Windows Weekly Episode 859 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 Therats here. Richard Campbell is here. I will finally find out who sent me all that whiskey. I might have a clue as to that. Also coming up, windows 11, the final patch Tuesday of the year arrives. What's in it? And Paul reveals how many hours he played video games this year. The answer might surprise you. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love. From people you trust this is Twit.
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therat and Richard Campbell, episode 859, recorded Wednesday, december 13, 2023. Taste the darkness. Windows Weekly is brought to you by Thinkst Canary. Detected attackers on your network while avoiding irritating false alarms. Get the alerts that matter For 10% off and a 60-day money back guarantee. Go to canarytoolstwit and enter the code TWIT in the how Did you Hear About Us? Box. Hello Windows fans, winners and dozers, both. It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Therat is here, shortling away in the background. He's, of course, with Theratcom, his own, what do you call it? Eponymous, his eponymous website? Sure, it sounds like it's diseased in some way. It's a good.
0:01:36 - Paul Thurrott
REM album.
0:01:37 - Leo Laporte
The eponymous REM, the eponymous Paul Therat. Richard Campbell is here Run his radiocom that's the name, of course, of the podcast, as well as sitnet rocks. Hello, gentlemen, richard, are you in your normal spot in Deer Lake?
0:01:54 - Richard Campbell
My normal space back at the ocean. Color problems today for some reason. I could probably rip the camera apart again, but I don't feel like it.
0:02:02 - Leo Laporte
Your little pink and green, which is unusual. Hey, I want to thank you. I got a mystery gift yesterday and it was a bunch of whiskey.
0:02:16 - Richard Campbell
Listen, a bunch of whiskey arrives. Why is that a?
0:02:19 - Leo Laporte
mystery. I should have known. I brought it in. I thought, oh, I can't wait to tell you, richard, about this. And then, of course it's from Richard, it's a whiskey advent calendar. How cool is that, paul, you got one too Did he get the same one I obviously.
0:02:34 - Richard Campbell
I think you got different ones.
0:02:36 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I got the explorers edition. What'd you get, Paul? I want you to explore some.
0:02:42 - Paul Thurrott
I don't remember it's. I think mine is like a rare whiskey the drunk edition. Nice whiskeys.
0:02:49 - Leo Laporte
So this is yeah right. So this starts with. This is I mean, here we are, we're on the 13th, so I've got a.
0:02:55 - Paul Thurrott
So I noticed you started. Oh yeah, I don't know how to do this, so the numbers aren't in order. You start with number one.
0:03:00 - Leo Laporte
No, they're all over it. That's to keep you from drinking too much. That's not going to help.
0:03:07 - Richard Campbell
The complication of wax caps.
0:03:10 - Paul Thurrott
The little cardboard thing you have to open to get to the whiskey might stop me from drinking, but only after a certain point.
0:03:17 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, I'm not sure how this, how this, let's see, wait a minute now. So that was the first one.
0:03:24 - Paul Thurrott
There you go. There's two. I don't understand what's, so you obviously understand this.
0:03:29 - Richard Campbell
I don't know. Everybody lays their ad-bends out differently. It's craziness.
0:03:34 - Leo Laporte
Seriously, I think they're trying to keep it so that you don't just open them all at once.
0:03:37 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah, I'm not almost a balanced thing, right, cause those bottles are heavy, oh maybe that's it.
0:03:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah, oh yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, so this is. I guess this is from the people who it says that boutique whiskey company, world Whiskey Blend. So I don't know who's what this is from, but this is a dram, an ounce of.
0:04:02 - Paul Thurrott
Let's just see how many of these you can get through before the end of the show. I shall I shall.
0:04:06 - Leo Laporte
every time you say insider, I shall take one of these. Yeah, oh, I got bad news for you.
0:04:11 - Paul Thurrott
That's five bills to talk about today One, two, three, five.
0:04:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's like a good day you know honestly, if I didn't have another show to do right after this one, I might actually consider that. But I can't. I can't show up drunk to a show, so you know what.
0:04:26 - Paul Thurrott
I'm not sure that's true. Let's find out.
0:04:31 - Leo Laporte
We used to in the old days of radio. This was a common gag and I did it once. You do it right before the holidays. You get a highway patrol officer to come into the studio and he administers alcohol to you and you get drunk and he gives you a breathalyzer, and then I don't know what the message is.
0:04:50 - Paul Thurrott
Because it's fun. It's under the supervision of a state trooper, yeah.
0:04:54 - Leo Laporte
Like what? Why does that make it better?
0:04:57 - Richard Campbell
The big one is that you cross the threshold where you'll be busted for drunk driving before you think you're that drunk.
0:05:02 - Leo Laporte
That's, I think, the point of it. Yes, right.
0:05:04 - Richard Campbell
And then it becomes fun an hour later, when you really are drunk.
0:05:09 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this smells good. So I wonder is this a house brand or?
0:05:13 - Richard Campbell
It'll be a house. It'll be a. If it says world whiskey on it, then it's a blend from multiple countries.
0:05:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh interesting, oh good, I'm sure there's a map in here somewhere. Yeah, and it's the the Nikkei.
0:05:25 - Richard Campbell
I'm equally sure that if you put it on a map, you couldn't watch from one place to another.
0:05:28 - Paul Thurrott
That's quite good.
0:05:29 - Leo Laporte
Now I would love to give this to Richard and see if he can identify the countries.
0:05:34 - Richard Campbell
My first guess, when as soon as you saw the name on that, is that it's probably one of the Nikkei world blends that has a little bit of the coffee still in it. I think you're right that, nevus.
0:05:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, cause it's not smoky or PD at all. It tastes like a Japanese whiskey.
0:05:47 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, so I think. But then because they own Ben Nevis in the Western Highlands, they would put that in there, which is an almost thing for them to do. Boom, it's a world whiskey. It's very good.
0:05:57 - Leo Laporte
It's. It's quite mild. I could probably drink this and not even notice.
0:06:02 - Paul Thurrott
Well, I bet we would notice In the Okay In a while In the.
0:06:07 - Leo Laporte
In time In time, in the words of Oprah Winfrey, at least according to this animated GIF, you get a shot and you get a shot and you get a shot. Thank you to the discord for that.
0:06:22 - Paul Thurrott
Maybe this is a good time to record a whiskey and pills diet, which is working wonders for me.
0:06:30 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, no, no, we don't recommend that's the Marilyn Monroe diet.
0:06:33 - Leo Laporte
We don't recommend that. All right, now we're going to be serious here, because we have to talk about Windows 11. And if you can do it without using the word insider, paul, I would. I would appreciate it.
0:06:46 - Paul Thurrott
What's up? I would just. My recommendation is pop a few more of those open, yeah, but we can start re-insider With Patch Tuesday, which was yesterday. This is the final Patch Tuesday of 2023.
0:07:02 - Leo Laporte
I'm already down to one here. This is terrible.
0:07:06 - Paul Thurrott
So for Windows 11 users, there's some new features in there which is interesting. So mostly well, not all, but mostly co-pilot related. The big one is that for those with multiple displays, if you open co-pilot on one of the secondary displays, it will open there from then on if you use the keyboard shortcuts, and I should say it will open on that window or in that display which is nice.
0:07:29 - Richard Campbell
That's a nice feature, yeah.
0:07:32 - Paul Thurrott
Actually, one of the things I kind of one of the reasons I don't like co-pilot, especially on a laptop, is that it pushes the windows over. Yeah, you know, honestly, having it over in a second screen is actually not horrible. It also solves one of the multitasking problems with co-pilot which I had in the original version of the book, which is that it does not appear in Alt-Tab or in Task View, which is Windows Key Plus Tab, meaning you can't multitask to it without actually clicking on it. But now you can't. So now it appears in Alt-Tab, but not in Task View.
0:08:04 - Leo Laporte
Are you talking about this new icon down here?
0:08:09 - Paul Thurrott
No, you're on an insider preview thing, oh that's a preview button Pre-co-pilot. Well, I should say it. Sorry, it is that button, but in stable it's not where it is on your machine. Oh, okay, it's over by the search bar. Yeah, because this is down where the charms are, for some reason. Yep, they're testing moving it there. Okay, so to make it more of a one-to-one relation between the button and what it, does I guess.
0:08:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because it's right there. It pops up above it, which makes sense, instead of having it here, which is where it was in the search pill.
0:08:38 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so we don't have that in stable yet, but we do have these two new features. So if you have multiple displays, again, you can move that thing around, and if you have it doesn't matter what you have you can Alt-Tab to it. These are unfortunately CFRs, meaning that you will not see them immediately necessarily. I'm seeing one feature but not the other on this computer and the other feature, but not the first one, in this one, you know, in the laptop. Yeah, so I had to go take. I updated the book today for this and that was amusing, so I had to do it from two different computers. It doesn't matter.
The other thing that's debuting this is less exciting or less good, but is this account notification feature that is in Start, which you'll almost never see. If you open your Start menu and you see a little overlay on your user account picture and you click on it, you'll see a little kind of advertisement in the menu there for you know, turning on OneDrive search or OneDrive folder backup excuse me or whatever Like that's. It's sort of those kind of notifications. And also in settings you can disable that, fortunately in privacy and security settings in the general area. I should just bring that up now and look at it actually, privacy and security general yeah, under Windows permissions and then yeah, so you might already be turning this stuff off.
So in the book I recommend actually turning all of these options off. But show me, suggested content in the settings app will probably be renamed to Start and in the settings app so you can turn that stuff off suggested content. So that's it for 2023 for Windows 11. For Windows 10 users, co-pilot is still in preview, but now it's available to anyone on Windows 10. So if you want to go in and search or seek for that, it's an optional preview update, I guess, and you can get that.
0:10:31 - Richard Campbell
You get that from update or you just go on the list Windows update yeah.
0:10:35 - Paul Thurrott
It's a preview update. Apparently, I don't have a Windows 10 machine so I can't see this part, but I believe it is the CFR, meaning you actually might still not be up to offer the preview update. It's crazy. So the Windows 10 version of Co-Pilot does not do any of the Windows integration stuff, so you can launch a few features, launch a few settings from Windows 11 Co-Pilot. That's not in Windows 10 yet it is coming. That'll be in a future release.
0:11:02 - Richard Campbell
See, the whole problem with this CFR thing is that they're even admitting that they're doing it. I mean, I'm not saying don't do it, because it's a good thing to put out to small sections and then metric them back to see how they're going. But if you put it up on a webpage saying this is happening and then some people don't get it, they just get angry. Don't do that, don't tell them or don't do it that way.
0:11:23 - Paul Thurrott
Google does something similar, in that they roll out new features. Today, for example, there's a Pixel Watch update going out. You may or may not get it today, you may get it tomorrow, you may get it in five days. Yeah, so they describe that as a gradual rollout, a rolling update.
0:11:39 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, and it's also about not knocking down the network right Like it's a lot of devices, yeah.
0:11:46 - Paul Thurrott
But in Microsoft's case it's weird because the CFR is literally random. So back in the day To you it appears random no they say it's random.
0:11:55 - Richard Campbell
No, they literally say it's random, but they might be lying.
0:11:57 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, okay, that's true. Well, in my case, this today's update was random, right, it was kind of interesting, but well, not right. I mean, that's not fair. It was. I only did this on two computers, but yeah, that's how they documented so traditionally for the past several years. Anyway, a feature update would be rolled out on a best known, good configuration basis. Right, your PC. There's nothing there that prevents this. We know this is going to work. Fine, we believe it is. You'll get it among the first. Right, CFR is literally just you know, just kind of goes out.
0:12:31 - Richard Campbell
I mean I'm wondering, for I think I bet A. There's a list of all. When it's a CFR, these people always get it. I bet there are this set of hardware. They never get it right. Right, because otherwise you just create problems Like nothing. It wouldn't be truly random, because truly random would cause to a struggle. Well, I wanted diversity of devices, but with a minimum amount of pain.
0:12:52 - Paul Thurrott
I can't explain this. I don't, logically, I understand the notion of we have an idea of why a certain software update may or may not work well on a certain configuration. Like I get that doing it random is like is there not a better way? And that's where I feel like it's not really random.
0:13:11 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, it could be. Random is a way to say don't feel bad. Okay, there you go. Interesting, when it's not that we're discriminating against you, it was random.
0:13:21 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, one of the random things we look for is the name Throt in your Microsoft account name, if that's there.
0:13:26 - Richard Campbell
But there's definitely an if Throt send each machine something different. Yeah, yeah, and one build, that's the rot. Only curve Right, right, right.
0:13:38 - Paul Thurrott
Change every graph? Is the UI orange for everybody or just me?
0:13:40 - Richard Campbell
Well, and only for a week. So you get all your screenshots redone and then turn it back.
0:13:44 - Paul Thurrott
They did that to me with Windows Vista, by the way, when I first came up.
0:13:49 - Richard Campbell
Last time I was doing screenshots for a book like that, it was like sequel 2000. And the month before release they overhauled the entire UI and changed everything. I redid 120.
0:14:00 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so with Windows Vista they didn't announce or reveal the translucent new icons for all the apps until right before it happened. Yeah, and the book was already printed and we had all the old icons. Yeah, so it was great. So second edition happened pretty damn quick. And that was the beginning of me saying maybe I don't do print books anymore. The print has problems.
0:14:23 - Richard Campbell
There's no two ways about it. Yeah, you do the internet.
0:14:26 - Paul Thurrott
Although, speaking of which, leo's taken off, but he might want to see this. Oh, he's coming back. Sorry, leo, I didn't mean to make you come so, but he just reminded me of this. What I'm going through all my old photos and consolidating my old photo libraries, and one of the things I found from 2010, which I've now put up on the Throtcom YouTube channel, is a 2010 kind of promotional video that you and I made for Windows 7 Secrets.
Oh wow, and I don't remember the what instigated this, if this was something you suggested to me or if I asked you if you would do it, I, I, I, actually it's possible. Yeah, maybe Amazon wanted something and maybe I asked you to do it for that reason, I know.
0:15:12 - Leo Laporte
I blanked it out.
0:15:14 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so Well, you can tell during the video, but no.
0:15:19 - Leo Laporte
Is this on the Rabban? Calendar.
0:15:21 - Richard Campbell
Is this on the?
0:15:21 - Leo Laporte
Paul Throt channel or the no content there. No, I've been going to YouTube.
0:15:25 - Paul Thurrott
Uh, youtubecom slash at sign Throtcom.
0:15:29 - Leo Laporte
Throtcom Got it, yeah you can click the link right on that. Oh my goodness, yeah, this is hysterical. Um, I don't know how I'd get the audio.
0:15:39 - Richard Campbell
We look like children. Great shirt though.
0:15:42 - Leo Laporte
Oh, look how young you are, paulie. Oh, it's 15 year old, paul, holy cow, all right. Well, anyway, it's um, yeah, uh, if you want the audio. Oh wait, a minute, here it is, let's turn it back on.
0:15:58 - Paul Thurrott
Now you should be able to. I was like, well, I you know it's trying to think where should I put the? I should save this, but where should I put it? I don't think it makes sense in the photos and I was like, wait a minute, you have a YouTube channel.
0:16:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, perfect place to put it. Isn't this like your garbage channel, or no? No, no, this is where this is, where this is the. I've latched your hair. I don't remember you looking like that. You're also kind of distorted. I don't know what's going on with that.
0:16:21 - Paul Thurrott
So actually when you go to a of when it's just me in the frame it, it changes the aspect ratio or whatever. Weird.
0:16:28 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I guess we didn't know how to do that. Well, yeah, I mean.
0:16:34 - Paul Thurrott
Even the graphics on this look like the old iOS interface, when it was, you know um, yeah, it's a long time ago.
0:16:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah, win supersightcom, I remember that. Oh, and do you remember that house he used to live in?
0:16:47 - Paul Thurrott
Well, yeah, well yeah, that's where my children grew up. Wow, that was the longest place we ever lived.
0:16:55 - Leo Laporte
How fun, how fun is that. And there's a exercise machine you never used and still haven't used it yet.
0:17:03 - Paul Thurrott
Well, no, I did use it quite a bit for a time, but um, uh, in fact we moved it to the house in Pennsylvania.
0:17:10 - Leo Laporte
Wow. Oh, so we're you're in denim here. Yeah, wow, look at that. Yeah, that's great video, yeah.
0:17:19 - Paul Thurrott
Sorry, I didn't mean to snag you as your drink or whatever.
0:17:22 - Leo Laporte
I was just getting up, as I usually do during. Uh, most people don't know it, because only you see me leaving. I like to wander while you're talking about things. No, actually, um, I was going to give this to Lisa Amy Webb, who's a regular on our on Twitter. Um said us she does the future today Institute. Um set us a very nice holiday gift. This is a set of probably it's valuable Nintendo playing cards. Remember they used to be, uh, hanafu, hanafu do playing cards, uh, but with Mario as the protective, the tarot cards. I'm not opening it because, uh, I think probably this is a somehow valuable. I'm going to put this on eBay. No, I'm going to give it to a Mario loving child in our family. But isn't that cool. Thank you.
So I was just going to run over to Lisa and say, uh, hey, I got something for a stock and stuff for for one of our little ones who is not so little anymore. What are you? You're using an iPad, it looks like to show this, you that's you. That's me.
0:18:33 - Paul Thurrott
You literally say I let you said something like I like to like dig Paul when possible. So I'm going to show it on an iPad.
0:18:40 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's hysterical. It's some sort of leather um harness, which is kind of yeah.
0:18:45 - Paul Thurrott
Well, back then, you know, we didn't have nice little uh iPad holder. I know this probably is like yeah.
0:18:54 - Leo Laporte
So do you know what, uh, the date is of this?
0:18:56 - Paul Thurrott
the windows seven would have been no, not exactly, but it's got to be late 2010 sometime yeah.
0:19:02 - Leo Laporte
Back in the day. Yeah, paul, we've been doing this a long time. Yeah, it says 20.
0:19:07 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we had been doing it a long time when that video yeah, we'd have been doing it for a few years yeah. Yeah, that was our third windows version.
0:19:19 - Leo Laporte
You did. The first windows secrets was 95.
0:19:22 - Paul Thurrott
No, I mean for us. When we started the show, xp was still a thing, but this was just about to come out. That's right and then Vista and then seven.
0:19:28 - Richard Campbell
That's why I started run as two right Cause it's a really great thing to talk a system in about windows technology when visitors just shipped Wow.
0:19:35 - Leo Laporte
Wow, those were the days. Actually, the Microsoft ugly sweater this year is not that ugly.
0:19:46 - Richard Campbell
It's the list from windows, it's from Vista, right, or is it XC? It's sold out instantly too.
0:19:50 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's like an old convention about how unugly it was. Yeah, of course, correct. Next, don't worry. Next year will be Windows 8 or something. Next year will be Bob.
0:20:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well, I'll wear. Next week on the show. I will wear the last year's clippy sweater, which truly is ugly.
0:20:09 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, that's the one. I got that one yeah.
0:20:13 - Leo Laporte
I kept hoping, every time Chris Cappicella came on, that he would give us these sweaters. But no, so screw him.
0:20:21 - Paul Thurrott
Well, no, I think they were actually very hard to get. I think they were limited. Yeah, see, it's not ugly. He often had one.
0:20:26 - Leo Laporte
He often had one. He would wear one. Yeah, no, I'm not saying he didn't have one. Yeah, I'm saying we didn't have one, paul, yeah, I'm not. I wasn't going to buy this one because it is not ugly, it's, it's bliss. And this is, by the way, sonoma County. This is where, up the road, in peace, from here. All right. Back to the show.
0:20:47 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, uh, pop out some whiskey. We got some insider stuff to talk about.
0:20:52 - Leo Laporte
Oh no, that's three. Oh my God, here we go. Oh, I've been putting it in my coffee, but I'm not going to be able to move before long.
0:21:03 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, I find it's best. If you know you're going to be doing this just to slay down, you know, just get it started.
0:21:08 - Leo Laporte
Drink upside down. Uh, this is something called darkness. It's a single malt eight years old. Hello darkness my old friend. Hello, darkness, my old friend. A single malt whiskey in my and eight year old in my hand. Eight year old, this probably is pretty good. It's a. It's a little darker than the uh the other. There's only one way to find out.
0:21:33 - Paul Thurrott
That's all I'm saying. Yeah.
0:21:36 - Richard Campbell
What are you going to do?
0:21:37 - Leo Laporte
You're worse than that state trooper. All right, I'm an enabler You're like power PC. Remember.
0:21:42 - Paul Thurrott
I went to a CS or complex one year and it's like power PC, it's an enabler. That was the thing.
0:21:48 - Leo Laporte
They just said over and over again they didn't understand, they really didn't know what they were saying yeah. Yeah, that was before. It was bad.
0:21:53 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's triggering. Yeah, that's not good.
0:21:56 - Leo Laporte
It's not good, it's not what you want. Yep, all right.
0:22:03 - Paul Thurrott
So we have a bunch of builds. So last Thursday we got canary and dev builds. Um, they're testing undocking co-pilot. So this co-pilot pain that you can now move to a different display and I would imagine one day we'll be able to move to the left side of any display. Uh, we'll apparently or maybe cause they're testing it be available also as a floating pain.
0:22:24 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, it does sound like this is just straight experimentation. How did people want to interact with co-pilot?
0:22:28 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, Actually, uh, one of the features in this list is literally experimentation. So, yeah, you're probably right. Um, minor changes to widgets not the one we're hoping for, although they are also testing separately the ability to turn off the widget no, not the widget feed, the news feed, the news and interest feed, which is those terrible quality news stories Um, and then maybe even replace it, that whole line about the television brought the sewer into your living room.
Well, yeah, this one brings it into your home office. Uh yeah, it's terrible. Um, and honestly, the widgets board, the widgets interface, with just the widgets, sounds great to me.
0:23:02 - Richard Campbell
I would I would actually use that. Hey look, I don't mind a news feed, but make it Reuters, for God's sake, right.
0:23:08 - Paul Thurrott
So there will be third party feed capabilities, but it will be a matter of someone making that happen.
0:23:13 - Richard Campbell
So, and it's the thing is, it's not going to be very long If somebody with enough meticulousness will build a feed of credible sources and go here you go, yeah, there you go.
0:23:23 - Paul Thurrott
So we'll probably see that. Uh, minor changes to the Windows 365 stuff, the two, the boot and switch. I hear that and I think patch, patch and switch. Yes, who are on run?
as this week, Nice oh good, good, good Love those guys. Um, so Windows share we talked about this a little bit. This is an interface I use a lot. I I mentioned two copy files from one computer to the other well-intended screenshots, right and the way that this thing work well actually. So Windows share is a little messed up in the sense that it works differently Whether you're in a folder that is part of one drive or just some other folder. You actually get a completely different interface.
0:23:58 - Richard Campbell
And you can see why. From a technological point of view, from a UX, what are you thinking?
0:24:03 - Paul Thurrott
Well, but okay, here's my problem with this. Um, if, uh, by default, windows will back up your pictures folder to one drive, right, and that's where your screenshots are saved, and then charge you for it. Yes, okay, but that's I mean. Yes, that's a separate concern, but the point is I want to go in there and then share the files. I just the pictures I just took with a different computer.
I can't. I mean I can, but I have to do it in a one drive way. So it's a one drive interface. It's a. I can create a link and it emails me and then I go to the other computer, I open my email, I click on the link, it opens one drive and the web and it can download. This is I just want to get the files Right. So the non one drive Windows share lets you do what I just described. One of the way you can use, one of the ways you can share, is nearby share, and that's the thing I used to do the instant share. I don't know why I can't save a local file from a one drive folder that is there on the computer using nearby share. But you can't. Maybe someday that will happen.
0:24:59 - Richard Campbell
Because reasons I know you're totally right, it should be utterly symmetrical, it shouldn't make any difference at all.
0:25:05 - Paul Thurrott
Right, so let me find. I just want to find a file here so I can describe what I mean.
0:25:09 - Richard Campbell
What's the logical outcome? Just don't use one. Drive Like really Is that what you wanted?
0:25:13 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, so what I've done is I've actually configured a third party screenshot program to save files to the downloads folder on that computer, because that's not in one drive, and then I can use the normal share. So yeah, so that's what I'm done.
0:25:25 - Richard Campbell
Literally. It's like this works better if you don't use one drive.
0:25:28 - Paul Thurrott
This is great. My whole life is a workaround to bad behaviors. Great messaging, yeah, that Microsoft does Right, but Windows share? No, it really is, and you know, I know.
0:25:37 - Leo Laporte
That's generally true statement about all computing, in fact all technology. Okay, we live in the work around the world of workarounds, yeah Right.
0:25:44 - Paul Thurrott
Right, they want you to do something. You don't like it and you say, well, how can I, what can I do to fix this? Okay, so that's that. And the point of this winter share feature in the canary and or Deb build is that Windows share also has other ways to share. Right, you can share via email with contacts, and then you can share with apps that register themselves as share targets. Right, this, they expect Windows eight. This is the, the notion that you're sharing. You know, I have a file to share and it will say well, you know, microsoft teams can do that, microsoft Outlook can do that, microsoft Mail can do that, that kind of thing. I guess what's happening is not a lot of third party apps are signing into this, so what Microsoft is starting to do is just add them. So, for example, what's app is an app you could share files with, but what's up does not register itself as a target for Windows share. So Microsoft is testing that right now and if this goes well, they're going to do it with other apps as well.
0:26:39 - Richard Campbell
They say they haven't said which ones, but they should probably work the other way too, like loop doesn't work with Android share.
0:26:45 - Paul Thurrott
Right. So there's a rumor that Android share compatibility, or Android nearby share compatibility, is coming to nearby share and Windows, so that may, maybe that will happen. Wait, is that what you were asking?
0:26:57 - Richard Campbell
I'm sorry, no, maybe that wasn't the question, but it's the idea that you take a bunch of pictures with your Android phone. You can't mark them all, say okay, share to loop, and they all pop in. You have to go to loop and say get a picture, go, select the photo collection, select a picture, right.
0:27:15 - Paul Thurrott
This is Leo may or may not remember this, but years ago I brought up this idea that I just didn't understand why this wasn't how things work. But if you're on a Chromebook, for example, one of the interesting things that's possible there is you have file system access to your Google Drive. Big deal, we have that Windows right, but it doesn't have to be syncing to the Chromebook Anything in there can be accessed through an open file.
Dialogue through a share, whatever it is. I mean, I've never understood why that wasn't the case with everything. These things are up in the cloud. I should be able to select some files it doesn't matter where I am or where I'm doing it in and they're in one drive and say I want to move these over to my Google Drive. But just make it happen. This functionality doesn't exist. It's sort of like the notion. That loop is sort of like Cloud Olay or whatever it's like. This stuff should all be connected. I don't know why operating systems don't do this, what Chrome OS does with Google Drive, but it just makes sense to me. I don't get it. Anyway, I would like you know it'd be so much easier to share things. I guess what I'm trying to say, so all right.
So last Thursday the co-pilot on docked widget changes Windows 365 minor things. Windows share the thing I just described. They're added character count to a notepad character count. Microsoft People want word count also. Duh. I added this functionality to my notepad clone three or four years ago. I don't even remember anymore If I can do it. I figure the Microsoft probably has the smarts they can figure this out. But that's cute. They're continuing to update notepad. Okay, on Friday we had a beta, beta, beta. We had a beta build, we had a beta channel build. The Windows share improvement I just mentioned is there, and then some minor Windows store stuff that's not really worth discussing. Today we have two more builds Dev Channel. Microsoft is deprecating something called Windows Speech Recognition, which is a technology that debuted in Windows Vista, if I'm not mistaken.
0:29:19 - Richard Campbell
Wow.
0:29:20 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and replacing it. Actually, it's already been replaced. There's a feature in Windows 11, what's called Paul. The voice feature is called. It's based on their nuance acquisition right, this is the guys who actually it's called. What is it called? It's called voice access. Sorry, so, voice access in Windows 11 and probably 10, I don't use 10 anymore, but probably is that modern nuance-based speech recognition engine. So they're deprecating WSR and replacing it with voice access. That will disappear in some future version of Windows, so that is available in the Dev Channel as of today. And, richard, this is the one, this one's for you In the Canary Build today, a new feature called Windows Protected Print Mode, which is, wait for it, that exact thing we've been talking about. Microsoft is taking over print drivers.
0:30:11 - Richard Campbell
Yes, oh, one little print nightmare which, by the way, was two years ago.
0:30:19 - Paul Thurrott
Right.
0:30:19 - Richard Campbell
Yes, where we?
0:30:20 - Paul Thurrott
Well, no one ever accused them of moving quick.
0:30:22 - Richard Campbell
No, I mean, the reality was when you had, when you used print everywhere, features in a network in, or when a machine would log in and one access the printers. It was an administrator-level thing, so it would auto-escalate to administrator account to be able to connect you to the printers. Ok, and that was with level three drivers, which is virtually what all that the OEMs make. They don't try and make level four drivers because those are hard, yeah. And they inferred, and they did the classic panic fix. The first panic fix was forced to UAC part, like why are you auto-escalating, Use the security for so? Instead, when people would fire up the machines, they would just immediately pop a UAC. And because that makes people happy, that was great, you know. And so their new level of screaming matched da, da, da, da, da. And as they finally fought through it over a year, they came to the conclusion yeah, we should just take the drivers.
0:31:15 - Paul Thurrott
We need to take the server.
0:31:16 - Richard Campbell
So here, well, and, by the way, the customers are delighted actually, oh, I bet yeah, because one of the things that happens when Microsoft writes to drivers not only does it do the fundamentals, it does not try to sell you ink even once.
0:31:29 - Paul Thurrott
No, they only do that in a Star menu. Yeah, so that's right. And bad news sources the two companies that still make printers were not too happy about this, but so here's what's interesting. They Windows Insider, is not very good at this, but they provided more information for the first time possibly ever. And apparently this kind of standard they're using are printer. It's something called Mopria, certified printers, m-o-p-r-i-a it's not cups. Huh, I'm surprised.
0:31:56 - Leo Laporte
I have no idea. Cups have been around forever and is open source.
0:32:01 - Paul Thurrott
So, but the point is what we were just discussing no more third party software installers, better security printers.
0:32:09 - Leo Laporte
Can you still install a third party driver if you want to or no?
0:32:12 - Paul Thurrott
Absolutely, it's Windows, so yeah right, yeah, ok, I mean, I'm sure.
0:32:15 - Richard Campbell
Of course. So this is really an admin thing, right? This is an admin problem. Is that I want. What I can't do is you, as a domain user, give you a printer, right? Not automatically Right? I have to actually configure it and deploy.
0:32:30 - Leo Laporte
See, we can do that on Apple, I think because of Bonjur.
0:32:36 - Richard Campbell
And you can do it on a home network and all kinds of things, right, because you already have administrator actions. It's an enterprise, I get it. This is when I want to restrict people's access to their machines, restrict their capabilities, stop them from installing apps, that kind of thing. Printers go along for the ride, right, and working around that without elevating privileges is complicated. But the alternative is ransomware. And we don't mind if consumers get ransomware, nobody cares. We care when corporations get ransomware Right, right.
0:33:03 - Leo Laporte
Well, and the truth is, consumers are no longer targets.
0:33:06 - Richard Campbell
I mean, there's no money there, there's no money there, but it's not.
0:33:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you're not yeah.
0:33:11 - Paul Thurrott
There's no money there. I might count. I've said inside a previous 17 times not only I don't know if you were keeping track, but I want to make sure you didn't miss any, Because you have some drinking to do. I'm sorry.
0:33:23 - Leo Laporte
I'm running out of steam man. I might. You might find me next time. You cut your ear sweating, but you're cold, Is that normal?
0:33:30 - Richard Campbell
I had on the table. There it is, yep. How was it? Did you taste the darkness? I did think I didn't, I can't, I have.
0:33:41 - Paul Thurrott
I think the darkness is a fantastic title for this podcast.
0:33:45 - Leo Laporte
I put I put the first one in my coffee, so at least it's a speedball. And actually it really enhanced the flavor of the coffee. It was good. So maybe you're right, maybe there were coffee grounds in the whiskey. It sounds good. Sounds good.
0:34:00 - Speaker 5
But I think I'm going to save the darkness for later.
0:34:02 - Paul Thurrott
Shall I save the darkness? Yes, yeah, of course. Ok, so that's it for the Windows Insider preview. That's 18. But we have other Windows news.
0:34:14 - Leo Laporte
Well, let me take a break, can I?
0:34:16 - Paul Thurrott
Well, I'm not done with Windows, yet I want me to finish Windows. Two Windows items left.
0:34:20 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's only two. Ok, go ahead then.
0:34:23 - Paul Thurrott
Fine, fine You've been drinking.
0:34:24 - Leo Laporte
You don't even know what's on your mind. What do?
0:34:26 - Paul Thurrott
you want now. Ok. So Clipchamp is one of those unicorns. It made me stop using something that works really well and use something else and said it's one of my favorite apps.
0:34:39 - Leo Laporte
You did like two or three episodes on Clipchamp. I think it was three.
0:34:42 - Paul Thurrott
On the answer on Windows yeah, I'm going to be doing a new one because there's four new features in Clipchamp Nice, one of which, maybe two of which, are AI based. The first is one of the ones they announced for Windows 11. 23h2, which is auto compose, and this is just one of those video creation things. You throw a bunch of assets at it and it creates a finished video for you and you can edit it. Obviously, you can just publish it, right. But the other three we did not know about.
What is something called content library, and this is a consolidation of the UI. They used to have previous or separately, had separate entries in the toolbar down the side for video, image, music, graphics, whatever. Now there's a content library. It's all in one place, so, whatever. That's fine. I think the UI was getting a little busy. It now allows you to do audio recording directly in the app. Actually, done this a few times, or needed to do this a few times, and I used whatever the thing that's built into Windows. What do you think I would know? I don't know Audio recorder.
Audio recorder. Yeah, something recorder. What's it called? Something different recorder steps. No, that's not sound recorder. Sorry, they've changed the name since Windows 10 sound recorder.
0:35:49 - Paul Thurrott
So much for that, and you import that stuff. I know it's like something.
0:35:52 - Paul Thurrott
It's something speech, sound something, something, something, something. Yeah, it's a feature I don't use a lot, but anyway we're fine. But now you can just do it directly in the app, which is great. Only up to 30 minutes, though. So if you need to a long voiceover, you will still have to use a third party tool or cut it up into pieces, which is fine, and then some improvements to its text to speech editing functionality, which, by the way, is one of those amazing things and that was an episode I did for Hands on Windows, because there's a set of three, five, whatever features that Clip Champ has that, I think, would really surprise people, like how good they are.
You know, auto transcription is one of them and that's part of this. So this is if you have a personal account. This is available now. This one's going to the commercial subscribers in early 2024. But all the other features I mentioned are available literally everywhere, no matter how you access this thing. But this is also not only does it do text to speech, which is basically like an auto transcription feature, but now you can change the language, the voice, you know, the men and women's voices, different types of the emotion in the pitch. You can, you know, edit the script, which actually isn't new, but you can do all this all from a single place, and this is, you know, for a free, goofy little kind of web based video editor.
0:37:01 - Leo Laporte
Not bad. Yeah, their market. It sounds like it's for TikTokers, right? I mean, that's kind of who they're.
0:37:07 - Paul Thurrott
And 57 year old males. Yeah, and people like you, it's yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:37:12 - Leo Laporte
It's for people like you, it's for people like Paul and TikTok and TikTok, so, but they seem like they're focusing on on that creator space kind of. Yeah, yeah, although I see training in the shot. You know, I guess a lot of people would use this.
0:37:28 - Paul Thurrott
They brought it to Microsoft 365 commercial accounts, right, yeah, and one of the neat things about that is it integrates with your OneDrive storage, which you can't yet do. I'm expecting this someday with a consumer sorry, a consumer Microsoft account. So right now the way I mean you could just use OneDrive. Right, you could obviously store your stuff in OneDrive. But right now the way I do it is I just have stuff on the desktop or whatever folder. I pull the things in. If I move those files later or delete them, they're not available in the project anymore, right, they're gone. They don't know it doesn't know where it went. One of the nice things about the OneDrive integration in the commercial version is you can move from computer to computer. Those assets will always be in the same place, up in OneDrive for business, right, and it doesn't matter what computer you're on, they're there, so they just kind of come up. So that's a really nice feature. It's kind of an obvious feature. I'd like to see it come to consumer and I think it will.
0:38:18 - Leo Laporte
And then finally, by the way, that's an example of AI right and that's example I mean, of that at Microsoft's could put AI everywhere.
0:38:26 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, right. In fact, the the first feature I mentioned was one of the AI features they promoted for this 23H2. Right, the auto.
0:38:36 - Richard Campbell
It's how the term ultimately goes away, and it just becomes just a computer.
0:38:39 - Leo Laporte
It's what a computer does.
0:38:40 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, that's what software does.
0:38:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly.
0:38:43 - Richard Campbell
I think that's fine.
0:38:43 - Paul Thurrott
Some day. Some day, we'll have AI PCs and we'll just call them PCs. It'll be fun. So that's what they do. Speaking of which, we know that Intel is going to release their major like processors tomorrow, dropping the high. Yeah, they've changed. We know. They rebranded the processors. Right, there's a core, ultra, whatever. This is the first time in a few to several years they don't remember the timing that they've released. The are releasing a mobile chipset in the fall. Usually they do desktop of one gen and then mobile. This year they're just doing mobile and it's now, and you know, we'll see. We'll see how that goes tomorrow. We're going to learn more about that tomorrow, but obviously we can expect MPUs, et cetera, et cetera. So this past week, amd released their equivalent version of this, which is the Ryzen 8040 series mobile CPUs, just like the Meteor Lake stuff. Oddly, this kind of kills me, but most of them have MPUs but some don't, and it's like guys, seriously. So the two lowest end chips in this family do not have MPUs, but the rest of them do.
There's a logical reason for this, Paul yeah, cheapness.
0:39:56 - Richard Campbell
You build, you build one chip, you build it one way, and then you test it. Oh, it's spinning. And if the and, if, the MPU is bad.
0:40:02 - Paul Thurrott
You cut it out and it's a chip that doesn't have an MPU. Yeah, ok, does they use like a tiny little ice cream scoop to get it out of there?
0:40:09 - Richard Campbell
It's like that. It's like that, only a laser, yeah, basically.
0:40:13 - Leo Laporte
Those chips are the pigs foot of processors right.
0:40:17 - Richard Campbell
You've eaten all the rest of the pig.
0:40:19 - Leo Laporte
This is what was left. You get everyone.
0:40:21 - Richard Campbell
Every one of those chips other than the top one is a defect of the top one. Right, right, I have. Every works is the top one and it costs more and the defect stack pushes it down. They cut out processors, they cut out memory blocks, they cut out feature sets.
0:40:35 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, ok, well, any hope.
0:40:38 - Leo Laporte
It's confusing for consumers, but because you know, they don't know that there's no NPU in this one, but they need one, I guess.
0:40:46 - Paul Thurrott
I mean based on the, the SKU layout and all this. I mean these are well would you?
0:40:52 - Leo Laporte
let me ask a question Would you benefit with Bing chat or this clip champ auto edit feature if you had an NPU, or it wouldn't use the NPU for that kind of thing?
0:41:02 - Paul Thurrott
That's going to the cloud.
0:41:03 - Leo Laporte
So now you wouldn't benefit Clipchips in the cloud, but as is being OK. But any on device stuff you would Right. And so in the short, term drivers?
0:41:14 - Richard Campbell
right? That's always the question. Everybody's making their own NPU layouts, Right? Is there any? Is there any ODBC for NPUs? At this point, like I don't think there is. I think it's very.
0:41:23 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we're going to find rights, like certain workloads are going to work better on this one chip set but not the other. But those will. Yeah, that's yeah. So I don't know, we'll see. I mean, I'm kind of waiting to see how Intel comes out of the gate here, but I do think it's a mistake to ship any chipsets right now. They don't have MPUs, but OK, whatever. I'm not as familiar with AMD's chips, but we know that Intel today has you P, h, whatever series mobile processors. It is the lowest end of the two U series chips that don't have the MPU, which is the lowest end ones. So these might be for very, you know, thin light, maybe even fanless type devices. That wouldn't necessarily, although they are 21. What parts are actually that kind of kills that cheap? Yeah, yeah, but they are the lowest end version. So, yeah, I really look this is a big improvement over what was the case before. Remember, back sometime first half of the year, amd released a single chip that had an MPU in it. So now they have several. So now what?
0:42:22 - Richard Campbell
you're seeing, is this incorporated into die design? Yeah, and so the norm will be in you. And if they know an MPU, the ones don't sell, then they're just going to scrap them and stop making a skew for them, right? I mean, there's another set that were even more defective than those that they just scrapped.
0:42:39 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, yeah, I mean sure that makes sense. I we need to wait and see on this stuff, right? Because A it's going to be what is in windows that takes advantage of this, and then what is going to be in all these third party apps that people use. Like where will this make the most sense, you know, is it?
0:42:54 - Richard Campbell
and a lot of these models are not so big that they couldn't run on on board. You know this is the question of did you get it free from a cloud company? Why are you supplies prize that uses the cloud?
0:43:05 - Paul Thurrott
So when Leo asked would Bing chat or whatever windows co-pilot benefit from this? You know the answer is no today, but that's today, right? So yeah, in the future there will be well, they're out today some, but there will be apps and workloads and things that run on device and it will benefit from that. And then we're going to start to see that hybrid thing. I think this is the. It's not just an interim way to save money, which is almost it's almost what I said. It is literally probably the best way to do it. You know when you can run things locally, when you can't, or if you need to augment the results with whatever might be in the cloud or your connectivity is low or whatever.
0:43:39 - Richard Campbell
This kind of hybrid approach is going to make a lot of sense. I mean, I'd love to see a two-stage model. I've just never heard of one. For me there's small enough that it fits on the machine, or too big needs to go to the cloud, and LLMs in general are too big Right, well, but this will happen, this is happening.
0:43:55 - Paul Thurrott
I mean it is going to happen, right, and so, just to suit, well, I mean, it is right. So I mean a simple, simple example that does not exist but is the Gemini stuff that Google announced last week, or whatever that was? There's three tiers of that. The smallest one fits on the phone, the Nano version. Today, there's only two features on a pixel that will take advantage of it. They're both on device or everything happens on device. It's a small subset, but because it is a subset of the bigger, the pro and, I think, ultra versions of this thing, it's conceivable that you know, when connected to the internet, and you know if you're paying for some subscription to something, what can happen on there, well, and what can't, well, you know, and they'll do that.
0:44:31 - Richard Campbell
Well, now we get into the app comparison, because Google is selling you the device, and so they're incented to have it not cost them anything after that.
0:44:38 - Paul Thurrott
So it'll get as much compute on the client. Well, that's why I said the phrase subscription service Right.
0:44:45 - Richard Campbell
And then it's always going to be the trade and you can just sort of debate which one is which I mean. I've, you know, Homocyst is now doing this with voice models, depending on the amount of compute in your Homocyst device, and so you're finding out that the low end ones, you're not very good yeah.
0:45:01 - Paul Thurrott
You're going to want the big ones. Actually, that's a good model. I mean, in a way, though, that is a good description, because you ask an assistant a question, it's not processing, processing, processing. It's, you know, going up to the cloud and saying, ok, what's the answer? Yeah, there's no reason future versions of those can't do that as well. Have a little kind of tensor processor in there with their little small language model, whatever, yeah.
0:45:24 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I mean it's something I can answer from the device or do. I have to go to the cloud anyway.
0:45:28 - Paul Thurrott
So, it is an interesting thought.
0:45:30 - Richard Campbell
I just haven't seen it yet.
0:45:31 - Paul Thurrott
I hope it happens. No, we haven't seen it yet, but they've talked it's coming. This is, this is a thing, this is a and that's why I started to say an interim way to say money, but not really, because, honestly, I think this model makes lots of sense. Even even when the price of cloud processing, of AI, comes down, it will still make sense, just from a latency performance perspective.
0:45:52 - Leo Laporte
Privacy. A lot of companies won't use Chant G.
0:45:57 - Paul Thurrott
Sorry, I'm a Windows guy. I don't really think about privacy, so I don't know. No, but you're right, you're absolutely right.
0:46:02 - Leo Laporte
And this is, I mean Google's trying to do the same thing. Everybody's trying to create these new small models that will fit on a device. Yeah yeah, it's interesting that this is a Microsoft product, not a open AI product. This is from Microsoft Research. I guess they're doing their own stuff, right?
0:46:20 - Richard Campbell
Everyone is I mean yeah so I use a race, no choice about it.
0:46:24 - Leo Laporte
But tomorrow, because it all comes up when sorry, because Microsoft, you know, basically owns open AI right.
0:46:33 - Paul Thurrott
Well, you know, I mean honestly and just with an ear toward the CMA and the FTC. No, they don't own them. I, let's be very clear.
0:46:41 - Leo Laporte
Forty two percent.
0:46:43 - Richard Campbell
There's no ownership stake, it's everything's fine until you make Uncle Sachin mad. Yeah, you know what.
0:46:50 - Leo Laporte
Honestly either one.
0:46:51 - Paul Thurrott
Open. Ai is a teenager who's moved out of the house. Technically you run their lives, but you don't actually make decisions for them and you don't always like what they do.
0:47:00 - Leo Laporte
There's also probably a certain amount of pride, like the Microsoft Research guy saying, hey, wait a minute, we can do this, why not, you know? Yeah.
0:47:11 - Paul Thurrott
OK. So I was just going to say I don't know what, I don't know how Intel's thing is going to go down tomorrow. But the one thing we're always looking for is Give me examples of you know what. How do I? What would make my mother or some normal human being say, yeah, I need to upgrade my computer?
0:47:28 - Leo Laporte
You know, we're still looking for that and I'm talking to that. I don't think.
0:47:31 - Paul Thurrott
Well, here's the thing. I think it will, but it won't be the same thing for everybody. Instead of like one killer feature, killer app or however you want to say that, I think it's going to be a little one to some number for everybody. It's going to be a little things. It's going to be a lot of little things. This will make my video editing capabilities a hundred times better or ten times faster, whatever it might be.
0:47:52 - Richard Campbell
I think the pixelates a great example of that. The video, the picture editing abilities on the pixel. Oh, it's incredible Because of the tensor processor, like I've tried to. It's very self-contained.
0:48:03 - Paul Thurrott
I have many times needed to do background removal and Photoshop. It does for many, many years. They've had tools for many, many years, yeah, and they have to do a bunch of edge editing work that you do manually. You, you and you screw up and you get into the thing you try not to delete and it takes a long time. And then I walk up to a pixel with my fumble fingers Amazing and I can remove a Volkswagen from the back of the picture even though it's interspersed behind people's limbs and things, and it looks great and that's that's the promise of AI, right?
I mean that's incredible.
0:48:35 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, and if you put that in, you put that kind of clip champ might be the thing. Friends, yeah, like, yeah, the chip chat might just be the thing where. Look at this on a surface PC with an NPU, how quick it is and how simple it is to do that, and they're like okay, I want one of those.
0:48:49 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you're going to have a you know, a CPU, a better GPU, an MPU yeah, on a laptop. And have the ability to video is a great example, because it hits on so many different things. And just take the processing off of the CPU where where you can and battery life is going to be better, and then it's just what you can do with it. It's going to be amazing.
0:49:08 - Richard Campbell
Well, the boss got our surface studio laptop. Oh good, oh, they're good. And put the CAD program on it that does the real time analysis of cloth behavior, when it actually and she's using the pen and grabbing a corner of a shirt on an, on an avatar and pulling it and showing how it pulls back to shape.
0:49:24 - Leo Laporte
Oh, my goodness.
0:49:25 - Richard Campbell
Maybe. Wow, it was stunningly fast, like it just looks natural.
0:49:30 - Paul Thurrott
That's okay, that's good, I'm glad to hear that. And then she's like now.
0:49:33 - Richard Campbell
Let me, let me show you with this different cloth and you could see the behavior change just as a type of cloth.
0:49:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, see, we are living in very interesting times. I have to say we really are. Yeah, yeah, it's. It's funny because for a while, like the last three or four years, I felt that the industry had kind of stagnated and in fact, the best thing they could come up with was was VR and AR, and that's not.
0:49:57 - Paul Thurrott
And you could just tell this wasn't it, this wasn't going to be the thing.
0:50:00 - Richard Campbell
No it's very pandemic. Escapist right.
0:50:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, right, but, but, yeah, but, I only want to escape from that Holy cow. And yeah, the things they're doing now, it just it's amazing.
0:50:12 - Paul Thurrott
And it literally you got to remember it's. It's been under a year, Well, just over a year, Since the thing that happened with open AI and chat by accident or and Microsoft internally saying, yep, let's do everything different.
0:50:27 - Richard Campbell
And obviously that's what I mean, but that's the LLM side I would also say you know, mid journey was already doing its thing, like the visual manipulation to be going on for a few years and yeah, but it's a lot of stuff we just described with clip chat and so forth, is in that class.
0:50:45 - Paul Thurrott
This, but this is the tree falls in the woods and no one hears it. Kind of a problem, Like so. In other words, like you know, the app came out with the Gioi and the Mac and it reached a certain audience, but you know, I'm not saying it's innovative, but it took Microsoft to do this at scale, for this to kind of reach the masses, and the end result was, you know, the internet and Windows 95. And now we all need a new computer. The hope is that AI can do this again. Like I said, I don't think right now we have that thing. I can't point to anything and say this is it, you know?
0:51:17 - Richard Campbell
but maybe a year from now.
0:51:19 - Leo Laporte
It's also that hundred little differences that eventually it's like if you didn't have this, everything's hard the part of the problem, of course, is that a lot of what we're doing, as you pointed out, is in the cloud, so people aren't yet seeing a need to do it locally. But those things will come Well, I mean look, we've all sat there and waited right.
0:51:38 - Paul Thurrott
Well, it's answers some stupid question what if we could do that like faster?
0:51:42 - Richard Campbell
Like both my iPhone and the Pixel, have NPUs, you know, and the other part of this is eventually the cloud loss leaders end Right Like eventually we're going to have to start playing for all this free cloud compute we've been using and that's the second.
0:51:57 - Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they want to get us off this as quickly as possible, yeah.
0:52:02 - Richard Campbell
But in the meantime a product and then can raise the price. It'll be easier.
0:52:06 - Leo Laporte
I you know I'm paying 20 bucks a month for chat GPT I have. Did I show you the custom GPT's I wrote? I think I might have showed you those. So right now, the advent of code coding challenge is going on. Yeah, that's how you do that. That's a better advent calendar, probably for my brain and whiskey.
0:52:25 - Paul Thurrott
I think you should do those, I think those together. There you go. It's the 13th. It's open a door and every time you succeed at a coding challenge, you drink one of the little maybe okay, but I've been using this common list because I'm writing in a common list.
0:52:41 - Leo Laporte
I'm using this common list expert. I wrote in chat GPT. It has replaced all the web searching. I used to do because I put in all of the, all of the you know the books, because I believe did you build tracking into it and advertisers.
0:52:57 - Paul Thurrott
because they did, I don't feel like getting the full.
0:53:00 - Leo Laporte
No, but let me show you. There is an under down here, under additional settings. It says you want to use the conversational data in your GPT to improve our models? Sure, and it's hidden away, by the way, that little little check. Well, the fold, yeah, below the fold, but I put all these list books because they're all open now, public domain. Yeah, I read it, I remember. And this, yeah, I showed you this. It's been incredible, you know, I can't remember. Oh, it's really neat. How do I do? I forgot how to do a loop and it's I mean, it's middly, it's not super fast, but, boy, it generates code I can use if I want to. Or, more importantly, I can say oh, yeah, I get it now. I remember that this has saved me huge amounts of time.
0:53:41 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, but you don't find um Googling like stock overflow is efficient.
0:53:45 - Leo Laporte
I'm curious because no, and this is what I like about these custom GPTs. I told it and you can say this it's an option. Please don't go search the web, Don't make up anything. Only give me stuff from this 10 foot shelf that I gave you of classic Linux or list books. So the root, so every answer I've gotten so far has has been right on there's been no. Or it says I don't know. Has yet to say I don't know because I gave it so much content. Yeah, right, it's, yeah, yeah.
0:54:14 - Paul Thurrott
And it's a, it's a very finite topic. I mean it's.
0:54:18 - Richard Campbell
The problem with these things, right, is that it tries to make stuff up when it's trying to answer.
0:54:22 - Leo Laporte
This is the good you this is a good use of. Yeah, you know.
0:54:26 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, you know what it is, Leo. It's the expert system we were promised. It's an expert system, exactly, and it's fantastic which we were supposed to build with Lisp, as I recall. Yes, that's right. That's why it's good, of course.
0:54:43 - Leo Laporte
In fact, one of the one of the books I have in my configuration is is a classic paradigms of artificial intelligence programming by Peter Norvig, who's now at Google, but it's a classic which he released into open source a short while ago. So this is like. This is a four inch thick book. This is like one of your books, paul, and, and the entire contents is in there. So, admittedly, nobody does AI this way, but it's in there. It's actually a great book, even if you're not doing AI. So, paul Graham stuff, all the classic stuff, including the Linux Lisp has the spec for the language, is online, and so the hyper spec, which is the, the actual language spec, is in here too. So it's really it's pretty damn cool. I, you're right. Expert system, it's what, what we were promised, what we were promised Way back in the day. Let me take a little break. You have completed that section, I think. Yes, yes, cause I want to talk about our honeypot. It's honeypot time on the network, because weekly is brought to you by things to canary.
Honeypots are an age old idea, in fact. I remember talking to Bill Cheswick, who created the first honeypot years ago. He had a bad guy roaming around on his network and he's had the clever idea what if I? What if I created something that looks like a genuine file share or a device or a service? But it isn't. It's a. It's a trap for the bad guy. So now this is Bill's a pretty sophisticated guy and this was a very. In fact, he wrote a whole book about his honeypot. I have it on my shelf over here.
But nowadays I mean, you don't want to do that yourself, but you can get a honeypot that does the same thing. It's called the Canary, as in Canary in the coal mine, from the folks at Thinks. Thinks is a great company to do this because they, as their business, have trained companies to teach us how to break into systems. So they're white hat but they know their stuff. So they designed something that they know will attract the wily hacker, and this is something that you add. This is, of course, all. Security is a layer. It's layered right. This is something you add to your perimeter defenses, because you know we all say, oh, we got the best perimeter. Nobody's ever going to get in our network. But they keep doing that, don't they? So you need a way of knowing an alarm system so if somebody is inside the network. You'll know immediately. And that's what this canary is.
You could put one or many. I think a bank might have hundreds. Small operation like ours might have a half dozen. Sprinkle them around. You can make them be almost anything. There's a great configuration, a website configuration tool that lets you say it's a skater device, it's a Windows server, it's running IIS, it's running Exchange, it's a mind's, a NASA Synology.
Nasa, the MAC addresses makes you know, hook up a write, everything's right, it looks completely real. So the hacker goes oh hey, I found something. Here's a file share and they open it up. But it you know something, they don't have the right password, they nothing happens, they move on. But you're going to get a note, a notification, and you're going to get the way you want Email text. It supports a syslog, it's support. You can write your own API. You could write your own custom stuff, webhooks, you can do it via Slack. You know, any way you need, you'll get that one notification that really matters, because when you get that notification, that means somebody has attacked a honeypot, that means there's somebody in your network. And, believe me, you want to know what average companies don't know for 91 days.
And it's worse. Remember the Marriott hack? Those guys were in there three years before Starwood noticed they were in there. They the damage, they do, and this is how ransomware guys work. Now, by the way, they get in there, they don't trigger the bomb right away. They investigate, they exfiltrate so they can blackmail you. They get all your company data, your employee data, your customer data, exfiltrate that they can then look at where you do all your backups, wherever all the shares are. Then they trigger the ransomware and now they've got you dead to rights. So the folks at Sony picture enterprise studios where they where, they got in there and they just, for nine months, downloaded movies and contracts and all this stuff. If they'd had a canary, it would have been different.
The canaries also, by the way, can create files. They call them canary tokens, an unlimited number that you scatter around your network, things like and we've got a few on our network like payrollinformationxls or employeeaddressespdf, or you I mean, if you want to really blatant socialsecuritynumbersdocx. These aren't really documents. As soon as the bad guy double clicks or tries to open them, or even tries to download them, as soon as he touches them, you get that notification, the one that really matters. You register your canary with a hosted console for monitoring and notifications. You can tweak the services. You could turn on a specific IIS version, for instance, or you could turn on open SSH or a file share whatever you want.
If you want to know how well this works, just ask CISOs who use it. In fact, there's a whole page canarytoolslove of people. You'll know well-known CISOs saying this is a must. You got to have this. Customers in all seven continents use the things canaries and love them. The best part is you deploy your birds and then you just forget about them because they're quiet until the worst happens. There's somebody in your network and you'll know right away how much.
Well, I'll give you an example Again. It depends on how big your operation is and where you want to store these guys. Canarytools slash Twits the place to go $7,500 a year. It gets you five of them and, of course, the more you get, the less it costs. You get your own hosted console, you get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance. I mean really good. They look like an external USB drive, which means you can put them all over your operation. Nobody will even know they're there.
One more thing when you go to canarytools slash Twits, use the offer code TWIT in the how Did you Hear About Us box. That gets you 10% off, as, no matter how many canaries you get for life forever. That's a good deal. But to make it even better because I know maybe this is the first you've heard of it, maybe you're skeptical they have a 60-day, two-month money-back guarantee for a full refund. So you have two months to decide if this is going to be something you want. I have to tell you during. We've been advertising for this for almost a decade, I think. Now they have never once said somebody say I want my money back. It's never been claimed. Because these are great, you will want one canarytools slash twit offer code TWIT in the how Did you Hear About Us box. The think's canary, let it be your canary in the coal mine of your operation. Back to Windows Weekly, paul Therrat, richard Campbell, and we move on from the Insider program. Another shot for me Taste the darkness, leo. Taste the darkness.
Taste it To antitrust. I can't believe they're investigating open AI.
1:02:21 - Richard Campbell
I'm just happy we were talking antitrust and not saying Blizzard, even once.
1:02:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh, hallelujah, it's dead, it's gone. That's progress.
1:02:30 - Paul Thurrott
Well, unfortunately that's not over yet either, but yeah, so the UK CMA and now the FTC have both said that they're investigating this special relationship that open AI has with Microsoft, this ownership without ownership, the company that Microsoft could never have required because of antitrust concerns. They have sort of acquired, but not really.
1:02:58 - Leo Laporte
Now, to be fair, they're looking into it. This is not an. They haven't opened an official thing right. They're just looking into it, they're checking it out.
1:03:07 - Richard Campbell
And this is probably political pressure. You should look into this, right. I mean, I think the structure of the deal was pretty straightforward. They were going to. The maximum they could get is 49%, which they don't have because not all the 10 billion has gone through like da, da, da da. There's ways to go on this. But I just I mean the fact that you put the UK CMA and the US FTC side by side. You mean both the two organizations that made fools of themselves over the Blizzard acquisition. Those two really.
1:03:38 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, that's a weird coincidence.
1:03:42 - Leo Laporte
I do mean those two. I want to defend them. This is their job and they should be. I look, yes.
1:03:47 - Paul Thurrott
No, look, this came up during Activision Blizzard. It has come up from time. It came up with the Microsoft Cloud Stuff in Europe, or the Microsoft Teams integration and Microsoft 365. Yes, these things should be investigated. That doesn't mean I have come or anyone has necessarily arrived at a decision. I'm not saying this is illegal or anti-competitive or anything like that, but this is their job. They should look at this.
1:04:11 - Leo Laporte
They do Right and I want them to.
1:04:14 - Richard Campbell
I just wanted them to do it well, right?
1:04:15 - Leo Laporte
Well, that we can't help you with, it's a whole larger issue of AI regulation and how it should be regulated, whether it should be regulated full speed ahead, and that's really almost a philosophical discussion as much as an antitrust discussion.
1:04:32 - Paul Thurrott
So yes, that's true, right, okay.
1:04:36 - Leo Laporte
Yes, but we're not here to discuss philosophy. That's the next section. I'm so I'm versus Kierkegaard here.
1:04:43 - Paul Thurrott
That's the next section. Yeah, google beat Epic in dramatic fashion in their antitrust trial over their app store policies. That's why this was a because this is one Epic lost to Apple. You know that's a little, yeah, people always say that, but actually I mean think there were very big differences and an Epic didn't lose everything with Apple actually.
1:05:03 - Leo Laporte
That's still not completely decided. The store may still be opened.
1:05:07 - Paul Thurrott
The thing is yeah, and there's other things going on with Apple and their app store, which we'll get to in a moment. I I everyone has like a pet kind of a theory about like why this went down different. You know, obviously Google was destroying evidence, which is hilarious and problematic. That's one thing somebody said likely criminal.
1:05:29 - Leo Laporte
I think Tim Sweeney and Epic said yeah, Apple just didn't write anything down, or we would have had that.
1:05:35 - Paul Thurrott
Well, so so Apple's motto culture helps a little bit. They don't partner as much and they're much more secret.
1:05:44 - Leo Laporte
The biggest difference is one was a jury trial and one was just in front of a judge and the jury really liked Epic.
1:05:52 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but what does that mean? So right, so unfortunately, you know this. I mean, I I don't want to go too far down this little rabbit hole, but one of the big problems we have in tech and I would say obviously in our whole society, is this kind of everything's black and white and people are on really weird divides and, honestly, most things in life are very nuanced, right. So I hear certain arguments be made and I can tell which side of the fence is coming from and it kind of just gets the bristles going a little bit.
The notion that this is what's been said to me is that, like well, a judge understands the law and these jury. You feel in a jury where idiots and it's like no, the judge in the Epic V Apple practically begged Epic to introduce more evidence. It was very clear that they saw huge problems with Apple's behaviors. It's just that you, they have to apply it as a kind of a matter of law and they just didn't make as good of a case as they did against Google. So you know, you live and you learn, and obviously they did better against Google.
1:06:48 - Leo Laporte
You say in your article. The cases were identical. Is that is that fair?
1:06:53 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, if anything if anything, apple's abuses are more severe because Apple does not allow side loading, right. Right, I mean, if anything, google could at least make the case, like you could put it on there if you want it. And Epic made the case that, yeah, but you make it really hard. Okay, fair enough, but you can do it. And so, yeah, they, they're literally identical, I almost.
1:07:14 - Leo Laporte
I almost feel like Google gotten more trouble because they were more open. They had open source. Yes, I was just going to say this.
1:07:20 - Paul Thurrott
So, for all of the evidence destruction, the real problem for Google was that there was too much documentation of them doing bad things, and they have agreements as Apple does, by the way with third party app makers that are secret and that are beneficial to that one company companies like Netflix and Spotify. Right, they have special deals. The judge made the point that if you could do this for Spotify, why can't you do it for Epic? We're describing exactly the same kind of arrangement. All that Epic wants is to do what you did do to Spotify. It's a reasonable thing, and that very statement makes one wonder when this guy comes back in January, whatever it is, if he's not going to Go right down this path and say, yeah, you need to give them what you gave Spotify.
1:08:08 - Richard Campbell
Well, the jury was perfectly aware that he said go make a deal. The fact that Google failed to make the deal, yeah, Like what did you think the jury was going to do?
1:08:16 - Paul Thurrott
Well, so here's my theory on that one. There was a team of people from both companies that met originally, then the two CEOs sat down. There was a total of you know, maybe three or four hours, whatever it was of meetings. I'm positive that Google's general console gave the advice to the executives at that company that you need to drag this out as long as you can, because the changes that are coming to app stores and the fee structures and the in-app payments and all that are inevitable. But you might as well lap this revenue up while you can, and if you just if you agree to what they want, which is what they're going to get eventually, you'll just cut that money off now.
1:08:58 - Richard Campbell
So what you do is you wait for the quarter or two, or maybe six, it could be years.
1:09:02 - Paul Thurrott
I mean appeal, appeal again, you know. So that's my theory. I only have a theory, no, no, no, I mean we don't know right, we don't have the inside track. We were in the room, but that's my theory. So that, and you know, here we go Now we have this wonderful precedent and things are going to happen, but Apple has got problems very much related to this in the EU. There's a report in Bloomberg, which is very reliable with this stuff, that the EU is going to charge them with abusing their monopoly and their app store by basically taking Spotify's side in this case, where Apple's 30% cut of in-app subscriptions makes it impossible for them to compete with Apple music, which doesn't, of course, pay those fees. Right, because it's Apple's product. Right, and, of course and this is a classic antitrust bundling problem, right, right, the same problem that Microsoft ran into with IE.
1:09:57 - Richard Campbell
Well, that's always going to be. The argument with app stores is if you're going to run the app store, you can't have products on the app store.
1:10:02 - Paul Thurrott
But this is. You know. Amazon does this in their online store, Apple and Google do this in their online stores.
1:10:08 - Richard Campbell
And, like Apple, didn't mean to make an app store. Right, they had to because the phone was being jailbroken. Back in the day, jobs said if you're going to build apps for the phone, you're going to build them in HTML5. You're going to build them for Safari? Yeah, right. And then they had to build the phone. So he had to do something. Yeah, but I'm not putting them off the hook. They've made billions and billions of dollars on it, but nobody planned the app store. We just sort of ran into it and, oh, it makes a lot of money. Okay, let's keep going, right, yeah, these are emergent forces, but ultimately you get into a conflict of interest. You know, shopify doesn't have a shop on Shopify.
1:10:47 - Paul Thurrott
Right, this is. This is my McDonald's principle. You know that Ray Kroc didn't start McDonald's to make America fat and unhealthy. He did it to take advantage of something that was happening at the time of the rise of cars and superhighways and people were on the go and more and more people, you know, needed to eat on the go. And it was. It was a good idea and a good business anyway. That had, you know, maybe some ramifications that no one kind of saw coming.
1:11:12 - Richard Campbell
No, and nor can you. You have to get to this place to say we need to revise it.
1:11:18 - Paul Thurrott
Well, this notion that we're going to create an app store, we're going to lock it down and we're going to make it, and the point is we're going to make apps safe. You know we're not going to let that happen. That was the argument.
1:11:25 - Richard Campbell
If you need to look at the argument in, context, we were having a lot of problem with that software, right, I mean they? The gestalt of 2008 was you don't download software from the internet, it'll wreck your machine, okay.
1:11:40 - Paul Thurrott
But that was but lockdown was actually and lock in was a big part of that strategy. And I will just you just mentioned jobs initial idea, or Bapples initial idea, for apps was web apps. They didn't lock that down at all. So I mean, you know, other than the limitations of the platform itself, right Of a browser which is basically in a sandbox.
1:11:59 - Richard Campbell
Yep Right.
1:12:01 - Paul Thurrott
But but not as locked down as the the current apps are.
1:12:04 - Richard Campbell
So it's this is going to change. Well, at least made the promise and said we are going to inspect these apps, we're going to make sure of them safe. You can trust our store. That's what our cut is for paying people to evaluate the software that goes in it. Yeah.
1:12:18 - Paul Thurrott
I'm not saying they did it but they did say it positive they didn't do a good job of it and that all the security you need is built into the arp.
1:12:26 - Richard Campbell
And you can see that in Android at least. They didn't even say it. It's like it's a store.
1:12:29 - Paul Thurrott
Good luck, well, I'm sure they claimed it at some point, but yeah, yeah, it's a store. Yeah, it is so. And then, also related to this uh, EU was also going after them for NFC. Uh, apparently only apples apps can access, or they have to. I don't know how that works exactly, but they're going to force them to open up NFC to third party.
1:12:51 - Richard Campbell
So they got them. They got them on USB-C, thinking, yeah, make an open standard too. It's yeah, yeah, these, for the most part, are you know when this is done right? This is about making it better for the consumer yes, Right, and and they don't always do it right, but in general these are good scrutiny yeah, it's always the largest companies in the world.
1:13:12 - Paul Thurrott
Right, it's marketed that way. It's not always true, uh, or so there's, that's, you know. Uh, this is one of the other things I, you know, part of that nuanced view of life, which is that, you know, I can say over here that Google makes the best search engine, or the best whatever, and I can also say over here that Google is a uh uh, uh uh belligerent monopolist that arms competitors, partners, developers and consumers. Um, those two things sound like they don't go together but they're not mutually exclusive. Sure and um, and that's part of the, you know, like I said, real life looks like right.
Yeah, and Apple's the same way. I mean it's you know, everyone's like oh, I love that, I like that. I got locked in like oh, good for you. The matrix is calling. I enjoy it here in the uh class of locked in and the warm, wet embrace of the Google made of the Apple matrix, yeah Great.
1:14:02 - Leo Laporte
Well, there is an advantage to the ecosystem, I see, but there's also a butt in that sense.
1:14:06 - Richard Campbell
Oh yeah, that's what that's the big. We do call it a walled garden right, not a prison Right Right.
1:14:13 - Paul Thurrott
Which is a gated community. It's a pleasant wet right, which is yeah.
1:14:16 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, the gate keeps you in as well as keeping things out, guys. That's that point.
1:14:21 - Leo Laporte
Well, and look what's that? You don't cover it. But that story with beeper mini is a really good example. This is the Android app that lets you use.
1:14:28 - Paul Thurrott
Well, I don't cover it on Windows weekly, I mean it's.
1:14:31 - Leo Laporte
it's not really a but yes, it is, it's an Android.
1:14:33 - Paul Thurrott
Although I well, but that could have fallen under the anti-trust angle. I mean, um, not that anyone's looking at that explicitly, but yeah, they uh. The thing I compared beeper mini to was Microsoft went to um Apple and said you know, we've got this thing called cloud gaming, we'd like to put it on your service. And they said nope, uh, you need to pay. People have to pay for every uh game that they stream. It's like well, that's not the model that no one's buying a game they're, they're streaming it, just like Netflix. You let Netflix and no problem, nope, can't do it. Why can't do it? We're not doing it.
And then Apple quietly changed the terms of their license agreement for the store to add the stipulation that game streaming services cannot do this. You know, it was just the real reason, and they and they could cite all these reasons, like security and you know, whatever, has nothing to do with it. They just wanted the money. That was the reason, and they retroactively changed the rules to explain what they did earlier. So, when you look at something like Xbox, uh, cloud gaming or Amazon, luna, uh, if you want to play that thing on iOS or like an iPhone or iPad, um, you have to use a web app, Right, cause that's the thing they can't control. So, yeah, don't think they're better people. This is bad and in some ways worse. Um, everyone, they're all terrible. You gotta remember any of these. All these companies are terrible on some level, right, that's actually the point. The greatest nuance of all. I'm not sitting here suggesting Microsoft is awesome. Microsoft is terrible too. Of course they are. They're too big not to be terrible. You can't get this big without being terrible.
1:15:58 - Richard Campbell
You know Amazon. You're running into somebody's. You know benchmarks for success. Yeah, I can lead to behavior that's harmful to the customer.
1:16:06 - Paul Thurrott
I always, you know, um, people will say things like well, I don't use, I think, google, I can't trust Google, I don't know. Whatever you know, pick your poison right. I mean, you're, you're, you're compromising in some way every day with whatever you use. Sure, you can't really. I mean, you can, I suppose, a little bit of um, but for the 99% of us that aren't using Linux and all open source software et cetera, um, you know, you kind of can't escape this. Um, it's you. Just, you've either educated or not, have made your decisions about where you're going to compromise.
1:16:36 - Richard Campbell
I think we started this conversation with it's all about finding the workarounds right. It's like what are the workarounds?
1:16:41 - Paul Thurrott
you can live with. Yeah, and I bet if we go through all of the Twitter podcasts about, uh, google, android, iphone, whatever a lot of the advice, a lot of the discussion will be literally around that topic. It's the you know something. Something's not good. How do we make that thing better? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, um, you know, you know we don't like to promote the negative aspect of it, but in, but this is the reality where you know we're trying to find solutions here. You know it's, you know, not just complaining. It's like, well, okay, this is the problem, now how do we fix it or at least work around it? Anyway, I'm just complaining. I don't have any solutions. I just complained, um, anyway, all right, so that's the. Yeah, that's everything for antitrust. Um, and I don't really have any Microsoft AI stuff. It's just some interesting AI stuff has happened. Well, actually, I do have one AI thing for Microsoft, which is that they've reached this agreement with the um America. I have to read this because it's like AFL CIO, the American Federation of Labor and Congress and industrial organization.
1:17:39 - Richard Campbell
I'm sorry, you're talking about one of the largest union groups.
1:17:42 - Paul Thurrott
This is the worst band name since. Anderson group at Wakeman.
How, um, or uh, Emerson Lake, palmer and what was. The other was, uh, and there was one guy I extra at one point who I can't remember. That goes to Paul, I don't remember. Um, anyway, yeah, they represent about 12.5 million workers, um, and obviously the concern here is, uh, you know, honestly, it's somewhat similar to the concerns in the entertainment industry. This past year we had the big strike in Hollywood, right, a couple of strikes, actually different strikes. Um, they're worried about the future and because of AI.
1:18:13 - Richard Campbell
When I saw the story, I mean you thought this is a Brad Smith move because, let's be clear, Microsoft makes their living automating stuff. Union should not be very pro Microsoft. That's exactly right. Unless you're. Brad Smith, it can get in there and get an agreement to say you know, we're going to try and make this less painful for you. At least give you a heads up about where things are going.
1:18:35 - Paul Thurrott
Hmm, I don't want to get off on like a uh, like, uh, oh uh discussion about labor unions. Here we go, yeah, yeah, yeah, but no labor unions have a big resurgence for you.
1:18:50 - Leo Laporte
This is uh, yeah, labor is big now, right yeah.
1:18:53 - Paul Thurrott
It's socialism. No, I'm just kidding. So, um, I I appreciate their efforts, uh, but unfortunately, the types of jobs where you would have a labor uh labor union, sorry uh are the types that might eventually lose their jobs to technology right, ai or otherwise.
1:19:11 - Richard Campbell
this is, you know, the automation labor unions showing up in software development these days, two friends, are they okay? Yeah, it's not the way you remember it and I and I understand the concern and it's tough for me to be a big pro labor guy too, but you know, I live in Canada. We're a little friendlier to this whole idea. There you go. Yeah, I'm just a little bit of a bastard. So for the people who brought you roads, yeah, we right, we.
1:19:35 - Paul Thurrott
Um. I had a friend who worked at the time at Intuit and they would go to whatever trade shows. And, um, one time, him and his buddies from work showed up in Las Vegas and they got down to the show floor which was being assembled all around them and they no one was doing their stuff. And they said you know we, we get time to kill. And we know we, we built this thing, let's put it together. And so they built a booth. Yep, yeah, this is. You know, the story is great. And then they did, a group of guys walked up and they sat down and just kind of watched them do it and they got the whole thing set up and everything was right. And then finally they, one of the guys, came over and he says you got this thing set up exactly the way you want it. And he goes yep, he goes, good, now tear the whole thing down again, that's our job. And they literally waited until they finished, yeah, until they put it all back. And it was the union, you know, of course.
1:20:20 - Richard Campbell
Or they turned the power off to the booth and it takes them two days to find how to turn it back on. Exactly Right.
1:20:29 - Paul Thurrott
And then, from a technology standpoint, there's two kind of Gemini related Google news pieces. One was from the other day. Google has something called a notebook LM, which is basically Google keep with some AI stuff going on there. They have now released it out of preview. It's available in the United States only, I should say so it's available to anyone with a Google account that wants to kind of check this thing out and guess what?
1:20:52 - Leo Laporte
The creator of notebook LM will be on this week in Google and about now. Oh, neat yeah.
1:20:56 - Paul Thurrott
I'm not sure. I've never been a fan of the Google keep UI, but that might just be some stupid mental block. I think it was smart of them to build it on top of that.
1:21:04 - Leo Laporte
It's essentially what I just showed you with my expert system. With LISP in a GPT. I could do exactly the same thing with notebook LM. The point of it is you upload your documents, your PDFs, your business contracts, and now you have an AI. You can query against that and it's based on like that's your data set.
1:21:21 - Paul Thurrott
Is that stuff Exactly? And this is, this is one of the greatest use, one of the great uses of AI.
1:21:28 - Leo Laporte
And they just put that on the Pixel phone too. Now, by the way, with the feature drop, I can get summaries of my text.
1:21:35 - Paul Thurrott
This stuff is popping up all over Android.
1:21:36 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I'm actually excited that Google's got a market strategy here. Like suddenly they have a brand, they're hitting across the market spaces, like they're doing their best to appear to be a competitor in the space.
1:21:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, I mean to say that I think Google's defense they've probably been working on this longer than anybody.
1:21:56 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, this is a rebranding, repackaging strategy.
1:22:00 - Richard Campbell
I'm delighted that they're able to do that, because they're usually so haphazard about these things.
1:22:05 - Paul Thurrott
That's true, I might just have to focus Gemini residents felt very Microsofty Like yeah exactly.
1:22:11 - Richard Campbell
No, you've got to beat here. You're talking at home.
1:22:13 - Paul Thurrott
They announced DeepMind and probably February, march at the latest, and released this product nine months later. Like you know, bump Bump, bump done. Yeah, so the three tiers of Gemini, as I think we talked about this earlier. The pro version is now available to enterprises. The SDK is out for developers. There's a whole Android thing. If you want to do that stuff, they have something called AI Studio. If you want to work on this, it's actually transactionally is free for now, starting in the beginning of the year when it rolls out I guess technically this is still a preview, but when it rolls out more broadly, next, sometime in early 2024, they've published a fee structure.
1:22:48 - Richard Campbell
It is Google. You know they were big on. You know when do we come out of beta? Let's ask Gmail. You know they can wait until they got a customer base they think is locked in before they say, oh right, it's time to be yeah.
1:23:00 - Paul Thurrott
So to me again, there's no doubt that 2023 is the year of AI. When you look at what Microsoft did, incredible Google. Now here we are, Amazon, a little slower, but Q. Whatever they have their API or, I'm sorry, they have their various alarms, I think 2024 is going to be way more exciting in 23. I thought this was incredible. This was honestly just from a sheer like a movement perspective. I don't know that I've seen it in real life.
1:23:24 - Richard Campbell
I think Google has been on its heels all this year since the original, you know, bing versus Bard demo and this is them finally getting their act together at the end of the year, like let's see the next two quarters because this could be cool. Yeah, okay, right. The acceleration of the browser, the vast improvement of the browser was a duel between the IET and the Google team, the Firefox guys. You know. They were even sending each other cakes right when they were really trying to implement HTML5, that's when the Canvas stuff appeared, all that GPU utilization, like the thing got dramatically better. Yes, when you've got good competition going on between these companies building stuff that matters and people getting value from it, it accelerates the process. I think 23 was stumbling compared to what 24 could be.
All right.
1:24:16 - Paul Thurrott
Okay. So I was at an HP event yesterday that I can't discuss yet, but I think it's okay to say that I was having a conversation with a person who may or may not have worked for HP, or was someone like me who does what I do, but someone who was there and they were saying that you know, the jump from 3G to 4G was such a big deal because that is when all of this stuff that we now take for granted happened Uber, all the shopping services, all the somehow that the pervasiveness and then just connectivity speeds of 4G was itself. It's like a kind of a giant leap forward that we don't really didn't sort of appreciate as it happened, and I was like I need to really think on that because I really don't remember the timing of certain things.
1:24:59 - Richard Campbell
No, because when stuff works well, it's invisible. You stopped struggling with bandwidth. You stopped putting down your phone saying I'll wait till I get home.
1:25:06 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so I mean, it is fair to say, a lot of the AI stuff this year was talk, yeah, and then, and you know the hardware we get. You know iPhones and pixels now, and I had also. I don't know if Samsung phones have this. They must have the MPU.
1:25:21 - Richard Campbell
Yes, 22 does Absolutely Okay. But they're further back in the pipeline right. It takes time to integrate that with the hardware Like we've yet to see the LLM era hardware yet it just takes a year to.
1:25:35 - Paul Thurrott
On the phone, yeah.
1:25:37 - Richard Campbell
Not that I think we can fit the models anyway, but just we. There's nobody who has started a device. Building new hardware after catching the TV can visible. Yeah, okay, because that was only January really Right?
1:25:51 - Paul Thurrott
I suspect that the SLM, as I'll call it, on the pixel was something that came about because of everything that happened in January. Basically, like what?
1:25:58 - Richard Campbell
we do, but I think they were working on it anyway and they it had got prioritized.
1:26:02 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's the more reason. But it happened with this device and it got marketing message yeah, this gen.
1:26:06 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, exactly Right. And that's through all the product stacks that are going on finding stuff that they can put under the Gemini banner. Go next, gemini Right.
1:26:19 - Paul Thurrott
Well, it's like they're co-pilot Exactly 100%.
1:26:23 - Richard Campbell
And that's as far as I'm concerned. This is good for us because this, because you, when you're the only game in town, you can hand wave a lot, right? But now you actually have to right. You actually have to deliver Exactly, and so this thing is like 23 was a hand wavy year. Okay, 24 is going to be a delivery year. Fair enough, fair enough.
1:26:45 - Paul Thurrott
I don't know why you hate AI so much, Richard, but that's fine. You know what I hate hype.
1:26:50 - Richard Campbell
Honestly, the only thing. I believe me. I took a lot of flack earlier this year when I was saying listen, guys, this is a hype cycle and it's a big one. Well, it still is. It's just coming down the other side now. But the thing that gets us from tanking this technology is competition in it.
1:27:05 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, I agree, okay, I agree. So we'll see. I think, yeah, it looks like Google and Microsoft, at least, are kind of right there. The Amazon picture is a little fuzzier and the Apple picture is way fuzzier. Yeah, what's going on over there? Well, apple has a way of showing up late and doing great. So I feel like whenever they do something and look they've been talking NPU, they call them neural process, whatever they call them, the neural processor, you know in the iPhone and the A series chipsets, and you know we've had this hardware for years and years and years.
They never did a good job of explaining what the hell it did. You know, and I think to the average user, it was like okay, you've got all these different core types on this die, and some of them are CPUs, some are GPU, some are NPU, whatever.
1:27:50 - Richard Campbell
They weren't first for the smartphone, they just built the best one. They weren't first for the tablet, but they also built the best one.
1:27:55 - Paul Thurrott
They were on that early. I mean, they the NPU stuff, the hardware part, yeah. So whoever the hardware ahead of the product, which is interesting, yep, and then they marketed it. They actually talked about it.
1:28:05 - Richard Campbell
And, who knows, maybe they have software internally. They just didn't brand it a Gemini or a Copilot to tell you about it. They just made stuff work with it.
1:28:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think every point of view was nobody wants or cares about the words AI but they, but they say all the time we do this on machine, we do this on device. Yes, we're doing on device work, and that's the problem was in the beginning.
1:28:29 - Paul Thurrott
the marketing is tough, because what that sounds like to me and I think it sounded this way to a lot of people was well, yeah, of course you do. You don't have anything else, you don't have anything in the cloud, you don't have this data center thing that Microsoft and Google and Amazon have. So, yeah, of course you do get other device. It seemed like almost a like a lemonade moment, like we have to, but I think you know Google or sorry, apple doing this on the device, I think is what led the way to where we're heading with AI PCs. I think this was the proof point that, honestly, having this stuff on device benefits greatly, both for, obviously, on device, but also for, you know, the hybrid stuff.
1:29:01 - Leo Laporte
And the other problem that Apple had, which is that their AI assistant, siri, was a nitwit and so it really made any claims Apple made about, oh, we're using AI, kind of moot Right. Well, it's not doing it too good.
1:29:15 - Paul Thurrott
Probably probably not going to do this, but someone should go back and watch the MPU portion of every Apple event ever just to see how this is a boss over time, because I'm curious. They must have, they must have used some use case where it does this better, because you know, today we have some, you know it plays your background and you know we have some examples. I don't I don't pay as much attention to Apple, so I'm not sure how they marketed it, but it would be kind of interesting to see how that evolves over time.
1:29:40 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think what's really funny and I don't I don't I get just as you used to get heat for dissing AI, richard, I dissed the vision pro. Apple spent a lot of energy saying AR, ar, ar. They said it in every keynote. They didn't mention AI. Well, though, of course, ai has got to be a big portion of what they're going to do with AR, and they're throwing I must be hundreds of billions of dollars behind this.
1:30:06 - Paul Thurrott
Special video, special audio, those things. No doubt it's in the iPhone now, you know. They just added that, no doubt benefits greatly from that process.
1:30:14 - Leo Laporte
They're using AI, but there I think it's a mistake for them to push this vision pro, because I think that's a non-starter and I think they may be amiss the boat. They're using AI, but they maybe should have said it.
1:30:26 - Richard Campbell
Well, and by all accounts, you know it was cooked at one a division pro out right.
1:30:31 - Paul Thurrott
Here's the the the issue I took. So the AR glasses thing is a great example of Apple coming very late to some market. But the thing that's weird about that is Apple did AR kit, you know several years ago.
And back when a HoloLens was more you know, more of a maybe this is the future thing and we had Windows, mixed Reality and different headsets going on there, they did something very slide that I thought was very telling. Which was they? There are these AI apps on the iPad and the iPhone, but for me, ipad, where you could be in a room and I always use the example, it's the dinosaur skeleton in the museum and you hold the thing up and you can see the dinosaur now and see what it looks like. And I thought, you know, here we go, we don't need this stupid stuff on our head. They have this thing where you have it in a pocket. Everyone has it, everyone loves it, and now it has this new capability and I thought this is, this is what AR is, you know. And now the crystal making the glasses. So who knows?
1:31:21 - Leo Laporte
but um, no, they've been doing. And then we but we talk about this a Mac break weekly. They've been for the last decade, gradually rolling out technologies with the aim the promise you made, this goal years ago of putting out these glasses. Microsoft has proven to be more nimble. They put a lot of wood behind the arrows of the hall lens and then said, oh, wait a minute, and they've shifted the AI. Apple is not quite as nimble, and I think they're.
They're so all in on the vision pro and I don't think they're looking at across the street and see what happened to.
1:31:54 - Paul Thurrott
Microsoft, the one so we talked to earlier about how there's no killer app for AI. It's a bunch of little things, and the way that I sort of got to that was Microsoft threw out hall lens almost explicitly saying somebody makes something awesome for this, please. You know, the the very first demos that they did included games that we're never going to come to this device because it's for the commercial, it's for very niche commercial markets and but because those types of visual demonstrations very clearly show some of the capabilities you know. So the the Minecraft thing, which was amazing, the 3D Minecraft thing, or the the bats flying out of the wall and walking the exact same road three years later.
Right, but, but so is AI in a way, right. So another. I guess what I'm trying to say is the reason I got to there's no one killer app is that we still don't have something we could point everyone to and everyone would not have their head say, yep, that's that makes sense. We were waiting for this with AR and hall lens, and it never came. There were these certain little things that were really great.
Great ideas like you're trying to fix an electrical wire. You don't know if you snipped the blue or the red one, but you got this guy in little scape screen and he tells you which one to do and they're like okay, I can see the value of that. It doesn't impact a lot of people, but I can see it. Car makers are using it too. Instead of using giant dinosaur sized clay models, are creating AR models of cars that people can walk around and open doors and do things like that, and I yep, I can see that too. But we're talking about like a dozen in the world, or it's very. You know hundreds, right, hundreds. You know NASA awesome, oh, you get NASA. Everyone loves NASA. Space travel fantastic. I'm not going to the moon, so I don't. It doesn't really help me like, and AI right now is right there.
1:33:39 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I think it's farther along, don't you? Okay, I'm going to flip champ. We are using AI.
1:33:45 - Paul Thurrott
I know, but it's, it's a little thing Like every that's what I mean, Like it's a like. The difference is that AI is going to. That's how I came to this. I think AI benefits in a bunch of little ways. It's not going to be no killer app, it's one or three. Yeah, yeah, A killer they're almost like killer tasks or killer features.
1:34:02 - Richard Campbell
Features.
1:34:04 - Leo Laporte
But either side of the.
1:34:05 - Richard Campbell
ML models that are weird is that they mostly benefit the amateur. Oh interesting. Yes, 100%, that's exactly right.
1:34:14 - Paul Thurrott
This is the ultimate culmination in the thing that made Microsoft popular, which is the democratization of technology. You take the technology away from these guys in their white slabs, suits and whatever, and you bring it to everybody Back in the day. You know, I think it's going to be one of the key passwords to pay a hit. I mean, back in the day it was literally like things that we now take a program that are very basic, but in more recent years, things like data modeling or data visualization or you know whatever it might be. I mean this, this is, and you know, I always hear from the people who are those experts and like what the hell are you taking away my job? And it's like your job is ridiculous.
Yeah, it's not enough for you.
1:34:47 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I just yeah, yep, and I and the model won't do as good a job of you, but it'll be good enough, right, and I can get it done today, and it's just that I.
1:34:58 - Paul Thurrott
I always use the same exact examples, that PowerPoint example. It's like, paul, it's been a year you have to do a PowerPoint presentation. You never do this, figure it out, and it's like in the past what am I going to do? Buy a book? I'm going to enlist an expert, I'm going to, like, google it, I'm going to you know, like I just I just got to get through this. I have some, I have the information I need, I just can't. I don't, I'm not good at making the presentation or whatever it might be. It's a simple example, it's, but it but it shows. The point of it is it allows someone who's never going to be an expert in that thing to get through it and get it done and have it be reasonably high quality.
1:35:30 - Richard Campbell
But it also means it's challenging to find champions Right Like the way you. We've typically sold techs technologies by having experts show it off Right, that's right, right and be the expert in it, and these are kind of against that. It's like if you're that good at it, you wouldn't need it.
1:35:49 - Paul Thurrott
So I mean, this is going to be a new kind of tech demo. It's going to be instead of the guy who is well versed in the product or in the technology. It's going to be we're going to drag someone out of the audience and you're going to draw a dinosaur or whatever the kind of quintessential killer app was the spreadsheet right. It was Visicalc on an Apple too, a desktop publishing with laser printing.
1:36:10 - Leo Laporte
So something is another hardware was brand new and the truthfully Visicalc was something kind of nobody was doing.
1:36:17 - Paul Thurrott
You could do it with a pencil on paper, but Well, you would do it on a chalkboard where you would erase the cells, Right. That was the thing that's actually. That's why they created it. I think one of the guys was that guy. Yeah, Dan.
1:36:28 - Leo Laporte
Berlund yeah, but no. I think the real thing, though, is that that was more like VR, in the sense that that was a new way of thinking about data and working with it, and that's maybe what made it such a killer app and, according to, coincided with a brand new kind of hardware, which is the personal computer on your desktop.
1:36:45 - Paul Thurrott
This is exactly why VR has not succeeded, because this is something I actually this is not related to it, but I talk about this all the time. I test things all the time, and by things I mean new products, new apps, new services and whatever it is. And I I challenged my workflows to try to find a way to be more efficient to do certain things. And every once in a while, that unicorn thing, the magical moment where some product, service, app, whatever it is, takes over and I drop something else, you know, like a notepad, going from one note to a notion, is a stupid, simple example. Most times it doesn't.
The way we do things, the way I do things, is already fine, like it's already more efficient, it's better Right Switching, the switching costs don't make any sense, and I think VR is that kind of thing. Yeah, it's, it's worth pursuing, it's worth looking at, but in the end, for standard productivity type tasks especially, it's just not better, more efficient, whatever than the thing people are already doing. And that's, I think, why it kind of fails, because it's it's impressive on one level, but it doesn't solve a problem that we're that's not very solved in a better or more efficient manner by existing tools.
1:37:47 - Leo Laporte
So you said spreadsheet did right.
1:37:49 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, that's right, exactly. It's like evolution. Sometimes it nails it. Sometimes it's like oh, I see what you're doing, but you know, I still like the way the thing I'm doing over here, yeah, and I think that I think that's where VR and AR have landed so far. Doesn't mean it's over, but I think that's what's been.
1:38:02 - Leo Laporte
That's what would give you that, but I think AR is already changing a lot of what we do.
1:38:10 - Paul Thurrott
I mean just by virtue of Apple doing it. Things are going to be different next year, so it's going to. I'm going to be curious to see if they can. In fact, it's not what worked, I know, but we still have to be still. It was still interesting how is it?
1:38:22 - Richard Campbell
They've also. They're also remarkably persistent, you know you try the Apple. Tv. The original watch was not that great, but it evolved.
1:38:30 - Leo Laporte
You know like well at least it told you the time.
1:38:32 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, I don't know what Vision Pro does for me that I don't Well it will tell you the time when you put on the glasses and look in the right direction, which is a problem. I don't get it. Why don't?
1:38:41 - Richard Campbell
you like it, I don't know it's also wait, my concern was that $3,500 is like who's going to buy the next one? Right, yeah, right.
1:38:49 - Leo Laporte
Right, I think they've got some big issues. Anyway, that will be a conversation for early next year. They, I think it's not just, it's just a few months away. And you know, you're right, Apple won't give up. Maybe they should. Might be wise. Well, they are persistent.
1:39:06 - Paul Thurrott
They stuck with the butterfly keyboard about seven years.
1:39:09 - Leo Laporte
There you go. They should have given that up. They should have given it.
1:39:11 - Speaker 5
They can be persistent in ways that are actually not stupid.
1:39:14 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, the MacBook Pro, so the actual ports. They stuck with that for a long time and then went back and you know, we'll see. I'm really curious. I did the asterisk here is always Apple, because they do have this record and they do have a history of showing up late but really kind of nailing something, yeah, and everyone thinks they invented it, like MP3 players or whatever, and it's like no, no, no, but they just did. They just did it right, yeah, and maybe there's a way to do this right, maybe. I know I don't agree. I don't think so either, but I've been wrong so many times with this. I just want to. I'm out of the hard to bet against that.
1:39:49 - Leo Laporte
I am out of the limit, I'm sawing the limit. This I speak because I know that all the Apple people are saying you're an idiot. But I think you're an idiot.
1:39:58 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but what you can respond to them is yeah, I sure am. Are you spending $3,500? Oh no, I would never buy one. Let's take a break then. The Xbox segment is going to be a little bit more interesting.
1:40:08 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's take a break. Then the Xbox segment and whiskey. And I'm getting a little tipsy, I confess.
1:40:17 - Paul Thurrott
but nice, I'm going to go open a couple of mine. Thanks, I'll tell you what I really think about Xbox.
1:40:24 - Leo Laporte
First, though, a word from Wix. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by Wix Web agencies is one for you. You're going to love this. Let me tell you about Wix Studio. This is the platform that gives agencies total creative freedom to deliver complex client sites while still smashing deadlines. How Well.
First let's talk about the advanced design capabilities. With Wix Studio, you can build unique layouts with you got to see this a revolutionary grid experience and you can watch as the elements scale proportionally automatically by default. And then there's the no code animations, which adds sparks of delight, the custom CSS, which gives you total design control. And it doesn't stop there. You can bring ambitious client projects to life in any industry with a fully integrated suite of business solutions, from e-com to events bookings and more. And you can extend the capabilities even further with hundreds of APIs and integration. And you know what else? The workflows just make sense. There's the built in AI tools, the centralized workspace, the on canvas collaboration, the reuse of assets across sites, the seamless client handover. And that's not all. There's lots more. Find out more at wixcom slash studio Wixcom slash studio. We thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly Paul Therrott, Richard Campbell and the entire Windows Weekly team, which is Paul Therrott and Richard Campbell.
1:42:10 - Paul Thurrott
We're going to include Kevin Kevin King, your producer and editor.
1:42:16 - Leo Laporte
There's this guy named Leo who sits there drinking while the show's on. Love that guy. He's a fun drunk, he's a little bit of a yeah. So Xbox time, mr Therrott.
1:42:32 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so this wasn't Phil Spencer, I think it was. Tim Stewart, chief financial officer of Xbox was speaking at a tech summit of some kind, whatever it was, but he was saying that they might be doing a ad supported version of cloud gaming, not for you, but for emerging markets. Right, africa, india, southeast Asia, places that only have phones, right, a lot of countries now are coming up into the modern world and the phone is their computer, that's their whole thing. Well, these people don't have consoles either. So what do we do to get them to want to play, to stream games, et cetera? And one of the ways would be to support it like an ad supported model, like we see in all the streaming services these days. So that's kind of interesting.
I guess I don't know, If they can't afford a console what are you going to?
1:43:26 - Leo Laporte
advertise to them.
1:43:28 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, a car, no, I don't Right a phone.
1:43:32 - Leo Laporte
It doesn't seem like a prime audience, but maybe I don't know.
1:43:36 - Paul Thurrott
I mean it's no, this is going to be. I mean, look, it's like the argument like why do I see a homeless person with a cell phone? You know, it's like do you seriously not understand that a homeless person might be able to afford a phone but not a house?
1:43:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, like there's a market. Yeah, you're right.
1:43:52 - Paul Thurrott
There's still a market, and these are micro-transaction regions perhaps, so it could be banking In many cases. Yeah, so it could be. There could be smaller things. I don't know. I'm not an expert in this area, but I think this is always something for somebody. It's an idea, it's an idea.
1:44:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's an idea, it's a good idea, it's a further diversification of Xbox.
1:44:11 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I didn't have a chance to write about this story because it happened during our podcast, but Xbox called gaming speaking. What we were just speaking is now available on the MetaQuest 2, 3, and Pro. So I mean, I assume what you're seeing is a flat screen in space. Did you play in the game on it? I guess? I don't know if it actually wraps around. It does like a kind of a 3D thing, but you'll be able to play these games. And again, Xbox called gaming is the game streaming service. So, okay, there's that.
1:44:44 - Leo Laporte
There are VR compatible games on there, right On.
1:44:49 - Paul Thurrott
Xbox cloud gaming Are there. I don't know that there are actually, because, oh, maybe there's a few, there could be a few, there could be a few. We don't have a VR solution on the Xbox console side. On the PC side, we did and sort of do still have Windows Mix reality and so, yeah, some of those classic and my MetaQuest hooks up to my PC, although the games are all on the MetaQuest.
Okay, so I don't want to say for sure, because I'm actually not 100% sure, but my guess is that all, or the vast majority of those games are just 2D PC games. Yeah, and then they would just be a screen, I guess.
1:45:26 - Leo Laporte
yeah, what's the advantage to that? I don't understand.
1:45:30 - Paul Thurrott
You like to get sick to your stomach? Nobody can see the dumb game you're playing. Yeah, like, for some reason, I like spending money on Meta hardware and I like to get sick to my stomach. That little Venn diagram of the audience, I don't know, I have no idea.
1:45:43 - Richard Campbell
You're not buying a headset for this, you have a headset Right, just add some things you can do.
1:45:49 - Leo Laporte
I mean, there's Netflix on those things too, and to me that's like the worst way you could watch a movie.
1:45:54 - Paul Thurrott
Well, okay, so I agree with that. But if it did a Dolby Atmos thing where it was actually kind of surround sound in your head, I don't know what kind of, and you're a lonely, sad individual.
1:46:04 - Leo Laporte
You're both sitting on the couch and looking in your own little things.
1:46:07 - Paul Thurrott
But I suppose those people exist and if you do, are listening.
1:46:10 - Richard Campbell
I apologize for making fun of you If you're going to do VR as a couple. One wears your headset and the other one laughs at them.
1:46:16 - Leo Laporte
That's how it works. You've seen my house, obviously.
1:46:21 - Paul Thurrott
I would just throw stuff at the person. Oh boy, I'm a prankster, of course I'd be the one wearing that thing anyway. So I walk in the door frames without wearing something over my eyes, like why would I want to cover myself up, anyway, okay. So Baldur's Gate 3, obviously big title this year, not big title. I think it was the best game of the year, or whatever One awards is the best game of the year, yeah, so it's been out in the PC and PlayStation for a couple months and it is now available on the Xbox Series X and S. So there you go.
I don't know if it's in. I actually don't know if it's in like Game Pass. I'm thinking it might not be. I think it's probably the standalone thing. Yeah, $69, standalone purchase. It looks like yeah, yeah, so it's a standalone purchase, but good, so that's good. We always like getting games late, that's fun. And then at that game awards ceremony the other day where Baldur's Gate won the game of the year, microsoft had a few announcements as they kind of teased there's a Blade game coming. This is that Marvel comic character that was a series of movies with Wesley Snipes which I actually was kind of a guilty prize for my day Daywalker.
1:47:34 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I really liked the first one at least. It was way ahead of its time in terms of the Marvel movies.
1:47:41 - Paul Thurrott
It almost Was it before the Matrix. It had that kind of fighting style. I thought it was kind of interesting. I don't remember when it came out, yeah, I think it was before the.
Matrix, anyway, cool movie. And another thing I actually really like I would also call this one a guilty pleasure is I'm really into horror movies and the other game that Microsoft announced, or Xbox game, was something called OD, which is a horror game from a Japanese video game director, hideo Kojima. I guess we would say and sorry, that's my Spanish pronunciation there, I don't know, we don't know much about these things yet they're coming next year, so kind of interesting. So there was a couple of game announcements the other day. That's cool. Remember E3? Anybody, anybody, anybody.
1:48:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the video game conference they announced and canceled two years in a row and now have canceled as well, yeah, and so yeah.
1:48:38 - Paul Thurrott
the narrative is that this thing was killed by the pandemic. The reality is In person. Events like this were killed because of the internet, frankly, and we're just so used to doing things virtually. There is Okay. So somebody Sorry, I'm discredited. Recon5 says yeah, it actually played Commodity Year before the Matrix, so that's cool. Yeah, I thought the surprise wasn't even earlier. It feels a little older than that.
1:49:04 - Leo Laporte
The thing that killed E3 is the fact that Microsoft, nintendo and Sony stopped going. Yeah.
1:49:12 - Paul Thurrott
That's exactly what I mean. When the big companies don't go. You got nothing right. It was like Apple never goes to CES. Right, apple killed.
1:49:19 - Leo Laporte
Macworld when they stopped going to Macworld. That's right.
1:49:23 - Richard Campbell
And I would argue the consolidation of the gaming industry is what killed E3. Because it used to be. There was 20 companies that were all vying for your attention to sell a game. Now there's three, and if any one of them doesn't go on a go, then none of them go and you don't have a show.
1:49:38 - Paul Thurrott
Gamers are people who sit in front of a screen that can now show you anything you want to see, including coming games right, we have technologies where they can kind of sample games without installing them, and it's a whole new world.
1:49:49 - Richard Campbell
But E3 was really for the buyers right. Well, that's like.
1:49:52 - Paul Thurrott
CES and Comdex were really for the buyers back in the day, but they started letting people in right Because it was fun and brought up a lot of money and buzz is valuable, but ultimately it was.
1:50:03 - Richard Campbell
where are we putting this on the shelves? What are our priorities for upcoming titles and having the audience there to be excited about it was a good way to help you gauge.
1:50:11 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, they still do like Star Wars as events and people kind of cosplay and obviously there are kind of Comic-Con type things like this. But yeah, a really big event like E3 was probably just unsustainable.
1:50:24 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, the other side of this is that you now you have the consolidated companies, they have enough money, they can just throw their own event, which they do yeah. When it was 20 companies, nobody could draw enough audience to do their own event, so they all came to one place.
1:50:36 - Leo Laporte
No, I think you're exactly right. Yeah, it's, you know. Look, we don't have Comdex either I mean these things happen.
1:50:42 - Paul Thurrott
I miss Comdex.
1:50:44 - Leo Laporte
I'm kind of surprised CES is still going strong.
1:50:47 - Paul Thurrott
I am too. I'm surprised it's still so big in a way, but I refuse to go to CES. I, this is no way. And if I did go to CES if they well, there is one way I would not go to the show floor. I would go to the little company events that they have offsite in hotel or hotel suites or whatever they do, ballrooms and things. But Vegas makes it privately expensive. It's hotels are awful, the getting around is awful, Just, you know, cabs and the what do they call the thing?
1:51:15 - Richard Campbell
It's just degrees of evil you could have had at the Javits Center and you're playing Manhattan prices right.
1:51:21 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, no, that's the same. It's the same problem. And both places have great food and you know restaurants and that's whatever. And Vegas is great shows, but it's just logistically it's such a nightmare.
1:51:32 - Leo Laporte
I remember going to summer CES at the McCormick Center in Chicago when it was 100 degrees. I've been there in Atlanta Same thing Summer CES, yeah.
1:51:43 - Paul Thurrott
Oh no, that was summer Comdex. Maybe it was summer Comdex. I thought it was summer CES. It was summer Comdex. Well, it could be both. We might be mixing things up, but there was, I think it was. I think I went to summer Comdex. Yeah, maybe that was it. I think that's what it was.
1:51:57 - Richard Campbell
But where CES started making sense was the little guys, right.
1:52:02 - Leo Laporte
There and that consolidation. You know we should have an.
1:52:04 - Richard Campbell
Epic booth and Microsoft have an Epic booth, but it'd be some little guy who's been working in Shenzhen for the past two years to make his widget.
1:52:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but the and in fact.
1:52:12 - Richard Campbell
And he gets highlighted.
1:52:14 - Leo Laporte
Microsoft is no longer at CES, but it doesn't affect it. Yeah, you nailed it, because it's not that there's no consolidation in the consumer electronics business. Exactly.
1:52:22 - Richard Campbell
This is a highly fragmented Well. One would argue it's been more fragmented before Right Right Because of Shenzhen, really.
1:52:28 - Paul Thurrott
Right, well over by the Hilton or whatever that is now. That used to be like Asia area. It was just like that whole part of the thing that like that were Hilton and the South Holocaust kind of met or whatever was just all these little but like. It was almost like a flea market and it was just little companies from Asia and I don't know what it's like.
1:52:48 - Richard Campbell
The thing is like American designers you move to. You move to Hong Kong for six months and you go to Shenzhen every day. It's a ferry ride and you work with the factory. It's going to build your device until you get there yeah. And then you take it to CES yes. And if you get highlighted, you win, if you don't, you fail.
1:53:06 - Paul Thurrott
It's a literal needle in a haystack finding a company or but lotteries work Right. Well, I mean well somebody does win the lottery.
1:53:15 - Richard Campbell
Yes, I work is work is like you can build an event around it because there's going to be a winner somewhere in here and people want to see it. People want to be it like it works for now, cause Shenzhen is pretty broken these days, like Hong Kong is not Hong Kong anymore.
1:53:33 - Paul Thurrott
I would like to go to a big Microsoft event like build or ignite again and have it and but I mean, I know I just went to ignite but I mean and have it actually be big. Those events are not anywhere as big as CES or what comics used to be back in the day.
1:53:46 - Richard Campbell
Well, change is our foot friends.
1:53:49 - Leo Laporte
So I know, I know, I know FIFA's not FIFA, that's a soccer league. Fifa has their own thing, fifa in Berlin, and I mean they're still European, yeah.
1:53:59 - Paul Thurrott
Computex is still bigger, smaller too. What was the big, what was the big one in, not Frankfurt, somewhere in Germany? Cbit, cbit. I actually went to the last CBIT.
1:54:19 - Richard Campbell
I mostly went to Z muertelon. You know a protected.
1:54:37 - Paul Thurrott
It's your 3,000 people back and you're like is this, bon Jovi, what's happening in here? And, like you know, people are standing in the aisles and there's no way to sit, and you know, so I that correction may be healthy overall for everybody, but it, man, yeah, it was like a kick to the face. So we'll see the next few years is gonna be interesting.
1:54:59 - Richard Campbell
My experience has been event teams are out of practice, venues are out of practice, attendees are out of practice, like everybody's struggling.
1:55:07 - Paul Thurrott
That's right. We need a dummy's guide to in-person events. Yeah.
1:55:12 - Richard Campbell
I wonder, though a lot of stuff is being relearned.
1:55:14 - Leo Laporte
Will they get back in practice? Is the question right? That's a great question, we're we don't need it To some degree.
1:55:21 - Paul Thurrott
Well, yeah, so I say this a lot, but in the same way that, like the stupid little company I might work for really loves saving money by not sending Paul around the earth, giant company like Microsoft that's transporting 20,000 employees around the earth because it's big, shows saving a lot of money too In a couple of years that they're like sorry, what are we spending money on again? I mean it's. I think it's a tough sell.
1:55:41 - Richard Campbell
You know who likes it.
1:55:43 - Leo Laporte
Is people who want to. It's community. People want to go there to see their colleagues.
1:55:48 - Paul Thurrott
But that's why I think the smaller events might make sense. So the shows like Richard does fall into this category. Microsoft used to and I think it's going to be doing again some kind of what I think of as road shows almost, where a small group of people from Microsoft will go and meet, maybe at user groups or whatever things they have locally, and it can be hyper specific and instead of ignite it might be just exchange or just some aspect of Microsoft 365, sharepoint, whatever it might be, and I think that stuff's very valuable it always was. I mean, that stuff all got consolidated into the 10 poll shows, but I don't see any reason why they can't you know the show we just did in Orlando.
1:56:23 - Richard Campbell
We have the whole swan right. We had over a thousand people there, but it meant when you walked into El Merino, into the bar, every single person said that bar was from the conference.
1:56:33 - Paul Thurrott
You could sit anywhere. Well, that was I mean, that was always Orlando We'd run into it would be me and Brad and Carl and Donna Sikar, and it's always like the same group of and you know, obviously I'm sorry and sorry, some other guy put the beard on me. Remember his name? It's so nice. Yeah, I think it was Karen Carl's bag, like Karen. The point is sorry it was, that community aspect was always great, you know it was always great.
1:57:02 - Richard Campbell
But I mean I'm really serious about the like. Last week I literally went table to table in that bar and it's like hey, yeah, I knew everybody. How well, even when I didn't know them, they were still show. It's like how was your day to day? What did you see? What did you like? How was lunch? You know we were, you were able to. That's the right size, is you have the whole place?
1:57:21 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, yeah and right, and so it's a lot easier. Well, Microsoft problem, if they do want to do these big shows, it's very hard to find places that can.
1:57:31 - Richard Campbell
Yeah they're a handful of them.
1:57:32 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, so for the type of show you're talking about, the type of travel mobility where I'm roadshow, I was talking about same thing. Like you could hotel, a hotel ballroom could do it. Yeah, depending on the size, that something you take out the hotel, hotel like that's beautiful. Well, and I've been asked about and they're manageable for you, they do another. Yeah, people like them.
1:57:53 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I've been asked about doing another Dotnet Rocks road trip and, by the way, the last one was 2013. So I am 10 years older, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, but also the infrastructure's been dismantled. There's not as many regional offices, many of them closed over the pandemic. Most user groups are defunct or purely online, like we don't have the same things. Like I hear them talking about doing a road trip, I'm like, where I know, where is it?
1:58:18 - Paul Thurrott
going to be efficient. Who organizes this? Yeah, we're going to show up in the parking lot of what used to be a drive-through theater. Yeah, drive-in theater, sorry. And yeah, just bring your candles. Yeah, you know.
1:58:28 - Richard Campbell
We'll hope for the best. And again they're pretty out of practice, Like what they have is a memory of doing this. So it's like, well, you know, let's get the little band together, yeah that never goes Sure. And the legit. You know you talk about me being the party paper. It's like I'm the logistics guy.
1:58:45 - Paul Thurrott
Here I'm just and I'm telling you this isn't going to work.
1:58:48 - Richard Campbell
Well, it's just like I'm just going down the list of what we did last time, 10 years ago, and it's like that doesn't exist and that doesn't exist and that doesn't exist, and like you want to rebuild these things. I'm in Because I thought a lot of those things were good. Yeah, Microsoft seems to be putting more energy into third party again the MVPs, the RDS, the MCTs. If they were going to start putting some energy into user groups, like all of those things.
1:59:11 - Leo Laporte
I create community infrastructure. Are there user groups still?
1:59:14 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, there are. Where are they? There are Really Well you know what. So they're local and there's a really big Windows developer user group in the Philly area. That's cool.
1:59:27 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I love user groups.
1:59:28 - Paul Thurrott
I used to speak out in the not really Boston but kind of Rhode Island area. They aged out.
1:59:33 - Leo Laporte
That's part of the problem. People are aged.
1:59:36 - Richard Campbell
Well, it's a question of you generate new generation. Young people don't need user groups. And a lot of backup. I disagree.
1:59:42 - Paul Thurrott
I think young people need us more than ever, because, more than anyone, because they're doing everything virtual and I think what they're not benefiting from is that occasional human contact with experts that they can and you could start talking to someone like, oh, I have a question, and you realize, oh my God, this was super valuable.
1:59:59 - Richard Campbell
Well, you know, you've seen me bomb around this year and most of the time I'm doing a keynote or recording some shows and so forth. But it's also very normal, if there's a user group in that area, to do an evening with that user group. Yeah, of course, 50 people, bad pizza, but folks that are passionate and that's super fun. Man Like that's a good evening, but there's far fewer than there used to be and the pandemic was a logical reason they had to wind down.
2:00:26 - Paul Thurrott
And there's no reason. There's no money, and then people roll out. There's no money to even pay for simple things like transportation or not even a hotel or whatever.
2:00:36 - Leo Laporte
I also think that because there's a whole generation raised on screens, they're just not community focused, they're very isolated.
2:00:47 - Paul Thurrott
And that's why I believe that they need this so badly.
2:00:49 - Leo Laporte
They do need it, but they have no desire for it.
2:00:53 - Paul Thurrott
Maybe this is the type of thing that can kind of come back now that the picture is there, so growing away.
2:00:58 - Richard Campbell
I'm certainly interested in that. That's the thing I'm working on.
2:01:01 - Leo Laporte
Community is everything I mean. Burning man isn't slowing down.
2:01:07 - Richard Campbell
But it is raining.
2:01:11 - Paul Thurrott
One more. Xbox One more, yeah. So you guys will recall that a company called Digital Eclipse which, by the way, is now owned by Atari created something called an interactive documentary, which was the making of Karateka. This was the first one. Fantastic, multi-platform, all kinds of different versions of the game, documentaries, interactive features, awesome. They promised they would have something. A second one for us by the end of the year. They've announced it. They haven't there. It's not ready for the end of the year, but the second one will be LamaSoft, the Jeff Mittener story 42 classic games from eight different video game platforms, from the 80s, and mostly the 80s, but also some of the 90s, some of the most classic games ever made Attack of the Mutant Camels, for example.
2:02:00 - Richard Campbell
Metagalactic Lama's Battle at the Edge of Time. Yes, are these all by?
2:02:04 - Leo Laporte
this guy, jeff Mittener. Yep, all by this one guy. So same thing as before.
2:02:08 - Paul Thurrott
A single guy a ton of games. Well, this guy's a ton of games. The last one was only a few games. So funny For over 40 games. A remastered version of the Commodore 64 game, gridrunner also a classic with modern graphics and sound a virtual museum of design documents feature, like the documentary, a bunch of other videos he created. He used to create these things called light synthesizers, and two of them were included, and then the original demo version of Attack of the Mutant Camels.
2:02:36 - Leo Laporte
Oh, he wrote Tempest 2000 for the Jaguar.
2:02:39 - Paul Thurrott
Holy cow, that was one of the few 90s titles Incredible. That's a modern title, yeah, so it's coming everywhere. It's going to be in the Switch, playstation 4 and 5, steam, xbox One and Series X and S, and also on what used to be what was it called Good Old Gamers, or it's Gogg or whatever GOGcom. Whatever, that's Great old games. Great old games.
2:02:58 - Leo Laporte
Great old games. Whatever was happened, they're good. Maybe not great, but good, yeah, they're good. They're old, they're old.
2:03:07 - Paul Thurrott
We all agree on that. They're games and they're old.
2:03:12 - Leo Laporte
I love this thing, that they're doing, this digital clip stuff.
2:03:15 - Paul Thurrott
What a great idea. You get this game, you get the story.
2:03:19 - Paul Thurrott
The modern Atari, which bears no resemblance to Atari, has. Because, of whatever pros and cons there are things that work and things that don't work They've decided that we're going to sit here and try to preserve the history of video gaming. That's just the Tari's and I love that, and that's why they bought digital eclips, because this is what they're doing with this stuff. These are the guys who created that incredible virtual machine technology, essentially so they can run the original code. It's not an M. Well, I guess it is an emulator. I'm sorry, it's an emulator running the original code. It's not like a redone. Yeah, so this is the code, this is the game, this is the actual game.
2:03:52 - Leo Laporte
This is Gridrunner 4, the C64, running on your Xbox.
Yeah, in an emulator Incredible, that's incredible. Yeah, then super fun. Yep, oh man, I'm excited. Yep, cool. Thank you for that tip, paul. I got a tip for all of you.
As you probably know and you've heard and we've talked about, we've had a rough year this year at TWIT and we are, you know, shutting down shows. We're going to cancel a few shows. We're not this one, don't worry, we are. We've laid off three of our favorite people. We had to lay off Jason Howell and Victor Bognath, who was an editor, and Aunt Pruitt, and I just cried when I did it, because I love these guys but I don't want them to work for free and I don't think they want to work for free, and we wanted to lay them off while we could still take care of them on the way out the door.
But I got to tell you we're not out of the woods. We were looking at a $1.1 million deficit in 2024. And there's nowhere for that money to come from. You know, we don't have investors. They come out, it comes out of my pocket and I don't have it. So, rather than kind of try to bring it to the bitter end and just fall off a cliff, we decided to. You know, try to tighten the belt as much we can, but we still need your help.
If you are not yet a member of Club Twit and I know, believe it or not, 99% of you are not it would be a great service to yourself, to us and to other geeks if you'd consider joining. It's $7 a month. Now we give you benefits and I'll talk about those, but really the reason you're doing it and the reason we need you to do it is because we need that money. We need to go from about 1% of our audience to 5% of our audience to survive into 2025. If we're gonna make it through 2024, it's gonna take a lot more of you to join and I think for $7 a month you get something worthwhile besides just the good feeling you're helping us and keeping these shows that I hope you love on the air. You also get ad-free versions of all the shows we don't need to advertise to you because you're paying the money. You get special shows, like Paul's Hands on Windows, that we don't put out in public. They're club-only shows. This morning I canceled Floss Weekly, went on the show with Floss Weekly, but we still have the untitled Linux show, which is gonna kind of take over, because that's a club show that's financed by club members.
And then there's, of course, the club Twitter Discord, which is a great I mean talk about community. It's a great community, a great place to hang out, not just to talk about the shows, but talk about everything you're interested in. So if you would club Twitter, it's at twittv slash club Twitter. There's family plans. If you're already a member, bless you, subscribe for somebody else. You know, it's a great holiday gift. You can get your corporate plans. You can get your family plans too at twittv slash club twit.
I'm not good at begging. I'm also, as it turns out, not very good at money, so one of them had to give and that's the one that's gonna give. I'm on begging. Please help us out, cause we wanna keep doing it and I you know, paul, I've been talking about this with our other hosts. Steve was gonna stop at 9.99, that's about that's the end of next year. He was gonna retire and he realized this is no time to quit. Things are happening. It's, you know, last five years been stagnation, but this year, with AI, vr, security, there is stuff happening and our mission is more important than ever. Our mission at twit is to give you the information you need to navigate the world of technology, and there's a lot of stuff happening that I think we all need help, kind of understanding. That's what we try to do and using. So twittv, slash club, twit, cause we wanna keep there's. We have a job to do and with your help we can keep doing it. Enough, said Paul. Back of the book time.
2:08:07 - Paul Thurrott
What's going on? I'm looking forward to tomorrow. By the way, I got to rerecord two of my and so what happened? To get lost. I deleted the videos oh. Paul. I know. I'm sorry, I don't know much about technology, so I could benefit.
2:08:19 - Leo Laporte
I know how that is. Yeah, you need twit. You need twit. Thank you, yes, I do.
2:08:26 - Paul Thurrott
I haven't written about this. I'm a little nervous about what this says about the state of Xbox, but Microsoft, like so many other services, is offering your kind of end year recap thing, right. So obviously, when you're in Spotify or YouTube music, you hear the songs you listen to the most. Xbox you're in review, as you might imagine. You could see the games you played the most and what you spent time on, and mine is horrific and I'm really nervous about this.
So go to xboxcom slash year in review, where it's year dash in dash review. You'll. That's where you can find this. So, of course, you may recall, last time I really played, I briefly you know eight minutes or something in November looked at the Xbox, but I turned off my Xbox on March 2nd and 3rd I don't remember the data anymore and haven't played since, although actually I have played PC. I have played on the PC a bit, not like I did, you know, on the console. So I'm thinking my year, 2023, year in review is going to be terrible and, honestly, I'm ranked pretty, pretty highly in some categories and I'm nervous.
2:09:29 - Leo Laporte
I don't know why that, I don't know how to. I'm guessing it's call of duty, so okay.
2:09:35 - Paul Thurrott
So, first of all, top genres. I've played 97% shooter that's mostly call of duty Well, also Halo Infinite and some do. I played a bunch of Doom games on the PC as well, and some Quake games too 1% each for action and adventure, card and board and racing and flying, and that's that was my first indication that something was wrong. Card and board. The reason that's there is because when I take screenshots for Xbox related stuff for the book, I use the Solitaire game that's built into Windows. Oh, that's hysterical. So okay, that's curious.
Card and board games Yep, racing and flying is Forza and Flight Simulator, yeah Okay. Action and adventure. I don't actually know what that is, but okay, whatever, okay, something you had to test. I'm in the top 15% of players for hours played in 2023.
2:10:25 - Richard Campbell
With you when you had your Xbox unplugged for months, I played for two months.
2:10:29 - Leo Laporte
Oh my.
2:10:30 - Paul Thurrott
God, yeah, that's scary. Now, granted, please don't do the math. I don't even wanna tell you how much I played call of duty. In fact. You know what God damn it. All right, I paid. This is what it says. I can't believe this is true. It said I played call of duty for 305 hours In two months, in two months. In two months, somehow, I don't, I don't know, I'm in the top 40% of players for Jamf's.
For you that's like 40 hours a week 1000 page book that during that time for anyway. The point is I am in the top 10% of people who play call of duty actively.
2:11:08 - Leo Laporte
I was like two months two months.
2:11:10 - Paul Thurrott
So you're probably number one really that's my number one game, yeah. My number two game is Halo. Infinite, which I played exclusively on the PC this year 26 hours. I am the top 15% of active Halo Infinite players. That tells me this game is a disaster, like an epic failure. That's true, cause you've got to be kidding me. I didn't play it that much. I played quick two for three hours. I'm in the top 15% of that game.
2:11:41 - Leo Laporte
I think it's a long tail right, that means it's just a the after 15% it goes way, way down.
2:11:48 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I played Redfall. I played quick three. I played other, played Forza Horizon five. Halo Infinite multiplayer. Doom two, one and three. I don't know why they're in that order. Doom Eternal I think it says yep and it goes. It's scrolling. I can't see all of it, minecraft legends, whatever, but yikes. So yeah, I mean, I only what to say? I only played for two months Like I wow.
2:12:14 - Leo Laporte
Have you shared these stats with your wife?
2:12:17 - Paul Thurrott
No, but I no. No, Leo, and no why? No, why I didn't think I'd ever have to pull this card out of my vest, but there's a certain man code I think we need to adhere to here the man code.
2:12:31 - Richard Campbell
You're right, you're right. The man code no, no, no, no.
2:12:34 - Leo Laporte
You're right, of course.
2:12:35 - Richard Campbell
I would point out you put this on the show right, like I know, I know.
2:12:41 - Paul Thurrott
Which makes it safe for my wife, because you know she's not coming here. No, okay, so that's my tip of the week Side. Tip Amazon. I wish I could see these stats from my Amazon reading, because I've read a lot this year too, by the way, guys, so Amazon has consolidated your libraries of printed books, kindle books and audio books. Oh, I want this. I want this yeah. So it's on the Amazon site. It's amazoncom slash, I think it's just your books, I believe it's called. Let me try this.
2:13:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so the thing that's weird about this is Amazon owns Goodreads so Right, and I used to check in with Goodreads, but now I realize I don't have to do Amazon.
2:13:23 - Paul Thurrott
So actually it's a neat little site. It has a discovery mode you can turn on and you can find recommendations based on the stuff you've read, which I know sounds fairly obvious. You can look at your saved books from your wish list, which is a good reminder, by the way, that they're probably really out of date, as they are in my case. So I'm gonna be doing some culling from that list. But yeah, this was, and my wife and I shared accounts, so some of the books you see in my account are her books and you can really quickly tell which. Like the one about the White House plumbers that was my book Stephen King, Me, and then like Rebecca Mockai, my wife, Jessica George, my wife. Yeah.
You know, like the history of 80s heavy metal. Yeah, that's me, you know you can kind of tell who's who, but anyway, it's a cool little site.
2:14:05 - Leo Laporte
This is great. It's in beta. I love this. All the books, they're all here. Ladies and gentlemen, Now is this public. People can't go look at mine, can they? Or can they? I don't think so. No, that would reveal too much about my bizarre.
2:14:20 - Paul Thurrott
Well, I would share mine. I mean, maybe that'll be a thing I don't care Every. I mean, sometime in the next week or two, I'm gonna write a you know my favorite e-books and audio books of 2023 or whatever, and you know I can use this site now to find them all in one place, so that'll be nice.
2:14:34 - Leo Laporte
I'm not the idiot I thought I was. Oh, this is a good book. I said actually I bought this book for Steve Gibson. Exchange, rax, rax. It is entirely written in assembly the book. It's a collection of assembly language.
2:14:52 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's, and every once in a while he's just reading and he goes you know what? He does. Some of them are funny.
2:15:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's some of them funny. There's no English in this, yeah, but if you know what it is, you go oh, that's funny, that's a.
2:15:08 - Paul Thurrott
YouTube music did. The my YouTube music thing is like Taylor Swift was like my number two artist. It's like I have a wife, okay.
2:15:17 - Leo Laporte
So, before there's any before we start judging man code says not gonna judge Not gonna judge An incredible song.
2:15:25 - Paul Thurrott
I'm just saying. I don't wanna be worried about it.
2:15:28 - Richard Campbell
The price of sharing accounts is what you're talking about yeah, that's a circle, so that's it.
2:15:33 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, anyways, anything. So this actually, I forgot about this last week. I think what had happened was it was released last week and I forgot, I didn't write about it until Friday. But Star Doc, where Brad works, released Fences Five this past week. So Fences Five is the way you can organize things on your desktop, which is the way a lot of people work. Oh, look at that.
2:15:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.
2:15:53 - Paul Thurrott
So they don't have actual little picket fences. Oh, I think that was a visual style at one point. But the way they're doing it now is they have a feature called chameleon so that when you're working in apps like most people work in apps that are kind of floating in the middle of the screen, they have this blank space off of the side. So you have your organizational structures, your fences over the side and they fade. But they don't just fade like whatever normal colors, they fade based on the background. So they fade into the background and it kind of reduces that visual distraction element to it, so you can click into it and it comes to the front obviously.
2:16:22 - Leo Laporte
Wasn't Microsoft gonna do this, and they call it Fences right?
2:16:27 - Paul Thurrott
No, you're thinking of sets. Sets, that was it. They were gonna add tabs to everything, so they scaled back and now they've added tabs. Just a handful of apps this looks great.
2:16:37 - Leo Laporte
What a great organization tool. I want this. That's great. Yeah, I love that. Fences Cool, yeah. Okay, so that's Paul Dun and Dust is. I'm gonna get some whiskey. I think.
2:16:52 - Paul Thurrott
Let me look ahead and see if I have what you have. I don't know how close can I get.
2:16:56 - Leo Laporte
I'm gonna sort of rip it open and then think, If he gave you what he's gonna talk about, he gave you a nice gift.
2:17:01 - Paul Thurrott
I guess I gotta tell you the guys he's about to talk to are two of my favorite people on earth. I love them so much and I was so happy to get. I haven't seen them in four years and we it was a lot of hugging in November.
2:17:11 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's a perfect Christmas episode for Run.
2:17:14 - Richard Campbell
As Radio. Yeah, I mean I should have published this a few weeks earlier. This is something we came up with the three of us Rick Clauss and Joey Snow and I, I don't know 10 years ago. It's like system ins are terrible to buy for right, but you know, it's just difficult. So we made a show talking about it and it was a hit and so we've done it every year, to the point where the boys now keep their lists all year round. So they you know it's pretty curated by the time we get down to record it. We actually recorded it at Ignite after the show sat together and kind of sort of knocked it out. But we literally go around the room like okay, you get a toy, then I get a toy, then you get a toy, and so forth, and talk about all our favorites. So the links are in the show notes but it is the what do you get? Your sis has been kind of show and so we go from sort of the nostalgic like three to half inch floppy disc coasters to love it. You know good cameras.
Rick suggested this alpaca hoodie. That's just like when you're, you know, hammering around the machine. It's nice to, it's comfortably warm. Of course you want a new USB charge battery pack Like those should be replaced every other year or so, and that kind of thing and some silly stuff. These Tetris LED lights are hilarious, like all the pieces from Tetris. Lit up in the right colors, you can stack it the way you want on the shelf. I gotta get one. I gotta put it back right here. Yeah, just some ideas and a good laugh for about gadgets that we all seem to like. We're not that hard to buy for you, just gotta get the right things. It's a great gift guide.
2:18:48 - Leo Laporte
I really love this. Yeah, what a great idea. I don't normally like gift guides, but this one I gotta say this is good, this is good stuff. I appreciate that. Yeah, just some.
2:19:00 - Richard Campbell
You know the stuff, we use stuff, we wish we had that kind of thing, and by three folks who are in the space. We're all the people that we're hard to buy for or are hard to buy for, and but you know also, I have some fun with it too.
2:19:14 - Leo Laporte
Tell us what your brown liquor. By the way, that's runasradiocom. The episode is the one after 9.09, 9.10. 9.10, the numbers are like that.
2:19:25 - Richard Campbell
Yes, last week we talked about Glen Fittock and I brought it up because it's very much hey, holiday season like this is the one Scottish whiskey is probably gonna be there. But I've fallen into a rat hole a bit, or a rabbit hole here of you can't talk about Fittock without also talking about Balveny. Oh the.
2:19:45 - Leo Laporte
Balveny yes.
2:19:46 - Richard Campbell
Because it's William Grant. So you know Grant built the Fittock Distillery outside of Duffton in the early 1880s and as soon as it was up and running they made their first production in 1887. He started working on another distillery almost right away. Originally called it Glen Gordon, literally next door, but eventually renamed it Balveny after the Castle Balveny that's like down the road from there which is a ruin, and it has been a ruin for a long time. The original castle was built in the 1200s, so it makes it one of Scotland's oldest stone castles and it went through the incredible times that were that era of Scotland. But the last time it was really inhabited was the early 1700s when William Duff committed suicide in it in 1718. And that is the Duff's of Duffton, like that's these people. So it's been. By the time William Grant was building on it had been deserted for almost 200 years. It was a ruin. Now this is the 1900s, so most whiskeys were blends, but the Balveny really was making a blend, primarily the Grants blend. As in William Grant, that Grant family makes a blend called Stand Fast, which is the family motto, stand Fast and that's what they primarily exported for decades and in fact you can still buy it today, although it's not sold in the US for some reason. I was checking because you get it here in Canada. The Grants blended whiskeys is a popular product. It's a good little product.
But remember that Glenn Fittic this was last week's story started marketing single malts first. They were the first to really start selling single malts in the 60s as a concept. So the blends have been doing well, so let's do a single malt. And so, next door Balveny, owned by the same creative folk, they decided to release a single malt in 1973. I went looking for this. They see if there was any 73 out there, and there have been a few 73 releases. Old barrels, found some and then bottled like 30 to 50 years old. One of them's only $30,000 if you're looking for the Christmas present, wow Boy. But I mean I've jumped a bit here, right? So they're up and running.
By the early 1900s they get through prohibition. Then they get by the 1970s when the blended whiskeys are starting to sell more poorly. They come up with this branding concept around single malt, which is a particular style that still uses a lot of the blending techniques, where they take sets of barrels and they put them in a vat and that sort of marry their flavors up and then they bottle them. So by the 70s Balvenys not as big as Glenn Fittic, but it is big. They've got eight stills running. They're also very much a traditional style distillery where they're doing their own maltings. They had to do their own copperworks, they do their own woodwork, their own cooperage as well. And that's when the current master distiller, the guy named David Stewart I've had the good pleasure to spend some time with over the years various times in Balveny, started at Balveny. He is still there today. So a lot of the sense of what Balveny is about comes from one man, in the modern era at least.
And the whiskey I wanted to talk about today is the one of the first of this style of aging in bourbon casks and then finishing in a different kind of casking. That was very unusual, but in 1993, the first double woods were made. So they aged in what they called American oak, but what we know is bourbon casks. Why? Because bourbon casks are cheap right, there's a lot of them and they taste good. Because the Americans will only use them once, typically for five or six years, and then they get rid of them. The Scots would buy them up, they would remake them in the cooperage into larger barrels. So they'd take five American oak bourbon barrels and make them into four hogs heads, normal sized barrels for making whiskey. They would age 10 years in those bourbon casks and then they'd take them out of those casks and put them into larger sherry punts for two years.
That's what it means to be a double wood. Is that you've aged this whiskey well, it's still a single malt and came from a particular malting. Now that it really means that anymore. But that's what the original intent was. I remember it was really a marketing term, but it's been aged in two different kinds of wood. This is different from the way Finnic did it, where they actually split the malt at the beginning of production and they would put 90% in bourbon, 10% in port and then marry them at the end in a vat. This is the same liquid being moved barrel to into different barrels along the way, and so this is now 30 years ago that they first started doing this and it kicked off a style. They've now gone on and if you go look at a Balveny roster, you'll find the Caribbean cask, where they do their finishing in rum barrels, the port wood casks or the French oak cask, different ages and so forth to get to the flavors that they want, but all the same kind of technique and I consider this another great place to bring someone into the single malt family.
Like a very approachable whiskey. It's got its own character to it. It's not incredibly expensive and Balveny's been stunningly successful with it. Well, they still make their blends to this day. That line, starting with the double wood 12, has a dozen variants now and they sell tons of it. Where they used to do their own maltings they have to buy grain from all over these days because they just they're so huge. They're up to 11 stills and 12 washbacks in that facility in Duffton, right beside Glenfiddick. They are literally side by side and yet their characters are very different. Same family, same locale, two different types of distilleries making very different products. You can find that double wood 12 for about $70 retail. It'll often on sale for $10 or $20 less 43 AVV, which is sort of the minimum for something that's in shill filter and imminently drinkable. This is a straightforward, gentle, pleasant whiskey that tastes great every time.
2:26:21 - Leo Laporte
The Balveny double wood 12 years of age and a classic. I mean everybody knows this one.
2:26:31 - Richard Campbell
The 30 year old style of whiskey and there's not a lot that can say that it's been made continuously for 30 years.
2:26:38 - Leo Laporte
Very nice, a lovely holiday.
2:26:40 - Richard Campbell
Quaff, yes, and not going to be quite as poking the eye as that eight year old darkness you've got. Does it taste like?
2:26:48 - Paul Thurrott
the darkness.
2:26:49 - Richard Campbell
Cause it doesn't.
2:26:51 - Leo Laporte
All right all right, all right, all right, all right. I'm gonna rate your fourth.
2:26:55 - Paul Thurrott
What's the point?
2:26:56 - Leo Laporte
Cause all I'm saying is I don't get the darkness, you know.
2:26:59 - Richard Campbell
I had to shuffle my collection since we moved it and I found an original octamor in the back of the room. You want to talk about having an urge to lick a dirty ashtray Octamor Like that is a lot of smoke man.
2:27:13 - Leo Laporte
Is that you think what's going on with? We don't know what this tastes like. I don't know what the darkness is.
2:27:18 - Richard Campbell
It's some special edition it doesn't have I don't know what distillery it is Like. It's again one of those world whiskey type things.
2:27:24 - Leo Laporte
It's a collection. I will learn something. It says it's an eight year old single malt. Yeah, that's all you need to know.
2:27:33 - Richard Campbell
All right, and it's. And that much color in an eight year old Hmm.
2:27:40 - Leo Laporte
Now I like it that it's got a wax top. That's pretty cool. Oh yeah, this is very cool. That's really cool and it's real cause I broke off the wax.
2:27:48 - Richard Campbell
All right, you get your nose in there. You're going to smell a bit of wood smoke. Oh yeah, it smells good.
2:28:01 - Leo Laporte
So you don't need ice, no, you don't need water.
2:28:05 - Speaker 5
You just need a weed, you just need a weed ram of the darkness.
2:28:09 - Leo Laporte
What I don't need a glass. This is a glass. It's delicious. That's a I don't know. I don't have the, the palate or the language to say what it is. It's just good, I don't need a glass. Oh, you want some Glasses for you, john Ashley.
2:28:32 - Richard Campbell
That little tobacco and pencil shape.
2:28:35 - Leo Laporte
What do you think? It's not that pity of old leather. It's almost. It almost is more like a bourbon than a Scotch. It's quite good, yeah, he says, I like it. So thank you for the tasting notes and thank you.
2:28:49 - Paul Thurrott
I'm sensing a hint of diapers.
2:28:54 - Leo Laporte
It's a weed ram of the darkness is what it is. Thank you so much. That was a nice gift from Richard Campbell. My advent calendar. I'm still only a day two, but I'm feeling it. I'm a lightweight, Richard.
2:29:06 - Richard Campbell
It's the 13th man. You've got some catching up to do, that's true.
2:29:11 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, richard. Richard, as at run as radiocom, what are your holiday plans? We'll be here next week, our last show of the year, yep, but you'll and you'll still be in the in town I was staying in Med Park.
2:29:23 - Richard Campbell
We're going to the daughters for Christmas and then they're all coming up here for new. Oh nice, really nice. Yeah, I'm delighted this is all new for us, right? Yeah, how?
2:29:33 - Leo Laporte
cozy how to make that work. How cozy Paul Therat in Lower Mckungy family coming home. All of that. Yeah, the kids will be back Chestnuts roasting by the open fire.
2:29:45 - Paul Thurrott
We do live right next door to Bethlehem, which is kind of a Christmas central during this time Well, during any time here.
2:29:50 - Leo Laporte
I guess Follow the star.
2:29:52 - Richard Campbell
It's a great place to get steel to. Literally there's a giant star to Hill.
2:29:56 - Paul Thurrott
Is this taking a little, a little literally. I guess it helps if you're coming from the south.
2:30:02 - Leo Laporte
Oh no, Bethlehem. Did I tell you that when I get a little tipsy, I started singing Paul, is it?
2:30:08 - Paul Thurrott
the 13th, they've Christmas, my true love said to me Paul Therat is at the rotcom.
2:30:16 - Leo Laporte
His books windows everywhere, which is a great kind of history of windows through its development tools and, of course they feel good Windows 11, featuring windows 10 inside, just like Windows 11, both available at lean pubcom. We will be back next week for the 20th of December with a Paul says a special guest. Don't know who people think, I know.
2:30:42 - Paul Thurrott
Richard and I are just going to have our wives do the podcast and call it a day That'll be fine with me have. Lisa come in.
2:30:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, lisa, come in, you know what?
2:30:50 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we should do that. The only windows they would talk about would be like a heck of a show.
2:30:53 - Leo Laporte
Venetian blinds, yeah that would be a great show. Let's do that. A heck of a show. The disc theft side, yeah.
2:31:01 - Paul Thurrott
And then we could just drink. In the background you could hear us cat calling them A little giggle.
2:31:10 - Leo Laporte
Thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you for your support. I love doing this show. I know these guys do, we know it's an important show and we are so glad you listen. If you want to watch us, do it live. We did turn the live stream back on during show production so you don't get all the stuff in between you just get a show.
2:31:29 - Paul Thurrott
Actually, can I ask you about that? I'm sorry. So, how does that work? So somebody asked me this question. I didn't know the answer. You just turned off the live stream at some point and then you turned it back on. So where did you watch?
2:31:39 - Leo Laporte
So we used to have a continuous live stream that would run reruns and would be everything in between the shows and stuff. Now, for reasons of economy, also because we want to encourage people to join the club, because the club does have that full-time live stream but we realized that the problem with Discord is this video streaming isn't very good, so we will continue. There's a button you can press on the TriCaster so it's easy to stream to YouTube. So go to youtubecom. Slash twit, if you know what I mean.
2:32:14 - Paul Thurrott
Can you spell twit for me, leo? No, twit.
2:32:17 - Leo Laporte
There'll be a live stream when we're like right now, when we're doing a show, but then we'll turn it off and then it'll come back on again for twig and if you'd like to get notifications, you know there's that little bell there there it comes, there's twit. Yeah, watch myself YouTubecom, slash Twitter and see there you are See. Yep, okay.
All right let's see he's a good looking guy. Thank you all. We do the show on Wednesdays, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1900 UTC, and right about then you can go to the YouTube and watch that. Of course, the easiest thing to do is watch it on your own schedule, which is why we make a podcast. You go to twittv, slash ww you'll find all the episodes there. You'll also see buttons there, one to the YouTube channel where you can watch the produced show.
After the fact and that's really handy if you want to share a clip with somebody If you have a, you know, a friend who would love fences, for instance, from Star Doc you can just clip that part of the show out and send it to him, share it with him. Youtube is really easy to do that. Many people, though, prefer to subscribe. Go get pocket casts or whatever podcast app you use, and there's a subscription button on the website. You can get the RSS there as well and just paste it. In that way, you'll get it automatically as soon as we finished cleaning it up. Thank you everybody for being here. Thank you, paul, thank you Richard, richard, thanks for the gift Cheers, and we'll see you next time on oh and there it is, there's the Leo, I know, there you go.
