:35:49 - Paul Thurrott
I've done before and I still have Richard campbell videos in my uh safe. You know watch saved watch list, whatever it's called on youtube. You know the you know kind of the history of windows development type stuff.

2:36:00 - Leo Laporte
You know this it must be quite entertaining. I mean, if you're getting that many bookings you're clearly a premier. You know, guy like I've had some practice.

2:36:10 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, you know, we've been doing this for 30 years these videos. That's great. But you know, we talked about the high school thing like one of the reasons I love talking to high school kids because they'll kick your butt. Man, that's a tough crowd, yeah, but if you can light a 15 year old up or a room full of them, you've done something. No kidding, and it makes it makes those tech crowds simple and you know, take them on, take them on the ride, let let's go, we're going to go, it's going to be fun.

2:36:36 - Leo Laporte
Paul Thurott is at Thurott.com T-H-U-R-R-O-T-T.com. Be a premium member and you'll get even more great content. And, of course, his books are available at LeanPub.com, including Windows Everywhere, a History of Windows Through Its Development Systems, and also the field guide to windows 11, now with windows 10 inside. I guess, now that I have a new windows 11 machine on its way, I might have to get that book so I can know everything there is to know. But are you gonna do a special arm version of the book?

2:37:09 - Paul Thurrott
no, I mean there's no real reason to. I'm not sure I should cover some. Do a chapter. Respect of it somehow. But yeah, something, I got to figure that out. Do a chapter.

2:37:20 - Leo Laporte
No, not a special version. Join us every Tuesday or, sorry, every Wednesday and, of course, watch at your leisure. You can subscribe to Windows Weekly and your favorite podcast player, or watch the YouTube videos YouTube.com/windows weekly um or download it from our website. That's another way you get a twittv slash w? W. Don't forget to join the club If you're not already a member. Twit.tv/clubtwit. Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell. Have a great week. We will see you next time on Windows Weekly Bye-bye.