Windows Weekly 909: Shaved Toasted and Charred

Summary

Windows Weekly 909: Shaved, Toasted, and Charred — A Comprehensive Summary

Released on November 27, 2024 | Hosted by Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell | TWiT

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Introduction

In the 909th episode of Windows Weekly, hosts Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell, joined by Leo Laporte, delve into critical discussions surrounding Microsoft's AI initiatives, the ongoing challenges with Windows Update 24H2, and the evolving landscape of Flight Simulator 2024. Recorded during the holiday season, the episode balances technical insights with candid conversations, providing listeners with a thorough examination of current tech issues.

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Microsoft AI and Data Privacy Concerns

A significant portion of the episode focuses on the widespread concerns regarding Microsoft's use of customer data to train its AI models. The conversation was sparked by a recent rant from Steve Gibson, which Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell address head-on.

Key Points:

• Clarifying Misconceptions: Paul emphasizes that Microsoft's Connected Experiences in Microsoft 365 are often misunderstood. Contrary to assertions, Microsoft does not use customer data from Word and Excel to train their large language models (LLMs). Instead, these experiences are designed to enhance user functionality by providing design recommendations, editing suggestions, and data insights without retaining user content indefinitely.

  Paul Thurrott (04:00): "They're not using your data to train their LLMs. They're enabling connected experiences that help you accomplish tasks without ingesting your content for AI training."

• Business vs. Consumer Data Use: While businesses using Microsoft 365 are largely insulated from data being used for AI training, consumer interactions—such as those with Bing, MSN, the Copilot app, and advertising features—can contribute to AI training. However, consumers have the option to opt out.

  Leo Laporte (12:33): "We do not collect customer data to train our LLMs. Period."

• Responding to Public Outcry: The hosts critique the tendency of the public to jump to unfounded conclusions, urging a more informed and critical approach to understanding Microsoft's data policies.

  Paul Thurrott (05:42): "The complaints that pile on top of that are meaningless. They're not doing it. So look, we can't make stuff up. There's so much real badness in the world, we should focus on the real."

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Windows Update 24H2: Reliability Issues and User Experience

Key Points:

• Gaming Compatibility Blockers: Microsoft’s Windows Update 24H2 introduced compatibility blockers for certain Ubisoft games, including Assassin's Creed: Valhalla Origins Odyssey and Star Wars Outlaws. This move prevents users with these games installed from upgrading, aiming to resolve potential conflicts.

  Paul Thurrott (52:28): "So this week Microsoft added a new set of blockers to the Windows 11 24H2 upgrade, which are certain Ubisoft games."

• Driver and Anti-Cheat Problems: Beyond gaming compatibility, users are experiencing issues with Intel drivers and anti-cheat systems like Easy Anti-Cheat, leading to disrupted gaming experiences and system performance.

  Richard Campbell (53:24): "They're still battling the Easy Anti-Cheat too."

• Enhanced Security Features – Windows Hello ESS: The update emphasizes stringent security measures, notably Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-In Security (ESS). While ESS adds robust protection by requiring frequent authentication, it poses challenges for users who prefer less intrusive security protocols.

  Paul Thurrott (14:07): "When you sign into Windows and OneDrive automatically starts backing up folders you don’t want to back up, it feels like malicious anti-consumer behavior."

• User Frustrations: The hosts share personal anecdotes about the inconveniences caused by these updates, highlighting a disconnect between Microsoft's security enhancements and user preferences for customization and control.

  Paul Thurrott (10:24): "I care when I sign into Windows and all of a sudden OneDrive is automatically backing up these folders... that's the bad behavior."

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Flight Simulator 2024: Hybrid Design and Performance Hiccups

Key Points:

• Cloud Streaming Integration: Flight Simulator 2024 introduces a hybrid design that leverages cloud streaming for high-resolution models, reducing the need for massive local downloads. This innovative approach aims to enhance visual fidelity and performance.

  Paul Thurrott (109:31): "Flight Simulator 2024 is interesting to me because of this kind of hybrid design where a bunch of it is streaming from the cloud."

• Performance Issues: Early reports indicate significant performance problems on certain hardware configurations. Paul recounts his experience installing the simulator on a laptop with an AMD Zen 5 chip, where the game performed poorly despite tuning settings.

  Paul Thurrott (109:32): "I decided to install it on that computer that's a laptop that runs the AMD Zen 5 chip that runs like Call of Duty wonderfully... it ran like crap."

• Ongoing Fixes: Microsoft acknowledges these performance issues and has released updates to address them, although challenges remain. The integration of a mini version of the Edge browser into the game bar is another layer of functionality that Paul examines skeptically.

  Paul Thurrott (111:17): "Microsoft integrating a miniature version of the Edge web browser into something with Xbox to me doesn't sound like I'm going to like this, but honestly I think this is a good idea..."

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Addressing Misinformation and Promoting Critical Thinking

Towards the episode’s conclusion, the hosts emphasize the importance of critical thinking in an era rife with misinformation. Paul Thurrott highlights the tendency of the public to fixate on incorrect issues while neglecting genuine concerns, such as the automatic enabling of OneDrive’s folder backup feature.

Paul Thurrott (135:06): "We all succumb a little too easily to the 'it sounds right' kind of argument... People don't get riled up about the right things and then they get crazy about the wrong things."

Leo Laporte echoes this sentiment, pledging the show’s commitment to "spreading light, not heat," focusing on delivering accurate information without sensationalism.

Leo Laporte (135:14): "We want to spread light, not heat. We give you the information you need without drumming up drama."

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Conclusion

Windows Weekly 909 offers an in-depth exploration of pressing tech issues, particularly debunking myths around Microsoft's AI data practices and navigating the complexities introduced by Windows Update 24H2. The episode underscores the necessity for informed discourse and critical analysis in evaluating tech advancements and corporate policies. By fostering a balanced conversation, Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell provide listeners with valuable insights to navigate the ever-evolving technological landscape.

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Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurrott (04:00): "They're not using your data to train their LLMs. They're enabling connected experiences that help you accomplish tasks without ingesting your content for AI training."
• Leo Laporte (12:33): "We do not collect customer data to train our LLMs. Period."
• Paul Thurrott (05:42): "The complaints that pile on top of that are meaningless. They're not doing it. So look, we can't make stuff up..."
• Paul Thurrott (135:06): "We all succumb a little too easily to the 'it sounds right' kind of argument..."
• Leo Laporte (135:14): "We want to spread light, not heat. We give you the information you need without drumming up drama."

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Accessing Windows Weekly: Listeners can watch the show live every Wednesday at 11 AM Pacific or access it on-demand through TWiT's various platforms, including podcast clients and the TWiT.tv website.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

Paul, it's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Therott and Richard Campbell are here. They're both home for the holidays and with lots to talk about. Paul is a little upset about the world worrying about Microsoft AI. He's going to correct a misapprehension that even Steve Gibson got wrong yesterday. We'll also talk about unreliability problems in 24H2. What a shock. And Flight Simulator 2024 is a cluster. We'll let you finish the sentence next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theron and Richard Campbell. Episode 909, recorded Wednesday, November 27, 2024. Shaved, toasted and charred. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we gather together and worship at the feet of Microsoft.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, no, let me, let me, let me hold it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Paul Th. He is more of a ranter than a worshipper.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like the. Like that general that used to appear on TV during the first Iraq war. And he's like, everything's fine. We're doing great. Were beating back the American imperialists.

[Leo Laporte]

General Westmoreland. Was that Westmoreland?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, the guy from Iraq. Remember?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Stuff was blowing up behind him. He's like, everything's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Baghdad Billy or what?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Baghdad Bob.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Bob.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think his name was Bob.

[Leo Laporte]

Also with us, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Richard Campbell. He is in his beautiful estate in lower Madeira Park. Oh, look at the view.

[Paul Thurrott]

Holy calm today.

[Richard Campbell]

Glassy calm.

[Leo Laporte]

That is gorgeous. That's what's nice about a heavy rain is after. It's so beautiful.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You know, the ocean can be mean, but not today.

[Leo Laporte]

She's a cruel mistress. Richard is from Run as Radio Dot Com. He does that in. That rocks with Carl Franklin. He joins us every Wednesday, as does Paul, because it's time for the Winners and Dozers report.

[Richard Campbell]

Indeed.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I'm gonna ask you about a little rant that Mr. Stephen Gibson.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, good.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Yesterday. But I'll wait till we get to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now. I want to guess what it was about.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you think it was about?

[Richard Campbell]

It's gonna be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Was it about Windows as an open platform? No. Was it about Windows resiliency?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

Was it about recall and click to do?

[Leo Laporte]

It was close. It was about the connected.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, the experience. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Experience.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I want to get some more. Once you. When we get to that, just say, what did Steve think of that? And I'll actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, yep, sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I want to get your Input on it because Steve was irate. But I'm not sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think he understood the.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I think.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I don't think he understood what was really happening, which is kind of the problem there. But. Okay, we'll get to it.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's what I want to talk about.

[Paul Thurrott]

But meanwhile, we can get to it right now. Do you want to talk about it right now?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, so. Yes. So the idea is Microsoft 365 has a new kind of agreement. It's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not really new, but they. It's not new.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, but. But let me pull up his show notes because that's probably the best. The best thing to do here. And I can.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean, actually. Well, yes. Right. To find out what he said, I. There were. Well, you know, this is honestly, this ties right into my tip for two hours from now, which is about as vague as that gets.

[Leo Laporte]

But it disconnected experiences. I mean, some idea of where he's going. Microsoft silently enabled AI training.

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

For Word and Excel did not.

[Paul Thurrott]

That didn't happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he gave the impression, I think he got the impression that they were going to use your content for training their LLMs. And I.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

I had to say to him, I don't think that's what they're doing.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're not.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, that's it.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I look, just as a general statement, and you've heard me say this before, there's so much to complain about with Microsoft, we don't have to make anything up. There's so much to complain about.

[Leo Laporte]

He said in Microsoft's documentation, it says connected experiences that analyze your content. Connected experiences that analyze your content are experiences that use your Office content to provide you with design recommendations, editing suggestions, data insights and similar features.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, it does say that. That's true. That's accurate. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you know what?

[Paul Thurrott]

It doesn't say use it to train AI because it doesn't do that. Yeah, it doesn't.

[Leo Laporte]

It also says that it will preserve. It will delete stuff for the most part. Most connected experiences don't retain your content after performing their function to help you accomplish a task. And this is, I think, another thing that kind of tickled his thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But this.

[Leo Laporte]

But there are a few exceptions. In those cases, Microsoft retains the content for as long as your account exists and it's used to support, personalize or improve that connected experience.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. This is what Microsoft has been doing for probably 20 years. No, I mean it.

[Leo Laporte]

I mentioned, I said any spell checker has to do this. Any grammar checker has to do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Here's the problem. Like you, you have this flow chart and the flowchart. The first question says, is Microsoft using your data to train its AI? Yes or no. And if you choose yes. There's this whole litany of problems that comes down. Right. And we've.

[Leo Laporte]

Businesses don't want that.

[Paul Thurrott]

No one wants it. But that's not really the point. I mean, no one wants it, but that's not the point. But there is no path where we go down that direction. So the complaints that pile on top of that are meaningless. They're not doing it. So look, I wrote about it. And by the way, for whatever it's worth, the way I wrote this was not Microsoft is not training copilot AI on your data. It's Microsoft says it is not training copilot AI on your data. That's how I phrased it.

[Richard Campbell]

How would we know?

[Paul Thurrott]

But the problem is people lose their minds, are not familiar with Microsoft 365 and you hear this phrase, Microsoft connected experiences. And like Leo just said, there's this new thing and it's like, what? It's not new. This is not new. I don't know what triggered this exactly. I feel like every time there's like a spell check change to a privacy agreement, they have to just retell users, hey, this is what's happening. But I don't think. I think what happened was people did not look up. Well, Leo just read a part of the Microsoft Learn page that describes Microsoft's connected experiences for Microsoft. 365.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It has absolutely nothing to do with training AI. It has everything to do with online features like document collaboration, spell check and spells or grammar style, type, stuff, preferences, stuff preference, you know, like personalization you're.

[Richard Campbell]

Most likely to collaborate with. These are the words that you think are words. You know, that kind of thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this episode required me to like, do things I don't like to do. Like go read Microsoft's privacy statement, go read Microsoft's services agreement. Just, you know, because you never know, they might have slipped something in there. They're pretty evil. Yeah, but it's pretty straightforward. And the way it, the way it plays out is if you're a business, nothing to worry about, end of discussion, we're done. If you're a consumer, Microsoft does use the interactions you have with Copilot in Bing, in MSN, in the Copilot app in Windows 11. And oddly, in the interactions you have with advertising. In other words, if you Click on something for like a preferences based thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

They do actually train its AI on that. However, you can opt out of it if you want to. It's actually a pretty straightforward process. If you pay for Microsoft Copilot, I always get the name of it Pro, which is the consumer version of Microsoft 365 Copilot. They do not train anything that you do. They leave you alone. So that's the end of the. That's it. That's the whole story. So again, not to ruin my tip for later in the show, but basically this, what this reminds me of is sometime about a month ago, Chris titus is on YouTube with probably a million views by this point. Microsoft is secretly installing and enabling recall on everyone's computers. No, they are not. No, they were not. No, they will not. I will not do that on a train. I will not do it on a plane. I will not do it anywhere. It's fake. It's not real. But people, you know, we live in this world where people who don't know anything about anything have like super strong opinions about those things and they, they see something, they see some phrase like connect. I'm not saying that this is what Steve did. I think Steve is reading other people who have complained about it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's probably what's happening.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's some Linux site that went to town on this and literally it was like, why do you use. Like, why not just call it what it is? AI Trading. Why use other words? This is unethical from a trillion dollar corporation. How is this even legal? It's like I can't debate that. It's just that they're not doing it. Like you're going nuts on something that is not a thing. And so I look, like I said there's so much real badness in the world, we should focus on the real. We don't have to make stuff up.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and I also feel like our job is not to spread heat, but to spread light. And.

[Richard Campbell]

I like that.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's tempting because of course heat generates hits and heat is profitable. And so especially on YouTube. It's one of the reasons I'm not thrilled about the rise of the YouTube influencer, because they're strongly incented to generate heat.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, it's about presentation and.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't care about our audience. I mean, we don't care about. Hey dog, do you know what?

[Paul Thurrott]

Microsoft is screwing you over this week. It's like, dude, relax.

[Leo Laporte]

We care more about our audience than whether we're going to get the hits and the Latest.

[Paul Thurrott]

Here's what I care about. I care when I sign into Windows and all of a sudden OneDrive is automatically backing up these folders. I especially fucking annoying not to back up many times. So like, that to me is malicious anti consumer certification.

[Leo Laporte]

Y.

[Richard Campbell]

This whole scrapping of all my preferences because you updated the os, not acceptable.

[Leo Laporte]

I've seen that happen on other operating systems.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it happens to my, you know, I update my. I update Android and boom, all the notifications are reset, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so that's. I, you know, I really want to say that what, what we as a network and what we as individuals really strive to do is to spread light, not heat, to get to. Because it's complicated for enough for everyone. Figure it out.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think of it as I. We don't always get there, but the goal is to be helpful, not to get in your way, you know, and when you lie to people or you just misunderstand something and then you waste their time by going on this crazy rant and you publish it wherever you publish it, and people read it and they spread it, and that's how we get to where our country is right now. So, you know, you could be part of the problem or you could think for yourself. Think clearly, you know, and, and, you know, like, my reaction to this was.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think he was malicious.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

He wasn't trying to get hits. He's not that guy.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I'm sorry. I want to be super clear about that.

[Leo Laporte]

I just didn't understand.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I said to him on the show, I said, you know, I don't think it's doing that. So let's check with Paul and Richard and find out tomorrow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I wasn't. I'm not criticizing him. I'm sorry. Some of the stuff, too, is just a fog of war type of thing. So this, your show, happens when it happens, that show. And, you know, we're still in the early days of what's happening here. Microsoft has been very clear in this case, like, excuse me, this is not what's happening because of their relationship with.

[Leo Laporte]

OpenAI and the general concern. And by the way, OpenAI seems to be a little bit more likely to suggest your stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

A little more likely. Ask the New York Times how likely.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think Microsoft has to bend over backwards to be clear. Yeah, and they are. They say it explicitly. We do not collect customer data to train our LLMs. Period.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And they have to say that because businesses are very skittish about business data. Getting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually, that's. That's a good point. And, and the reason I took it upon myself to go back and reread the relevant sections of their service agreement privacy statement was businesses. Yes, but what about consumers? Like consumers, I am, at least. Well, that's the point. So I, and I gotta be honest, like, I quoted from it, I think, in my story, but there is a. There's a passage there where I was like, I had to reread it three times. Like, hold on. I was like, what are you saying here? It was the bit about Copilot Pro, but eventually, you know, I kind of parsed it and I was like, no, no, no. Okay. They do not. They are not. The only instance in which Microsoft trains LLMs on customer data is the thing I said before, which is consumers only. And it's Bing, msn, Copilot app and advertising. It's not while you're using Microsoft. So to get into Microsoft Word with Copilot, you have to pay for it. And once you pay for it, they're not training their LLMs on you. So it's not happening.

[Leo Laporte]

And to be clear, even if you don't pay for it, they are not training their LLMs on you.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're not reading OneDrive and training their.

[Leo Laporte]

LLMs, nor looking at your actions or the PowerPoint you're creating. And then they are looking at it to help you to suggest images and so forth or, you know, clippy style. But they're not ingesting it for. To train their LLMs.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, they're enabling. They're using. Well, how do I say this? They're using your data. Like, this is, you know. Okay, let's go back in time a little bit. When Microsoft added Cortana to Windows or Bring me to Windows Phone. That was first. But I don't remember the. I don't remember. When this complaint come up, some guy said to me, let me get this straight. I'm going to sign into this app and then it's going to have access to my calendar and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, it's a personal assistant, dude, if that's what you want, want, it has to have access to that data. You know, like, he was outraged by this common panic.

[Leo Laporte]

Instagram changes their terms of service and so forth, and people go, oh, my God, they're going to sell our pictures. But they have. I think it's a misunderstanding about what permissions a piece of software needs in order to do its job. And what it does need to do is Read your data.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not going to get this correct off the top. So this is like we talked about this last week to some degree. There's this notion that there's two windows essentially, right? There's the team that's responsible for the underpinnings, the resiliency stuff, the security foundation, blah blah, blah, whatever. And then there's the clown car people throwing features out every month without even testing them, right? So we have to deal with that as Windows users. But the credible part of Windows, the responsible adult part of Windows, they take this stuff so seriously. You get into a weird situation like you clean install Windows 11, you look at Windows security, it has a yellow bang on it and you go and you look at it and there's one to three things that are not green. Checkmark everything. Great. And I'm not going to remember exactly what these are off the top of my head, but one of them is like, one of them can be like reputation based protection is not enabled by default. And you can enable it, but when you do, you have to go through a UAC prompt. And the reason is for that thing to work, it actually has to understand what apps you're using, which is a violation of your privacy. And you have to agree to it because you agree that it understanding the apps you're using in an anonymized state. It's not like Paul is associated with these apps, but rather people are running these apps. That's how it protects you. It uses heuristics and AI to look at the behavior of the apps and whatever. But it won't do it unless you let it, right? And there's two, like I said, one to four settings in Windows that are like that, sorry, Windows security, where you have to go in and manually turn them on because it won't do it on your behalf because it requires this little iota of anonymous data, anonymous personal data. And that's in this case how serious they take that. And so we should sort of acknowledge that that's the reality. I mean, look, we just talked about this there. They're also auto enabling photo backup and OneDrive. And a lot of people, so just the yin and the yang, you know, so this, a little bit of both.

[Leo Laporte]

And there's also definitely in the world a mistrust of big tech right now. And I think that that also plays into this. People are just assuming that they are.

[Richard Campbell]

Bad actors, which they've earned, right? Like, oh, they earned it.

[Leo Laporte]

Can't say they haven't earned it. But if you're If I think, if a company deserves skepticism, don't do this. That the, the onus is on somebody else to say, well let me prove that they can't.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And so unfortunately these are the conversations or debates or even arguments I guess that I get into with people, which is like, you know, I read this article, I explained it, I point to the documents, I quote from them and people says, well, you know that documents not worth the paper it's printed on. Okay, look, I can't help you with your basic distrust of this company.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

This belief that it will violate the law by not doing what it says it's going to do in a legally binding contract. I guess I, if you believe that.

[Leo Laporte]

Then it's not going to see the proof. If you say that I want to see the proof, I want to see the evidence.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I, well, so this is the way arguments like this is the way these arguments. Yeah, or they'll point to the thing I just said. Well, they said, well, they started enabling this folder backup thing. Isn't that the same, Isn't that the same thing? And it's like, no, they never explicitly like. And also this isn't a violation of my privacy. Also this is like claiming that forcing me to wear a motorcycle helmet or put a seatbelt on is in some way a violation of my civil liberties.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that is, that is okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Common sense, right? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to get crazy there. I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Come on, let's not go too far.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, you're right. I'm sorry, but. Right, I was right. I'm just about to compare Gates to Hitler. I was just going right there. All right, so it's like a slippery slope. This is how the conversation ends. Anyway, but you know What?

[Leo Laporte]

This, remember 20 years ago everybody said, oh yeah, no, the government has a better backdoor into Windows. I know that was commonly accepted. There was never any evidence.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sounds right, of course, but we. No evidence. Now, people outside of Microsoft have viewed the source code. The source code is leaked. There's no backdoor. I mean, whatever. The NSA can't even get into a frickin iPhone. Do you think that? Come on, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

And the reason I believe Microsoft, as I've said before, and I'll say it again, it would be against their business interests, their better.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know why I believe them? Because their AI is terrible. And if this, and if this thing was reading my data, maybe it would work. You know, it wouldn't suck so bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this would kill the sales of Windows, if this, if people found out they were doing this, it's too risky. There's no point and there's no advantage. You don't want to read a bunch of customer garbage. Yeah, that's not what you want to ingest in your.

[Paul Thurrott]

So the one complaint I keep remaking in this show and then for the past year, this thing about folder backup. Right. Not that they've ever given this response, but if you could imagine some future class action lawsuit. We're sitting there on the stand and some guy from Microsoft is explaining why they did this, and he said, hey, let me read you the 17 customer stories I have from people who wrote me and said, thank you. I would have lost this thing I put on my desktop, but you backed it up to my OneDrive and I got a new computer and bang, it was back. And you can. At least. That issue incenses me just as a technical person who wants to configure a computer the way I want to configure it. However, I have to recognize that in many cases, maybe even in most cases for typical consumers, mainstream users, whatever, that they actually benefit from this policy now.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, we get back to this whole idea that you're not a typical consumer.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. No, but I try to. But I do try to see the world through that lens. I try to think that clearly about this topic. And my response, my overall take on this is you could try to enable it, but you should let me say no. And if I say no, you should respect that choice. You know, I go through a really complex series of steps to configure Word the way I want it. And then as soon as I'm done with it and I save a file to the desktop, which is where I want to save it, it says, whoa, wait a minute. God, dude, no, you really. You got to back this thing up to OneDrive. What are you doing? And it's like you just saw me do it. Like, I didn't misclick one button. I did 17 steps to get to this.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it wasn't an accident. I'm not fumbling my way through here.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Or in that instance, in that stupid yellow strip that comes up, give me an option that says, yep, I got it. Yeah, don't tell me this ever again. And then it goes, are you sure? I am sure. And then let me go. But it doesn't do that. So to me, that's the bad behavior. Well, that and the automatic enabling of something I literally said no to seven or eight times. But whatever I do Agree. It's maybe the best configuration, the recommended configuration for maybe most people. Certainly many people, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that they're not doing it.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's not what we're talking about here, right? Like, we're not talking about that. We're talking about something that's not insane, but it isn't insane like, like you said it would be. It would be a net negative to Microsoft's business because it would be found out. You know, you can't get away with anything anymore. You can't. Microsoft can't secretly be training this stuff. It would be found out. Someone would do a search or whatever it is or use Copilot. They'd be like, huh, it spit back something I wrote, the exact thing I typed in this document from 13 years ago or whatever. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

So there's too many disincentives. There's no real incentive to do it. It doesn't make sense. And they say explicitly, they don't do it to me, case closed. And I. And there's people in the chat right now saying, well, you know, Microsoft's doing it.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I mean. I don't like that. Because if that's where you're at, then just don't use Microsoft stuff. I mean, then walk away. Like you have to. Just. Look, if you just don't trust that the company's that level that they can't, literally cannot be trusted.

[Leo Laporte]

Linux, you got Linux, you gotta.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, use something else. Use a Mac. I mean, use whatever you want either. No, I've just. I don't care. Like, use an abacus, I don't care. But, you know, as long as it's not made by the Chinese. Those aren't Chinese, damn it.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, is it back door to Abakai?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, that's right. What's inside the. What the hell is a camera?

[Leo Laporte]

Those beads have transmitters.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know. I can't solve all the world's problems. I have my own problems. But I. But this one, I. Look, I. I guess my point was I have a healthy distrust as a strong word, but a wariness certainly of Microsoft skepticism. Thank you. That I did. I did the work. I looked, you know, did something change? I don't see anything in there. I'm not the smartest guy in the world. Maybe someone else could do it and be like, oh, Paul, you missed something. I don't. Good, go for it.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Or just spread the hate. People who would love to catch Microsoft out who are always looking, oh, yeah, you'll hear about it if it happens. You'll hear about it. Now, let's talk about recall. Because on Sunday I had a great panel of smart people and I asked.

[Paul Thurrott]

Him about recall because they all lose their minds.

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, good.

[Leo Laporte]

I said, would you. Would you install this? I said, yeah, I can't wait. In fact, we all agreed. I certainly believe it should go farther. It needs to be on all platforms to be really useful.

[Paul Thurrott]

It needs to be on all your PCs so you can sync all your data as well. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

As an individual, an AI that's trained on what I'm doing or can answer questions about what I'm doing should see everything I'm doing to be really useful.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. So that was my. That was the first thing I asked. I said, yeah, okay. I use, I don't know, 18 different computers in a year. How has this helped me if I can only have the data from one computer and have it stuck on that computer?

[Leo Laporte]

And this is where moral panic gets into trouble, because Microsoft isn't doing that because they know the out hue and cry would be so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oddly for a company that seems so disconnected from reality. When they announced this, they actually did see that this would be a problem for people.

[Richard Campbell]

But I think adults took over the problem and said, you guys screwed this up.

[Leo Laporte]

But what I don't like, I'm losing a feature that I would really like, which is it to be everywhere.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

And we could deal with Apple and Google and put it on my Android and iPhone, for that matter.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, don't get crazy. But we. So it will get everywhere. It will go everywhere, like cancer does. It will get there. But in the recall announcement, you actually do see those two sides of Microsoft I was talking about, or Windows, I guess, in this case, which is the kind of gleefully clueless Google, like, part of the company that's like, you trust us for our privacy protections and security. And we're like, I'm sorry, what did you just say? Most people in the audience. Are you describing someone else? Because that's not how we think of you. But then they also take the security and privacy strongly enough to actually build in some pretty serious protections. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

The biggest mistake they made, though, was they were going to announce it. They were going to release it to the public without testing it privately at all. Like, granted, I know, in preview.

[Richard Campbell]

But seriously, I think it was just deadlines, right? They were trying to beat the deadlines.

[Paul Thurrott]

This was a huge, huge mistake. Totally great. That, to me, is just the. And the other thing that they were going to do. So you know, people, people will point at these little nitty gritty so called security configuration changes they made. I'm not saying they didn't make any. I'm actually literally saying they didn't make any. But you know what, don't worry about that. Let's just agree that you're all wrong and I'm right and we'll just move on. See how easy that is? No, no, no, that's not what I. I'm sorry, I'm joking. I'm sorry. That's how that works. No, no, let's disagree that you try that on Stephanie.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just curious.

[Paul Thurrott]

I. It doesn't work with her at all actually.

[Richard Campbell]

So strange.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, let's not go down that path. So with recall, let's just say that to my opinion, the biggest changes, the most material changes to this feature or app, whatever you want to call it, or I think there are three of them. So one is that they called it optional, but what they really meant was opt out, which is gross. Now it's opt in, so it's not enabled by default. You have to opt into it to use it. And by the way, this came up last week or sometime in the past. Richard, you will remember this. One of the weird things about Windows 11 on ARM, Snapdragon version with all the LLMs is like they're going to provide us with this ISO. Are the LLMs going to be included? And we know that because it's 5.1 gigabytes or whatever. They are not.

[Richard Campbell]

It's huge.

[Paul Thurrott]

So what's that experience like? Well, that experience is like you go to run an AI feature and it says hold on a second, we got to download something and it downloads the LLMs that that feature needs. And each time you use one of those features, that's how that will work. If you do like a true clean install with the Windows 11 on ARM ISO. That's how recall works. So you install this new build in the dev channel of the Windows Insider program, which by the way, doesn't take very much time at all because I think it's just installing the app, honestly. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And I know this should always be downloaded. Like everything that can be downloaded should be downloaded.

[Paul Thurrott]

I couldn't agree more. But again, I think they, the Xbox, it's like they're trying to do the right thing, but it's not the right thing for everybody. And they don't give the people that just want that the ability to do that. It's so complicated, I don't understand it. But anyway, so you install Recall, you reboot. You're like, great. You run Recall. It's like, nope, you got to go to Windows Update. Install something. Like, all right, so you go to Windows Update, you install something. It takes a little while. All right, go back to Recall. All right, here we go. Nope, still got to go back to Windows Update. Got to install another thing. All right, cool. You're like, all right, this is it. You go back. Nope, there's one more thing. There's three LLMs you got to install. They don't install together. It's crazy. I don't know why maybe that changes, but right now, when I did it. Not the case. All right. And then you run this thing, and you're like, huh? That's all it does. It just.

[Leo Laporte]

It did all that for this?

[Paul Thurrott]

It just runs in the background. It uses.006% CPU, and now I have 3 million screenshots of me browsing full pants on Amazon. Dear God, why? And it's. And you wonder. And. Oh, and by the way, every time you look away from the damn thing and come back, it does the Windows hello ESS experience, which is a rather tedious process of authenticating. I think we talked about this last week. This notion of it doesn't just come up with the Windows hello thing with a little. You know, the little eyeball goes, is it you? Is it you? And when it finds you, it gives you a little okay, button in the dialog. You have to click to get by.

[Leo Laporte]

You should just recognize you.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know it makes me crazy, but this is what happens again. All the outrage. You know, whatever. Okay, fine. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Starting to feel like there. Actually, I felt this way for a while. There's a group of people who don't like anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. And they just complain and complain and.

[Leo Laporte]

Complain, and they're really stopping tech companies, like, I think we. I think this is out there. But it's possible that AI could be a transformative technology. It's possible. I'm not saying it's going to happen, but it could be a transformative technology that brings us into a future of flying cars and fusion electricity, basically all sorts of things.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

But we may never get it because people are so afraid of it that they stymie it. And it bothers me that we're not getting stuff that we could get.

[Paul Thurrott]

It bothers me.

[Leo Laporte]

Scaredy cats.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've raised this issue a few times this year. This notion that the most technical people are the ones who are holding us back. You know, interestingly, in my. I don't know 16th rereading of Steven Stofsky's book, I was reminded of this phrase they have, or had anyway, inside Microsoft called the basement. Have you heard this term?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is from one of the. I think it's Die Hard and Live Free, one of the Die Hard movies. There's a technical guy that work, and he lives in the basement. And these are the technical experts. These are the smartest. We know this thing inside. Note. And so when you design a product like Windows or Office or whatever it is, and then you change the UI or you change the way it works, what you're doing is making life better for everybody. Hopefully. I'm sorry, your goal, except for the guy in the basement or the audience that will describe collectively as the basement. Because these guys already know every little in and out of this thing as it is. And now you're changing it and they hate it because you've made them less. You've moved useful or valuable.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. That's a lot of value in knowing where that cheese is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. And so this is a phenomenon that is not new. It's been around for a long time. This came up in the discussion about Windows 8 and the Start screen and all that kind of stuff, whatever. But I just have to say, in my own experience, it's real. And the way it exhibits itself for me is they announced this thing in May. They were going to ship it in June. They delayed it. There was some news over the summer, but not really. And then September, they're like, this is what we're doing. So over the course of time, I've had to write about this thing 8 to 12 times, whatever it is. And every time you get the same three or five idiots who are like, I'll never install this thing. I'll never use it. I'll stop using Windows if I have to. And it's like, hey, thanks for jumping in. Great conversation. What are you doing here? Or maybe a better example is like, when you write something about Apple and there are these guys who just hate Apple. They'll never use anything Apple makes on a story about Apple. And they get it just so they can get in and be like, screw this company. I would never waste money on an Apple product. It's like, hey, thanks for jumping in. What is it you're doing? Like, what do you think you're doing here? And this is a good example of something that, like Leo said, I think it's going to benefit a lot of people. I think it will be even better when it's on multiple devices. For sure. But normal, everyday mainstream users, useful. We talked about this notion that maybe AI solves search finally, right? This thing that Microsoft has tried to solve so many times over so many decades that by analyzing things, instead of building indexes and making people add metadata and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I used. I was joking about the pants thing, by the way, but I did go to a site and look at some green pants. So I could later say type in green pants and see if it came up. Shocking.

[Richard Campbell]

You never actually own green pants, is what you.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, I did. I was 7. And they matched my. There were Geranimals that matched like the top at the bottom or something. I don't know, a long time ago. But. But the point of it was just to give it some nonsense excuse or me an excuse just to try something. I knew what the result would be so I could see what happened. Right, right. So it works great.

[Richard Campbell]

It works.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, my life hasn't imploded. Hackers haven't entered my network, the police haven't.

[Richard Campbell]

It is essentially a search product. Right. Is that the software now is analyzing these screenshots and creating a summary of it. So you go do a search into that aesthetic. I want it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I want it. The thing they didn't say at the time back in May, that they did say in September. And I'm not 100% sure I tied these two things together. They're not always together, but was the click to do piece, which, by the way, terrible. Google like name, but whatever, let's get over that. It's one thing to find something that you're looking for, great. But the next step is triggering some action, like doing something with that thing you found. Now, depending on what you're looking for, maybe that's obvious, right? I don't know. But you can also go through your recall database or catalog, whatever they're calling it, and it will do text recognition. If this text in an image, it will do image recognition, obviously, if it's an image, whatever's in the image. And then you can right click on that thing and it will give you actions that you can do on that thing that are related to that thing. They're contextual. Right. Now, this is another example of something that's going to be amazing when third parties can link into it. It's pretty good. What's there now because it's Microsoft stuff. If it's an image, obviously you could edit this thing with paint or something or whatever. That stuff's all obvious. If it's text, you could do things like summarize it, make it longer, make it shorter, whatever, that's obvious. But someday there'll be an API. It will probably be called, I don't know, the Copilot Runtime or some stupid thing like that. I'm just guessing, just guessing.

[Richard Campbell]

It's more like Agentic Copilot.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like that's where you're headed, where you are. I'm trying to think of a third party. Like maybe I use Affinity photo. And now it can say something like, remove the background of this image using affinity. Or I'm just making something up. That's not even a really good example, but. Or take this text and make a video with it using AI, using some app or whatever it might be. So this stuff is all really very much. I was going to say 1.0. It's not even 1.0. Right. It's still a preview. It's still playing around with it. 0.5 or whatever it is.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I think about, like Google does this to me all the time, where it takes a set of pictures that thinks are the same, which I'm pretty sure that you're using a machine learning model to pull those pictures together. And then makes me a little animated sequence of them. And then. Did you want to save this because I made this for you?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. I just went through a thing with. I've been using Google Photos for years and for some reason the other day it was like, hey, do you want to take a few seconds to identify some people? We think we know who they are, but we just want to make sure. And you know, it's like Saddam Hussein and Hitler and then my sister, you know, it's like. And it's like, are they related? And like. Yeah, I think they might be, but. No, no, but it's like one of the things.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what I could tell.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, one of the things. One of the things that's fascinating about Google Photos explicitly is that it can identify a picture of my daughter when she was 2.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And a picture of my daughter when she's 23 and say, these are the same people, aren't they? And it's like, yikes. And yes, they are. You know, that's useful though, isn't it? Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Right after the dog died, it was really good at putting an assembly of my dog's pictures together and going, hey, look at this. It's like, hey, thanks for that. I really enjoyed that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Now we still do. We have the same thing and we have.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I very consciously rounded up all the pictures of the dog and put it in a folder away because I really don't want to look at them for a while.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, yep. Yeah. Now we have the same issue. So anyway, what we talk. So Recall. Yeah, so. So here's the thing. So I talked about the basement. I talked about these, you know, the technical people just. I can't stand that this even exists. It's. We get that you're never going to use it. Here's an idea. Quietly just never use it. You don't have to hear about it. But you guys are all familiar with the Register, right? These are the guys who, like 20 years ago, every time they mentioned Microsoft, it was Micro Sloth and I think with a dollar sign instead of an S, that kind of thing. And they always like users were punters, like this kind of stuff. So these guys are so. They're a typical example of the basement. Super anti recall. Wanted this thing to go away. Can't believe it's coming out. And now that it's out, they have to complain about it. And look, I think it's fair to say I am bracing for the first report where some security researcher says, hey, I found a problem with this thing. By the way, I haven't heard anything like that. Have you? So not yet. Not yet. So interesting because they found that really early last time when they hacked into it and made it look like something stupid that we needed to worry about. But anyway, I have no doubt they're hammering away at a. I'm not unhappy.

[Richard Campbell]

That they are, because if there is a vulnerability everybody wants to know about.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not unhappy either. I think this. I. Listen, what I said at the time was similar to what I said earlier in the show. We can't make stuff up. Let's see what happens when it's out. Then we'll, you know, then we can talk about it. Anywho, the Registry, the Register has a story about the problems now that it's out. And it is hilarious. Not purposefully, because what they want to say is, yeah, it's a security problem. I got in as an admin and I got into the encrypted database. They said we weren't going to be able to do that. There's none of that. These are the problems. This is unbelievable. It's a little slow making snapshots. What?

[Richard Campbell]

What?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a little slow. In other words, let me ask you a question, like you're doing something right now that maybe in the future you might want to search for the thing you're doing. Right now. Like, I'll use the green pants thing. When do you not need to search for that? It's right when you did it. Yeah, right, You. It's sitting there in the browser tab. I don't need to find the green pants right now. But what they're saying is, yeah, the green pants snapshot didn't take it immediately. Like, I had to wait like 30 seconds for it to appear. You're like, okay, what are you doing? Like, I. Okay. And then they're like, well, the OCR stuff works great, but recognizing what's in an image, it's not as accurate. Okay, I mean, like, what are you talking. This is what we're complaining about. Is this why it was delayed for six months? It's a little slow. Are you kidding me? This is how awful the world can be about nothing. It's nothing.

[Richard Campbell]

So anyway, you know, now it's something.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what something. Our fine sponsor, US Cloud. Let me take a little break and when we come back, we can talk more about whatever the hell it is you're talking about. Oh, no, no, I get it. I'm with you. I'm with you, man. I'm right on. I'm totally with you, whatever it was that you were. Let's talk about snapdragon x co pilot plus PCs. Okay, when we come back. How about that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Fine, fine.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry, let me say that differently.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, sounds great. No, I want recall. I want it, but I'm not going to get it because I don't use Windows for other reasons. Anyway, our show today brought to you. Is that a bad admission? I had a Windows machine and I was going to, but I'm sending it to Paul, so I guess maybe, Paul, I could get a recommendation. How about that? That'd be good. The show today brought to you by US Cloud. Now, see, if you are using Windows in your enterprise, as almost everybody does, as certainly we do, you need to know about US Cloud. The number one Microsoft Unified Support replacement replacement. US Cloud is the global leader in third party Microsoft Enterprise support. You might say, well, why would I want third party? How about better, faster, cheaper? I mean, okay, that would explain why 50 of the Fortune 500 use US Cloud for their enterprise support. Switching to US Cloud could save your business 30 to 50% on a true comparable replacement from Microsoft Unified Support. Let's not say cheaper, say less expensive. How about that? That sounds better, but it will save you money. US Cloud supports the entire Microsoft stack. Of course. They're there 247 every day of the year, they respond faster and they resolve tickets quicker for clients all over the world. And let me tell you something, when you talk to US Cloud, you're talking to real humans who are very good at what they do. Expert level engineers with an average of 14.9 years. That's for, and that's for break fixer, DSE. That's, that's. I mean, I talked to these guys at US Cloud. I was very impressed. They bend over backwards. They work very hard to get the very best engineers, they pay them well, they give them great benefits, they give them great working conditions. That's why they love working for US Cloud. And that's why you're going to love the support you get from US Cloud. Oh, and by the way, their teams are 100% in the United States. Your data never leaves the US oh, and incidentally, they offer something Microsoft will not offer. Financially backed SLAs on response time, that's a guarantee. Initial ticket responses average under four minutes. It's even. That's. And you know what? When the whole thing, the network's down, nothing's working, you can't figure out what's going on. Having having them on the phone in four minutes is a lifesaver, right? Every minute counts. In 2023, 94% of US clouds reported saving 1/3 or more. 94% said they saved 1/3 or more when switching from Microsoft unified support to US Cloud. Everybody who uses US Cloud loves it. From Fortune 500 companies and large health systems to major financial institutions and federal agencies, U.S. cloud ensures that vital Microsoft systems are working for over 6 million users globally every day. And I'm talking big brands that trust US Cloud. Caterpillar uses US Cloud. Hp, Aflac, Dun and Bradstreet talk about a business that can't afford to be down for even one minute. Under Armour KeyBank uses US Cloud. Even the folks at Gartner have chosen US Cloud for their Microsoft support needs. I heard an interview with the Director of Information Technologies. I wish I want to get the recording so I can play it, but I'll act it out. Okay, he said. And within an hour, US Cloud responded with, I want to say, four engineers. So not only did they bring the right guys to the call, they brought the cavalry. I just felt like, wow, that was amazing. That was unlike anything I had experienced with Microsoft in my eight years with being with Premier. We made the right choice, make the right choice with US Cloud. Oh, and by the way, when it comes to compliance, no one gets it better than US Cloud. They're ISO gdpr, ESG compliant. And those are not for US Cloud. They're not just regulatory requirements. They, you know, they do their strategic imperatives. They really believe in this stuff. They say it drives operational efficiency. I talked to them, I was really impressed. They drives legal compliance, of course, but also risk management, corporate reputation. These are standards that foster loyalty and trust among customers and stakeholders and attract investment and ensure long term sustainability and success in a competitive marketplace. Uscloud.com book a call today to find out how much your team can save. I told him, don't focus on how much you could save. Focus on it's better it faster, better faster and you'll save money. That's pretty good deal. Uscloud.com book a call today. Get faster Microsoft support for less US Cloud. We thank them so much for supporting the show. We appreciate your belief in Paul and Rich and the Windows Weekly team. And you folks, you support Windows Weekly. When they ask you, they say, hey, where'd you hear about us? You say Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Those guys are great.

[Leo Laporte]

I believe whatever they say.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean, you know, trust but verify.

[Leo Laporte]

Trust but verify. Good way to put it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, by the way, just got an email from Microsoft about this issue.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Even more explicitly, Microsoft does not use customer data from Microsoft 365 consumer or commercial applications to train foundational LLMs. The Connected Experiences setting in Microsoft 365 that people are referencing has no connection whatsoever to how Microsoft trains its models. This setting is not new and it has been available since 2019.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you for flattening that. I appreciate it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just, I don't know, like I said, I, I would. You want. When I get outraged about something, I would like to think it's coming from a place that's real, you know, I mean, of course I would like, I think everyone would like to think that about themselves. I don't know. But you're.

[Leo Laporte]

But the thing is you're the experts. And I told Steve, I will ask and I will, I will find out. Paul and Richard will know.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've been hit by the wave a lot. It hurts, you know, so I don't know. Expert. I don't know what that means.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what it means either.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've been on the front lines a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

They pretty diligently go back and reread stuff like that's. You have to go and really read it because it is corporate speak a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's part of the problem.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Lawyers write it, right? They need to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and like I said, I. I went back and looked. I was like, you never know. I mean, I want to be sure or whatever. But anyway, one not side issue, but I guess one issue with this whole recall thing right now is that it's only available in preview and only on Snapdragon X based Copilot Plus PCs, which means you have to take a perfectly working computer and put it in the Insider program, which is not something I actually recommend for most people.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, wow. So you have to go to Insider to get the beta.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And it's in the dev channel. Right. And so whatever that was, that's a little hairy. You know, it's not great. So obviously it's going to make its way through the system. It's also going to make its way to AMD and Intel based copilot plus PCs in time. We don't have a schedule for that when those exist. Well, they do exist. Right. Those are shipping now. They just haven't. But they haven't made that transition, I guess from a branding perspective. But yeah, that's another thing that has to happen. Right. So supposedly by the end of the year they'll start getting these Copilot plus PC experiences, but we haven't heard anything about that either. So we'll see what happens.

[Richard Campbell]

And I'm still watching closely on can I build a Copilot plus PC from parts. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So I would say the ISO release is a good step, but it's like one of maybe five steps that have to happen. If you think back to the discussion I think we had last week about the ISO, depending on the PC you have, my recommendation is to go through the five or other whatever it is, methods for recovering a computer before you ever try that. Because it doesn't have the drivers. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know how else to say this, but I think you would be insane to put your computer in the dev channel of the Insider program. Frankly, if you have an I need.

[Richard Campbell]

To use it for anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And obviously I did do that because I'm insane. But that's my job. I mean, I have to do this.

[Richard Campbell]

Right, Your insanity as a profession. I get that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. It has. I have a rationale. I have a rationale behind my insanity.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. You mean there's a method to your madness?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Right. What I did do though, however, was because Microsoft offers downloadable recovery image software you can put on a USB stick, I created it and I booted the computer and made sure it worked. Right. So if I want to get it back, I can get it back, you know, easily. If I didn't know that I could do that, or if you didn't know you could do that, don't put it in the dev channel. It will eventually make its way down to everybody, obviously.

[Leo Laporte]

Boy, I've learned my lesson.

[Paul Thurrott]

I am not Leo's over there like, okay, which channel do I want to be in?

[Leo Laporte]

I am not changing my channel.

[Paul Thurrott]

What are you doing, man?

[Richard Campbell]

But that Snapdragon dev kit should be just the thing to throw in the dev channel.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, that's what a dev kit's.

[Paul Thurrott]

And actually, I think that's maybe the best possible thing to test on for trying to recover it afterwards, using the base ISO to see what that experience is like, because that's the one that's going to have the least.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, the most referenced hardware. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Good news, Paul. I forgot to reset it, so it's got all my crap on it. So go ahead and I'll just blow it away from.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'll nuke it from orbit, as we say from space. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, just as a bit of advice, I mean, I wrote an article about this when the ISO came out a couple weeks ago. Please look at it and think about what you can do. And if you have an HP or a Lenovo, whatever type of copilot plus bcc, whether they offer something, I gotta look up, frankly, whether they offer those recovery images because you want that.

[Richard Campbell]

You want the ability to get the manufacturer's recovery first.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's a capability in Windows when you enroll a PC in the Insider program to opt out automatically when this version of Windows ships. I'm not saying it doesn't work anymore at all, but it mostly doesn't work. And because these don't map to a next version of Windows per se, the dev channel and I think the beta channel are both testing features that might or might not be added later to 24H2 right now. Doesn't mean that there'll be some switch over where you'll get out of it automatically. I wouldn't trust that. So just be, you know, just be sure you can get out, is my point. Okay. I think that's about it on the recall thing. Unless you'd like to beat that to death a little more.

[Richard Campbell]

I think we've beaten it up pretty well.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Let's, you know, talk about how much fun 24H2 is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So every week there's another problem with 24H2, and I think I'm just going to make this a permanent part of the show this week in 24H2.

[Richard Campbell]

This week broken 24H2.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. What broke this week in 24H2? Or like why don't I have 24H2 yet? You know, it might be this. So this week Microsoft added a new set of blockers to the Windows 1124H2 upgrade, which is certain Ubisoft games. Recent games. Assassin's Creed, Valhalla Origins, Odyssey, Star Wars Outlaws.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Which built on the same engine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, okay. Apparently those games will exhibit problems if you in place upgrade from 23 to 24H2 and it's working on a resolution with Ubisoft. So for right now it's just going to block.

[Richard Campbell]

So the point being if you have any of those games installed, it's literally just not going to offer you 24H2.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. But the problem is it might have before. So if you experience problems. There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's all kinds of other problems with this thing. There's like certain intel drivers causing problems.

[Richard Campbell]

They're still battling the easy cheat, easy anti cheat too.

[Paul Thurrott]

The anti cheat stuff is causing problems.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean I understand the driver stuff because that's all that low level behavior and the chipsets fundamentally different. The anti cheat I even buy into too because it has to do some sneaky things to detect cheaters.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean pretty much driver. It's probably. It's pretty much drivers.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like it's pretty much like a VPN type thing or something. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's sniffing pretty low. The Ubisoft one is interesting. It just means they've done something sneaky. Likely in video. Right. And they're poking into Ring zero on video and the ARM machine's like, nope.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that sounds about right. So anyway, maybe I don't know if this is. I don't know where this falls in the list of problems with 24h2 but it's lower on the list, I would say.

[Richard Campbell]

You know they complain all along. Well for ARM at least was the game. This is 24H2 on anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Which is, you know again, I wonder how much of this is ARM adaptation creating issues.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

It's you know, going back to Aria Hansen that run a show. It's like 24H2 is a new version of the OS.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And right. And because it just kind of. It's Windows 11 so you're like, I doesn't seem like that big of a deal. But there's a lot of there was a lot of foundational work that went into this, which was one of the reasons why it wasn't an enablement package, but what they call it, a full OS wipe or something.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which is a tough way.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a big hill. It's a big lift, you know, and I get it. But I don't know, I feel bad about using these terms. Like, why would you just make it in UoS? It could have been Windows 12.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. It's mostly support lifecycle related, I would imagine, but fair enough. Yeah. So Windows 11, when it first came out in 2021, was new UI, but the underprintings were the same.

[Richard Campbell]

The same. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So now we have this one that looks exactly the same, basically. But now the underpinnings are not completely close, but they've been significantly updated.

[Richard Campbell]

That's certainly a corporate thing where win 11 was just a no go because a whole lot of group policy broke.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's like, sorry, not doing it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So they filled that in.

[Paul Thurrott]

This came up last week because we talked about ignite and the resiliency thing. But it's fascinating to me that Microsoft has kind of retroactively made real the claims for the higher Windows 11 hardware requirements. Right. That now there's all these built in security controls that really do differentiate Windows 11 from Windows 10. Whereas in the beginning it was like, well, you know, the first two, two and a half or whatever, three versions. It was like, not really. Right. I mean, but now you're like, oh, no. Now it's. You know, all the new computers I've gotten recently have Windows hello, ESS on it. Right, Right. This is a stringent new security requirement.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Requirement. It's like crazy. And getting the industry to just adopt something like that is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Again, back to what's my goal here? Building this next PC is Can I make it hello ESS compliant from Components. And I'm.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know ESS is going to be tough. That one. I don't. That. I don't think so. Well, I'm.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm really wondering, like, can I buy a camera assembly that's the infrared camera and so forth to just attach to the top of a monitor? I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can't. I don't think it's not, not. Not with ess. I don't think so.

[Richard Campbell]

All right, so I'm just going to have. I'm going to dismantle a laptop and turn that monitor, all those parts into a display. That would be a weird waste of resources. Would it? Maybe.

[Paul Thurrott]

I Mean, they don't make them anymore. But when Intel NUCs were a thing, and I would imagine for other nucleic computers today, depending on how you bought it, you got this kind of complete computer, but without the RAM and the storage. Right. That was one of the configurations.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah, I bought it.

[Paul Thurrott]

And yeah. And so you can. It's nice because it's upgradable and you can do what you want with it and all that kind of stuff. But you could make an argument that, I mean, obviously there was no camera with that or fingerprint reader, but there could have been and that could have been an ESS computer if they made them today. And adding RAM and storage doesn't change that fact. That stuff's fine. You're not bypassing anything or whatever by doing that. So it's a possibility. Well, it's not a possibility. They don't make them anymore anyway. Maybe there will be PC kits for 24H2 and forward where that's the case where it's like an ESS compliant kit and then you just add the other stuff that's not security related. Maybe. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And you know, and I have friends in the right places too, so I could go so far as to poke in on this and say like, can I third party buy a component that would normally be, you know, for a builder?

[Paul Thurrott]

Could I buy a laptop? Motherboard, you know, is it.

[Leo Laporte]

You need a tpm. What chip?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, no, it's everything. It's the camera, everything. No, it's facial recognition part.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have to go look this up on Microsoft Learn. It's crazy. There's some list of like 27 requirements. It has to be factory certified by Microsoft and the PC maker to meet all of the requirements that this thing has never been. No, you can't add to it. You can't add. Once you add an external camera or an external fingerprint reader, you don't have ESS anymore. It will not work because it can't guarantee that the system has never been compromised. There's something, you could have put something in the line that reads the keystrokes or your fingerprint or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a response to the weird super micro fake issue that Bloomberg raised years ago about the little Chinese rice chip placed on the Supermicro motherboard so it could spy on you. Yeah, they really want to control the supply chain, the whole chain. And they won't certify it secure until. Until they can do.

[Richard Campbell]

So maybe they need to. Yeah, I'm looking at that.

[Leo Laporte]

That means it's not going to be a Build your own PC ever? No.

[Richard Campbell]

It's going to be tough.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well no, but that's why I said if you could build. If you could have a PC kit. Yeah, an ESS kit that would have a security solution or two. Security solutions.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean what else is there?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well there's the case, the ram, the storage, the. And then other peripherals that you could add to keyboard, mouse, whatever screen, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but I mean can't you buy an ESS PC that doesn't. That you can upgrade the RAM and the peripherals in the model.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a real. I mean full stop. Is there a desktop off the shelf? Hello, ESS mechanical.

[Paul Thurrott]

So during the next ad break I'm going to go take a look and find out because do some shopping. I know there, I bet. No, I mean I think I have one. I'm going to go find out but I.

[Leo Laporte]

It's probably a laptop, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's an. No, it's. No, I mean the desktop PC. So it's an all in one computer with a built in webcam. Right. So I think. I bet it is ess. I'm going to go look. I. I'm trying to think. I can't remember. Yes I can. So probably over the summer first gen Meteor computers. Well even those could be ess. I'm trying to remember the last time I had a non ESS laptop in for review. It was early this year. It's been a while. Like they're very common now all of a sudden they came out of nowhere like they were. This was like a unicorn last year. Like you could get them.

[Leo Laporte]

But who needs this enhanced sign in security ess?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well this is going to become the baseline. So this is the baseline requirement for Copilot plus PC. And one of the things we talk about is how this will over become the baseline requirement for Windows all PCs. Yeah, so this is the beginning of that. But the thing is. Well no, most of them are I guess technically the AMD intel style copilot plus PCs. But even before that you could get like a first gen meteor lake if configured that way by the PC maker. Again, expensive, hard to do that could have it. I did have some or at least a couple but it was rare, it was unusual. Now it's become very common at least in the premium PC space. Anyway, it's part of the. This is, you know, you're trying to bring an industry along with you. It's not like Apple's like we just switched over now we're doing this new security thing. You know, you Got to get the buy in of all the chip makers and the PC makers. It's, you know, it's a little complicated.

[Leo Laporte]

And the PC master race is not going to like this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, Richard?

[Richard Campbell]

No, I just want to be able to build one, that's all.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but I bet you.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, that sounds like something you can't.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, okay, but what's the downside here? So, in other words, let's say you can't buy. You can't. You can't build one. Right. So you build a computer. It's based on whatever chips you have. So you'll have Windows hello. Or you could. Right. Depending on the hardware you choose, you just won't have Windows hello, ess. So, from a user experience perspective, it's basically identical. I think the big difference from using it is just that Windows hello, ESS requires you to authenticate way more. Like, way more. There's no like in Windows hello. There's a setting that says, after I've been gone from the computer for whatever number of minutes, force me to authenticate. That's grayed out. In ess, you authenticate every time. If you turn this way and come back, authenticate.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's why I don't think it will be all Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

At some point, I'm actually going to make people angry. If you interrupt people, it's going to.

[Leo Laporte]

Take you really angry. That's okay for a business that needs enhanced security. But I want to play Valheim at home.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't need that. And I want to build my own PC. I don't need that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but the people that actually say that are PC masters are a tiny percentage of the user base. It is a PC. So you're going to have this option. This will be an option. I guess what I'm trying to say is, you know, Richard's case, he's going to build his computer. It's not going to be ess. So is it okay? Like, it's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

So you will be able to put it on Windows on a PC that doesn't have that full enhanced?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, No, I definitely want to try and get to the Copilot Plus PC standard. But if they require hello ESS for that, that's a problem. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is weird because it's not. AI, has nothing to do with ess.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I mean, but they've tied them together because of things like recall, where you want that kind of data highly secure.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's Steve Gibson's fault.

[Richard Campbell]

Totally. I blame Steve all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I get it. Yeah, they want enhanced security. I understand.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And to be clear, because everyone seems to confuse this matter. That was the case the day they announced recall. This is not new.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not new. They just did a bad job of it wasn't explaining right.

[Paul Thurrott]

But now they're just going along like, well, we have a new security architecture. It's like, do you. Because I'm looking at the thing you wrote back in May and they look the same, but, you know, whatever. Again, I will beat that to death if you let me. You know, let's spend an hour on it. No. Okay, so Ubisoft got that there are no insider bills this week. It's Thanksgiving holiday in the US Last week we did later today.

[Richard Campbell]

When? As soon as we're finished the show.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, right in the middle of it, right now that I've said that it just went up. Here comes waiting. There was a new beta channel build last week that has an early peak at kind of we're going to call it like what's the Apple not handoff. Maybe it is handoff. Is that continuity? Is that the Apple stuff when you can pick up something where you left off on a different device. What's that called? Handoff. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't remember.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

On a Mac it's. Yeah, handoff.

[Paul Thurrott]

Handoff. Yeah. So Microsoft would like to do as much of that as they can. In Windows, it's probably going to be Android only, obviously, but. Yeah, well, the idea is you're working on a document on your phone or tablet or something and you turn, you know, you go home or whatever it is, log into your computer and you get a little pop up that says, hey, would you like to, you know, keep working on that document? And so this comes from one, you know, this assumes that you're using one drive, you know, storing the thing in OneDrive and blah, blah, blah, whatever. And by the way, when you click yes, obviously it enables folder backup because you know Microsoft and then.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I'm just kidding.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I don't know, it's interesting. I get it. This is a key pain point, I think for Microsoft that they can't duplicate this thing Apple's doing because Apple controls the whole stack. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the wall advantage of the wall.

[Paul Thurrott]

IPhone, iPad, Mac. It's a little easier when you control all of it. So they want that so bad and. Yeah, we'll see. Okay, now this is the same as the Microsoft 365 is using my data to train AI and it is also exactly the opposite. And what I mean, by that is people have gone online and published like a picture. Like, look, they're testing this thing in Windows now where they're not going to put the little Start Backup icon in File Explorer for those folders that could be backed up with folder backup. They're getting rid of, you know, forced folder backup. Wait, wait, wait, wait. What. What makes you say that? This is one of, I don't know, seven places where it wants to remind you. Right. Of. Maybe you should turn this feature on. I'll list a couple of others off the top of my head. Pop up banner notifications, toasts in the Settings app, in the Start menu, next to your user profile in the OneDrive app, in the Windows Backup app, which also is advertised like it's only one of the ways. In fact, it's arguably the least annoying of the ways. So I'm super glad they're getting rid of it. This is definitely a step back from the cliff, if you will. But this does not mean, like, it.

[Richard Campbell]

Does not follow certification. Is that what you're talking about? Is that. That's not even.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is a. Yeah, like, it's, you know, it is a little bit. But we. I need to know more. So, yes, I'm glad someone found this, uncovered this in some beta build of Windows 11. Yay. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. This doesn't actually mean they're getting rid of the feature, like the forced usage, right? It does not mean that. I mean, I wish it did. I wish I could say that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, what does it mean?

[Paul Thurrott]

It just means they're going to get rid of one of the ways that they notify you that they want you to do this. Not all. So, for example, on my computer here, on this computer, I don't have folder backup turned on. So when I go to the desktop, it up in the corner. Not in the corner. On the left side of the address bar, there's a little Start backup button. And it animates, by the way. So when you first hit the folder, it does a little, you know, does a little thing.

[Leo Laporte]

It wants to get your attention a little more annoying.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I don't like it, so I don't do it. Yeah, it's got like a little up arrow on it. The up arrow animates. It's annoying, but like I said, it's actually not the most annoying of the ways in which it tries to prompt you to do this. I mean, honestly, the most annoying is when they just turn it on, but it's one of the ways. So Someone can see in a beta build that looking at turning that off or providing a way to turn it off, actually that's actually the right way to look at it because I think you right click on it and say, I don't want to see this anymore. And yeah, like, yes, that's what I want for all of that stuff. So we'll see. Maybe it's part of something bigger. But for now it looks like it's just the one thing. They didn't find any examples of this anywhere else in the ui. So I don't know, don't get too excited I guess is my point, because it never ends. More earnings. HP and Dell reported earnings without getting into the weeds. Very low single digit growth, if that, in PCs over the quarter or in HP's case, the year. These companies both in Lenovo also and IDC and Gartner and everyone else were like, yeah, this is going to be the year. And yeah, this is not going to be the year. So both companies basically said, not basically, literally said, we don't see the big upgrade bonanza happening until the second half of 2025 now. So yay. And that of course is when Windows 10 goes out of support. There are indications that these AI PCs, which include Copilot plus PCs, have not driven like an upgrade wave per se. I mean, people are buying them like they're doing pretty good. And eventually there'll be some big percentage of all the computers, of course, because eventually every PC will be an AI PC. But I don't think Microsoft did a great job of providing unique software that makes sense to people in the system. So I mean, it's six months later we're talking about recall still, still not out, you know, so it's taking a while, unfortunately.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's not out because of Steve Gibson. I mean, it's not. Yeah, no, I mean it could have been out.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, honestly, screw that guy. If I could just speak honestly. I'm a little tired of the Steve Gibson stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just teasing.

[Paul Thurrott]

We love Steve Gibson.

[Leo Laporte]

We do.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I mean I went back. These guys don't always do this in a timely fashion. But Gartner and IDC both had their respective reports about PC sales in the most recent quarter and the previous two or three quarters, depending on which one you were looking at. We saw mild growth, 1 point something percent like, or flat growth, whatever, this past quarter, PC sales actually fell again.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't this kind of, shouldn't it be, is this normal now? How it should be from now on? It was it went up because of COVID and work at home.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So what you're really asking is have we reached this new plateau where this, you know, plus or minus some percent is the PC market. That's what I'm wondering. But there, but there is, but we do have these upgrade waves. Right. And the corporate PC market, which by the way is the only part of the PC market that did well in any way this year for anybody. PC, like consumer PCs have fallen off a cliff. Like these sales are by and large any gains they have are from the commercial side. It's going to happen when Windows 10 goes out of support. Right. And so, you know, there'll be a bump of some kind and by October of next year, hopefully, you know when.

[Leo Laporte]

There'Ll be a bump.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

When. When 60% tariffs on products from China go into effect.

[Paul Thurrott]

I can't wait for that.

[Leo Laporte]

Then there will be a massive. They'll just buy. Everything that's already in the country will be sold out.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

What do you call the opposite?

[Leo Laporte]

And then the sales will drop off a cliff because there'll be a massive increase in prices.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But you know what? America first, that's all you know.

[Leo Laporte]

But I'm going to Madeira park to buy my PC.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Not a lot of best buys up here.

[Leo Laporte]

So you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You guys just drive down to Vancouver. I know.

[Richard Campbell]

Pretty much, you know. Yeah. Normally I would just order by Amazon, but the postal service is on strike, so.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Canada Post is on. Been on strike for almost two weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

That means no mail at all.

[Richard Campbell]

No mail except for government checks.

[Paul Thurrott]

What's the issue?

[Leo Laporte]

That's problematic.

[Paul Thurrott]

What's, what's your issue?

[Richard Campbell]

Wages and worker replacement, the usual things.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is it because I can't retire until I'm 41 or something? It's like Canada, you know, like mail.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a good job being in a mail carrier. It's a great job.

[Richard Campbell]

Miss this country. It certainly is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It is in the US too.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, sort of. My brother used to be a mail carrier and the one thing that they do now they didn't do when he, he's. No, he hasn't been a mail carrier for a long time. But they started metering the, the roots. So they have these little like check in that you have to go up with a scanner on a telephone pole and be, you know. Oh, that's, that's because my brother used to run a side business. He was doing great. And then like they figured out you could do your route in like 17min. Why is this Taking all day. Oh, dear. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why Amazon now is putting cameras in the trucks to watch you and make sure you don't. They do things like sing out loud.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

They actually prohibit singing out loud in the Amazon delivery.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, sometimes the Amazon driver will take a picture of the package when he leaves it on your front porch. I got a picture of my package in the air on the way to my front porch.

[Leo Laporte]

What I don't understand.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which was fine. It was glassware.

[Leo Laporte]

They always take a picture. They sometimes take.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I know. It's completely random.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't they? I don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not. I know. It doesn't make any sense.

[Leo Laporte]

I have the garage delivery that's been kind of fun because I gotta put it. Put a sign that says packages here because it's a like, Easter egg hunt.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Where'd they put it?

[Leo Laporte]

Where'd he put it?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's in here somewhere. I have a UPS package that I guess has arrived that was delivered by the post office to my previous house.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, that's not good.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's fine. But it's. But this is. What is. What. Where is this from exactly? Like, I have to deal with a federal agency, worldwide shipper of goods, the small business that put this thing in the mail, and the idiots who bought my house. The hell is this? Like, it's crazy. But anyway, that's the world we live in. It's, you know, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead and finish this segment because I do want to do an ad. We need to do an ad here.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was. So I don't know if you got. You must have talked about this on the Google show. This report or. I think it's a set of reports now that Google is going to merge or get rid of Chrome os, essentially. Right. And base future versions of this thing on Android.

[Leo Laporte]

Android. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

This actually kind of freaks me out.

[Richard Campbell]

A little bit because it's such a good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I like Chrome os. I will miss Chrome.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, there's a simplicity to Chrome OS.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S just a browser.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It's lacking everywhere else.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And Android is so complex. There's an element of Android that I think does make sense. Back in, I don't know, June, August, whatever, they announced they were going to bring more of the underpinnings of Android into Chrome OS for things like device driver compatibility, because device driver makers, hardware makers, target Android because, you know, several billion users makes sense. And Chrome OS is like three users. And they don't do that. They don't do that. Testing so, like, if we bring that over, we're going to benefit from that. And it's like, yeah, no, that makes sense to me. But now you're going to take this, like, hairball and, oh, what do you do?

[Richard Campbell]

I'm over it doesn't have to be a hairball either. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

I agree. I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, even. And to be fair, even Chrome OS is becoming more and more complex.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

When it first came out, what literally is a browser.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, God, you could run Linux apps in this thing. You could run Android apps in this thing. I don't know. I'm worried about it. I agree that when you look at the iPad and you're like, okay, so what is it that makes this thing so good for tablets compared to Android? Right. There are probably two things. One is that developers actually give a crap about iOS. Developers follow Apple and Lockstep in a way. They just do. Not with Google. I don't know what's going on there.

[Richard Campbell]

No tablet has been really successful except for the iPad.

[Leo Laporte]

An Android tablet's good. I have a Pixel tablet over here, which, by the way, Google is discontinuing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I know, but 16 by nine. Like, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, I had an expanding battery on my Google tablet three months after the warranty expired.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, okay, that's frustrating. But the other one is, this is not exactly true, but the Safari web browser on the iPad is not the desktop browser, but it's more desktop class, if you will. It has more of the desktop type features. And I feel like if they just, I don't know, I guess you would simplify the UI somehow. This is all coming, this is all testing in Android. Whatever the beta thing is, they have now where they have a desktop mode with like a taskbar and a Start menu looking thing, but they need, like the desktop browser. Right. You need Chrome, like the actual Chrome that we use on Windows or whatever. Like that needs to work. And then, I don't know, maybe it'll be okay.

[Leo Laporte]

But I wonder if Google had a hint or an inkling that the Department of Justice was going to try to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

And they thought, well, at least we still got Android.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, but that's like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, we'll always have Bowie is like the line from, you know. And the guy's like, oh, like, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, my favorite line I watched Demolition man last night is after the franchise war. Every restaurant's a Taco Bell.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

Love that line. It's the best.

[Leo Laporte]

After the DOJ lawsuit. Every operating system. Xander.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, boy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Oh, boy. Anyway, I just A little, just a.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, just a thing thing.

[Richard Campbell]

A little something something something.

[Paul Thurrott]

Other people may go, there was a.

[Leo Laporte]

Big outage of Microsoft 365.

[Richard Campbell]

It was a yesterday.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is one of the things that maybe would cause people to pause before they buy the thin client to do Windows.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know what happened? Everyone was clicking opt into AI training thing and it just crashed the whole system.

[Leo Laporte]

He's joking, kids. Steve, he's just joking. I'm just saying. We will be back with more of Windows Weekly in just a bit, but I want to tell you about Experts Exchange, our sponsor for this segment of Windows Weekly. You listen to our shows because we're experts and you learn things, right? Imagine a 24 hour, always online network of trustworthy, talented tech professionals where you could go to get industry insights and advice from people who are actually using the products in your stacks instead of paying for expensive enterprise level tech support. Get answers from the people who know from a community, a community that you're a part of. That's Experts Exchange. As the tech community. For people tired of the AI sellout, Experts Exchange is ready to help carry the fight for the future of human intelligence. We need a. We need a. There you go. There's a logo, there's a symbol. I'll hold that up. Experts Exchange gives you access to professionals in over 400 different fields. I'm talking programming, Microsoft Azure, AWS, DevOps. Duplicate questions are not only encouraged, they're welcome. You don't get the snark you do at other places where they go, oh, you're the questions already been asked and we're closing this thread. Or worse, you could do it that way, but I don't think you should. Why don't you do it this way? No, the contributors at Experts Exchange are nice. They're tech junkies who love graciously answering all questions. You know why? Because they understand that the real reward for the expertise, the hard earned knowledge that they have won, is passing along to other people, paying it forward, sharing it. And they're there to do that. It's just that's what Community is all about. We help each other. One member said, quote, I've never had ChatGPT stop and ask me a question before, but that happens on EE all the time. It's an exchange of information from humans. They're proudly committed to fostering a community where human collaboration is fundamental. And the Expert Directory is full of experts who will help you find what you need. Many of them listen to our shows, by the way, like Rodney Barnhart, who's a security now and a twit Listener. He's a VMware V Expert or the well known ethical hacker Edward von Biljon. He is a Microsoft MVP as well. So imagine, you know, he's an ethical hacker at Microsoft mvp. This guy's like a font of wisdom. Plus, Cisco design professionals, executive IT directors, and more. Here's another point that's I think pretty important. Other platforms betray their contributors. Everybody does it now. X does it. LinkedIn does it. Reddit does it. By selling the content you put on those sites to train AI models at Experts Exchange, your privacy is not for sale. They stand against the betrayal of contributors worldwide. They have never and will never sell your data, your content, or even your likeness. They block and strictly prohibit AI companies from scraping content from their site to train their LLMs. And by the way, that's a, that's a full time job blocking those guys because they're always trying to sneak in, but they stop them. And the moderators strictly forbid the direct use of LLM content in the threads. Because the whole point of this is you're talking to humans. It's an exchange between human beings helping each other. And frankly, if you're an expert, you deserve a place where you can confidently share your knowledge without worrying about some company coming along and stealing it to increase shareholder value. This is your safe haven from AI, something I think a lot of you would like. Join Experts Exchange today. You get 90 days free. You don't even need to give them a credit card. They know you're going to love it. So they're offering it three months for free just to give you a taste. Visit e-e.com I had a great conversation with these guys. I used to use the Experts Exchange all the time when the tech guy show was on to get answers to questions I don't know. And I was really thrilled when they called and they're back. It's wonderful. Thank you Experts Exchange for supporting windows weekly e.com tweet. All right, Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell on we go with Microsoft 360 fiver.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, there's not much to say here because no one can access the service, but I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

How long is it down?

[Richard Campbell]

It's up and running now.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was the. Yeah, no, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

The cloud goes down from time to time. I know that that's one of the people people reason people say I'm not going to work in the cloud, but we're just kind of used to it. You take, you go get a cup of coffee yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

No, and you're.

[Paul Thurrott]

And they.

[Richard Campbell]

Their outages are less often than your own.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, that's an interesting point.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You're more likely to be out than they are.

[Paul Thurrott]

Also, their outages. They'll fix it. You know, you could just. I guess I'm just gonna.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, the best thing about the. About the cloud. The cloud is it's somebody else's fault.

[Paul Thurrott]

Somebody else's problem, too. Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah. So, you know, according to their sla, I think you'll be getting a refund, so don't worry about it. Yeah. So what do you think? What was the. I went and looked at the admin center and, my God, is there a lot of information.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It was not an elegant outage. There's been no explanation for what it actually was, much less how they actually fixed it. It's just that it's back up now. They dumped a lot of. They were really thrashing. I seemed like on this one, where they just kept putting out postings, but they. But most of them were. Yeah, we're still down.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So as of right now, in this glaringly white screen I'm looking at, everything is up and running. That's what I see. So it took the better. It was over 24 hours, I would say, before it got to that.

[Richard Campbell]

And it sounded like the admin tools came up last. So.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah, I got in yesterday morning. This is on the commercial side, so. So my understanding is this impacted both consumer and commercial, actually. But it's more serious on the commercial side because of all the services that are impacted and they pay for those things. There's a lot of it, but, yeah, there were. Certain parts of it came back faster than others. I think Outlook Web Access, whatever they call that today, I think it's actually Outlook Web access, I don't know. Was one of the last ones to be reliably up for everybody, but. But yeah, it took a. Took took a long time. I don't. Do you think. Do we. Do they typically provide, like a postmortem kind of a thing?

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, they used to, but, you know, it's just like the way the security documentation used to be, like the reference material. This is the right way to do it. A few years ago, it just sort of faded off and it seems like as of late, outage analysis and summary is just not good anymore. I'm not sure why.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I don't either. Okay, well, your nightmare is over and it's time for Thanksgiving, so you can stop working again.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Everything's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually Thanksgiving is probably a good time.

[Richard Campbell]

Somebody's Thanksgiving got screwed up, that's to be clear. Like they did not get on an airplane yesterday like they were planning or the day before. Right. They've been.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Now they're. Now they're trying to get to wherever they're trying to go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It was probably, you know, all the changes they had to make so they could train their AI. I mean I.

[Richard Campbell]

It's technically not helping.

[Paul Thurrott]

I knew it's hard. It's hard being this cynical. I'm sorry. Or sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not false. It's a way of life.

[Paul Thurrott]

It comes all too easily.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's very natural.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then this is just a grab bag of stuff. We already talked about the Microsoft training, in fact I just mentioned it. Of AI not happening, et cetera. Amazon then I think starting late last year and then culminating early this year, invested 4 billion in Anthropic, the AI startup, and has now invested another 4 million.

[Richard Campbell]

That's Claude is their claim to fame.

[Leo Laporte]

Claude.

[Richard Campbell]

It's good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Which by the way is looking increasingly pretty good. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Got a great reputation. Without a doubt.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Anthropic just announced like a new standardized way that we'll see if anyone adopts it for integrating AI with data and they released it as open source and you know, we'll see like rag.

[Leo Laporte]

Like retrieval X.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's. It has a. It has one of those stupid names like MPO or you know, like it's a acronym.

[Leo Laporte]

Too many acronyms. I pay for copilot. Claude. Open AI. Perplexity AI.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's part of. It's partly like my.

[Richard Campbell]

Just set them off talking to each other. Is that it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, Keep busy like. Yeah. Yep. So I'm going to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

What's interesting is they're all good in different ways and like you know, I'd use Claude to do that. I'd use OpenAI to do that, that kind of thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

So OpenAI and anthropic are both supposed to be particularly good for programming type topics. Yeah, I use the pair programmer stuff for coding. Yeah. So chat or. I'm sorry, not copilot. Copilot. Copilot. GitHub. Copilot is going to be or has already been opened up so that it can support third party AIs including anthropic and OpenAI.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't pay for copilot on, on GitHub. I have a paid account, but I don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

I didn't do this. I set out to do this yesterday I got distracted. But I want to do one of those side by side things of the trianthropic first and like have Visual Studio open and then I guess what do you do? It's like copy and paste code and be like could you make this more.

[Leo Laporte]

Efficient or just ask it to do stuff? This is for me. What first I did is I made a custom GPT that I put all the Lisp books in and it was very good and I said don't give me an answer that's not in one of these books. Books. So it was very reliable. It was very good. But then it's funny because as the, this was a year ago. As the LLMs got better pretty soon I was able to ask the same questions of an unmodified LLM and they would get the same answer.

[Paul Thurrott]

So they're starting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're all very good at coding in other words.

[Paul Thurrott]

And even I always thought that Google's strength was going to be they would like you know, in the early days of this by what you mean like seven months ago they were saying things like AI is really bad at math. One plus one equals Q or whatever. Yeah. Or it's really bad at certain like obviously.

[Richard Campbell]

Is that JavaScript? I think it's JavaScript.

[Paul Thurrott]

JavaScript. Well it's fine if it's integer math but it's you know, let's, let's go, let's be accurate here. But they. I always felt like Google was going to be the one that would be able to meld like up to date search results and whatever level of accuracy with. Yeah. And so far that's not played out so we'll see where that goes. But okay. Actually this ties into the next one. That was coincidental sort of. But you know Brave Search is one of the 1100 third party search services we have. They're free of big tech. Right. That's not based on Bing and to some degree or whatever else. So they've got that going for them. Of course that also means that they're limited in some ways. Right. I mean they don't have that huge data store backend to kind of work on. But they also have Leo which is their. Not Leo laporte but Leo, their AI.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm very annoyed. Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry. Talk to your parents.

[Leo Laporte]

Nothing I could do. I know there's nothing I can do about that one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And they are like Google and probably Bing. I don't look at Bing, I'm normal. But like Google have been putting AI answers at the top of search results for a while. So now they're doing like a. And that's called Answer Worth AI. So they have a new chat mode for search where if you ask it an explicit question, what is the capital of Alaska? Or whatever, and it gives you an answer. With AI, there's a little chat box under there and you can ask follow up questions that will keep the context. And because it's brave, it's private, and yada yada, yada, it's good. I wrote this in the article, but I asked Brave search, how many Star wars movies are there? And it said there were 12 canonical Star wars movies. So I'm like, no, that's not true. There are 11. Right. I'm like, what does that mean? There's like the nine movies. Right. And then the two standalone movies. Solo.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Recon, what's called I can't remember, it doesn't matter.

[Leo Laporte]

One, which by the way, points out humans are no better than AI at this. Well, why did you expect the AI to be right? And you couldn't remember Rogue One? I mean, that's.

[Paul Thurrott]

I couldn't remember the name of. But I know there are 11. Except that I googled it. And when you go to Wikipedia, Wikipedia says there are 12 too.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why.

[Paul Thurrott]

But the 12th one is. Well, but the 12th one is not the same one.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So in Brave search and their AI, whatever they're using that said that the 12th movie was a man, was Mandalorian or something. Something. And it was like, that's a TV show. But on Wikipedia, apparently they combined some of the episodes of the animated Star Wars TV series, which was also forgetting Clone Wars. Yes. And released it theatrically on a limited basis. And to them that qualifies as a movie. And I'm like, yep, I'm gonna go with 11. I still think it's 11.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me ask Perplexity Pro.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, when I started typing, how many Star wars they offered, how many Star wars movies are they? How many in order? How many they're in total, including spin offs. They know this is probably not a great test question.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because we'll see what they say, though.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let's see. We're doing them in order.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's the nine episodic movies and then the two standalones.

[Leo Laporte]

There are currently 12.

[Paul Thurrott]

And solo a Star Wars Story. Yeah. So no, I didn't mention that. Solo and Rogue One.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're saying Clone Wars.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're also adding the Clone Wars. And I'm like, that's. No, that doesn't count?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, does it? It's worth noting. By the way. Perplexity says it's worth noting. While this is the chronological order events of the Star wars universe, it differs from the release order. Oh, good. It's totally for Completionist. There are also two legacy films that are no longer considered canon. The Caravan of Courage and Ewok.

[Paul Thurrott]

Adventure and Ewoks. The Battle for Edor. All right, so here's the thing. They made Star wars as a movie they released in the theater, and then at one point, it was on hbo and it eventually was on tv. That doesn't mean it's a TV show.

[Leo Laporte]

How about the Mandalorian and Grogu?

[Paul Thurrott]

That's coming later.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's coming.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I'm saying as of today. This. The fact that they took episodes of a TV show and put it on the big screen.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I don't count.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I don't think.

[Leo Laporte]

But in this case, they got 12 because they include Clone Wars.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I'm saying. That one. I don't think it counts. That's baloney.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's not the Mandalorian.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no. This is assembling a bunch of animated cartoons and making them and calling it a movie.

[Paul Thurrott]

Animated TV cartoons.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, so much for AI. Obviously, AI is an idiot.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think that's what I proved. Thank you. So that was my point. Point.

[Richard Campbell]

Dumb. This is all a waste time.

[Leo Laporte]

AI, you're so dumb.

[Paul Thurrott]

If they could just train it on our data, this thing would make sense.

[Leo Laporte]

If they would just ask Paul. Yes, they would know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hold on. I'm getting a phone call. It's A.I. yeah. What do you mean? 11? The answer is 11. God damn it. Do not screw with me with Star Wars.

[Leo Laporte]

I just think it's ironic that we expect AI to be 100% accurate when we as humans are not.

[Paul Thurrott]

We expect all technology to be at 100% or accurate. I should say. That's the problem. Like, we.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not, though.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I know, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, back to when intel couldn't do floating point math.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I will never forget that as long as I live, because my friend spent a big money on a Pentium and he was so excited to get it, which I think at the time was like 60 MHz, if I'm not mistaken. Or 50, so. Stupid number.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And, yeah, he had to give him the credit card number and send it back. Yeah. Two plus two equals Q. Yep. No, that's not the answer. And yeah, we're in trouble. Well, at Least now, adding an interface.

[Richard Campbell]

To these failures, that apologizes to you when it does it incorrectly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's.

[Paul Thurrott]

That was the. I was. I was sitting at that. Oh, I forgot to look at the desktop computer and doing whatever I was doing, and I was shutting something down, and. And it did. It wasn't working right. And I cursed at the computer, and then my iPhone's over there. And Siri said something like, well, that's a good question, Paul, but. And I'm like, shut up, you idiot. It's like the. You know, like the. It's like, yeah, like, you have to remind me of how stupid you are, like, every time, basically.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, I just want to say. And Lisa's sitting, right. I'm not saying anything in a school. But when Lisa doesn't want Siri to continue, she doesn't just say, thank you, goodbye, cancel.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

She swears. She swears. She says, shut the flip.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, and I know why it works. Aside. Aside from the irritating, by the way, it does work.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm so surprised. It works.

[Paul Thurrott]

But she also gets like, well, you don't have to be a jerk about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Listen, she's flipping me.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like I do have to be a jerk about it, because you're that stupid. Like, literally, you're not. Not only not adding value, you're just getting in the way. That's my point. But maybe there's a training.

[Leo Laporte]

It's okay to swear at machines. They have no feelings. Or. There are parents out there who teach kids some guide.

[Paul Thurrott]

Apple's looking at the logs and he's like, I gotta say, like, the number one interaction with Siri is shut up and it's all caps. Maybe we should fix this.

[Leo Laporte]

There are parents who try to teach their kids to be polite to Siri and thank you and please and stuff. No, you're teaching them the wrong thing. That's a machine. Don't make them think it's a human. They need to learn the distinction right now because they're going to grow up in a world where the distinction becomes.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Difficult.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, every time that stupid thing pipes up on my iPhone, I'm reminded of how stupid it is. Like, come on. Come on. I'm waiting for it to be like, actually, Paul, there were 12 Star wars.

[Leo Laporte]

Movies and, oh, believe me, we lost the chat room. They are now. That's the debate going on right now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah, of course. This is. This is. This is honestly how our minds work. This is. This is a. This is what? Psychological. They should train AI on This.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is what we care about. Oh, yeah. No, you. Yeah, of course.

[Leo Laporte]

So you said.

[Paul Thurrott]

Paul, you said. Oh, is wrong on Leo Braves dot com.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wrong again, Monkey Boy was my favorite early response to me on. What do you call it? News groups or whatever Use.

[Leo Laporte]

Wrong again, Monkey Boy.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was like my first online interaction was like, yeah, not after a good start here.

[Leo Laporte]

Baby's first flame war. Always. Always.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Bunch of Antitrust.

[Richard Campbell]

That was a Windows Weekly title back in 2010. Wrong again, monkey.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it really?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, you searched.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it makes. It makes sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Which Windows weekly. What? Episode.

[Richard Campbell]

175.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, we got there early.

[Paul Thurrott]

Early. Well, it was a formative experience for me. You know, it really kind of set the stage for, like, a lifetime of online activities.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. It's so fun.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Because it's not enough to argue with my wife. I get to argue with the planet.

[Richard Campbell]

Argue with software, too. Very nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, software. Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

When my voice rec device for the house, which is plugged in through OpenAI, misbehaves, I just unplug it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know what? It feels good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which, by the way, is what they do to C3PO in Star Wars. Beautiful.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what I'm saying.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just unplug this thing. You know, don't tell me the odds.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, you bought me less and you have no electricity.

[Paul Thurrott]

I realized that's what you should say to us. Don't tell me the odds. And then it's like, what? What are you doing? I don't know what you're talking about. If you don't understand that reference, you're not sentient. Just get out of here.

[Richard Campbell]

We're all fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

While we were talking, Google has asked an appeals court to appeal. To appeal to throw out the order in Epic v. Google that requires it to open up.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So we'll see how that goes. Google and the DOJ both made their final arguments in Google's ad monopoly case. By the way, this is another source of big misunderstanding in our world. So when Google was found guilty of antitrust violations with Surge, and we started discussing, well, what are they going to do? What could they do to fix this problem? There was a lot of ideas. And then finally the DOJ came out and said, all right, here are our ideas. One of them was getting rid of, you know, make them get rid of Chrome. Right. And everyone's like, you know, losing their minds. Let's make them really rein in their activities on Android. And if that doesn't work, we'll take away Android too, You know, everyone's freaking out. Right. And you get, these people are like, oh, this is going to destroy the business. You know, I'm like, well, maybe let's look at their revenues. And actually, as it turns out, you know, if you figure like they're still going to own their ad business. No one has ever talked about taking away their ad business. Right, Right. Well, I mean, they're going to compete now in a more open market. So they're not going to have 100% of it anymore. But what if they had like 50%? Right. This is still a company that makes tens of billions of dollars a quarter. They're going to be fine. Right. But now, now there's this ad monopoly case. It's like, see, now they're going to take away their ad business and no, they're not. So if you look at the amount of money that Google makes from ads in a quarter, which is between 60 and 70% of all the revenues, there are many sources of that. YouTube, Google search, et cetera, et cetera. The thing that they're in court for is the smallest part of it. It's single digit billions per quarter. And it's related to DoubleClick. Right. And the ad auction business that they have, there's like three components to it. So if Google loses everything here and nothing else changes, their revenues will be reduced by, I don't know, 10% or 12% or something. I mean, this is not like, is not a core part of Google. Even though you hear Google Ads, you're like, oh, they're screwed. Not really. You know, so apparently the court they're in or the judge that is seeing this case is known for her quickness. I think they call her the rocket Docket.

[Leo Laporte]

Docket, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which is beautiful. I love that I need a nickname like that. Except mine would be something horrible and profane. But anyway, it's. Yeah. So she's going to like roll in this by the end of the year apparently, and we'll apparent, you know, have hearings for remedies early next year.

[Leo Laporte]

And don't worry, Jack Smith will dismiss all charges before he leaves office.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think that's how government works, but we'll see. We'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like, of course, what's really unknown is what the next administration is going to do about Google. Because half of it hates Google.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Half of it loves Google.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Clear.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So the big case, the biggest case is the search case. That one was launched by the Trump administration. Doj.

[Leo Laporte]

So Trump has also recently said, said I love Google because China's scared of it.

[Paul Thurrott]

So yeah, it's almost like there's no common sense there or something. So I don't know. It's hard to say. You're right. I think that's the easiest way to say. Yeah, we don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

And of course Sundar Pichai along with all the CEOs is very actively courting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh my God. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think what will prevail. It's the same thing that prevailed for Apple. When they propose tariffs.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is it ass kissing?

[Leo Laporte]

No. Well, it's a form. It's really saying, hey, you're hurting American companies. We're an American company. We're something America should be proud of. If you really focus on this is the source of American innovation. Apple. This was in 2017 when they announced tariffs in China of 20% and Apple persuaded the President to literally put in an exemption for smartphones by saying, hey, if you do that, you're just helping Samsung. And I think that's what will happen is they all will understand.

[Paul Thurrott]

By the way, you'd also be helping Qualcomm. But fair enough. I mean I, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, but I think that they really just need to hit hammer hard on American innovation. American companies, this is the shining light the rest of the world wishes they had Google and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon.

[Paul Thurrott]

Let me ask you a question. Does the rest of the world wish they had Intel?

[Leo Laporte]

No. You can have intel, please.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, it's like I'm doing pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll trade with time.

[Paul Thurrott]

This weird bump on my hip. I don't. Could you look at it? I think there's a hair growing out of it. I don't know. It's weird.

[Leo Laporte]

Intel did get a chunk of change.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So this is another example of. This is a minor example of misinformation. A day or two before this happened, there was a Bloomberg report that said that their financing under chips would be reduced because they weren't hitting milestones. And that's not what happened at all. Like their, their potential payout in the form of loans and grants was $8.5 billion. But in September, intel was awarded $3 billion in grants and funding for a military related chips program that's separate from this. So because of that and because of congressional oversight of this, they actually had to reduce the amount that intel would get through chips from 8.5 to 7.6 billion. It had nothing to do with intel hitting or not hitting milestones.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I mean, honestly, in many ways this is a Base case scenario, they were going to get 8.5. Now they got 11 point whatever. 11, I guess 11. 11.6 billion. So they're doing okay from the government. And so intel is going to continue their. They pledged basically what amounts to $100 billion in investment in US based chip making facilities in Ohio, Arizona, New Mexico. And I want to say one other place, maybe that's it. The Ohio stuff is new. The New Mexico and Arizona stuff is refurbishing and upgrading and whatever existing facilities.

[Richard Campbell]

I wonder why those states. Have they got some tax incentive to the state as well?

[Paul Thurrott]

They absolutely did. So their tax hit was reduced by like 25% I think at least in Ohio. I don't remember the exact numbers, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you would have thought they would have stayed in Oregon. They've got all kinds of facilities in Oregon, but I imagine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that is the other one. I'm sorry, the other one is Oregon. Yep. Sorry. I knew I thought there was another one. It's Oregon. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, so good. And then we, I don't know if we ever talked about this, but TSMC also got like, I think it was $3 billion through the chips program back in September for US based.

[Richard Campbell]

And was that a facility in Texas they were working on?

[Paul Thurrott]

I think it is. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, Yep. Hey, you know, we've come to appreciate that chips are strategic asset as well and they, a certain number of them should be produced domestically. And Ben is happy happening bit by bit and it just doesn't happen that quickly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Was that a play on words? Richard? I'm a funny guy.

[Richard Campbell]

Have you met me?

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let me, let me break here. And we will get to the Xbox segment.

[Richard Campbell]

It's all going to be good news.

[Leo Laporte]

Just a moment. You're watching. I see a little Dagwood Bumstead, little look there, punctuation of bluff cloud here.

[Paul Thurrott]

Some of it's good.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell, and we will continue in a moment. But first a word from our sponsor, Flashpoint. Flashpoint. You know, governments have intelligence agencies to keep an eye on what's going on to, you know, to prepare for the next thing. Right, right. But what about businesses for security leaders? 2024 has been. Oh, then talk about the next thing a year like no other. Cyber threats, physical security concerns, they're continuing to increase. Now you've got geopolitical instability adding a new layer of risk and uncertainty. What's going to happen in Taiwan? How's that going to impact the supply chain? I'll give you just, you know, in one little area. Some examples, last year, 84% rise in ransomware attacks. That's almost double in one year. And a 34% jump in data breaches. And boy, if you're a security leader, the last thing you want to see is your company's name in the headlines next to the words data breach. And of course it's not just that. It's also losses. Trillions of dollars in financial losses and of course threats to employees and staff and team worldwide. That's where Flashpoint becomes your intelligence agency. Flashpoint empowers organizations to make the mission critical decisions that will keep their people and assets safe. They do it by combining cutting edge technology with the expertise of world class analyst teams. They do it just like national intelligence agencies do it. And with Ignite, Flashpoint's award winning threat intelligence platform, you get, man, you get a dashboard with critical data, finished intelligence, you get alerts, you get analytics. It's all in one place. The kind of information you need to maximize your existing security investments. In fact, some Flashpoint customers avoid half a billion dollar fraud losses annually and report a 482% ROI in just six months.

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Wow.

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[Paul Thurrott]

It's going great, Leo.

[Richard Campbell]

Cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

Going great.

[Leo Laporte]

You thought this was going to be the next big thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, moving on.

[Leo Laporte]

Not to throw it back in your face or anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, it's good. Flight Simulator 2024 is interesting to me because of this kind of hybrid design where a bunch of it is streaming from the cloud and they're not doing the world update download thing anymore. Like you're going to get high res models from the cloud. Allegedly. I will say when reports started circulating last week that it wasn't going so well, like people were waiting forever to get into the game online, et cetera, et cetera. I decided to install it on that computer that's a laptop that runs the AMD Zen 5 chip that runs like Call of Duty wonderfully, et cetera, et cetera. It ran like crap. Honestly it was pretty bad. Bad. I had to like release, tune down the models and it didn't look good. So yeah, there are issues. Microsoft or Xbox or I guess Flight Simulator Inc. Or whatever this company is has acknowledges obviously and they're working to fix the issues. So they've released a big update, et cetera, et cetera. It's still better than Windows. I don't know. You know, I guess you look at it in perspective. I, I, it's not like it's force installing like airports on you or anything. I, I don't know, it could be worse I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

I like the old version where they had that bug in Melbourne that made like a thousand story building just sort of sticking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Which was probably the inspiration for a scene in Star Wars.

[Richard Campbell]

It was fun.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, yeah, well, so that's happening. I don't know this one, I have to say Microsoft integrating a miniature version of the Edge web browser into something with Xbox to me doesn't sound like I'm going to like this but honestly I think this is a good idea which is that some big majority of PC gamers have a web browser open somewhere in a phone or whatever it is next to the game or maybe on the computer itself where they switch. Right. To figure out how to get forward in the game or whatever it is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, read the cheats, the cheat website, you know, that kind of thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

So they're building a mini version of the web browser Edge into the game bar which is part of Windows 11. When you hit the Xbox button on the controller or Windows key plus G brings that thing up.

[Richard Campbell]

I use this more Edge utilization.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, yeah, of course, yeah. This will be the version of Edge that opens when you click on a story in widgets Now. No, I don't know, but I use the game bar a lot now because I'm measuring the frame rate of various games and you can pin that thing to stay open. It's actually pretty useful for that purpose. But yeah, I mean, this is. I, I read that. I'm like, yeah, no, this actually makes sense to me. So, yeah, we'll see. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Just. Does it have to be Edge or could it be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Of course it has to be Edge. I mean, that's, I don't even know what you're talking about, man. I mean, what does anyone else use if they. Everyone uses Edge? It's such a weird program question that asking.

[Richard Campbell]

Not even worth asking, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

I wonder if Edge is going to become more if, If Google for sell Chrome.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, but I wonder.

[Richard Campbell]

Chrome os.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. No, no, the DOJ wants him to sell Chrome.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I was talking about. Yes. Splitting Chrome off because it's such a revenue center.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. But I wonder if at some point Edge might become kind of the best Chromium browser.

[Richard Campbell]

I think that's.

[Paul Thurrott]

There are people out there who would tell you that right now it already is. And those people, I'm telling you are, have problems.

[Leo Laporte]

They work in Redmond. Although, by the way, best Chromium browser, I mean, Chrome probably. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I would say Brave, honestly, because stripped down so much and they got rid of a bunch of the junk and without replacing it with their own junk. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a de. De. Googled Chrome.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But I don't know how good that is.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

That's really what Brave is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm not arc, I'm. You, you, it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Your ARC is very good. I, I, I know. So I, the thing is, I actually, I do have two Google accounts and Google account integration is pretty good. Like, I don't mind that stuff. It's the, you know, the tracking, privacy, something something stuff. You know, I, that I'm not a big fan of.

[Leo Laporte]

I've given up, to be honest.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think most of us have.

[Leo Laporte]

You want that information? Fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

I sometimes feel like I just say this to say it, but I, I don't know. I try to avoid Chrome if I can, but I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

We kind of. I kind of have to use Chrome for Restream, which is what we use for this show.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, by the way, I'm using it right now for Restream because at first I couldn't get it to work with Edge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So. And it had worked before. I don't know what changed.

[Leo Laporte]

Honestly, it's kind of the thing is if you need full compatibility you just have a copy of Chrome lying around because only Chrome is fully chrome.

[Paul Thurrott]

I still have have four or five browsers installed on every. Oh, me too. I mean, you know, like I keep thinking about Brave.

[Leo Laporte]

I keep trying Brave. You really like it? I should give it a shot.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like. Well, what I mean by I like it is it never gets in the way. There's never like a weird problem with it and there's never extraneous nonsense. I can.

[Leo Laporte]

And they were smart because they built in U block. They effectively U block origin into the browser engine. So manifest V2 V3 MOX next doesn't.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not saying they're the only browser, but I would say they're kind of the only mainstream browser. If you include everything down through like Vilvaldi Opera that actually passes all of the anti tracking site tests without installing anything. Yeah, Brave, like it actually just works like Brave. Not Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Firefox too. Curiously you have to install extensions for those things to get up to that level. Which is fine, it's not a big deal. But like Edge Brave actually does that by default and I have to say I kind of respect that.

[Leo Laporte]

The only reason that I've stuck on Arc this is ARC is a. Because there's no widgets, no menu bar, nothing. So it's very clean. No Chrome. That's the term. And I love this little pop up thing it does where this is a little pop up on top of.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, I know and I wish and I love that.

[Leo Laporte]

And then of course the sidebar is really effective for me. So.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, nice, right? It's good.

[Leo Laporte]

And the browser company says, well, Arc didn't really take off so we're going to do something else. But I hope they keep it around a little bit.

[Paul Thurrott]

It seems like they're going to. But ARC very decidedly turned into this power user tool that some percentage, whatever it was of people saw that and were like, yes, but most people were like ooh, it's a little bit different.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you were right. When I first tried it, I said oh, that's too much to learn.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not going to. It's too much.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

And then you got in.

[Paul Thurrott]

But then you learn it actually. And I think they made some good concessions like on every browser except for that one Control T or Command T is new tab and they turn that into kind of the central UI for commands and things and it's like yeah, no, that's smart. Like people know that and they use it and now you get to see their exactly kind of new ui.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the minute you block Origin doesn't work on it, I'm out of here. I need that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I might go to Brave.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep, Brave.

[Leo Laporte]

I do use Firefox. That was my go to for 10 years.

[Paul Thurrott]

But yeah, you know, so it's different for everybody. I. One of the things I run into, one of the things I have to do for work is like get an image off of a web article because it's a news story and I often have to use the dev tools and the dev tools in Edge and Chrome and Brave and probably Arc, but I don't remember, are all the same or enough the same that it's basically the same process. And then in Firefox it's completely different. And I actually can't figure it out and I'm like, I can't. It makes me like. So it's like a weird blocker. It's a very specific blocker. But I like Firefox. I like the whole vibe of it, obviously. But in using it I'm like, oof. Like I kind of. It's a problem, you know, it's like a day to day problem. So I don't know. I know that that's not the reason, but it's like one of the things I can think of.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, this was an Xbox segment. I didn't get distracted.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So this is a browser.

[Richard Campbell]

Talk about a browser in it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So let's see. So you know Microsoft used to have this thing called Mixer and I feel like on the list of terms for Microsoft.

[Richard Campbell]

No, there was Mix that was a conference, but Mixer.

[Paul Thurrott]

Mixer was the Twitch competitor.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean it would have been if it competed anyway.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they hired Ninja to it, But I think 10 million on bringing a 27 year old over with purple hair.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, I know, I know. So now they don't have that and they're integrating with third parties. Discord's Twitch is one, YouTube is one and Discord is one. And so now they've added the ability to make direct voice calls with your friends on Discord. Xbox through Discord. I guess they're friends on Discord like they would be the people you have in Discord. So it's integrated into the Xbox UI as it is by the way, on the PlayStation 5 apparently, which I don't own, but I guess that's a thing. So that was kind of interesting. By the way. Related to that, an apropos of nothing, Sony announced today that PlayStation 2, which I think everyone knows is not the new version of the console. Right. Was first released in I think the year 2000 and they stopped manufacturing it like 1212 years later. Ish. Has sold 160 million units.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? Now why would you say that? Like why even, why mention that now? Like what's the point? The point is that Nintendo is about to outsell its best selling video game hardware, which is the DS, with the Switch, which has sold 146 million units and it has to get to 154, which based on their, you know, predictions will happen by the end of March, which is the end of the fiscal year. So Sony was like that's cute. We sold 160. Like I think they literally just did it as like a middle finger to Nintendo. Now that said, I, I still think the Switch is going to come out on top because it will be around, you know, for past. It's not like they're not.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Nobody's buying a PlayStation 2 now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, and they don't like Nintendo doesn't have something to sell yet, something new. So they'll keep selling this thing throughout the year. Even if it sells in single digit millions in coming quarters, they'll get there. I don't think that was in the notes. Right. But it was kind of an interesting thing that just kind of happened today. There's an Xbox feature called the Avatar Editor which is even more ridiculous than you think it is. Yeah. And I say that because I know none of you are using it because they're getting rid of it because no one uses it. So this is a console only feature. These are like mentioned the Switch. So when the Nintendo Wii was a thing, they came up with these little Mii characters which were supposed to represent you in this ecosystem.

[Leo Laporte]

Mii?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, Mii.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Microsoft came out with avatars for Xbox that were tied partially to at first to Kinect, which were likewise these kind of weeble looking kind of cartoon characters. And then 10 seconds later they stopped selling Kinect and they still continue forward with avatars but they're a little more, I don't know, modern looking I guess. But yeah, no one's doing that. So anyway, that's going away in January. And then I think we talked last week or the week before. Microsoft is apparently looking at Xbox portable gaming, hard hardware and Phil Spencer said something about this in an interview. He's like, look, it's years away, blah blah blah, but we're looking at it. And then today or yesterday there was a report from Bloomberg that Actually, Sony's looking at this too. And of course Sony has a history of this. They had the PSP and then the Vita, and the Vita was the one that fixed the problem. They had the two thumbsticks which enabled really elegant third party shooter support like you would have on a console. And then of course they killed it because we can't have anything. Next. Nice. But apparently, I mean, they got it right. Like they finally got it right because originally it only had the one side and it was like, this is not quite it. But they did the two thumbsticks and they got it right. So apparently they're looking at a way to bring PS5 games to a portable device somewhere. It's still years away, but it is something they're looking at. And this is kind of the thing I've been talking about with Xbox. Like I think there should be a way to play like I would have said like when Series X and S came out, like make this thing an Xbox One X level of whatever hardware performance and allow it to play the games to that level. But on the go, to me made a lot of sense. So we'll see what happens. But yeah, I guess, I don't know, like in the game of console or the market for video game consoles, I guess they're looking at these PCs like the Steam Deck and whatever else that like they sell well enough. It's like, well, this is pretty good for us. Like if we had something that sold as well, this might be pretty good. Good. So I think it makes sense. I would like to see something like this. But he says having the last time I played a video game on a plane was probably 1997 or something. I don't know. It was a long time ago.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't. Yeah, strictly PC. Right. I don't want to play on a handheld. I can barely see the damn thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, this is the big problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's funny, I'm so spoiled with a 55 inch display. Exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

I haven't written this up yet. I have a 31.5 inch inch all in one PC out there that I put Call of Duty on Spectacular. The captioning is approximately this big. It's like really big on the screen. Like it's huge. Super crisp. And I mentioned maybe this is an ESS computer. It's not. So I just, I did check on that last ad break. It's actually not ess, even though it has the built in webcam, et cetera. So it's a, a, it's a high standard. It's A high standard. Yeah. I mean, that's the way to put it. But that means that I don't. There must be or will be ESS compatible desktop hardware. I've never seen it, so that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean, well, it's. I mean, I mostly review laptops, but I. It's come slowly to laptops. I feel like that's the mass market. They're going to go there first. But I think it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Laptops always have a camera built in, often have a finger built in. They have affordances that ESS would like or maybe even requires.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Desktops don't always have a camera.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. But that's why I thought maybe the all in one. And I said. I said, you know, I can't honestly remember the last time I saw a non ess PC, but now I can. It was like 11 seconds ago. But as far as, like a laptop, I mean, like, it's. I can't remember. It's been a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

But surely Microsoft doesn't intend it for laptops only. They surely intend it for desktop desktops, too.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, I would think so.

[Leo Laporte]

We would hope. One would hope.

[Richard Campbell]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the Xbox segment. I hope you enjoyed it. You won't get another one for a week, so enjoy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry. I might have prestige by then. Who can say?

[Leo Laporte]

How are you doing? How are.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've had so many PCs to test, I've been forced to play Call of Duty.

[Leo Laporte]

Test them.

[Paul Thurrott]

There is only one way to. Well, there's many ways, but I'm using one way and it's. Yeah, it's going pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what I find? Whenever the outside world becomes difficult, I retreat sometimes into my video game. And Valheim is a good one because it's really my own little world. I'm just a Viking. I'm building a house, I'm growing crops, I'm fighting off bad guys, and it's just me. And it's quiet, it's peaceful, it's satisfying. If I want, I could just sit in my throne and enjoy this, smell the roses. And I find I do that more now. Like, it's become kind of a refuge. So I'm wondering if Call of Duty is not exactly peaceful kingdom, but I'm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wondering if that's a refuge on what makes you happy. Like, yeah, if, like, headshots are what make you happy. Call of Duty is ideal. It's very calming. You know, I think the problem with Call of Duty, Call of Duty has that kind of addictive element by the.

[Leo Laporte]

Way which when I'm talking throne, I'm talking an actual throne.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like a. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There are no toilets in Valheim. Okay. It's another thing I like about it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Lack of toilets, the lack of gastrointestinal problems. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You eat a lot. There's a lot of eating.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I mean, I make big feasts now. It's wonderful. But yeah, I was sure he was.

[Richard Campbell]

Going to say feast. That's what he was going to say.

[Paul Thurrott]

Feast.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I just. We're gonna take a break and then the back of the book is coming up. Tip app and brown liquor pick which. Is this a brown liquor? This sounds like a. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Atlanta looks like a. Like a vino verde or something.

[Richard Campbell]

It looks like just a random set of characters thrown.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've never seen 17 consonants in a row in a name.

[Leo Laporte]

But we will find out what is it? What is the game is afoot. Or at least the whiskey is in just a bit as the back of the book approaches.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now AT T Mobile get four 5G phones on us and four lines for 25 a line per month when you.

[Richard Campbell]

Switch with eligible trade ins.

[Paul Thurrott]

All on America's largest 5G network. Minimum of 4 lines for 25 per.

[Leo Laporte]

Line per month with auto pay discount using debit or bank account, $5 more per line without autopay plus tax and.

[Paul Thurrott]

Fees and $10 device connection charge phones via 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement due bill credits end if you pay off devices early.

[Leo Laporte]

CT mobile.com Imagine relying on a dozen.

[Richard Campbell]

Different software programs to run your business.

[Leo Laporte]

None of which are connected, and each one more expensive and more complicated than the last.

[Richard Campbell]

It can be pretty stressful.

[Leo Laporte]

Now imagine Odoo.

[Paul Thurrott]

Odoo has all the programs you'll ever.

[Leo Laporte]

Need and they're all connected on one platform. Doesn't Odoo sound amazing? Let Odoo harmonize your business with simple, efficient software that can handle everything for a fraction of the price.

[Richard Campbell]

Sign up [e-mail] that's o d o.

[Leo Laporte]

O.Com I want to take this moment though, to invite you to join our club. We talk about Club Twit a lot because we love our Club Twitters. In this case, Club Twit makes it possible for us to do not only this show, but Paul Thurat's Hands On Windows. We do make the audio of that available to the public, as we do with Hands On Macintosh and other shows. But the Video is available only to the club. It's really a club because there's no advertising in it. It's a club supported show. I personally, from day one of TWIT 20 years ago, wanted to do a listener supported network. Turns out we couldn't grow at the rate we ended up wanting to grow and growing at with a number of shows we're doing purely by listener support. So we, we started doing advertising and that's been fine, but I would really still, I still think the ideal would be listener supported. And the interesting thing is it doesn't mean 100%. It doesn't mean we'd have to have a paywall. We don't. Most of the stuff, almost everything we do is in public in some form or fashion. Even when we do the club things like Stacy's Book Club, which is coming up in a couple of weeks, we do a live stream of that that everybody can watch. In fact, thanks to the club members, we did on YouTube, Twitch, Kick, X dot com, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, and in our club, Twit Discord. So we stream it eight different ways and everybody's invited to watch. But after we stream it, we put it into the TWIT plus feed which is available only to club members. But we only do that for a month. Again, I'm not this, I don't want to like wall off our content, but I would love the idea of having it be listener supported. The thing is, it doesn't have to be 100% support, doesn't even have to be 50% support. Right now somewhere it's hovering between 1 and 2% of our audience is a club member. If we could get that to 5%, we would, it would turn everything around. We wouldn't need ads, we could grow, we could add shows. We could do so much more just with 5%. If only 1 in 20 of you subscribes, maybe that one is you. 7 bucks a month. We try to keep it affordable. That's less than most podcast networks charge. It's really not much more than individual single podcasts charge, but you get a whole lot more. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Discord, which has thousands of really smart, interesting social people in there. We're hanging out. It's become my social network. I love it in there. In fact, in fact, December 1st, the advent of code coding challenge starts and we have a very active advent of code group in there. And it's so much fun. Probably will stream some of that anyway. The club is A great place. And it makes a big difference in what we do. It gives us an opportunity to kind of live my dream, which is.

[Paul Thurrott]

We.

[Leo Laporte]

Only owe allegiance to our listeners. That's it. We don't have to. We don't have to gin up interest by, you know, creating drama. We just give you the information you need. And if you think that's worthwhile, I think it's valuable. If you love this show, if you love our other shows, please. Twit TV ClubTwit. There's a two week free trial. If you just want to get an idea of what it would be like. There's also a referral code. Now, everybody who joins gets a referral code they can use anywhere. And every time somebody joins with that referral code, you get a free month.

[Paul Thurrott]

Month.

[Leo Laporte]

We're trying to make this fun. We're trying to make it affordable. We're trying to make it. And you can help us do it. Twit. TV club Twit. That's all I'll say. And by the way, if you're a member, no ads. You don't even see this. You might see it live because we can't figure otherwise. I just have to play do like Google does and play a moment of Zen. So live you're going to get the ads. But if you don't want the ads, you can, you can just get downloads and they'll have no ads. Not even this pitch. Twitter, TV Club Twit. Thank you. We really appreciate your support. Now back to Windows Weekly. Whoops. It's Paul's turn.

[Paul Thurrott]

By the way, as you were speaking, news came out that the U.S. federal Trade Commission has opened an antitrust investigation of Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Paul Thurrott]

It sounds like cloud computing and software on it too. Cybersecurity.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm actually shocked. It's like, we've seen this before.

[Richard Campbell]

I thought they were the kinder, gentler.

[Paul Thurrott]

Tech giant they used to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you feel like they're trying to do everything they can before January 20th? It's like, let's just get this all in the hopper.

[Paul Thurrott]

And this is like. If you're a fan of football, football is this kind of whatever type of game it is. And then if it's a close game and there's like two minutes left, it turns into a completely different game.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a different game.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And that's what this is like politically. It's like, I guess we get. It's like, gotta move, let's go. You know, like, so, yeah, stuff's happening. That's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, it's funny how many games this football season have been resolved in the last few plays.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know if anyone watched the Cowboys commanders game the last five minutes of that. Oh my God. Like that might have been one of the best five minutes of football that's ever been played.

[Leo Laporte]

Was that where the guy. Extra point?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh my God. And then they were. Were there two more scores after that? Like, I think, I think when that happened there were like less than 10 seconds. No, I think it was one more score. There was less than 10 seconds left and the Cowboys rent back the kickoff for another score. Like it was unbelievable. I think in the last five minutes there were like 30 points scored or something like that. It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Definitely I watched that, then I switched from that to another. The end of another game where the same thing happened. It was all like last minute. And then of course the 49ers managed to lose in the last few seconds of every game. So.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, sorry, listen, you're going to be true to yourself.

[Leo Laporte]

Tip of the week time.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't have much of a tip this time because I already talked about this. But thanks to the era of misinformation we live in now, I think we all succumb a little too easily to the it sounds right kind of argument. Microsoft is secretly rolling out recall to all these computers and then Chris titus gets like 1.2 billion views or whatever it is, and it's like, no, you're stupid. That's not happening. Or this thing this week with Microsoft is training AI on your data. And the outrage, the instant outrage. Meanwhile, I'm like, Microsoft is enabling Folder backup in OneDrive 15 months ago. And people are like, paul, I think you're making this up. I'm like, okay, I don't know what to tell you anymore. People don't get riled up about the right things and then they get, you know, crazy about the wrong things. So unfortunately, I, I can't solve the problem. But you know, we need to think a little more critically here. You know, just clearly critically. I don't know what I'm looking for.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and I want to pledge. I, I agree 100% with you and I, I want to repledge our commitment to spreading light, not heat.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's. I, like, that's a good phrase.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because we do it. Yeah, we're on YouTube, we're on all those platforms, but we don't make our money from that. That's why I really want to make our money from the audience. Because I don't want to have to chase links, chase numbers. I just want to give you the best information, the most accurate information I can without, like, drumming up drama.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Look, I mean, there's drama to be had. We don't have to invent it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. We don't have to make it up. There's plenty of drama.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just saying light, not heat. That's.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's kind of the way Mark Manasse used to say this, in his own sort of egotistical format was, I use my superpowers for good, you know? And. Yeah, there you go. I mean, just. Yeah, just. So anyway, we gotta. We gotta start looking out for each other now. So. I mean, we always should have.

[Leo Laporte]

Blame YouTube. I really do. This YouTube influencer thing is just really destroyed.

[Paul Thurrott]

People who know nothing about nothing, accepting money from companies are now influencing people to buy products or make decisions. And it's like, guys, come on. This is like, it was bad enough when it was celebrities. It's like, Cher. What do you think about the election? Who cares? You know, like, at least. I mean, but at least that's someone I've heard of. It's like, cindy, you're wearing pom poms. What do you think about the election? It's like, like, like, Come on, stop.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, so, too far. Has it.

[Paul Thurrott]

It. It's too much. I don't know what happened to us, but, yeah, we've lost it as a race. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I have been encouraging folks to read as raw news as possible. Reuters, Associated Press.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

The only thing you'll notice is that there's so little opinion in that you actually have to think about what you're read.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, my God. And by the way, there's. You go. That's a skill we should all be developing right now. What does this mean?

[Leo Laporte]

Why don't they tell me what it means?

[Richard Campbell]

Right, Exactly. They don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

But should I be outraged? Where's that paragraph? Because I want to be outraged part? It's funny.

[Richard Campbell]

The other thing I found with the reading news from there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sure.

[Richard Campbell]

It's really short when you don't have to decorate.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't take a lot of time, does it?

[Richard Campbell]

Each piece is like a minute or two.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that's an interesting observation. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can be concise, you can be clear.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, Reuters has started doing YouTube clips now that are a minute or two. That's what. Just basically reading the story with a couple of camera shots. And again, no opinion in it. So you really have to say what does this mean? Mean, Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I can't write without.

[Leo Laporte]

As. As Alec Baldwin said, Americans are very uninformed about reality.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right. Well, I mean, he's right. He's not wrong. Right. I mean, I. He's not wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

He's not wrong.

[Paul Thurrott]

What a weird place to be in where Alec Baldwin is right about anything.

[Leo Laporte]

But.

[Paul Thurrott]

But here we are.

[Leo Laporte]

There's the irony.

[Paul Thurrott]

But he's not wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

We're listening to Al, like, now. How about your app pick of the week? I need a new browser. What do you got?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you're always asking for new browsers. We got two. There's a new version of Firefox out this week. 133. Those guys, they're on a faster release schedule than anyone, by the way, through every four weeks. Opera gx, which is a browser. I don't quite understand, but this. We talked about this notion of a web browser built into Game Bar. Opera GX is specifically aimed at gamers. Right. And so Opera itself is this browser that is like infinitely or. I thought it was personalizable. This thing is even more so. It's kind of crazy, but they tailor it specifically for gamers. So it does all these. It's like special, like, dark mode and lots of reds and greens and like, kind of a different. Wow. Yeah, it's kind of weird. It's kind of interesting. But they're really buying into this. And they have, like, fast.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at the posture of this kid, by the way. And can I say, why is he wearing Crocs? Okay, I'm sorry. You sound like the old man. Shout out the class.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't mind him wearing Crocs. What I mind is when I see a guy from America wearing those Crocs in Roman Northe walking down the street with his MacBook. I want to beat him to death with those Crocs. Like, that is just, you know, you're not on a beach. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this what teenagers look like now?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I don't think so. But this is how they think teenagers look like. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

This is maybe how. Where's Opera? Norway. Right. This is how Norwegian teenagers look.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what it is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. We're still doing the Crocs thing. Yeah. So I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Only in Norway.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it only for gamers?

[Paul Thurrott]

No. I mean, anyone could use it, obviously, but it's designed to be used along. You know, you're playing games and you got this thing and it kind of, you know, can be customized to be, like, visually Simpatico with whatever else you're doing. It's. It. You'll see when you install it. It's. It's not your. Your father's Oldsmobile, I guess is the way to say it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, here's another teenager wearing Crocs. Man, this is. They must have done some research. By the way, kids, posture. Sit up, pull your pants up.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's got it. Because otherwise, I mean, his. His screen is angled perfectly for where his head's going to be. Some ways, in some ways, that is good posture. If you ignore the fact you have a back.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Trust me, you're gonna know you have a back.

[Richard Campbell]

A teenager doesn't know he has a back for another 30 years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Right then. But then he'll look at that image.

[Richard Campbell]

And say, what was I thinking?

[Paul Thurrott]

What was I. I heard my back getting out of bed. Like, I don't even.

[Leo Laporte]

We really sound like a bunch of old timers, don't we? Oh, you kids. Watch out.

[Paul Thurrott]

Your knees do that. I'll do this with my friends. Somebody like, oh, my God, my back's killing me. Like, you do something heroic. And they're like, no, I just rolled over wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Opera GX for people who wear Crocs. And sit.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the target audience.

[Leo Laporte]

The Crocs audience. Richard Campbell. What's coming up on Runners Radio published.

[Richard Campbell]

Today, my talk with Mandy Walls, who works for PagerDuty, about incident response. And it really ended up being more of a focus on what it's what it's like to deal with incidents when you operate a SaaS infrastructure. So. So first is scope. Like, you have a lot of customers here. Are they all being impacted? Is it only a particular customer? That. That was a huge issue. You can't just go around kicking servers to try and get things up and running again. Gotta kind of scope in the problem and then deal with the issues. And obviously it was the class of issue, like corrupted data or update failures, like all these kinds of things. And a good second half, that was just a conversation about the postmortem, about getting away from accusation, really understanding, you know, what happened model and then building good strategies for no recurrence.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Like how do we ought to recover from that? How can you know, what's the. If it doesn't lead to a fix in software, maybe you haven't taken it seriously. You know, usually we should be able to track from the incident to the work items on the stack. So that's what real retrospective shows that it reflects into code. Code. So that was the conversation and a great one. We did it in person at NBC. Porto a few weeks ago was very enjoyable.

[Leo Laporte]

Speaking of Porto, I'm guessing that this comes from Porto.

[Richard Campbell]

It does not.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, but it says it's vigno.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. That's the one. I, that's what I'm stuck on too.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't it Portuguese? What is it?

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's, it's weirder than that.

[Paul Thurrott]

So good.

[Richard Campbell]

I have friends. I don't know, I don't know you know this, but I do have friends and these friends bring me things. And so while I was in Lithuania, my friends Ben and Heather had brought me a little sample of this whiskey. They, they put it the way they got it because they're, they're very much travel, you know, warriors. So carry on only. So how do you bring me a sample of whiskey? Carry on only. They put it in a little 2 ounce bottle and carried it in their toiletry bag. Right. So I was able to have a decent 2 ounces. So I got 2 ounces enough to taste it, you know. Very reasonable. But this is the caval vino bari, which is from Taiwan.

[Leo Laporte]

Taiwan.

[Richard Campbell]

Taiwan What?

[Paul Thurrott]

Taiwan?

[Leo Laporte]

That is not what I would have thought. Looking at the name, I would have thought maybe Finnish from Kavalan, maybe.

[Paul Thurrott]

Would have sworn. Even if you go to the website, that island looks like it's off the north of Scotland. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's used to probably.

[Richard Campbell]

And so you know, now for our little geopolitical lesson. So Taiwan is about a 36,000 square kilometer island. It's about 14,000 miles in the measures of the Crossers mountain ranges on the east coast plains in the west coast. It's about 160 km from mainland China across the Taiwan Strait. Japan to the northeast, Philippines to the south. The south is China Seas to the south, the east China Seas to the north because directions are complicated because the Philippine Sea is to the east. And of course it's a subtropical environment. Although the southernmost parts of Taiwan are considered fully tropical. So that's, that's hot summers, monsoons, very mild winters. Not a normal thing you'd think of for growing whiskey. Although there's been people on this island and the islands around it literally for millennia. The first evidence of human occupation of that land goes back 20, 30,000 years. There's clear evidence of agriculture starting around 3,000 BC in an abruptly emerging culture that probably walked across a land bridge. The interaction with the mainland, with the Chinese mainland starts in the Yuan Dynasty, which is about 1300 AD. Of course, then the Europeans arrived. The Portuguese named the island Formosa when they discovered it in the 1600s. And then it was both a Dutch and a Spanish colony. They spot over it for about 20 or so years until a local someone named J. Shengdong in 1662 successfully defeated the Dutch and made his base of operations while he was fighting rebellion against the Qing dynasty, which he lost in 1683. And then the Xing Dynasty ruled that island for a couple of hundred years as part of the dynasty. Not until the Sino Japanese War of 1895 does things change when Taiwan actually becomes part of Japan until the end of World War II. So about 50 or so years at the end of World War II, when Japan's in full retreat, the Republic of China takes control of the island. Which is good because within a few years towards the end of the Chinese Civil war, Lee Kai Shek and the rest of the Rock will retreat in 1949 onto the island and communists cement their victory. That becomes China. But Rock remains on Taiwan and rules as the only for about 40 years until Democrats democratic reforms in the 1980s, whereupon they become what is known as the Taiwan Miracle or one of the four Asian Tigers. Along with South Korea and Hong Kong and Singapore, that becomes a rapidly industrialized nation. Sort of a demonstration model for how you can abruptly convert an economy. Today there's about 24 million people living on the island and this where TSMC is and many other interesting and important things. However, when it comes to alcohol, until 2002, Taiwan had a completely state controlled corporation called the Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation that dealt with anything to go with tobacco and liquor. They made their own beer, although it was largely based on the German American style and also made what would be appropriate local liquor like shouju and the like. There is a domestic liquor that is really derived from a Chinese style called Xiaolang, which is a made from fermented sorghum more potent than shoju. It's called Chinese white wine. With indirect translations. There are versions that are in the 50, 60% range. There's an Everclear variant that's like 92% alcohol, good for stripping engine parts. But as the above, after 2002, when Taiwan joins the World Trade Organization, they end their monopoly and allow more imports as well as local production of alcohol. And very quickly Taiwan became a huge fan of whiskey. In 2021 they imported 22 million liters of whiskey, of which 90% of that came from Scotland. So like Japan, they had a really strong interest in Scottish whiskey. And the Scots were enthusiastic too because the Way that Taiwan taxes spirits is by alcohol content and volume, not by the retail price of it. So not only was whiskey relatively low taxed, but expensive whiskey was very low taxed. And so high end whiskey is very, very common in Taiwan. They do have excess drinking culture, very much a binge drinking culture. Although in recent years there's been a big pushback against that.

[Leo Laporte]

That kind of like Japan, huh?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, and Korea as well. Like it is sort of a known issue that is now sort of transforming so very quickly after the WTO connection. A conglomerate called King Car which is built by. It's a family business. The founder is Tian Xia Li who and this King Car literally translates to like drive. Well, they make beer, they make hygiene products. Mr. Brown Coffee. They have an aquaculture conglomerate.

[Leo Laporte]

Mr. Brown Coffee.

[Richard Campbell]

Mr. Brown Coffee.

[Leo Laporte]

It comes in a can in a vending machine, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Something like it's free. It's freeze dried coffee and free of charge. Freeze dried.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, freeze dried. Okay. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And so Lee was a big, is a big fan of whiskey. So he wanted a whiskey operation and by 2005 he started Mr. Brown copy. He started on building a distillery they called Cavalan. Caval is the name comes from the local indigenous people of the region that they built. Oh, interesting distillery in a tie in with the native people. The area is called Yilan, which is up in the high northeast corner of Taiwan. Would arguably be the coolest part. Although they're up against the hills there because very good high quality water supply supply. And as they were they the distilleries built very quickly. They went totally Scottish. So four sides of Scotland supplied for distills. Sent a pair of 7,000 liter spirit stills, a pair of 12,000 liter wash stills. And they hired as an advisor a fellow by the name of Jim Swan who I should almost do a soul separate show about Dr. Jim Swan who's passed now known as the Einstein of whiskey. Oh, worked with dozens of distilleries. The ones you probably heard of would be like Clyde Scythe in Glasgow, Kilchomani on Islay, Amrut in India, which is on my Ray. I do have a bottle of. At some point we'll do a show on him. He's published, I mean he's literally a PhD in whiskey mixing and has published a bunch of papers on that. And one of his specialties was how to make good quality whiskey in hot clothes climates. And so he spent 10 years working with Kavalan and his focus was specifically on what they called wood policy or what kind of wood would work well under in the conditions that Taiwan offers. And his focus was on, you should be using American oak rather than European oak, as European oak tends to be more bitter in those kinds of temperatures. But he also developed a methodology for utilizing barrels called the STR cask treatment. STR short for shaved, toasted and rechar.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man, I do that every morning. There you go. Otherwise known, Mr. Brown, of course, Saturday.

[Richard Campbell]

Night at my place now. And this, this really came about in the early 2010s when whiskey was taking off and there was a big shortage of barrels. And so he sort of showed that you can take existing barrels, including wine casks, and shave them down, take the interior surface off toast and char them and utilize them again. So better utilization of barrels. And Cavalin took this to heart and makes a large array of different kinds of whiskey. Now, this place has been in operation for less than 20 years, but by 2016 they were doing so well, they built a second distillery and added 16 more stills. So they're now up to 20 stills, although all identical, all the same style of wash and spirit stills from four sides. So they produce 9 million liters of alcohol a year. Their barley comes from Scotland and Finland because it's not a good growing conditions for barley on the. On Taiwan. They have 16 stainless tanks for fermentation. And their storage facility is a pair of five story warehouses that are built into the hills and try to keep as cool as possible. Because of the frequency of earthquakes in Taiwan, they're very careful with how they strap their barrels. So they tend to take four barrels and strap them together and mount them onto the rack so they can take some shaking without a lot of trouble. But they do have high temperatures to deal with through the summer. And so their angel share, which is, you know, in a place like Scotland, between 1 and 2% per year, I bet with the heat, 15%.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

So they don't do a lot a. They haven't had time to do long ages aging, but also long aging just doesn't serve them particularly well. And it means their whiskeys come across with strong flavors in a short amount of time. But their relationship with Dr. Swan also opened them, get them access to a lot of different barrels. So they do a lot of unique barreling. So almost all of their whiskeys are initially aged in American oak, both virgin and used bourbon casks. Very Scottish approach to it. And then they'll do. They'll do different kinds of finishing barrels. So you will see some ports and some sherrys and some wine finishes. And that's what we're talking about here, the vino barique, is actually a barrique, is a kind of cask that stores wine. But in this case, the vino barriques have been str. They've been shaved and toasted and recharred for doing aging. The expectation of this particular whiskey, the one we're talking about, the Vinobaric, is about five years old. Again, no age statements on any of Kavalen's whiskies. This. I only had 2 ounces of it. Boy, it was good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Got it.

[Richard Campbell]

Big, strong fruit notes.

[Leo Laporte]

You wouldn't expect that, to be honest.

[Richard Campbell]

No. And this is one of the reasons that Heather and Ben brought it to me. It's like they were in Taiwan. This is the biggest distillery in Taiwan there. So they figured they'd try it out. They tried a lot of different ones. And then they were pinging me saying, yeah, we're bringing you some of this.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

The one I had was 54.8. So basically a cask strength. A lot of clout to it. And. Well, it is available in Canada. I can get it. The bottle is 315Canadian, which is about 225us if you can find it. Wow. Relatively hard find. They're not. There's only a couple more distilleries in Taiwan so far, but this is the big one One. And they've won a bunch of awards, including this whiskey itself has won World Whiskey Awards. They've won Best Distillery Awards. Like they're doing good things, but they're plugged into some of the best, which there's a reason for why they've been as successful as they've been.

[Leo Laporte]

That's very cool.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it was a fun tour for me. And it's, you know, the same way my friend. My friend Glenn brought me the. The sledgehammer, the Howitzon from last week. It's a little bit left. Left. Oh, it's only a 500 mil bottle.

[Leo Laporte]

I've got good friends.

[Richard Campbell]

I do have good friends. And they're starting to enjoy the fact that, you know, I'm doing all these nutty things with whiskey. So there have been more. More being brought to me all the time. So you have some fun with it. Anyway, that's. I thought a Taiwanese whiskey would be fun. And it was delicious. Really extraordinary.

[Leo Laporte]

Solist Vinho Barrique.

[Richard Campbell]

That's it.

[Leo Laporte]

Single cast strength. And it has been shaved, toasted, toasted and recharged.

[Richard Campbell]

That's it. That's what they did.

[Paul Thurrott]

And also shaken, apparently, thanks to all the earthquakes.

[Leo Laporte]

So thanks to Mr. Brown. Wow. We have gone all around the world on this episode and now we're right back where we started. It's kind of a major miracle, but I'm so glad you guys were here to do it. Paul Thurat is@the rot.com that's where his blog is. Become a premium member to get access to everything, including, including the Field guide to Windows 11. Or you can go to leanpub.com and buy yourself a copy there. It includes Windows 10, by the way. Inside, it's like the soft, chewy layer inside the gun.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's the nougat.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the nougat of the offering the Tootsie and the Tootsie Roll in the Tootsie Pup. He also wrote a book called Windows Everywhere, which is a really interesting kind of. It's a unique look at the history of Windows through its development frameworks. It's really, really a great idea. I think a great book. Paul, always a pleasure. I'm glad you're here. I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thank you, sir. You too. What are you doing? How are you doing this?

[Leo Laporte]

So we got invitations from four different family groups.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

At which point Lisa and I said, let's go out to eat.

[Paul Thurrott]

Really? Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't want to have to choose one. You know, we're going to go visit a couple and so forth. But yeah, I couldn't just choose one. I might have underestimated it. Might even be a larger number. So we. There's a lovely hotel in Sonoma that's a wonderful resort and they do an incredible Thanksgiving. We've been there before pre Covid. And we thought, oh, let's, let's go there.

[Paul Thurrott]

It'll be fun.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll have a nice. They have a caviar bar and a prime rib station, as well as a turkey, actually.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, Richard, you might. Did you meet. I can't remember if you met Don. So I have a friend who makes his own alcohol, including some pretty good whiskey. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Always risky.

[Paul Thurrott]

Does he risk. He does a five year whiskey. So we're opening a five year barrel on Friday. Actually, his last one. The 2020 whiskey bit.

[Richard Campbell]

Next week then.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it was very, very good. Well, this one's super exclusive.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't get it. I mean, you know, you have a friend. Yeah, both kids made it home.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you. Yeah, they're both here now. Yay. My, you know, we don't have a house, so we go to my sister's now. But My sisters, both of them have demanded that my wife do all the cooking because she does it right.

[Richard Campbell]

So I, I have American cousin up. This is one of my wife's cousins.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so you're getting second Thanksgiving.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So we're getting a little extra thanks.

[Leo Laporte]

Because Richard, as you know, as a Canadian.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we do it in October, like civil October.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, I think I'm going to bring Thanksgiving to Mexico. That's going to be my clan family. I think the Mexicans will embrace this holiday for its food and family thing, and I think they would love it. Mexican, plus the whole repression of the natives thing, they love that stuff. So it's going to be fun.

[Richard Campbell]

It all works together. Really.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's just kind of. It's the holy trinity of holiday, really.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard Campbell is at Run As Radio. That's his website, run as radio.com. he also does Net Rocks. You can get both at his website. He comes to us from Madeira Park, British Columbia. It's wonderful to have him home. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1900 UTC. You can watch, as I mentioned, live on eight different platforms. All the major video streaming platforms we'd be on. We'd be on mixer if we could, but we can't. But that's another story for another day. But we are everywhere else. Watch us live at the recording time. Or better yet, you know, watch us at your convenience. You can get copies of the show, either audio or video or both at TWiT TV WW. If you go there, there's a link to the YouTube channel. That's great for sharing clips. You know, if you have somebody you think would like this Cavalance whiskey, you just clip it out. That's nice for two reasons. One, it's an easy way to. Everybody can see a YouTube clip. So it's an easy way to share something. And YouTube makes it very easy to say, start here and here. But also it's a great way to share Windows Weekly and tell people about the show because we really, we. We really appreciate that. So that's another way to watch. But the best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it automatically as soon as we're done and you won't ever have to wonder, hey, what should I listen to next? Listen to Windows.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which of my data should be trained by AI?

[Leo Laporte]

All of your data, Paul. Richard. Have a wonderful week, Paul. Have a great Thanksgiving. We'll be back together in December for the next Windows Weekly will be 1 after 9:09 Yep, take care you too.

[Paul Thurrott]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Paul Thurrott]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Paul Thurrott]

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[Leo Laporte]

Thursday morning and thinking to yourself, just one more day until Friday.

[Paul Thurrott]

But then somebody in the elevator says happy Fri. Yay. Then you check your phone quickly and discover today is actually Friday. So yes, Happy Friday. Random stranger in the elevator. Happy Friday indeed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, switching and saving with GEICO feels just like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

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